There's a cool flow to the way Vanquish works. While it has a lot of the standard trappings that you'd expect from a cover-focused third-person shooter, you can also boost. Boosting drops you to your knees and lets you glide along the ground very quickly. You can boost right up into cover, and you can even boost up flights of stairs, if you like. While boosting, you can hold down the left trigger to aim, which also drops the game into slow-motion. You can also slip into slow-motion by kicking off of cover into an evasive flip, which gives you plenty of time to line up shots on the enemy. The sequence I played had standard enemy troops, but also big enemy mechs.
You'll do your fighting with a gun that morphs into different modes, like assault rifle, sniper rifle, shotgun, and so on. While it's one gun morphing into other forms, it works similarly to a standard weapon inventory, as you can only hold four different weapon morphs at any given time. You'll also find upgrades, like an assault rifle item that increases the amount of ammo you can carry. Grenades are also available.
In addition to boosting around like a lunatic, you'll also be able to get into vehicles. The level being shown has large, flat platforms with legs and guns, letting you stomp around while firing powerful shots at the red threat.
Vanquish has that "beautifully stylized violence" thing going on, where the acrobatics mesh with the slow-motion shooting to give you John Woo-like thrills. It's hard to say if the whole game will hold up, but my brief time with the game certainly left me interested in seeing more.