As a genre name, ‘dungeon crawler’ doesn’t sound particularly enticing, but as games like Diablo and Baldur’s Gate have proven, spending time trawling through dark and dingy dungeons can actually be a rather pleasant experience. Enter Demon’s Souls – a game so harsh and unforgiving it makes Ninja Gaiden seem tame, yet running through its gloomy and oppressive tunnels is never less than entertaining.

Take the tutorial for example. Demon’s Souls gently coaxes you into getting to grips with its dual trigger combat system – L1 to raise your shield, R1 to strike with your sword – imparting info on it’s online note system (more on which later) and generally letting you carefully dip your toe into its scalding hot bath of unrelenting challenges.

Bring the ruckus. Some battles can get pretty heated.

Dispatch a few weak enemies, learn to parry attacks with your shield – a well-timed press of L2 – and you’ll start to feel fairly comfortable playing Demon’s Souls. That is until the tutorial ends with you entering a room where a giant Vanguard beast just happens to reside. The game hasn’t even properly begun yet, and already you’re being pounded to puree by a 15 foot tall creature with fists the size of houses.

Before entering Demon’s Souls labyrinthine dungeons, you’ll need to build your own character using the detailed editor. As is de rigueur with the majority of character creation tools, there’s an ungodly level of depth, so you can tweak the size and shape of your nostrils until you’re ready to collapse in a quivering, teary wreck. And yet, no matter how long you try to make your creation look good, he or she will invariably become a dopey, vacant-eyed fool. Still, it’s nice to have five million sliders to fiddle with.

Boss characters are fearsome and usually cause instant death. Increasing your soul level is essential to best them.

There are also several classes to choose from, each with varying initial statistics. Pick wisely though, because while a knight might be exceptionally tough and handy in a scrap, his soul level is low, unlike a lowly thief with lesser aptitude in combat whose soul level is much higher. As you’ll quickly discover in Demon’s Souls, it’s good to follow the example of the late, great James Brown and get some soul(s).

Life in the military isn’t for everyone. For us, the fresh air, vigorous exercise and ruthless discipline required were primary turn-offs, not to mention being thrust onto the frontline dodging bullets and explosions from all directions. Thank goodness, then, for games like Operation Flashpoint that allow us to look down the ole’ iron sights in a realistic battlefield situation without the risk of our heads popping like overripe melons.

Cast as 2nd Lt. Mulholland, leader of a four-man squad, stationed on the fictional island of Skira, your job is to weed out the entrenched enemy utilising advanced military tactics lifted straight out of the US Marine Corps handbook. Chinese PLA forces have set up encampments all over the island’s 220 square kilometre expanse in a bid to mine the Russian oil buried beneath its surface. Or something. We weren’t really listening.

See all that lovely grass? You'll probably spend most of your time crawling through it while playing Op Flash 2.

Operation Flashpoint is the anti-Call of Duty, punishing brazen, head-on assaults with a swift bullet to the brain. Previously aimed at the PC audience, the game’s presence on consoles has prompted the developer to resort to console-friendly pop-up radial menus, which might slightly antagonise the aforementioned desktop squaddies.

Issuing orders to your team is both simple and streamlined for console and PC users alike, despite the compromises made to controllers. Establishing and executing your strategies and commands is remarkably effortless once you familiarise yourself with the control scheme. Happily, your team’s AI is reliable too – save for the odd unusual glitch – carrying out your orders with military efficiency.

Who or what are these morons firing at? Answers on a postcard, please.

You’ll quickly learn that there’s a lot of shooting from range in Operation Flashpoint, as engaging the enemy up close is suicidal. You’ll need to be prepared to line up distant collections of pixels in your scope for the majority of Dragon Rising’s campaign as that’s really the crux of the game and (presumably) true to the realities of war.

For the less patient player, there are a number of gameplay assists that ease the steep difficulty curve somewhat: where the full-fat unassisted game removes the HUD, checkpoints and helpful feedback of any kind (such as the animated crosshair that indicates a successful hit on an enemy), the lower difficulty levels provide all of the above. Playing the unassisted experience might prove a bit much for some – dying face-down in the dirt with a cranial puncture wound without a checkpoint to fall back to is a bitter pill to swallow when you’ve worked your arse off to complete an exceptionally gruelling objective.

No military game is complete without green-o-vision. NVGs and laser-sights are invaluable during nocturnal engagements.

For the devoted hardcore, tackling the campaign missions without the luxury of assists or check-pointing will undoubtedly sort the men from the boys. Regardless of the level of challenge you choose however, the AI remains constant, so the enemy put up just as much of a fight on the easier settings as they do on the highest. Occasionally, though, you’ll see an enemy troop attempting to crawl out of trouble as bullets kick up dust around him – an unintentional but not unwelcome bit of comedy on the developer’s part.