Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2023 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Granny fever Hunt: Showdown added an elderly woman to its roster, and fans are going ga-ga to be in the granny gang. Past words Google is to roll out passkey tech – a replacement for passwords. Cheat this Activision’s Ricochet anti-cheat system is now tormenting Call of Duty cheaters. Watt? Cryptocurrency mining in the US sucked down more energy than every computer in the entire country last year. Redfail Arkane’s vamp-’em-up arrived to disappointing review scores. This is fine Geoffrey Hinton, ‘the Godfather of Deep Learning’, has resigned from Google. LOWS…

Today, Michael Hüll is a senior level designer at MachineGames. He cut his level designing teeth elsewhere however, with multiplayer maps. When he was playing GoldenEye with his friends back in the days of the N64, he never suspected that he’d eventually be designing levels played by others with their friends. The ability to play with others in the same virtual environment was always attractive to him. “I guess my first love in games was Duke Nukem 3D”, he says, “because [while] it was not fully 3D, it was still awesome that you can play with your friends and you know, in those kinds of environments, just go around killing each other.” Some time helping out in an internet cafe sparked an interest in games like these, an interest that…

My squad of mercs were enjoying a day at the beach, following up on intel that an explosives expert was there. Instead, they found themselves in a minefield surrounded by foes. Several goons were grouped together, which was handy for my shotgun-wielding medic. One turn in, half of the opposition were dead. Then my mechanic stepped on a mine. Chaos took hold. One of my squad went berserk, ran out of cover and just started spraying bullets. Another panicked, tried to flee and, of course, stepped on another mine. Someone thought it would be a good idea to toss a molotov into the mix. More mines went off. Bullets pinged off rocks as shots missed their targets. There was shouting, plus screaming and threats. A miraculous headshot finally ended the…

Kriegsfront Tactics reimagines the 1970s conflict in Southeast Asia with a bunch of towering mechs with silly paint jobs. It’s as if the movie Apocalypse Now and one of the Front Mission games had a really screwed-up baby. Its low-poly retro art style will really strike a cord for anyone missing that classic PS1 era of turn-based mecha hijinx with a touch of permadeath. You play a mech commander behind enemy lines whose squad must do everything possible to survive. You’ll do this by outwitting your enemy with sound military strategy or, in my case, leaving a heavy mech out in the open as bait while a smaller, more agile unit comes up from behind and blasts them with a giant shotgun. PLAYED IT The demo I played was like…

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is arriving at a time when there’s too much Star Wars, and most of it is not good. The Mandalorian has gotten too cheesy in its third season, the Boba Fett and Obi-Wan shows were toothless side stories, and enthusiasm around the next wave of movies feels, at best, muted. Jedi: Survivor bucks this trend. It’s one of the best things to happen to the series in years, and easily the best modern Star Wars game. At a glance Jedi: Survivor seems like it falls squarely on the pulpy, safer side of Star Wars—the gifted Jedi with untapped potential, faithful droid companion, and swashbuckling crew certainly paint that picture, but there’s more to Cal Kestis. Jedi: Survivor doesn’t shy away from the darkest chapter of Star…

Sonic has been murdered—well, not really—and it’s up to Tails, I guess, to finger the suspect from a cast of his anthropomorphic mates. There’s Amy and Knuckles—you’ve probably heard of them. There’s the infamously edgy Shadow, here without his trademark arsenal of guns. And while I don’t know the others, I like them after playing this. This is an affectionate visual novel that redeems an oft-maligned band of mascots. It’s also, of course, a joke game—an exceedingly polished one—released on April 1, for free, on Steam. Set aboard a luxury train where Amy Rose has organized a murder mystery party, you have to solve the murder of Sonic the Hedgehog—who has really been attacked and rendered unconscious—by examining clues in each train carriage, and interrogating such suspects as Knuckles and…

Portal 2 provides us with a rare instance of relief at the lack of Richard Ayoade. The game almost featured him in the role of Wheatley, the chipper intelligence-dampening sphere voiced in the final release by Stephen Merchant. It’s not that Ayoade would have been bad, but that Merchant’s portrayal of the idiotic orb takes Portal 2 to a uniquely chaotic place. This month’s theme is titles that would run on a potato, so Portal 2 seems like a natural place to start. Unlike almost everything in the decaying Aperture Science laboratory, Valve games are so well-optimized that it feels crisp, clean and functional even if your creaking old PC is wheezing like a hoary pug and struggling to open Chrome. It’s one of many things that makes Portal 2…

