Alone in the Dark

Needless to say, this isn't exactly military combat. Carnby is a brawler, not a ninja or a soldier, and he's up against foes vastly more powerful than him - this is survival-horror, after all, not action-adventure. Combat is heart-in-mouth stuff, and while there are some beautiful moments where you turn the tables by using items like bottles of petrol (the possessed don't like being sprinkled with fuel and set on fire, oh no), much of the combat time will be spent with your heart in your mouth and the sensation that you're up against something vastly more powerful. Just how survival-horror should be, really.

Driving is a rather more fluid experience, as you'd expect from a development studio whose last outing was Test Drive Unlimited. Although you start off in the confines of a dark and nasty underground car park, you'll escape the collapsing building (having picked up a couple of companions on the way, a young woman and the elderly man from the introduction, who seems to be the only person with a clue what's going on) and launch into a driving sequence which, we suspect, will be remembered as a high point of the game.

Again, it's resolutely linear - there's one path to follow, and you need to follow it bloody quickly - but it's not just the building you were in that's collapsing. The whole of Manhattan is affected, and as a result, you'll find yourself hurtling headlong through the streets as the city falls apart around you.

Skyscrapers crumble, huge buildings fall directly onto the road in front of you, the street drops away into the subways below, enormous cracks open up that need to be jumped - and in the background, a thrilling piece of choral music ramps up the tempo with each corner you turn. There may not be much replay value in this section of the game, but by the time you reach your ultimate destination, a crash-landing in Central Park and the end of the second chapter, your pulse will be pounding.

Alone In The Dark sets its cards out fairly clearly on the table by this point. It gives you immense freedom in terms of what you can do with the physics and the items in the world, and later on, we're assured, it also gives you a free-roaming world covering the entirety of Central Park (for those who haven't been to New York, take it from us - that's a big bloody park). However, its key events are heavily scripted, and the whole experience is a linear narrative at heart.

That's not necessarily a bad thing at all. The story Alone In The Dark spins is intriguing, kicking off with truly epic set pieces and gradually weaving multi-layered mysteries around what's happening in New York and what has happened to Carnby's character himself (bear in mind that last time we saw him, he was a private detective in 1925 - this game is set in 2008, and he certainly doesn't look over a century old).

On the strength of these opening chapters, Alone In The Dark is shaping up to be one of the most compelling single-player experiences of the year. Strong narrative, gorgeous graphics and hugely flexible gameplay, constrained by highly scripted progression, put us in mind of last year's BioShock, and the comparison is not undeserved. Any fan of action-adventure or survival-horror should be mulling a pre-order for this one as its release date approaches. Meanwhile, we'll be keeping our fingers crossed that the full game can live up to what we've seen so far.