Innehållsförteckning för December 2023 från PC Gamer

1 month ALAN WAKE 2 RELEASE October 17, 2023 | DEVELOPER Remedy Entertainment The long-awaited sequel promises more survival and psychological horrors, rejoining the story 13 years after Alan Wake went missing. CITIES: SKYLINES II RELEASE October 24, 2023 | DEVELOPER 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. LIKE A DRAGON GAIDEN RELEASE November 8, 2023 | DEVELOPER Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio Just when he thought he was out of the yakuza life, Kazuma Kiryu is dragged back into conflict by a mysterious figure. Hot new action JRPG incoming. 3 months AVATAR: FRONTIERS OF PANDORA RELEASE December 7, 2023 | DEVELOPER Massive Entertainment With Far Cry-style first person combat as well…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2024 DEVELOPER Monster and Monster PUBLISHER Raw Fury LINK shorturl.at/cehn8 I ’m not going to claim Star Trucker was the best thing I saw at Gamescom, per se, but I did come away from my hands-on demo thinking: yes, I understand exactly what this is, and I would like to play more of it. It’s a trucking game, but in space. That’s it. That’s the pitch. In the announcement trailer you get a feel for the vibe: diners, country music, CB radios – a nod to the mythologised trucking culture of the ’70s. That it’s all happening in deep space means it would be very easy for Star Trucker to lean into the comedy of the conceit, but as far as I can tell, that’s not…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER C Prompt PUBLISHER Paradox Interactive LINK shorturl.at/lK135 H istory is littered with defeated Civilization-likes, from Humankind to GalCiv 4. Try as they might, no one’s knocked old Sid Meier off his perch just yet, even six games in and 27 years on. But that doesn’t mean devs will stop trying. Enter Millennia, a new 4X strategy game from C Prompt published by Paradox Interactive. For big chunks of Millennia’s demo, I didn’t necessarily need the tutorial tips. On a micro level, plenty of what you’ll find works just like it does in Civ. You’ve got your cities, your settlers, your major competitors and the minor, single-city bit-players you’re competing for influence over. You’ll fend off barbarians and rush for space and resources in the…

Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical I’ve played dozens of visual novels and narrative adventures in my time, and I’ve still never experienced anything like Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical. It’s a game that delivers its branching narrative through song rather than the spoken word, boasting a talented cast of voices such as Laura Bailey, Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson. For the most part, it’s a wonderfully engaging adventure – even if it is unfortunately let down at points by a lack of attention to detail. Stray Gods blends modern-day and Greek mythology, putting you in the shoes of musician Grace as she finds herself intertwined with gods like Apollo, Aphrodite and Athena after receiving the powers of Calliope, the final Muse. Thing is, she gets these powers because Calliope has…

Sea of Stars Sea of Stars is another indie RPG built in Chrono Trigger’s image. There’s the seamless battle transition, there’s the techs, sorry – combos, there’s the Yasunori Mitsuda soundtrack. Been there, done that, got the time-travelling T-shirt. What separates Sea of Stars from the ever-increasing pile of RPGs that think they can recapture the spirit of the ’90s is that it understands the difference between ‘inspired by’ and ‘mindlessly copying something’” the game wants to be itself more than it does Famous SNES RPG Clone #7632. The most obvious way it draws a line between itself and the past is through its extremely – almost excessively – well-animated world. Anything that can sway in an unseen breeze does so, and every every mundane NPC or minor story event…

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Papers, Please, developers Lucas and Keiko Pope have created a demake/spin-off that lets you control the border of glorious Arstotzka from a simple LCD screen. Well, alright, a simulated LCD screen displayed on your high-end monitor – but just look at that simulation for a moment. I’m lucky enough to have owned some LCD games, and the accuracy of LCD, Please is uncanny. It’s there in the bassy, bleepy sound effects, in the subtle screen glare and light screen scratches, and it understands how sprites were drawn on LCD devices. That is, everything from HUD elements to characters would permanently reserve sections of the tiny screens, even when they were not being shown. That last one is a massive limitation, but it’s not the…

Rounding up this month’s list is Mad Max, a game that reminds us, much like the films, that Max is actually significantly less mad than most other people in the crumbling world around him. This is one of those titles that sits comfortably in the pantheon of beautifully average games; the 7/10 experiences you can recommend to friends even though you know they’re not perfect. The story is basically a romantic comedy with cars: with the help of a disfigured mechanic called Chumbucket, Max builds a new car so he can take revenge on the people who robbed him and get his favourite ride back. Maybe he’ll learn to love the new car instead? Maybe cars were actually the friends we made along the way? It honestly doesn’t matter. Because…

