Crysis 2

Weapons go off like short bursts of thunder - even the silenced pistol lets out a jarring grumble - and cover, ranging from solar panelling to concrete trestles of flowers, comes apart all too quickly when the real fighting kicks in. Beyond that, the map is linear but enormously broad, meaning there should be plenty of scope for replaying scenarios as you screw around with the smart enemy AI.

A second encounter suggests that Crytek's finally found a way to make its aliens as satisfying to take on as its human opponents. In the first Crysis, the extra-terrestrials were wafty little nuisances, squid-like knots of cabling and diodes that would float around enigmatically before succumbing to a hail of gunfire, often without doing anything that interesting while they had the chance.

Warhead made them a little more entertaining, granted, but the first proper sequel appears to have rethought them entirely. The ones we're treated to today walk on two legs, for starters, bringing them down to the player's level, while simultaneously making them far more threatening.

"Making them bipedal really allowed us to create an enemy you can get a better sense of," says Yerli. "Just seeing something walking tells you far more about it than you could ever learn from watching the first game's aliens float by. You can tell if they're looking for you now, if they are oblivious to you, and even if they're panicking, and we've given them this steel coating which suggests they won't be easy to take down."

They aren't, by the looks of it. Significantly larger than human enemies, and turning up in devastating clusters of three or four, these new aliens are swaggering bullies, stepping on cars, investigating suspicious corners of the map, and mowing through Crynet soldiers with little trouble.

With huge dark bodies and glowing clusters of eyes, they look a little like Venom from the Spider-Man comics, and success against them, given their armour and firepower, seems to be a matter of quickly closing the gap, separating them from one another and then getting up in their grilles: using the Nanosuit's abilities to transform you into both a tank and a predator, in other words.

It's been the shortest of in-game presentations, but it's already proved the supposedly impossible: Crysis 2 is likely to work as well on consoles as it will on the PC, and with little, so far, in the way of obvious compromise. Whether you care about the story or the bump-mapping, Crytek's latest is looking extremely confident, then. Finally perhaps everyone will get a chance to see what all the fuss is about.