Backbreaker Vengeance

Tackling may be simple enough, but racking up the kind of points you’ll need to unlock some of the later rounds requires a frightening mix of dexterity, insight and timing. (As an additional bonus, incidentally, the god-ray that illuminates your ultimate opponent adds a dreamy faux-religious feeling to proceedings.)

Supremacy is the final mode on offer. It’s the newest of the bunch, and it’s also the weirdest, in that you race against three other AI players - or a friend and two other AI players - to reach the end zone first, with the loser in each wave coming back as the lone tackler for the next one.

It’s the hardest mode to get your head around at the start and, initially at least, it’s no fun whatsoever. Once you realise that jostling your rivals into out-of-bounds areas not only removes the competition but ups your score multiplier, however, it starts to get interesting.

As an arcade diversion, Backbreaker: Vengeance is basic but surprisingly involving, and for a game in the post-Autolog world, it does a great job of flinging other people’s stats at you to keep you playing - whether it’s pairing you up against a random leaderboard rival for each challenge or just cycling through the best in the world for the event you’ve just completed.

The game’s more traditional take on multiplayer isn’t bad either, offering online and split-screen local two-player options for each event. Better yet, it’s all delivered with Euphoria technology, turning each wave into a truly brutal comedy as rivals trip each other, hit the ground chin-first after coming off a hurdle, or miss a tackle only to touch the back of your foot and send you spinning just as you were about to get that touchdown.

Ultimately, you can think of this as a step in the right direction. The first Backbreaker struggled with the central mechanics (although a post-release patch worked wonders). The second game only really struggles with the over-optimistic pricing. (1200 points might not seem much to quibble about, but compared to the 800 Ubisoft is charging for Beyond Good & Evil HD, say, it’s hard to defend here.) Next time out, then, we should be in for something special.