You start to think, sat atop one of Bionic Commando’s highest perches and with an entire ruined city spread out below you, that Grin might just have cracked it.

The game really can look rather special, as the early levels’ irradiated roads and buildings – partially destroyed by those ever-present pesky terrorists – create a snaggle-toothed skyline for the sun to filter through in a blaze of lighting effects and strong depth of field.

Jump off your eyrie, however, and you might find yourself in trouble. Getting about, for those used to simply tilting a stick in a given direction, is complicated. Hero Nathan Spencer (voiced by Mike Patton in restrained mood, although his squelchy yelp when hurt gives the actor’s identity away) can run, of course, but also shoot his bionic arm at any surface that’s in range (and not irradiated), and from there reel himself in, swing, leap or drop.

It’s all explained in an infuriating tutorial that teaches the art of patience and route planning as much as it does the control system. And those controls do actually work – but not until they’ve clicked in the player’s mind. Most arm-movement commands are on the same button, so you grapple with a trigger, push A to jump, release then push and hold to reel in the cable, then release and push again to leap on top of whatever you’ve just scaled.

It’s certainly a better system than having those commands on separate buttons, but can take a while to sink in. The arm has a dedicated reticule that skips about from object to object, its colour telling you whether it can be grabbed, retrieved, attacked or swung from.

And once you’re swinging, it’s not just a case of Spider-Man and his old ability to attach webs to the sky. Attempts to use the camera to pick out objects to grapple almost always result in hitting the ground as you get horribly disorientated. Much better to trust our hero, whose uncanny ability to pick out grapple points outside your cone of vision means his aim is almost always true, so long as there’s something there in the first place.

Sequences in which our hero crosses deadly fissures by swinging from convenient floating mines would be all the more terrifying if it weren’t for this, although they are likely to be attempted more than once if you don’t have a flowing rhythm and a strong sense of where you’re going and how to get there – and the code we’ve played was at its best when this was achieved.