Right from the start, the chance for some Renaissance racketeering held a monopoly over my time with the game. Thanks to my efforts, after many solid hours of play, the Assassins were really no closer to defeating the Templars or the Borgia, but they had amassed a commercial property portfolio large enough to float on the stock exchange. I’d purchased the Coliseum with an eye to demolishing it and replacing it with the Maximus Decimus Meridius shopping centre, and, if there was such a thing, I would surely have unlocked the Silvio Berlusconi achievement for the growth I’d single-handedly stimulated in the local prostitution industry. By the end, I honestly expected ‘The Truth’ this time to be a personal message from Sir Alan Sugar.

Brotherhood is, without question, one of the most impressive sandbox titles made to date, and proof positive that great open world game design is a lot like great interior design. It’s not so much about the amount of space you have, as how cleverly you fill it. That’s what makes the difference between creating a place you can live in, and a place you can exist in. A world that envelops you, and one that merely accommodates you. The former feels like home, the latter like you’re staying in someone else’s home. No matter how kind and welcoming they are, it still feels uncomfortable.

When you think back to the original Assassin’s Creed, and the way awkwardly integrated gameplay elements occasionally broke the immersion of the world, (remember those collect-all-the-flags-within-the-time-limit missions) it’s to Ubisoft’s great credit that even Brotherhood’s ancillary activities, like the wealth accumulation ones, now add a wonderful depth and richness to your surroundings.

The thing is though, I signed up to be a fleet-footed, silent killing machine, not a parkouring Theo Paphitis, and what struck me about Brotherhood, was that Ezio may be getting dangerously close to becoming more entrepreneur than assassin. Was I more invested in Brotherhood’s world because of the presence of all the additional content? Yes (quite literally). Was I more involved in, what should be, the most important part of the game, the main storyline? No, because I was constantly being drawn away from this by the fact that I was closer to a bank, blacksmith’s or some other going concern than the next mission marker.

Ubisoft announced recently that the next Assassin’s Creed game, subtitled Revelations, is due this November. If the success of the series now means that the company is going to reward fans by pushing out a game every year until everyone loses interest, let’s hope they don’t continue this upward trend for cheap and easy filler content (no matter how cleverly contextualised or addictively immediate) over actual innovation and development of their fantastic central premise. It would be a huge shame if player fatigue overtook the assassin’s before they’ve had time to run their course, and I swear, if Desmond ends in the modern day running a chain of successful health clubs I’ll assassinate him myself.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a Chamber of Commerce meeting to chair.   

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.”

Our thoughts on Brotherhood’s multiplayer were stalled by launch server hiccups. Read about the campaign here, and scroll down for the score.

After three interviews, two previews, an opinion piece, a two-part review and a half-dozen news items, I’m just about ready to see the back of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. It’s been a wild ride, but I fear the intensity of our coverage is starting to take its toll on my subconscious mind. I knife people in my dreams, readers. Merely walking through crowds doesn’t cut it any more – these days, I feel the urge to blend. Hell, I’ve even started buying up raggedy newsagents and converting them into blacksmiths and apothecaries, like Finsbury Park really needs any more of those.

The worst part is that we’re not getting any kickbacks for our unrelenting attention, providing you discount the free food at preview events and that one time the PR guy helped me bury a hooker. No hard feelings though, because Ubisoft Montreal done good with Brotherhood’s campaign, and Ubisoft Annecy’s multiplayer component is rather fascinating. Uneven at times, but fascinating.

Where the single player gave you the sprawling totality of Rome, the online modes confine you to bustling inner city districts a couple of minutes’ walk in diameter, sealed by a fog of silvery binary code. You won’t be playing Desmond or one of the other present-day Assassins, but their enemies the agents of Abstergo, rather, practising lethal techniques on each other in VR environments.

It’s kill or be killed, that most basic of formulae, but it’s no mere bout of deathmatch or capture the flag. Assassinating another player is as easy as pushing a button – no bullet physics, combo trees or regional damage to worry about here – but finding a target is not. Each map is populated by computer-controlled characters who exactly resemble those of the participants. From the moment a match begins, any one of the passers-by could be the individual you’re contracted to kill, or the individual contracted to kill you.

The tension this inspires is, to be frank, matchless among boxed console releases (indie gamers, feel free to let us know how much you love Bloody Good Time and The Ship roundabout now). You’ve got a proximity indicator, its blue-white directional wedge fattening as you near the victim, but it’s useless within a dozen metres or so. Accordingly, the close of each hunt hinges on skilled observation alone.

