Unreal Tournament 3's just around the corner, and it's more impressive than ever. With crazy new weapons such as the 'slow bubble,' that slows the pace of anything that goes through it, to 'smart rockets' that can act like a flytrap as well as give away an enemy's position, this arsenal is bound to keep us occupied for hours.

Other features include their new game types: Assault, Double Dominatione, Bombing Run, Invasion, and Mutant to name a few.

Unreal Tournament 3's most eye-catching new feature is a two-metre-square block of pink gelatinous wibble that Epic is currently calling the "slow bubble". Once deployed, it slows the pace of anything that passes through it to a crawl. You can fire a rocket into one end and then run round the side and watch it slowly carve through the centre, before resuming its breakneck pace as it exits. More usefully, you can also dump it in a corridor that chokes your enemy's progress and use it like a flytrap, snaring the opposition and then blasting them at will. And, brilliantly, anybody stuck inside also gets to watch your bullets seep towards them at the same gradual pace that prevents them getting out of the way. Surely this is the best deployable since Armed & Dangerous' rarely mentioned shark that leaps out of the ground and eats you when you walk over it, if not the can of Red Bull I just found in my desk drawer.

Not that the blobosquirm is the focus of Epic's presentation at E3, of course. That would be silly. But, having been up for 48 hours at the point it creeps across producer Jeff Morris's screen, it was the thing that jolted me back to life, and thus deserves celebration.

Unreal Tournament 3 (it's "3" rather than "4" because Epic considers UT 2003 and 2004 to be part of the same "series") is the latest instalment in the arena-based multiplayer shooter series that gave us the asymmetric "Assault" team-play principle, the pilotable Redeemer mega-weapon, the concept of "mutators" and a viable alternative to id Software's 1990s FPS monopoly. "We're keeping this one to a set number of game modes, and making sure we pack as much into them as possible," says Morris, introducing the game in a crowded corner of Midway's suite at the Loews Hotel in Santa Monica, when asked to explain the thinking. To that end we've got Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and Warfare. Gone (to some extent) are Assault, Double Domination, Invasion, Bombing Run and Mutant, although vehicle-CTF is reportedly still in there. "Streamlined" is the word.

Storm via eurogamer.net »