One of the games that I wanted to check out going into E3 was Airtight's Dark Void.  The early trailers had shown some stomach churning vertical combat and given that Airtight is composed of a lot of people who worked on the Crimson Skies games there was a lot of potential in the game.  After talking to Jose Perez III (audio below) I think Dark Void is another game to keep on your radar. 

You play Will, your typical everyman who's sucked into the Void while traveling through the Bermuda Triangle.  Now you have to find a way to escape and defeat the Watchers, an alien race trying to destroy mankind.  The best way to think about the vertical combat is to take the cover based gameplay from Gears of War and turn it 90 degrees upward.  Throw in a little acrophobia and now you're talking Dark Void's core gameplay mechanic (which makes sense given that the game is using the Unreal Engine 3).  You'll only be climbing up rock surfaces for part of the game as eventually you'll build a fully functional jet pack and that's where the Crimson Skies influences really start to show.  With the fully upgraded jetpack you can zoom around levels without any worries or restrictions and the game opens up to accomplish that.

I only got to play the game for about five minutes but zooming around the with the jetpack was a lot of fun as you got to try and take out a series of flying saucers.  The real key is that you need to board one of the flying saucers and then use it to take out the others in the area.  Once you get close to one of them you press the B button and then that kicks off a small mini-game where you circle around the edge of the saucer trying to work your way in. Thankfully it's not a quicktime event but once you have control you can then zoom around and take down the rest of the aircraft with ease. Controls are very tight and responsive.  I will admit that flying in the jetpack is a bit like flying in WarHawk as you have the option of hovering as well as flying forward.

From what I saw the game looks like it's coming along well.  I do worry that the vertical combat part of the game is going to take some getting used to as you do have to climb your way along a linear path but I don't think a lot of people will mind it.  I guess we'll find out when the game ships.  Here's our interview with Jose Perez III that explains more about the backstory of the game and more about the vertical combat gameplay.
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Despite a packed schedule I ended up with about fifteen minutes of free time to spend in the Concourse Hall.  After seeing all the videos and screenshots of Disney's Pure I thought I might pop over and see if the game played as well as it looks.  While the game look a lot like Sony's Motorstorm games they play concepts are vastly different.  Motorstorm is a pure racing game with various vehicle types while Pure is a trick based ATV game. 

Pure looks as good in person as it looks in all the trailers we've shown as the racing environments are lush and highly detailed.  The heard of the game is the jump trick/system.  Before you hit a jump you pull back on the left thumbstick and then push up as you go over which gives you big air.  While you are in the air you can pull off tricks with the facebuttons.  You start off with just having A button tricks available but as you pull off tricks on the track you earn boost which unlocks the other facebutton tricks.  While you're pulling off a trick you can tap the right bumper to put a twist on the move that you are currently pulling off.  These moves tend to be a bit more exotic and require more air as they take more time to pull off but that's the risk/reward of using them.

What's impressive about the game is how accessible it is.  It took me a few tries to get the controls down but once I did I was knocking out jump and tricks without a problem.  The harder tricks are really difficult to pull off but they do result in some spectacular wipe outs when you miss them.  I'm interested to see how the full game and the multiplayer works out but the brief taste of Pure I got was pretty solid.