Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2023 i PC Gamer

1 month ASSASSIN’S CREED: MIRAGE RELEASE October 12, 2023 | PUBLISHER Ubisoft Montreal The series returns to its roots, with a stealth-orientated game taking you back to ninth-century Baghdad. You play as thief-turned-assassin Basim. ALAN WAKE 2 RELEASE October 17, 2023 | PUBLISHER Remedy Entertainment The long-awaited sequel promises more survival and psychological horrors, rejoining the story 13 years after Alan Wake went missing. CITIES: SKYLINES 2 RELEASE October 24, 2023 | PUBLISHER Colossal Order Ltd The much-anticipated sequel to arguably the best city building sandbox ever created arrives in late October. Create a thriving metropolis from the ground up. 3 months LIKE A DRAGON GAIDEN RELEASE November 8, 2023 | PUBLISHER Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio Just when he thought he was out of the Yukaza life, Kazuma Kiryu is…

In En Garde! 17th century Spain is slathered with a sense of nostalgia. Not for the setting itself, of course – I’m not that old – although it is an enticing reimagining, with its piñata colour palette and kitsch flamenco soundtrack. Rather, because it reminds me of Asterix books, of Dogtanian cartoons, and black and white episodes of Zorro on Sunday mornings. Of simpler times, in other words, and simpler forms of entertainment. Playing this swashbuckling adventure, meanwhile, tickles a different memory gland. En Garde! is like the remaster of an early 2000s console effort that never existed, from a time when developers were figuring out how the scrolling beat-’em-up might evolve into three dimensions. Superficially, it bears a family resemblance to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but…

This action adventure is the quintessential console exclusive. Released for the PlayStation 5 in 2021, it takes a beloved duo of Sony mascots and sends them on a journey designed to show off the capabilities of that hardware – particularly its fast-loading SSD, showcased with a story all about hopping between different universes. All of which makes it a bit of an oddity to be reviewing on PC in 2023. Let’s start with the simple stuff. Even if you have no familiarity with the Ratchet & Clank series – which, if you’re a dedicated PC player, you almost certainly don’t – Rift Apart is an accessible introduction. Set in a bright and cartoony sci-fi galaxy, the game follows Ratchet, a furry alien space hero, and his robot sidekick Clank, as…

FREE GAMES REVIEWSCOOL TITLES FOR NO CASH Shroom and Gloom takes the deckbuilding roguelike and bungs in a big load of mushrooms. Your enemies are murderous fungus people, and most of the cards are mycology-themed. On top of that, it’s all exquisitely hand-drawn. You know the basics by now: every turn you expend energy to play cards that are randomly drawn from your deck, while out of battle you plough through a dungeon, gradually acquiring shiny new cards. The difference with Shroom and Gloom is that the dungeon is viewed from the first-person perspective, although admittedly you’re still walking in a very strict straight line, without the ability to sidestep or even go backwards. But exploration is neatly handled by the game’s second deck of cards, which come into play…

THEY’RE BACK OLD GAMES REVISITED You want to know what true versatility looks like? Richard Ridings. He’s the voice actor who played the narrator from Dungeon Keeper, High King Thorgrim Grudgebearer from Total War: Warhammer and, of direct relevance, Pigsy from Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. He’s also the voice of the dad from Peppa Pig. And yes, I do know the last two characters are both pigs. Don’t cheapen this. Enslaved is one of those marvellous disasters we only see in game development. Too beautiful to live, too precious to be almost completely ignored by the paying public. But ignored it was. It was originally pitched as an animated movie by developers Ninja Theory, but, after a ripple of indifference from Hollywood, things changed. Andy Serkis…

GROUP TEST Wireless technology has come a long way in a short period of time. Slipstream, HyperSpeed, Lightspeed, Stellar, Quantum – call it what you like, but you can pretty much consider a stable and robust connection as a given with any wireless gaming mouse from a renowned manufacturer. With that covered, you’re free to focus on finding a mouse that suits your needs elsewhere. Comfort is a key consideration. A top-quality mouse will contour to the hand and put every thumb switch within easy reach, even if there’s ten of them. Then there’s the sensor itself, the actual hardware translating your real-world movements to accurate actions in-game. If you’re particularly aggressive with your mouse movements, only some mice have the acceleration ratings to keep up. 1 Burst Pro…

