Batman: Arkham Asylum

Fortunately I did when it came to the next challenge room, Survival Tactics. Set at the prisoner entrance to Arkham, it's a series of overlapping, split-level walkways surrounding a small stack of admin buildings smothered in staircases, topped off with a glass roof, all of which is circled by the gargoyle-spattered bleakness of the asylum's outer wall. As with the other Invisible Predator challenges, it's a broader space, emphasising height as much as breadth and patrolled by half a dozen henchmen, each packing an assault rifle.

Each could be tackled hand to hand, but the cost of incurring gunfire is prohibitive, and enemies are drawn to their comrades' plight when you engage them directly, so it's safer to use the left-bumper Detective mode to locate them (they appear as glowing red skeletons, through walls and all) and then isolate stragglers by grappling and gliding around the room at gargoyle height to employ stealth kills, also called takedowns. There are obvious attacks - by holding the right trigger to crouch, you can sneak up behind someone like Sam Fisher, peering out of cover, before performing a silent takedown from behind - but the more severe and elaborate finishers are correspondingly satisfying. They're also immeasurably cooler.

You can travel between grapple points at surprising speed with a few stabs of the right bumper, so it's tempting to go for the most iconic kill, witnessed last month, where Batman hangs upside down and hoists the target from his feet, leaving him dangling by a cord, where he will attract attention and terrify the other henchmen. You can then encourage them to disperse by firing a batarang from afar to snap the rope, and hopefully notch up a falling-body kill in the process.

Or you can work harder for your payoff, using a glide-kick to swoop silently over distance and disable a bad-guy, before silently rubbing him out on the ground and firing a swift grapple to ascend back to the shadows. Situational takedowns are typically brutal and more exotic, allowing you to haul an enemy neck-backwards onto a railing that you're suspended from.

As with Combat modes, there are sub-objectives, but in this case they emphasise takedown variation - the most satisfying and elusive in this instance being to smash through a glass ceiling onto an enemy beneath, which first involves coaxing the AI down the right pathways. It's this kind of kill-hunting that exposes Invisible Predator for what it really is: playing with your food. All the meanwhile, a clock quietly rounds up time taken; the best people on the leaderboards will have to match a short kill window to a checklist of sub-objectives.

But what's especially promising about Arkham Asylum is the things you don't immediately concentrate on as you compete for fast times and heavy combos: there's no slack in the economical controls, which allow you to dance around and disable enemies, and hunt with predatory poise through a minimum of button presses; the camera is right-stick controlled and seldom if ever gets in the way; and developer Rocksteady's use of the Unreal Engine not only articulates the steaming noir of Batmans of comic and screen, but delivers it with complete coherency. As a variation on the traditionally brutish Unreal aesthetic, it's stylistic enough to outstand lingering memories of both The Dark Knight and Gears of War, but polished enough to stand up to direct comparison. It is, overall, looking and feeling as significant as any other game we've previewed this year.