All of that comes next year, no doubt.

Never mind that, though. The matter at hand is Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, a platformer that combines the usual item-collecting and pit-jumping with gunfire. Lots and lots of gunfire.

After the events of the original game, Ratchet and his robotic sidekick Clank are kicking back, enjoying being celebrities. A sudden message from Abercrombie Fizzwidget, the CEO of MegaCorp, brings them to the nearby Bogon galaxy in their spaceship, as there's work to be done. Fizzwidget hires them to hunt down a thief named Angela Cross, who's stolen the experimental Proto Pet from MegaCorp. More than twenty worlds and countless skirmishes with the mercenaries of Thugs-4-Less later, it'll turn out that there's more to this than the simple matter of a stolen widget, but that's kind of a given.

With a touch of the Triangle button, you can open his weapons menu, designed to hold up to twelve guns. More are available through vending machines, where you can purchase them with screws that you collect from destroyed enemies and handy crates. Apparently, several of the weapons from the first Ratchet & Clank will be returning, and if you have a save on your memory card from that game, you can pick them up for free in Going Commando.

In our demo, Ratchet moves from disabling transponder towers on an isolated spaceport, to infiltrating a group of bandits via hoverbike racing. In both play modes, the action is fast and furious, and the graphics are colorful. Ratchet's adventures take place in a bizarre futuristic wonderland, like Tokyo turned up to eleven; neon tubes and glowing widgets light the way, as you slide across transparent walkways and leap across gaps with red-hot diodes and pipes at the bottom. This isn't the chrome and steel future city that you might be expecting, but rather some kind of glass Victorian space station, complete with bizarrely anachronistic spacecraft.

My particular favorite is the spaceport's transponder station, which is a small spherical world that you can run all the way around in about a second. If you zoom out from it with the R3 button, it looks like a marble or something, with antennae and towers jutting out from it in every direction. The gravity remains constant, so if you manage to get up high enough, you'll actually have to take the curvature of the world into account when you leap to the next platform.

Ratchet jumps about these environments with this weird boneless look to him, kind of like a cat. He occasionally pauses while doing this to shoot about three dozen guys. Seriously, this is ridiculous; it sometimes feels like it would if they included a "curbstomp" move in the next Dance Dance Revolution. Mess with Ratchet, and he'll throw you into the empty yawning void of space if you're lucky. Odds are that he'll probably ventilate you with his giant crackling electric shotgun, or tear you apart with the world's scariest throwing stars.

Using his weapons, on the other hand, will eventually result in their evolving into another gun entirely. Each destroyed enemy will emit nanites, which acts to fill up the experience bar that you can see below a weapon's ammo counter. When the bar's full, the gun evolves.

In our playable build, the Blitz Gun starts as a short-range blaster that'll knock down stronger enemies, but won't knock them out. Still, use it often enough, and it'll suddenly henshin into the devastating Blitz Cannon, an electric shotgun that can wipe out anyone standing within about a ninety-degree angle from Ratchet. The Gravity Bombs turn into the Mini-Nuke; the Lancer laser pistol becomes the fully-automatic Heavy Lancer. Each gun's evolved form is quite a bit different from its original version, so the game can be said to have somewhere around thirty-eight new weapons.

Going Commando is set up so that as you progress, the enemies will begin to get tougher just as you do, by, for example, putting on better armor. If you find that the enemies are getting too tough, you're allowed to return to earlier levels at any time to earn more screws, buy new weapons, and build experience.