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 RS ASRock £115 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400F Intel £210 Intel’s added four more cores to its entry-level Core i5 and it’s become even more fantastic value. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 4060 Nvidia £315 The…

Cosiness and MMOs are my two main vices, so Palia feels like it’s being made specifically for me. I’ve got a bit of emotional investment in its success, I’ll admit, so I voluntarily played a good bit more of Palia’s alpha than I really needed to for work purposes. In Palia you are not a hero. You’re one of many, many humans who’ve popped into the world after the local Majiri people believed you’d all gone extinct – a nice deviation from the usual MMO setup, which asks us to believe that the world is primarily populated by chosen ones. There’s no PvE or PvP combat, and your goal is to become a member of the village. Unlike a typical life or farm sim, I’m not tracking days or energy…

MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED Amnesia: The Bunker is the latest entry – and genuinely the greatest entry – in a long series of excellent first-person survival horror adventures from Frictional Games. But even though I’ve played several of them, I have to admit… the Amnesia games aren’t really my jam. The hook of the horror series is that it keeps you alone, vulnerable, and defenceless from start to finish, and that just doesn’t sit well with me since I already spend most of my actual, real life alone, vulnerable and defenceless. I don’t need more of that from a game! If I’m gonna dive into a world filled with monsters and madness I demand to hold something in my hand with a bit more power than a…

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT Former Gerlat Henry Cavill has made a point of saying he “pushed really, really hard” to stay true to the Witcher books, while also claiming that some of the writers on the show “actively disliked” them. Some aspects of Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels have been simplified for the TV show, and in an interview with Polish site Wyborcza, executive producer Tomek Baginski said: “[A] higher level of nuance and complexity will have a smaller range.” Baginski said he encountered a “perceptual block” with American audiences some years ago, when he was promoting an unfinished film project called Hardkor 44, a sci-fi retelling of the Warsaw Uprising. “For Americans, it was completely incomprehensible, too complicated, because they grew up in a different historical context, where everything was…

Special Report PCG INVESTIGATES NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT The name Wizardry still carries weight, which is probably why the recent announcement of Eternal Crypt: Wizardry BC – a blockchain-based clicker game and NFT platform – went down like a lead balloon. A sad sign of the times, perhaps, but a good excuse to talk with Robert and Norman Sirotek, the brothers behind Sir-Tech, publisher of the most influential RPGs of the 1980s. It’s hard to imagine a world without Wizardry. The first game, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, released in 1981 for the Apple II before being ported to almost every platform of its era, is one of the key foundational works of the medium. Even in its original form it’s intuitive, accessible and (to anyone…

PLAYED IT NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2023 DEVELOPER Saber Interactive PUBLISHER Focus Entertainment LINK shorturl.at/ehmxA I n the year 2011, men were men and the terrible affliction of ‘Unreal Engine 3 Neck’ raged unabated. At this time of peak Xbox, we got the original Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, which paired the gothic grimdark far future of the Imperium of Man with Gears of War-style shooting, minus the knee-high cover everywhere. Twelve years on, not much has changed in Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, at least going by an hour-long demo level I had the chance to sample. I never get tired of seeing those big ol’ blue Ultramarine pauldrons, and we’re actually pretty starved for straight-up, linear, over-the-shoulder shooter campaigns like this, but unless the full game has some serious…

Gord opens with a disclaimer that it “explores mature scenarios and themes”, including among its list of triggering material “sacrifice” and “child sacrifice”. What it means by this is it lets you witness Mortal Kombat fatalities being performed on children. When I first brought a shuddering waif to kneel before one of the various “horrors” that rule Gord’s forests, I expected some artful cutaway when came to the big moment. Nope! Instead, Mr Blobby’s evil cousin wrapped its tentacles around the screaming urchin, raised them into the air, and crunched them down like a bony strawberry. I’m not one to moralise on what imagery games should and should not depict. But if you want me to take your gritty tale of survival in the wilderness seriously, then I question the…

