The newly named PlayStation Vita game, Resistance: Burning Skies was demoed by Sony in a press event today, and we found out a few more details. The game is in development at Nihilistic Software with lots of input from Insomniac.

Burning Skies takes place just before the events in Resistance 2 - during the Chimeran invasion of the East Coast of America. The game starts with you waking up on Ellis Island in a hospital bed. Being a fireman you have an axe, but no other weapons, and as you go outside you see the Chimerans ravaging the cityscape. The game follows your story as you begin to rally people to fight back and become the Resistance. It’s got the makings of a great story, and it’s a full new chapter in the Resistance saga.

The Vita looks like it can do first person shooters really well - the dual analog sticks make the controls the same as when playing on a console, and Nihilistic have made a graphics engine for the game that looks every bit the equal of the PS3 games at first glance - perhaps in detail it isn’t but it is certainly in the same class. Some things work even better on the handheld, like the ability to use touch to access quick weapons (the axe, for example) and to navigate the weapon wheel.

Some new weapons were demonstrated - one was the CFG, a gun that shoots short bursts of shatterable rounds that do lots of damage to soft targets. Its secondary ability allows you to touch enemies on the screen to lock on to them. The developers told us that most of the secondary abilities of the guns in Burning Skies will use the Vita’s new input mechanisms in interesting ways, but they haven’t been finalised yet. A second new gun was a chaingun cannon which takes a while to spin up but is very powerful. Also demoed was the Carbine. Its secondary ability is to shoot grenades, and these can now be shot by tapping the screen, which seemed to work really well. Nihilistic informed us that weapons can be upgraded in many different ways which leads to tailoring your guns to suit your play style.

There was no mention of multiplayer made, and the closest we could get to a release date was “2012”. The engine and game mechanics look quite well advanced but the content itself is nowhere near done. Resistance: Burning Skies is shaping up to be a full console FPS experience on a handheld, which makes it something to watch out for.