Microsoft has a ton of Xbox exclusives in the pipeline. Gears of War 4, ReCore, Dead Rising 4, Sea of Thieves, Forza Horizon 3 -- the list goes on. Here at Gamescom, we've been speaking to the developers behind each title, listening to their pitches and, in some instances, going hands-on. So what impressed us and what didn't? I took 10 minutes with Engadget Senior Editor Aaron Souppouris to break it all down. (Hint: I really liked Scalebound...)
Resident Evil 6 was a bad video game, and Capcom knows it. To save its zombie franchise, the publisher has taken a radically different approach for Resident Evil 7, throwing out the loud explosions and over the top combat for smaller, more atmospheric scares. First shown at E3, the game is unusual because it takes place from a first-person perspective -- most of the core Resident Evil games are third-person -- and is compatible with PlayStation VR. The tone is radically different too, with a new set of characters to discover and a rundown plantation as its setting.
A renewed interest in spaceflight has sparked a wave of video games looking at the harsh realities of living in space. We've had Adrift, a near-future survival epic similar to the film Gravity, and soon Tacoma, a story-driven exploration game set inside a space station in 2088. Now, you can add another title to that list: Outreach, the first game from independent developer Pixel Spill. Whereas Adrift and Tacoma are set in the distant future, Outreach looks to the past, exploring the tail-end of the pivotal "space race" that took place between the US and the Soviet Union.
Source: Outreach
Officially, it's day two of Gamescom here in Cologne, Germany. For us, though, it's day four of Nick Summers and I marching up and down a vast convention center, visiting developers to find out more about their games. It's been a stressful 100 hours or so, working together without a break, but we finally got to let off some steam today with Oh Sir. It's a game that let us sling abuse at one another in a way that wouldn't involve a call to HR in the morning.