FREE GAMES REVIEWS The tale of the wish-granting monkey’s paw is brought into the future in The Third Wish, a point-and-click made for the Adventure Game Jam. Despite being made in just two weeks, the game is fully voice-acted, which really helps to emphasise the obvious Twilight Zone influence. You play as Mr White, whose family runs a moisture farm on a desert planet, a place where shrivelled monkey limbs are the furthest thing from his mind. A few traditional point-and-click puzzles later, an old trader friend appears and shares his story. He ends the night by discarding the monkey paw that has ruined his life – and telling you to destroy it. It would be a happier, shorter game if you obeyed him, but after some cajoling from your…

THEY’RE BACK Swirling red sands batter a group of rebels, hunkered down against a building. One turns to another, eyes wide with fear. “We can’t win this fight! We need help. We need… a demolition specialist.” Cut to Alec Mason, polishing his sledgehammer as he lands on Mars… This image is more pleasing if you imagine a mechanic other than destruction underpinning Red Faction: Guerrilla. Shovelling. Riveting. Dry stone walling. But in truth, the gleeful annihilation of structural environments is a game in itself, and, thankfully, Volition is smart enough to know that we don’t need much incentive to hit things with a hammer. As Alec’s obviously-doomed brother explains, salvage on Mars is like gold, which is the reason you didn’t need to flatten every building you see. All the…

TECH REPORT We all love a plucky underdog story, and Intel’s entry to the discrete graphics card market felt like just that in 2022. Strange as it sound to describe a semiconductor behemoth with a $140bn market cap as the Mighty Ducks to Nvidia’s Hawks, it does make sense when you consider that Jensen Huang’s outfit has a $1.13 trillion market cap. Besides, the graphics war hadn’t been Intel’s fight until the release of the Arc A750 and A770 cards. Not really. Intel’s on-die graphics served a small proportion of the gaming community, but it was Nvidia and AMD who were really down in the trenches, exchanging salvos of benchmarks. It was a fight that had been waged for two decades, too. What chance did Intel have of catching up?…

CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING I’m not good at fighting games. I have a cursed combination of great reflexes and god-awful fine motor control. This makes the Dragon Punch motion catastrophically hard in my sweaty hands. If I want to learn a combo, I have to plug in hours in training mode until it’s deep in the muscle, leaving me with sore thumbs and a headache. Despite all this, I actually did get into a typical fighting game, once. I had a brief love affair with Guilty Gear: Strive back in 2021, finding a decent handle on the characters Giovanna and Axl Low, I had a good time. But I hit a wall: fighting games are really hard to come back to. All those hours in training mode faded with the…

Capcom has been knocking it out of the park in recent years. The Resident Evil series in particular has gone on from strength to strength, beginning its resurgence with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard in 2017. The latest – the remake of Resident Evil 4 – has been fuelling my evenings as well as making sure that the villager’s eerie chants torment my nights. Truth be told, I’ve been a bit stuck on what to play lately. The sun is shining. Lockdown is a thing of the past. It’s time to seize the day… I’m sorry, the president’s daughter has been kidnapped? Taken to a remote village in Spain? And I’m the only one with the necessary skills to rescue her – why didn’t you say so? RE4 is exactly what…

James McGregor got his start in video editing when, as a member of Rooster Teeth’s Achievement Hunter community, he became a part-time contractor managing and moderating their community video submissions. This helped him develop his editing style which, in turn, led to a professional job within the game industry itself. Eventually, a job opening for junior video editor at Team 17 caught his eye. “I was looking for something more permanent rather than pipeline contract work.” he explains, “so I thought, I don’t have any real past experience, but I’ll apply.” One fake trailer for a nonexistent Overcooked DLC and two interviews later, McGregor had landed the job. This involved tasks such as B-roll generation, screenshot capture… and trailer creation and editing. Today he’s freelance, helping a variety of developers…

W hether you like hardcore simulation and strategy or the explosive thrill of mecha anime, games about big stompy robots have always had a home on PC. With the upcoming Armored Core 6 and MechWarrior 5: Clans on the horizon, it’s definitely a good time to be a fan of games about 100-ton death machines. While mech games span genres, they are bound together by the simple truth that piloting suits of mechanised armour into combat is a fantasy that never gets old. It’s an aesthetic that dates back decades to the very first MechWarrior in 1989 and now lives on in newer games like Titanfall 2 and Brigador. That’s why we’ve rounded up a diverse selection of our favourite mech games spanning multiple genres – from the traditional sim…

