Only a few steps inland from the beach where your ship is wrecked at the start of Boomerang X, you realize some great calamity has befallen this strange place. As you make your way into the interior of the island, you find a ravaged village and the bodies of the giant mantis people who once lived there. Whatever happened here, they tried to fight it. They failed.

But then you find one of their artifacts: a strange boomerang, which looks more like a throwing star made out of bone (or more specifically, the Glaive throwing blade thing from the movie Krull). The mantis people, the Yoran, weren't able to use this boomerang to save themselves, but you sure can. Just seconds after finding it, you'll whip the blade through strange monster creatures made of goo as easily as if you had invented the weapon.

Things move fast in Boomerang X, as we discovered with a hands-on preview of the game that lasted about an hour. The game is actually a series of wave-based arena fights where several brands of these goo creatures appear, and you need to cut them down to size with the boomerang. You play Boomerang X from a first-person perspective, so these fights have a platforming and shooter feel, with the caveat that you only have this one weapon to defend yourself with. The handy thing about your boomerang is that it always returns to your hand (as you'd expect), but that delay in shots means that every throw is a tactical decision.