Homefront

There's undoubtedly a spot of balancing to be done, however. At the moment Kaos positively flings BP at you, even giving you additional points for little things like rivalry kills.

Weaker players aren't left impoverished, either. At one point in my pre-alpha demo (and purely for the sake of objectivity, right?) I spent a whole match stumbling into gun fights backwards and stepping fatally out of flying choppers. However, I still had enough BP at the end for a down-payment on a tank. There's a happy medium to strike here: I shouldn't be kept out of the fun for being rubbish, but I shouldn't be too richly rewarded for wanton idiocy either.

Battle Points aren't the only thing Kaos has been working on to bring order to multiplayer. If bribery keeps you on message, the newly unveiled Ground Control mode should ensure that players keep circulating, too. Ground Control spawns three capture points on the map, and teams have to hold them in order to score. Once a score limit is reached, the round ends and the capture points shift about.

It makes for a dynamic game. Kitted out for sniping and tank warfare over wide open spaces, you'll be calmly sitting there just, you know, capturing Bravo, when everything changes and the score zones are suddenly wedged inside a deadly ramble of close-knit streets where your big juddering motor won't fit and your scoped rifle will be useless.

The maps shown so far showcase the different scope of the matches available quite well. Cul-de-Sac, an infantry only affair, is a riddle of tattered sitcom suburbs where vehicles simply wouldn't work, and soldiers fight it out in driveways and back yards on their own.

Farm, meanwhile, is much bigger: it's autumn in the countryside, the kettle's on and the crops are burning, and you can fiddle around with a range of choppers, tanks and jeeps - all of which are pretty deadly.

And there's always the drones, of course: dangerous little model choppers and buggies that allow you to mess with the enemy in some humiliating ways. It's largely a tactical choice: if you're taking damage, do you buy a mini-tank and race through the streets shooting rockets up people's trouser legs to draw the heat away from you?

Or do you take to the sky in a buzzy little helicopter kitted out to blast enemies from above and perform basic reconnaissance? The drones handle effortlessly and bring a pleasant kind of deadly Wall-E chic to proceedings, but the trade off is that you're a sitting duck when at the controls.

The world of the online military multiplayer game is one deathmatch I wouldn't personally want to have too much riding on at the moment. However, Homefront is looking pretty smart. With a focus on large-scale battles to mark it out and some clever ideas to make those battles actually work, this could be a viable option for anyone tired of Call of Duty or Bad Company.