After FromSoftware’s incredible run from Souls to Sekiro to Elden Ring, Armored Core VI is a near-radical departure: short, relentlessly paced missions, forgiving retries, and an empowering arsenal that makes it clear you are a one mech army instead of some nasty little guy. Its lean approach holds it back in a few minor ways, but a big budget game this dead set on what it is and what it is not is a precious thing in 2023. It may have taken FromSoftware a decade to return to its love of mechs, but it was worth the wait: Armored Core VI is a ‘we’re back on our bullshit’ slam dunk. This would be a great action game in any year, but I’m particularly smitten with Armored Core at this moment…

Mimimi is a studio that understands its niche. Shadow Tactics, Desperados 3 and now Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew are fundamentally the same game; tactical squad stealth where players must quicksave and load until they can pull off a flawless heist. This time they’re celebrating the power to quicksave. Shadow Gambit makes it a magical plot MacGuffin and the power of the Red Marley, your sapient pirate galleon. For newcomers to the series and genre, Shadow Tactics, Desperados 3 and Shadow Gambit are what Mimimi defines as ‘stealth strategy’ games. Take your Metal Gear, Hitman or Splinter Cell and pull the camera up to an RTS perspective and give the player a small squad of sneaky sorts to complete their goals and get out intact. From this elevated perspective, players…

Dune is an obvious influence on striking sci-fi adventure Shards of God, with you playing as a space nun in a medieval-flavoured setting. Along with your mother superior, you’ve suddenly been summoned to the god-emperor’s temple, but when your spaceship touches down there’s a revelation. God is dead. Yes, we’re in murder mystery territory, more specifically in a locked room scenario – or I should say locked coffin, as that’s where you find him. No one on the planet had the means to unlock it, and ‘God’ wasn’t killed before he went inside, so you have to work out the how as well as the who. I’m a big fan of locked room mysteries, and this is a clever and fairly clued one with a novel concept, thanks to its…

Most rhythm-based action games don’t wholly work. There’s a danger of them being the worst of both worlds: out-of-time music accompanying stressful action. For every crisp Crypt of the Necrodancer, there are a dozen clones with the grace and finesse of an art teacher with labyrinthitis ruining a school disco. The answer to this problem, as is so often the case, is experimental jazz. Ape Out deftly sidesteps the need for action to land on the beat by offering a freeform cacophony of cymbal crashes, rimshots, and juddering fills. It’s like playing a drum kit as it falls down the stairs; a version of Whiplash where a 500-pound gorilla pulverises JK Simmons; the feverish night terror of a zookeeper with a paradiddle phobia. It’s a simple conceit made more satisfying…

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they look upon their gaming setup with fresh eyes. Usually that time comes when an outsider catches sight of your grinding dungeon. It’s a similar phenomenon to that of moving house, seeing intensely personal belongings being paraded around outside and saying to yourself, yep, definitely time for a new mattress. For me, it was having a mate round my house and seeing my gaming room through his eyes. And what I saw was hardly the stuff of an Architectural Digest tour. Dead and dying house plants arranged on a second-hand Ikea desk I’d bought on eBay during lockdown when new furniture took seven to eight years to turn up. Tea rings on my mouse mat. Dust. Cables dangling everywhere. And worst of…

The drow raider lies mangled in a pool of his own blood, his limbs twisted and broken, the consequence of a bad end in a savage battle. Evidence as to why this drow, along with a pack of goblins, had attacked a coaching inn is sparse, and aside from the fact that a high-ranking official from the city of Baldur’s Gate has been abducted from the inn, nothing else is known. It’s a good job, then, that my party of adventurers in Baldur’s Gate III currently includes not just one but two clerics, masters of support magic, religious studies and, as this is the glorious world of DnD, rituals that allow them to commune with the dead. And, let me tell you, Baldur’s Gate III is absolutely a game where…