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Under the Skin Hands-On

Grab your blaster, strap on your disguise, and toss cream pies at humans in Capcom's new alien action game.

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Under the Skin is a new action game from Capcom. In it, you play the role of an alien out to harass the human race, collecting coins along the way. You'll do this by disguising yourself as a variety of humans, each with different items to help you out.

You have a scanner ray, which will let you scan humans and give you the ability to disguise yourself as the humans you scan. Disguising is done at little UFOs that hover in various spots on each level. The goal of the level on display was to collect a specific number of coins before time expired. Coins pop out of humans when you smack them around with something. Different humans will have different items. Some of them will have a flurry of cream pies that you can toss, some will have huge boxing gloves that you can essentially fire at humans, and some will have radius effect powers like karaoke, which can cause a whole crowd to spit out some coins. Some humans are aggressively using those same items, though. If you're hit once, the game pulls a Ghosts 'n Goblins, busting your human disguise out of its clothes and forcing you to run around in your underwear. If you're hit again, your disguise is blown and you're stuck in alien mode, leaving you defenseless. You constantly lose coins when you're not disguised, so you'll have to hop back to the nearest UFO to put on a new disguise. Some of the human skins are really crazy, and the game will even feature a cameo from Resident Evil characters, like Jill and Nemesis. Specifically, you'll be able to disguise yourself as Jill and launch grenades at humans or Nemesis.

Graphically, the game has a cartoony look to it that's cel-shaded like Viewtiful Joe, but the game's graphics are a lot more whimsical and bouncy. Overall, it looks pretty good.

Under the Skin looks interesting, but we're hoping that there's more to it than the process of disguising yourself, using all of your special weapons, and redisguising yourself to get more. Under the Skin is currently scheduled to ship in the third quarter of 2004.

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