It never feels like it from our perspective here in North America, but gamescom is the world's biggest gaming convention. Attendance averages in the few hundred thousands yearly, dwarfing E3 by multiple times. It's Euro-centricity tends to motivate publishers and developers from the surrounding area to make bigger splashes there. Between August 20th and 24th of this year, we will have out eyes and ears open for the oncoming deluge of game info pouring out of Cologne, Germany.

The long-running, Dungeons and Dragons-themed MMO, Neverwinter, has been basking in the success of what has been its biggest expansion launch ever. Earlier this year, players got to explore one of the most iconic locations in the Forgotten Realms: Undermountain. Besides the new area, the game got a tons of other quality of life updates and re-balances that has really changed the tempo of the game in a good way. Now, Arc Games expands on this framework with their next expansion: Uprising.

Hearthstone has come a long way from the in-house side project it started as. It’s consistently the most watched card game on Twitch and it’s intensely popular at the competitive level. It also seems to be an endless font of new content. Now, the game's 12th expansion, Saviors of Uldum, looks to spice up the 5 year old game with new keywords, card types, and story.

Nowhere Prophet, the new card-based rogue-like RPG from Sharkbomb Games, can appear daunting from the outside. When you start your first trek to the infamous Crypt, you could be overwhelmed with all the information being thrown at you all at once. The in-game tutorial does an OK job at harnessing it all, but a little help is always useful. That's where we - and specifically, the following beginners guide - come in. Hopefully by the end of the reading, you'll have more than enough information to navigate the dangers of Soma.

Soma was jagged and dangerous world, even before The Crash. Many years after it, this wasteland is ruled by petty warlords and berserk machines. Your convoy believes that you can take them to the safety of the mysterious Crypt. Their hope rests in your leadership. This is Nowhere Prophet.

Phoenix Labs runaway hit, Dauntless, will launch the game's first large expansion today. Entitled "Fortune and Glory", the update will bring a new challenge mode, new cosmetic gear, and a new Hunt Pass to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and the Epic Store.

Next week, Riot sponsors their first ever tournament for their month-old League of Legends game mode, Teamfight Tactics. The Teamfight Tactics Showdown will take place between July 17-18, and gather 64 popular streamers to duke it out for an opportunity at a piece of a $125,000 prize pool.

AGEOD teams up with another iconic name in strategy games, Slitherine, for Field of Glory: Empires (FOGE). This spin-off should not be confused as a sequel to the main Field of Glory series. Empires is its own more grand, high level take on battles in 300BC. As the Roman Republic, your goal is to conquer Italia through military might and cunning.

There is an interesting sub-genre arising out of the development sim space that puts automation front and center. The goal isn't just to harvest resources and expand, but to do so as efficiently as possible. At peak play, these sorts of games involved developing expansive supply chains that resemble Rube Goldberg machines on steroids. It would almost be relaxing, if it wasn't also so overwhelming. Kubifaktorium, the latest from developer Mirko Seithe, at least makes it look less threatening.

There might be no more popular period of time to make a video game about than World War II. Maybe because it has all the ingredients for a good game: easily identifiable bad guys, plenty of myth-making to exploit and make fiction out of, and an incredible technological revolution rife with new toys to play with on the battlefield. Many games like to take a lot of license to embellish on the high's and lows of WWII. Steel Division 2 is not that game, and that's because there is painstaking effort involved in making the most accurate depiction of the Eastern Front ever in the Steel Division games.

So if I told you that a video game existed where you needed to stop an evil intergalactic bird creature from destroying the universe, you'd probably say something like "well, that sounds like a video game, alright."  What if I told you that this bird creature - lets call him Glorkon - has gained this universe-destroying power from the energy he'd sucking out of your dogs that he kidnapped. Oh also, he gets that power from jamming the dogs into his eye sockets. Lost yet? Well, that's Trover Saves the Universe for you.

Between the Han and Jin dynasties, China would find itself in a swirl of conflict the likes of which the country had never seen before. The tale of the dominant Wei, Shu, and Wu states has been written in novels, made into television dramas and big blockbuster movies, and has been the focus of some of the longest running video game series in history. The Yellow Turban Rebellion and the resulting Romance of the Three Kingdoms gets immortalized in yet another way this week, with its own entry into the Total War franchise.

Considering how popular simulation games are nowadays, it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that a game exists about buying beat up houses, renovating them, and selling them for profit. House Flipper is an apparently lucrative one that has found a dedicated audience since its launch back in 2018. It's been almost a year exactly since House Flipper's last big DLC offering, Apocalypse Flipper, and fans have been eagerly awaiting new heaps to be turned into treasures. The wait ends with Garden Flipper.

After several months in hiatus, Dontnod's Life is Strange 2 is back with a new episode. The launch trailer for Episode 3: Wasteland, which debuted last week, suggests that the solace that the Diaz Brothers find in the wilderness of California is temporary.

There exists a competition where folks dawn armor, grab shields and blunted swords, and beat the crap out of each other. Something about experience of doing close combat the way the old Europeans did it ages ago. There’s an appeal to swing a big sword to slay the enemy with. Something even valiant about it, according to my reptile brain. That curiosity dies as soon as I remember that the people you’d be hitting with swords will probably hit me back.

I think i’ll get my swordsmanship kick elsewhere. Maybe in the form of Mordhau, the multiplayer, medieval, melee game by new developer, Triternion. From a successful Kickstarter campaign, to a long alpha test, Mordhau is ready to charge its way to a full launch.