Innehållsförteckning för December 2024 från PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Keep games Xx x alive If a million people sign a petition, a ban on making multiplayer games unplayable could become law in EU. Sneak Xx level x 100 The Fallout show makeup team snuck in a character from the games. Dragon-light Dragon Age: The Veilguard has some undemanding specs gaming, for such a pretty game. LOWS Disrespectful After confirming his Twitch ban came from exchanging “inappropriate” messages with a minor, Dr Disrespect deleted the tweet and teased a comeback. Undemocratic Helldivers 2 cheats undercut a major order with millions of false bug bits. Nuked Modern Warfare Remastered mod H2M got killed by Activision.…

Bill Slavicsek is perfectly qualified for fantasy worldbuilding. An incredible tabletop gaming career spanning decades, which included work on the original Star Wars roleplaying game (and writing the Star Wars Sourcebook) and Dungeons & Dragons to name but two, began in the 1980s with answering an ad in the New York Times. “It was a blind ad for a game editor,” he explains. “Turned out it was for West End Games”. He would go on to work for TSR and then Wizards of the Coast, writing new stories in existing universes as well as inventing new worlds of his own. In 2011 he interviewed for ZeniMax, where he serves as lead writer and narrative director for ESO today. “The fact that basically all computer games are based on the model…

Be honest: when you play Civilization, do you get bored sometime around the Renaissance and start over? If you’re the dutiful type, you’re in the minority: Firaxis has been collecting statistics, and although unable to share specifics, the dev told me it was “surprised” to discover how few Civilization players had ever finished a game of Civilization. Firaxis has substantially changed Civilization’s structure for the next game. In Civilization VII, you no longer begin in the Ancient era, advancing through and beyond the Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial and Modern eras. There are just three ages in Civ VII—Antiquity, Discovery and Modern—and the tech tree is simpler. This might turn out to be the most controversial change since Civilization V ditched unit stacking, or since Civilization VI adopted a cartoonier art…

Do you ever wonder why there aren’t more tactical shooters like Counter-Strike? Valve’s round-based, economy-driven competitive FPS stood largely unchallenged in a subgenre it created for 20 years before Valorant arrived on the scene, painting over CS:GO’s grounded arsenal with a roster of Riot-style heroes and playmaking ultimate moves. Valorant was exciting proof that there’s more to be done with the CS formula, and more than enough player interest to support two tac-shooter giants. Spectre Divide wants to be the third. After playing a few matches, I think it has a decent shot. I know, I’m still on the fence about that name too, but I’ll keep saying it out loud until it sounds normal. Spectre Divide is the debut game from Mountaintop Studios, an independent startup with an 80-person…

DESIGN Designing a new water park ride is a multi-stage process. First land must be bought or cleared. Then gamers can either place pre-built rides, of which there are many, or design their own take on it in the ride editor. It then must be tested before opening to the public. CUSTOMIZATION Just like coasters, water rides can be built piece by piece, and then customized as desired. For example, flumes can have open, closed, banked and transparent pipes, be painted in hundreds of colors, and then decorated with thousands of scenery pieces. FACILITIES As you would expect from a water park, it’s no good having amazing pools, flumes and water rides if visitors have nowhere to change into their swimming gear, so changing rooms are essential. Guests also appreciate…

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The average level in Cygni: All Guns Blazing is about 15 minutes long, give or take, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like a two-and-a-half hour special effects showcase that ought to have ended with a fade to black and ‘Directed by Michael Bay’ in big, bold letters. Cygni’s audio-visual bombast is difficult to overstate, with its Unreal Engine 4-powered hordes of alien jet fighters screaming toward you from above and below. After just a couple hours of playing, I felt like my senses had been jackhammered to sludge—and it was intoxicating. Don’t get me wrong, I love my pixel art, but dodging incoming trains, taking potshots at a flying space whale and blowing apart sleek alien tanks is riotous when it looks and feels this good. It…

