This year, Farrago was lucky enough to attend the world’s biggest gaming expo, E3, in Los Angeles. After several days of roaming the show floor and attending press conferences, we’ve summed up our favourite new announcements and demos on display at E3.

This game looks phenomenal. Yes, it is highly derivative from the Arkham games, but there also seems to be enough originality on display that it gets away with it. The trailer shown at the Sony press conference finally gave us a look at the villains who will be on display and the demo on the show floor hinted at even more. The demo lasted around 15–20 minutes set in a limited section of the open world, with various different paths you could take before the demo wound up.

One thing that everyone will mention, and with good reason, is that the web swinging in this game feels fantastic. Once you get the controls down pat, swinging around New York is a delight. Likewise, the combat takes a bit of getting used to, but is equally as pleasing. Again, it does take a lot of its cues from the Batman: Arkham games, but it also seems to have slightly more depth and variety than Batman does—there were so many new combos I found each time I engaged, and I know I didn’t use Spidey’s kit to its full potential. This game is definitely one to pick up on launch if you’re a Spider-Man fan—the game is developed by Insomniac Games and available on 7 September exclusively on PS4.

Revealed during Sony’s press conference but not available to demo on the show floor, The Last of Us Part II is the follow up to Naughty Dog’s acclaimed 2013 game The Last of Us. The game looks absolutely stunning—the footage shown at the press conference made big promises. The animations look flawless, almost surreal, and everything looks so fluid that it was hard to tell what was gameplay and what was a cutscene at times. There’s still no release date for the game, which means a 2019 release is still unlikely. It might be more realistic to wait for E3 2019 for a release date announcement.

In what seemed to be the only major announcement from Nintendo at this year’s E3, Super Smash Bros is back with a new game on the Nintendo Switch. The biggest part of the announcement was that Ultimate will include every single fighter from past Smash games, which brings the roster up to a massive 68 playable characters, the most from any Smash game in history. There are also a bunch of mechanical and balance changes to the game, but the verdict is still out on whether those changes will be welcomed or rejected by the competitive Smash community. Super Smash Bros Ultimate is out on 7 December exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.

Forza Horizon 4 is the eleventh instalment in the Forza series and the fourth in the Horizon subset, this time set in the United Kingdom. The Horizon series are open-world racing games and generally more arcade-y than the mainline Motorsport series, and this one looks to be no exception. The two biggest changes in Horizon 4 are the inclusion of in-game seasons—which change the weather and allow new areas and challenges to open up depending on which season it is—and the addition of other real players in the game world. Whenever you play, you’ll also be playing with a select number of other players who are also driving around the map and completing races and the like. You can interact with players or friends and challenge them in-game with ease. Forza Horizon 4 is available on Xbox and Windows 10 from 2 October.

Another PS4 exclusive game with no release date, but boy does this game look beautiful. Set on the island of Tsushima, you play as the last samurai on the island during the first Mongol invasion of Japan. The game wasn’t available to demo on the show floor, however we did see some gameplay in the press conference, which looked visually stunning. The verdict is still out on whether the gameplay will be as satisfying as the visuals, but I imagine this will be settled at next year’s E3. Don’t get your hopes up to play this at home anytime soon.

Hoo boy, there is a lot of hype behind this game. Rumours were circulating that a trailer would close out Microsoft’s press conference and despite those rumours, you could hear the anticipation in the room once the trailer started rolling. Cyberpunk 2077 is the next game in development by the acclaimed developers of the famous Witcher series. Set in a cyberpunk sci-fi future, as the title would suggest, the game will be a first-person RPG with shooter elements. Demos of the game were shown to the biggest gaming outlets behind closed doors at E3 this year, but for now all we have is the delicious trailer shown at the Xbox press conference. Watch it and weep at the lack of a release date.

Super Mario Party looks like a lot of fun and will be great to muck around with. Likewise, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is set to be a solid continuation of the rebooted Tomb Raider series. Those who enjoyed Cuphead will be happy to hear there’s new DLC on the way with Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course, and those who enjoyed Fallout 4 but wanted it to be an online multiplayer game should look into Fallout 76, because that’s basically all the game is. Halo: Infinite was another huge announcement, but there isn’t really much to talk about yet—we know next to nothing beyond what was shown in the dramatic reveal trailer. Death Stranding looks as strange as ever—we did get to see some gameplay in the new trailer, but that hasn’t really helped anyone figure out what the game is actually about.

So, those are our favourite announcements of E3 2018! It’s hard to cover everything on one list, but we tried to give a variety of different games and genres so that there was something for everyone. With so many games announced without release dates, expect many of the games listed above to also be shown at next year’s E3. Until then, keep an eye out for more demos at Gamescom in Cologne, which usually bridges the gap between E3 each year.