Darksiders 2

There is, he continues, one way for Death to be granted an audience. He must travel to the colossal arena where every soul is allowed to fight a champion for the right to continue living, and he must slay that champion. With that, the indefatigable Death is off again, bounding down steps towards his prey and hacking apart dozens of brainless golems en route.

Getting a first look at Darksiders 2's combat is hugely encouraging. Every animation seems to have been halved in length, resulting in fights that look a lot crisper and more responsive than in the original game. Where this might have made the action flighty and intangible, the game is saved by an impressive suite of crunchy sound effects. Death's enemies crack, crunch and pop under the blows of his dual-wielded blades, which Death snaps together to form a single, giant scythe if you keep a combo going.

"Death doesn't block," comments the man from Vigil, as if he were talking about how a friend of his doesn't drink. Where mighty War was happy to deflect blows, Death further boosts the momentum of combat by only ever rolling out of the way.

But the biggest surprise is the huge, floating numbers that Death knocks out of his enemies with every attack. To tie in with the game's new loot system, you now see how much damage you do every time you so much as brush the pad. Far from being immersion-breaking, these numbers instead give you even more moving objects to care about on the screen. It works.

Any doubts about the new loot system can be fumbled into a bottomless pit, too. Every item of armour not only appears on Death, it's all been designed with Darksiders' over-the-top art style where each shoulder pad looks like it could crush a brown bear. There are also talismans, capes and secondary and primary weapons to equip. As we watch, Death picks over a pile of defeated golems to recover a hammer that, when wielded, is bigger than him. Each attack has an agonisingly long wind-up time, which we find out is no problem at all.

At the touch of a button, a vast flock of crows spills out of Death and proceed to peck away at his enemies in a storm of numbers. This, it turns out, is one of the special abilities that lurks in Death's skill tree, which is supposedly so big that even thorough players won't be able to unlock all the powers. Vigil want to have players agonising over these choices, which can only be a good thing.

Death's showdown with the arena champion ends the demo on a suitably Darksiders note. On the one hand, the boss is gorgeous - a tottering, giant construct assembled from the arms and armour of a thousand fallen champions, with an attack that sees him pulling his entire skull and spine free from his armour to use as a comedic flail. On the other, these attack patterns seem slightly repetitive, and none require anything more complex than Death rolling his old bones endlessly out of the way.

Which makes me think that all of these new RPG elements represent the perfect direction to take Darksiders in. Where the first game dragged, here you'll have loot, side-quests, a robust skill tree and the exploration of a beautiful world four times bigger than the first game to hold your attention like the welcoming rungs of a ladder. Reversing the apocalypse from within the barren, supersized scenery of the Abyssal Plain might not make for an imposing challenge, but it's certainly looking like an appealing one.