When a patient comes in with a bullet wound, it’s your duty as a doctor to have a nosy inside. What you find in there—yes, a bullet, but also a geyser of black sludge that knocks you unconscious—sets the tone for this horror set in a compact space. You wake up in the abandoned hospital to find that, among other oddities, a pile of chains is now smothering the only exit. Alone, you have to figure out what’s going on and whether you even want to return to normality at the end of it. It’s a tiny game world—if a corridor can even be described as such—but, like PT’s singular hallway, it’s a corridor that changes as you progress through the story, though to a less dramatic extent. An eldritch…

I have a theory that terrible things happen to people just because they want to avoid making a scene. Imagine it: you kick up a fuss, but, in reality, your fire-eyed kidnapper just wanted some human company. Wouldn’t that be painfully awkward? This is one of many things in Inscryption which plays not only with my expectations as someone who plays games, but also my obedience. It’s like the game is using my awkward Britishness against me. I’m reluctant to stand up from the table and explore the shack in which I’m imprisoned, let alone play with the cursed trinkets that adorn the walls. And when I do finally start doing this, it’s only because a talking stoat on a sentient playing card told me to do so. My first…

Storming through the halls of Castle Wolfenstein, which are festooned with swastika banners, occult reliquary and propaganda posters for the fascist regime, all I can think of is, “Boy do Nazis love their medieval suits of armor”. I mean, I can barely storm into a single room or corridor without being confronted with an awfully shiny medieval knight, with me swiftly losing track of their number as I run and gun my way to freedom. If the Nazis living in this drafty old castle were especially fond of these suits of armor, then they’re definitely not going to like me, US Army Ranger William ‘BJ’ Blazkowicz, as I’ve swiftly adopted a new hobby of shooting these antiquities to pieces. This is not just to spite my Nazi opponents, but also…

ADJUSTABLE WEIGHTS Remember when your mouse came with a set of tiny weights? It was like a drug dealer collab gone wrong. ADJUSTABLE DIMENSIONS Mad Catz’ RAT was where gaming mouse met Savile Row tailor. Tweak every dimension to fit. RGB EVERYTHING If your hand isn’t glowing like the digits of some Marvel movie deity, your mouse needs more RGB. TOO MANY BUTTONS Why bother with a keyboard, when you can contract RSI just as quickly by using a mouse for every input?…

Four years to the day before Game Science released action-adventure Black Myth: Wukong, the Chinese studio shot to immediate international attention with the kind of trailer that made a lot of us go, “No way… really?” It looked good. Really good. Lush, strikingly detailed foliage, subtle reflections on the surface of mossy puddles, transformation after transformation showing monkey king Sun Wukong’s deep reservoir of tricks and battle techniques. It seemed too ambitious, too strong a first showing from a studio that, up to that point, had primarily worked on mobile games. It was no coincidence that when Game Science finally let us play Black Myth, we started in that same densely forested level. “One of the things we value is a promise to our game fans. We tried to keep…

The so-called ‘Paso Kon’ market (ie katakana’s transliteration of ‘Pasonaru Computa’) in Japan was originally spearheaded in the 1980s by NEC’s PC-8800 and, later, its PC-9800. However, in terms of quality, Fujitsu’s FM Towns and the Sharp X1, as well as the mighty Sharp X68000 (the latter being the high-end of the Japanese PC gaming experience in the late ’80s and early ’90s, one that boasted an arcade perfect port of After Burner) ended up in a world of their own power-wise, dominating higher-end PC gaming. Despite this, the home computer market in Japan at the time ended up being led in terms of architecture by Ascii’s MSX (a Microsoft-Sony and Panasonic joint venture), while in Europe there was a battle between Commodore’s Amiga and the ST from Atari (run…