Evading an assassin is as gripping as being one. The interface helps out a little, again, red-ringing pursuers who behave in an eye-catching fashion and all but screaming “run, Forrest, run!”, but anything less energetic than a chain of daredevil leaps will elude its notice. As a consequence, you’ll find yourself constantly spinning the camera as you saunter down alleys, watching for silhouettes on rooftops or sudden, un-computer-like bursts of haste. It’s a pure form of suspense – and the thrill of being missed by inches, your would-be killer plunging his blade into an identically dressed man at your elbow, is something no Call of Duty I’ve tackled can best.

It’s possible, nonetheless, to thumb one’s nose at all this insistence on stealth, and play the game like an athletic but very basic action thrasher, barrelling over roofs into the vicinity of a target and hoping dumb luck will carry you the rest of the way. Indeed, in the final seconds of each round the idea can be difficult to resist. But if you plan on dispensing with subtlety, you should brace yourself for a long wait till the next gadget or mode unlock, as showy, unscientific kills bag far fewer experience points.

The weighted scoring system brings about some brilliant turnings of the tide. I recall one round of Wanted, the basic free-for-all 6-8 player mode, in which I was trailing at sixth place. With 50 seconds to go, my man emerged from a mob below and headed for the archway that fed into a neighbouring street.

Throwing caution to the winds, I hurled myself from the nearest precipice and, more through blind chance than anything else, landed in a haystack on the other side of the arch. When the perp jogged into view, possibly intent on a courtesan in the plaza beyond, I reached out of the straw to slash his jugular. Boom. Top of the podium. In the business of murder, Brotherhood sets its store by quality workmanship every time.

The two team-based modes, Manhunt and Alliance, aren’t quite as successful as Wanted, though that owes more to the people you play with than anything else. Manhunt sees teams of four taking turns to be cat and mouse, while Alliance is Wanted with a single partner. In each case it pays to have a well-stocked Friend list, as Xbox Live’s randoms aren’t generally disposed to cooperate or, for that matter, communicate.

Besides that, there’s the slight worry that some of the unlockable tools, perks and killstreak rewards may be a trifle overpowered. The combination of a speed boost and smoke bomb, allowing you to quite literally leave other players in your dust, is a tough one to beat, even with a hidden gun to hand. Nothing leaps out at me as game-breaking thus far, however, and again, these are problems that can be rectified by picking and choosing your opponents.

With only four modes to its name (including Advanced Wanted, where compasses lack a height indicator) and 30 experience levels, Brotherhood won’t rival the likes of Halo: Reach or Black Ops as an online time sink. But given the immensity and richness of the campaign, it doesn’t really need to. What it needs to do is reintroduce a little verve to a gameplay package that, for all the luxuriant shoulder-guards and snazzy death moves, is starting to taste stale, and in that regard, it unquestionably delivers.

I know, I know – we haven’t published an Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood multiplayer review yet (catch my thoughts on the single player component here). Blame Ubisoft for roping half the really interesting unlocks to the topmost branch of the experience tree, and Sony for mailing over our copy of the (excellent) Gran Turismo 5 four days in advance of the embargo. Sigh.

Why not put some multiplayer hours in now then, Edwin, rather than testing the internet’s patience with yet another badly reasoned opinion piece? Well, hypothetical interlocutor, I’ll tell you: I’ve just had an epiphany, an epiphany that turns Brotherhood’s otherwise impressive Metacritic average on its head.

It’s an idea I brushed against, a tad poncily, in my review of Assassin’s Creed 2 a year ago, but the precise practical ramifications didn’t strike me till this week. Tom Bramwell sort of covers it in his Brotherhood write-up, too. (Thus making this piece a little surplus to requirements, yes, but you know what? Fuck Bramwell. He edits Eurogamer. He probably drives a solid-gold hovercar and lives in a villa walled and roofed with pole-dancers.)

What is it? It’s this: all Assassin’s Creed games are, by necessity, flawless.

Flawless, that is, in spite of their flaws. Flawless despite an epidemic of short-term memory loss among Renaissance guardsmen, unrecorded in the history books. Flawless despite the fact that the PS3 version of the original tore like a pillowcase full of mating hedgehogs. Flawless despite the nuclear-powered countering system, and number two’s unremarkable economic subgame.

You may be wondering whether I’ve taken leave of my senses. Bear with me. Assassin’s Creed does not – indeed, cannot – put a foot wrong because of a little thing called the Animus. It’s the wacky Matrix-esque cyber-gadget that facilitates Desmond’s trips around the time-line, ripping fragments of latent memory from his DNA and rendering them up into breath-taking holos of 12th century Constantinople and 15th century Florence, among other cities.

Without it, Desmond and his fellow assassins would be unable to fight the Templars or watch their ancestors have sex. More importantly, though, the Animus is perhaps the best-integrated, ballsiest get-out clause in the history of game narrative.

Fascinating, isn't it. Mocking us with its... Animus-ness.

