As we’ve already mentioned in our Geekly Review, we were lucky enough to get some Sunday tickets to Eurogamer Expo at Earls Court.
Now that the show is over, we wanted to talk about our highlights from the show.
I’m a little torn for what my highlight of the show was, I really enjoyed Alien: Isolation and FarCry 4. But I think the one that stood out a little more for me was Dying Light, which was a bit of a surprise actually, and maybe that’s why it’s stood out more as I wasn’t quite expecting it to be as much fun as it was.
Techlands Dying Light is an open world survival horror zombie apocalypse melee fest.
The demo I got to play was the same one that seems to be doing the rounds at all the game shows. You get 8 minutes, a handful of different melee weapons, and essentially get to run riot.
As soon as I was in control, I quickly flicked through the buttons to learn what was what, took a look around to take in the sun soaked views and set off up the side of a small building.
Parkour plays a fairly big role in Dying Light, you can quickly scuttle up buildings and on to cars and vans, leap across gaps between buildings, and even jump across zombies heads, although I didn’t actually do this during the demo. It was a little awkward at first, and pressing LB to climb didn’t always seem to work. But for the most part it was pretty fluent, and easy to pick up.
If running away from zombies up buildings was all that was on offer, then it wouldn’t be very fun, Ok, maybe it would but I want to smash zombies in the face with my baseball bat! So after a quick scan around I quickly closed in on my first group of zombies.
Melee attacks in the demo were pretty simple, a quick squeeze of RT does a ‘standard’ melee attack, whilst holding RT down allows you to do a more powerful attack.
Judging the distance between me and the zombies for an attack was the trickiest part, and I found myself swinging at air a few times. But when you do finally connect, it’s pretty satisfying, blood spurts in to the air, heads roll and bones break.
After a couple of minutes I was easily chaining together attacks with slide tackles and spinning electric axe attacks. It was all very enjoyable, and I could’ve quite easily played for a lot longer.
As we only had 8 minutes to play, there wasn’t much in the way of quests, or missions to complete which made it hard to judge what that side of the game will be like. But from a purely gameplay point of view, it was great fun and has actually swayed me to wanting the game a lot more than before.
– Will
I went to EGX with the intention of playing Bloodbourne, The Order, Smash Brothers and DriveClub. I only managed to get my hands of 2 of them due to the queues, and those two were Bloodbourne and DriveClub.
While both looked stunning in motion, and I enjoyed playing them neither of them were my highlight of the show. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t impressed with them, they were everything I expected and more, both incredible.
But the game that ended up being a highlight for was the one WiiU game I actually played at the show. Splatoon.
Now I know that it’s common knowledge by now that I’m very pro Nintendo, and it could be seen as me simply picking this game as I can’t look past my fanboyish ways. But no that’s not the case at all.
Far Cry, Alien, Dying Light were all great, And I will end up getting them all, I was actually won over by Alien at the show as I wasn’t entirely sure. but now consider it a must have. But I did particularly enjoy seeing Nintendo’s newest IP in action.
I remember the reveal at E3 and my initial impression was “Classic Nintendo, turn what could be an awesome game into a kiddy looking friendly game”. But as more details were shown, and the game play video went on, I got more and more interested in the ideas that were being shown.
When I finally got my hands on it I was pretty excited. I enjoyed the use of the game pad to aim at areas to cover in ink. I loved simply hiding in my colour ink waiting for an unsuspecting victim to try and turn the area I was in to his colour, only for me to pop up and blast him away. The controls and aiming were really simple to pick up and get to grips with. The level we played was pretty large, but I never had any issues navigating it or inking it to my teams colour. I was told by the rep to focus on the floors rather than the walls as I was going gung ho everywhere. Happy to say that I only ended up with one ‘Death’ and multiple kills. Our team won quite comfortably which I was chuffed with.
I can only hope that WiiU owners will pick this up, as there is potential to have some incredible multi-player fun online. I can’t see it shifting systems unfortunately, but the people who do pick it up are in for a treat.
The show was full of incredible games visually and some games that will go on to be massive selling games, And I enjoyed pretty much everything I played excluding The Crew, but this game in particular stands out purely for how much fun it was.
– Murr