As I watch three of the operatives of Expedition 33, Gustav, Lune and Maelle, face off in turn-based combat against a monstrously big and bulging abomination, a nightmarish version of an Edwardian-era child’s toy hellbent on our destruction, all I can think of is, boy, this game reminds me of Persona in all the best ways. Everything from the camera angles positioned behind our team of operatives to the turn-based combat system, through the weird, unsettling designs of the enemies, and onto the strike first or be struck advantage system when entering a battle, as well as, even, the supremely slick menu animations and transitions. It all creates a gut reaction in me that Clair Obscur owes plenty to Atlas’ long-running series. But, as I proceed to learn quickly during…

Theme park simulators have long made their home on PC. From the now legendary Theme Park, created by Peter Molyneux back in 1994, to Frontier Developments’ 2016 hit Planet Coaster, this genre taps into much of what makes PC gaming so great, letting gamers flex their creative and, yes, management skills in one of the most fun environments possible. But making a good theme park simulator, as with any building sim, is not easy and, as history has shown us, there have been plenty of failures along the way. Only last year, for example, did Park Beyond, a new theme park sim published by Bandai Namco fail to launch, with PC Gamer’s review stating it offered “a limp campaign and serious lack of depth”. For a simulator, these failings felt…

Zooming in on planets from outer space is nothing new: I’ve been landing on alien worlds in games like No Man’s Sky and Kerbal Space Program for years. The difference here is scale. The world Brendan Greene (aka PlayerUnknown) is showing me—the digital planet he’s building—is the size of an actual planet. It’s called Artemis, and it’s a planet the size of Earth. As I peer over Greene’s shoulder at his monitor, the view is from orbit, with roughly half the planet visible in outer space—until he begins zooming in. And in. And in. As we dive toward the planet’s surface, terrain appears, resolving into mountains and hills. Massive forests become individual trees, and as we reach ground level I admire the textures of realistic boulders and rocks. After a…

These animals may not have thumbs, but they sure have hands. Tony the Tiger studied the blade just to carve me into a pumpkin lantern and I’m not even mad about it; in fact, I’m impressed. The entire zoo is out for blood in Black Myth: Wukong and I’m here for it. Dark Souls never let me stick my tongue out as a giant frog and slap my enemies around with it. It never let me create a posse of clones to punch an evil pile of rocks back into the ground either. If Dark Souls is a trial, Wukong is an adventure. Or if you want to be accurate about it, it’s a Journey to the West, but the animals have health bars. Wukong imagines a version of the…

There’s a phenomenon observed among most tabletop roleplaying (TTRPG) groups: As you play together, falling into each other’s rhythms, two things start to happen. Firstly, your capability for sincere storytelling reaches new heights; secondly, your ideas grow increasingly unhinged. Tactical Breach Wizards, a turn-based tactics game by Suspicious Developments Inc, captures the essence of a seasoned TTRPG group and distills it into around 18 hours of absolute malarkey, heartstring-pulling character stories, and yes—defenestration. Tactical Breach Wizards is far from XCOM in a robe and wizard hat. Instead of long-term battles, it zeroes in on the ‘breach, clear, repeat’ loop of bite-sized combat puzzles, and gives you more tactical tools than you could fit inside a bag of holding, with a ton of different ways to wield them. It’s what’s scribbled…

It’s been 16 years since World of Goo squidged its way into our hearts, the much loved physics-based puzzle game that became one of indie gaming’s earliest and biggest successes. But a lot has changed since then. Polished games from unfamiliar studios aren’t some headline-grabbing curiosity anymore, they’re absolutely everywhere, all the time. Who needs more World of Goo, considering the original was very much done and dusted years ago? Me. I do. We all do, really. Playing this game is a lot like catching up with an old friend. Everything from the artistic stage-select design to more than a few goo types, environmental hazards, and puzzle pieces, look and behave just as they did before. Even the little time rewinding bugs have returned (thank goodness), making it easy to…

