Medal of Honor

The Ranger combat seems bang up to scratch. The assault rifle effortlessly takes out enemies both close up and distant on the hillsides - but without getting my hands on the controller I can't tell if that's because of an over-friendly assist, or an over-talented demo guy. In terms of what we're doing, there's nothing mindblowing or unexpected.

We come into a devastated encampment. Broken stone walls support a wooden skeleton where the roof once lived. Flipping 90 degrees to the right, our man takes out an Afghan soldier approaching over a rock. I make an internal sad gasp as the enemy soldier transforms into a ragdoll and flies over a dozen feet backwards.

The official line on setting the story in a current conflict is that Medal of Honor has always been about telling a soldier's story, with strong elements of authenticity and respect. I'm no fan of reality, as we've established, and I'm not overly fussed about the transfer of momentum - but seeing as we're dealing with a current conflict, it would be more comfortable if the corpses of the enemy weren't treated with undignified fantasy physics. Legs don't do that.

Our man requests a clip of ammo from a squadmates, but he needn't have bothered - we're about to stumble across a stash of enemy ordnance. I'm half-worried that we'll find a rocket launcher (the universal language that a ruddy great helicopter is about to arrive) but this is simply making sure we've got enough ammo to lay down suppressing fire on our mission objective - an encampment with a DShK anti-aircraft machinegun. Our hero's fire lets his squad advance in close enough to set a marker flare, and then it's a simple matter of hiding behind a rock while an air strike does the final killwork.

The reactions of our squad to the huge explosion are diverse. Awestruck: "Holy s***!" Awesome: "That was sick." Withdrawn: "I don't ever want to be that close again." It's the first chance we've had to get a feel for the individual characters of our team. Finally, some banter - and it's good to get the feeling that although we're all professionals, and we'll get the job done - between Favreau, Ybarra and Hernandez, some are more suited to war than others. This is the kind of thing I'm after from a modern-day war game. A little bit of connection.

It's one click to the new LZ. We walk through the mess of the bombed camp, and Ybarra kicks tentatively at a corpse. Either he's stronger than he thinks or ragdoll physics is at work - the dead Afghani soldier guy rolls down a hill. I find myself imagining how hard it would be to flip a corpse over using only your ankle joint. It's a difficult thing to imagine, so I stop.

After a bit more workmanlike soldier business - taking out RPGs coming in from the hillsides, flushing guys from their cover in the valley, that kind of stuff - we come to the foot of a mountain. It's a chance to see Afghanistan's wilderness in all its unpopulated splendour. The landscape looks deadly and beautiful - the only break in nature, and therefore the thing to which our eyes are instantly drawn, are a couple of huts.

They're not like the other buildings. Their walls and roofs are intact. They look inhabited. Our boys adopt the usual position - either side of the door. Then something unusual happens. A mobile phone rings. It's momentarily mood-breaking. Like hearing a text alert during a radio show, you end up batting your pockets to see if it's you. So, I'm looking away when the reason for the call becomes clear, and the bomb inside the hut is triggered.