The bulk of Assassin’s Creeds 1, 2 and Brotherhood take place within a world generated by this wondrous machine. Of the handful of playable scenarios conducted in the present day, many are no more than glorified hub menus, and some are riddled with bleed-out from the Animus interface – prompting the suspicion that, at some point in what is likely to be a very long line of sequels, Desmond’s own life and times will be exposed as Animus constructs, re-enacted by some distant descendant.

And this means that all the niggles mentioned above – together with lacklustre quests, frame rate dips and those wildly over-the-top Italian accents – are in fact facets of the Animus experience. See where I’m going with this? When Assassin’s Creed screws up, it’s because the Animus screwed up. The game itself is just a depiction of an imperfect depiction.

And how can Ubisoft take responsibility for the shortcomings of the thing depicted? It’s a fictional device, crafted by fictional beings. If we were going to rail at anybody, it’d be the Templars who threw the concept together, and we can’t rail at the Templars because they don’t actually exist. Whoops. “Not my department, monsieur,” as Associate Producer Jean-Francois Boivin might have put it. “You should apply for a firmware upgrade.”

Man, do I feel thick. There I was thinking that the whole “back to the future” gambit was some cynical marketing call, a sop to those who might find a pure period action-adventure too “rich” to swallow. Turns out it’s a carefully calculated exercise in covering one’s arse. Bravo!

For more preposterous rationales, check this Limbo write-up. Find out why Brotherhood is the only game in the series to adequately recreate the experience of stalking and killing here.

Do you really trust me, reader? How do you know I’m who and more importantly what I say I am? There’s a name up there at the top of this page, and if you click through to our staff section you’ll be able to put a face to that name, but what does that prove, exactly? How does it set this sentence apart from the spam comments that clog our CMS? Everything can be falsified on the internet, after all, humanity included.

Browsing Google the other day, I stumbled on one of my very own articles, pilfered and fed into some clumsy but effective piece of script that swapped out every adjective, noun or verb for a synonym. It was an unnerving experience, like peering into a carnival mirror: familiar constructions rewired, turns of phrase bent back on themselves, a weird alloy of man and program.

I know that face.

I’m getting a similar vibe from the monk walking down this bustling alleyway towards me. He’s wrong on some level, out of step. Literally out of step, that is. He keeps dodging forward, jostling the elbows of the group he’s with. When they turn to avoid a pile of crates he looks, for a second, like he’s about to scamper up onto the obstacle and springboard off it. He isn’t my target – my proximity gauge is only one-quarter full – but I may very well be his.

Keeping my pace slow and natural I tilt the reticle over him, lock on and shift my thumb to circle button, ready to unleash a debilitating counter-blow. But caught in my crosshairs, he seems suddenly harmless. I note that he gets a leg caught on an awning – a pathfinding issue, possibly. Perhaps he’s just a bot after all. Perhaps it’s safe to break cover.

As I shuffle on, undecided, a courtesan idling on a bench stands up casually and whisks a razor-tipped Venetian fan across my jugular. Blast. Top assassin’s tip: let your prey come to you. I was right to be wary of the monk, though. My assailant’s arm barely has time to complete its sweep before he jerks out of formation, stamps on the back of her knee and rams his crucifix into the top of her skull. Second top assassin’s tip: catch ‘em in the act.

You’d better pay attention to NPCs when playing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood online. They’re important people. Or at least, they may be important people. Ubisoft Montreal’s crowds are as convincingly realised as ever, bewitching in their ebb and flow, but they’re a whole lot more, nowadays, than spongy, bovine masses to elbow through or terrorise. Nowadays they’re secretly stuffed full of sharp objects – breeding grounds for rival killers, hunters and hunted in turn.

The Courtesan does her thing. Not for long though. That guy with the penknife wants a word.

Each player’s character spawns with cruise control toggled, another ordinary citizen about his business, and it pays to spend a few seconds just watching yourself move, getting reacquainted with how an NPC walks, how sharply an NPC turns, whether they favour the middle or the sides of a street, where they stand when they’re chatting to one another. Learn the computer’s habits, and learn them well. Sudden changes of direction, moments of only-human hesitancy, shoving too authoritatively past bystanders – these are behaviours to watch for and avoid. Cultivate a serene automaton’s demeanour. Settle into that lobotomised stroll. Bide your time.

There are special abilities, two per player per match once you’ve unlocked the slots, to make blending into the AI mob easier. Morph, for example, transforms all nearby civilians into dummies of your character. If you’re lucky, the player on your tail will knife one of these hapless innocents by mistake, invalidating his assassination contract, diminishing his score and exposing himself to a swift smack round the ear (you can’t bump off pursuers, but you can knock them senseless for a few seconds, leaving them vulnerable to assassination themselves).