The Flash game era is sadly behind us, but here’s a new point ‘n’ click adventure in its spirit. After finding an eviction notice and going to bed, you wake up in a dream realm that populates your apartment complex with mildly unsettling sights. Surely the floor above you hasn’t always been a pitch-black void? And did the corridor two floors up used to go on forever? In ominous office and factory environments, sketchily drawn people go about their business, playing their few frames of animation on a loop. This is as much a short film—or a multimedia installation—as it is a game, just like the Flash games I used to enjoy back in the day. What will you see after you go up the next flight of stairs? It’s…

There’s not so much a theme to this month’s column, but a feeling. The closest we can get is ‘cabin-in-the-woods-core’, like identifying a body in a copse with Pinterest boards. Slouchy knitwear, a vintage video camera, hiking boots, Twin Peaks badges, entrails hanging from branches like fairy lights in a child’s bedroom. Bigfoot is basically this, but a game; a horror movie in which soft, aspiring cryptozoologists venture into the forest then end up smashed against tree stumps by a malign force of nature. Mechanically, it’s similar to Phasmophobia, a game it preceded by three years. You collect technological doodads from your home base and venture into the wild to ensure Bigfoot, whatever species it actually is, becomes extinct. We can learn about it once it’s dead. There’s something silly…

Wi-Fi routers may not be the most exciting hardware ever to grace these pages, but the chances are every one of us has one, whether it’s the latest high-speed model or some junk sent to us by our ISP. Increasingly, we’re seeing models advertised as ’gaming’ routers, not because they’ll run Doom—though as you can play that on a printer they probably can—but because they detect and prioritize gaming traffic so that your family’s Netflix habits don’t interfere with your Destiny 2 addiction. Whether you really need the latest networking equipment depends on your device collection, and how you connect to the internet. Sharing a multi-gig fiber connection may require expensive Wi-Fi 7 and fast Ethernet, but with the average internet hookup well below this, getting a new router is a…

ENSLAVED: ODYSSEY TO THE WEST In this sci-fi cinematic platformer, Andy Serkis played Monkey a year before Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. ORI AND THE WILL OF THE WISPS Stately monkey warrior Opher teaches Ori new moves throughout the adventure. WARFRAME Released a few months after Warframe debuted in China, this suit comes equipped with Wukong’s famous staff. FINAL FANTASY XIV Dungeon boss Qitian Dasheng rides in on Wukong’s famous magic cloud before dishing out some of his famous moves.…

I think if I discovered that my entire life was just a story in a children’s picture book, I’d probably have quite a serious breakdown. Jot, the eponymous hero of The Plucky Squire, seems unfazed by it all, however—even as he leaps from the pages of his book and discovers an entirely new 3D reality beyond his own. It’s a great twist for a game that at first just seems like a cute little adventure in the style of the old top-down Legend of Zelda games. Initially charged just with finding some beeswax for a wizard, Jot merrily journeys through the pages of his book with his friends, all brought to life with gorgeous 2D animations. But when the evil sorcerer Humgrump unmoors him from the constraints of the story,…

This strategy sequel’s biggest new innovation is that its robot protagonists can now switch freely between different battlefield jobs, and combine abilities unlocked in each together. Though there are only six roles, there’s an impressive depth to the amount of different possible combinations. That’s emblematic of a sequel that expands on its predecessor in almost every way. The original SteamWorld Heist was the most impressive of the bunch – a turn-based tactical RPG, its clever twist was manual aiming and ricocheting bullets, allowing you to pull off wild trick shots. Heist 2 takes that great core combat and expands out everything around it, adding an overworld to explore, more progression and equipment for your crew, a more elaborate story and a lot more fights to blast your way through. You…

Earth Defense Force 6 is one of the most joyful shooters I’ve played in years, delivering mega-scale slapstick gunfights like nothing else while walking a tightrope-fine line between genius and idiocy in its design. It’s also a janky, rough-cut piece of software with a mediocre PC port and egregious recycling of assets. The original PS2 EDF was a simple third-person retro B-movie shooter about a little soldier guy fighting oversized alien ants and wobbly UFOs using skyscraper-flattening guns that could send your own ragdoll body flying if you got caught in your own blast. That core remains unchanged, although EDF now has four classes of soldiers, online co-op and more enemy variety. The joy of being a little guy fighting hordes that blot out the sky remains unchanged, and is…