COMPONENTS Consoles favour an APU design where rendering happens on-die instead of on a discrete card. DRIVERS Consoles don’t need a hardware abstraction layer like drivers because they know what hardware they have. OS Console operating systems need to interface with a tiny number of components and only those. CONTROL INPUTS The PS5’s DualSense haptic controller presents a brand new input headache for devs working on ports.…

A dust-capped Alienware Aurora whirrs underneath my desk. It arrived with turquoise accents, onyx plates and an array of parts pre-assembled by the boutique manufacturer. I’ve never constructed my own machine by hand. For many years, I did the majority of my gaming on a laptop, which was packed with so much tech that it felt like hauling a cement block around in my backpack. But in 2020, I decided to take a formal jump into the hobby. The Aurora is a no-doubts-about-it gaming PC. At last, I had finally seen the way, the truth, and the light. So why did I still feel like a bit of a fraud? Because I knew that the purest distillation of PC gaming—its Platonic Ideal—has nothing to do with the games themselves. To…

Everything pointed to Li Li Qiao. It was her husband splattered across the kitchen floor, her fat, wet thumbprint on the hilt of the blade that lay next to him, and her blood-caked size 12 boots that had traipsed tremulously out the door not long after the crime was committed. Her associates backed it all up: a chat with the neighbors revealed she’d been seen emerging from the apartment in a state of visible distress around 7pm, smack-bang in the middle of the period that my cursory field forensics told me was the time the murder took place. When I visited her office, I was told she failed to turn up to work the next day, and she hadn’t returned since. One coworker said they’d seen her haunting a nearby…

Before I declare Humanity a new member of the videogames-as-art canon, I should confess that I know embarrassingly little about art. My mum is an artist, yet I somehow developed no vocabulary for the subject—I spent the time I should’ve been writing about this brilliant videogame trying to decide if it was futurist, or constructivist, or minimalist. Did you know there’s a post-minimalism? I should try my hand at being a post-post-minimalist writer and turn in an empty page next time I’m on a deadline. But that wouldn’t be fair to Humanity, which I’ve been playing nightly for the last couple of weeks. Perhaps this is a more useful aesthetic reference point: Humanity is an early 2000s physics tech demo turned into a proper game. It unabashedly pairs philosophical musings…

Slay the Princess is a visual horror novel with a simple premise. Save the world by killing a seemingly defenseless princess locked away in the basement of a remote cabin in the woods. However, neither she nor the game’s narrator don’t plan on making it easy. There’s a darker power at work, as you mysteriously reappear outside the cabin after every encounter, with each reset growing darker and more unsettling. RELEASE 2023 DEVELOPER Black Tabby Games PUBLISHER In-house LINK bit.ly/3LpWLQg…

TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER This trilogy is about as loving and authentic a tribute as the original Warhammer Fantasy setting could receive—as well as some of the most expansive and rich grand strategy you can play on PC today. WARHAMMER 40,000: MECHANICUS This XCOM-like, about cyborg weirdos excavating an alien tomb, features both compelling turn-based combat and the best writing of any Warhammer game. WARHAMMER: VERMINTIDE 2 Grab a sword and join three friends for co-op action at the end of the world. Few games nail Warhammer’s dark sense of humor as well, and its fast-paced melee combat is a blast. WARHAMMER 40,000: CHAOS GATE — DAEMONHUNTERS Chaos Gate’s turn-based clash of Grey Knights and Nurgle cultists feels authentic—hopefully a good sign for Realms of Ruin.…

My gut says Ravenbound took flight a little too early, flapping furiously with half-formed wings as it tailspins into mediocrity. Developed by Avalanche Studios offshoot Systemic Reaction, Ravenbound has the bones of a decent game—gorgeous environments, fast-paced combat and a progression system that gives you just enough forward momentum to stop you from giving your monitor a flying lesson by tossing it out of the window. But that gorgeous world is also staid and lifeless, one that makes little effort to conceal its role as a mere backdrop for a punishing grind to power. Ravenbound’s premise is explained in the game’s introductory cutscene, the mythic Scandinavian vibes of which are only slightly spoiled by the distractingly cockney voiceover. The island of Àvalt was watched over by six gods known as…

