It’s now the end of the second day of Gamescom 2024, and I wanted to recap the past two days in a kind of diary manner as that’ll allow me to share the most without having to create a new article for every separate game I’ve played. It also lets me share some personal stories along the way.
This year, I’m at Gamescom for two reasons: to find new clients for my own personal business (Pirate PR) and to play some games I can tell you all about. That way, you can experience Gamescom a little from the comfort of your own sofa (man, my feet are jealous of yours right now).
For those who haven’t been to Gamescom before: It’s HUGE. It’s like the size of my hometown and then some, all packed in a multi-story event building. You’ll find yourself running from one hall to the other just to get to meetings on time. Walking 25km or more per day here is no exception, it’s the rule.
Day One – Indiana Jones hype and secret games
I’ll spare you the work-related meetings (unless I played cool games for them) and cover mostly the games I saw and played for LifeIsXbox. First up was an unannounced game by Amazon. I had no idea what to expect, but apparently, it was shown at Opening Night Live while I was sipping cocktails and checking out games at Courage Cologne.
This was King of Meat. A 4-Player co-op game that looked like Fall Guys with combat, but the focus was much more on the combat and small room encounters than on any platforming. It was also cooperatively and with the goal of accumulating as big a score as possible by smashing boxes, enemies, and getting to the finish line. You can then spend that earned money on new cosmetics.
We were invited into the Amazon booth to play it with four people, and I kind of felt like I’d seen it all after a single playthrough as it’s not really my genre (and I didn’t know this ahead of time because the appointment just had “Secret game by Amazon” listed) but I kept playing anyway as otherwise I’d let the other three players down. I didn’t expect to spend a full hour in this meating (autocorrect tried to correct that pun four times before it stuck) but I still had fun with it. Not a game I’d boot up on my own, I don’t regret playing it either. Could especially be fun if played by four friends and there is a big community-content focus so you could even make your own arenas.
Moving on, I had a meeting at Bethesda for a Cinema experience. This means you just sit in a room with other press & creators and watch a TV. No hands-on demo, no developer feedback, just a small taste of things they’ll usually share publicly a little later with the world. In this case, it was about Starfield: Shattered Space, explaining what’s new in the DLC and the update of a rover being added to the game so you can get around more quickly on the massive open spaces.
I come to Gamescom mostly to play indies; however, luckily, Indy was there to whip me into focus shortly after. They showed us some fun gameplay sections that seemed promising, with (scripted) clever whip-based navigation and some nice combat sequences that made me more excited for the release of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle later this year.
Speaking of “Indiana Jones”, I had also planned a visit to the Xbox booth in hall 7 and they had the biggest booth ever, taking up what seemed like two/thirds of the entire hall. As per usual, they had activations at the booth where you have to queue up to spin a wheel, get a picture taken, or play a game and that gets you a token to maybe win a cool prize. (I gave up saving for four tokens after waiting in line for two photo-ops that didn’t reward me with a token, but it did cost me some endless shame).
Most of the games I cared about on the booth were already playable at home (like Visions of Mana), or were similar “cinema” experiences without a hands-on. The biggest news for me recently though was Genshin Impact coming to Xbox. This would be HUGE news for me as someone who always wanted to play it… if I weren’t living in Belgium, where such games are forbidden by law because of their lootbox systems. (It won’t even be visible in the store here, as has always been the case on PS5).
I couldn’t linger much longer in the entertainment area as I had an appointment at Nacon to play Greedfall II and Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown. I didn’t play the first Greedfall but I kind of knew what to expect and it felt like the follow-up doesn’t really provide anything groundbreaking, but would make for a fun western RPG for fans of the genre. But like many developers have warned us about in advance: with Baldur’s Gate 3 being a thing: Don’t expect features and depth of this magnitude anytime soon, that game is in a league of its own. I couldn’t beat the demo in the half hour I was given, but did see some fun party interactions and a kind of detective system that lets you sniff out clues or important items to interact with, which is a skill inherent to the native you play as.
Onwards to Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown. Where I had to ask the simple question: “Where on the Forza Horizon 5 – Gran Turismo spectrum does this fall?” It’s an important question for me, because I love the former but couldn’t even be paid to play hours of the latter (including Forza Motorsport). Racing games need to have a certain level or arcadey feel to me, to be enjoyable. The answer was that this one is “unique” in that it focuses on the driver instead and how they have very few funds to buy new cars, so each one has to be chosen carefully. That’s where the “test drive” aspect comes in from the title as you can check out some of the cooler but more expensive cars for a few minutes.
