Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops

Myra can use these areas - and indeed only she can access some of them, thanks to her acrobatic skills - to hide and evade. The stealth system is meant to be forgiving, says Black Lion, and so it sacrifices realism to this end - you can pass right in front of your enemies providing an awareness meter above their head doesn't fill completely.

At least the stealth isn't slow - Myra moves quickly through environments, as she has to when her enemies are splitting up and roaming through them seeking her out. If they get too close, she always has the cloak.

Later on the duo infiltrate the dictator's palace and have to work their way through the interior to reach him. Myra takes the lead, changing into a dancer's costume so she can get closer without being thought out of place.

We're not shown how this sequence plays out, but we're shown a room with podiums and pole-dancing setups and told she has to plant a GPS tracker on his jacket, so you can probably use your imagination. With the tracker in place the action switches to a Dubai, where Aron and Myra have to shut down an illegal arms sale, before the game moves on to Cuba for its finale.

And did we mention there are giant robots? The year is 2025, and there are giant robots. They're the illegal weapons that the Somalian dictator is after, and they look an awful lot like your everyday MechAssault or Metal Gear walker, complete with machineguns, clunky ED209 gaits and stompy sound effects.

Your first brush with one of them comes when Aron has to mine a bridge it's moving across, but then Myra hacks it so Aron can jump in the cockpit. Infantry, tanks, helicopters - nothing's going to stop you until the next cut-scene.

Shadow Harvest is currently only due out for PC - Black Lion says it will consider an Xbox 360 port if the PC one is successful - and lacks multiplayer. The code we're shown is sufficiently early that many of the animations are said to be unfinished, and the voices haven't been recorded for the English version yet, so it's hard to get an exact read on how it will end up.

Even so, it's hard to imagine Shadow Harvest changing the world. There are a couple of nice touches - like the way Myra's darts and bladed weapons inject nanites into the target, which then activate a cloak so the body is concealed wherever it falls - but the gameplay is straightforward and unremarkable in the main. Hopefully those last few months of polish will make the difference.