Its burly space-soldiers call Gears of War to mind, of course, as does the cover-based shooting, but it also carries faint echoes of Lost Planet. Ordinary movement and shooting has the same heft to it, and the giant transforming robot that appears at the end of the demo suggests that it might have some impressive bosses up its sleeve, too.

But Vanquish twists those solid, tried-and-tested third-person shooting mechanics in with oddly balletic, slow-motion close-up combat. It's a weird mix, but and far it looks like a successful one.

Vanquish's E3 demo opens with a dynamic menu that zooms around the inside of a sizeable space station, spinning slowly in the void. It's not all burnished aluminium - there are trees, too, suggesting we won't always be fighting in sterile P.N.03-style environments.

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A press of the D-pad switches the grenades on Sam's belt to EMPs, which we can use to disable and take over AT-ST-style enemy walkers, vaulting acrobatically into the platform and showering the remaining robots with laser fire. After a while, a much-tougher-than-usual mech comes stomping down some stairs, helpfully blowing away a barrier that lets us at the mounted guns overlooking the level.

Bigger enemies drop new weapons, or upgrades for your existing ones; smaller ones just drop ammo. You have to hold a button to pick them up, though, which stalls the otherwise-fluid action somewhat - particularly when you run out of ammo in the middle of a boss fight and have to take a speedy tour of the arena, bending over periodically in the midst of gunfire to pick something up off the floor like a thrill-seeking environmentalist.

Ammunition seems quite strictly regulated, forcing you to change weapons or pick up new ones quite frequently, and make optimum use of mounted guns or hijacked walkers.

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.

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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.