Innehållsförteckning för August 2023 från PC Gamer

1 month 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! ARMORED CORE VI: FIRES OF RUBICON RELEASE August 24, 2023 | DEVELOPER FromSoftware Inc After an 11-year gap the Armored Core series returns, promising even more massive stompy mechs, dazzling new graphics and an epic story set in a dying star system. BALDUR’S GATE 3 RELEASE August 31, 2023 | DEVELOPER Larian Studios The legendary fantasy RPG returns in the hands of Larian Studios, the talented chaps behind the Divinity: Original Sin games. Minsc and Boo confirmed! 3 months STARFIELD RELEASE September 6, 2023 | DEVELOPER Bethesda Game Studios We now have a confirmed release date for Starfield, with the open world…

W e all have weaknesses videogames exploit to make us love them in spite of any obvious faults. It turns out that one of mine is watching 100 raptors fall out of a portal in the sky, then shooting them with a machine gun. I guess that makes Exoprimal an educational videogame? Exoprimal is a deeply strange game, and somehow the dinosaurs falling from the sky are the most normal thing about it. The story seems like it’s headed for a Jurassic Park setup, with your team of special forces operatives heading to an island where some sort of disaster has taken place. But instead of landing, finding a bunch of dinosaurs and then killing them, you first go through an interdimensional time portal controlled by a rogue AI, and…

Milestone has been constructing something strange, rare and quite special over at the Milanese headquarters for a few years now. A licensed racing simulator of the ‘careful what you wish for’ variety, one so dedicated to realism that to all but the most seasoned and dedicated virtual riders, their MotoGP games are astonishingly difficult to survive a lap of without eating a large serving of gravel trap. Obviously, there was only one direction MotoGP 23 could have gone in: it’s made it even harder. Actually, you could make the argument that the addition of AI aids this year has made the game more accessible than it ever was. Peruse the pre-release press materials and you’ll see a promo vid featuring Moto3 rider Jaime Masia, legendary MotoGP esports racer Trastevere73 and…

“The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth,” is one of Captain Picard’s most iconic lines, and the team at Dramatic Labs – a bunch of self-confessed diehard Trekkies – have embodied that mantra in their Telltale-esque adventure, Star Trek: Resurgence. The story is the perfect mix of everything Star Trek and Telltale’s choice-based narrative: humour, gentle moments that focus on care and affection, and phaser fights with lots of diving about. The Telltale formula of a strong narrative combined with morally ambiguous decision-making – and plenty of QTEs – seems to fit the Star Trek storytelling style perfectly. But Dramatic Labs offers something more: complicated puzzles, stealth sequences, time-sensitive exploration objectives, better cinematics, and an overall departure from the Telltale default of feeling like you’re watching…

OLD GAMES REVISITED If you’re thankful for nothing else in life, be glad it’s me doing this re-review and not the Doom Slayer. I’m going to write 400-ish words of gentle critical analysis. Perhaps I’ll come up with a pun for one of the cross-heads. The Doom Slayer, however, would reach out of the magazine and ram your soft face into the score until your skull cracked like a Kinder Egg. It’s obviously as much about guns as it is about melee combat Be glad, then, that in this feature I plan on respecting the sacrosanct boundary between writer and reader. You scan the words, I’ll stay on this side of the page. On the face of it, Doom is extremely serious business. People are dying. Hell is real. Humanity…

GROUP TEST AIt’s been an awfully long time coming. But rejoice, for the OLED revolution has finally made the leap from smartphones and TVs to the PC. You can now choose from a critical mass of gaming-optimised monitors all powered by the latest OLED tech. From full 4K resolution and ultrawide aspect ratios to 240Hz refresh and sub-1m response times, OLED panels certainly tick a lot of boxes. You can even get an OLED monitor with a flexible screen. But is the technology truly ready for the demands of the PC? Should you be worried about burn-in and image retention on an OLED PC monitor, for instance? What about peak brightness? Does OLED tech still have a problem lighting up the whole panel? And if OLED is indeed up to…

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 Arc A750 Intel £230 You get…

MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED Hey, Dragonborn! We know you love climbing mountains, exploring caves, and riding horses across the plains. But instead of blasting out dragon shouts, maybe it’s time to use your lungs for something else, like holding your breath. A mod called Sirenroot: Deluge of Deceit adds a mysterious submerged temple at the bottom of Lake Honrich. Getting into that temple is the easy part. Getting out again is something else. This quest begins in Riften, where I head to Elgrim’s Elixirs, the town’s alchemy shop. There I meet Frissa Black-Briar, who offers me a job. It sounds pretty simple: collecting a newly discovered plant from the bottom of Lake Honrich, just outside of town. This quest is recommended for Argonians, naturally, who can breathe…

