Microsoft is now poised to be the leading name in western role-playing games. Alongside Bethesda, it also has experienced studios such as Obsidian and InXile Entertainment under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella. That’s a lot of RPG experience right there, which will pay off in the years to come.

Technically, it’s news to someone even if it is almost a week old! While we were all shoving handfuls of food into our gaping maws during the silly season (how do you make mince out of fruit and turn it into a pie asking for a friend), developer GSC Game World dropped a new trailer showing off STALKER 2’s first-person atmosphere.

Project Warlock has its moments, but the retro good comes with some nostalgic bad. If you’re able to look past its flaws, there’s a chunky and satisfying first-person shooter that still manages to be a blast from the past when you get to grips with it.

Back in 2018, one of the games that caught my attention was Prodeus. With 2016’s DOOM remake proving that something old can once again be new, it was hitting all the right notes for the kind of action game that I was looking for: Unrepentantly violent, vicious and looking like the product of an age where bleeding edge gaming technology …

GUN JAM is an innovative, rhythm first-person shooter where the player must shoot to the beat to survive. It features an original core mechanic and firefights choreographed to the soundtrack in a vibrant world. Prepare to obliterate enemies whilst blasting to the beat.

Borderlands 3 may be a braindead story of already dead on arrival memes and a cast that is largely forgettable (Save for Tannis, I still love you for being my socially inept spirit animal), but it’s easily the most satisfying power fantasy of the year thanks to its amazingly tuned gunplay and a sophisticated flow of action that picks up the juvenile slack.

The future is coming, and it kind of looks…grim. In Disintegration, the destiny of humanity has resulted in our species being served a combo of disaster, as game director Marcus Lehto’s return to sci-fi action picks off a good couple of years after overpopulation, famine and the mother of all pandemics has almost succeeded in wiping out our species. The only solution? Putting our juicy bits of grey matter into robotic shells, thus creating an integration between man and machine.

It’s all about choice. There are very few games at Gamescom that are generating the hype to match Cyberpunk 2077. Everyone knows it’s coming, and that it is a very large deal. T-shirts are everywhere. The Cosplayers are growing in number. The merchandise is flying off the shelf. CD Projekt Red know that we are waiting. We’ve been waiting patiently …