There’s still a place for directness, mind. Sooner or later a target will get wise, whether because he’s looked straight at you and gleaned ill-intent, or because the game itself has decided that you’ve caused enough ruckus to trip the warning lights on his HUD. The best and most common response is to leg it, breaking line of sight for long enough that the contract will expire, and so the softly-softliness of each round periodically escalates into panicky bouts of the parkour the franchise is famous for.

The best views are to be had from aloft, naturally, but this is kind of like painting a bullseye on your head. Watch out for wrist guns.

The key difference between Brotherhood online and the campaigns of prior games is that lethal, eye-catching agility and studied discretion are now equal partners in the endeavour. Entertaining though they were, Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2 struggled to foster a sense of consequence. You were nudged towards stealth, encouraged to work the crowd, but you were never punished too much for simply barging into a hotspot, stabbing at random till you found your target, then beating it up the nearest vertical surface. It wasn’t so much a game for assassins as a game for pre-industrial Spidermen, all speed and flourish.

The new game rectifies this, and in doing so produces something quietly revolutionary: an online experience where the challenge is to identify a human being while passing yourself off as a lump of software, to distinguish the one from the many while remaining indistinct. There’s a lot more to talk about – not least the single player mode, which we’ll be getting our hands on next week – but that, for the moment, is enough to make Brotherhood one of this winter’s most exciting propositions.

The game’s out for PS3 and Xbox 360 in November, with a PC version following in Q1 2011.

Besides being an interactive weapons manufacturer catalogue, its roster of true-to-life planes lounging against pseudo-Matrixy menu backdrops like underwear models with fuel-air bombs for tits, HAWX the First was a game about ‘enhancing reality’ via a ‘system’ known as the Enhanced Reality System.

As it turned out, Ubisoft’s method of ‘enhancing reality’ was to fill reality with rubbery pop-in video, daisy-chains of electro guide hoops and so forth, all of it in the interest of adding body and nuance to the relatively bloodless business of virtual air combat. This was championed as a revolutionary angle, and what with all the acronym madness very much looked it, till the point dawned that almost every preceding action game had offered something similar, that something being the humble heads-up display.

To maintain the impression of raw, unmitigated advancedness, the developer was obliged to create an artificial distinction in-game between ‘Assists On’ or ‘just another Ace Combat wannabe’ mode, in which interface convention applied and life made sense, and ‘Assists Off’ or ‘WTF’ mode, in which the cameraman took a sudden leap from the port wing with most of the HUD in his shirt pocket.

While justifications were offered at a mechanical level – the new perspective made it easier to dodge missiles – what Assists Off really amounted to, one suspects, was psychological warfare on critics, a bucket of icy data loss violently hurled over any accusations of wheel-reinventing. ‘Oh, so you’ve seen it all before, have you?’ HAWX seemed to be saying. ‘Then I guess you won’t mind if we – snip! – take it right away from you. PERISH IN FLAMES, UNBELIEVER.’

The feature’s still there in HAWX 2, albeit stamped into the sublayer like a furtive cigarette end, Ubisoft having realised, presumably, that warming over the line about pushing envelopes might provoke some sort of armed reprisal. In homage to presentational hubris, and also because we don’t let a grudge go gracefully here at VGD, I’m going to model this review on the idea of ‘assists’. Ours won’t keep you airborne, but they might keep you interested in what few doubted would be a flight sim of profound and unflinching… adequacy.

Let’s start with the assists on. HAWX 2 is awesome! The globe is up to its unmentionables in peril, or at least the Arabic-speaking parts of its unmentionables, fierce and spectacular shoot-outs erupting over tracts of oil-rich desert and poverty-rich hovel, but don’t get your harness in a bunch, pilot, because you’re well out of that – way, way up in the brilliant blue fastness, where the only things to worry about are jarheads on the radio getting chippy because you haven’t strafed the bunkers yet, goddamn flyboy.

My other car's a Fiesta.

In the course of the campaign’s 20 missions, you’ll occasionally find yourself spying on brighter stars in the insurgent cosmos, siphoning their phone conversations or overseeing the blowing-in of their doors and windows by Ghost squads, but what you’ll mostly be doing is participating in tweaked and tucked replays of the original’s solid dogfights.

Homing missiles with a splash of cannon fire are still the bread and butter, but the enemy AI is just that crucial bit smarter. Evasive turns are either well-timed or believably desperate, flare deployment often calculating (though, later on, rather excessive). On regular difficulty, there’s a much solider sense of a ‘sweet spot’ between loosing a homer from so far off the other pilot is able to square up his bird and light a match off it as it buzzes harmlessly past the cockpit, and loosing one from so close that it whirrs straight through his jet streams.

