Before I got my turn playing the game, the TopWare Interactive rep manning the booth explained to me that X-Blades had added story and RPG elements to the original game, but the hands on time I spent was all about the action. After waiting what seemed like an eternity the guy before me finished playing, cleaned up his area, and left me to my own devices.

My device of choice was the Xbox 360 controller, hooked up to the PC version of the game. I started off in a rather nondescript rocky corridor without any sort of explanation, so I went with instinct and began killing everything in sight.

The game essentially plays like a poor man’s Devil May Cry. You’ve got your blades for close combat, your gun for taking out those annoying bastards who materialise in the air 10 feet above you, and a few spells at your disposal to keep things interesting.

I was a bit disappointed, really. Though Ayumi is animated quite well the action fell a bit flat, with no real sense of impact. Rather than feeling like I was taking down hordes of enemies, I felt as if I was swinging my weapons and there just happened to be relatively insubstantial monsters nearby. What’s worse, the game follows the old formula of running into a room, room seals, kill monsters, room unseals. Seems a bit primitive in this day and age. Block the path with debris that the last dying monster smashes free, or go the Gauntlet route and make the enemies the wall…just don’t fall back on the old mystical forces path-blocking mechanic.

Ayumi still looks lovely, as do the environments she is running through and the foes she disperses (to a lesser degree), but I just didn’t quite get the feeling she was actually there, carving her way through the armies of darkness. The style is definitely there, but the substance is a bit lacking. Damn anime women, always messing with my emotions.

Most interesting was the new Berserk features that Insomniac will be integrating into multiplayer. If you’ve played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the new system is similar to that game’s “Perks” feature.

Insomniac is ensuring that your progression through Resistance 2, whether it be in competitive multiplayer or coop, will provide constant reward. You’ll be racking up experience points for just about everything you do in game. Fire a bullet, get some XP. Kill an opponent get some XP. Get enough in a round of multiplayer and you’ll be able to initiate one of your Berserks.

These special attributes include things like invisibility, the ability to see through walls or a defensive aura that looks somewhat like the bubble shield from Halo 3 on a team-based scale. Schneider showed all these Berserks in action, giving us over the top examples of each being used.

In one, we watched a pre-taped attack on a group of human soldiers, each of whom had a Chimeran enemy sneak up behind them, then eliminate them while cloaked in a Predator-like invisibility shield. In another, we saw team member take advantage of the X-ray vision, firing sticky bomb rounds via the Magnum’s secondary fire and blowing up his opponent without ever having actually seen him in person. Pretty snazzy.

The XP feed will also bring with in non-playable perks, as Insomniac is planning to bring over 160 medals, Trophies and ribbons to players of Resistance 2, maximizing bragging rights.

Finally, Schneider showed us R2’s newest weapon reveal, the Splicer. Similar in style to a gun we saw in Dead Space, it uses a guided buzzsaw to rip enemies apart. Its primary firing mode delivers ricocheting saw blades, but its alt-fire gives one maximum goring potential, as the hovering blade can be moved around a body for extreme gibbage.

We’re definitely looking forward to trying all this stuff out for ourselves, hopefully when that private Resistance 2 beta goes public and an entry key magically shows up in our inbox. It’s to the left of every page on Kotaku, my good Insomniac friends, in case you lost the e-mail.

The game starts out with the protagonist Charles Deckard at a museum, about to insert a mystical key into a mystical box…well, the magical box. The one you don’t want to open? Yeah, he opens it, and in return it brands his hand with a mystic rune and unleashes doom upon the human race as we know it. It’s a damn good thing that box came with that branding featuring, allowing the bearer to absorb mystical energy in order to heal himself, hurt mythical beasts, and solve puzzles, because otherwise we’d be completely screwed. Let’s hear it for escape clauses!

Anyway, as soon as you are branded the museum begins to shake and break, fires breaking out, the earth heaving, tossing passersby to their deaths, fire and brimstone, dogs and cats, living together, etc. Your character gains some basic knowledge about his powers as he escapes while everything goes to hell around him. It’s a common FPS mechanic…essentially placing you in the middle of a disaster movie where you can’t get hurt, but it’s done really well.

Things get even more exciting when you exit the museum, as we see some magnificent cinematics that effectively amount to the entirety of New York City doing the wave, streets, cars, people, and all as a wave of otherworldly energy floods the surroundings. Streets crack, people run screaming, and then the griffons show up and start tossing cars about.

You navigate a maze of cars, new paths opening as the griffons toss vehicles about as if they were really big birds tossing about cars, until you get to a place where you are completely stuck. Then some seriously awesome shit goes down.

