Boom boom pow!

It took forever (well, nearly) for Treasure's seminal N64 game Sin and Punishment to see a Western release, but thankfully the sequel isn't due to take anywhere near as long to find its way to your Wii disc tray, with a European release date of 7th May. When Nintendo offered us the chance to play it with the Wii Zapper on a huge projection screen with booming, bassy surround sound it would have been rude to say no.

Manouevring with the control stick and firing with the pointer, it feels very faithful to the original only far more intuitive: the implementation of the pointer allows pinpoint accuracy and makes picking off distant enemies truly satisfying. Not that your opponents keep your distance; they're more than happy to get up close, but thankfully you can take them out with your sword if they get a bit hairy. There's no button needed to swap weapons - holding B fires, tapping B slices. It's that simple, and although it takes a while to get used to it certainly saves your fingers a lot of strain.

Sin and Punishment 2 is action in its purest form, with swarms of enemies onscreen at any time and a kill counter running into the hundreds every level. The stages themselves encompass everything from derelict city centres crawling with tanks and turrets to underwater ruins and more, with some enormous bosses such as a forty-foot tall robot walker.

Simply put, it's a return to classic arcade spectacle: there's genuinely nothing like this on Wii and probably not on any other current consoles either. A good old-fashioned shoot 'em up, it's a very faithful successor to the original game and certainly has the potential to occupy hardcore blaster fans' itchy trigger fingers for quite a while. Think actions speak louder than words? Check out this incredible trailer, then.