Halo: Reach

Active Camo is also an ability that comes with more stringent limitations. While you get a generous amount of time to ply your secretive trade, it's slow to recharge and screws your radar while activated. It works best when you hold back until the last moment, activating it just before you encounter enemies rather than roaming around cloaked, hoping to stumble on the perfect kill.

Snipers will obviously get a lot of mileage out of it as well. Combine a cunning elevated position with one of the fearsome new long range weapons like the focus rifle and you can inflict terrible casualties before the enemy even pinpoint you.

Then there's Armour Lock, perhaps the ability with the most long-term potential. Essentially the tank of Reach's fluid class system, it offers complete invulnerability at the cost of all your movement.

You can shrug off anything - including a direct hit from one of the game's vehicles - but once you return to normal you'll have attracted all sorts of attention and no doubt be in the crosshairs of multiple enemies. To begin with, many players seemed completely at a loss as to what to do with such a useful-yet-useless skill, but now we're seeing teams figuring out tactical advantages.

It's obviously handy for modes where defence is required, offering fortification options on the fly, especially when you have three or four Armour Lock players alternating their impenetrable stasis. Use it in conjunction with the new Spartan grenade launcher, seeding the ground in front of a capture point with primed explosives, then let them detonate as you shrug off the blast for an especially effective way of keeping the wolves from the door.

Alternatively, since the armour customisation in Reach makes it impossible to tell which ability a player is using from one spawn to the next, it can make for a fun surprise should you jog around a corner into an enemy. They open fire, you turn invincible, and meanwhile one of your team-mates creeps up and executes the sucker from behind.

Finally, there's the Covenant Elites, as if they needed any more help. They get their own exclusive ability in Evade, which does pretty much what it sounds like: makes them a right pain in the arse to hit.

Equally handy for dodging incoming fire or taking the upper hand in a melee confrontation, it's similar to Sprint in the sense that it doesn't have any immediately cool impact, but once you've gone toe-to-toe with a player who has mastered the duck and roll you'll see how it completes the frankly terrifying arsenal that Elites bring to the game. Resilient, fast, and now difficult to hit as well - it's a killer combination for players willing to put in the hours to master the manoeuvres.

These abilities are all mixed and matched with weapons old and new to create a buffet of loadouts tweaked for each map and mode. Operators head into the fray with Armour Lock, plus shotgun, pistol and frag grenades. Stalkers arm up with Active-Camo, assault rifle, pistol and frags. Elite Gladiators rock Evade with plasma sword, plasma repeater and a pair of sticky grenades. Others, like the Spartan Marksman and Elite Assassin, are only available in Invasion mode. Part of the fun is just browsing the modes and seeing what each combination brings to the table.

Internet forums are already throbbing with arguments about which ability is best, which new weapon will become the default choice for most players and which loadout will dominate the maps. Such speculation seems to suggest that, a few tightening tweaks aside, Bungie is set to deliver another deceptively rich multiplayer experience, with enough immediacy to woo the casual crowd but layers of depth that reward the long term player.