Suddenly cars and wreckage get sucking into this swirling vortex, slowly coalescing into a massive giant built from spare parts, easily the size of the skyscraper he then walks through, opening up your new path.

From there things move into more familiar puzzle-solving FPS ground, opening valves to put out fires as you make your way towards the subway system, hoping to find a way to escape the city. My last moments with the game were spent shooting at fire-spitting lava dogs in the ruined subway tunnels of New York. Th guy waiting in line for the game behind me had moved from intently staring to uncomfortably rubbing against me, so I fled.

So the first 15 minutes of the game hooked me. I am dying to see what else happens over the course of the game now. Gameplay was fast and smooth, though I didn’t get a chance to play enough to determine if I like the combat yet or not. So far it’s just been standard pistol fare, so I’ve know idea what happens when the big guns come out.

Still, I can assure you that Legendary did manage to live up to the name several times during my brief encounter. I’m looking forward to playing more when I am not surrounded by touchy Germans.

We’ve already written about the driving game inspired character control — the R2 button moves her forward, with the left analogue steering her head and shoulders — so let’s focus on how everything else is done.

When the demo kicks off, you get to choose between five different characters, the Seraphim, Shadow Warrior, High Elf, Dryad, and Temple Guardian. While three of them are relatively attractive women, I instead went with the Temple Guardian, since he looked a bit like an undead robot Anubis, Egyptian god of the living impaired.

Upon selecting my avatar, I was dropped in the middle of a small village, surrounded by folks with various icons over their heads. Vendors, crafters, and…AHA! Someone with a question mark over their head. I had managed to find a quest giver. This was going to be easy!

Turns out the quest giver wanted me to spriegel the schmitzel wertzen or something to that effect, which seemed to indicate to me that he wanted me to wander off into the woods and kill many, many wolves. Wolves are the rats of the isometric action RPG. My undead dogman came with a scepter for melee attacks, as device that seemed to shoot lasers when enemies were out of melee range, and a right mouse button attack that called forth a swirling mass of ether that would then shoot forth a glowing tendril, damaging the enemy. From the moment I discovered it, every enemy got the swirly gate treatment. You can’t go back to regular melee attacks after delivering an ethereal energy enema to a mutated wolf.

After the wolves came a gaggle of human bandits, who went down relatively easily. Having no real direction, I wandered randomly throughout the countryside after that, killing more wolves, more bandits, and getting frustrated that I couldn’t kill the rabbits or cows. You cannot put a cow into an action RPG and then not let me kill it. If Sacred 2 bombs completely, mark my words – it was because of the cow issue.

Towards the end of my 10 minutes of pretending to read German proficiently I ran into another quest giver, who wound up following me around everywhere I went. I guess he wanted me to do something, and apparently that something didn’t involve killing wolves, bandits, or standing in a field bitching about cows. At least I found it fulfiling.

Abortive cow tipping attempts aside, the game is very pretty to look at no matter how close you zoom into your character, combat is exactly what you’ve come to expect from this particular RPG sub-genre, and was quite capable. The voice acting needed some work, but it’s nothing that switching to a language I can actually comprehend wouldn’t fix.

Once my 10 minutes was up the PC restarted the demo automatically, and a nice woman directed me towards the exit, leaving me with these words of wisdom: “If you seek buy game, click on tombstones. So funny!”

Well at least she tried.

According to a new release from the Games Convention hosts, the vast majority of those surveyed at the show think the show should stay in Leipzig. A competing show, known as Games Con, is planned to hit Cologne (Köln) around the same time, making for a very confusing split.

Regardless of who’s doing what and where, we’ll be there… somewhere next Summer covering the sausage beat (and maybe playing a game or two).

Final report: Games Industry Staying in Leipzig for 2009 [Leipziger Messe]

Chris Corey, executive producer for Red Alert 3, says that McCarthy is a “badarse” Tanya, that’s she’s more than capable to tackle the role of the special ops commando. After co-piloting a two-player coop demo of the PC version of the real-time strategy game, Corey tried to allay fan fears that the former Playboy Playmate wasn’t ready to fill the tank top. Corey sounded pretty enthused to have her on board.

Hey, if they’re happy, I’m happy.

We got one of those non-answers that was very telling. “We haven’t announced anything about what will be playable at Blizzcon”, a Blizzard rep told us. Inconclusive, yes, but delivered with one of those smiles that one frustratingly can’t print.

It sure sounds like Blizzard is working to bring a playable copy of Diablo III to BlizzCon this year, but we realise that things can change at the last minute. However, if you’re going to the ‘Con in Anaheim this year, don’t be surprised if you’re knee deep in hellspawn and rainbows all weekend.