At Gamescom a few weeks ago, I had an appointment to see Oculus to try out the soon-to-be-released retail version of the Rift, which I was interested to see but not exactly zinging with excitement about.

Last year, before E3, and back when Dambuster Studios was still called Crytek Nottingham and hadn't been sold to Deep Silver, I saw a presentation of Homefront: The Revolution in action. I thought it looked fantastic, like an open-world version of Half-Life 2's City 17.

For two years, we've wondered what Quantum Break actually is. Having seen it, I'm now worried that Quantum Break is a bland-looking shooter interrupted with 20-minute episodes of bad television at the end of every chapter. It should be so much better.

You can always rely on the Halo series to have great music, and even though it was a piecefrom the original game, hearing it kick in as Master Chief and the other three members of Blue Team hurtled through space towards a Covenant-infested ship in Halo 5 did make me go all gooey inside.

Mafia 3 made its first appearance this week at Gamescom, and beyond the scene-setting first trailer (which you can see below), the team at 2K Czech had a half-hour of city-roaming and third-person shooting to show off. I had mixed feelings about what I saw; its setting is great, the music and ambience are fantastic, but it also looked like exactly the same kind of open-world crime game that I've played many times before.

Look, I didn't like Dark Souls 2 all that much, alright? There was something missing. Something that Dark Souls 3 appears to have. That thing is majesty.

With the release of Windows 10, one of Microsoft's new headline features is Cross-Play between Xbox One and PC players. This isn't the company's first foray into cross platform play.

Since announcing Xbox Game Preview (Xbox's version of Early Access) at E3, Microsoft has had "a mad rush from the game development community" to be part of its pilot program, says the company's head of publishing Shannon Loftis -- even Microsoft itself plans to release its own first-party games through the service.

Video: Behold, the debut trailer for Sims 4's next expansion pack, called Get Together. The pack features a new, European-themed destination and copious amounts of partying. It will be available in November.

At Microsoft's Gamescom conference today, Deep Silver Dambuster has given us a glimpse of the singleplayer campaign in their upcoming open-world shooter, Homefront: The Revolution, along with a rather nice CG trailer, seen above.

Briefly: Some good news coming out of Gamescom for fans of city builders: Cities: Skylines from Paradox Interactive is coming to Xbox One next year.

Quantum Break has been delayed a few times, but in addition to a bunch of new gameplay footage, we finally have a release date: April 5, 2016.