Red Steel 2

Reese's Pieces indeed. In Red Steel 2's world, east and west rub against each other in a lovely, unbothered manner as you plod past towering pagodas, through cog-driven electrical gateways, and find yourself in the midst of a dusty old cantina with a buffalo skull hung above the bar.

Mad Max technology - cobbled and jury-rigged - provides the mortar between the different blocks, and it all fits well into the game's structure, a rough-and-tumble overworld hub where there are missions to accept, weapons and ammo to upgrade, new moves - offensive and defensive - to learn, and occasional spills down into more elaborate dungeons filled with bosses and simple puzzles.

It's pretty handsome, too, with its clean lines and rich, flat slabs of colour, and a horizon riddled with mesas and palms. Squint a bit and it looks sort of like Borderlands let loose on the iPhone. (Please do this, Gearbox. I'd help pay for R&D myself.)

Does it play as well as it looks? The answer to that question lies largely with the MotionPlus - mandatory for Red Steel 2 and available, by the sounds of it, in a bundle. Thankfully, VandenBerghe and his team haven't expected Nintendo's seemingly forgotten peripheral to deliver their game by itself. Instead, the result looks like a clever mix of player freedom and canny developer subterfuge, with MotionPlus' increased input fidelity used both for moments of one-to-one mirroring and other periods where it provides a smarter means of interpreting what you're trying to do before spitting out the pre-canned attack you wanted.

"We make the decision of how to use MotionPlus differently for different actions," says VandenBerghe. "On the one-to-one end of the spectrum, we have blocking, where the motion is as close to accurate as we can have it while still making you look like a hero. What we found, though, is that if you do true one-to-one, you just look like an idiot. You look terrible. It's just so bad. So bad.

"The fantasy of the hero doesn't survive that one-to-one modelling, so we're always doing a little bit of handholding. Every attack goes through the centre of the screen, for example, no matter where you're swinging - but the angle of that attack is 100 per cent determined by you and what you did. It's not like there's eight slashes - there's an infinite number of slashes.

"On the other end of the spectrum, we have special moves which are deliberately triggered actions," he continues. "You push a button and swing in a particular way, and as long as you get the input right, we're going to pull off a cool move that may not always look that much like what you physically did. We're using the MotionPlus to get a better idea of what you want to be doing, and then we make sure you get the result you wanted."