All this and ducking malarkey would be a waste of time if the hordes of enemies you are faced with weren't up to much. Fortunately the AI in kill.switch is, for the most part, excellent. The AI teams well, using the terrain to press and advance in covering manoeuvres. They will also liberally use grenades and will even take over from a felled comrade at one of the many fixed gun emplacements. Although you get to use these yourself there are only a couple of instances where the enemy will be obliging enough to charge straight at them. Running and gunning is sometimes the only option and always provides a rush as you sprint for safety to the soundtrack of hundreds of bullets smacking off of concrete and zinging off of metal. Try this all the time and you will have to make your way back from the last save point, a trek which is often too long for my liking. So most of the time you will find yourself huddled up against a wall or a barrel, waiting for the enemy to reload or foolishly expose their upper body to take a peek. This is when you lean round the corner and let off a volley blindly or rifle a few select shots into their helmet. Each time you play a certain section things will work out differently, although the enemies will always initially appear in the same spot. Death animations are location specific, so revel in the spectacle of enemies dancing and twirling around like a tooled up Baryshnikov. Pop a cap in their foot and the poor bugger will comically hop around until you end his pain or he makes it to the safety of cover. One particular favourite sight is the fallen enemy dragging their useless legs behind them for a few feet before they expire. Ghoulish and fun. Sometimes you will shoot a bad guy and move on, only for the bugger to haul himself back into a firing position and ventilate Bishop's spine. The AI really will try to flush you out with grenades and flanking manoeuvres, even mob you if their numbers are sufficient, and only rarely makes a slip up. On occasions I was stuck in the middle of a room full of soldiers only to find myself surviving for a freakishly long period of time. It seems that the AI just doesn't know what to do in such a situation. But for the vast majority of the game the bad guys will challenge the player, the AI being more than capable enough to solidify the gameplay in kill.switch. It will lure you in sometimes, and the baddies do get tougher as the game goes on, although this is mostly toughness of the thicker-skin variety rather than more complicated tactics.

There are some niggles however. If you are pressed tight up against a wall the enemy can get the jump on you by coming up past your field of fire. You can't pivot enough to get a bead on them, so you have to come out of cover mode and hope you can swivel around in time. You can also bash people's brains in with the melee move, but unless your opponent is standing right in front of you be prepared to take a beating, as Bishop can only scrap with foes directly in front of him.

You have the standard health bar, but if you take a bunch of damage and can find some cover to rest behind it will regenerate up to a point. At fist I thought this would spoil the game, but it works really well. It makes you that bit more adventurous, and provides for some tense moments as you try to guide your wounded soldier to a safe spot while dodging enemy fire. You can dive and roll into cover, a move often used when you see a grenade sailing through the air in your direction. Clearing rooms with grenades works really well, although the bad guys won't stand around and let themselves get eviscerated as they have the same dive move in their repertoire. Flashbangs make your ears ring and burn the last thing you saw into the screen, and will cause the enemies to wail and shuffle about for enough seconds to down a few of them with shotgun blasts or the like.

The framerate slows down in some levels, with aiming becoming more of a challenge than it has a right to be during a couple of the more intense encounters. Things never get close to being unplayable, and although it is annoying when things slow down it only forces you to be more careful. Still, I'd like to play this on an Xbox. The graphics are generally very good, with lots of variety between the levels. The models in particular deserve mention, with some nice texturing complemented by fluid animation. Firefights are always full of movement, and muzzle flashes illuminate the scenery in a most satisfying manner. One particular level is situated on an oil-rig during a storm. After getting sniped many times from an invisible man on a tower I was finally able to pick him off when he was backlit by a burst of lightening. Very cool. Nice shadows accompany all the character models, although on some of the more expansive levels this feature is disabled to preserve the frame rates. Occasionally bits of apparently transparent scenery will block shots, but for the most part the collision detection couldn't be any better. You can hit elbows and feet poking out from cover, and a bullet to the forehead will take care of that baddy once and for all.

Kill.switch is nothing revolutionary but what it has set out to do it does well. The is relentless, looks and sounds great and plays really well. I didn't get bored the whole time I was enjoying it, and I tend to get distracted or bored rather easily. The load and save games take mere seconds and although the levels aren't the biggest they provide a strong initial challenge. Playing over again in hard mode was tricky enough to make my hair worried, although it is a shame that there are no secrets to entice you into giving it another go. I wish I had a nice widescreen telly to enjoy the available mode, but at least my 5.1 sound was on hand to give that extra welly to the gunfights. I liked kill.switch a lot. It has a limited scope but this isn't a problem when the developers do such a good job on every element within that scope. It won't take you long to finish (what games do these days?), but it's such a damn enjoyable blast that I'd be very surprised if it didn't get played over and over again.

81%

By Sam Gibson