Inversion

We’re floating a few feet above the ground, but we didn’t choose to be here. A second ago, as we were drawing a bead on our opponent, about to blow him to pieces with our shotgun, he fired off a ball of blue energy, which destabilized gravity in a small radius under our feet. So we end up floating, helpless, as... » Read Full Inversion preview

Videogames have given us the power to do things we otherwise couldn’t for decades. Whether it’s time-travel, ninja skills or marksmanship, games allow us to live out our fantasies in a way no other medium can. Namco’s Inversion wants you to dream about what you could do if the laws of gravity were at your fingertips. Enemies often run along walls or ceilings, you can throw a grenade sideways, make items or enemies weight more or less using a fancy... » Read Full Inversion preview

The last time we played Inversion, we left with an unanswered question: does the game offer more than a gimmick? Well, after playing some more of the game we’re still not sure, but we do know that the game does present more imagination surrounding its gravity-based antics than we had thought previously. We’ve seen some awesomely mind-bending environments as well as an entirely new function of the Grav Link, which is the technology used to manipulate gravity. By now we’ve seen enough to know that if you enjoyed playing around with the physics in Just Cause 2... » Read Full Inversion preview

Namco Bandai claimed right before our recent hands-on with Inversion that the game’s central conceit, that you can manipulate gravity in all sorts of ways, is most certainly not a gimmick. In fact, we were told, Inversion will do no less than revolutionize the third-person shooter. After playing the game, we’re not convinced (yet) of either of these claims. It’s possible that Inversion has some innovative tricks up its sleeves, but we didn’t see them in the demo we played, or in the hands-off live demo we watched. » Read Full Inversion preview

Gravity manipulation isn’t new. Dead Space, Prey and Bayonetta have all dabbled in the anti-Newtonian art with great success. It’s surprising then, that no game has ever made the art of ceiling-crawling its central mechanic – when it’s featured it’s always been in the background and always within predetermined parameters. Inversion seeks to break this trend. » Read Full Inversion preview