Sleeping Dogs Preview: A True Open World Contender?

"Even our most optimistic internal projections show that continued investment was not going to lead to a title at, or near, the top of the competitive open world genre.

"In an industry where only the best games in each category are flourishing, to be blunt, it just wasn't going to be good enough."

Ouch. Activision CEO Eric Hirschberg didn't pull any punches when explaining the reason the publisher pulled the plug on True Crime: Hong Kong last February.

Games get canned all the time, of course, often before their existence is even shared with the world. To come so far and to be dismissed so brutally, then, must have come as a particular savage blow to United Front Games after its years of toil on a dream project.

Games are cancelled, studios close, jobs are lost. We read the headlines all too frequently and our hearts sink even as our heads, reluctantly, understand. While Activision is all-too-easily cast as the villain of this little piece, few expected a hero to emerge and save the day.

And yet that's exactly what Square-Enix did, reviving the project's still-warm corpse a few months later, breathing new life into an ailing, demoralised team that could, to its amazement, have a second crack at realising its vision.

"It's hard for me to say why they dropped it, but I can tell you why we signed it," says Lee Singleton, who heads up Square's London studio, which is overseeing development of the game now called Sleeping Dogs (as Square didn't pick up the rights to the name).

"We've got a lot of experience of making open world games, so we know the development pattern for games like that is a little bit different to the traditional model in that you go quite a long time before you see the true value of everything. It all comes together very late in the process.

Melee combat takes its cue from Rocksteady's Batman games, all linked combos and counters.

"When we looked at the game, it was just starting to come together. Perhaps they couldn't see when it had come together, I don't know. What we saw we really liked, and we could see the potential."

You'd forgive the developer for a concentrated dose of bitterness towards its former publisher, but it really does seem a genuine case of "no hard feelings" and "that's business".

"You put so much hard work, effort and time into something and to see it all stop, it's very difficult to deal with," admits Stephen Van Der Mescht, exec producer at United Front Games.

"Strategically, they wanted something they believed could be right at the top of the open world genre and we knew we needed to take a little bit more time to get there."

Singleton is more blunt about the state of the game when he picked it up: "If we were to squint, we could kind of see what was coming and it was about working together to polish and iterate - and giving the guys the time they need to do that."

If a major publisher's act of faith hasn't warmed your cockles enough, consider this: "Even people we had to let go at the time the project was cancelled, probably 90 per cent we asked to come back and they came back," reveals Van Der Mescht.

"They were willing to leave other jobs to come back and finish this project. That's how much it meant to them." Truly, a United Front.

Sleeping Dogs' greatest asset is its setting. Hong Kong is a place where east meets west with a bump, since Britain handed the region over to China in 1997. The city soars upwards, many of its residents crammed into the world's tallest residential buildings, while its grandest architectural monuments pulsate in neon after dark along the mesmerising harbour.

The real star of Sleeping Dogs is Hong Kong itself.

Sleeping Dogs is a crime story inspired by the cinema of the region. It's a classic undercover cop story, in which detective Wei Shen infiltrates the Triads, with the unfolding drama focused on what is the true cost of maintaining this cover.

As a game, it is unmistakably and heavily indebted to Grand Theft Auto in structure: an open-world adventure with a main narrative thread, multiple side missions and sideshows, vehicles to hijack, pedestrians to bother, criminals to bludgeon.

The influence is profound, from rising in your own apartment, and switching clothes in a wardrobe, to retrieving a favourite vehicle from the garage down below and setting off into the city.

Excitingly fresh setting aside, United Front and Square highlight the mechanics as a key differentiator, in particular its Batman Arkham Asylum-esque melee combat. In gang fights, blows can be strung together into smooth combos, with symbols appearing above the heads of enemies about to strike, who (in a nod to Batman) can then be countered to maintain the assault.

By far the most enjoyable aspect of combat is environment kills. Grab an enemy during a squabble and look for something glowing red. Drag them over to that and you can carry out one of many uniquely gruesome, fabulously satisfying takedowns.

Those I experience myself include: forcing a baddie's head onto a hotplate, which then catches fire; slamming a security shutter down into someone's face; forcing a head into an industrial fan; shoving another into a phone booth, then smashing the receiver repeatedly into their skull; shutting fridge doors onto faces; stuffing heads down toilets. You get the idea.

