Give me a game where I can hoof an enemy over the side of the cliff like a cut price Leonidas, and I'm happy. (It seems I'm not the only one.) So, yes, while I was sad to see no swarms of rats in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, I was very happy with the switch from stealth gameplay to scrappy melee. I might have been more worried going in if I knew just how little experience developer Asobo Studio have making combat games.

"Nobody did a combat game before Resonance," lead level designer Valérian Robert told me, and then he explained how they pulled it off.

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I've never mastered the combat of Sekiro and Sifu. They're games that demand you recognise an incoming attack and match it with millisecond perfect parries and dodges. Success sees you turn a foe's assaults against them, ducking under their swinging blade and popping up behind them to deliver a precise punch to their kidney; failure sees you knocked to the ground or cut in two. So it's not great news for me that Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy has dropped its stealth roots in favour of combat inspired by the most exacting third-person melee games.

Thankfully, protagonist Sophia fights dirty.

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