Armored Shell Nightjar offers an experience mech-heads will be unable to resist: the chance to pilot a giant stompy mech from behind its imposing dashboard, by physically pulling levers, pushing buttons and adjusting sliders. It’s a very specific kind of fantasy and one I’m only too happy to get onboard with, not least because Armored Shell lets me operate said dashboard—forces is probably the right word—with just the mouse. Sure, it’s not as tactile as using the Steel Battalion controller, but it immerses me behind the steering wheel well enough. Except it’s not a steering wheel, but a joystick-looking thing at the bottom of the screen. And to stomp forward, I push the throttle-looking thing on the right. I should probably Google the terminology, but I’m far too busy pulling…

I don’t think I’ve ever been so delighted to do nothing in a game. While other players might want to catch outlaws or pull off daring heists, all I want to do is brew coffee, brush my horse, and oil my rifle. It’s a game that’s best when you’re doing things that sound like saucy euphemisms instead of playing it. Before that, though, Red Dead Redemption 2 is like a new roll of toilet paper that refuses to tear: mostly white and difficult to start. It’s a minor complaint about a game that’s so thoughtfully crafted, but the first few hours of the game are spent trudging through snow and squinting through blizzards. It’s a characterful opening, but a laborious one for anyone hungry to ride out into the wilderness…

I’m still not sure what possessed me to return to an obscure, rough-cut anime tie-in from the depths of my backlog instead of playing any of the fantastic things released this year, but I’ve not been regretting my time spelunking into hell with Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness. It might not be the best I’ve played recently, but it’s one of the most interesting. For those unfamiliar, Made in Abyss is a popular (if infamous) anime/manga series that looks like a kids’ show but quickly reveals itself to be a harrowing dark fantasy about hapless, bright-eyed children exploring the Abyss, a cursed chasm full of treasure, mystery and horrible hyper-evolved predatory creatures. No punches are pulled or bones unbroken as they explore its complex dungeon ecology. Released…

They say familiarity breeds contempt. Then again, how often do you see them popping up at Counter-Strike 2 majors? All of which is to say that when it comes to our gaming setups, there are two opposing forces locked in an eternal tug of war across our meticulously RGBed desk. On one side, the PC gaming hardware industry and its ever-changing roster of products, each featuring slightly higher numbers and vaguely different-sounding features than the last. Peripheral makers make us a tacit promise that this latest cool thing they’ve been working on will make us better gamers. On the other side is our muscle memory. The divots we’ve furrowed into our neural pathways over innumerable hours spent attuning to our current, imperfect, outdated setups. We sit down, our hands find…

The problem with sim racing isn’t that it’s not fun enough. No PC gamer with even a fleeting regard for suspension stiffness has done a few laps in a sim with a good direct drive wheel and said to themselves, “Well that was boring. On with my life”. If you don’t believe me, watch someone try a sim racing rig for the very first time—whether they ordinarily play games or not, the grin that takes over their face when they get up to speed is life-affirming. No, the problem is that the hardware and space requirements are really high. Similar to VR, it’s a big financial investment that you need to find a dedicated space in your house for, and while VR at least offers a range of genres and…

TRIPLE-MONITOR SETUP The extra peripheral vision that three panels gives you really adds to the sense of speed, and makes braking markers easier to spot. SWAPPABLE WHEELS Since manufacturers started selling wheelbases with quick-release catches, a whole world has been opened up. 120HZ OR HIGHER Higher framerates have just as profound effect here as in any shooter, so high-refresh monitors are desirable for any sim racer. LOAD CELL PEDALS The swappable load cells beneath the brake mean you can adjust the braking force required to hit full brake pressure.…