A man wearing a long leather coat and faintly ludicrous ten gallon hat stands with his back to the camera, looking out over a sun-drenched canyon floor. He recites verses to himself absently, gobbets of Old Testament, his Californian twang calling to mind the clatter of saloon doors, the hiss of tumbleweeds at high noon. Bristles of fern and tall cacti ripple in the heat rising from the sand.

It could be a scene from one of Thomas Ford’s rootin’ tootin’ epics, but this isn’t the Wild West – or at least, not the one we remember. The camera sweeps round, exposing the Kevlar plates strapped to the man’s chest and the pick-up truck parked behind him. Voices crackle over an earpiece, and gunshots cut through the sizzling air, dragging the anonymous warrior-preacher and his audience back to the modern era.

Call of Juarez: The Cartel is a game with one foot in the past – or more precisely, perhaps, a game with one foot in the present. The third in Techland’s hard-boiled gun-slinging series, it enters a world in which the Wild Western shooter, once just another bandito fleeing the wrath of Sheriff Contemporary Middle Eastern Scenario, has ridden to fame and fortune. That’s mostly the work of one videogame, the much-caressed, multiple-zillion-selling Red Dead Redemption, and it’s of course this game, however fairly or unfairly, that The Cartel will be measured against when it hits consoles and PC later this year.

Lacking Rockstar’s cultural cachet and reliably excellent writing, just how are the Techland gang and publisher Ubisoft to set their whiskery brainchild apart? Well, firstly by sternly resisting the temptation to go open world, a prospect toyed with at intervals in the otherwise heavily micro-managed Bound in Blood.

Outlaws to the trend

“It’s true that Red Dead Redemption is an excellent game, and if you release a western game now you’re going to be compared,” Senior Producer Samuel Jacques admits to VGD after walking us through a two-mission demo, “That said, we’re a different kind of game. We’re a shooter, we’re more action-oriented, while RDR is what Rockstar knows how to do very well – it’s a sandbox game where you can wander through the environment.”

Nice place for a picnic.

The other point of differentiation is a tad more drastic: The Cartel’s 16 missions take place over a century after the events of Rockstar’s magnum opus, scattered across the ganglands of Los Angeles, the Mexican town of Juarez itself and the intervening desert. But hold your horses a second, pardners – can a game in which mouthy tattooed pimps unload automatic weapons at spangly inner city discotheques really be styled a “Wild Western”? Why yes, Tex, yes it can – and “style” may be the key word.

In Techland’s view, conjuring the spectre of the American frontier isn’t a question of adhering to chronology, but of embracing certain archetypes and attitudes, a certain look and feel. “We keep saying that the Wild West was universal, it was not an era, it was a spirit – we want to prove that,” Jacques explains. “We’ve been saying that since the first Call of Juarez.”

Which makes perfect sense when you think about it: the Wild Western in film and literature has always been rather closer to fiction than documentary reality, whether you’re talking about the clean-shaven, clean-living John Wayne kind or the oppressive, unsentimental No Country For Old Men variety. By freeing the genre of its historical shackles, time-warping its tropes and techniques into modern-day America, Techland’s writers have set the stage for some spicy bits of self-referential humour, like the directorial gag outlined in my opening paragraph.

As I walk through the shadow of the valley of death I shall fear no evil, for the checkpoints are evenly spaced...

Less agreeably, they’ve also treated the Wild Western to a fresh layer of controversy. Mere hours after The Cartel was announced, Fox News Latino accused Ubisoft and Techland of glamorising real-life violence in the region. Juarez, see, is a very real township, and not one trumpeted for its law-abiding youth. The broadcaster’s case, apparently based on a single press release, is as rife with assumption as you’d expect, but in Fox’s defence, the implication that the romanticised anarchy of the Old West can be easily equated with the current state of the US-Mexican border deserves a bit of scrutiny.

Jacques says the Cartel team are following the Fox story “pretty closely”, but that the game itself will steer clear of any socio-political nitty-gritty. “The game was Call of Juarez for years before events took such a dimension,” Jacques tells us. “We are not really depicting any real life act. The game is an entertainment product.”

“We’re going to Juarez, but it could happen somewhere else,” he adds. “We could go to Argentina. We’re not supporting the violence – we’re playing cops, we’re not playing the Cartel guys.”