Lockdown brought out many strange habits in us all. Frenzied walking around parks. Giving ourselves haircuts. All the endless bloody baking. And for me and my mates, a renewed enthusiasm for Slightly Mad Studios’ 2017 racing sim, Project CARS 2. While the world was laugh-crying at the hilarious antics of those colourful little beans in Fall Guys and shouting at Phasmophobia’s ghosts, we whiled away what for all we knew was the apocalypse by adjusting radiator cooling ducts and rake angles. THE WHEEL AND PEDALS’ OTHER ADVANTAGES MADE THEMSELVES CLEAR I’m exaggerating for effect. Obviously we played all of those in-vogue titles too, but Project CARS 2 was the one that stuck. It was so malleable, so sandboxy for a racing sim. I created 100-lap Indycar oval races in the…

NOW PLAYINGTHE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW My spaceship is serviced, painted and its engines are primed for take-off. My hired crew member, Marika, is chipper and raring to go hunt some bounties. And my armoury of weapons now includes a Rapidshot tactical shotgun, Furious Orion laser rifle and, what can only be described as a lethal Ashta Tamer explosive projectile launcher. I’m cocked, locked and ready to rock Starfield’s Settled Systems. But instead, I’m picking out a fetch green sari from EIT Clothiers in New Atlantis, and afterwards I’m going to wear it, grab a coffee, and then go stroll around the leafy, wooded parkland in the city’s Mast District. It’s going to be a pleasant morning. Because after the barrage of hype surrounding Starfield, I’m trying to take…

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT Bethesda’s Todd Howard has been on the interview circuit for the launch of Starfield, and some of the questions have been doozies. An early highlight was an interview with Bloomberg Technology, where Bethesda’s director was asked a stark and crowd-sourced question: why did you not optimise this game for PC? “Uh… we did,” says Howard, as Xbox head Phil Spencer fails to suppress a chuckle. “It’s running great. It is a next-gen PC game, we really do push the technology, so you may need to upgrade your PC for this game, but it’s got a lot of great stuff going on in it and the fans are responding awesome.” He means people fans, not case fans. Howard does occasionally get a little spicy, such as…

Special Report PCG INVESTIGATES NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT Wolfenstein: The New Order and New Colossus developer MachineGames obviously loves shooters. But even within the studio there’s a circle of devs whose love transcends the norm: The Quake Club. This crew of creatives are responsible for fresh expansions bundled into the recent Nightdive remasters of Quake and now Quake 2. There’s a long history here: for one of MachineGames’ founders, Jerk Gustafsson, Quake 2 is linked to his career in game development. “The whole reason I got into the industry at all – as for many, I’m sure, is Quake 1. I didn’t even buy my first computer until 1996, when Quake 1 came out,” he says. “I quite quickly realised that I could actually do something…

COVER FEATURECities: Skylines II The moment Cities: Skylines II clicked for me was when I unlocked farms. One of several specialist industries included in the city-building sequel, farms produce a variety of crops and livestock from a circular outline around the central farming structure. Because of this, each farm occupies a large expanse of land, giving these areas a very different vibe from your dense and bustling town centre. In the first Skylines, having a small number of buildings occupy so much space would have been impractical. But Skylines II is built to accommodate more dispersed, low density settlements. “When you are building the city, you don’t necessarily have to think about a huge city, you can actually have these more rural spaces,” says Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of developer Colossal…

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a futuristic time capsule that bursts with sonic and ocular swag. There’s a primordial videogame joy in these sick combos and great tunes, which pulled me through 25 hours of skating off walls, dodging cops and spray-painting labyrinthine levels. It’s rare to play a game with such a fervent sense of self, even when it’s channeling such clear Y2K-era inspirations. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is so fun. In the first 20 minutes, an evil DJ decapitates my protagonist with a vinyl record, my friends rebuild me into a cyborg, and I’m off on a revenge mission to overthrow this tyrant and ‘Go All City’ becoming the definitive spray painting crew. Before I gush about the great stuff, which there is a lot of, I have to say…

