Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

The 'something truly mammoth' might look like a Berserker: an oddly lovable giant with a squat body and wrecking balls for arms and legs. Monkey's main method of attack - a staff that brings to mind all the right memories of Beyond Good & Evil - can be used to stun the Berserker if you're quick enough, allowing you the opportunity to crawl up on his back and pull off one of the game's truly lovely Takedowns - a finisher which, in this case, sees you literally pulling the robot to pieces, yanking off plate metal and whirring gears before short-circuiting his spine.

Finishers like that are just one element to take into account in combat scenarios, but there are plenty of others: cover is useful but entirely destructible by the looks of it, and some enemies will broadcast for reinforcements if left unmolested long enough, turning each battle into a stacked series of little timing challenges.

Trip, while never able to actually enter the fray - she's probably too busy dreaming about socialised healthcare and reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins poetry - can still be issued simple orders asking her to fire EMPs or cause distractions, and even in the middle of a brawl, there's always your traversal options to take into account, as each area is generally built with a couple of usable paths in mind.

From the half-hour Antoniades is currently able to reveal, it looks like a pretty smart take on action-adventure games, and it's worth noting that it's extremely pretty, too. Characters are large and detailed, with the robots filled out by gears, pistons and tiny little lights, while Monkey is every bit the grizzled loner, even if he appears to be wearing a pair of Iggy Pop's trousers.

Trip looks like she hasn't just been surviving the end of the world, but has been able to track down branches of LA Fitness and Jimmy Chop Chop. The landscape is beautiful, too, as New York slips into the embrace of a fairytale woodland with huge, twisted oaks rising out of brownstone courtyards and Technicolor sunsets shooting staves of light through the emaciated skeletons of old skyscrapers.

It's a world that's been pieced together by a fair amount of star power. Besides the staff at Ninja Theory's Cambridge offices, novelist and film producer Alex Garland has been brought in to serve as writer - a job he apparently ran with, having weekly daylong meetings with the design team, by the sounds of it.

Nitin Sawhney handles the music, and Andy Serkis returns from his stint on Heavenly Sword to co-direct the performance-captured cut-scenes, as well as play the role of Monkey, slotting in alongside Lindsey Shaw, from the TV show "10 Things I Hate About You" - number nine being: "You stuck me in this bomb-riddled headband and now it's going to kill me," - as Trip.

While it's easy to be blinded by famous names, the most interesting element of the whole project remains Ninja Theory itself, a team which, up until now, has made striking, stylish, fascinating games, but has yet to create one that seems to be entirely complete.

Although it's still got a long way to go before release, the team's latest is starting to look like it could change all that: in its blend of action and adventuring it seems far more rounded that either Heavenly Sword or Kung Fu Chaos, while its love-hate story and handsomely derelict world combine to create something that's slightly pricklier and more interesting than most studios tend to offer up.