There’s been considerable noise and fuss over the rather, shall we say, “comfortable” state of currently announced Nintendo 3DS software. Too many familiar faces, goes the refrain, not enough compelling new blood. This is an unjust complaint for three reasons. One, launch wave titles are backward-looking affairs almost by definition – the last thing most right-thinking publishers want to do is try out something new on commercially untried hardware. Two, the day we turn our noses up at the combination of Super Street Fighter IV, a workable analogue stick and medium-length train journeys is the day this here United Kingdom tips over into the Atlantic Ocean.

But most importantly of all, the people whining about the prevalence of old names on the handheld are turning a blind eye to Steel Diver, perhaps the tastiest 3DS exclusive in the offing. It’s easy to turn a blind eye to Steel Diver, to be fair. Screenshots suggest a somewhat characterless underwater shooter, all muddy blues and coppery browns and cute but generic cartoon submarines. There are enemy tubs, nobbly mines and tetchy, tentacled molluscs to blow up or avoid while exploring ripple-haunted aquatic landscapes, each stocked with Saturday morning cartoon props like carved Aztec statues and wrecked pirate galleons.

The fact of the matter is, the old adage about needing to play something before you pass judgement is more than usually true of this naval oddity, an ancient DS tech demo that blew through to the big-time at E3 2010. For one thing, the much-vaunted, much-questioned 3D effect brings the presentation into its own. Background objects are more precisely defined against the all-pervading murk, the shimmer of surface radiance accentuates the curve of your hull, and the water itself acquires a beguiling sense of volume and heft. It’s still no eye-popper, but that’s to Nintendo’s advantage in some ways: Steel Diver won’t tax your lenses like certain other 3DS titles. The thrill of visual projection here is gentler, more accommodating, enhancing rather than overriding the experience of play.

Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto likens the game to a pocket aquarium. With high explosives in it.

And that’s crucial, because Steel Diver has plenty of other ways to tax you. Submarines are steered not with the D-pad but by moving various sliders and wheels on the touch screen, mocked up to resemble a nautical dashboard. To accelerate, for instance, you press and drag the engine slider into the positive. Or, to raise the sub’s nose, roll the steering wheel forty-five degrees anti-clockwise.

It’s a ponderous, unintuitive system, and were this your average air or space-based schmup I’d be so much torn drifting metal by now, but nothing happens quickly on (or under) the high seas. You could catch the Eurostar to Calais in the time it takes a torpedo to find its target, and fit in a sexy weekend at Paris before the accumulated pounding sends your vessel to the bottom. Top speeds are reached only reluctantly, even aboard the smallest and nimblest of the three playable subs, and the dreamily unhurried physics system will have you scraping sparks from every boulder till you learn to reverse-thrust several beats ahead of when you’d like to stop.

Accordingly, the idea isn’t to dart in and out of engagements by the seat of your diving suit, but to plan out manoeuvres carefully by way of the sonar map on your dash. That’s not to say you won’t have to think on the hoof at times – in one of the missions we tackled, destroyers battered us with depth charges while sneaky subs threw torpedoes our way from marginally off-screen. Air is health, and you can replenish it simply by going topside (if you dare), but critical damage will make your submarine leak. Fortunately, the swift application of a stylus point is all it takes to inch a punctured craft back into the green.

The feel is less, in the end, that of a shoot ‘em up as of something akin to that old momentum-managing favourite Lunar Lander. Inertia and water resistance are both your allies and your nemeses as you struggle to out-cap’n other cap’ns, unloading torpedoes not at where they are but where they will be by the hoped-for second of impact. It’s thoughtful action with a splash of strategy, straying just near enough to simulation to challenge, while retaining enough insta-fixy twitch value that you wouldn’t mind whipping it out on the bus.

Left hand down a bit. (Any Navy Lark listeners in the house?)

We were unable to try the periscope shooting gallery mode during our hands-on, not so much for want of time as for being unabashedly embroiled in the main game, but acquaintances have sung its praises. Using the 3DS gyrometer to move the scope, players must blow nearby ships out of the water. It sounds like a nice, relatively brainless break from the carnage beneath the waves, give or take a few niggling concerns about the marriage of motion sensitivity and autostereoscopic 3D.

