Modern Warfare 3

You may not have a great deal of control over how to approach many of the encounters – at least not in the sections Activision's currently unveiling – but Modern Warfare 3 certainly mixes up its target ranges for you fairly regularly. Enemies pop up first in the foreground and then in the distance, while the campaign sends you through the trading floor of Stock Exchange where you have to inch from one piece of cover to the next (it's a close-up, low visibility battle that brings back plenty of memories of the first Modern Warfare's TV station assault) one minute, and then upwards onto the overhead gantries to whittle down the ranks of enemies spawning below the next.

It mixes up weapons too – Manhattan includes everything from standard assault rifles to the AT4 and that lovely grenade launcher - and keeps the objectives ticking over nicely. Meet the team, flank the Russian forces, head to the rooftops and take out a radar jammer. After that, there's just time for a quick – and tightly choreographed – buzz through the skyscraper canyons of the island while you take down a few rival whirlybirds. Up here you can see that New York's a wreck, but it's nowhere near as artful or meticulous a wreck as Crysis 2's take on the city. Instead, texture and detailing has been sacrificed for a rock solid 60 fps, and it's a trade that makes a lot of sense. This is a busy world that moves past you at great speeds, and it would be a crime to see it halt or stutter.

London, meanwhile, offers a change of scenery, but refuses to release the firm grip on pacing. Dropped into the shoes of a gruff Statham type named Burns, you're on a night mission in dreary British rain, sent in with your team to take a peak at a supply depot where the Russians are moving something unpleasant around in a convoy of vans.

The level kicks off in a semi-Dickensian warren of alleyways and dead ends as your squad moves into the facility, clearing out buildings before heading to the target. There are plenty of people for you to shoot with your silenced P90 – "silenced" is a relative term in the COD fun park, mind – but the real pleasure lies in seeing your partners neatly taking out their targets around you, too: sniping through windows from a distance, or killing up-close. It's a beautiful piece of atmospheric theatre, and the kind of thing that COD games excel at.

Once the mission turns hot (I felt a little like Statham myself just using that term) it's back to painstakingly-crafted panic, as you race through an industrial estate ducking bouncing concrete pipes that have come loose before leaping into a pick-up – manning the turret, obviously – to chase after a runaway tube train. The game's budget is being spent everywhere you look – before a truly mesmerising crash, you zip through stations where individually animated commuters wait on the platforms, and out into a huge rain swept skybox, dominated by Canary Wharf - but while it's a classic Modern Warfare moment, it can feel, just a little, like something Nathan Drake should be doing rather than the hardened realists of the SAS.

COD just can't resist the lure of cinema, then, even when subsequent playthroughs will potentially mean that the cinema you're getting is the bank truck robbery scene from Groundhog Day. One, two, three, dog bark. Five, six, seven, air strike. It's elegantly done though, and the best scripted sequences out there, like the building collapse from Uncharted 2, and the plane hijacking that caps the first Modern Warfare, proves that there's a real Time Crisis thrill to memorising spawn patterns and tightening your racing line through a level. What's more, it's hardly easy to pull off, either, as Homefront, with its cut-price theatrics, has already made clear.

Talking of rivals, is Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3's big competitor this Christmas, likely to make the same choices? Will it match this campaign, or counter it, exchanging scripted thrills for something a little less linear? Can't wait to find out: November is going to be pretty interesting.