In the same way that many once believed the Earth to be flat and not round, many also once believed the first person shooter to be a keyboard and mouse exclusive genre - and any attempt to transition it to consoles was considered bloody blasphemy. Much like the initial fact eventually being dispelled, the latter belief was also proven wrong - the likes of Golden Eye, Perfect Dark and Halo: Combat Evolved began to show us that the Earth wasn't quite as flat as we previously thought. These games and more showed the world that the formerly PC-only genre could find a home on consoles, as well as demonstrating the ability to achieve relative mass-market success. Unreal Tournament III's very existence on console is a testament to this fact.

Much like Quake of the earlier years, the Unreal franchise has become the flag carrier for a very particular brand of first person shooting - the twitch shooter. The slightly slower mechanics and motifs you've come to expect from the console shooter don't quite apply to Unreal, where the slightly slower pace is exchanged for a faster, repetitive-strain-injury-inducing style of play. Off the bat, manoeuvring your weaponry and character around the environment won't feel entirely natural. It will undoubtedly feel sluggish, unresponsive and awkward. The default turn speed and sensitivity are bizarrely unfitting for a game of this speed, and cranking up both settings in the option menu will provide you with a much needed adrenaline boost, taking the Rainbow Six pace to a faster-than-fast-itself velocity - now you're playing Unreal Tournament III! Analogue sticks and waggling wands have yet to truly match the accuracy, precision and reactivity of the mouse though, as is made evident here - if you happen to transition from the PC iteration to the Xbox 360 then you're going notice the difference. However, if you're a player who's shy of the keyboard and mouse then the console iterations will still feel fast and frenetic. They are by almost any standard, but veteran players will definitely notice the difference.

Although you won't puzzle to find a counterpart, the arms line-up isn't inhabited by entirely conventional weapons, but instead by standard weaponry with an unreal flair. These are undoubtedly the staples of Unreal Tournament and provide more of an identity to the series than almost any character, map, vehicle or visual style ever could. As fun-to-fire as the weapons might be, we've seen them before in previous iterations (or at least, PC gamers have). That's not to say that the weapons are stale as such, but they no longer correspond with the game's namesake; the once insane, super-crazy, 'unreal' weaponry was original - almost a decade ago. Firing flak and drowning an enemy in green goo doesn't quite have the edge it did all those years ago; such weapons are now as seemingly normal as a P90 or 50. Calibre rifle.

Those more familiar with Unreal Tournament or shooters in general will know that the franchise is virtually synonymous with the terms 'deathmatch', 'team deathmatch' and 'capture the flag'. In this respect, Unreal doesn't exactly push the envelope, offering the standard affair of the aforementioned. But what does stand out is the new Warfare mode, which ultimately resembles a smaller-scale skirmish found in your typical vehicles-and-all Battlefield match. The goal of Warfare is to destroy the enemy team's power core, but to do so you must sever the core from a series of connected nodes. Once the enemy force captures the path of nodes leading to your core, it becomes unlinked and vulnerable to attack. As well as the frontline nodes responsible for the safety of each team's core, separate, unlinked nodes also populate more remote areas of each map and capturing these usually rewards your team with a powerful vehicle or some sly advantage, such as an indirect means of damaging your opponent's power core despite it still being secure. Warfare is similar to Unreal Tournament 2004's Onslaught and it requires a level of coordination not normally needed in the likes of Team Deathmatch. The most successful team will be the group of players who best manage their resources and dedicate particular players to protecting or capturing particular nodes.

Travelling across larger maps on foot can be a daunting task in any game, so to keep players in the action, Epic has placed a particular emphasis on vehicles in the Warfare mode. And if at any given time you struggle to hitch a ride, every player has access to a hoverboard to keep travelling times to a minimum. If you do manage to get behind the wheel of any of the mechanical goodies on offer then you're in for a good time; Unreal's varied assortment of vehicles spans from the earthy and sane to the weird and wonderful, obviously taking inspiration from very particular science fiction. From humanity to the Necris, both sides own exclusive vehicles though with a comparable counterpart, if not in aesthetics then in power. When thrown into a crowd of meagrely armed soldiers, vehicles naturally dominate, though the likes of the rocket launcher and the Avril (specifically designed to take down vehicles) give those on foot a much better chance of surviving. To see the alien tripod, the Dark Walker, for the first time is truly a sight to behold and by the time you've actually beheld such a sight, you'll probably be already dead. Vehicle controls are a matter of preference, with three options available - if the initial setting doesn't work well then there's always an alternative. For me, "Direct" was the most effective.

To maintain its speed of play, Unreal defies laws that most other shooters undyingly adhere to. Respawning isn't seconds, microseconds or nanoseconds but is instant, keeping you constantly on the battlefield with little interruption and never disrupting the flow of the fight. Reloading is also scrapped, meaning that the chances of gibing an opponent are dictated more by the amount of ammo conserved and general resource management than an oh so unluckily timed reload. The lack of a melee move-per weapon also limits players to gunplay even face-to face, unless you choose to unleash the Impact Hammer, though using it will probably result in little to no success. At close quarters, Unreal becomes about jumping and predictive aiming rather than actual targeting accuracy, and because of no native melee for weapons, players can't simply attack with a fist or the butt of a gun and must resort to bunny hopping to avoid incoming fire and, at best, hope to catch their foe with a stray rocket or miscellaneous fire.