I can’t imagine Steel Diver topping pre-order charts – for all the whinging about derivative software portfolios, consumers can be relied on to play things safe – but in its own, quirky way the game stands head and shoulders over everything I’ve seen on 3DS so far. True-blue originals are rare enough even on long-established platforms, and this one has the makings of a classic.

Hope it shows up over ‘ere then – Steel Diver has yet to be confirmed for European release. The Yanks get it alongside the 3DS on 27th March.

It’s impossible to convey in 1500 words just how great, how necessary the Halo franchise has become, but one way to start is by looking at something small and theoretically unimportant, something every player, however brief his or her time with a Halo game, will have encountered: the Covenant Grunt.

These shrill, tottering amphibians are Bungie’s bullet fodder, the extra-terrestrial equivalent of Wolfenstein’s goose-steppers or Modern Warfare’s sullen trrrrrists, but they have something few other generic infantry units from few other first-person shooter IPs can boast of. Personality, that is. Personality, and a degree of resourcefulness and spontaneity that makes them a credible threat long after you’ve broken the campaign’s back and are up to your power-armoured chin in Flood.

Less effusively put, the Grunts are complete and utter bastards, and this is why they’re such fun to fight. Though small, slow and fragile, their yellow-bellied tendencies and mild fanaticism are constant sources of surprise. There’s no telling when one might blow a psychological gasket, grab two handfuls of live grenade and hug the nearest pair of Spartan knees. Or flee, shrieking and flailing its arms comically, drawing the player’s fire in much the same irresistible way a dangled piece of string will lure a cat, leaving you oblivious for a crucial few seconds to the Elites sneaking round your flanks.

The press release calls them 'cute'. Er, right.

All qualities we’re reminded of, obviously, while playing new Halo: Reach match type Gruntpocalypse, a variant on Halo 3: ODST’s wave defence Firefight mode, that pits a team of proud upstanding Spartans against mob after mob of chattering leather-skinned Munchkins.

At first it feels like a duck-shoot, the flat roofs of the night-time Waterfront map affording plenty of places to stand and put the new single-shot Marksman rifle to use, Grunt heads popping into dandelion clocks of confetti amid the curiously macabre sound of children cheering. But before long the timed map modifiers or ‘Skulls’ lock in, tightening Covenant aims and fattening grenade belts, and the Grunts start to shun the broad unshielded expanse of the beach in favour of the cool alpine darkness to the rear of the facility.

Being the last person to know when it rains proves tactically advantageous here, as the invading forces elude our scopes by lurking on the second to topmost steps of stairwells, or trundling down shallow gullies. This becomes especially bothersome when the stumpy devils get hold of Fuel Rod Guns or the all-new, fearsome Covenant grenade launchers. If somebody can glue four heat-sensitive balls of viscous blue death to your arse in a single volley, the last thing you want that somebody to be is on the short and unobtrusive side.

Tiny yet testing, undisciplined, cowardly and thus dangerously hard to predict, the Grunts are a sort of Halo-in-miniature, a metaphor for the cavernous, multiple-jointed stage machinery that contains them. Their refusal to be uniform is Halo’s refusal to be uniform, whether you’re corkscrewing the rump of a Warthog over the rolling green hummocks of a re-made Blood Gulch map, or jetting out into the Swiss Family Robinson immensity that is ‘Forge World’, the backdrop for a tweaked, expanded, vastly more user-friendly upgrade of Halo 3′s breakthrough map editor.

It might not be as showy as Killzone, but Reach still looks top tier.

A point often overlooked by those who consider Bungie’s ‘thirty seconds of fun’ philosophy reductive is that every time you play, it’s a different thirty seconds of fun. Cover points may be jogged sideways by rocket impacts; Brutes may opt to stake out a gallery rather than huddle behind a barricade in the courtyard; a Grav Lift might land askew, punting a crate across the bonnet of a Wraith. Non-linearity has always been the magic word for Halo’s spawn-free plains, roads and valleys, its scaled, responsive enemies, and the wizardry is at its most unmissable, from what we saw at a preview event last week, in Halo: Reach.