The co-creator of Fallout (and more recently Outer Worlds) Tim Cain has recently embarked on a one man mission to spill the beans about the early days of cRPGs. Over various YouTube videos Cain has served up treasures about Fallout including that the true purpose of vaults in Fallout, it turns out, were basically testbeds for a starship. “If you ever read reports from the ’50s about what scientists thought of full-scale, international, superpower nuclear exchange,” said Cain, “there basically is no Earth to come back to”. So the vaults are testing various limits of humanity, with the long-term goal in mind. “Every vault was in some sense a test,” said Cain. Funnily enough, it’s not too far removed from Mr House’s big scheme – building a rocket and getting…

My earliest PC gaming memories are haunted by a shipwrecked sailor, stuck on a desert island. For the longest time I couldn’t remember who this spectre of my gaming past was. His bedraggled appearance and amusing antics – building sand castles and feuding with a seagull that wanted to sit on his hat – didn’t belong to the first level of the original Duke Nukem (which I never got past), or any other childhood favourites. Not Chopper Commando, not Lighthouse: The Dark Being, and not Quest for Glory. This mystery sailor remained shipwrecked in my brain, and after years of ignoring him, I finally dedicated myself to unravelling the mystery on a slow afternoon: his name was Johnny Castaway, and he wasn’t actually from a game at all, but instead…

H ere’s how Australian Broken Roads is: instead of magic potions, you drink beer. Game director Craig Ritchie casually mentions this when listing consumables, alongside bandages and first aid kits. “You can’t get magic potions in our game so we have multiple sources of beer,” he says. “The beers have different abilities.” Broken Roads is so Australian one of its character archetypes is summed up as someone who “wouldn’t even blink in a shit storm”. Funny thing is, this post-apocalyptic homage to classic RPGs like Fallout wasn’t always set in Australia. It wasn’t even always an RPG. When Ritchie first told a friend about his videogame idea in 2019, it was a tactics game, “A road trip with tactical battles along the way.” The focus was on turn-based combat, and…

Different people may have different reasons for revolting, but the most common reason they do it is because social conditions have become unlivable. Some event has occurred or policy has been enacted that goes beyond what’s bearable and into a territory where compromise is not possible. It’s at this point society can no longer be reformed; the new world will emerge from the ashes of the old… in Runeterra. Definitely just in Runeterra. The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story, developed by Digital Sun and published by Riot Forge, Riot Games’ worldbuilding-centric publishing wing, is the origin story of Sylas the Unshackled, a LoL melee burst/skirmisher champion added in early 2019. Depending on who in the player base you ask, Sylas is either an especially edgy anti-hero or a straight-up…

Boltgun is the first truly exceptional Warhammer 40,000 game since Dawn of War 19 years ago. An intense, retro-themed FPS, Boltgun casts you as a nameless, faceless Ultramarine: a violently hateful gorilla with the brain of a 14 year old, let loose on the traitorous Black Legion and their daemons. For the uninitiated, what separates Space Marines from the average gym goer is the ten tons of nuclear-powered armour they’re entombed within. Walking is a bit sluggish, but turn on auto-run in the accessibility menu and your soldier, the Sternguard Veteran, becomes a bounding hulk of metal and flesh, a bunnyhopping tornado of pure carnage and zealotry. It’s one of the few instances where a licensed Warhammer game appropriately conveys the overwhelming power of a single Space Marine. As both…

I’ve spent decades inheriting farms in desperate need of rehabilitation. On acres of forgotten land, I methodically till, plant, and harvest until I’ve grown popular with the locals. My reputation as an expert farmer earns me a modest living, and I’m often up plowing before sunrise, sometimes working until a neighbour finds me facedown in a pile of turnips. That’s all in Harvest Moon, by the way. In reality, I can hardly keep a cactus alive. Roots of Pacha is a prehistoric farming simulator that brilliantly iterates on a genre famous for finding joy in the monotonous and mundane. It quickly establishes its interest in building community more than its genre cousins. Instead of leaving first-time farmers to fend for themselves, your clan settles together. I spent my first spring…

You could turn the opening on DmC into a drinking game. It has every trope that has since become synonymous with manufactured cool. There are strewn bras, leftover pizza, bottles of liquor, and exposition via the medium of discarded newspapers. The only danger is that you’d end up as hungover as Dante. It’s interesting going back to DmC after the fifth ‘proper’ Devil May Cry game. Ninja Theory’s excellent reimagining of the series takes the odd swipe at the original, even throwing in a cheeky gag at the expense of Dante’s white hair. But it’s kind of like comparing the Libertines to Iron Maiden. DmC tries so desperately hard to be cool that it’s almost paralysed, like a doomed Tory PM pulling a power pose at a party conference. Meanwhile,…

