Infinitesimals is a Honey I Shrunk the Kids take on Halo with a very good jetpack, and its vibrant combat sandbox reminds me of one of the most underrated Xbox 360 cult classics

I'm not quite sure what I expected from Infinitesimals, the insect-scale indie sci-fi shooter that debuted at the Summer Game Fest kickoff show, but it certainly wasn't an open-ended combat sandbox that reminded me in equal parts of Halo, Deus Ex, and Xbox 360 cult classic Binary Domain. Infinitesimals feels like it's jumped forward in time from an era when shooters were far more bold and experimental in their design and setting, and amid a sea of modern military games its approach feels downright refreshing.

You take control of a tiny alien commando, who wanders through what he perceives as a strange and hostile alien wilderness, but which actually looks like an insect eye's view of a rural patch of grass here on Earth, complete with some very unpleasant ants and a watchful crow. While you're free to do battle with wild creatures, they're not the main focus of the combat. Instead, there's a cadre of robotic enemies known as Hunter Gatherers, or HGs, which are launching in on little dropships and setting up militarized bases across the landscape.

Small soldier

You're equipped with traditional guns like pistols and SMGs, but it's the jetpack that gets me excited as I take my first steps into a hands-on demo guided by the developers. You can shoot up into the air at the press of a button, and hover around to get a better view or rain down fire on the enemies below. Your ability to float isn't limitless, as you've got a meter governing your jetpack power, but it refills on a quick cooldown so you're never grounded for long.

There's a lot of freedom to move around the big, open-ended levels - the devs tell me this isn't a full open-world game, but the scale of the environments means that it can pass for one at a glance - which is good, because the HGs can be just as mobile. The highlight of the demo was a big shootout with a couple of locust-like bots that remained constantly on the move through an intricate base full of labyrinthine walkways and shipping containers, where I found myself flying in and out of cover, dashing around barriers to pop off quick shots before the enemies could return fire.

And this is where that Binary Domain reference at the top - which I'm sure at least three of you reading this are very excited about - comes in, because you can blast apart these enemies piece by piece. Shoot a leg and they'll have their mobility greatly limited, crawling around on a single appendage to try and take a shot at you. Watching the enemies react so directly to the damage you're dealing is really satisfying, and the devs tell me that later enemies will have more and more discrete parts to be disabled, letting you, say, knock off a gun arm to destroy their ability to attack at range.

While combat seems a big part of Infinitesimals, you'll also have the option to sneak into various bases if you don't want to go guns-blazing. The devs explicitly evoked Deus Ex when describing how these segments play out, as you'll have various paths toward your objective, whether that means hacking doors or crawling through vents. They were also quite excited to show me a fully modeled power system, implying that you'd be able to selectively disable certain base defense systems as you infiltrate, but I didn't get to play around with that option during the brief demo.

I have a lot of questions about Infinitesimals: How deep will the stealth be? Will the enemies be varied enough to keep the combat interesting over the entire game? Will the sandbox offer the right amount of wrinkles to keep you from just using the same solutions over and over again? But among the many, many games I played at Summer Game Fest, it's one that I keep finding myself thinking about even now, days and days after the event. If it delivers on even a fraction of the promise I've seen in this demo, we're in for one hell of a unique shooter.

Check out all the upcoming PS5 games and upcoming Xbox Series X games you need to know about.