That’s apparent even in the first ten minutes of the campaign, where the presence of a six-strong, multi-specialism Spartan team has obliged the developer to push back the boundaries of play and step up the number and variety of sights and sounds. Unseen and more aggressive breeds of Jackal bring the fight to your face within a breath or two of eyes-on, crowding players who hang back from the frontline; panicked native wildlife (harmless, and bizarrely Ostrich-shaped) does its best to startle a few rounds from your clip.

‘Getting back to the roots’ is a phrase we often hear in connection with sequels to series that have gone a bit Lindsay Lohan, and what more clear-cut a case of franchise crash-out than Driver, celebrated for its first iteration, panned for its third and sniffed at complacently for its second and fourth? A Senior Brand Manager bolds the point at our Driver: San Francisco hands-on by propping a weather-beaten copy of the original game against the TV. There it sits beside the high definition rough-and-tumble of its descendent, very much like a grandma abandoned in a theme-park cafe while the kids merrily concuss themselves on the big dipper.

It’s a slant we’re not fully comfortable with for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Ubisoft has already spun this sentiment of Driver: Parallel Lines, the solidly inoffensive 2006 outing. Secondly and more importantly, it sells the project’s ambition a little short. In some respects San Francisco is indeed classic Driver – it’s an open-world vehicle sandbox modelled on the bonnet-flapping pursuit sequences of films like Starsky and Hutch – but in certain others it’s as far remote from its forebears as a Tardis is from a Dodge Challenger. Indeed, the latter analogy says it all.

Tanner's relationship with the fuzz is as ambivalent as ever.

‘Shifting’, the new showboat feature, is fascinating not so much for what it is – the ability to warp away from one ride, pan the camera across the city in suspended animation and phase-hop into another – as for where we find it. Teleportation mechanics date back to StarCraft and probably well beyond, but this is the first time, to my knowledge, that we’ve encountered the idea in a racing game.

There are fairly obvious reasons for this, and seasoned motorheads would be well-justified on the face of it in throwing many a toy Ferrari from their 540 horsepower prams. Stay with this one for the moment, though, guys. From our experiences on Wednesday, San Francisco could be rather special.

The narrative tread stitching such fanciful gameplay conceits to the road is that returning protagonist John Tanner has wound up in a coma after one too many head-on collisions with old nemesis Jericho. Where other leading men might have used the hallucinatory downtime to revisit childhood horrors or hang out with their inner serial killer, Tanner’s private delusions see him continuing the hunt for Jericho while making every wheeled object on 208 miles of authentic (and reasonably attractive-looking) West Coast tarmac his own personal plaything.

Cockpits are lavishly accoutred.

Unhooking the campaign from the constraints of Tanner’s body has allowed Ubisoft Reflections to look afresh at the idea of non-linear progression. The city reportedly contains 500 individual lives, with their own personal dilemmas and associated missions or side-missions, each housed in one of 120 licensed cars (including Pagani Zondas, DeLoreans and Aston Martins). As the story wears on the shift mechanic will upgrade, letting you pull the camera out and jump further, till at last by the denouement the entirety of San Francisco is accessible from on high.

Besides the expansiveness of Microsoft’s pockets, the histrionic stupidity of E3 in general and the fact that there is no depth to which PR teams will not sink, given sufficient quantities of caffeine – no abuse of the brain, knee joints and bladder they will not contemplate – the one thing last night’s Cirque de Soleil extravaganza should have re-impressed upon you is that Kinect is ‘for everyone’. Universal appeal was the company line at the peripheral’s unveiling a year back, and universal appeal remains the company line today.

Trouble is, Microsoft’s ‘everyone’ does not, in actual fact, cover everyone. Rather, this ‘everyone’ is the latest in a series of imaginary buying demographics mass-produced by the likes of Coca Cola, MacDonalds and (of course) Nintendo – another encore for that classic commercial quartet, the nuclear family. Jovial, pipe-smoking Pop. Supportive, apron-clad Mom. Little Joey with his model airplane, and Sally with her pigtails. There’s no room in the picture for the heavy-duty, isolationist, Call-of-Duty-spamming ‘gamer’s gamers’ with whom the Xbox 360 has been hitherto associated. No room for you, if our estimation of our readership is correct, and definitely no room for me.