As gloriously gratuitous as these are, they could get old very quickly on endless repeat - but United Front insists there are "dozens and dozens" to exploit throughout the game.

The studio wants it key missions to play out like mini-action movies in themselves, seamlessly blending various gameplay types. An example involves tracking down a small time criminal called Johnny Ratface.

The developer was formed from the ashes of a former Need For Speed developer, so you'd expect the driving bits to be decent.

First using a mobile to contact him using a false identity, the device simultaneously triangulates his position by scanning and tracing the signal.

A journey to the docks ensues, with an outdoor fistfight (environmental kills include chucking someone into the sea and crunching another's head in a car bonnet), segueing into a cover-and-shoot gun battle inside a warehouse.

Shen has a neat manouevre activated by running at an obstacle to slide over it. The action switches to bullet time, with heads exploding theatrically left and right with the help of a good aim. And if triggers aren't your thing, there's always the trusty old machete. Squelch.

From here, Shen jumps on a bike in pursuit of Ratface's escaping car, blasting enemy-filled vehicles from his path, which burst into flames and pirouette absurdly through the air. Get close enough and it's time for an Action Hijack, where Shen leaps inside the target car to seize control as the missions builds to its gory conclusion.

Beyond the main narrative, United Front promises a wealth of additional content. Triad Wars side-missions, Hangouts to conquer, smart car racing, cockfighting and even karaoke. What it lacks in originality, therefore, the developer hopes to make up for through generosity.

Getting hands-on with the game in Hong Kong, the assembled press are warned that it's an alpha build, and that there will be glitches. And indeed there are. There's a notable lack of smoothness to the busier action sequences, where the framerate frequently plunges, while pop-in is very apparent at speed in a vehicle.

Police have curiously been switched off for the demo, so I spend many a happy minute attacking pedestrians at random with little comeback. NPCs are nicely animated, with an almost surreal quality to passers-by that makes them stand out against the urban sprawl.

Mesmerising in its variety, the city's 'essence' has been recreated, rather than a street-by-street copy.

During proper fights, the AI is set to "dumb" and clearly needs turning up a few notches to add an element of peril and purpose to the proceedings.

Balance, balance, balance. Widening a road here, reducing the pedestrian density there - these are the things open world developers lose sleep over, the smallest changes with the biggest impact, good and bad.

Releases live action trailer.

True Crime: Hong Kong renamed, out in August.

We're also told during one of the playable missions not to explore the open-world at all and stick closely to the mission structure.

All of which suggests there's still a lot of work to be done to smooth out the rough edges. But, as Square would probably point out, of all the genres in gaming, open-world is always the last to come together.

Having salvaged the project from the scrapheap, Square is hardly going to kick the game out of the door unfinished. But with a release pencilled in for the second half of 2012, there's clearly plenty to keep the studio busy.

And that's without the added distraction of a certain Grand Theft Auto 5, which may well end up launching before Christmas, eclipsing everything else in sight.

"Obviously we don't want to ship against those guys," says Singleton. "We'd like distance between the two, but I think there's room in the market for both of them. There's not tonnes and tonnes of open world games."

Sleeping Dogs has become an uplifting story of triumph over adversity and the gift of a second chance. The pressure is now on United Front Games to show us it has a happy ending, too.

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Kingdoms of Amalur Preview: Action Speaks Louder

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. It's an instantly forgettable title. And it's not just meaningless and profoundly generic, it's saddled (like Dragon Age: Origins before it) with the exhausting suggestion that this isn't the birth of an exciting fantasy universe so much as the launch of a new franchising opportunity.

Having spent 15 hours or so in the company of a near-finished preview build of 38 Studios' brisk role-player - out next week - I can confirm that it deserves much better than this limp nomenclature. And yet, it's true that the title fits it like a glove.

'Kingdoms of Amalur': the game's universe is exactly the derivative mishmash of worn high fantasy tropes that you expect after reading those three words. It's been rubber-stamped by some big-name creatives (fantasy author RA Salvatore and comic and toy king Todd MacFarlane), and I suppose it's possible that "every building, tree and creature has a clear and defined history within this immersive world," as the literature claims. But this land of elves (sorry, Fae), dwarves and men initially offers nothing to distinguish itself beyond a similarity to Blizzard's Warcraft that's not so much striking as actionable. (I could swear that I met the Night Elf druid from the original WOW trailer. She even had the same clothes on.)