TECH REPORT Look back down from the summit of Mount PC Gaming in 2023 to the base camp of 2013, and you’ll see quite a view. BioShock Infinite, Battlefield 4, Metro: Last Light and their bloom-soaked ilk were objects of life-affirming beauty in their day. They were the reasons we bought new graphics cards. And now look at them! A bunch of silly old garbage. What was the point in even making them, eh, Ken Levine? As much as time’s stripped away the lustrous sheen from 2013’s triple-As, when you look back at them what’s striking is that the way PC graphics have evolved in the intervening decade has been pretty linear. That is to say, we’ve seen a continued refinement of the same techniques developers used back then –…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING LAUREN AITKEN THIS MONTH I crashed my boat a lot. ALSO PLAYED Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Mass Effect Legendary Edition After months of casting spells, avoiding being eaten alive by zombies and slicing up bad guys with a lightsaber, I was hoping to find some calm and relaxation in Dredge, a singleplayer fishing adventure game. What I should have done was read the next line which also described it as having a “sinister undercurrent” which made it just as stressful as the bigger RPGs I was trying to get away from. While much shorter in length than the other games I’m playing, it’s still necessary for me to fish around for sidequests, talk to weirdos, travel around…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW ROBERT JONES THIS MONTH Realised the pistol is mightier than the pen. ALSO PLAYED Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Black & White 2 T he setting is post-apocalyptic America, deep within a series of dark and dank ancient mining tunnels running under Klamath, a two-bit town filled with nothing more than a community of trappers and their homes, a seedy inn, and a constantly busy brothel. And I, Natasha, a small-framed, bookish, yet strangely charismatic young woman and her drug-addled tribal warrior companion, Sulik, are knee-deep in giant rats who are trying to gnaw our feet off and are being prevented from doing so by being smashed into chowders of bloody guts by Sulik’s sledgehammer. We’re on a quest to rid Klamath…

Britain TOURIST GUIDE Robert Jones WHAT TO READ PC Gamer magazine, Pride and Prejudice and Mutants. WHAT TO EAT/DRINK Irradiated cups of Earl Grey tea, glowing pints of London Pride ale, hedgehog pies. HOW TO MAKE MONEY Butlering for the ruling Ghoul Family, sweeping the chimneys of rich mutants. WHAT SPORTS TO PLAY Cricket for the local First XI against Zombie CC, rugby using human skulls. WHAT BREAKS TO TAKE Bank holidays, where British subjects are forced to cower in the crumbling remains of old banks, hiding from giant mutated badgers. USA TOURIST GUIDE Wes Fenlon WHAT TO READ PC Gamer magazine, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: The Official Movie Novelization. WHAT TO EAT/DRINK Freedom (from a functioning society) fries, super jumbo prawn gumbo, 128 oz Coca-Cola. HOW…

Like most people, Waël Amr entered the industry at a young age. Unlike most people, he began with his own company, and never looked back. After a stint in the French army, Amr founded Frogwares at the age of 24. It began with a few people, and today employs around 90. Initially, Frogwares developed point-and-click adventures, beginning with Sherlock Holmes: The Mystery of the Mummy. Three games later, in 2005, it had moved on to its first 3D game: 80 Days. “The game was a flop market wise,” says Amr, “but it was very ambitious. The idea of going 3D was to modernise the genre. It was taken positively by some, but negatively by others because, you know, there are a lot of people that are looking backwards. Interesting, by…

H umanity’s anxiety over the prospect of nuclear Armageddon has manifested itself in countless creative ways, but it is videogames that have perhaps thought longest and hardest about the ramifications of atomic annihilation, building worlds dedicated to exploring what happens next. These games can be cynical, satirical, melancholy and sometimes outright goofy, but they are all ultimately visions of hope. They posit that, however twisted by fallout and factionalism it may be, life does go on after nuclear Armageddon. And they pick through the bones of the past to salvage a future. Missile Command 1980 Videogaming first contended with the prospect of nuclear annihilation in Atari’s classic. Designed by Dave Theurer, this arcade game sees players defending a line of cities from ballistic bombardment by blowing up the titular missiles…

At least aesthetically, Ravenlok makes a great first impression with a beautifully lit farmstead backdrop, populated by detailed (but still pleasantly chunky) voxel people. A girl sits in the shade of a tree, playing with her dog. It asks you for the girl’s name, and what accessory her faithful pooch will be wearing. And then the fetch quests start, and will continue until the moment the credits roll. It feels like an unfortunate statement of intent that despite being a hack and slash action game, Ravenlok begins its ersatz Alice in Wonderland adventure with legwork, bouncing between two small (but beautifully detailed) scenes, talking with just two unmoving NPCs (the young heroine’s parents) and collecting a series of items for them when – and only when – requested. The items…