The point was writ large in the form of some disgracefully shiny lifestyle demo reels, four madly-grinning, All-American actors jiggling in front of various Microsoft-branded shades of Wii Sports and EyeToy. Meanwhile, on the floor of the arena itself, dehydrated journalists glanced round frantically for means of escape or, failing that, suicide.

Specialist write-ups of the Kinect reveal have been almost universally negative, lambasting everything from the choreography through the canned applause to the high tech yet patronising attempts at audience interaction (Darth Vader’s appearance was a solitary highlight). We’d love to suggest that Microsoft wasn’t anticipating this response, but the opposite is probably true. The publisher’s real guests of honour were the ‘mainstream’ commentators, not the dependably cynical hardcore press – safely unacquainted with terms like ‘latency’ or ‘pre-rendered’, and rather more susceptible perhaps to diversionary razzmatazz.

GOOD JOB, MOM.

As far as its traditional consumers are concerned, much now hinges on the company’s conference this evening (morning in LA), where the bulk of Kinect-enabled third party titles are expected to make berth alongside pricing details, release dates and a more comprehensive account of product strategy. Having stoked much gossip and mystery over both the artist formerly known as Project Natal and the precise nature of its E3 offering, the big M has stumbled at the first hurdle, and it’ll take more than another fancy lightshow to restore the balance.

Kinect is due out in November. Why not refresh your memory of our first look piece?

In hindsight, we shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that Ubisoft’s fifth home format Prince of Persia game, The Forgotten Sands, handles exactly like its first, Sands of Time, with all the monkey bars, pillars and pressure panels you can swing a time-rewinding dagger at. The project’s inherent retrospectiveness is, after all, right there plain as day in the subtitle.

Ubisoft has never really ‘forgotten’ Sands of Time, of course: released in 2003, the game broke one mould for third-person action platforming only to trap itself, its creators and to an extent its own genre firmly inside another. The same-generation sequels, Warrior Within and Two Thrones, played with different narrative tones but kept the formula intact, and while 2008′s cell-shaded episode brought some interesting new ideas to the table, it repulsed as many pundits as it impressed.

Besides upgraded though not quite razor edge looks and a new plot, which pits the Prince, fresh from his original Azad adventure, against a host of sand creatures unleashed on a besieging army by errant brother Malik, the second Xbox 360 and PS3 title makes use of elemental powers such as rock armor, ice projectiles and a wind area attack. When not in combat, the Prince can also freeze flowing water to provide scalable surfaces. Nothing all that game-changing, as noted, but enough perhaps to keep the franchise’s deep-rooted fanbase ticking over.

Jan-Erik Sjovall, Animation Director, was on hand at the preview event to talk shop. And talk shop he certainly did. Read on.

The Prince puts water sources in stasis to traverse a room from above.

VideoGamesDaily: Thanks for making time for us, Jan. You worked on the art and cinematics for Prince of Persia 2008, which looked absolutely terrific.

Jan-Erik Sjovall: We got an award for that from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences for ‘Outstanding Achievement in Animation’, so yeah!

VGD: Nice job. And this is running on an upgraded version of the same engine, but the colour palette seems to have been played down a bit…

Sjovall: It depends on where you are in the levels. The colour palette changes. So it’s very reddish-orange at the beginning, and changes towards blueish-green when you’re in the underground sewers and the prison, and then it lights up again – it really shifts, for all the maps. Every single map has a primary colour palette to it, there’s a primary colour for every map, so there’s massive thought put into this.

VGD: Yes. Still, it does seem to be much less stylised this time round. Did you find that the previous game’s aesthetic was too esoteric for some players?

Sjovall: No, I don’t think that. Of all the things that were put into this, there was a lot of thought process put into game design, level design, which move to take, how everything was put together, but for the visual art style, we simply said that the illustrative art style used for Prince of Persia 2008 is uniquely reserved for that brand.

We wanted to go back and see what we could do with Sands of Time. Sands of Time was not necessarily meant to be photorealistic, but when you see the sequel, the sequel – let’s call it the sequel – to Sands of Time was actually internally Assassin’s Creed. So Assassin’s Creed came out of the Sands of Time seam, the Prince of Persia seam. And they went photorealistic because they could. And if the technology had been there for PS2, probably Sands of Time would have been a photorealistic game.

