Red Dead: Redemption

Sharpshooter challenges, meanwhile, run in matches or Free Roam, rewarding players who can, say, shoot hats off heads and guns from hands. Levelling up unlocks more challenges and playlists, while furnishing you with cooler weaponry and a variety of mounts - including bulls and, brilliantly, a donkey.

That's all the stuff I'm told about by Rockstar reps. The bulk of my hands-on time is spent within a playlist featuring four match-ups we loop through, howling, cursing and face-shooting every boot stomp of the way.

We begin with a Free For All Shootout in the cluttered crucible of Chuparosa, a Mexican village with an open central area littered with emergency cover options, bordered by two-level buildings riddled with interior hideaways and rooftop vantage points.

Other players are hidden on the map, revealing themselves only when sprinting or, to the more eagle-eyed gunslinger, when icons for collectible items disappear. A basic set of weapons, including hand gun, shot gun, rifle and knife, is accessed via the left bumper, which brings up the weapon wheel from which any selection can be made. But additional weapons are also scattered around the environment, found in cases or dropped by the fallen.

Players quickly revert to type, some camping on the nearest rooftop with sniper rifle, others mazing around the houses, unleashing bursts of handgun fire at close range. A useful tactic which quickly emerges is the roll-and-shoot: when holding the left trigger to target, pressing X rolls your character in any direction, a more effective means of dodging point-blank fire than the more sluggish leap. This produces absurdly entertaining moments of death-defying gymnastics - often the difference between life and death if you run out of ammo at an inopportune moment.

Dead Eye, which returns from Red Dead Revolver, is a limited resource that gives a killer edge in a tight spot. Activated by hitting R3, while it doesn't slow down time in multiplayer, it still allows the 'painting' of multiple targets on an enemy in range, making it considerably more likely you'll take them down first. Once exhausted, only a green pick-up can restore Dead Eye; white ones, meanwhile, boost ammo supplies.

Gang Shootout is the team-based version of this mode, and for our three-on-three encounter we're whisked to Armadillo, the Platonic ideal of a Wild West frontier town, the wide-open main street flanked by wooden buildings redolent of any number of classic Spaghetti Western sequences, freshly transposed into a hide-and-shoot adventure playground.

At the end of each round, a standard stats screen lists achievement by score, number of kills, deaths, assists, max kill combo and so on. Then it's into a new 'track' in the playlist via the capering carnage of a shootout.

Goldrush is Red Dead's capture the flag - in this case, literally, capture the bag. Back to the oppressively narrow confines of Chuparosa, respawning bags of gold are strewn around: grab one and dump it into a chest to score a point; 10 points wins. You can carry two bags at a time, but this severely reduces mobility and renders you a slow-moving target for everyone else.