Despite being ambitious and largely successful, the game disappointed an expectant audience of hardcore gamers by being overly simplistic in its gameplay. Although a gameplay-enhancing expansion is planned for next year, the Cute & Creepy Parts Pack add-on really just confirms that EA’s target audience is mainly kids and young families.

As if there wasn’t enough creative potential in the creature creator tools, anyone picking up this pack will find themselves with more than 100 new body parts that, funnily enough, fall into one of two categories: cute, and creepy. A bit like me, I’ve been told.

That, of course, was all fixed when development duties were handed over from UK studio Core Design to US-based Crystal Dynamics, resulting in the jolly good Legend and Anniversary. With the third ‘new adventures of Lara Croft’ game, the Crystal Dynamics team is well into its stride, which is also a polite way of saying that innovation is now a little scarcer.

To be fair, Underworld does throw in some new exploration abilities for the crypt plundering heroine, and going by the demo the quality of the adventuring experience is at least as good as ever. And that, in the end, is what we’ll be judging it on.

The game was built around the Unreal 3 engine, with a focus on large scale battles that you can influence through a newly designed battle command system. The story is a fairly typical tale of rescuing a family member and learning the secrets of ancient magic (in this case the Remnants) in order to take down the unjust ruling classes. Quite what sets it apart from most JRPGs isn’t exactly clear, though.

The first thing you’ll need to do is create an avatar, which is basically Microsoft’s version of the Mii but much less playschool-looking. You can even dress up and photograph your likeness, although options in the former are a bit limited at present.

Essentially everything is the same but presented differently and with a much more graphical display for game listings, rivalling that of the PS3. Everything is a lot more layered now, which can be a bit annoying, but the Guide menu offers some handy shortcuts if you need them.

Overall conclusion: hardly revolutionary, but pretty cool all the same.

While there have been a few other, more unique co-op modifications produced for Valve’s Source engine, they’ve always been a bit wonky and poorly adopted by players. Enter Left 4 Dead, a ground-up co-op experience that has not only been professionally produced by one of the world’s most significant developers, it has been designed to revolutionise the sub-genre.

Everything from the interface to the level structure to the health system to the enemy AI has been crafted specifically to put four people in the thick of battle and have them rely on and communicate with one another as if there lives depended on it. Which in the game, it does.