Halo: Reach Multiplayer Beta

Invasion is definitely the most involved and elaborate of the new modes, and it's the one that Bungie seems most proud of, but you'll also be getting a chance to try out Generator Defence, Stockpile and Headhunter too.

Generator Defence is essentially a streamlined approach to one of Invasion's first stages, with three Spartans going up against three Elites in a fight to destroy one of three generators. Stockpile, meanwhile, is an exploded take on CTF: a party game in which teams race around the map collecting neutral flags and transporting them back to active capture points.

The twist is that these points will only register scores at specific intervals, meaning that you can have a pile of flags - a stockpile, if you will - in your capture point for ages, but it's worth nothing if they've all been raided by the time the buzzer goes off. Expect bitterness, the end of friendships, and lots of complex blackboard diagrams as players learn how to divide up teams efficiently between flag-grabbers and base defenders with this one.

For my money, though, Headhunter is the sharpest of the new games if you're after stupid knockabout entertainment. Working best in smaller maps and played as a free-for-all, points are earned not for killing opponents but for collecting their skulls - skulls which pop out of their collapsing bodies like toast from a particularly cheery toaster - and then returning them to scoring zones which regularly shift positions around the map.

You can carry as many skulls as you want to before dropping them off, and they don't affect your movement or weapons abilities in the slightest. What they do affect, however, is your visibility, as a huge luminous marker listing just how much swag you're carrying appears over your head, allowing rivals to spot you through walls and move in for the kill.

It's a concept that ensures the best players are always in the hottest of spots, and allows for a kind of clown-in-the-wake-of-a-dying-gazelle scramble as the weaker kids wait for the big-shots to kill each other before sneaking in for the skulls that have then bounced all over the floor.

Frantic and charmingly mindless (no pun intended - oh, who am I kidding?), it's a nice reminder that, while Halo's single-player campaign increasingly descends into grandiose flummery, somewhere a tiny part of the game will always be American Gladiators.