Style and speed sets Sega’s Vanquish apart from its shooter brethren. A third-person shooter set in a futuristic/sci-fi/space colony setting, you suit up as hi-tech scientist-soldier Sam Gideon in a purely single-player experience from Shinji Mikami, the guy behind Resident Evil 4 and God Hand. Whoa, no multiplayer? In a shooter? That’s because the game’s high-speed boost and slow-motion abilities would be hell to incorporate into a multiplayer experience. Understandable given how crazy the action in Vanquish can get.

The boost ability is the game’s primary mechanic. The boost opens up other options as well. If Sam opens fire mid-boost the game slows down into a bullet-time type situation allowing for more precise aim and an overall “Holy smokes, this is so cool” feeling. Sam can do the knee-skating boost any time, so long as he doesn’t overheat his suit. Once that happens he needs to take cover and allow the suit to cool down for a few seconds.

Taking cover plays a lot like Gears of War – find a chest-high wall and hide behind it with a press of button. Actually, it’s fair to say Vanquish as a whole plays a lot like Gears of War only with everything sped up , a lot, and with a ridiculous boost power. There are plenty of fancy QTE moves as well a la Resident Evil 4. The boss at the end of the demo provided a lot of these, where Sam grabbed missiles it fired, redirected them at the boss and leapt off with ninja-like finesse. Pretty thrilling! Although I couldn’t actually kill the boss since I ran out of ammo. Apparently a lot of other media guys I talked to had this problem. Hopefully that won’t be a problem in the full version. Or it’s game over, I guess?

Playing it on the floor, I was promised by helpers from Sega of America that there would be no noticeable differences between the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game, unlike Bayonetta which had some display issues in the PS3. We’ll see when Vanquish touches down later this fall!