Being a hardcore military shooter, kill.switch doesn’t have much of a storyline, which I’m happy to see absent in this type of game. After all, the whole "save the world from terrorists" storyline has been played out so much, and not just in games, that we already know how it’s going to begin and end. In kill.switch, as in most action titles, you’re a super-secret combat operative sent to various hotspots throughout the world to cool things down. Of course, being a combat operative (emphasis on "combat"), your idea of cooling things down typically begins and ends with a flurry of hot lead flying toward anything in your way. In sum, you’re a human bulldozer, but instead of a plow you’re packing big guns, heavy grenades and some cool combat moves. And you’ve got the Offensive Cover System on your side.

kill.switch is different from other shooters in its Offensive Cover System (OCS), which is something every shooter should implement from this day forward. With OCS, you can duck behind, below or beside obstacles while still reaching out to fire blindly at your attackers. It’s not a true blind-fire, because you can still aim your weapon, but the game engine compensates by throwing your aim off any time you fire multiple weapon bursts. As the terrorists bear down on you, crumbled walls, burned out cars and even garbage barrels become your only hope for survival as you duck behind them and spray bullets like a lawn sprinkler.

While the demo we played had only a few levels, it’s easy to see that this game stands a chance to attain arcade-inspired greatness. The weaponry and environments are all based on their real-world counterparts, which deepens the immersion of the game, and the enemy AI is excellent, with terrorists using cover and terrain to conceal their approaches and protect themselves from your barrage. Death squads will stalk you around every corner using classic leapfrogging techniques, and snipers will make the sensible choice to duck after firing a round or two at you. Trying to hit the shoulder of a sniper who’s ducked down behind a windowsill is about as real as combat is going to get.

Graphically, kill.switch still has a way to go, as most of the character models and environments look like they were put together just to get the demo ready for show. The demo levels are played within a bombed-out middle-eastern city filled with the burned husks of vehicles, broken windows and blowing sand, but they lack enough texture to feel real. The character model for your operative looks good, especially when he moves, but the terrorists need quite a bit more work so as not to come off looking like a clone army. The sound is just as limited as the graphics, with only the basic weapons fire having any realistic quality to it yet, but we can cut it a little slack seeing as this was a very early demo.

Namco’s on to a good thing by modeling kill.switch after the fast-paced arcade shooters of old, and once they beef up the graphics and deepen the levels, they could have a real winner on their hands. It’s nice to see some old-school action brought to next-gen consoles, and any twitch-shooter fan should be getting excited for the arrival of kill.switch on PS2 and Xbox this fall.