Like the MDK series, even the basic game engine and enemy design feels witty. Our hero plods along in front of us with a sort of bigfoot cartoon gait. The land's pesky predators burrow alongside you and pop up to hurl rockets your way, grunting and delivering double takes that may remind you of the Tasmanian Devil. The Vimps graze the countryside like wool-covered ostriches that got too close to the nuclear reactor. They scatter when they sense your presence and explode into hunks of raw meat with a single round from your own rocket blaster, which, by the way, can knock you on your own ass if you are too close to the target.

And this covers just the first in a series of missions you perform as multiple characters throughout the single-player game mode. Not only do you slip into different characters during the single player storyline, much like MDK, but you also move across the planet's races and drop into various sub-plots within the developing tensions among the locals. In the beta build we played, the Smarties mini-missions lead into the Sea Reaper part of the story in which you play Princess Delphi who must advance her skills in her own series of mini-missions in order to take on her evil Queen Mother.

Each of the characters you play has discrete powers and some different control conventions, but generally it is familiar 3rd-person action fare. Mouse and keyboard control moving and aiming. Jumping or rocket pack gliding are available, and you cycle through weapons and special equipment from your backpack. Reapers, for instance, have spells, while Kabuto can toss things about and roar.

The graphics here look absolutely stunning. The engine will use advanced lighting and bump map features, but it is the panoramas and sense of scale that will astonish you. Plodding along some of the leviathans that populate the game world is a real treat. It seems as if both the designers of Giants and Peter Molyneaux (who is working on Black & White) both have detected an unexplored area of visual drama in their games – scale. As scores of Japanese disaster flicks proved long ago, even badly done images of outsized creatures terrorizing us is great fun. Giants clearly understands this aesthetic.