Frozen Synapse

A neat lobby/profile screen offers instant access and prompts to whichever matches you're currently embroiled in, with rankings and leaderboards a reward for those who crave them. This is not like the old play-by-email games, as slow as a pensioner on a snowy day; it's whip-fast, jumping from match to match to match, thoroughly modern and pulse-raising despite its fundamental adherence to old, old values.

Frozen Synapse has been in open-ish beta state for over a year at this point, and its once-finicky interface has improved hugely during that time. It still, perhaps, lacks a slickness that the minimalist aesthetic might suggest; for example, the aim and wait buttons are fiddly to click on if you're playing at maximum zoom, as you probably will.

The unchanging, ghostly neon look, reminiscent of the games by fellow Brit indies Introversion, can also wear thin after a time. When you can have any number of matches on the go at once, dancing between waiting opponents as you wait for other game's turns to resolve, it's hard not to wish there were more distinguishing features to each. Change is always guaranteed by the conflict: the maps and even the unit rosters are randomly generated each time (unless you start a game with specific stipulations), while a variety of modes shake up the challenge. But the visuals and the palette will forever be the same.

The single-player campaign pushes things a touch more, introducing a few hand-designed maps (still subject to random elements) that are often built to look weird and play hard. Talking heads pop up too, the only time that the game offers characters outside the spectral silhouettes of your soldiers.

In single-player, your soldiers are 'shapeforms', genetically-created idiots fit only to be bossed around by remote commanders such as yourself and the expository folk who you're collaborating with and conspiring against in a corrupt future city. While the single-player storyline perhaps goes too deep into techno-babble at times - the devs have clearly enjoyed penning their own fiction - the writing is peppered with agreeable pitch. The concept suits what was clearly originally designed as a competitive game remarkably well.

It's the missions themselves that really sing, though. Freed from the fairness and random generation necessary for the multiplayer game, each level is a tailored experience in terms of both map design and challenge. The mechanics remain the same, but the campaign is packed with smart twists on the Frozen Synapse formula: sneaking a hacker into a specific room within a specific number of turns; escorting a VIP across the breadth of a sniper-filled map; assassinating a specific enemy.

On occasion, it can seem cruelly, impossibly difficult, but a lucky turn, a sudden brainwave or (most of all) a gut feeling about what the enemy's going to do can dizzyingly tip the odds in your favour. Without the waiting that multiplayer matches can entail, everything happens in a heartbeat. The tension of guessing, predicting and committing is sweaty and extreme - a testament to how high the stakes feel.

It had seemed doubtful, months back, that this would ever be a convincing single-player game. It seemed wholly designed for player-versus-player, and a Brink situation of strung-together bot matches seemed the most likely outcome. Frozen Synapse is an excellent and inventive multiplayer game, but it is, truly, also an excellent and inventive single-player game - one that provides its own distinct challenges and rewards even as it effectively tutors you to be a multiplayer champ.

But the dizzy thrill of defeating an implacable human opponent - after all that panicky guesstimation, all your courting of the mendacious spacebar - is the sweetest song the game has to sing. That's why your $20 or £15 buys two copies of Frozen Synapse, making an already fair price for a smart and slick game all the fairer.

Frozen Synapse takes the old, the stuffy and the traditionally glacial and it makes it brand new, instant and brutal. It's such an achievement.