Anyway, the game took me a little over eight hours to finish and I died 192 times along the way. Which meant that I died, on average, every two and a half minutes. That does sound like a lot, but the game didn’t feel too hard or unfair – except for the one spot I mentioned yesterday, which my wife says took me a lot more than ten minutes to get through. (And if an unfair spot can make half an hour seem like ten minutes, it can’t be so bad.)

Overall thoughts now I’ve finished? Well, it’s brilliant. It’s fun, exciting, tense, cathartic, violent, messy and rewarding. The default difficulty is just right, with no real sticking points or frustrations – but it’s no cakewalk, either. Seems to be perfectly balanced for me.

Now I need to try the multiplayer and then I guess I’ll write up a full review for UpToJump.

However, I found one short bit that raised an eyebrow. You sit in a mounted gun emplacement firing at enemies. Which is all fine and fun. However, I kept dying without warning. I’d be firing and killing the guys, then I’d be dead. I still have no idea what was really going on. I suppose I wasn’t killing enough of the enemies, but there was no feedback. Eventually the sequence ended in success after I used up all my ammo. I’m wondering if maybe there’s an invisible timer on the section which kills you if you don’t use all your rockets in time, or something. That sounds ludicrous, but I’ve really no idea what was going on.

Odd little bit of weirdness in the game. But it only held me up for ten minutes or so, then everything was back to normal. Several astounding fire fights last night, again. I think I’m at the end of the game now, near enough, but didn’t have quite enough time to finish it off.

I’m enjoying it enormously. The speech is a bit rubbish and the graphics are very muted, colour-wise, but that ends up helping the game, because it makes it a lot easier to spot the glowing eyes of your enemies. No, really. In a shanty town or a desert village you need everything to be grey and brown so you can see where to shoot. And the controls, which I hated when I first played the demo, aren’t an issue any more. After playing the demo so many times, I came into the game comfortable with the controls and have only thought about them when I’ve realised I’m not thinking about them, if you see what I mean. (Oh, apart from the tacked-on bits that use the motion centre for turning wheels and setting bombs, which are rubbish, but which don’t get in the way.)

The demo didn’t lie to me – the full game is incredibly good fun. I couldn’t recommend it to everyone, because I know some people need more than shooting, probably would’t be able to get used to the controls and wouldn’t be able to stand the macho, sweary space marines, but it fits me like a custom-made glove.

Such a turnaround.

Maybe more people would be wanting to buy this if they’d made the demo longer, because it certainly seems to need some play before it clicks.

This clicked last night. Like, properly clicked. I put the sensitivity options up one notch each, which may have helped, but I don’t really know why last night it clicked when it hadn’t before. But I loved it. I was using tactics, taking headshots, spraying fire for control purposes, using grenades to flush enemies out of hiding and everything just worked.

Immensely fun and satisfying fights, like nothing I’d ever had before. The only comparison I can really think of is Halo. Which, from me, is high praise indeed. But it may – may – even have felt… better.

Seriously, I was astounded by how much I enjoyed myself.

I need to play the demo again, to see if the fun has stuck, or if this was some crazy aberration.

But, no, somehow I found an incredible game in what had previously been a standard shooter with awful controls.

No idea what happened there, no idea at all.

Anyway, I got to the beach landing, which I did first time on my first play through and died about twenty times before giving up. No idea what the problem was.