Michael G Wilson, the celebrated producer of the new generation of Bond films, including the upcoming 23rd entry, stares out into the One Marylebone auditorium as a wall of blue light shines behind him, contrasting oddly against the former church's ceiling of mosaics just above. A flock of journalists applaud as the Bond logo glows on screens all around. "It's like we're launching a movie," he softly chuckles.

Almost. Sure, there's the glitzy location, the two Aston Martins parked outside, and Joss Stone waiting in the wings. But there are clues. The foremost is me, decked out in my torn cut-offs and grungy t-shirt.

As the Bond series continues to resurrect itself through Daniel Craig, and as gaming surges forward as the leading entertainment medium of the 21st century, so the reveal of a new Bond game becomes a big deal. Yet it says something key about the series' gaming history that it's given the same standing at today's press event as the remake. 007's performances in games have been more shaky than stirring, minus that certain standout N64 title, now a staggering 13 years old. Was it that long ago?

Neil Thompson, the studio art director at Bizarre Creations, looks more the part than I in his dark suit, champagne in his right hand. "We're not necessarily looking back at previous titles in the franchise," he says, "It's just a general approach. We just want to make the best [Bond] game."

Bizarre may seem like a, well, bizarre choice for Blood Stone. While the Liverpool-based studio has been around for night on 20 years, their experience is limited to one game: The Club in 2008. Bizarre is much more renowned for driving games like and Project Gotham Racing.

Once you see the game in action, you understand exactly why Bizarre is at the helm of it. While Blood Stone could easily be classified as a third-person shooter, the we see of its opening level, set in Athens, Greece, gives as much screen time to fast-paced driving sequences, first in a speedboat and then later in a car, as it does to on-foot shooting.

"The real unique challenge was to blend both driving and on foot, as well as the cinematic presentation," Thompson reveals, "What we really wanted to breaks in the for the player. The cinematics are in there to provide the narrative function of the games but they also hide load times."

The demo shows this off neatly. After receiving his orders from Judi Dench's M, Daniel Craig's Bond makes a typically spectacular entrance by parachuting from a moving plane and then landing on a cruiser, but not before taking out an unwary guard with two airborne feet to the chest. Almost like skipping a beat, we then zip ahead to Bond on deck, hiding in cover from two gunmen. It's almost a bit hard to follow at first, only because it's unexpected. There's certainly a flow, and no pause for breath.

Once inside the boat, Bond takes out a couple of guards with some tidy melee moves, an elbow here and a punch there. Each of these melee takedowns fills up a token on the Focus Aim gauge in the top left, up to a maximum of three. Much like in Splinter Cell: Conviction, Bond then uses the Focus Aim to mark and then perfectly execute headshot kills, a token for each kill. Heavily influenced the feature may be, but Focus Aim does fit the Bond persona quite neatly.

"The Focus Aim is [there] to encourage the player to play the game in a certain way," Thompson explains, "Daniel Craig being a very physical Bond, very hand-to-hand orientated... you can play the game using gunplay only, but that's not the value of the Craig way. We want you to be a hard man, we want you to get up close and personal, so if you do that you're rewarded with the Focus Aim token."

Having negotiated the cruiser, Bond sees his target speeding off into the horizon. The agent hops on to a convenient passing speedboat and sets off in pursuit. With one hand on the wheel and the other on his gun, Bond's able to drive and take out the inevitable onrushing and surrounding enemies. He dives between boats, twisting and turning as missiles fly around him, and then everything goes into slow-mo as the player is given a brief moment to shoot an explosive tank to the right and take out an unwitting group of soon-to-be-dead bad guys. Quite a few of these slow-mo moments occur in the demo, clearly designed to add to the cinematic feel of the action.

There's a definite Split/Second vibe to the driving sequences shown off rather than a Blur one, something Bizarre is quite forthcoming about. There won't be weapons in the cars like in Blur, Thompson reveals - it doesn't really suit the Craig Bond, does it? - and the more surrounding rather than direct chaos and carnage, along with cartoonism of the bright visuals, certainly aligns closer to Studio's than it does the actual developer's. Not that there aren't influences or lessons learned from Project Gotham Racing and Blur. As the action intensified in Blur, the camera zoomed in to increase the impact, and that device is used in Blood Stone's high-octane melee and driving moments.

The Athens demo is quite linear from start to finish, but Thompson assures that as the game progresses multiple routes within missions will open up, and players will be able to approach Blood Stone either as a game or more all-guns-blazing. While the game starts in Athens, in typical Bond fashion 007 will travel across the world during his mission, taking in the sights of Siberia, Istanbul, and the south of France, over the course of five to seven hours total according to Thompson. Bond also ends up in Bangkok, Thailand, where he will be involved in a madcap chase across rooftops to evoke the free running that's been such a big part of recent Bond films.

There's every hope that the story will be one to rival or at least sit respectably alongside those of the films, given that the script is penned by Bruce Feirstein, who wrote the story for Tomorrow Never Dies as well as co-writing The World Is Not Enough. Not forgetting - how could we after her grand unveiling at the event - Joss Stone as new Bond girl Nicole Hunter, an 'it' girl that Joss described to a sniggering audience as a "posh version of Paris Hilton". Stone also provided a boisterous Shirley Bassey-esque performance for the title song, "I'll Take It All".

While it's being kept behind closed doors for now, Blood Stone will feature and co-op modes, although the latter will be entirely separate from the single-player campaign, and will release for PlayStation 3, 360, and later this year. The game is looking to tick as many of the films' boxes as possible: a cinematic feel, the shooting, the driving, the drama, and even the Bond girl. The danger Blood Stone faces is being a jack of all trades but not a master of one, but Bizarre has rarely tasted failure in its long history. It could be just the studio required to turn around Bond's gaming fortunes.

By Sinan Kubba