The term reactivity crops up a lot as we sit down to play Alpha Protocol: the rep from developer Obsidian is obsessed with the word and all it means. This is because beneath the third-person gunplay everything you do in the game affects the overall outcome, as well as how your character develops. ...

Last year's Championship Manager was a big step forward as the series makes a determined effort to reclaim its pre-Football Manager glory days. While many aspects were improved, it was still a tad cumbersome, which is why the aim this year has been to improve information flow and make it more engaging for the user. ...

The voice of Gearbox’s founder Randy Pitchford cuts through the air: “These players were coming up to the crest of a hill and this wall of flame shot up. Some dude emerged and had an Alien-style flamethrower under his arm, and I was like: ‘What the f**k’s that?’” ...

What you've got here is basically Mass Effect, set in a Star Wars universe and massively multiplayer-enabled. So when you're not talking to a human-controlled player, you get fully-voiced cutscenes and interactions, with the same conversation system that Mass Effect uses so convincingly. This applies to every non-player character, making this the first fully-voiced MMO. Fact. ...

Aliens Vs Predator is being shown behind closed doors at Gamescom in Cologne, demonstrating Alien gameplay for the first time. Here's what we thought.

Unlike the rather traditional-looking mercenary gameplay - which looks like Doom 3 with pulse rifles - the Alien side of things is looking very different.

Aesthetically, the game is much more stylised in this mode. The fish-eye lens effect, coupled with some neat discolouration and ...

It's still early doors at Gamescom and we're already dripping with sweat. That's not the German beer sweats though, we've just sat down with Infinity Ward to see Modern Warfare II. These are real excite-sweats.

IW played through an entire mission in the game's Special Ops mode, a new mode that throws you into small, bite-sized missions where all hell breaks loose for a few minutes - enough time to make you sweat out without the hassle ...

Assassin's Creed II looks absolutely gorgeous. The demo being shown to press at Gamescom this week sports superb draw distance, detailed crowds in the streets and it's all running silky smooth on Xbox 360.

This particular demo takes place in the Florence area of town, kicking off with protagonist Ezio performing a familiar 100ft leap from the top of a building into a hay car below.

This time around the crowds in the sci-fi, ...

As long as there have been MMOs, there’ve been dice. Not actual in-game dice, mind you; instead, we’ve been looking over our characters’ shoulders while virtual dice are rolled behind the scenes to determine our accuracy. Although skill-based first-person combat has crept into the genre with match-based games like CrimeCraft, real-time FPS combat hasn’t made its way into a truly open-world MMO like WoW or Champions Online. ...

Surviving a near extinction level event in an ‘Ark’, you are thawed out by an untimely earthquake to find you’ve been woken too early, and the world is a wasteland populated by mutants, scavengers, and tailors who used to make clothes for Judge Dredd’s Cursed Earth storyline. ...

Ubisoft had never intended for anyone to play Conviction’s E3 demo, so it’s easy for us to completely break it within about four minutes of starting the game. We’re standing in a room, surrounded by armed men emptying round after round into Sam while he clutches bad guy Kobin by the throat and soaks up bullets like Robocop – while a forced cut-scene makes him invincible. ...