Aiming and movement are both responsive — though the default settings felt loose and ended up needing adjusting — and once we got the hang of it we had little trouble pulling off those satisfying headshots. Racking up kills fills up your concentration meter, which can then be activated by tapping the right bumper. Doing this slows time and turns your enemies red — it’s loads of fun to do, and it becomes a necessary companion when the odds are stacked against you.

Although it works fairly well, there will be times when you’ll toggle between spell sets without knowing it because once you defeat an enemy you’re left with two choices: save it (left bumper) or sacrifice it (right bumper). With the right bumper pulling double duty you can accidentally switch while sacrificing a fallen adversary, and as a result you may, for example, heal yourself instead of firing a projectile. This is mostly an inconvenience except in the cases when your offering is nearly exhausted — then you can actually break a spell and lose use of it for the duration of the fight.

The final showdown with Washington is rather similar to your earlier skirmish as the whole thing is basically rock-paper-scissors re-imagined as wolf-eagle-bear. Here you’ll need to use one of your animal abilities at a time to penetrate the King’s supernatural defenses. The game is incredibly forgiving — so much so that I don’t think you can actually be defeated, only delayed. This fight gives way to a brief explanation that ties the DLC in with the main storyline, but it’s a pretty loose connection at best.

Our tour of the new maps begins in jolly old England with an open-air amphitheater set up to house an intimate gathering (seriously, how many seats are there in this place? 250?) for a concert. Although the seating area seems like the intended gathering point, players traverse it at their own risk as there are elevated positions on either side (one on stage, the other in an adjacent room) to mow them down. This leads to most of the fighting happening on the periphery.