Dead to Rights: Retribution

This probably sounds like the usual journalistic embellishment for the sake of a snappy intro, but I swear on my games collection that my family used to have a pet Alsatian dog called Shadow, and that he was a complete and utter psycho. He once took so much exception to being stroked that he decided to savage me in the face, missing my left eye by a quarter of an inch. Check out my scar sometime!

That's not to say I have any issues with canine-kind, or the fact that Namco Bandai has elected to make its own sociopathic man-eater the co-star of its latest action-adventure. Just spare a thought for the screaming, bloody tears of the four-year-old me when you're busily commanding the Dead to Rights version of Shadow to rearrange someone's vital organs.

Arriving more than four years after the previous visit to the one-man-and-his-psycho-stealth-dog franchise, Dead To Rights: Retribution is probably the most unselfconscious action epic you'll play all year. Combining slick melee combat with brutal gunplay and sneaky-sneaky interludes, it throws pretty much every decent action game mechanic of the past decade into the pot and reboots the franchise in breezily confident style.

Kicking off with a flash-forward to a bloodied, beaten Jack Slate, things don't look peachy for the Grant City police officer, with surly gang members taunting him about the non-appearance of his faithful hound. The manic mutt then bounds into the fray in the nick of time to demonstrate his penchant for 'Scrotalities', giving you an early taster of the likeable ridiculousness ahead.

Those evil hover cars are going down.

Rewinding back to how Jack got in this jam in the first place, you find yourself engaging in what appears to be a routine hostage-rescue mission, as an amped up gaggle of 'Union' thugs take over the city's Temple Tower to make their point. Early encounters switch fluidly between stop-and-pop cover-based blasting and teeth-gritting melee combat mechanics.

One of the game's early triumphs is how well the two mechanics work together. Blessed with a slick disarm manoeuvre, you can storm right up to an enemy, snatch their firearm out of their grasp and follow that up with a hot lead sandwich for good measure. You're able to take ludicrous amounts of damage in the process, but you'll be having so much fun that you won't care.

That's not to say you'll storm in willy-nilly. Limited ammo ensures you have to keep a steady aim and make good use of the game's satisfying cover system. Taking its cue from iconic third-person action-adventures down the years, the game liberally pinches the best bits of everything from Resident Evil 4 to Gears of War and Yakuza and combines them all to great effect.

Nothing worse than bullets spraying out of your own face.

In terms of mechanics, you push a button to snap to one of many cover points, lean out with the left stick then fire with the right trigger. You can also suppress the enemy from complete safety by blindfiring - especially useful when you're trying to buy some time and recover some health.

Another useful trick is the game's slow-motion 'Focus' mode. With a quick press of the left bumper you can go all John Woo for a few seconds and remember the days when every game felt the need to have Bullet Time. Fortunately the designers only allow sparing use, and for the most part you'll be using what ammo you can muster and engaging in risk-taking melee encounters.

Once the game moves on from its tutorial phase, things really kick up a gear and the set-pieces pile on the agony. Before long you start to appreciate the balance between gunplay and bone-crunching melee - the likes of which takes its cue from the head-stamping brutality meted out routinely in the Yakuza titles and, latterly, Batman: Arkham Asylum. Leamington-based studio Volatile certainly hasn't missed a trick to make you wince.

Utilising the same 360-degree combat system, Dead To Rights: Retribution feels like a modern-day progression of the non-stop brawling insanity of Streets of Rage and Final Fight, but with added guns. It's a fairly casual system at its core, with light and heavy blows and an array of combos to choose from, while pointing the left stick in the chosen direction directs the focus of your attack.

To add an extra layer of Die Hard-style mania to proceedings, you can even grab enemies and use them as a human shield for a while. As they writhe around in panic, you can crack them over the head to keep them in check. The knockabout ambience is in evidence everywhere, aided no end by Jack's exasperated, expletive-strewn utterances.

Although the game's main focus is undoubtedly explosive action, it manages to shoehorn in a few stealth-based interludes without making it feel a tedious chore. Controlled from the perspective of psycho-hound Shadow, the world is an entirely different place, filled with gaps to sneak through and armed sentries on patrol.

I want a codpiece like that.

The general idea is to sneak up behind each guard and rip their throats out one by one. Initially you can pad around silently with the left trigger held down, and pull off a context-sensitive kill when the button appears, but once you have to deal with more than one guard at a time, you have to use Shadow's bark to provide an audio distraction.

One might split off from his group to go and investigate, leaving you free to savage them to death for daring to be curious. If you happen to get caught, a chase will ensue, and they'll spray bullets in your general direction - but more often than not the net result is that they'll end up separated from their colleagues. Upon returning to their patrol, once again you'll be able to pull off a sneak attack and whittle down their numbers with patient ferocity.

Your canine companion can also help out during combat on certain levels, and when available he proves a very useful ally. Sometimes it's useful just to send him scurrying off to provide a distraction, while other occasions make for perfect stealth kill opportunities. With a few basic commands issued via the d-pad, it never becomes overwhelming, and the fact he can only be incapacitated spares you from interminable frustration, even if it is a bit silly to witness Shadow continually raised from bullet-ridden hell.

In the kneecaps, Jack.

But like everything in the game, there's always a sense of fun about what's going on. Take the story: its progression from gang thuggery, to Triads, through to an army of mechanoid Anti-Crime soldiers, is so utterly insane it might just be genius. Whatever the hell it's about, its permanent adherence to being utterly unhinged is quite alright in my book.

With impressive tech allied to its thoroughly engaging mashup of gunplay and melee, Dead To Rights: Retribution is chaos of the best kind. It's tough to call quite how good the game becomes towards its conclusion, but by the halfway stage it looks mightily promising.