We Sent Our Man Super Joon to Visit EGX This Year And He Loved It!

This was my first experience of going to EGX or anything like it and I was very excited to check out the new games as well as the other things on offer.

From the pictures I had seen from others on twitter for the Thursday and Friday this had only heightened my excitement and couldn’t wait to get there. Luckily with my press pass I was able to be one of the first ones in.

What I should have done, if I had known at the time, was gone straight for The Division and played that, however I decided to have a walk around first and get my baring’s. While sliding in to play some games on the way.

The first game I did play, which was near the entrance was Splatoon, which the team I was on, won and the guys from Nintendo UK made a rather big fuss about. Which was nice, until I was leaving and saw that we were up against little kids. Didn’t feel like such a big victory after seeing that. But for my first go on the game I was quite proud. Although I didn’t like the gyroscope viewing from the gamepad. That caused a fair bit of confusion at the start.

After this, I play my first of the to be released games in Plants V Zombies 2. Wow, I loved the first game, but playing the second was awesome. The character I was, which I think was The Imp, was amazing. His all round game felt perfect to play with, and one of my friends who played later on played as this character as well and said how good he was.

I only got to play this once, so I’m not sure what the other characters were like. But the game overall felt smooth to play and felt like it had the right balance. I know this was probably something EA have been working on to get right for the show, but it didn’t feel like a game that was still around 6 months till release. I have now placed this on my Day One list to buy.

The next game I had the pleasure the playing was Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. Since the fiasco with the Unity release last year, my expectations of the AC games have gone downhill, and unfortunately after playing this one, I’m not too hopeful for this year’s iteration.

I know there’s still time for them to tidy things up, but there were glitches happening which I was experiencing from Unity, so it’s one of those where maybe they’re not sure of how to get rid of the glitch?

One of the glitches I did experience was with the throwing knives. I threw one at a guard, it hit the guard and killed him, but the knife was still showing on the outside of the body, just floating there in no mans land. Awks.

Also, that annoying thing where the character won’t move when your climbing despite there being somewhere to continue climbing on, that happened as well, and took up valuable playing time as well.

The next game I got to play, which is one of the ones I wanted to try to see whether I would be getting this when its released was Just Cause 3. I liked the look of the game from the trailers I had seen, but wasn’t sure whether it would be something that could hook me in to keep playing or get used too.

All I will say it, what an amazing game it is. Beautiful, and so much fun to play. Using the grapple to attach it to someone and then attach again to a petrol station and watch it blow up is simply amazing, to grapple a cow… One of the funniest things I’ve seen. Wing suiting across the world to get to your objective feels fluid and awesome, and once you get used to using the grapple and pulling yourself along, it only gets better. This again is going to be a day one purchase for me when it comes out on December 1st.

There was one issue when playing, it didn’t happen to me, but my wife, when she went to get into a car, she fell out of the world and into water, and could only swim around, by the time she managed to fight her way out of the glitch it was time to end. She did grapple a cow though, so all was good with her.

Homefront 2… This is one game I have been waiting for since the first one. I loved the first one when that was released by KAOS and THQ, I loved the ingenuity of the first game and the freshness it brought to FPSs at the time, especially the introduction of vehicle warfare.

I enjoyed Homefront 2, there is a different feel to the game, but that’s probably down to a different studio creating it and using a different engine etc.

The game looks visually stunning, and plays really well, again this is probably the same as PvZ2 above, in that this portion has probably been specially worked on for these events.

There were dips in the framerate when the game was saving a checkpoint, but again with it being pre-beta and still heavily in development I can forgive this, I just hope it’s something that will be sorted when the full game is released.

When playing the above games, it’s amazing how polished they actually looked, and I’m including Assassins Creed in that, as the game was visually beautiful, it was just those silly in game glitches that spoilt it for me.

These were the only games that I managed to get to play because of the size of the queues, I wanted to spend more of my time going round as much as I could rather than sticking to one or 2 things and queueing for hours.

I really wanted to play The Division, but with the queues at around 4 hours, that would have taken up most of my day and for me that was too long to wait for one game.

The event in itself was very busy, the floors were packed out and each booth was always busy with queues of at least an hour.

For any gamer who can go, I would highly recommend it as the amount you get to see and do it unreal, and the freebies you get are amazing. Although I would suggest saving a lot of money as there is so much you will want to buy in regards to Tees and accessories.

We met some amazing people there as well who we talk to regularly on Xbox Live party chats, and it was nice to be able to finally put faces to the voices that we speak to so often.

We converted my brother in law into a gamer and he walked out of the Event with an Xbox One, my wife who didn’t think she would enjoy it absolutely loved the event, so all in all I think it was a successful trip and a thoroughly enjoyable one as well.

So enjoyable in fact that we are now planning for next year and can’t wait to go!