Vanquish

It's outside of normal pointing and shooting that Vanquish gets interesting. Having peppered robotic enemies with bullets until they begin to spark and twitch, you can finish them off by sliding along the ground and kicking them in the face in slow-motion, landing back on your feet in a twisting somersault.

The jets on Sam's battle suit let him slide around on his knees like a delighted child on a slippery airport floor, except at considerably higher speed, and going into slow-motion lets him shoot at things on the way past. It's both an escape tactic and an extremely stylish killing tool. Every gun has different melee attacks, but it's the jet-slide-powered somersault-kicking that's the most fun.

Slow-motion kicks in automatically if you're low on health as a kind of helping hand, albeit an extremely distracting one when you're trying to flee into cover. You can leap in and out of cover with a faintly ludicrous horizontal vault that flings Sam sideways about five feet into the air - another excellent opportunity to deploy slow-motion and blow off some robot heads before hitting the ground again.

It can also be activated directly after Sam's signature move - lighting up a cigarette before chucking it nonchalantly over his shoulder - in order to shoot cigarette butts out of the air, if you're a dreadful show-off.

After we've cleared out every enemy from the hangar with a combination of machine-gun bullets, face-kicks and close-up pistol-whips, it's time for the boss battle. It's the huge robotic space spider from Vanquish's unveiling, emerging from the ground in a mess of smashed concrete and metal.

This time, though, after emptying most of our ammo into the red weak spot on its head, it transforms into an enormous bipedal machine with grimacing evil red face like a Rock'em Sock'em Robot.

It unleashes pretty bullet swarms, instant-death lasers, rockets, limb-smashes and various other varieties of death, knocking us straight out of the mounted gun that we were aiming at its face. We're dismayed to find that launching yourself at the robot's knees in a slow-motion flying-kick does absolutely nothing, but shooting at its orange-glowing joints proves more effective.

After hammering the robot's elbows for a while, Sam leaps in for a slow-motion QTE, dodging rockets in the air before diving into the robot's arm-mounted gun and ripping it off, leaving a sparking mess of wires hanging out of the limb. After another assault on the robot's exposed core, it's over; it crashes to the ground, its red glowing face fades, and the demo comes to an end.

When director Shinji Mikami claimed that Vanquish looks like a shooter but feels like an action game, he wasn't wrong. Watching Sam slither past man-sized bullets with a swivel of the analogue stick and rip the limbs from an enormous boss brings back pleasant memories of Bayonetta.

Comparisons feel slightly redundant, though; Vanquish looks as entirely idiosyncratic as any of Platinum's other games. Suspicions that it's a re-skinned, Japanese Gears of War fade to nothing as soon as you slide-kick a barrier into a crowd of robots before chucking a cigarette onto the debris.