Luckily, multiplayer is downright dramatic, dynamic, ridiculous, brutal and tense. But before we get into that, one more bad-news-first: the server browser. For God’s sake, Epic, sign up with Games for Windows Live or, better yet, Steam. This cobbled-together GameSpy abomination is simply pathetic. There’s no way to just browse through all UT3 servers, which for a server browser is a pretty staggering oversight. You have to first commit to one game mode from a dropdown list, and then you’re permitted to see only the servers running that. And as in Battlefield, completely unresponsive servers show as having a ‘0’ ping rather than a high figure, meaning they rank as the fastest when in fact they’re the slowest.

Perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky to be privy to such dark secrets as our own ping in the first place, because in-game, the scoreboard shows no such thing. In fact, there’s a bizarre trend toward hiding information you have a basic gamer’s right to know: outside of regular Deathmatch, there aren’t even any death reports in UT3. That means you never find out how you died in Warfare or CTF. While games like Call of Duty and Team Fortress 2 are showing what a fantastic improvement it is to be shown precisely why you died, it’s bizarre that UT won’t even tell you how. It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that much of it may be fixed.

So we’ve eaten our greens, let’s get to dessert: the good stuff. The good stuff is extraordinary. You’ve seen the Necris Dark Walker, right? It’s like a Strider, only a bit more War of the Worlds, and it walks like a squid learning to tap-dance. Here are three interesting facts about the Dark Walker: 1) it’s ridiculously overpowered, 2) it’s every bit as awesome as it looks and 3) it’s the worst Necris vehicle.