'Reckoning': if this subtitle makes you think of a violent console action game saturated with acrobatic combos, murder gauges and gory slow-motion execution moves, you're right again. In game design terms, Amalur's principal departure from the BioWare and Bethesda games that loom so large over it is a punchy, brawling combat style, ideally suited for a game pad.

1/10 It's like the Cataclysm never happened; for refugees from old Azeroth, Amalur will be a home from home.

But before you tar it with the dumbed-down brush, consider that Amalur never pretended to be a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate - or anything else, for that matter. It's got all the branching conversations and skill trees you could want, but this taut and immediate action (along with its colourful artwork) sets it apart from its American RPG peers: games that, for all their qualities, can be dour and mechanically clumsy. Amalur, by contrast, is bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and slick as you like.

Amalur's development at Big Huge Games - which was owned by THQ for a spell before being incorporated into 38 Studios, an ambitious company owned by MMO enthusiast and former baseball star Curt Schilling - has been led by Ian Frazier (Titan Quest) and Ken Rolston, an Elder Scrolls veteran who was lead designer of both Morrowind and Oblivion. It's not exactly a pretender to Skyrim's throne, however.

The game unfolds in a more structured, less naturalistic or open-ended manner than an Elder Scrolls; its very large open world is made up of quite neatly defined and thematically discrete play fields, connected by disguised corridors. Game flow is clearly more important than total freedom to Big Huge Games, and the same is true of its approach to storytelling.

There's certainly a wealth of narrative detail and background lore here, and quests are framed in a familiar style, with conversation options and talking-head exposition. But fans of BioWare's intricate interactive fictions (regular and observant readers will know I don't really count myself among them) might be disappointed. Meaningful choices or forks in the tale are rare (making a lot of the dialogue redundant, it has to be said), and progress through the game is defined less by story than it is by exploration.

Your main quest and a choice of faction quests lead you from one location to the next, with a starburst of optional side-quests around each hub. Recovering WOW addicts like yours truly will find themselves soothed by the structure of this particular offline methadone. (It also bears comparison to Wii gem Xenoblade Chronicles.) Quick travel and a very detailed map keep things manageable, but while this certainly feels more like a video game than an untamed wilderness, it's not without a sense of scale and adventure - and, pleasingly, there are plenty of secrets to find.

Most of these secrets yield loot. Kingdoms of Amalur is a joyously loot-happy game - not quite a Diablo but close - and rightly unconcerned about showering a solo role-player in treasures. Chances are you'll be wearing something with a purple name and more stat boosts and status effects than you know what to do with in your first half-dozen hours, and you'll have superseded it just as quickly.

"We MUST make a profit to become what we want to become."

And Mass Effect 3-themed extras.

"I'm not going to pretend that Skyrim doesn't exist."

I haven't delved deep enough to judge Amalur's story yet; suffice to say that your character is a resurrected warrior with no memory (like most RPGs, Amalur assumes you want all your points invested in Amnesia from the get-go) who attracts the attention of a band of seers called the Fateweavers as well as an antagonistic, warlike tribe of Fae. In this world, everyone - especially the story-obsessed Fae, who constantly re-enact their fabled songs - believes their fate to be written in advance. So your ability to decide your own fate (and others') is both alarming and precious.

It's a cute conceit for a medieval fantasy game, although it's hard to tell if the rather functional writing will have the grace to handle it when the going gets tough and the choices start to matter. It's also tied, with varying degrees of success, to your character development and the mechanics of combat.

Among Amalur's best achievements are some thoroughly addictive and rewarding crafting options; non-boring crafting isn't easy to do.

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Character development, like so much in this game, is a pleasant balance of freedom and definition. There are three simple 'Destiny' archetypes (mage, rogue and warrior) but at each level-up you're free to invest points as you desire across these three skill trees. You can specialise one path or create your own hybrid quite easily, and at certain points you'll be rewarded with bonuses appropriate to your particular combination of Destinies. If you get bored, it's possible to pay a Fateweaver to unlock your Destiny, and reinvest all your points in a completely different build.

