Good afternoon dear campers, and finally I return to Ooh Sometimes to actually do some writing about something instead of pimping out the gaming videos that recently have taken a lot of the time that ordinarily would have been given to writing about rubbish as and when I generally felt like.

While sadly for some it’s more games rubbish instead of remarking more about how the world is a dark and nasty place where people who take drugs and stick their genitals in dead animals to then become Prime Minister, this post will let you know about some of the games which was on show at the Eurogamer (or EGX) Expo 2015, this year being hosted in Birmingham since Earl’s Court was closed to make way for more flats that no-one in the UK can afford.

For this post, we will be purely remarking about the games played / watched over during the day which are worth a mention here be it either good or bad, and there will be a second part to this line-up in a follow up post tomorrow.

For now, we begin with;

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (Or London Reskin)

No….just no…..

Now after last year’s disaster of a launch where it was universally slammed for such terrible performance across all platforms, that they then cancelled the season pass for Assassin’s Creed Unity and gave everyone who bought it another game from their catalogue, all the while taking a hit on their share price, Ubisoft had to come back with something bloody good in order to remove doubts about this year’s instalment, now set in London.

Based on the PlayStation 4 demo at EGX, I have no reservation in saying this;

STAY THE F**K AWAY FROM THIS.

It was pretty clear that very little had in fact changed at all, save for the fact that it came across as just being a Map Pack with different characters. You played a female assassin within the demo, which makes a nice change considering it’s not happened that often in the series so far, the only true game being Assassin’s Creed Liberation, which came out on the Vita the same time as AC3, and then that got ported to everything else, in an attempt just to make the cash back from not getting much on the Vita.

You were attempting to kill some woman in the Tower of London for some reason, and then once you scaled the wall, and got to a certain point, the game presented you with “opportunities” to free someone to help you, bribe someone or do some other thing.

My god, someone’s fallen over onto this knife…..

These were all optional to help you get to the woman in question, but ridiculously, you didn’t have to pay attention at all, as basically you can just turn yourself invisible (yep, they’ve now nicked a Klingon cloaking device it appears) and just sneak around and then just batter guards to then wander past.

What happened was I just ran down some spiral stairs, threw down a few smoke bombs and then instead of a sleek, ninja like kill of the target. I literally just hit her with a cane till the button choice on the PS4 changed to execute. Then we got a cut-scene with bad clipping, dealing with story which makes no sense then the demo ended.

I cannot stress enough, that this demo pretty much put me off putting money down on the game that actually I had been playing year after year, and if I were to play it in future, something massive has to change. It’s tired and frankly I had far more fun with Black Flag, where I got to be a pirate too.

Star Wars: BattleFront

Is the force strong in this one, or is it the wiff from that bloke over there?

EA sure made a strong appearance with a Tie Fighter on Show and row after row of PlayStation 4’s ready for everyone to try it. Truly this was one of the games with massive pull for sure. From seeing others playing, it certainly looks the dogs googlies in terms of how smooth it was playing, but given it was on a show floor, latency and other issues was not an factor as you would find on the internet.

Sadly there were no PCs set-up to give it a try and the queue heaved even (the picture was taken at 10:15am) an hour before most other people would be let in, which in itself tells you how many people are looking forward to this, there was no real chance of playing the game without loosing at least an hour or so to get 10 minutes with it.

But the same day, it was in fact announced that there will in fact be an Open Beta in October for all platforms and therefore this then dropped off the list to play and we will give that a go during the 4 day open event as that pretty much will make or break the view of the game, especially given that it is in fact going to be close to how it’s going to play on Day 1, despite the beta title. Given what was said about it from E3 earlier in the year, it’s more vital to know if it’s worth spending the money ahead of release.

Square Enix

Mmm….sexy

Rather strangely, despite the lies, treachery and deceit surrounding some of the preorder tiers for one of their games and another being delayed until March 2016 due to needing more development time, Square Enix were making the most of the space with Just Cause 3 taking a good deal of space to host a tournament.

The gameplay being shown during the 10 minutes you had to cause as much destruction as possible and do whatever you liked, did show that it was going to be a cracker. It was running on PCs clearly, given the mice and keyboards tied to each machine, but with the fact you were forced again to play with a controller, it was sometimes a bit difficult to get a full idea of really some of the crazy shit you could do.

It was running pretty damn well, got to be fair, and come December, it may be worth seeing if it’s raised its game way above the wonderful silliness of Just Cause 2.

Hitman and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided were there but only in demonstration form only which is a shame as it would have been grand to see how well they would be faring at this point first hand. The demos they had to show where mainly the same from E3 earlier this year, so one could argue it was a let down to not see too much which may have been new. But despite that, it was grand to see them in a little theater and of course both are looking remarkably good right now.

While the chap for Deus Ex wasn’t looking to be too talkative, I did take some time to ask the Hitman PR rep from Denmark about a few aspects;

• First of all, it does carry on from the events of Hitman: Absolution but it’s not 100% needed to know what happened during that. Given that Diana is back as your handler, it will be curious to see what happened next.
• The game modes from Absolution will return for sure, as contracts was a great way to replay the game and make it far more challenging.
• If you were happy with the PC version of absolution in terms of how well it ran etc, you should be very happy with the new game as it should be as well optimised.
• With the confusion over exactly what the game is going to be on release in terms of missions and locations, some news was coming out next week to tell everyone what will happen in terms of additional content etc.This may confirm what the base game will provide and then what new content will be releasing as time moves on. He did say that a new location would be released about once a month along with new targets every couple of weeks in a given location. Given the details in theory will be coming shortly, I guess it will be a case of watching out for the news when it’s released to the games media.

Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide

OK, where the hell did this come from?

NO ZOMBIES! NOOOOOOOOO….ok, we’ll play it.

One of the best things of an expo is finding a gem of a game you didn’t expect. Normally this is in the various indie zones, but this was running on a few PCs at of all stands, the SCAN Computers / nVIDIA stand where it was just being used to show off the uber priced PCs that SCAN were attempting to sell to everyone and at first, I honestly thought it was just a tech demo.

Turned out it was a full on game which was being shown by FatShark Games out of Sweden, set in the Warhammer universe when the world has gone to poop and the place was being over run by large rat people things.

For the record, I had no interest in Warhammer. I bought some games set in the universe on Steam during a sale and to this day, they remain unplayed. A waste, certainly. So ordinarily, I would not bother.

Here’s the thing; It’s basically Left 4 Dead in the Warhammer universe and it’s done really really well. To the point where I actually am considering just paying the £22 quid for it on Steam right now.

It was a hell of a lot of fun to stick with 4 chracters from the Warhammer Universe roaming through a town, fighting off rats here there and everywhere, sometimes, being completely overwhelmed by numbers, and all the time, just using axes, shields, knives and other melee weapons to boot to fend them off, along with longer range weapons and it was fantastic.

The characters as well seemed to have been nicely flushed out in differences and they occasionally said strange and funny dialogue which broke up the combat nicely. I played as an elf dude, with two knives, a bow and arrow and occasionally picking up a bomb to throw out. there was a moment where a large group of armoured rats came over and I just threw the bomb while the group was trying to defend against them, took them all out. It was just so satisfying.

How well this will run on the internet and on the normal PC, we will find out from October 5th where the beta begins for a few days before a general release on October 23rd. But for sure, this has my attention.

To Be Continued….

Join us again tomorrow, where part 2 will show some more to watch out for. Till then, toddles!