Inversion hands-on: gravitas and gravity do battle

I'd like to believe Saber Interactive's poking fun at the CliffyB-patented dudebro action game with Inversion, a shooter which purports to turn shootering as we know it upside down, but sadly, it doesn't seem to be happening. An hour or so in, bull-necked lead Davis Russell and his Latino friend Leo Delgado are rumbled trying to sneak out of a slave mine. "MOVE YOU DEAD," bawls one of the Lutadores, the game's utterly baffling subhuman baddies, aiming a gun with a carving knife strapped to it at Russell's head. "Don't move," our hero cautions Delgado in an undertone. "I think he'll shoot us if we move." Smart cookie, Davis. With crisis-handling skills like those, it's no wonder you're a cop.

And with arms like those - arms that aren't so much arms as tamed, shaven elephant seals, grafted to your shoulders - it's no wonder you're trotting through a devastated yet suspiciously well-organised New-York-ish city, trading lead with ugly baldies who tunnel out of the ground. As far as inspirations go, Inversion wears its heart (that's to say, Gears of War's heart) on its bulging sleeve. Saber's loony gravity-altering mechanic bequeaths some distinctive set-pieces, but it can't quite erase Epic's heavy thumbprint, and more importantly, it dredges up little of the soul which makes Gears of War's macho excesses forgivable. With release day in under a month, I'm tickled but not tremendously hopeful.

Russell's mastery of gravity comes care of a handy McGuffin-powered baldric, looted from the Lutadores, who nicked it from Half-Life 2. There are two flavours of gravity power: blue makes people and objects float - a handy trick, when you're fighting from cover - while red squashes them to the ground. Afflicted characters will be immobilised and unable to return fire for a second or two, which makes the gravity attack a potent, not to say blisteringly annoying weapon in multiplayer. You'll need a vial or two of bright blue gravity juice to power the gizmo, and vials can also be spent defensively to kick yourself out of grav-lock.

Despite these flashy manoeuvres, and despite many a spectacular scripted gravitational hiccup in the campaign - at one point, Russell and Delgado enter a blasted apartment by flipping Dead-Space-style between nuggets of spinning debris - Inversion's core trick feels a little gimmicky. On the field of battle, the functionality's essentially a fancy stun grenade. Outside combat, it feeds into rudimentary puzzles like flattening rickety wooden barricades or hoisting objects to make ramps. And then there are boss battles like a face-off with a mysterious airborne robot, whose silly face we immediately fill with Force-thrown rocks and oil drums.

Multiplayer is where the game's relaxation of the laws of physics has most potential, not so much for what it allows you to do directly as for the modes and dementedly omni-directional maps it enables. The sprawling, fizzling Geostation initially seems a classic sniper's alley, built around a pair of opposed vantage points with nearby heavy weapon drops, but there's a twist - the floor curves 180 degrees, meaning you're as likely to get shot from above as dead ahead. Hourglass Mode, meanwhile, sees one side assaulting the other side's base: capture it and you'll flip the whole world upside down, unlocking what is effectively a second map in the process.