More high-falutin’ breeds of armament are doled out to cleanse palettes numbed by propellant, and while a few (e.g. the AC-130′s side-mounted howitzers) are just there to prop up certain scenarios, others are part of a thinking pilot’s tools of war. Radar-guided missiles, for instance, ignore all attempts at misdirection providing you keep a circle reticle over the target, making them deadly at range but crap within a thousand metres.

Completing campaign missions unlocks wild card ‘arcade’ remixes which ask you to repeat the trick with a gimped load-out, or in the face of withering odds, or both. They provide a nice upper level of engagement for the dedicated, and should set players up nicely for the multiplayer’s five maps and grab-bag of eight-player modes: deathmatch, team deathmatch and some decent ‘pressure-cooker’ episodes that pit pilots against one another and a flock of NPC craft.

Stuffed all that under your belt? Off with the assists then. HAWX 2 is dismal. It gets everything its ambivalently received predecessor got right a little more right, but it does everything its predecessor did wrong almost as wrong. A lot of the misery has to do with the ground, from which you may now, in a bold and brilliant twist, take off, and on which you may now, in another bold and brilliant twist, land.

Pulling off the latter is a mild challenge, especially when stepping down for a hasty refuel and rearm in the middle of a raging battle, and as Edward Douglas told us in August, seeing an airbase up-close does indeed help with the sense of actually sitting astride an enormous, throbbing turbine. But once you’re airborne, the ground is just a spawn point, however attractively contoured with the aid of satellite mapping. It yields forth things to bomb, and things to defend by bombing the first things, and on these two brittle touchstones many of the missions are once again founded.

Which means countdown timers and (decreasing) friendly damage percentages. Heaps of them. Plane to plane combat is an edge of the seat affair in itself, but it’s driven right to the final few threads of cushion fabric by the consciousness that, at any second, you might be imperiously recalled to pick some tank column out of a pickle, dry its eyes and dust off its knees. Screw the cliché about keeping a dozen plates spinning – more cluttered levels made me feel like a Space Invaders pro turned nursery assistant, scuttling from cabinet to cabinet to rescue a series of shrill, sticky, juvenile obscenities from their own failures of hand-eye coordination.

Head-to-heads with the AI are few, far between and generally lethal.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle missions vary the pace in the same way that lying facedown on a mattress for ten minutes will vary the pace of a marathon. Boredom, it seems, is the only alternative to baby-sitting for the men and women of HAWX squadron. Cruising at a fixed altitude, the view locked earthward, you lay down waypoints for friendlies and packets of smoky death for unfriendlies till Ubisoft gets bored of Pacmanistan accents and unhoods the next batch of ham-fisted infants.

Part of HAWX 2′s problem may be that it’s a Tom Clancy game. I’m starting to feel dubious about Mr Clancy, frankly. Many great stealth-em-ups and fixer-flankers have been concocted in his name, but the fiction’s fascination with straight-up mano-e-mano warfare rings a little hollow, seems a little insensitive to the flex of a medium which allows battlefields to morph into poker tables, or entire levels to be built out of trapdoors.

Certainly, the last thing the unloved flight combat genre needs is a specimen that sticks to its guns. With its jazzy interfacial facade consigned to the chorus, HAWX 2 is all the more familiar a tune. You’ll taxi, take-off, turn, lock on, let rip, dive, plunge and bomb and wonder whether grabbing the nape of a multi-million-pound jet fighter is really this tepid an experience in real life.

Read our score guide here.

What’s a games journalist but somebody who asks you to flat-out disbelieve the evidence of your own senses? What’s a games journalist but somebody who insists that not only is black white, but black was white long before white ever signed its first publishing contract? What’s a games journalist but somebody who tells you that the man you caught trying on mother’s knickers had just popped over to borrow a cup of sugar? What’s a games journalist but somebody who declares that the game you should be buying today isn’t the all-conquering Xbox 360 prequel to some iconic shooter or other, but a dog-tired multiplatform dog-fighter?

As you may have noticed, VGD hasn’t published a Halo: Reach review yet. This is a source of some displeasure to me, and rest assured the people responsible are being roasted over a pyre of bricked 360s, controllers in hand. But don’t fret, kids, because Reach isn’t the title you should be scraping together those pennies for! Oh, ‘they’ will probably tell you it is, but don’t forget – they’re the ones who told you that Sony would come first place this generation. Just how much of a sucker are you, exactly? Because if you’re that much of a sucker, I have some magic beans for sale.

Let us now turn to HAWX 2. It has an ‘X’ in the title – a breakthrough feature – and is unencumbered by a colon. Read on for other unanswerable truths.

Don't stare. It doesn't like it when you stare.

