Mass Effect 2

They're not to be seen in the latest hands-on demo, however: a slightly lopsided number, with a short first section providing Shepard with a breezy jaunt through a nightclub followed by the opportunity to be poisoned by the alien barman, while the second part throws you into a dazzling shootout in the network of offices beyond.

The nightclub section appears to have been included largely to show off the darker world: the skyscraper canyons lurking outside the bar seem grim, industrial, and thick with luminous clouds of pollution and passing space traffic, while the club itself is filled with seedy-looking aliens lounging on benches, and shot through with red lighting, dancing...girls (?), and holographic fire displays moving in time with the booming dance music.

It's also a chance to foreground the improvements in character modelling, as a stubbly Shepard keels over at the bar and gets a very convincing case of the sweats. The results are pretty astonishing actually, with brilliant texturing and only the slightly awkward mouths continuing to give the game away: most importantly, the creepy dead eyes of the original Mass Effect are long gone, and Shepard looks canny, devious, hunted, and rather ill, given the circumstances.

The second section is there to prove that BioWare is taking guns seriously this time around - and it is, by the looks of it. It's hard to point out a single specific improvement given the speed with which events unfold, but the whole business of blowing people away simply seems a lot more refined, and a lot more immediate. Shepard and his squad-mates move about with more elegance, the targeting is a lot twitchier, and snapping in and out of cover - and subsequently vaulting over it - now seems entirely natural.

"We literally did a post-mortem of Mass Effect 1, and reduced it down to a category of things the fans really wanted us to look at," says Dr Ray. "One of the big items for us was the shooter experience: we really wanted to improve the combat intensity. So, moment-to-moment, when you play it, you can see it's far more intense in terms at how fast things are coming at you, the controls are now really precise, and the whole thing's locked and loaded at 30fps. We took a long look at squad AI, and how the Biotics and weapons work together for them, and we've really stepped up the range of enemies. The shooter experience is now really good, we think."

And there are new guns to try out, too: a lethally enjoyable sniper-rifle that zooms in close and pumps out single rounds with a satisfyingly definitive thwack, and a rocket launcher that sends waves of Eclipse troopers falling through the air in flaming pieces. The encounter's final boss - a no-nonsense robot with a strangely lovable head - requires disruptor rounds to chip away at his shields, and then there's just time to fire up the Adrenaline Rush power to slow down Shepard's enemies, before switching to cryo ammo, which freezes the giant mechanical beast into ice, all ready to be pulverised by the rest of the squad.

Dr Ray refuses to be drawn on details of the Cerberus Network - although there it was on the screen when we logged into the demo - which allegedly handles the game's DLC, but he does promise that BioWare is taking post-release support far more seriously this time around, with regular and sustained updates providing players with a reason to come back to the Mass Effect universe for months ahead. He also suggests that the team is paying a lot more attention to the extra-curricular planetary exploration of the game, bolstering side-quests, and making the worlds themselves more interesting and varied.

All of which suggests that Mass Effect 2 is shaping up to be a real treat for those people who are always complaining that no good games ever get released on 29th January. The first Mass Effect was a surprisingly good match for the makers of Baldur's Gate: it was seeped in rich alien lore, riddled with interesting species and ideas, and, if truth be told, the developer's slight tendency towards wooden dialogue only enhanced the Kubrickian chic of the whole thing. With fresh worlds to explore, new nebulae to criss-cross, and some really ghastly bugs to splat, next year can't come around quickly enough, frankly.