Unreal's most glaring weakness when compared to other shooters, even Quake, is its lack of a true single player campaign. A campaign does exist it doesn't correspond with the typical definition. Epic has valiantly attempted to sugarcoat a multiplayer, bot-inhabited, arena-based fragfest with a bare bones storyline, maintained by elaborately produced cut scenes. For the sake of ticking a checkbox, it works, though by no means is it even remotely comparable to the likes of Call of Duty or Halo. The cut scenes provide only a loose context for the same maps, enemies and vehicles that become played time and time again. The distinct lack of a proper campaign would normally leave a gaping hole that would usually be filled by such content, but in the case of Unreal Tournament III, Epic has cemented that hole well and truly with a staggering forty-six maps. If you're looking to complain about any aspect of this game, the amount of areas in which to battle honestly can't be one of them.

Anybody to have spent an unreal amount of time wielding a console controller isn't going to find this game too difficult by default. Although this is somewhat remedied through Godlike bots or an Insane campaign, you can't deny the game's notable lack of difficulty in general. Whether the developers deliberately tweaked the AI to compensate for the missing mouse or the Xbox 360 simply isn't pulling its weight isn't clear, but an even higher difficulty would've catered to the most unreal of players. In the later stages the game certainly becomes more difficult, but not necessarily for the right reasons; with any increase in difficulty coming from sheer numbers, the opposing team usually has an extra player or three - so no matter how skilled you are, eight guns are always going to be better than five. As with any game patrolled by "bot brigades", to ultimately win the day you'll eventually develop reliance upon lines of code. In the campaign you're effectively just a single soldier, so if your bot buddy's brains decide to go walkies then so will your chance for victory. For every few flags captured or orbs safely delivered, a bot will show an inexplicable moment of stupidity. This usually results in that particular bot staring aimlessly at a wall or circling in a seemingly endless loop, a problem that proves most aggravating when said bot happens to be carrying the winning flag or manning the most powerful vehicle. Thankfully these moments aren't overly frequent and when the bots are on form they still remain some of the best in the industry. If bots were to be labelled with mock gamertags then you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between them and human players, an impressive feat in itself.

Whether or not you find the game particularly difficult can be offset by help from friends in four player co-operative over Xbox Live or two player co-op in split screen, the latter being a feature exclusive to this version of Unreal Tournament III. Obviously you'll find the game considerably easier with several competent players by your side but you'll also find it much more rewarding too. Xbox Live co-op play runs without fault and, in fact, my initial run through was entirely online co-op. Throughout the entire experience lag, drop-out or visual issues never reared their ugly head, meaning that those with the option should undoubtedly look into co-op play for the campaign above all else. For those without the data packets to spare, split-screen play is also an equally viable option and amazingly, the game's visuals remain intact during the experience. You will encounter some slowdown but in very brief and intermittent intervals. The option is also available to jump online with others with a friend on the same console.

Those looking for a true challenge will be compelled to jump online, which of course is the true foundation for Unreal Tournament. As much fun as the old school gameplay is, the "old school" online functionality isn't, with any party or matchmaking system out the window. If you're looking to play with friends but don't own the bandwidth to create a match yourself then you're constrained to co-ordinating a server to join together. Leaderboards and stats are included but this functionality is virtually a given, leaving the absence of a party system as a severe disappointment - any title in the game of being a multiplayer mainstay should have matchmaking, and Unreal Tournament III doesn't.

The engine that every developer and their word processors apparently use, Unreal Engine 3, once again proves its prowess and reminds us why this is perhaps the most utilized engine of this generation, though it also leaves many to wonder why the infamous visual texture "pop" still exists. Even after a loading screen, textures can often take notable time to appear and in the latter part of the campaign this problem proved irritatingly persistent on the larger scale maps. Despite being minutes into the game, respawning in a different region of a map caused the problem to reappear. To put graphical faux-pas aside, despite the game's original debut last year, it still remains one of the best looking console games to date.

For many, the matter of user-created modifications might be a deciding factor in which version to pick up. Even with the possibility of Epic releasing mods via an update themselves, the advantage in this category is ultimately exercised by the PC, with the PlayStation 3 not too far behind. The Xbox 360 edition doesn't natively support user-created content, meaning that the game that ships on day one is virtually the same game you'll be playing for the next century or so. Extra content is already included on the disk with several new maps and characters but this "advantage" of extra content by default is far outweighed by extra content developed by avid fans and techies on the other two platforms.

The most compelling reason to play Unreal Tournament III is its rarity, as such games are a dying breed. Regardless of your feelings toward this vein of game, you can't deny that they're something a little different than what born and bred console players are used to and Unreal still proudly flies the flag for old school shooters with great success. To judge a game labelled "tournament" on its single player offerings wouldn't be entirely fair, but at this time in the generational family tree, many might be expecting a more robust package. The most famous of console shooters are known for a developed single player and equally thought-out competitive offerings, so when compared side-by-side, Unreal Tournament III comes off to be the inferior game. But if you're exhausted by the thought of bubble shields and seven-kill-streak air strikes then Unreal is certainly a worthy alternative and provides a much-welcomed breath of fresh air, if only relative to other shooters. If you're looking for an old school experience with a slightly next-gen twist then Unreal Tournament III is absolutely the game for you.

Reviewed by Adam Meadows for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).