1. Has real weapons

OK, so in Reach they’ve got Gravity Hammers, Focus Rifles, sticky grenades and camo cloaks, but you know what? Say hello to the Sukhoi Su-37 ‘Terminator’. Actually you’d better say ‘goodbye’, because the Sukhoi Su-37 ‘Terminator’ wants to say hello too, and when the Sukhoi Su-37 ‘Terminator’ says ‘hello’ it says it with 12 underslung radar-guided missiles, and when the Sukhoi Su-37 ‘Terminator’ says hello with its 12 underslung radar-guided missiles you say goodbye with your arse.

2. Better helmets

Despite being set twenty squillion years in the future, Halo has yet to get its head round (or behind) the concept of sliding face visors. Score one for HAWX 2, whose Irn-Bru-flavoured wraparounds slip up and out of sight at a mere button’s touch, thus helping to cut down carbon dioxide emissions. What’s more, they’re orangier. A good 50 per cent orangier, according to studies conducted by the giant-chested Anglo-Asian med students who exist purely IN MY BRAIN.

3. No unnecessary excitement

A SPARTAN’s life is full of care and bullets, but an aviator’s life is full of pretty cloud shapes, long leisurely trips from carrier to target, long leisurely landing sequences, long leisurely waits in the multiplayer lobby till you realise that nobody else is playing this POS game online and you should probably trade it in for Halo: Reach.

Having a sliding visor also makes it much easier to wash out the puke.

4. Has politics

HAWX 2 contains many important political lessons. It teaches us that all insurgents come from a special country called Insurgencia, where they spend all day posing for undercover cameras, smoking their own opium crops and coming up with uncrackable military strategies, like ‘just hang around till the bollocksy arbitrary mission timer winds down and then we win by default’. It also teaches us that the United States and Russia, despite having enough nuclear missiles between them to powderise Neptune, are doomed to downfall and servitude if black marketeers should ever get their hands on just one. And what does Halo teach us? It teaches us that the best way to not die when you’re shot at is to jump.

5. Stealth punctuation

‘HAWX’ is an abbreviation – or is it? Are you sure it isn’t in capitals for effect? Some reviewers write the word with all four full stops in place, and some reviewers don’t – which is the correct version? You’ll never know, just like you’ll never know whether your girlfriend’s lying to you when she says that it was just a mistake, and we haven’t spoken since, and you’re the only one for me, sweetie.

We also write proper articles, like this Mirror’s Edge 2 feature and this RUSE (R.U.S.E.?) review. So don’t judge us.

If you’ve read much about RUSE, chances are you’ve read about it in connection with something else. Helmed by Parisian small-timer Eugen Systems, the project attracted notoriety last year when the PC version was attached to Ubisoft’s proprietary ‘always online’ DRM software, thankfully absent from final code. On the console front, the game has often been perceived purely in terms of its PlayStation Move compatibility: updates to existing titles like Heavy Rain aside, it will be the one unequivocally ‘core-oriented’ release to support Sony’s svelte Wiimote-killer at launch.

The substance of RUSE has gotten somewhat lost in the politics, then. Rather appropriate, that, for a game so disposed to misdirection. Like fellow unsmiling acronym-peddler HAWX, this umpteenth virtual tour of World War II stakes its claim to your pennies on a gimmick, the application of region-based powers or ‘ruse cards’ to deceive rival generals, uncover their secrets or empower your units directly – but its ‘gimmickry’ is mere marketing camouflage, veiling a cleverly tucked-back and nicely balanced RTS.

The mode selection is pretty straightforward, encompassing a 10-15 hour campaign, six one-off battles or ‘Operations’ derived from famous scenarios like the Normandy landings, a 22 map skirmish mode with customisable bots and tech levels, and free-for-all or two-vs-two online multiplayer. I could have held out for a map editor myself, but what’s here cuts the mustard.

Tanks and unexplored town centres: not a safe mix.

RTS solo escapades traditionally serve as fattened-up tutorials, wheeling out each pean or mechanic one trial-and-repetition-driven mission at a time, and RUSE sticks so closely to the formula it all but winds up with friction burns. Experienced or more easily bored tacticians may chafe at the hand-holding, which is accompanied by performance-killing pop-in video and info windows (to say nothing of the storyline, a tepid affair of tea-sipping Brits and glowering unshaven Yanks). Given the sheer specificity of each unit’s capabilities, however, the stateliness with which Eugen peels back the layers is welcome.

The rock on which RUSE is founded is the rock on which any decent top-down tank-trasher ought to be founded: unit balance. The developer has scored an unqualified win in this department, skimming the froth from the history books and boiling it down to the familiar archetypes of infantry, armour, anti-armour, recon, artillery, aerial and anti-aerial – skewed a bit according to faction (there are six – Italy, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and the US), with the odd ‘experimental weapon’ game-changer available at great expense.

This is a PC beta shot, I'm afraid - Xbox 360 ones are hard to come by. The white line shows a unit's field of view.

