He's behind you...we lurk in the shadows with Daniel Lamb mental patient, murderer and star of the darkest game on Wii.

We're certainly not of the opinion that Wii is a family-friendly box piping Nintendo goodness directly into the living room of grannies and toddlers around the country. Given the number of times we've strangled for pennies in The Godfather and kneecapped for fun in Resi 4, we have bloody and conclusive evidence to the contrary. Nintendo has long since stopped beating third-party developers with its censor-stick.

But this... we can't help but be slightly taken aback by its appearance on a Nintendo console. Not surprised, and certainly not shocked, but perhaps a little-excited? - to see the bright while Wii menu fade into the darkness of what is indisputably the most gruesome videogame we've ever played on any platform.

More importantly, Manhunt2 is also one of the best games on the Wii. The astonishing level of brutality is an integral part of the experience, and probably the aspect that delighted fans and appalled detractors alike will focus on, but there’s a lot more to it than just digital blood.

The sum of all fears

Combining the tense stealth elements of Splinter Cell with the crowd-pleasing fatalities of Mortal Kombat, wrapped up in a story that's a little bit of Second Sight, a little bit of Hostel and a whole lot of unsettling, Manhunt 2 is a unique treat for adults gamers with strong stomachs.

The star of the show is Daniel Lamb, a former doctor who spends six years in a secure psychiatric ward following a medical experiment that went disastrously wrong and left him with no memory. A riot breaks out and Daniel is able to escape with a fellow patient, Leo Kasper, who encourages him to kill in order to get closer to the Project - organisation that experimented on both of them and has now sent hunters to murder them before they can discover the truth about their past.

The opening level, in the chaotic hospital, acts as a tutorial for Manhunt's two game play staples - staying in the shadows and creeping up behind people. Being spotted at the start results in getting splattered with bodily fluids from other inmates it's a strong incentive for staying out of sight, although not as strong as the prospect of being beaten to death, which is what will happen later.

Shadow Warrior

When you're safely in the shadows, the health bar turns blue and you can't be seen. Enemies might stumble into you if you're unlucky, and sometimes they'll get suspicious and peer into the gloom, at which point you'll have to hold the remote as still as possible to avoid being rumbled. But a patch of shadow is almost always a sanctuary.

Any nearby enemies appear as arrows on the radar, showing which way they're facing. If you see one of them on his own, searching in the wrong direction, you sneak up behind him and take him out of the equation. Daniel was locked up for a reason. Egged on by Leo, his first kill in the hospital turns his stomach, but once he's got blood on his hands - and everywhere else, as he tends to be completely covered with the stuff by the end of the level - he discovers quite a talent for human butchery.

There are weapons all over the place, from obvious candidates such as crowbars, power tools, sledgehammers and sickles, to the more creative like of pencils, slivers of glass and plastic bags. With a suitable item equipped, you lock on a stalk your prey.

Getting your hands dirty.

As soon as you're close enough, holding the A button starts to wind up an execution. An icon appears in the corner of the screen, showing a simple nunchuck or remote motion, which you must copy to initiate the killing. The icon starts out white, which is the simplest and quickest type of kill, and turns yellow then red as you tiptoe behind your unwitting victim. So the longer you follow a person, the slower and nastier he's going to die.

The motion controls out you in Daniel's shoes in a way that simply holding and releasing the button (the control method in the PS2 version) cannot. Each execution has several stages, activated by a chopping motion, or a prod, or a slam to the floor, or a sawing movement. Once it's over, you can drag the remains - at least, the bits you can clear up without a shovel and mop - into the shadows, leaving the other hunters none the wiser.

Or you can leave it all on display. Bodies left in the open will panic the remaining enemies, potentially opening new avenues. The AI is unpredictable, apart from during scripted events such as the triggering of new waves of hunters, so you're free to tackle most of the scenes in a different way every time. Smash lights to create new shadows, throw bricks and bang walls to decoy hunters, lure people towards industrial machinery...It's also possible to sneak through a lot of areas using stealth. After we finished most scenes, we got the urge to try them again using a different technique.

The journey to the Project's labs takes in some truly rancid locations such as a torture dungeon beneath a fetishists' nightclub and a porn theater in which you fight while adult movies plays on the big screen. There are also flash back levels that show Daniel and Leo were up to before being institutionalised.

While the narrative does get slightly confusing at times, the surreal nature of some scenes is in keeping with the psychological horror theme that runs through the game. Of course it's best that you experience the twists and turns of the story yourself, so we'll leave it at that.

Look - no hands

As far as the controls and the general comfort of play the game go, it’s clear there's a trade-off in the Wii version. This sort of third-person game is normally best with a second analogue stick to handle the camera, but while there's no doubt it would be a little simpler with the traditional method, we wouldn't swap the other benefits of the Wii controls for the standard joy pad.

The D-Pad is used for strafing left and right, cycling between weapons and taking cover behind scenery, so the remote has to be gripped quite high up. Pressing1 lets you get a first-person view, but because that's the difficult button to reach when you're holding the top of the remote, we hardly bothered with it. When you get guns, though - from the fifth level (of 14) onwards - the precision of aiming with the remote is most welcome. The sniper rifle, in particular, makes superb use of the controllers - if only they'd done it like this in Resi 4. Unlike in the original Manhunt, the basic tools are still very important after firearms come into play, and it's possible to do executions with any weapon.

Executions are more physical with the Wii controls, and we found we felt more immersed in the game world thanks to them. Shaking either hand makes Daniel swing punches or knock against a wall, so if you've got him hiding in the darkness and feel the need to scratch your nose, do it slowly - otherwise the hunters will come running. Not only is it one of the best looking Wii games, with richly detailed environments and great animation, it’s also a cut above everything else in terms of audio quality. Crouched in a dark corner of a ruined house, Daniel's thumping heart and the footsteps creaking the floorboards nearby make a fantastically tense soundtrack. The hunters come up with some petty disturbing lines when they're trying to flush you out, and the music is never intrusive - apart from the scenes where it's intentionally deafening.

Dogs of Gore

A lot of people are going to be offended by it, for its copious violence and occasional sex scene, and somebody, somewhere is going to get a shock when they walk in on a friend laterally bisecting a hunter's head with realistic sawing motions. Manhunt 2 is what Wii's parental controls are for. The sticker on the box says it's for over 18s only and, believe us, it's not wrong. But however morally dubious it may be, we love this game. In its own bloody way, it's an example of how the '30 seconds of fun' gaming ethos popularised by Bungie's Halo, slowed down and stretched out into stealth and horror. It's simple enough that the basic hide-stalk-pounce mechanic is learned by the end of the first level and doesn't change a great deal until the very end, yet sufficiently unpredictable to ensure progress is never a foregone conclusion

We've deliberately avoided talking about the game's more grisly excesses because these things are best discovered yourself. You'll wince, you'll jump, you may even laugh at times, but we can guarantee you'll never forget it.

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