You need to watch your back while playing Nexuiz.

Check your corners.

Weapon designs look so much better after you put a giant blade on them.

Don't forget to pick up your armor shards.

Having trouble figuring out how to pronounce Nexuiz ? Well, you're not alone: even the design team behind this fast-paced, CryEngine 3-powered shooter suffers internal strife over how to say it. "You can say it however you want, but I always say 'nexus,'" says Creative Director Kedhrin Gonzalez. "The original creator, basically, he chose the name because it looked like it couldn't be pronounced. There are entire Internet threads out there on how to pronounce this, and no one really knows how. I always tell people 'Whatever floats your boat.'" Regardless of how you say it, we now know how you play it.The original Nexuiz, developed by Lee Vermeulen, was released as a stand-alone free game powered by LordHavoc's modified DarkPlaces Quake engine in 2005. It didn't take long for the game to develop a cult-type following thanks to its fast paced old-school combat. While many mainstream multiplayer shooters were slowing down the pace and adopting iron-sight mechanics (ala Call of Duty), Nexuiz's community embraced what was different about this game and worked hard to improve upon its original formula. These changes were large and small, with numerous revisions and improvements to enhance both graphics and gameplay style. The most recent (and last) version of the original game came in 2008, Nexuiz 2.52, which you can still download for free on FilePlanet In 2010, Vermeulen sold the rights to the Nexuiz name and website to Illfonic , which took the ball and ran with it to develop a brand-new cross-platform version of Nexuiz. As you can imagine, members of the open-source community who worked hard to make Nexuiz into what it is today with many of its updates, was less than pleased . Reforming in solidarity, the community decided to make their own game inspired by the original Nexuiz, currently known as Xonotic and recently released version 0.5 of their game.So now we have two games: Xonotic and Illfonic's soon-to-be released commercial, multiplatform version of Nexuiz, one that the team says they're working very hard on to keep the old school shooter mentality firmly in place. That has to count for something.We've only seen the Xbox 360 version of the new Nexuiz, and it was a single-player game against bots (full disclosure: it was a net connection technical problem on our end, not the game), so we don't yet have a sense on how well the game controls with a mouse and keyboard, or what it's like to play against human opponents. Another factor is that the console version is set to have things like aim-assist enabled and the overall speed of the game (which right now is pretty fast), may be increased on the PC."We've been debating increasing the speed for PC players because that's something they prefer," says Gonzalez. "It's just a matter of making the animation look right. We definitely understand what the PC players expect out of this genre."Beyond the speed of the game, the PC version will support dedicated servers as well being able to create private matches through the server browser in Steam. But what about mod tools and the ability to create maps or other modifications to the game?"I'm from the mod community, so I totally want something like that," explains Gonzalez. "It's just a matter of finding the time. So if I can, I'll definitely get it in post-release. Mod communities love arena FPSes, so they'd want that in there. And Crytek would want that in there too, since they're all about that kind of stuff. It's just a matter of getting to that. If implemented, we'll probably have it so that only private servers can host these maps."The maps that were demoed, one of which being the classic Nexuiz map Strength, have a lot of vertical design elements. There are warp gates, ramps, and some narrow corridors as well, but the sense of speed of movement was very prevalent -- I like! While the number of maps is something that's still being nailed down, we do know there will be nine weapons (rocket launchers, sniper rifles, pistols, etc.) in the game that can be upgraded during a match through "dynamic mutators."These mutators are scattered throughout the levels and have a variety of effects on the game, depending on the specific mutator you enable as a player. Things like turning off gravity, randomly blowing up an enemy, creating a safety net for your teammates if they fall off of a ledge -- there will be over 100 different mutators that can be found during any one of the matches and game modes. Each match you play in Nexuiz will be different from the last, because you don't know which mutator your opponent plans to use.You can influence it a bit, though -- you'll be able to develop your player profile to boost the odds of your preferred mutator types appearing in a match. So, for example, if you like the ability to temporarily put the game into third person or if you're a fan of jet packs, then you can anticipate those special abilities at some point during your online matches.Though the original Nexuiz was a free game, Gonzalez says this version will have an asking price of $10. "We feel that with a free-to-play model, you have to have so much content to get players involved. Maybe if we had more time to make other mutators, that could have been part of the F2P model. But out of the gate, it was just something that didn't sit well with us."That's not to suggest that this game will be short of content -- from everything we saw in terms of map design, weapons, mutators, dedicated server and bot support, Nexuiz could end up being quite a bargain for fans of arena shooters when it comes out in the first quarter of next year.This is nothing but good news for fans of old-school arena shooters like Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. The genre hasn't gotten a ton of attention since Quake IV and Unreal Tournament 3 both sputtered, but there's still great fun to be had in the meat grinder!