So that was the basic idea, we said ‘OK, we’ll make the game Sands of Time would have been if we’d had Xbox 360 or PS3 at the time it was made’. That was the idea. It has nothing to do with [the art design being too esoteric] – the same art director who did Warrior Within with the broodingly complex Prince and the heavy metal, that same art director was also doing Prince of Persia 2008 and that same art director’s now on this title. I call that range!

VGD: Let’s talk about range in another sense. The Prince of Persia series isn’t quite as discontinuous as Final Fantasy, but every iteration of the Prince himself does seem to be an entirely different character. Who is the Prince for you, at this point?

Sjovall: For me, of course, because I’m working on Forgotten Sands I think this is the Prince for me, in the sense that you take the Sands of Time guy and the Warrior Within guy and you merge them somewhat. So you have not as brooding, as goth-style a Prince, but he has seen some bad things, and that made him grow to a certain degree, so he’s a tough guy, he’s seen some stuff and he can hold his own.

Splinter Cell: Conviction has the mother of all tutorials. Or rather, father. Scuttling from over-turned table to over-turned table in a Maltese marketplace, following the ear-mic directions of old comrade Anna Grimsdóttír, the lately out-of-retirement Sam Fisher reacquaints himself with some basic stealth dynamics by way of flashbacks to his infant daughter’s bedside.

Darkness, the grizzled assassin explains to sleep-deprived Sarah, has its uses. Not wishing to give his offspring night terrors for life, he doesn’t go into much detail, but veteran Splinters will be well attuned to the violent current beneath these paternal reassurances. That undercurrent soon bubbles to the surface, as you road-test the new ‘Mark and Execute’ mechanic mid-flashback on three unfortunate housebreakers, queuing up headshots with right bumper and loosing the rounds in a split-second with Y.

This smooth interweaving of exposition and interaction is typical of the new game, with pre-rendered plot points and objective data mapped, home cinema style, onto flat surfaces as you approach them in real-time, tactics reminiscent of Heavy Rain’s object or limb-tethered button prompts.

If you can smell a psychological dimension to Ubisoft’s stylised approach, you should trust your nose: in the three levels we encounter at the press event – marketplace, mansion house and military airfield – Fisher’s surroundings are occasionally crowded by painful remembrances, monochrome snapshots of tombstones, the whisper of ambulance sirens. Later on, a villain harangues us from the security of a projected image and there’s a moment, just a moment, in which we confuse this nebulous threat with another figure from Sam’s past.

Sarah’s affection, it transpires, was one of the few things keeping the man’s murderous leanings in check in the wake of Splinter Cell: Double Agent (“What did you do, daddy?” she asks, appearing at the bedroom door, and he sheepishly hides the gun at his side). Deprived of that affection by a road accident in which Third Echelon, his old employer, may have a hand, he’s become an utterly ruthless rogue cannon, operating in the pitch-black regions beyond even the secret agent’s muddy code of conduct.

Our Xbox 360 demo build sported noticeable tearing and frame rate dips. This aside, Conviction looks decent.

The new interrogation sequences, of which we get to sample two, are obviously symptomatic of this departure. Scripting is again cleverly intermingled with brutally hands-on play as we throw a jabbering skinhead around a toilet, mashing his head through the slats of a cubicle and cracking it against the sink, the game restraining us at intervals for just long enough to let another plot morsel dribble from our victim’s bloodied lips.

Also symptomatic, perhaps, of Sam’s righteous savagery is the game’s relative action heaviness, playing down the careful monitoring of view cones and light levels that characterised earlier Splinter Cells in favour of adaptation on the fly. Cover points, handholds and goons within reach of a fatal headlock are picked out by HUD elements for maximum convenience, and our hero is a lot quicker than his advancing years should allow, whether he’s shuffling palm over palm along a ledge or scaling a wall pipe.

Fans of the previous games will doubtless be crying havoc at all this, and it’s hard to know how to soothe their fears. Splinter Cell has become something different, a flashpoint-dotted escapade across moody but easy-to-read sandbox environments, asking less of the player’s capacity to analyse an area but counter-balancing this with greater pace and more sophisticated presentation.

