Call of Duty: Black Ops

The first of the Russian base's relay station wobbles into view, and a Treyarch designer, plugging away at the controls, demonstrates that you can either take it stealthily, picking off enemies from a distance, or switch to explosive tips, blow up a nearby munitions truck and watch as troops spill out from the surrounding hills to get a shotgun blast in the face.

Even now, though, the staging is everywhere, and it's very effective. Racing through a kind of military-grade parking garage, parka-clad baddies pop up from behind caterpillar-tread crawlers at just the right moment to send your Innocent Smoothie into your lap, while there's no such thing as a bunker door in this game which doesn't have someone waiting behind it wielding something sharp for you to avoid as you poke him in the throat.

The base cleared, it's time for a little rappelling down a cliff-side, and then - didn't see this coming - right through the window of a second relay station. After the fairly scrappy fire fights of the last few minutes, this is a condensed 20 seconds of focused murder as your allies rip into a tiny room filled with very chilly Russians, leaving just enough space for you to pop off the odd finisher.

Finally, it's a quick rolling rumble through chambers filled with old data reels and computer banks, before you scramble across a gantry just as it's being attacked with rockets, along a mountain ledge that is coming apart around you, and then off the end of the next peak to parachute to safety.

It's thrilling to watch, it's probably thrilling to play, and, yes, there's no avoiding the fact that it's scripted right down to the snowflakes.

As it is with the fire. It's still 1968, but we're now in Hue City in Vietnam. The place is in ruins: American choppers are blasting it heavily from the air, the buildings are in chunks, and the sky is red with flame.

The mission starts with a bit more rappelling - down out of a chopper towards a target installation in the streets below - but the whole process speeds up a little when the helicopter you're spilling out of takes a direct hit and starts spinning towards the ground, lofting you through the window of a nearby office block in the process.

What follows is a blast through the dilapidated building that is as brilliantly controlled as anything in the series. This isn't the placement pop-out of Time Crisis, it's more like full-blown staging than scripting, and as you move from one damaged room to the next, you pass plenty of memorable vignettes stuck in alongside the baddies crouched in corners and ready to give you a shock.

At one turning, a man frantically tries to break a window and escape; at another, a cowering local ducks with his hands up as the door splinters behind him. Your shotgun seems to fire some kind of napalm charges that erupt in nasty little puddles of explosive light taking out three or four enemies at any one time, and even the bloodiest of encounters has been tweaked for cinematic thrills, as VCs appear to have been positioned at the top of stairs just so their torn corpses can roll downwards in the most ickily pleasing of manners.

Out on the street, it's the same tightly organised chaos, if that's possible. Flames guide you through obstacles, and rubble forms convenient ramps between tumbledown buildings while gunships buzz through the scarlet sky overhead. And then it's over.

That sky, though: it's just enough to remind you of a famous moment from Call of Duty 4 - an incident involving a downed chopper and a mushroom cloud. In reality, all of Call of Duty's single-player is gradually becoming that famous moment - cinematic, controlled, exquisitely directed, but far too linear for some people's tastes. Black Ops promises to be an incredible first playthough at the very least, then.

Afterwards? Afterwards there's multiplayer.