Squaring off these archetypes effectively – positioning artillery to flatten Panthers, for example, or sending Hurricanes to divebomb light tanks before they can run down your marines – soaks up the bulk of the brainpower investment, with only a handful of upgrades to research, a dozen or so buildings (constructed along roads) to worry about, and a resourcing aspect that takes care of itself once the relevant supply depots have been assimilated.

While staying on the right side of the terrain can be vital, with infantry able to casually annihilate whole armoured columns from the shelter of swamps, towns and woodlands, RUSE pulls up a few furlongs short of any Total-War-esque niceties of height, incline or cover – partly because this would detract from the macro game, and partly, I suspect, because the Xbox 360′s analog sticks are as imperfect a precision instrument here as elsewhere. An expanding ‘brush’ reticule, sliding production menus and group-select hotkeys ensure fluid control with practice, but picking out individual units – as when deploying individual riflemen squads around the fringes of a forest – remains awkward right up to the ending credits.

The interface’s real triumph comes hand-in-hand with Eugen’s technical achievement: reel in the right stick, and the camera will plummet away from the game’s alright-ish vehicle and terrain textures to a vertiginous overview, the fiction back-pedalling simultaneously from the crash and churned grit of combat to the cardboard discs and arrows of a tactician’s map room. It’s from this comfortable remove, with the disposition of the entire battlefield in your lap, that players will generally want to implement the 10 titular ruse cards.

If you can micromanage this lot, reader, you're clearly not of this Earth.

Never quite compelling during the campaign, where the odds are scripted, ruses begin to show their worth in multiplayer and skirmish face-offs, where they occasion some quite brilliant out-manoeuvrings of raw material fact. Some are more obviously useful than others – Blitzkrieg is always a good opening gambit, doubling the speed of your construction trucks, and Radio Silence enables many a cheap victory till opponents get wise, as invisible paratroopers swarm bases from behind. But each card has its place, temporarily corrupting the game’s otherwise incorruptible tactical logic.

While there’s some truth to the idea that Eugen has simply put a bolder spin on the secondary or support abilities one might find in an older RTS, the freshness this endows is fantastic. Together with the stripped-back construction and resource schemes, and the digestible but flexible unit hierarchy, the notion of ruse cards moves proceedings closer to the mistrustful intimacy of a round of poker. Is that innocently advancing light unit a ranger, or a Tiger Tank masquerading as such? Has the other guy cottoned onto the fact that your forward airfield is only a balsa-wood replica? Truth is, indeed, the first casualty, but it certainly won’t be the last.

It’s doubtful RUSE will manage to con its way into Mainstream Land – we are, after all, talking about a World War II RTS – but this game is proof at least that ‘serious’ strategy simulation, often excitably proclaimed ‘dead’, has plenty to offer given a willingness to tear out dead wood, to turn monolithic inherited feature-sets on their heads and expose the asymmetries and outright underhandedness that gave titles like Advance Wars their charm.

Score guide hyah, readers. Bonus question: what was the most successful tank model of the Second World War?

A little thought experiment, before we begin. Have a look at this picture, reader. It’s an F-16 Fighting Falcon, one of the US military’s best-known dogfighters. Gasp at its enormously destructive loadout. Admire the elegant way the bubble cockpit fuses with the skin of the hull. Now – identify with it. You read us right. Relate to the thing. Empathise.

If you’re struggling, don’t worry – that’s just an indication that you’re a normal, healthy, emotionally attuned human being, insofar as such a thing is possible within the acidic realm of online videogame enthusiasm. I’m guessing you rarely find yourself moved to tears, or laughter, or contempt, or any other state by the sight of a large metal machine. Unless, of course, it’s a RRODing Xbox 360.

And that may be why you don’t play flight combat games all that often. Providing they’re more authentic than not, games about planes often struggle for character. There might be fellow human beings involved, but they’re tucked inside licensed aluminium triangles, wrapped in breathing equipment and scattered across miles of empty, uninteresting sky, their trials and tribulations distilled down to blips on a radar screen or snippets of radio chatter.

All of which is bad news for Edward Douglas, Narrative Director on Tom Clancy’s HAWX 2, to whom we spoke at a preview gig on a small airfield (NB. INCOMING META- ALERT) outside London last month. But Douglas is a specialist in the sexing-up of high-power machinery – his previous work as a storyteller includes Need for Speed and the gadget-laden Mass Effect 2 – and claims to have found a few ways to squeeze a little personality out of Ubisoft’s streamlined but sterile Lightnings, Thunderbolts and Raptors.

Complete this sentence. 'Too close for...'

Step one is the simplest: make the planes more brutal, more forceful than they have hitherto appeared. ‘One thing is, especially in HAWX 1, the planes look smaller in third-person view for the game, they don’t look big and powerful,’ says Douglas, ‘And I wanted to make these planes look awesome. When you’re on the ground, the planes feel big, powerful, you can see people around them, you know the scale of these planes.’

