It's nice to have hands, perfect for gripping vegetables, carpet squares and heavy artillery.

But, whoopsie daisy, big silly soldier that you are, you've only gone and had yours ripped off by a killer robot. And some other parts of you may also have come away in the messy tangle. Either way, it has very much become something of a Six Million Dollar Man scenario.

This means whacking a whole host of techno guff into your head, offering up nifty abilities, much in the way that Black Ops titles are prone to do. It's the future, so fancy wares are slapped on every combat-ready paraplegic.

This means you can blow up robots from a distance, send some nanobots to annoy the hell out of your enemies and other neat stuff, depending on which skillset your threw at your character at the start. Kind of like the old barbarian/dwarf/magician option of old.

And teaming up with chums who've chosen differently is where Black Ops 3 really shines. The different skills mean each scenario offers up a variety of approaches, and finding out which is best while laughing at your mate's ludicrous efforts is great larks.

This is just as well, because the single-player campaign story is a cut-and-paste job of every CoD tale that came before it. Prepare to settle into familiar CoD routine, because there's little to excite, which is disappointing considering the massive set pieces for which the series is known. The twist is pretty good, if ripped wholesale from a popular film, but getting there is a bloody slog.

Completely aside from Black Ops 3's typically war-orientated scenes, the gift basket on the doorstep is Shadows of Evil, a curious noir tale involving a magician, boxer, policeman and dancer, played with gusto by Ron Perlman, Jeff Goldblum, Heather Graham and Neal McDonough. Each battles zombies and occasionally bursts into a be-tentacled demon of unknown origin. So different are the two games, it's like finding a carburettor in your macaroni cheese, but it's a fine diversion from the monotony of military violence.

Buy it for the multiplayer and the zombies, and say hello to the campaign if you can be bothered.