You get a whole island to explore, races to win and cars to test, but to answer my own question more accurately: it’s somewhere in the middle. It has a more quest-based system of progression like FH5, but at the same time the cars behave more realistically, there are limitations to what you can buy and it’s not like you’ll have a rewind or boost feature here. I’m sure the series has it’s fans, but I’ll stick to Fora Horizon and The Crew titles myself for now.
Time progresses differently at Gamescom. Days seem to fly by and crawl at the same time. You have to walk pretty huge distances between booths (especially if you have press appointments), and so you can’t check as many games on a single day as you might think. Even though we are lucky to not have to queue up for over an hour just to test a 10 minute demo.
The sad thing this year, though, is that nothing in the entertainment area really got me all hyped up to play it it. There was no Kingdom Hearts 3 or Final Fantasy 7 Remake this year to win me over. I find myself gravitating towards the indies more and more for this reason, but I’ll dive deeper into them in a later article! (I’ll try to bring you a top 5 or a Top 10 indies at Gamescom if I find the time).
So let’s skip ahead a few hours and I’m off to grab some dinner with a group of Belgian developers from Appeal, Demute, Rablo Games and more. A few of them decide to go sing Karaoke, even though our feet are wrecked and our voices have been destroyed from shouting over the gamescom noise, but hey, it’s time to have some fun! A few beers and tequila shots later, and we’re singing ‘I want to break free’ in a bar far away from our hotels, but we’re having a lot of fun and will probably regret this in the morning (I did!)
Day Two – Bonaparte and a not so “bon” party
On day two, I had a ton of business meetings. Most of the details are still confidential or won’t particularly interest readers. However, my morning walk to the Koelnmesse was painful—my feet hadn’t fully recovered from the first day(s). With no time for breakfast (I’d slept until 8:30), I rushed to shower and attend my first meeting at 9:30.
I met up with some great people, grabbed a bite to eat at like 1PM, not yet knowing that sandwich would be the one and only thing I’d eat that day, but we’ll loop back to that later…
My sole press meeting of the day came via Cosmocover, and again, they had a “secret” game to show me. I like the gamble this offers and it’s exciting, but there is always a risk with these things that you realize after 5-10 minutes you’re not interested and it would be rude to walk off.
Luckily, this wasn’t the case with Bonaparte: A Mechanized Revolution. It’s a Canadian-made turn-based strategy game based on France’s revolution. Full of historical accuracies and figures like Marquis de Lafayette, Maximilien Robespierre, the sansculottes with their pitchforks and… the giant mech you ride in.
I feel like that final phrase needs some further explanation. You play as a fictive alternate universe version of Bonaparte, with a different first name (and gender if you choose) but with all the same options presented to you (kind of) as the famous French leader. The biggest exception is that this universe has giant mechanical titans you can use or face in battle. I’ll leave it up to you if that either gets you more interested or turns you off, but in my case, it’s closer to the former and I quite liked the idea.
I asked (as I should) if the game is coming to Xbox at some point, but it’s currently PC focus only with Mouse & Keyboard controls, but who knows!
After dozens upon dozens of impromptu talks with indie developers throughout the day, I decided to make my way to the Diablo IV exclusive party (invite only) because it seemed like something cool and reminded me of the Gamescom fanfest I once had with Jim & Thierry from LifeIsXbox, and I kind of wanted to recreate that awesome moment in time.
Little did I know that the “27 min” walk was closer to a 45 minute march and when I arrived, I was greeted with a queue (as if I hadn’t seen enough of those at Gamescom itself). I talked myself into waiting it out, but after another 45minutes of not budging at all (or hardly noticeable) someone from the organisation came out to warn us that the maximum capacity of the venue had been reached.
I was a bit bummed out about this, especially since the event was invite-only so you’d think they knew how many people to expect, but that sadly wasn’t the case. At this point, it was close to 22:00 and I still hadn’t eaten anything other than that singular sandwich for lunch and I saw my dreams of tasty diablo-themed food sink into a pitfall straight into hell.
My sphincter had also been begging me for about an hour to find a toilet, so I ordered an Uber and went back to the hotel. I called my wife for over an hour while multitasking (this means I was on the porcelain throne) and decided, against better judgement to write this article recap instead of going out for a bite to eat. I’ll probably regret this in the morning.
Tomorrow is my last day of Gamescom but I’ll spend most of it at the Indie Arena Booth and I’m also looking forward to playing Little Nightmares 3 (won’t be able to talk about it for some time though!).
Robby lives and breathes video games. When he’s not playing them, he’s talking about them on social media or convincing other people to pick up a controller themselves. He’s online so often, he could practically list the internet as his legal domicile. Belgian games-industry know-it-all.