If that sounds a rather banal tactic, it impels a more involved relationship with the surly bonds of earth than is customary for the genre. In most of HAWX 2′s peers, the ground is either something to bomb seven shades of syrup out of or stay the hell away from. Here, by contrast, the satellite-mapped terrain beneath is an immersive crutch, no vaguely defined backdrop but a means of better evoking the weight and dimensions of your plane, lending credibility to the action above the clouds.

‘The other thing I tried to do in the game is make you feel like you’re a real pilot in the real world all the time,’ Douglas continues. ‘Your question hit the nail right on the head, about how do you make it feel like you’re not just this metal box flying around. So, whenever I can I try to make you feel like you’re a real person in the real world.

‘When you’re grounded, you’re always in a real space – you’re interacting with other people, other characters that you can see either in a cinematic or in semi-interactive sequences. And by the time you get up in the air, you know who you are, you know why you’re there.’

The increased sense of identity and investment is certainly noticeable during take off, as you watch the ground crew scuttle away from the belly of your craft, then begin the stately taxi past open hangar doors and radio towers to the strip (closely followed by your wingmate, if you’re playing co-op), hit the throttle, pull the nose up and let the base dwindle to an ant-farm between your exhaust trails.

Such sequences are also there for the sake of challenge, of course – landing on an aircraft carrier in the dead of night, with AA fire ringing in your ears and half your hull integrity gone, will test the mettle of even the most hardened pilot. But the overarching aim is to suggest to the player that there’s more going on down there than some solid but undazzling texture work, and thus to give the tailing, nailing and so on a palpable context.

The Enhanced Reality System flight aids are back, but get much less of a billing.

It’s a step up from the previous game’s opportunity to play chicken with Christ the Redeemer, then, but will it be enough to see off the familiarity of combat itself? While Douglas declared that getting away from the ‘fire and forget’ mentality of elder arcade fliers was a priority, two of the campaign missions we played were pretty orthodox. Lock-ons were acquired, missiles loosed, targets led, Top Gun quotes dutifully dropped.

The full game is said to offer much more variety, though. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle missions (of which Douglas seems particularly fond) involve carefully tracking and marking targets, rather than blitzing them. The new precision bomb, manually aimed from a camera beneath your plane, is good for some testing bouts of ‘whack the terrorist’ over dense urban maps, with civilian death a distinct possibility.

We’d be lying if we said HAWX 2 ranked highly on our incoming list, having thrown up our hands petulantly at the original, but Ubisoft Romania does seem to have identified one of the principal reasons the air combat game has yet to escape its niche. The question now is whether the developer’s attempts at redress amount to more than just some high resolution stretches of runway tarmac.

Euros will find out on 3rd September. North Americans get their shot on 7th September. The game’s coming to Wii, PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

When Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood was dated for release almost 12 months to the day after Assassin’s Creed 2, many pundits expressed fears that the franchise would become Ubisoft’s Call of Duty – the publishing equivalent of Santa Claus, shoved out into the cold to wow the kiddies on a yearly basis.

If you’re one of those pundits, here are two things to reflect on:  (1) Activision’s high intensity release schedule hasn’t exactly brought Call of Duty to its knees, or at least not yet, and (2) as far as Assassin’s Creed is concerned, Ubisoft is happy to take things slow. Like a Venetian assassin stalking a well-defended prelate, perhaps.

So said Brotherhood’s Associate Producer Jean-Francois Boivin when we prodded him on the subject at a preview event yesterday. ‘It’s not going to be one a year,’ he observed flatly. ‘It’s a hard question to answer because we’re not doing it one a year.’

Brotherhood was born of a wish to capitalise on the lasting popularity of Assassin’s Creed 2 in particular, Boivin revealed. ‘This made sense to us because it’s the continuing story of Ezio, and it’s still very fresh in people’s minds. A lot of people are still playing Assassin’s Creed – we have the data, online and whatnot, of the people who sign in and they’re online – we know a lot of people are still playing the game, we know that people are still buying the game. The story’s still fresh, so it makes sense to us to release it that quickly.’

Boivin thinks putting a lot of time pressure on a franchise is a bad idea, especially a franchise as storied and substantial as Assassin’s Creed. ‘I don’t think it’s a service to the license to release something every year, I think a license like anything in life needs to breathe and resource itself once in a while.

‘You can’t force a tree to grow more rapidly than it should, if you’re ploughing a field year in and year out, one day your earth is going to have nothing, so you have to let it rest. The same thing is true for every living thing in the universe.

‘So there’s definitely going to be a gap between this opus of Assassin’s Creed and the next.’

Read the full interview with Boivin here, and watch out for our hands-on soon. Game’s out for Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 on 16th November.