Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It wouldn't be Gamescom without a Geoff Keighley liveshow to kick it all off, would it? Tuesday's Opening Night Live showcase featured a huge amount of trailers to gawk at, a baggage carousel of content that moved at a blistering clip. Despite its two hour runtime a lot of interesting (and in most cases, new) titles weren't given a huge amount space to breathe, their moment in the spotlight frequently cut short by another trailer waiting impatiently in the wings.

You'd be forgiven, then, for missing a few bits and pieces because you were blinking really fast or distracted by the cat eating something unknown underneath your coffee table. Not to worry though, as I've once again gathered team RPS to tell me in detail about the games that caught their attention during Geoffcom 2022.

Much like our E3 roundup from earlier in the summer, each RPS staffer took ten minutes out of their day to wax lyrical about an upcoming project featured within the showcase. All eight (including yours truly, who thanks to Katharine actually remembered to contribute this time around) chose completely different games. Some picks are more obvious, whereas others are a little off piste. In a good way, of course!

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Steam Deck is a brilliant system, but its internal storage is limited - from anywhere from 64GB to 512GB depending on the model you chose. Thankfully, Micro SD cards are getting extremely affordable, even in massive sizes all the way up to 1TB. Smaller sizes like 256GB and 512GB are better value per gigabyte, but today in the UK there's been a big discount on a 1TB Lexar Play Micro SD card that brings it into contention too.

The Lexar Play 1TB is now retailing for £110 at Amazon, compared to a usual price of £140. If you'd prefer something a little more high performance, the highly-rated SanDisk Extreme 1TB card is also on sale, dropping from £220 to £140.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Minecraft Legends was first announced at Geoff Fest earlier this year, and a smidge more footage dropped again at a Nintendo Direct Mini. But despite both of these events, it's been difficult to ascertain what the game actually, well, is>. Aside from being a real-time strategy spin-off, there's been nothing else to scan with our eyeballs for more info.

Colour me intrigued, then, as I sat in a quickfire presentation at this year's Gamescom and bore witness to some mythical gameplay>. I can now report that what Minecraft Legends appears to be is as mix of real-time strategy and building, made all the more approachable by being set in Minecraft's colourful cube-verse.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Eight years ago Graham (who used to be to blame for all of this) got hands-on with Dead Island 2, back when the game was being developed by Yager, the folks behind Spec Ops: The Line. Since then, development changed hands like a baton at the Olympic relay; Yager left a year later, to be replaced by Sumo Digital, only for Sumo Digital to leave and be replaced by Dambuster Studios. Usain Bolt hasn't expressed interest yet, but there's time.

So going into a 20-minute hands-on with the game in the year 2022, I was a bit apprehensive. What sort of Frankenstinian horror awaited me behind closed doors? But, far from a shambling mess, what I played was a zombie 'em up that seemed close to what Graham saw in 2014, only polished up to a surprising, bloody gloss.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Dunno if you’ve noticed by there’s an awful lot of sci-fi games on the way, most of which – these being games – revolve around shooting space creatures to glowing green bits. Deliver Us Mars, the recently delayed sequel to Deliver Us The Moon, takes a more peaceful option, now blending the original’s puzzling with some Tomb Raider reboot-style platforming. Your deadliest enemy here is gravity, and as far as I understand, you can’t shoot that.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Amazon are intending to announce they’ve made an offer to buy publishing colossus Electronic Arts later today, according to a new report from USA Today’s For The Win, who cite sources from Swedish gaming agency GLHF. No clue yet as to how much they’d be paying, but it’s likely to be ranging in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Maybe just not as many as Microsoft’s $68.7 billion buyout of Activision Blizzard, revealed in January.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The AMD RX 6700 is retailing for £300 right now, a great price for a strong 1440p graphics card with support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and FSR 2.0. The card in question is a PowerColor Fighter model, with a simple two-fan design that should be more than capable of dealing with this mid-range card's modest 175W TDP.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The LG C2 OLED probably isn't your first thought when you're considering a new desktop monitor, but its incredible image quality and new smaller 42-inch or 48-inc sizes make it a surprisingly valid choice. Right now you can pick up this monitor in either size for under £1000, depending on where you shop, a price that puts it make more affordable than smaller monitors with worse HDR performance - and that makes it well worth considering.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

One of the advantages to games heading westward long after an initial release in Asia is that there's sometimes a stack of existing update content already waiting to be localised. Perhaps that's how Tower Of Fantasy, which released two weeks ago, is already teasing its first piece of additional content. Find a trailer for it below.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Not that all the other wars were just a bit of goofing around, but World War One – a conflict remembered more for its bleak, arduous trench warfare than any great triumph over evil – seems like a particularly unusual source of inspiration for a strategy game that will, presumably, be played for fun. Nonetheless, The Great War: Western Front, a combination of macro planning and tactical RTS battling revealed this week at Gamescom, has elected to lean right into WW1’s complexities and difficulties rather than dance around them.

Developers Petroglyph have gone for historical accuracy in various ways, senior designer Chris Becker and audio director Frank Klepacki explain to me at a hands-off demo in Cologne. The soundtrack will even include licensed music from the era. But something they want to really hammer home is the brutality of the war: territory won’t be won in heroic pushes but slowly and bloodily, while collapsing morale is as much a danger as any advancing army.

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