Previews// Vanquish

As fantastic as these moves are to pull off, they come at a price. A gauge at the bottom of the screen serves as a charge mechanism for your ARS abilities – even punching a dude takes some weight off the bar, so you need to make sure you've got enough charge if you're winding up for an awesome finishing strike.

If you get shot to buggery, an automatic AR mode kicks in and offers you a chance to regain your health while finding cover. And you'll need as much cover and help as you can get. If this game had a little animal powering its engine, it would be Sonic the Hedgehog – shit goes down incredibly quickly.

In the madness, the initial strategy you're encouraged to try is to simply go with the flow and slide everywhere to destroy everything in the shortest time possible. While you're certainly able to do that, the enemies in Vanquish are wise to your abilities.

Red robot 'Gorgie' grunts come in packs of ten at a time to pummel you with bullets, making speedy takedowns a process that requires a bit of sensibility. When I reached a circular area in the clinically-white space station environment, I was greeted with waves and waves of bullets, rockets and flying debris.

Things came to a head when, right in the middle of my battle with twenty red Iron Men (some of them crawling towards me at high speed after I very kindly took out their legs) a huge boss robot called 'Argus' appeared, turned into a MegaZord and fired about a million rockets at me. Help.

The amount of chaos on screen was more intense than I've seen in any other game of its kind, and there wasn't the tiniest hint of slowdown or framerate trouble. We'll see if later levels manage to pull off crazier level design ambitions in the same way, but so far it's a promising sign.

It wasn't just gunfire and the number of missiles that impressed either – the depth perception of the enemy is quite something. A robot can be firing a rocket at you from the horizon and you wouldn't even notice if you were primarily focused on your immediate surroundings. Much like Bayonetta before it, Vanquish seems to be a game that won't let up and will command every bit of your attention.

There's more than action-based mayhem too, with another mission seeing Sam and the DARPA squad escort a tank through a dark underground tunnel. Serving as a change of pace, this forces you to slow down a bit and defend the main unit from getting attacked by walking jellyfish. Yeah, you read that correctly. Space jellyfish. These, as well as hefty Transformer-esque robot enemy mini-bosses, become formidable obstacles to overcome in order to complete your mission.

No doubt many of these gameplay traits will be detailed in the upcoming Vanquish demo for you to experience yourself. It's about to hit Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. But for the here and now, know that this game is likely to do for third-person shooters what Bayonetta did for third-person brawlers.