[The Game]
With all of the breakout sessions completed, we were finally able to dig into the game -- or rather the one section that we hadn't actually been able to see highlighted in the presentations: Clank's shooting level. A throwback to the old-school on-rails space shooters of old (and in a very obvious nod to the work that High Impact Studios did with the amazing PSP Ratchet game), clank flew around the screen dodging incoming shots while peppering the enemies with his own.

The level was clearly tweaked for the testers at Insomniac (and of course will be adjusted for normal humans before release), as one journalist after another tried in vain to get through the frankly diabolically tough run that saw us nearing a black hole, tearing through an icy labyrinth of a planet's surface and down into the machined trenches of an artificial moon or satellite before Clank destroyed the moon and raced out with the camera turning back to watch the massive explosion. Luckily, with the help of some of the Insomniac crew, we were able to fast-forward through the chaos to the boss fight that happened when Clank zoomed into the black hole for a massive clash against a boss in the resulting wormhole.

After besting the shooting segments, we got just a little bit of time to check out some of the planets that were part of the tour. Gameplay-wise, well, it's a Ratchet game, which means tight controls, a ton of weapons and an insidiously addictive upgrades system. We're dying to actually sit down and play through the first few levels of the game to get a proper sense of the storyline and to really dig into some of the environments, but given that the game will hit -- officially, now -- on October 23rd, we're guessing we don't have much longer before a proper preview build slides into the office. As soon as it does, we'll be sure to give you the full scoop on the storyline and some of the characters that we've only seen teases of so far. Check back soon!