Dark Void

It's here that the game owes most to the team's experience on Crimson Skies. Will soars through the air like Superman, barrel-rolling left and right to avoid mountains and getting into aerial duels with the Watchers' fleet of flying saucers. These can be tackled with gunfire but it's also possible to grab onto them and try and take control of them, working around the circumference of the outer layer hand over hand, trying to rip out control panels to gain access to the cockpit while the Watcher inside fires lasers blindly to try and dislodge the player. Once the cockpit's breached, a bit of left-stick waggling ousts the pilot and allows Will to take his place.

Then you can dogfight with other UFOs. Directional changes are quick thanks to a gyroscopic rotation of the cockpit module within the saucer ring, and gameplay is clearly reminiscent of FASA's much-loved Xbox dogfighter. It's also possible to leap to enemy UFOs and take them over afresh if the gun-sights struggle to line up.

After a few moments tackling UFOs, Will finally makes it to his goal and scales the side, but any celebration is cut short by the arrival of giant, insectoid boss enemies that swarm the ship. Will dodges a few swipes from the bosses' claws and valiantly scales the nearest one's head, but Airtight isn't ready to show us how this battle plays out yet, and the demo comes to an end.

Although ostensibly Western in design, Airtight devs explain that the team had a lot of input from Capcom's Japanese veterans including Keiji Inafune, who apparently described the team's bosses - the ones we haven't seen are said to be "gigantic" - as the first Japanese-style bosses he'd seen done well in a Western production. Capcom's influence has also been felt elsewhere; in terms of the emphasis on building characters as well as scenarios, and in projecting the fact that the exo-suited Watchers are organic. When Will rushes a Watcher in a corridor, he can melee attack with a knee to the groin followed by a grope and a shotgun round through the back, splashing blue innards all over the floor.

For the moment we're not being shown much else. There's an upgrade system that ties the game's equipment together (Airtight says that stuff like Will's armour, including a rather fetching bucket helmet, will be reconstituted Watcher technology) and weapons that tie in with the vertical cover system will be introduced later on. For now we're shown typical fare: a shotgun here, a plasma rifle there.

It's a quietly composed showing, even in the difficult context of Captivate 08, where the games the publisher is pushing hardest are Street Fighter IV, Resident Evil 5 and Bionic Commando. A single-player focus (there's no multiplayer or co-op) means that Airtight will need to bind its numerous concepts together coherently, and without succumbing to Lost Planet-style lapses in fluidity, in order to stand out from the rest of its genre, but the fiction's interesting, the mechanics are sturdy and evolutionary, and the developer's openly confident. There's about a year of development left to run, and we're expecting further revelations later in the year - perhaps as soon as E3 and Games Convention. It might not have the impact factor of a name as established as Resident Evil, but it's definitely worth keeping an eye on.