At Gamescom 2026 in Cologne, Germany, we got a chance to go hands-on with Tides of Annihilation. With its one-hour demo (also open to consumers), we could take on two boss battles or work through the story mode. Developed and published by Eclipse Glow Games, this Arthurian legend title is ambitious, to say the least.
If you’re unfamiliar with the game, in Tides of Annihilation, you are Gwendolyn, a survivor of a great calamity caused by an invasion from The Otherworld. As Gwendolyn, you traverse a broken London that blends fantasy and reality, all while enemies from The Otherworld continue to decimate her world.
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As the lone survivor, the fog that accompanies The Otherworld brings nothing but destruction in its wake, leaving the level designs to move from modern day to desolate ruins. Gwendolyn’s goal is to figure out the mysteries of The Otherworld, the reason for the invasion, and uncover the truth about the catastrophe to save her family and ultimately the world in the process.
Tides of Annihilation is shaping a new world around Arthurian legends.
Steeped in Arthurian legend, the game explores a breach between fantasy and reality, pushing the player through King Arthur’s story in a way we haven’t exactly seen before. Throughout the game, Gwendolyn will meet over a dozen Knights of the Round Table who use English folklore to define their place in her journey and how they interact with combat.
Each of the Knights that you encounter offers new and different combat dynamics to take advantage of with vanguard charges, explosive damage combos, and buffed defenses; the use of the Knights is pivotal to success in boss battles, and understanding when to use them is a level of combat strategy that elevates standard action-adventure game combat.
While loadouts matter for weapons, setting your Knights is just as important, especially for tactical needs. The goal with each of the Knights is to be able to effectively create combos with their powers and elevate your damage output or fortify your defenses.
The Tides of Annihilation Gamescom Demo offered players a glimpse of how the loadouts, weapons, and skills interact. It’s clear that the game will have ample customization options for cosmetic armor, stat-based armor, weaponry, and Knights, but the loadout we were given at the beginning of the demo stayed consistent the entire time (except for the cosmetic items we were able to find easily in chests). So while I can say that customization and player agency in building Gwendolyn will be there, how it is executed is something we’ll have to wait and see to form a solid verdict on.
Tides of Annihilation also pits players against bosses called Colossal Knights. As big as mountains, the Colossal Knights cross the boundaries between worlds and, while intimidating, also showcase the game’s attention to detail and gorgeous character design far better than Gwendolyn or any of the beautiful women that have dominated the trailers.
To put it simply, every part of this game is gorgeous. From the character designs to multiple outfits and the environments. There is a level of high-fidelity visuals that don’t even get close to losing sharpness in the heat of battle, which makes it easy to appreciate the game’s art direction, even if some of the camera angles in scenes are more attentive to the lead character’s cleavage than the rest of the beautiful world that the studio has crafted.
At times, the game’s lore can feel overstuffed. There are a lot of names that get thrown at you, and as a take on Arthurian legend, the game doesn’t often give you footholds to rest on if you don’t know the source material. A world of magic, the Knights in Tides of Annihilation act like Stands from Hirohiko Araki’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. While the visual designs are interesting, it’s their combat utility that really pays off.
You see, there are moments where I questioned exactly what Tides of Annihilation is as a game. With so much going on, it was difficult to track the narrative choices and the lore itself. Even when learning combat in the opening tutorial, the game felt like it was trying to be everything for everyone at once. The snowball effect of scope creep felt like a feature, not a bug, in Tides of Annihilation, but it also muddied how I processed what I played.
Combat is Eclipse Glow Games’ strength, and in the Tides of Annihilation demo, it shines.
Then, I played the boss battles and everything changed. The combat that I had been slightly ornery about clicked in a large-scale fight, and the combat design became even more beautiful than the game’s protagonist. What stands out is how the game positions itself against current games in the genre.
The use of the Knights is distinctive, but it’s the high-skill aerial combos, dodges, and parries, and stringing them together, that makes the game’s kinetic nature click into place. One step further, the verticality of boss battles adds depth to the field, making it clear this isn’t just a simple formula to solve but a continued investment in the fights.
Each boss I faced had multiple phases. Learning the new combat elements while simultaneously remembering previous ones pushed me to see each boss fight and each phase as new encounters in and of themselves. And it works. There is something to be said for designing good combat in a game. Something that locks you in instead of letting you press one button to auto-combo. The parry and dodge systems are telegraphed with red and yellow, respectively.
The mechanical separation of the two, combined with the vertical element of combat, creates interesting sequences. For the most part, the telegraph windows were easy to time, but one boss is covered in red light, shooting red projectile attacks or making red tremors on the floor, which made it difficult to spot telegraphs. Ultimately, the intuitive nature of the Tides of Annihilation’s combat immediately made me forgive all of the qualms I had as I was exploring.
Tides of Annihilation has a shot at capturing audiences looking for complex combat that doesn’t rely on difficulty.
Yes, that’s how good fighting bosses in this game feels. While I was overwhelmed with the lore and even the systems themselves (which is something I don’t say lightly as a 4x Paradox Strategy player), boss battles clicked everything into place. There is a lot to love in Tides of Annihilation’s approach to combat and how quickly it goes from convoluted to compelling.
Add in the fact that the game cuts no corners in highlighting how much the team at Eclipse Glow Games is leveraging Unreal Engine 5, and a score composed by Caisheng Bo that feels every bit as epic as the fight you’re experiencing; it’s a game I want to play again. That said, there is no denying that Tides of Annihilation’s glimpse of its narrative looks more like story beats that are in place to build out combat. My biggest questions are how big it intends to be and how many more components it will add before release.
Tides of Annihilation feels good to play, and the number of systems can feel either overwhelming or intriguing depending on what kind of player is behind the sticks. Still, Tides of Annihilation has a shot at capturing audiences looking for complex combat that doesn’t necessarily rely on difficulty, but on understanding the combat system on its own terms.
Tides of Annihilation doesn’t have a release date or window currently set.