Magic is rarely wondrous in its frequent videogame appearances. It harms, it heals and if you’re lucky it maybe transforms enemies into sheep or frogs. Not so in Age of Wonders 4 where it drives every component of this arcane 4X, transforming worlds, cities and the creatures that inhabit them. With your expansive collection of magical tomes, you can dabble with god-like powers to your heart’s content. Age of Wonders 4’s structure should be familiar: you start with a single city, erect new buildings, develop the surrounding provinces, recruit armies and explore the map to find treasure and new enemies. Resources like food, gold and mana must be managed, rival rulers can be engaged diplomatically or aggressively, and eventually you’ll start working towards one of the victory conditions, perhaps focusing…

Created for this year’s Dungeon Crawler Jam, Uncharted Wanders is in fact a game about dungeon crawling to turn a profit, as you lug goods from one town to another. They might only be minutes apart from each other, but monsters are a persistent hazard on the grid-based pathways. Everything in the world is geared towards the trading business. The Ministry of Trade sells licenses that determine how many hired hands you can bring with you, while the only things the shops sell are trading goods and exploration supplies. Mapping the dungeon is really a by-product as you shift table legs from Physopolis to Spiriton on the reverse journey. You will only earn a little profit each time, but eventually you can afford more mercenaries and be able to head…

Spelunky is an exercise in learning to own your failures. Every swooping bat, enraged shopkeeper and airborne rock that results in an untimely death leads to the same, numbing conclusion: I should have been more careful. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating, of course. But Spelunky’s systems are so meticulously crafted that you spend hours and days running through scenarios in your head, trying to understand what went wrong. Sometimes, you’ll sit staring at the obstacles in front of you, visualizing every outcome in the feeble hope that you can proceed in a rational, productive manner. Other times, you waddle forward without thinking and get killed by a snake on world one, level one. If it was just a case of navigating these mechanically-perfect encounters, Spelunky would already be brilliant.…

A new generation of GPUs has arrived and with them a new generation of gaming laptops. Some new designs, some a refresh of what came before. We’ve had heaps of RTX 40-series laptops in the PC Gamer labs for a spin round our benchmarking suite to give them a run for their money. There are also new AMD 7000-series GPUs for laptops announced, but, alas, no gaming laptops made it across our desks with one installed in time for this test. Legion Pro 7i LENOVO $2,750 Simply the best 1 This Lenovo Legion laptop is outstanding. Where other laptops try to squeeze in absurdly powerful RTX 4090 GPUs into a slim chassis with miserly results, Lenovo has opted for the much more sensible RTX 4080 here. But don’t let that put…

People were excited in 2004. The most anticipated PC game there had ever been was on its way. Half-Life 2’s predecessor had shaken up the game industry to a degree that even the last 25 years of hyperbole in the game press hasn’t quite got across. It was like someone had just flipped a switch: one minute there were only Doom clones and stifled yawns, the next, everyone was doing set-pieces, real-time storytelling, and turrets. Valve’s FPS was so good that we were even happy to play the bad impressions of it. Even before there were screenshots, the PC gaming population was enraptured by Half-Life 2’s announcement. And then there were screenshots, and we all basically melted into burning-hot hype puree. A strange, Soviet-inspired dystopian city. Massive ants. A car.…

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… Cal Kestis, Jedi, expresses himself through a series of beards, including… …UNTIL JULY 11…

During a PC Gamer designer roundtable, Cyberpunk 2077 quest director Pawel Sasko and other RPG veterans discussed the “staggering” complexity of triple-A games. The PCG article titled ‘The cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet’ caused “a commotion” at CD Projekt Red, said Sasko: “Everyone, after reading this article, said, ‘We mostly agree, actually, with the thesis. At least when it comes to triple-A, we are just running at a fucking wall, I think, and we’re gonna crash on that wall really soon.’” Many RPG players assumed that as CDPR had done such a fantastic job with The Witcher 3, it should be able to do the same with Cyberpunk. But Cyberpunk’s more immersive first-person presentation ended up making it a vastly more difficult game to…

Finally, a turn-based RPG that appreciates the wacky performance art of professional wrestling. WrestleQuest feels like a game an eight-year-old wrestling fan would have dreamed up. Meet the world’s greatest wrestlers in a goofy adventure as you suplex your way to the top and make some fans along the way. PLAYED IT The glory days of professional wrestling are alive and well in this goofy yet charming wrestling RPG. In some ways, WrestleQuest is honoring all your old favorite wrestlers like Jeff Jarrett and Sergeant Slaughter, and of course, Macho Man Randy Savage. If reading those names makes you smile, this might be the game for you. The story’s hero is an up-and-coming wrestler who idolizes the Macho Man and needs to go on an epic quest to battle baddies…

