Of all the great franchises Microsoft has frustratingly sat on since the Xbox era began (High Heat Baseball, MechWarrior, Links, and so on), Crimson Skies is the one we remember most fondly. It’s been dormant since its 2003 Xbox Live–defining turn, and it doesn’t look like we’ll ever see another one. But thanks to Dark Void, we no longer care. The game’s being built just a couple of miles from Xbox headquarters in Redmond, and Dark Void’s development team includes over a dozen members of FASA Studio — creator of that beloved original-Xbox action-flight game. After spending a day at their office playing several levels, we can see that Void takes many of its cues from Crimson, upping the ante in nearly every conceivable way.

The one-upsmanship begins in the story department. While Crimson Skies kept us interested with an alternate-reality World War II tale, Dark Void gets exponentially crazier…and a lot more riveting. As a cargo pilot named Will, you’re on a routine flight that ends up with our hero flying into the Bermuda Triangle, where he’s somehow transported to another dimension called, naturally, the Dark Void. There he finds his ex-girlfriend, Ava, who seems to know more about what’s going on than he does, Airtight tells us. He also encounters famed electricityobsessed scientist Nikola Tesla.

As you explore the Void and attempt to find your way home, you’ll face foes that appear to be robots. A closer inspection, though, reveals that each inorganic body is actually a shell for a small, slug-like creature — the lowest evolutionary form of a race of creatures known as the Watchers. Naturally, they long to get to Earth and conquer it (it’s worth noting that Airtight kept phrasing it as their “return to” Earth…hmm…), but they’re opposed by the Survivors, a group of humans (some Void-born) who are reluctant to trust any outsiders. Winning their confidence will be a key story arc in the game.

Of course, Will, Ava, and Dr. Tesla all just want to get out — and stop the Watchers before they do — so it’s the button-bashing, thumbsticktwisting action that matters most. Here, Void separates itself from the rest of the action genre by mixing three control schemes simultaneously — on-foot, jetpack, and vehicle. That would be a challenge for any game, and it’s one that Void will live or die by. Fortunately, it’s well on its way to fruition, if our extensive hands-on time is anything to go by. While our first brief session with the gamepad earlier this year sent us repeatedly slamming into cliffsides and walls anytime we engaged our jetpack, the controls and flight mechanic have since been balanced so that we were much more comfortable while in Rocketeer mode. No wipeouts, even.

Our first level was an early one titled “Spare Parts.” Set just after Will straps on the Teslabuilt jetpack, this area gives you a chance to experiment and get a feel for both the aerial maneuvering and the game’s second lynchpin feature: vertical cover. Intriguingly, much of Dark Void goes up or down (in fact, the team advised us to simply look up or down if we ever got lost). Pressing X while underneath a ledge will make Will automatically fly up and grab onto it. From there, you can blind fire, hold LT and aim, or press B when up close for a melee attack.

We quickly found ourselves favoring the ammo-conserving fisticuffs, skittering around the bottoms of ledges with our pack until we were directly beneath our target, where we could then press B and be treated to one of several throw-’em-down-to-their-doom animations. Besides, doing it that way meant we wouldn’t have bodies raining down on us after we shot them with our gun. (Dark Void packs three human firearms and three Watcher weapons.) In a smart little design move, if a falling corpse hits you while you’re in vertical cover, you’ll need to do a quick button-mashing quick-time event to hang on and not get knocked off with the body. Equally interesting is the option to scoot by everybody, jet all the way to the top ledge, and then press Y to flip yourself around so that you’re now facing down while still in vertical cover, giving you the high ground.

Later, in a chapter titled “Into the Void,” we took on our first mini-boss: a sort of floating seahorse-from-hell called the Knight. Not content to simply pepper us with gunfire, it also has a rocketequivalent that it’s smart enough to fire behind you, causing you grief even while you’re behind cover. Constant X-axis movement will get the job done, or you could choose to bob up and down in the air with your jetpack and torture it that way. But we had more fun mixing those two tactics and cooking grenades from behind cover, timing it just right so our toss would explode in midair right next to the Knight.

This fusion of combat options appears to be Dark Void’s calling card. In a later mission titled “Prison Escape,” we battled every which way possible. We jetpacked around shooting stationary turrets, hijacked UFOs out of midair, hovered and shot foes, and even took an approach to one situation that seemed to genuinely entertain our Airtight hosts: On a high, balcony-like platform, rows of cover blocked our way inside the structure and our goal. With a half-dozen enemies between us and our destination, our traditional Gears of War mindset would’ve told us to methodically stop-and-pop our way along the cover, eventually making our way inside. Being far more impatient and sadistic than that, however, we instead hovered high above our enemies — well out of their accurate weapon range — and dropped grenades on them, rendering their cover useless. “I think you got four with that [grenade]!” lead designer Bradley Rebh exclaimed.

Whether Dark Void’s clever blend of sci-fi story and real-life historical figures actually pays off by the end of the campaign remains to be seen, but we’re definitely convinced that its seamless mix of ground, air, and vehicle-based combat is its meal ticket. If you played Crimson Skies, you’ve probably already pre-ordered this, but if you didn’t, Dark Void will show you what you missed.