Combat can still be paused at any time to access your skillset. However, crucially it doesn’t need to be this time. Arranged on the wheel that appears on screen, you can assign skills to three shortcuts, and then deliver them on the fly. These abilities now include some that exploit physics to perform some pretty decent attacks. We were shown one in particular where enemies were lifted up from their hiding places, and cartwheeled in slow motion through the air, trapped in a blue stasis field, through which Shepard fired lots of lovely bullets.

Squad members can also be controlled independently (although we didn’t see this in action), which should also make for more involved battling. Nine new weapon classes are added to the mix, along with the ability to use heavy weapons. We saw a wrong-faced male Shepard using a rocket launcher to take out cartwheeling baddies (although it seemed to launch pretty weedy rockets - it doesn’t seem quite right that people should get up again after being hit by such things).

Finally for the fighting, the enemies have not had the rather unfortunate (for them) upgrade of having their bodies divided into regions. So you can now shoot out a leg, or more practically, a face.