Glance at any PR shot of Red Dead Redemption – aside from the close-ups of TNT stacks exploding, that is, or of Texans ingesting lead through their belly buttons – and you’ll be struck by the desolateness of it all. Hazy plateaus of sand and grass sweep away to splendid but featureless hillsides, stuccoed with cacti and scarred very occasionally by tracks or railroads. Settlements protrude from this landscape like islands at low tide, tumbleweeds nosing their doorsteps. Even the larger fortified townships seem a tad ephemeral, a little insecure.

Grand Theft Auto IV had high-rise billboards, and custom ringtones, and the everywhere-present hubbub of traffic with which to grab and guide your attention. Redemption, set a full century or so before Nico Bellic first phoned for a pizza, has no such enveloping man-made fabric of noise and newsfeeds at its disposal. Instead you get buffalo trails and tanned boulders, or the hiss of the wind over thorns. Nico had an apartment, or at least a succession of safehouses, complete with TV, kitchenette and the occasional girlfriend. New hero John Marston, a murderous outlaw turned family-man turned reluctant state-sponsored assassin, has only his pistols, the dollars in his pocket and what sticks he can gather for firewood.

As I noted in our first look, it makes a lot of sense for Rockstar to relocate to the Old West. The spaghetti epics from which Redemption takes many of its artistic cues have a lot in common with the developer’s cherished Scorsese or Coppola-directed gangster yarns – hard-eyed anti-heroes, hard-edged ethnicities, a taste for violent absurdities. But those uninterrupted vistas are still a shock, even months after the public reveal, and when we’re told that the new backdrop is one of, if not the biggest Rockstar has ever created, there’s the fear that this primordial sterility could bequeath a sterile game, its hotspots dispersed across miles of uninteresting wilderness, lacking the tightly-packed geographical playgrounds of post-modern urban sandboxes, or a concentrated populace from whom to leech one-liners and punch-ups.

We weren't able to try this out, but it looks like first-rate Youtube fodder.

We’ve seen and heard plenty about how the developer plans to fill your time – about sly horse thieves and I-Spy treasure maps, highway robberies and recreational finger removal – but only today, in the prolonged hangover of an English January, do we get a chance to slip on John Marston’s rawhide boots and kick back with a controller.

Redemption handles much like GTA IV: analog stick movement and camera control, right trigger to shoot (or punch, if ammo is scarce and you’re feeling thuggish), D-pad to hot-swap one of your six firearms and left bumper to unfurl a weapon wheel. Right bumper locks to cover, while holding A button makes Marston run or, when tapped, sprint. Strolling around a plain just outside the rickety nowhere-ville of Armadillo, taking potshots at bottle-green Saguaro trunks and wild horses (whom you can skin for additional moolah), we find the layout as dependable as ever.

Horses serve another and more important function than target practice, of course, and much as GTA wouldn’t be GTA without its celebrated, varied fleet, so Redemption’s claim to fame may depend on just how successfully Rockstar has fleshed out the relationship between rider and mount. “Flesh”, indeed, is the key word: these are living, breathing creatures, or at least passable recreations of living, breathing creatures, and there’s a corresponding element of give-and-take, of mutual respect, as we belatedly and bruisingly discover after being a little too generous with the spurs.

Scott Shelby just won’t bloody die. He’s had ample incitement to do so – broken bottles across the gut and nose, a chair over the back of the head, an intimate encounter with a sinkful of dirty crockery – but the likable old git refuses to snuff it, even given some considerable native disadvantages: the waistline, complexion and jowls of a serial doughnut pilferer, the lungs of an antique vacuum cleaner. God and I do not want this man to live, and yet somehow each brutal re-run ends the same way, with Shelby limping heroically off into the fade-to-black.

The first time I played through Shelby’s introductory chapter, the fourth in our Heavy Rain preview build, I played to win. That’s the way you’ll want to play it, in all likelihood, the way you’ll feel it “should” be played. That the game appears to agree with this assessment is revealing – but more on that point anon. Here’s how it goes.

