Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Auto-combos hide a genuinely deep three-character team fighter. The gap between mashing the light button and an assist-extended combo is the entire learning curve.

The combos are the advertised difficulty and the easy part. The real one is movement — walking, backdashing and sidestepping are the skill, and no mode in the game teaches them.

Single-player is as gentle as you set it; Ultimate Team online is a different game where defending is manual and everyone else has practised it.

The single-player is genuinely welcoming; ranked is a decade of other people’s practice delivered eight frames at a time.

Individually the easiest execution in the genre and the most reading: strings are simple, but every one of them is a decision about whether the assist you also picked is available.

A simulator with a full wall of assists in front of it, so the same corner can be a formality or a genuine test depending on what you left switched on.

The inputs were made easy so the system could be hard. Roman Cancel is four mechanics behind one button, and every match above the low floors is decided by who used it correctly.

Two games in one box. The campaign is forgiving and will hand you wins on assists; the licence golds and the online time trials are a precision game with a tenth of a second between grades.

You can finish it by mashing. The difficulty lives entirely in the gap between finishing it and playing it, and the game is happy to let you ignore that gap forever.

Wider than Hades and more demanding with it: two escape routes, a resource economy on the surface, and bosses that punish the sprint-attack habit the first game rewarded.