Tides of Annihilation - 40 Minutes of Gameplay Hit the Web
Roughly 40 unbroken minutes of Tides of Annihilation hit the web on Saturday, which is more of this game than we have seen in the previous eighteen months put together. The footage comes from a press session in China, and it is the same build that goes public at gamescom in two weeks. Add up every clip currently doing the rounds and you are close to a full hour.
The knights do half the fighting
Combat is the hook here, and it is a weird one. Gwendolyn does not swing alone, she summons spectral Knights of the Round Table and attacks alongside them. The studio talks about more than ten knights to recruit into your own order, four of them fielded at once in two pairs you flip between mid fight. Watch the footage and the whole rhythm of a fight hangs off that swap, not off memorised strings.
Walking buildings, and thirty bosses behind them
The city is the other half of the pitch. Modern London, torn open by an invasion from another world, with Arthurian legend holding the whole thing together and Avalon bleeding through the wreckage. You play Gwendolyn, the last human left standing, hunting for her family. Eclipse Glow Games revealed all this at a State of Play back in February 2025, then went very quiet. What the new footage adds are the Colossal Knights, walking buildings that patrol the streets and have to be climbed before you find anything worth hitting. Over 30 unique bosses are promised. On video the scale lands. Whether it plays as a fight or as a guided climb is the one thing no stream can settle.
Cologne settles it
The first public hands on runs at gamescom from August 26 to 30, hall 6, booth B-050, with branching routes, several kinds of encounter and a few of the bigger set pieces. The night before, on August 25, a fresh trailer airs during Opening Night Live. Game director and co-CEO Ary Chen says that after years in development the team mainly wants to see how people react when they touch it for the first time. Confidence or nerves, take your pick. There is still no release date, just a coming soon on Steam, with PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC versions planned, the PC one running Unreal Engine 5 with path tracing and DLSS 4.
My honest read after those 40 minutes: it looks tremendous, and since Black Myth: Wukong nobody sensible writes off a big budget Chinese action game on principle. The Chengdu studio has over 150 people off action series like For Honor, and it shows. What I want to know is whether the knight system still feels fresh at boss number thirty, because spectacle wears off and systems do not.
Have you watched the footage yet? Drop a comment and tell me whether the spectral knights look like a full game to you or a very good trailer.