Inversion

For a third-person cover shooter, Inversion has a lot of ideas, so it's strange that it doesn't initially make very much of an impact. See Saber Interactive's latest in action, and it seems to wash over you. Then you go home and look at your notes and realise a lot of its gimmicks actually sound pretty good.

The problem might be that it's hard to get a sense of how its various pieces click together over the space of a fairly swift demo. Or it could be due to the fact that the developer taking us through the most recent build looked like he'd had a long day shoeing horses or repairing elevator machinery and really needed a rest. It was late in the afternoon, maybe he had an interesting restaurant booked for later on? He'd probably talked his way through this presentation a thousand times already: perhaps he was simply more excited about some of Saber's other forthcoming projects.

Whatever the reason, Inversion still has lots of ideas, and the big one is this: You know gravity? Not any more you don't.

Inversion's set in a world in which gravity can't be trusted anymore. It's broken, unreliable and bent out of shape. What this means for you, super cop Davis Russel and your generic co-op partner, is that it's become both an annoying hazard and something you can use to your advantage as you battle a bunch of nasty alien invaders.

Russel's already a man on a mission - partly because those invading aliens have offed his wife and partly because his name's clearly stuck on back to front - and the main tool he'll be using to inflict his revenge is the Gravlink. The Gravlink is a device that allows him to mess around with gravity to his heart's content, and it comes with two settings, much like one of your cheaper hairdryers.

Unlike one of your cheaper hairdryers, however, those settings are for Low-G and High-G use and they both seem fairly entertaining. Low-G's good for yanking enemies out of cover, using debris to make temporary shields, flinging pieces of the environment about and generally turning everything a little bit, you know, floaty. High-G, meanwhile, allows you to bring your foes to their knees for a few seconds, or send huge pieces of the scenery tumbling to the ground – either to squish people you don't like or to open up new parts of the levels.