SHOCK CHARGE

Black Ops II gets a multiplayer reveal that dishes heavily on the kind of future-tech features usually seen in sci-fi shooters like Halo or Crysis. My favs? A wacky load-out contraption, possibly called Guardian, that seems to shoot sickness rays, and an x-ray gun straight out of Perfect Dark. This is probably the first time a Treyarch entry has looked as aesthetically pleasing as the nearest Infinity Ward instalment. The Santa Monica studio has typically been stung with outmoded engines, and teenage mud and blood impulses that trended gauche. On the evidence presented here, this looks clean and quick. If Treyarch can dispense with the kind of revenge spawning that took the shine off Modern Warfare 3, and clean up a netcode model that saw Black Ops constantly whiffing hit detection, we could be looking at a worthy successor to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's frankly peerless multiplayer.