Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2023 i PC Gamer

3 months DIABLO IV RELEASE June 6, 2023 | DEVELOPER Blizzard The beloved action-RPG series returns once more with a darker look, plenty of exciting classes to play as and, hopefully, no auction house. PARK BEYOND RELEASE June 16, 2023 | DEVELOPER Limbic Entertainment Continuing the PC’s storied legacy with theme park sims, Park Beyond lets you construct and then ride mind-bending impossible rollercoasters. FINAL FANTASY XVI RELEASE June 22, 2023 | DEVELOPER Square Enix Final Fantasy returns once more with gamers slipping into the shoes of Clive Rosfield during his adventures in Valisthea. Chocobos will be ridden. 6 months EXOPRIMAL RELEASE July 14, 2023 | DEVELOPER CAPCOM Honestly, what’s not to like here? Exoprimal promises gameplay where humans armoured in cutting-edge exosuits fight dinosaurs. Roarsome! SEA OF STARS RELEASE…

PLAYED IT 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. The demo I played was like…

S tar Wars may have started its journey in cinemas, but you can make the case that its best experiences are in videogames. 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…

COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH 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 organised a murder mystery party, you have to solve the murder of Sonic the Hedgehog – who has really been…

OLD GAMES REVISITED 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-optimised 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…

Anew 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 £2,800 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…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick these parts if you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price. Mid-range build You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through. Advanced build You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart. BUDGET BUILD Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank MOTHERBOARD B660M Pro RSASRock £115This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400FIntel £210Intel’s added four more cores to its entry-level Core i5 and it’s become even more fantastic value. GRAPHICS CARD Arc A750 Intel £230You get a lot of graphics card…

A fter enjoying Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened so much this month (see my review on p74), my appetite was whetted for Lovecraftian horror. Hazily I remembered a game from a few years back with a pretty similar premise: Call of Cthulhu. Just as I had the thought, it popped up at a deep discount on Steam. Call of Cthulhu, based on both Lovecraft’s work and the board game, is a pretty classic mythos tale. A private detective is hired to investigate a death, travels to an isolated community to investigate, and finds himself drawn into bizarre events that sap his sanity. So far, so good, and indeed the game makes a great first impression. My introduction to the crumbling fishing village of Darkwater is wonderfully grotesque and creepy – surly…

MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED I was somewhere around Whiterun, on the edge of Fort Greymoor, when the skooma began to take hold. Things became washed-out and smeary, and then there was two of everything including me and my pet elytra – an odd kind of mantis-looking bug who I realised, seeing two of the bizarre insects beside me, wasn’t the best companion to bring on a skooma bender. Skooma has a long history in the Elder Scrolls universe. It’s a narcotic substance made of refined moon sugar that’s banned in some parts of Tamriel due to its addictiveness, though it’s considered a sacred sacrament by the khajiit. In Morrowind and Oblivion it fortified your speed and strength while draining your intelligence and agility, while in Skyrim…

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT 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…

Special Report PCG INVESTIGATES 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 –…

FIRST LOOK Slay the Princess is a visual horror novel with a simple premise. Save the world by killing a seemingly defenceless 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…

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…

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…

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…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY  Free DEVELOPER  Jimb Esser LINK bit.ly/UnchartedWanders 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 licences 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…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY  £11 DEVELOPER  Mossmouth PUBLISHER  In-house 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, visualising 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…

TECH REPORT 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 decentralised 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 de rigueur 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…

I ’m on a rocky island surrounded by lava deep in an underground labyrinth in the Underdark and, while there’s a lava elemental stalking the vicinity, it’s the least of my worries. That’s because I’ve found a locked chest on the island and, frustratingly, I’ve left Astarion, my vampiric, rogue, lockpicking master behind with the rest of my party. Instead, there’s just me, Natasha De Metrial, a half-elf fighter fumbling with the chest’s lock in the dark as lava laps at my heels. How did I get into this sticky patch? Well, I’ve played enough RPGs to know that a solitary chest on a volcanic island in the middle of a lava field, guarded by lava elemental, and deep in the TPK-friendly Underdark, is absolutely worth checking out. I mean,…

H MV. 1998. My birthday. A credit card. Whatever I bought was THE entertainment for the next six months. I had a major Elite itch that needed scratching. I’d done Frontier to death – literally, as my Atari ST died playing it – and I couldn’t get First Encounters to load up, as it had shipped broken. It’s easy to forget that sometimes you bought a PC game that just didn’t work. No day-one patches, no online support. Most shops pointed to the specs and blamed you. Sometimes they were right. You just had to chance it. Promising space combat and trading, Hardwar looked amazing. The box artwork was created by The Designers Republic. There was a touch of cyberpunk, a dollop of Japanese neon anime culture and some futuristic…

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…

Another day, another outbreak of zombification among an asteroid mining colony’s workforce. It’s a story as old as time, and Terminist Arcade’s crack at the horror first person shooter genre looks to meld elements from some of gaming’s greatest hits with a suitably retro visual style. First-person shooters that take inspiration from ’90s stalwarts are all the rage, and there’s certainly something appealing about the latest crop that combine modern mechanics with visuals that wouldn’t appear out of place running on a 486. Hyperviolent is the latest release attempting to bring this mix of old and new to contemporary systems, and does a decent of job of setting the scene for what developer Terminist Arcade is no doubt hoping will become the genre’s next hit. Hyperviolent has stiff competition in…

PLAYED IT F inally, 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. The glory days of professional wrestling are alive and well in this goofy yet charming wrestling RPG. In some ways, WrestleQuest is honouring all your old favourite 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 idolises the Macho Man and needs to go on an epic quest to battle…

COVER FEATURE Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin 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…

Sometimes you just want to relax with a game by yourself. Low pressure, soothing sounds, just enough challenge to keep you engaged but not frustrated. Environmentalist strategy puzzler Terra Nil fits the bill, and puts a refreshing low-key spin on the city-builder genre, making it all the more surprising that it comes from Free Lives, developers of raucous meathead action games like Broforce, Gorn and… err… Genital Jousting. Officially billed as a ‘reverse city builder’, it’s not inaccurate to describe Terra Nil as such. It’s a game about spending and generating resources, building synergistic chains of structures to achieve numerical goals. Despite this, Terra Nil owes more to puzzle games and solitaire than anything else. Terra Nil is a meditation on what we – as a species – owe to…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY  Free DEVELOPERkindanice LINK bit.ly/driftrGame 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…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY  £10 DEVELOPER  Asymmetric PUBLISHER  In-house 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 flavour text that accompanies everything is so sharp. It’s funny, too. The pale horse you end up searching for turns out…

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. NUDGE GAMERS INTO A MORE PERSISTENTLY ONLINE ECOSYSTEM 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…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW The real hero of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy isn’t Arthur Dent, it’s the man from the council, Mr L Prosser. You know, the guy who tries to convince Arthur that the bypass absolutely needs to be built directly through the field where his house is currently – and inconveniently – standing. In a way, Mini Motorways is a Mr Prosser simulator. Here I am, smashing great stretches of asphalt through green and pleasant swathes of serene countryside so the citizens of my ever-growing conurbation can get their gas-guzzling SUVs to the local hypermarket to buy stuff they don’t (presumably) need. As I lay yet another roundabout or gargantuan multi-laned highway with wanton abandon, my mind is cast…