Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions

It's harder to judge how well it's going to actually work, however, since the lighting in the demo we're shown is utterly busted, with Spider-Man literally disappearing into complete blackness as he races around a Coney Island-style fairground, laying the silent smackdown on a number of Tommy-Gun wielding sentries.

It's an early build, however, and, given that you'll likely be able to actually see what you're doing in the finished version, it seems like a promising take on light stealth, as you time your movements to avoid revealing your position during regular bursts of light from fireworks, and choose your placements well to get the drop on the enemy, working out when to lurk at ground level, and when to zip up above everyone and pirouette across power-lines and gantries.

There's a neat bleeding red light effect that kicks in whenever you've been spotted - it would call to mind Schindler's List if it wasn't for last year's drunken punch-up The Saboteur - and if your cover's blown you've still got Spidey's traditional arsenal of melee moves and ranged web attacks to help you out.

The third dimension revealed so far pulls the timeline out of the past and shoves it a little way into the future. This is Spider-Man 2099, an early 1990s comic book spin-off that pitched Spidey into the heart of a futuristic cyberpunk dystopia. Hopefully it's all a bit more interesting than it sounds - it certainly looks pretty at any rate, as the game exchanges murky noir tones and four-colour-styled cel-shading for glossy blues, oranges and silvers.

New York has become Nueva York - probably not a Thomas Pynchon reference, sadly - in a corrupted future where corporations and a sham police department have carved up the city. There's a new man in the red and blue suit - a Mexican named Miguel O'Hara - and there's a new red and blue suit, come to think of it: a shiny cybernetic affair covered with light strips and complex piping.

There's plenty of lens flair and fast-moving hover taxis to be seen in our short demo, as Spidey chases the Hob-Goblin across busy skyscraper canyons, and the focus here is on a more 'feral' take on combat. Spider-Man can grow claws and talons, by the looks of it, and the game seems to have a much faster pace, moving from one hemmed-in combat arena to the next in bursts of violent action.

The fourth dimension is yet to be revealed, but the overall shape of the game is starting to become apparent, with three separate acts, each with sequences spread across the four universes, each based around different villains, before the game comes to its climax in a final boss fight.

The baddies seem to be a good selection - Noir gets Hammerhead for starters, and there's also hints of Kraven and the Green Goblin floating around - but Shattered Dimensions will ultimately live or die depending on how well it balances the fun across its different universes: allowing each one to mix the pace up, while ensuring none of them become chores you can't wait to be done with.

Until we've had a chance to see how the game feels - and whether it can really justify its shifting pallets by nimbly reinventing the mechanics each time - Shattered Dimensions remains an interesting proposition. Trading focus for range is a bold move on the developer's part - hopefully it will have been a smart one as well.