First things fraggin’ first: play Unreal Tournament III offline or on and you’re getting slightly different shades of the same blistering experience and both are as swift as sh*t from a goose. While other titles often feature single-player campaigns but are, in cold reality, really multiplayer titles with a single-player mode that justifies itself with a trite story slapped to run-to-waypoint-to-progress levels, UT III sticks firmly to its guns and provides arena combat so nauseatingly perfected that ideally you’ll need to play with a spare adrenal gland ready to one side, lest the other shrivel to a prune. Devoid of any fat and honed to perfection, this is the game to separate the muzzle-spittling gonks from true sporting champions.

Epic Games so love its beefy graphical style that the first thing newcomers to Unreal Tournament III will notice is that the Campaign mode features what looks like, but isn’t, Marcus Fenix from Gears Of War. No, it’s his smarter, more skilful and demonstrably more heroic older brother, but he has such a generic Epic Games face and comes fastened in ridiculously bulky armour that we may as well call him Mr Meat. Similarly the arena’s graphical styles are very Gears, but feature more variety in location, a wider palette and aren’t designed to encourage you to spend your time hiding like a pale-faced kid on Child Catcher Day.

There’s no cover system, no aiming down an iron sight and, blissfully, no need to hose down opponents with automatic fire to end their lives. The game’s weapon set is perfect and each one can be used to deadly effect to fell a foe with ruthless efficiency, once you know how to handle it. One of this reviewer’s major gripes (among many) with modern shooters is the way they provide you with more extravagant firepower, but then nullify the effect almost totally by upgrading everyone’s armour. When you catch sight of an opposing player or bot in Unreal Tournament III they can be dead a heartbeat later, whether you’re armed with a rocket launcher, a Shock Rifle, Biorifle, Stinger Minigun or even the Enforcer pistol. If you’ve got the skill you can be a surgical killer, no matter what you are armed with, or what armour pick-up they have, and while the variety of weapons is vast they’re so perfectly balanced as to make them all worthwhile. Marksmanship as well as the ability to predict where a target will be seconds after you’ve pulled the trigger is what you need, and what you will be rewarded for. Holding down the trigger will just make your shots inaccurate and put your timing off.

Single-player Campaign mode plays like a series of multiplayer matches with the other 15 humans being replaced by artificially intelligent bots, because that’s precisely what it is. No matter how the mission briefing describes the fight-to-come they all fit into one of six modes of death-bringing so Campaign can be seen as a series of prescribed arena matches that you play through either alone, online, or with another local player via a split-screen. There’s Deathmatch (kill everyone), Team Deathmatch (kill the other team), Capture The Flag (take their flag to your base), Vehicle Deathmatch (do the same with vehicles available), Warfare (destroy the core at their base, defend and repair yours) and Duel (a two combatant duel). If they all seem familiar then that’s because a process of natural selection has killed off the need for other, flabbier, modes but that isn’t to say there’s nothing in UT III that doesn’t massively stand out as being perky and fresh. Large arenas featuring vehicles automatically equip players with hoverboards that can be activated at the tap of ‘X’, so little time is spend trundling from A to B, the new Translocator device arms you with a gun that fires a teleport pad that you can beam to by triggering alternate fire mode, and thereby let you zap to higher ground instantly.

Incomparable to the pure fear that accompanies Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and more akin to taking part in a sport than a war, Unreal Tournament III is the most accessible and technical shooter available, and it’s near impossible to fault it. Perhaps you’d like a smoother frame rate? Maybe you scream for a higher resolution because your eyes are powered by lasers? Nothing mars the game to any level that affects its majesty and even the inclusion of Mr Meat and some truly risible dialogue can’t deny the game it’s place on the must-have shelf of 360 FPSs.