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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.

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...

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.

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...

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...

You there! You look manly and macho. Do you like your meat red, your Russkies dead, and your flag red, white, and blue? Then you need to watch the newest video of Trenched, the WWI-era mech shooter from developer Double Fine, who also created Stacked, Costume Quest, and Brutal Legend. Unless you hate your country, you’ll love it – things explode. If you have seen it, it surely got your red-blooded, All-American man juices flowing and you probably think you know what the game is all about. And you’re probably wrong. Sorry, soldier. But don’t cry like a little sissy girl. Square those shoulders, grab your boots, and prepare to salute, because we’re here to do our patriotic duty and deliver you the intel you need to fight any dirty propaganda you might have heard...

Developer Double Fine consistently challenges our expectations of what can be done within a genre. Trenched isn’t any different. Trenched tells the story of two soldiers who lost their legs in World War I, but still wanted to fight. So, one becomes corrupt and creates a race of TV monsters and the other creates mobile trenches; essentially giant, customizable walking tanks. Gird up, soldier! It’s time to defend your country, your way of life, and your very manhood. And bring three friends, because this thing is at its best in four-player co-op.

If you don’t know your superheroes, you might have glanced at Iron Man and had him down as a dull robot-faced crime fighter. He’s actually one of Marvel’s coolest characters - a billionaire playboy genius with a ’70s ‘stache, an eye for the ladies and a heart of actual steel. And that’s before Tony Stark puts on his self-designed flying armour and becomes the Invincible Iron Man. Beat that Peter Parker