Bionic Commando

Despite the intuitive and easy-to-learn way in which the bionic arm is implemented, there's a lot of room for skilled acrobatics; Bionic Commando has the potential to be a punishingly challenging game on higher difficulties, but crucially, you feel completely in control. Failure, in our experience with the game so far, has always been down to our own unpractised ineptitude rather than any fault with the camera or controls.

The shooting is slightly less effortless than the grappling and swinging. Clicking the stick switches to an over-the-shoulder aiming mode, which is useable but a tad imprecise - there's no automatic lock-on in sight here. Melee attacks, including a particularly enjoyable move that punishes everything within a certain radius by flinging the grapple around in a spinning death-circle, change up the third-person blasting a bit. The real fun in combat lies, once again, in the implementation of the bionic arm to fling enemies around or pull yourself towards them before shooting them in the face or kicking them off a cliff, or stealing their cover and blasting it back in their direction with satisfyingly raw force.

The bosses and mini-bosses, which pop up with impressive frequency over the course of the single-player game, prove far more interesting to fight than the drones, demanding creative thought as well as fast reflexes. We're told that this is the area in which Capcom has had the most input, and it shows in their creative attack patterns and subtly signposted weak points. So far our experience of Bionic Commando's bosses has been limited to the small-scale, battling a nippy robot with monkey-esque climbing abilities and an annoying habit of grabbing the end of your grappling hook, but the finished game promises larger-scale, more cinematically impressive battles.

The multiplayer has the potential to be a real hit. The combination of traditional deathmatch modes with bionic arm abilities and environments conducive to their full exploitation is inspired - swinging out in the open makes you visible and vulnerable to other players, so deathmatches can become tense battles of will with small numbers of players, waiting for the others to come swinging around a corner. With the full complement of ten players things are a bit more hectic, with bionic soldiers zipping around all over the place in a race for the homing rockets. There's also a form of capture-the-flag that is far more a test of acrobatic ability than combat, and a confirmation of the long-suspected race mode.

Our anticipation for Bionic Commando hasn't faded since we last saw it. The core of the game - swinging and shooting - is immensely appealing, and the implementation strikes a good balance between acrobatic freedom and ease of control. That core appeal, partnered with the polished animation and dark but wholly unpretentious art and plot direction, makes this reinterpretation a compelling one. The multiplayer especially is proving tremendously popular on the Leipzig show floor, and it's not hard to imagine it replicating that success online when it's finally released at the end of the year.