This demo contains 4 total missions, two story missions and two side missions. You’ll be tossed into the first one immediately with a Hero rank, and tasked with getting a train full of Reaper prisoners out of their territory and back to safety. Your enemies aren’t going to take kindly to this, and here is where I should tell you that the AI in this game doesn’t mess around. If you don’t have your wits about you, then they will make pleasant sport out of killing you over and over again. Did I mention that the difficulty for this demo is what they call “easy?”
The controls for this game are fluid and responsive, and I never had much difficulty making Cole do exactly what I needed him to do in any situation, and even if your aim on jumps is slightly off, the game is good at anticipating what you were trying to do and helping you out in that regard. The ease at which Cole will turn and try to grab onto things was at first annoying, but the more I played it, the more it just made sense.
After you get the train to its destination, the game opens up a bit. You’re set on the map, given two waypoints, and told to go to one of them. At this point you can pretty much explore the area and do what you want. There is a time limit, but you’re not kicked from the demo when it expires, but simply pushed into the next mission. During the second two missions (one of which tasks you with restoring the purity of the water supply, and the second of which asks you do defend a vital crate of medical supplies from a Reaper assault), you’ll do so under the Infamous rank, which changes both your appearance and the effects of many of your powers (they tend to skew more towards destruction at this juncture).
After you have completed both of these tasks, the final mission of the demo will open up, and for this one you’re back to your Hero rank. This mission can be either really easy or really hard depending on how you do it, but your goal is to destroy a tar truck that the Reapers would very enthusiastically prefer you didn’t. The difficulty of this task in entirely dependent on your proficiency with a new ability you’ll have: the power to call down lightning from the sky to annihilate everything in your path.
Accomplish this, and the demo is over…and then you’ll instantly want to play it again. It’s THAT good. On May 21st you’ll all get to experience this first-hand when the demo goes live for everyone who wants it, at which point you’ll understand why you NEED to own this game when it releases on May 26th. Dear readers, the PlayStation 3 has yet another must-own exclusive, so you better bulk up those wallets.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play the demo again.
