Gears of War 2 Hands On

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The scripted moments themselves are undeniably thrilling as incoming mortars curl down out of the sky flinging wakes of black smoke behind them, noisily taking out your neighbours in chunky explosions, and crumbling the nearby mountains into rockslides. To top it off, a frantic battle against a Locust-controlled derrick provides the necessary spectacle for a mini-boss encounter with none of the annoying QTEs.

As you arrive in a deserted mountain town the game switches pace yet again with the addition of a new enemy. The Ticker is an overgrown cockroach with a mine charmingly grafted to its back: attacking en masse, success lies with detonating them from a distance, often triggering a chain reaction of delayed explosions, which is sometimes useful, and sometimes just highly amusing.

There are new weapons, too, such as the mortar, planted in the ground with the left trigger, and fired with the right. It's fiddly at first, with aiming controlled by holding down the right trigger. But as your skills improve, mortars come into their own and provide a way of raining death down on distant Boomer crews while your co-op partner tidies up closer enemies.

Act one saves its greatest thrills for the very end, however. The first is an audacious tunnel set-piece which literally turns out all the lights, sending the screen into total blackness before unleashing a skittering, twitching horde of Tickers who can only be located by the creepy clicking sound they produce and the sporadic light of gunfire.

In its simplicity, it's one of the more memorably frightening moments since Half-Life 2's Ravenholm, and is immediately followed by a second highlight: a fleeting glimpse of a new Locust, the Skorge, spotted merrily screwing around on a derrick, showboating with his dual-chainsaw-bladed bow-staff. The Skorge is apparently the Samurai of the Locust world, scalpel to the typical grunt's sledgehammer, and despite the fact he looks a bit like a Bionicle that's been left on top of a hot fireplace for too long, he promises to be a nasty piece of work. "He's a handful," suggests lead designer Cliff Bleszinksi, helpfully.

With the inclusion of a side-story that sees Dom searching for his wife, Bleszinski wants a much wider audience to play. Come for the story, stay for the improved gibs - good luck with that, Cliff.

With the campaign looking spiky in all the right places, multiplayer seems likely to provide a burst of leftfield innovation in the shape of the new Horde mode. Playable on any of the multiplayer maps, Horde is pure score rush, which sees five players facing of against waves of different variations of enemies, which means it's presumably like working the late night shift in a BP garage.

There are 50 waves in total, with the enemies improving in terms of accuracy and health every ten (the garage analogy breaks down at this point). Bleszinski, who it's safe to assume is probably rather good at this kind of thing, has only made it as far as wave 27. Be warned.

As Horde only pauses rather than resetting between waves, the emphasis is on the post-fight scramble for newly-spawned weapons then the rush to find a good spot before the next onslaught. Playing on a new map, Day One - a surprisingly colourful city intersection, complete with neon signs, a '50s diner and an amusement arcade filled with chirping and bleeping cabinets - offers a mixture of street-fighting and second-storey gantries for sniping and boomshot attacks, and as the waves pass, the game flows between high and low combat very naturally.

The Cog breastplate still makes Marcus look like an Autobot caught part-way through transforming into a portable stereo.

The enemy AI, as in the main campaign, seems significantly improved, with Locusts rolling out of trouble or making a break for distant cover when they come under fire. You also get the chance to check out some of the new weapons - such as the gatling gun, which is intensely powerful but slows you down and, as a low-slung weapon, can't be used when taking cover.

The new up-close favourite is the Scorcher, an extremely pleasing flame-thrower which is completely useless at a distance. There's even portable cover in the form of the boomshield, which looks like a hubcap designed by Jean-Paul Gautier, and can either be wielded with the left trigger or planted in the ground.

Although there's no real danger of Gears getting caught in the end-of-year crush, its proximity to unknown quantities like Mirror's Edge and LittleBigPlanet means Epic's good old-fashioned carnage has not generated quite the amount of excitement as it could have so far.

But deep down this is a far from old-fashioned game. As the single-player continues to bring a touch of Resident Evil's thoughtfulness to the futuristic pomp of Halo, and the multiplayer broadens its scope to take on tantalising aspects of Geometry Wars and co, it seems a pretty safe bet that this Christmas, the frosty air will ring out with the sound of a million Locust heads being stomped underfoot.