We all have gaping holes in our life experience resumes. Hands up, one of mine is the gothic gaming garden of Castlevania, but my inexperience is rendered somewhat immaterial by Konami's explicit description of the venerable series' upcoming entry as a reboot. I embraced that declaration with open arms when I played through the first third of Lords of Shadow.

The game has endured a concentrated newsroom scrutiny typically reserved for space marines and shiny cars ever since Hideo Kojima's advisory involvement was revealed, but in this instance the developer is a red herring. may be co-developing the game with MercurySteam, but Lords of Shadow draws its inspiration from hack-and-slashers like and Heavenly Sword, as well as from Shadow of the Colossus in its gargantuan set pieces. Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Dracula it ain't.

It is, though, closer to the murk and melancholy associated with Bram Stoker's creation. The world of Lords of Shadow, one crippled by the dead being left on Earth in limbo to terrorize the living, feels alluringly weathered. There are bubbling, eerie swamps, ruins overgrown with moss and sullied by the decay of tumbling bricks, and the candlelight of regal halls glows faintly against grief-stricken grotesques. Haunting booms throughout, although not quite as booming as the Shakespearian narration of Sir Patrick Stewart. That aside, there's a minimalism to the game's narrative that accentuates the pervading sorrow of the Gabriel Belmont, a recently widowed knight of the Brotherhood of Light voiced with sombre brogue by Robert Carlyle.

Carlyle doesn't actually open his mouth until the hour mark, with Lords of Shadow rightly putting its firsts up before opening its gob. The game opens with a hooded Belmont riding in to town to the backdrop of a dreadful storm - is there any other way? - villagers backing away as he approaches a tall wooden gate. And wouldn't you know it, there's a huge bastard of a wolf behind it, red-eyed and all teeth. This is the backdrop to the tutorial, a surprisingly challenging tutorial too in which I died during my first go. It's rare to see a game introduce its moves and make you work to adjust to them, but it makes for a dramatic and engaging curtain raiser.

The basic tenants of the combat are quite simplistic at first, mind you. Belmont is armed with the Combat Cross, a chunky contraption that unleashes a chain whip to lash ghouls with, either using long thrusts of short-range area attacks. It's of course hard to not see Kratos' chain blades in the Combat Cross, but Lords of Shadow draws from a larger technical pool than just that. There are, for example, hints of in the air-juggling via a theatrical mid-air grab-and-drag, and there's a definite shade of the ill-fated Golden Axe: Beast Rider in the taming and riding of giant nasties - more on that later. The basics of making blocks, counterattacks, throwing daggers, and performing grabs are all neatly explained within this scene setter, and combination moves are no more complicated than a set of four repeated face buttons.

Progress, though, brings experience points, more if you've evoked a bit of Crowe and Flatley with a brutal but showy display, and these can be used to unlock further combos and boots. These are all found in the menu screen, a travel book, and you can preview your combo purchases in it through a nifty etching-like animation. Alongside the slow introduction of the more defining elements like light and dark magic (see below), the ever-growing arsenal of combos helps to keep the game evolving through its opening third. The pace is dead-on for the most part, and there's always the feeling that there'll be something fresh around the corner, be it a new move like the double guillotine (looks like it sounds) or a whole new feature. Whether that balance can be maintained or not for the whole game is another matter.

The game's early proficiency at rhythm is no doubt aided in part by a strong difficulty curve. Surprisingly difficult tutorials aside, Lords of Shadow does something which is oddly enough getting rarer and rarer in modern video games: get harder as it goes along. Towards the end of the first act, Lords of Shadow places stress on tricky skills like seamlessly moving through one combo after another, pulling off a perfectly-timed block or dodge, and in particular on using the right abilities against right enemies. Wolves and goblins, for example, really don't appreciate a flurry of daggers launched towards their guts, guts which explode spectacularly - and a little amusingly - upon contact. Another crafty imp likes to chuck a deadly, grenade-like explosive at you. The best way to deal with him? Chuck the grenade right back, style. Boom.

What looks to be the combat's crux in the later stages are the light and shadow magic abilities. These grant a temporary imbuement to Belmont's attacks. When light magic is active successful attacks drain health, and when shadow magic is active the attacks become more powerful. The catch is that you can't have both active at any one time, but you can switch between one another with a button press. The shadow magic is only unlocked late in the first act, so I didn't see it in too much, but the hope is that the powers will add another tactical layer to fights, forcing players to think about which magic to use against which enemies.

On top of this tactical layer is a meter called the focus bar, which rewards the most skilful of whippersnappers. If you make a series of successful lashes without taking any back then it fills up, and when it's full you start filling up your magic meter. And by no means is it easy to get it filled up, let alone keep it that way.

Also unlocked late in the first act is the spiked chain. You can use this to tame and master the larger beasties you encounter a la Golden Axe: Beast Rider, like a gargantuan spider that coughs venom all over you like an angry chronic smoker. Once atop one of these nasties you're practically indestructible, but you'll only ever be able to take them so far before having to get off. They also play a part in some platforming puzzles; the spider, for example can weave a bridge for you to cross a chasm with. And when you're done with it, you can draw tight on your spiked chain and choke it down. Because animal cruelty is fun (in video games).

Talking of puzzling and platforming - even I know these are the staples of - there are dashes of both in Lords of Shadow, but I was left unsure as to how well they worked. They do break up the combat, which is almost always a good thing, but I'm not sure they particularly added anything to the experience either. The first puzzle was, admittedly, an excellent one involving the spirit of Belmont's wife, a huge guillotine in the air, and a series of rotational platforms - you work out the rest. But one towards the end of the act involving finding purple tablets hidden in the most undetectable of crevices was just plain annoying, not least because of a detached voice reminding me every other second to hurry up and find the next tablet. Hopefully that's a one-off and not an indication of too many arrows to the game's bow.

The last piece of the Lords of Shadow puzzle are the set pieces in which you climb behemoth-like foes, like a huge ice titan with a penchant for stomping just when you approach him. I won't give away too much about these, but since openly compared them to Shadow of the Colossus what I will say is that they're certainly up there with the classic in terms of scale and skill. With so many modern games full of very typical, formulaic boss fights, it's great to see the developers resurrect the essence of an iconic game from the previous generation.

After plying through the first third of Lords of Shadow, it left me wanting to play more. I thought about camping inside a cardboard box and trying to hide from the Konami security man looking to chuck me out of the office. That's all coming from someone with no prior experience of the series. Whether Castlevania's new direction will leaves its fans joyful or bitter is something for them to tell me when it arrives on October 7, but on the basis of my six hours with the game, the rest of us have a title full of potential to anticipate.

By Sinan Kubba