Active skills take the form of new weapon-attack combos or special skills that can be attributed to one of four trigger-plus-button slots. Combined with the basic controls - shield block, dodge and primary and secondary weapon attacks - you get a simple, responsive, flexible and fun combat system. Enemies are pretty easy to down with combos, but when they hit, they hit hard - and with no recharging health, you'd better have some potions at the ready.

The most inelegant graft from console beat-'em-ups is the Reckoning meter, which charges with the bonus Fate you earn in combat (you get more Fate for more varied and effective use of your abilities). Fill this and you can enter a 'bullet time'-style frenzy, aiming to reduce as many enemies as possible to minimum health before the meter drains. Then you can "unravel their Fates" by executing them all in a single blood-spattered climax. It works, and it's useful in busy fights (Amalur likes to throw large, mixed enemy groupings at you). But it feels like an egregious inclusion in what is otherwise a sensitive and seamless mix of stat-crunching and free-flowing action combat.

With Skyrim's long shadow extending well into the early part of this year - and with only muted support from publisher EA, which is more invested in BioWare's work - Kingdoms of Amalur might prove a hard sell to sated fantasy enthusiasts. That title and the game's rather forced, generic personality don't help.

But initial impressions are of a game that's very nicely put together and hard to put down, with a refreshingly direct approach to putting pulse-raising action into a trad role-playing epic. Check our review next week to find out if the promise is fulfilled.

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Darksiders 2 Preview: Looting the Classics

"Choose Your Own Death" is one of the strangest video game pitches that's been flung our way in a while. Choose Your Own Death. Okay, so I've thought about it, and I'd like to go with rollerskates, a wonky stepladder, a plate glass window, and the glinting tines of an upended garden fork, please. At my funeral, I want them to play the theme from Shaft, and everybody has to dress like they work at Burger King.

It all makes a bit more sense, though, when you discover that Death is the new protagonist for Darksiders 2. He's taking over from his brother War in a sequel that fits neatly inside the timeline of the original. Think of it as Back to the Future 2, but with a rock-fisted demon in place of Thomas F. Wilson. War has been accused of kicking off the Apocalypse early, and he's out to clear his name: that's Darksiders. Meanwhile, Death thinks War is his kind of people, so, as another of the famous four horsemen, he sets off on his own parallel adventure to see if he can help his brother out. That's Darksiders 2.

As for the element of choice, this comes from a slight change of emphasis. In Darksiders 2, you'll be able to shape Death a little as the game progresses, selecting which armour you want him to wear as you pick paths through his skill trees, while juggling his load out of weapons and magic attacks. It's a mix-and-match approach that mirrors that of the developer, Vigil Games, which built the original Darksiders, in part, from its favourite pieces of the Zelda and God of War series, taking the dungeons-and-gadgets structure of the former, and the pointy melee combat of the latter. For Darksiders 2, all of that stuff remains in place, but the team is throwing in some new inspirations as well.

So there's a little of the Diablo formula present in the sparkly loot that enemies now drop, giving you a new piece of kit to try out after each encounter. It's good stuff, too. There are plenty of different armour sets available, but they all fall into three basic types, which work a little like classes. Necromancer armour will always boost spell-casting stats. Slayer armour will improve your defence, melee attacks and general weapons proficiency. Finally, Wanderer gear will steadily turn you into a kind of rogue character - fast, stealthy, and brilliant at assassinations.

Puzzles are likely to be a little more involved this time around. At one moment, Death takes control of Constructs - robot-like digging mechs used to build entire planets - which allow him to cross lakes of lava and reach over long gaps.

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After the swaggering heft of War, is there a danger that cobbling your own outfit together over the course of the game could mean that Darksiders 2's main character ends up looking like a bit of a charlie? Vigil has taken pains to make sure that this doesn't happen, apparently. Not only is Death kitted out with a dandy Skull mask and a distinct, wiry physique, both of which will always be readily visible no matter how you've dolled him up, the studio has also been messing around with armour since the first days of the sequel's development to make sure it all fits his style.

"It's very complicated stuff," admits art director Han Randhawa. "You have no idea. In the end, we basically had a wall in the studio with all the different armour sets laid out, and as we'd build them, we'd put them into the game as quickly as we could to mix and match them. You have to be harsh and chuck stuff out that doesn't work. Elements may look great on their own, but they may look garish together. You also want to make sure that people are picking up stuff that isn't throwaway." With bundles of decent loot to sift through, then, and two separate skill trees that allow you to tailor your hero even further, choosing your own Death suddenly doesn't sound too bad.

