Crackdown 2

Given the backstory, dereliction is a bit of a theme throughout: that smart little observatory nestled in the armpit of the mountains where you once found that big golden globe you then ran about lamping people with, is now burning wreckage filled with dozens of hazards, while the three tall cooling towers stuck rather incongruously in the middle of town are partially shattered in Crackdown 2. Citizens move about the emptier streets in patched-together vehicles reinforced with corrugated iron, or barricade themselves in skyscrapers where the Freaks can't get them.

Trashing the place appears to have been done partly to create a different kind of playground, but also to allow for an eruption of content from below. Crackdown 2 will feature numerous large underground cavernous areas where the Freaks live in picturesque squalor. Cope loads one up and zips around a bit - entering into the subterranean chamber through a hole at the bottom of one of the cooling towers. Inside, it magically manages to feel both huge and claustrophobic, as if the whole thing is a complex raid area pulled from some kind of Fraggle Rock MMO. Such close-up skirmishes are a tantalising prospect in such a traditionally open game, particularly when the area's filled with lumbering mutants.

And even above ground, the Freaks are causing trouble: Freak Breaches are impromptu mini-missions which, when triggered, lead to monsters suddenly pouring up out of the earth in a set location until a timer runs down. They provide a snappy little rush of intense action in a gameworld that generally has a nice background level of chaos, but not much in the way of sudden spikes.

Wading into a breach, Cope displays a handful of new combat options - picking up a large cotton bud-shaped chunk of metal and concrete, which originally formed a natural piece of cover, before meleeing freaks into wet chunks of splatter, or switching to the new UV-blast gun, which looks like a radioactive short-burst hairdryer, capable of blowing any surrounding enemies - and light vehicles - back a good distance to kill, injure, and generally create breathing space. "It's not a few people in a fight any more," as Cope points out. "This time around, you're always fighting hordes."

And the horde is rarely as stupid as it looks. Freaks come in a variety of different flavours, from the common scroungers at the bottom of the food chain, to slinger scroungers, with fairly unpleasant acid-lobbing ranged attacks, all the way up to creepers, the real Agency adversaries who can take the battle to the rooftops if you try to escape, and will have the brains to put up a real fight. "Creepers solve another of our problems with the original game," admits Cope. "We had this great open world, but whenever you got up high, you were safe. No one could really touch you up there. That's not the case anymore."

There's a handful of other things to be seen - night and day will pass very differently in the new Pacific City, with both the Freaks and the Cell thronging the streets in force after dark, while elsewhere Ruffian's hard at work on a more varied mission structure, mixing up the familiar baddies who need a truck parked on them with tasks that tell a little bit of story (the one I'm shown involves an assault on the Volk refinery to reconnect the Agency to the power grid).

There's also - whisper it - going to be a new strain of orb potentially joining the party, although at the moment there's only the Pavlovian green glow of the agility variety scattered, temptingly, on every rooftop and ledge (Ruffian reveals, rather shockingly, that the originals were put there simply because most testers ignored the game's verticality without them). But there's no word yet on new vehicles or new powers or tweaks to the levelling system, and the Agency Tower - one of the most beloved gaming landmarks of this hardware generation - is still being redesigned, even though the team does hint that it's not necessarily the tallest building in town anymore.