Final Fantasy XIII

Fighting is nimble, visually and mentally engaging and easy to understand and experiment with, as HP recharges automatically after each battle. The game encourages - though doesn't quite yet necessitate - keeping a careful eye on the enemy and its attack patterns, as getting hit in the middle of a combo breaks it, leaving you to wait for the time gauge to fill again before being able to retaliate. At the end of a battle you're rated on speed, style and technique on a scale from one to five stars - pleasingly satisfying when you've taken out a boss with one dizzying combo streak - and Lightning and Sazh are free to run along the broken track, with flying things screeching overhead and giant robots smacking soldiers aside on the paths beneath

The way that the game segues almost seamlessly from cut-scene to battle to exploration is extremely impressive; one second you're watching, then there's a subtle change of camera angle and you're back in the game. Run into an enemy and there's nothing more than a brief pause before the battle commands blink onto the display and you're into the fight. It's incredibly sleekly designed, beautiful to watch as well as play, and unexpectedly immersive. There's a fast-paced, action-game feel thanks to all the explosions and firepower and unnecessary air-launching of enemies.

After a lot more battles, there's a mini-boss and a dead-end: Lightning, curt and imperious, ignores Sazh's humorous complaints, and the two of them fly off into the city on a slow-moving transit ship. She's clearly a woman on a mission. Sadly the demo's not exactly heavy on details about what that mission might be - only that she's aiming to take down the Cocoon from the inside and expose the fallacy of the holy government.

From here, you take control of Team NORA, a Cocoon resistance group fighting on the tracks below. There's Snow, the bandana-clad, confident blonde with the interesting facial hair from the trailers, token sassy female Lebreau, Gadot the orange-haired tank and bumbling, skittish young Maqui, clad fetchingly in neon pink. Playing Snow is a big change from Lightning; his attacks are slow and physical and he doesn't manoeuvre out of the way with the same agility, so fights are more considered.

Announcements about dangerous intruders and resistance fighters boom out from a mysterious PA system in the sky as these four fight their way to the other end of another ruined track, towards a group of what appear to be refugees - a group of scared children and panicking adults. Enlisting some of their help, they fight towards the final battle of the demo, a close-quarters confrontation with another of the huge robotic animals we've seen in the trailers. What happens thereafter is probably a massive spoiler - suffice to say that not everyone survives, and we get a glimpse of the potential depth of FFXIII's storytelling cut-scenes beyond the impressive action bombast that we've seen so far.