Darkest Dungeon 2 is a hard game to love at times. Just like its party of heroes packed into an armoured coach and sent rumbling down the road towards oblivion, negative feelings are somewhat inevitable. It might be when an untimely series of crits kill a hero and leaves your party in shambles, or when you arrive at the mountain after four regions to find a final boss you’re completely unprepared for. There are myriad perils that can end a run and banish you back to the shadowy edges of the map to lick your wounds and grumble. As with its predecessor, love and hate spin on the same strange axis, and it’s ultimately up to you to decide if the eventual triumph is worth the tribulation it takes to…

Let me tell you about the one that got away. She was pitiless and cruel, narcissistic and delusional. She unfurled through Citadel Station in a thousand security cameras and as many cyborg slaves, their meat taken from the bodies of the outpost’s former staff. She made pustules and blisters, mutants and monsters. She was the death of me a million times over, and I’ve missed her more than words can say. She is SHODAN, of course, the malevolent AI goddess who was the centrepiece and proudest creation of 1994’s System Shock, now rebuilt in sparkling Unreal Engine 4 in this remake from Nightdive Studios. It suits her. Gone are the sprite-based enemies and screen-eating UI from the original game, replaced by clanking, three-dimensional automatons and an inventory that is certainly…

The ever-adaptable ASCII alphabet has been put to an inventive new use. We’re used to symbols standing in for creatures and loot, in traditional turn-based roguelikes. However, here they take the form of spaceships, bullets and other space clutter. Cravespace is still a roguelike, but primarily it’s a shoot-’em-up – it’s Space Invaders. As in that classic, you control a ship as enemies descend from the top, although everyone involved moves a mite more intelligently here. Ships move up and down, as well as left and right. Some of the bigger craft will even offload smaller ships. The end result is a game of exciting dogfighting, feeling strangely fresh as it’s all on a flat 2D plane. You’ll pop off shots and dodge missiles, collect power-ups and ultimately advance to…

Of the many things I’ve done as a parent, showing my child Little Inferno is near the top. Never mind the potential danger of creating a future pyromaniac. Now that she’s seen how much fun I have burning toys, my threats finally have some weight behind them. On the face of it, Little Inferno seems like one of those games that feels like it should get boring quickly. You’re literally just setting fire to things. But while most of us have gleefully torched paper, wood and maybe even the odd plastic soldier, the true joy here comes when it starts offering the forbidden burnables. Batteries. Televisions. Nests of writhing spiders. Then it becomes an illicit power fantasy. A place where ignoring health and safety or finger-wagging parents won’t result in…

It’s 7pm on a hazy June evening in my atrocious student house. Supercharged by a diet rich in Tangfastics and a supermarket Red Bull alternative, we spent the first part of the evening playing a particularly destructive indoor cricket match. But now it’s time for us all to settle down and write the personal and academic development essays we’ve been putting off for 11 months. The deadline is, after all, tomorrow. 7.15pm. Hmm. Need For Speed: Most Wanted was running a bit slow just then during my pre-essay warmup car chase. And I don’t remember quite this much pornography being on my desktop, browser homepage and bookmarks. It’s probably nothing. Better get on with that essay. 7.28pm. Yep, something’s definitely not right with Need For Speed. It wasn’t struggling that…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW WILL FREEMAN THIS MONTH Tried to collide with bullets to succeed in a shmup. ALSO PLAYED Dead End City, Terra Flame A pproaching the learning curve that a modern shmup offers up can often feel like running full speed at the foot of a cliff face. It’s not just the infamous difficulty those tightly packed bullet patterns present. There’s also profound mechanical complexity to overcome. Because in truth, to experience the real thrill of a 2D shooter is to interact with a furiously elaborate scoring system built from intersecting multipliers and combo metres, all while edging your way through tiny gaps in the ordnance barrage. Alas, all that can make the genre the opposite of welcoming. There are easy modes out there,…

Has Jedi Outcast finally had its day? For over 20 years, Raven Software’s sequel to 1997’s Jedi Knight has (with its sister game Jedi Academy) been the gold standard for Jedi-based action. Its masterful portrayal of Force powers and lightsaber combat has never been bettered, not even by mega-budget Star Wars games like The Force Unleashed or Jedi: Fallen Order. Yet the sequel to Fallen Order, Jedi: Survivor, had me doubting. Respawn’s follow up is not only a spellbinding action-adventure, but also a far better Jedi simulator than Fallen Order was. It has more force powers, a wider range of lightsaber stances, enemies that are more fun to fight, and crucially, a blade that cuts through Stormtroopers rather than simply clobbering them. It’s the first Jedi game since Outcast and…