Striding magisterially out of grim autumn weather, I approach the motel counter and ask for Lauren Winters. The clerk has a memory problem, so I slip him five bucks to help things along. He directs me up the stairs and along a crimson-lit hallway to the third door on the left. Heavy Rain’s retrogressive approach to movement, whereby you point the character’s head at a destination with left stick and hold R2 like an accelerator, has long since ceased to be irritating.

The facial animations, textures, filters and lighting have to be seen to be believed.

Knocking, I’m confronted by a wan girl in a black silk nightdress. She only sees customers “by appointment”. She’s a prostitute. There’s a panicky moment in which I think I’m a customer. No, thank heavens – I’m a private detective (as a discreet flash of Shelby’s business card informs me when I drop a banknote on the table). I’m here to ask Lauren about her son Johnny, one of many victims – all male, all young – of the Origami Killer, who serves as Heavy Rain’s general antagonist.

She’s understandably rather upset. She’s already been through this with the police. I reason with her, tapping face buttons to trigger the dialogue options – “convince”, “sympathise”, “trick”, “buy” – which float around Shelby’s paunch. Tough love does the trick. I’ve got ten in-game minutes before her bedside clock announces the end of our little tete-a-tete.

Lauren on the verge of giving Shelby a right ticking off.

More circling dialogue options. Staying in step with Shelby’s mild, paternal manner, and not wishing to antagonise Lauren further, I pass over the bare facts of Johnny’s murder, asking her about their living arrangements, his school days, hoping to get at some oblique facet of the awful deed. I press her gently as to her son’s opinion of her calling. As she talks I move about her apartment, twitching aside the curtain to look down at the street, leaning on her dressing table, and finally perching a respectable distance away on the end of the bed.

The clock beeps. Lauren tells me to “get the hell out.” If any of her halting, downcast responses contained vital detail it’s not apparent right now, a quick inspection of Shelby’s thoughts – summoned, like fragments of notebook in an updraft, to drift overhead with L1 – being decisive: “I didn’t learn squat.”

“For ages we were told we can’t call it the jet pack game because that didn’t convey the sci-fi conspiracy plot aspect, or the cover-based shooting stuff. Then we delayed the game a bit and added in the hover functionality and you know what. Now it’s DEFINITELY the jet pack game.”

So reads the cover letter which accompanied our Dark Void preview code. We’re glad Capcom’s Powers That Be changed their tune about the way the game should be presented. Dark Void can do without its sci-fi conspiracy plot, and it could probably lose the cover-based shooting stuff, but it wouldn’t be worth a sausage without the jet pack.

On the strength of half an hour’s play, Dark Void is a dispiriting Uncharted/Gears of War rip-off with unconvincing Fisher Price weapons, invisible level walls and a lumpy, lumbering graphics engine which would have felt out of shape back in 2005. I was immensely gratified when the 360 build crashed a few missions in (thus “forcing” me to resume my criminally late playthrough of Mass Effect). But then you get the jet pack, and everything starts to look, well, up.

Death from above is much more fun than death from behind a chest-high wall.

William Augustus Grey, a drop-out of the Nathan Drake school of raffish masculinity, is cheerfully flying himself, old flame Eva and a short-lived colleague over the Bermuda Triangle one pre-WW2 evening when he runs into a flying saucer. The saucer comes off best from the encounter, and a suspenseful blackout or two later Will and Eva are standing besides the wreckage of their plane, staring out over a mysterious archipelago.

The archipelago, it transpires, is the gateway to an alternative dimension, carpeted with mist, stuck through with colossal rock pillars and ruled over by a savage alien race known as the Watchers. The Watchers used to be Earth’s boss species, having travelled here millennia ago and taken on certain aspirational apes as slaves, but were eventually banished to their present abode by a bunch of ancient heroes.

Sadly, those ancient heroes neglected to inform the tourist and shipping industries of their ingenious plan, and the Triangle now boasts a sizeable population of stranded humans – including a few celebrities like Amanda Earhart, whose journal entries are tucked away in what I’d love to call “crevices” if the levels were capable of such architectural finesse. Some of these refugees live in vaguely Aztec theocratic communities outside the dimensional portal, venerating the Watchers as gods. Others prefer to fight the offworld menace on their own turf, nicking Watcher technology and refitting it, Mad-Max-style, for their own ends. Guess who you end up rubbing shoulders with.