Shopping action

Grab hold of the best action games available on PlayStation 3.

With the high street turning into a frenzied, shopping warzone it makes sense to prepare for the action. Whether you're shopping for the gamer in your life or keeping an eagle eye out for yourself, these action-orientated games make the perfect gift. If opened early, they could even prepare you for the bustle on the streets.

John Woo's Stranglehold is a perfect example, with the renowned film director bringing his signature blend of fast-paced choreography and freeze-framed sequences to a PlayStation 3 title as action packed as his films.

Taking on the rule of Inspector Tequila, you're dropped into a blockbuster movie of a game, complete with two-handed, stunt-laden gunplay and massive environmental destruction. If the gunplay gets too much, Stranglehold lets you take a more passive stance as it comes packaged with the 1992 epic, gun-fu movie Hard Boiled that introduced Inspector Tequila, the breakthrough movie for both John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat in the west.

With a look and feel like something straight out of the movies - check out the Heat-like street battles and Collateral-esque club scene - Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is another great gift contender. These two gun-toting bad boys, bound together by circumstance as they wait on death row, are the antithesis of Inspector Tequila. Forced to embark on a violent and chaotic journey, Kane is a flawed mercenary, while Lynch is a medicated psychopath.

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men excels in many areas; one in particular is an innovative take on online multiplayer gameplay. Based on greed, betrayal and revenge, up to eight players can choose to work as a team during a bank heist up until the point they choose to go it alone, with the money. The eliminated bank robbers return as cops, hot on their former companions' tails.

The search for loot is also one of the motives in the mix driving Nathan Drake in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, that and uncovering his connection and the details surrounding his rumoured ancestor Sir Francis Drake. A treasure hunter by trade, Drake is a much more real-world hero than many of his PlayStation 3 contemporaries, which has allowed the developers Naughty Dog to weave an elaborate but engaging pulp-adventure. From the high seas to the depths of the jungle, Drake faces a variety of challenges and puzzles, as well as hails of bullets from the people out to stop him.

If dodging and weaving through a hail of bullets is your thing then the The Orange Box will keep you locked and loaded. Really five games in one, this care package for the first-person action obsessed includes the new Half Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2 in addition to full versions of the award-winning Half Life 2 and Half Life 2: Episode.

This bumper gift will take you beyond the walls of City 17 for the first time in Valve's Half Life trilogy, test your reasoning, puzzle and spatial awareness skills in the innovative Portal and offer up frantic, online multiplayer shoot 'em up action with Team Fortress 2.

In addition to these four - well eight - games that will guarantee an explosive start to the festivities on PlayStation 3, others titles to keep in your sights include Resistance: Fall of Man, in which you lead the fight against the alien invaders in an alternate WWII, and Warhawk, where you wreak havoc in furious, online multiplayer action.