Loot and an increased focus on character progression has helped build a game that looks and feels like Darksiders - you've got the same colourful dereliction, the same earthquake audio and the same chunky Joe Mad enemies - while giving you a lot of new options in combat.

"So much of that came out of the shift in character," admits Randhawa. "War for us was your soldier of justice. He sees everything in black and white, he's heavily armoured, and he basically just rips through everything he sees. Death? It wouldn't make sense for him to be a hulking warrior, as we've already done that. The next thing we wanted to do would be someone who was a bit more agile and tactical when he's fighting."

1/11 The game's apparently due out for the Wii U, but Vigil won't discuss specifics.

Death's primary weapon is his scythe. It's called Harvester (a name that conjures images of pleading victims and soul-reaping for American audiences, perhaps, but dumps English players into a rundown world of damp corn cobs, limp roast turkey and Lindisfarne on repeat), and he can wield it either as two short swords, good for fast, close-up damage-dealing, or as a single pole that gives him a bit more reach.

Secondary weapons, meanwhile, include everything from giant hammers to guns that can shoot various different ammo types. Death's not as resilient as War overall - he has a dodge instead of a block, encouraging you to constantly shift in and out of range - but he can also make use of a selection of magic attacks that invoke classic Blizzard every bit as much as all that loot.

Even in the lower branches of the skill trees he can learn the ability to summon zombie allies who will fight alongside him, or to stun his foes with flocks of crows. He's got more tricks up his sleeve than War ever did, in other words, and that's encouraged Vigil to make his enemies bigger and deadlier in response.

If Diablo is the most obvious new influence, there's also a little Prince of Persia in there too, however, as Darksiders' nimble new lead executes wall-runs and jumps far more swiftly than his brother ever could. Death can use a Ghost Hand gadget to grapple from one point to the next when climbing around the environment, and his improved range of traversal moves are frequently chained into complex gauntlets.

It allows for some surprisingly dynamic set-pieces, such as a section in which he's pursued by a rising tide of lava as he scrambles out of a well, and it suggests that platforming is no longer a simple palette cleanser between combat encounters or puzzles. Darksiders 2 should flow from one moment to the next with a touch more grace than the original could muster. (It also promises to be a lot more generous, incidentally, with an overworld map split across several hub towns, each with their own story quests and side missions, and a suite of entirely optional dungeons that come with their own mini-bosses and loot.)

It's weird that a game with so many obvious reference points should somehow manage to feel so coherent and so likeable, but Darksiders 2 still appears to exude a charisma that stops it from degenerating into a collection of tributes or thefts. Its ideas, when borrowed, are always repurposed inventively, and the whole thing is wrapped up in the hulking, wonderfully toy-like art style that gave the original such a distinct sense of character.

Besides, Darksiders never hides its many influences. It continues to wear them proudly, in fact: choice pieces of shiny armour dropped by some of the very best in the business.

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Ghost Recon Preview: Rebuilding the Future Soldier

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier ain't quite what it used to be. When it first broke cover - and when we last took a serious look at it - Ubisoft's tactical shooter series had evolved into something far removed from the games of old, having become an action-heavy third-person shooter starring a soldier who was, in Ubisoft's own words, "an F-16 on legs". It had turned into Gears of Recon, and it proved an unpopular shift in direction for a series once known for its tactical smarts.

"We'd just finished Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, but that was just an iteration of the first Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter," creative director Jean-Marc Geffroy says of Future Soldier's first pass. "The team wanted to renew the game - they wanted to stay faithful, but they wanted to renew as well. And sometimes, when you're like that maybe you go too far in one direction."

Remember the over-powered exoskeleton, the class system and the player tethering discussed at the game's reveal? Forget about it - all of it - as today's version of Future Soldier is a world away from the one first shown in 2010.

"The team was thinking about changing the game, and at the same moment we were working with consultants," says Geffroy on the decision to switch tracks with Future Soldier. "It was interesting - at this time, we needed another view from someone who could tell us that maybe it's a great game, but from a military perspective, it's just s**t.

There are a handful of elements borrowed from Splinter Cell, lending Future Soldier's stealth a new dynamism.

