EarlyGame is at Gamescom 2022, reporting live from the expo in Cologne. In this article, you can read about our highlights and impresssions from one of the biggest games festivals in Europe.
Gamescom 2022 has officially started with the Opening Night Live on Tuesday evening, now the German games convention is in full swing. From August 24 till August 28, everyone in the gaming world from developers, publishers, to press and fans gather in Cologne to see exciting new games, shows, exhibitions and more. The best part? We from EarlyGame are reporting live from the scenes!
Thousands of studios, exhibitors and games await fans, press members and industry members during Gamescom. We will report about the biggest, bestest and most interesting things we see at the convention, including play sessions, interviews and more!
In case you don't know, Gamescom is the largest gaming event in the world in terms of space and numbers of visitors. Around 370,000 people visited Gamescom at the last in-person fair in 2019. Every year, thousands of game studios, exhibitors, other companies, government organizations and more show off their upcoming products. That includes many different things, but chief among them? Video games, baby.
There are literally thousands of things to see at Gamescom. From the business area, where interviews and hands-on sessions happen behind closed doors to the showroom floor in the entertainment area, where everyone has access too and where the big, shiny stages and exhibitions are located. It's all just impossibly huge. Between walking for miles on end, we did manage to see some cool games though.
We got to see an exclusive preview for Meet Your Maker, the new game by developer Behaviour Interactive, best known for Dead by Daylight. The new game by the studio has you raiding defensively tight outposts to extract an important resource. The catch is: every one of those structures in the game is built by another player. It's another spin on asymmetrical multiplayer by Behaviour and it seems super promising.
This game feels like Super Mario Maker set in the world of DOOM. You have essentially two modes: building and raiding. For the former, you have a pretty neat building menu, which lets you individualize your outpost. You post traps and guards to make life harder for other players, meaning that you basically create an obstacle course. Raiding is more straight forward: go in with your loadout of choice, evade the traps and extract the resource you're looking for, called biomass.
This is a super cool concept and Behaviour have clearly thought a lot about how to structure this game. There are interesting details, like the fact that every new level will be surfaced to players, instead of most popular ones. We will go further into detail soon, for now know that Meet Your Maker left us excited.
We were able to play the upcoming Darktide. The game is quite similar to its spiritual successor Virmintide, with one big difference: it's the 40K universe, so we now have guns! And they feel good, as does the whole game.
It's at the core still a spin on the Left 4 Dead formula, but it seems very well realized. It all feels grimy, grungy, splatty, there are masses of enemies and effects, heavy and powerful weapons mowing through them. It's awesome to play, let's hope the finished game will keep that quality up.
This game has (surprisingly) been one of the biggest things at Gamescom 2022, with huge banners and even a live concert featuring music from the game. I say surprisingly because it had a fairly low profile so far, but I can confirm that it does seem pretty awesome.
The new studio The Outsiders, comprised of ex-DICE and Avalanche members (among others) has created a shooter that looks fairly uncreative on the outset: you are in hell, shooting big bad skeleton dudes. I've already made a DOOM comparison, insert another one here. The big catch is, that Hellsinger combines 1st-person action with rhythm game gameplay. Shoot to the rhythm of the beat to make more damage and rake up combos, which in turn reward you not just with gameplay bonuses, but also with an increasing intensity of the awesome metal soundtrack.
It's a bit kooky and it does feel weird in the beginning. But once you get into the... excuse me... rhythm of the action, it does feel amazing. Let's see if the game can keep this up for the full duration and if it can keep up with other shooters out there.
Yes, I played Farming Simulator 22. No, I don't know what I was doing. I had a chainsaw, but couldn't cut down a tree. I had a crane but I couldn't lift anything. It was confusing and the ultimate proof, that these games are for a special audience, which does not include me.
Talking about highlights: Capes should be on everyone's watchlist for 2023. The game is developed by Spitfire Interactive, which consists of developers who made the popular Hand of Fate series. And it's fairly easy to summarize this game: it's XCom with superheroes.
This was immediately so much fun. You will control a group of superheroes, who fight against villains who conquered the world. The coolest thing definitely is the combination of superpowers that can occur within your team. Every combination of heroes has unique abilities, depending on who is in the team and who is close enough to each other. This promises tons of cool variety in the fights. I'm definitely very excited about this one.
One of the coolest spaces in Gamescom is in hall 10, where the Indie Booth Arena and the Retro Area are combined. This was one of my favorite places at the Gamescom. The retro area is lovingly presented, with tons of different games from the past, including absolute classics like Mario Bros, Sonic, Pac-Man etc. to more obscure older titles. It is huge, like anything here and the same goes for the Indie Booth Arena. Over 120 developers from all over the world showing off gem after gem. The vibes are good and wholesome and the games looked great. Like most things at Gamescom, it might be a bit too much of everything, but it was a lovely highlight during the fair.
Yes, another XCom comparison, I'm sorry. But that's just the way it is. Hear me out though: Moonbreaker instantly became one of my most anticipated games of the year. The new game by the makers of Subnautica is basically a 1v1 tactics strategy game. There are three unique selling points for this game though:
The game feels great to play, has a fantastic style and the painting is unique and lovely. And you won't have to wait too long to play it yourself: Moonbreaker is launching for Early Access on September 29.
Ubisoft is of course also at Gamescom and has, among other things, set up a huge booth for Skull & Bones. No question, the booth looked impressive, but what was offered was a joke. After all, Skull & Bones is no longer an unknown quantity, we've already seen plenty of footage from the game and even seen extensive gameplay footage. So you'd expect to finally be able to play the game at the trade show, right?
Wrong! Visitors were able to wait in an endlessly long line to.... queue drum roll... see a video of the single player mode. That's it, thanks for nothing Ubisoft.
Listen, you sometimes just need to take what you can get at a place like Gamescom. The queues are ridiculously long, there's too much to see and too little time. So yes, we actually played the game for a few rounds and my God, it is just about legally distinct from Mario Kart, that's how close they cut it here. It's not just that every item from Mario Kart has an equivalent here (red shells are bees, green shells are acorns. Don't ask), it's the menus, design, everything. And I'll be honest: it's not fantastic.
It feels very clumsy in comparison to Mario Kart, the tracks aren't terrible but nothing special either. So this is basically a worse feeling version of Mario Kart.terms of structure, it's very similar to Mario Kart. But hey, it has all the familiar characters and I'm sure very young kids won't mind it too much. But it's not the best game I saw at Gamescom, let me tell you that.
Neither me nor my colleagues managed to check out the remake of Destroy All Humans 2, which is borderline tragic. But there was a fun booth full of Aliens and here's a pic of us:
That's all folks, we're logging out. Stay on the site for the next few days, to see more in-depth articles on some of the games discussed here.
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