In 2015, the Warhammer world ended. You know, that place you fight over in Total War: Warhammer and Vermintide 2? Games Workshop blew it up. From its ashes rose a new setting, in a new era: the Age of Sigmar. Such a dramatic move, driven by business realities more than narrative passion (it’s complicated, but basically Warhammer Fantasy models weren’t selling) inevitably upset huge swathes of the fanbase. Many of them have turned their nose up at Age of Sigmar ever since. But in the years since, the new setting has grown into a wonderfully rich, mythic and exciting universe of its own, where gods and their armies war over eight Mortal Realms formed out of pure primordial magic. It’s a fresh canvas for Games Workshop’s biggest and boldest fantasy…

Star Wars may have started its journey in movie theaters, but you can make the case that its best experiences are in games. The Star Wars universe lends itself well to an interactive medium. Jedi, bounty hunters and rebel spies make ideal videogame avatars, while the universe’s rich library of spacecraft laid the foundation for some of the best space combat on the PC. Today, there are more good Star Wars games than good Star Wars films, and the best Star Wars games rival the original trilogy in their ability to tell exciting stories. Here, we’ll chart the galaxy of adventures Star Wars has brought to the PC, from the first time we climbed into the cockpit of an X-Wing, to the more turbulent modern era of Star Wars gaming. JUMP TO…

Roughly ten hours into my playthrough of Dead Island 2, I started to wonder if there was much point in continuing. I kept waiting for the game to introduce some new gameplay mechanic or narrative surprise that would keep me invested, or at the very least give me some kind of reason to keep going. After ten more hours, I was certain; if I wasn’t playing this game for review, I’d have stopped playing long before its conclusion. My biggest problem with Dead Island 2 is its gameplay loop, which isn’t so much a loop as it is a flat circle. Get weapons, kill zombies, break weapons, get more weapons—rinse and repeat. It might sound like a dismissive way to criticise a game, but in Dead Island 2’s case the…

Driftr is a Vampire Survivors-like, meaning you’ll be fending off waves of enemies and carefully curating a character build, as a timer ticks away. However, you’re only being asked to survive for a piddly three minutes here. Child’s play. No, I haven’t managed it. Driftr is hard. Where it differs from the rest of the genre is the nature of character movement. As if you’re steering a car, you direct the plain white block protagonist by using the Left and Right arrow keys. The block will accelerate automatically, but you can also activate a hard-to-control boost by holding either key down. You begin by simply dodging enemies, which is tricky enough, before the temporary green and yellow zones are introduced. Successfully steer into a green zone and you’ll get a…

There are few things rarer than a game in which you’re happy to spend more time reading than you are playing. In this sense and many others, West of Loathing feels like striking gold. Sometimes, a game so densely packed with secrets and collectibles can be intimidating to the point of paralysis. You experience the rising panic that only comes from finding a new weapon before you’ve become accustomed to your current one. But I want to discover everything in West of Loathing. Partly because you can gain XP from the most left-field situations; but also because the flavor text that accompanies everything is so sharp. It’s funny, too. The pale horse you end up searching for turns out to be an actual ghost, and you can buff your abilities…

If we learned nothing else from Naughty Dog’s PC version of The Last of Us Part 1, we now know that in the year 2023 it’s still eminently possible to mess up a videogame port. We can run the global economy on a decentralized blockchain and climb mountains in photorealistic VR, but good luck getting TLOU to build its shader cache before Steam’s refund window expires. Prior to that release, you could have been forgiven for thinking the days of borked PC ports were basically behind us. It was absolutely normal throughout the ’90s and ’00s for a critically adored console game to turn up in mangled and mutilated form, and as recently as Dark Souls’ PC arrival in 2012 we were disappointed but far from surprised by a locked…

CAPCOM 2020 A mid-pandemic ransomware attack revealed Street Fighter 6, Dragon’s Dogma 2 and more to the world against Capcom’s wishes. Stop hacking stuff please, hackers. EVERY ASSASSIN’S CREED 2007-PRESENT Ubisoft has had a harder time keeping the stab sim under wraps than an NFL team with its draft targets. Numerous titles have leaked over the years. FALLOUT 4 2013 Anonymous tipsters sent Kotaku script excerpts and casting docs in 2013 that revealed Bethesda’s upcoming Project Institute was Fallout 4, and it was set in Boston. GTA VI 2022 The world looked down at its shoes in embarrassment when hackers disseminated screens and videos of Rockstar’s new one across the web. Stop spoiling everything!…