"It was at this moment where we thought that we're too sci-fi - we had some good input from Special Forces who told us what really is their job. It was the right moment to change. We didn't change the engine, we didn't change a lot of stuff - but we changed the design, the visuals and the mission system."

First highlighted at Microsoft's E3 conference last year, Gunsmith is where Future Soldier lets you craft the game's tools. It's an incredibly detailed and comprehensive customisation tool that allows you to swap out various elements, from the sights to the barrel and beyond, with each piece coming with its own stats. Finding the right gun should prove a compelling exercise in alchemy, and it's a feature on all versions of Future Soldier. The Xbox 360 gets Kinect functionality that adds a tactile element, and while it's perfectly serviceable, it's hard not to see it as any more than a briefly diverting novelty.

It's one hell of an about-turn, although it's an about-turn that's hardly alien to Ubisoft, nor to Tom Clancy's extended family of games. I Am Alive recently shifted from a sci-fi survival horror to a taut downloadable action game, swapping studios in the process, while Splinter Cell: Conviction famously debuted with a hobo Sam Fisher and an elaborate combat system that were both never to be seen again.

Future Soldier's been taken down a similar path, and in its roundabout journey in the last six years it's ended somewhere near to where the series left off. Having flirted with gung-ho heroics, it's now returned to the considered yet fast-paced tactical shooting of the Advanced Warfighter games - which, if you can recall the brace of Ghost Recon games that came at the dawn of this generation, is no bad thing at all.

Gone is the gung-ho shooting, and in its place is squad-play that's easily directed and pleasing to tinker with. You're one of a team of four - there's no divide between single-player and online co-op in the campaign - sent out to fight in a series of nondescript and slightly over-familiar scenarios.

But - and don't tell poor old Tom this - no-one plays the Clancy games for their gripping stories. It's about technology and battleground wit, both of which empower the action and help elevate it above fellow third-person shooters, including the kind of game that Future Soldier once threatened to be.

The over-the-top technology of Future Soldier's old self has been removed, but in its place is a selection of gadgets that look just as satisfying and that have woven wonderfully into the game. First there's a remote-controlled drone that looks like it's fallen from the pages of the Innovations catalogue - it can be driven across land or flown across a short range, picking out targets and giving the lay of the land. Sensor grenades perform a similar trick, marking out nearby enemies.

Both of these tie into Future Soldier's other key introduction, a feature dubbed 'scan and execute'. It's remarkably similar, both in practice and in name, to Conviction's mark and execute; enemies can be tagged and then taken down, but the ability has been embellished. With the emphasis on co-op play, it's possible to tag kills for squad-mates before giving the order to pull the trigger, at which point the action trickles into bullet-time.

Like other Clancy games, Future Soldier's visuals are solid if hardly dazzling.

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Unlike Splinter Cell: Conviction, there's no economy keeping use of scan and execute in check. It was always an awkward and somewhat nonsensical limitation, but by removing it, Future Soldier runs the risk of over-powering the player - the cool, clinical run-through that was once the reserve of the skilled and patient now becomes the default way to play.

But Ubisoft's level designers seem to be having fun exploring the possibilities and stretching out the mechanics across a variety of scenarios. Stalking a military leader through a Bolivian camp requires stealth and a steady nerve, and Future Soldier's active camouflage - again, a feature that's kept relatively unchecked and is available at all times - removes some of the frustration inherent in other games of hide and seek.

An abandoned traffic jam in Pakistan shows signs of the more action-oriented game that Future Soldier nearly was, an explosion of noise and colour that funnels you through a thin, enemy-infested strip of road. It allows Future Soldier's cover mechanics to reveal themselves - it's fast and snappy in this regard, and with the ability to roll in and out of cover when lying prone it makes for equally fast and snappy combat - as well as revealing a handful of other quirks.

Come under fire from a heavy machine gun and Future Soldier's suppression mechanic kicks in, layering a dose of shaky-cam that makes it hard to fire off a clean shot in return. The solution tends to be sending a squad-mate out to take care of the unit - a small snapshot of how Future Soldier is placing an emphasis on both the tactical and the shooter sides of its genetic make-up.

The tactics and the shooting seem to be working in harmony now, restoring the balance that made both Advanced Warfighters such a success. It's a different game to the one Ubisoft once intended - but it's most definitely a better one.

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