FREE GAMES REVIEWS COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH South Scrimshaw, Part One has really come out of nowhere, using a familiar framework to show something thrillingly new. It’s sort of a visual novel – but forget the cutout characters and dialogue choices. No, we’re being told the story of the Brillo whale – enormous whales that adorn their bodies with other sea life, in a symbiotic process – and our only choices are whether to hear more of it, when given the option. I’m confident you will, as Scrimshaw guardedly reveals its fascinating backstory, which has made an ocean’s worth of familiar yet different sea creatures available for scientific study. We’re watching a documentary about one specific Brillo whale as he looks out with his adorable Brillo…

THEY’RE BACK OLD GAMES REVISITED I’d love to speak to the person on Level 5’s localisation team who decided Drippy from Ni No Kuni should not only be Welsh, but richly, creamily, aggressively Welsh, like a male voice choir armed with longbows that fire Gavin and Stacy DVDs. It’s impossible to imagine the Lord High Lord of the Fairies sounding like anyone else. Brilliantly executed localisation is perhaps not something we associate with JRPGs. It’s more common for English language versions of Japanese games to feature acting that sounds like a text-to-speech program. But this is one area where Ni No Kuni feels wonderfully different to other similar games, and it’s a measure of the game’s level of production. It feels lavish. The experienced creative hands of…

A dream shared by PC gamers everywhere has been to take our entire gaming PCs on-the-go. From LAN parties to powerful gaming laptops, we’ve gotten close to portable gaming nirvana, yet no solution has been quite as simple as pulling out one of the latest generation of PC gaming handhelds and gaming from near enough anywhere. It took a few good mobile processors to make the dream a reality. The first handhelds out of the gate were a little underpowered, then Valve made the Steam Deck and now we’re all interested. VALVE HAS COMMISSIONED ITS OWN LINUX OS, STEAMOS, TO RUN ON THE DEVICE 1 Deck STEAM £349 Best value The Steam Deck is the handheld device that I could only dream of as a child; a compact,…

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 £115This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400F Intel £199Intel’s added four more cores to its entry-level Core i5 and it’s become even more fantastic value. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 4060Nvidia £288One of the cheaper ways…

I recently returned home from competing in my first Tekken 7 major, which means I’m in that post-tournament training stage. I still suck pretty bad at the game. I don’t compete in these things to win, I compete to be around my friends, other like-minded people and, most critically, receive instant feedback on how I play. So now I’m taking the constructive criticism I received at the tournament – my impatience, lack of matchup knowledge, pressing buttons when I shouldn’t be – and trying to apply it back home. Yeah, turns out you can’t just mash buttons at these things. Who’d have thought?! I’ve also picked up a new character since my main, Lucky Chloe, seemingly isn’t making it into Tekken 8. Truly heartbreaking stuff. All’s well though, because…

MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED S top me if you’ve heard this one. You and your party of adventurers are running around some dimly lit cavern or sneaking through a crumbling temple or entering a spooky, abandoned little town. It’s quiet. A little too quiet. Surely, not everything is as it seems. Then you hear a sound: a dice roll. It’s a perception check, and you’ve failed it! Your entire party, in fact, one by one, has completely failed to spot… well, something. So, you stop in your tracks because even though you didn’t notice anything, you did notice that you didn’t notice anything. It’s pretty funny to fail a perception check, but it can be a little immersion-breaking, too. That doesn’t just happen in Dungeons &…

During and after university, Kirsty Gillmore studied – and had a passion for – drama; after university, she did both music and arts degrees. A post grad in sound engineering, and then a move to the UK, followed. The rest of her storied career up until now could easily take up the whole page; but it includes directing actors and acting herself, work for the BBC, and setting up her own business. For nine years, this included directing, producing and writing other actors’ voice reels. “Over the years that I did that,” she explains, “I realised what I wanted to do was more directing.” Fast forward to 2023, and she’s been involved in audio dramas, multiple animation projects (including for streaming giant Netflix) and, of course, several games. Modern Warfare…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2023 DEVELOPER Croteam PUBLISHER Devolver Digital LINK thetalosprinciple.com O ne of the best of the many first-person puzzlers that followed in Portal’s wake, The Talos Principle offered what felt like a complete experience. The possibility space of its puzzles was thoroughly explored. And its story, in part explored through text prompt conversations with a nihilistic contrarian, was complete. Where’s even left to go? In The Talos Principle 2, the answer is far into the future. My hands-off demo starts with a short boot-up sequence that mimics the style, architecture and puzzles of the original game. It’s after this that The Talos Principle 2 reveals itself. You are born into the world – the 1,000th robotic citizen of the city of New Jerusalem, and, according to the…

You’ve probably heard the expression ‘sea of stars’, but The Anglerfish Project takes that a step further, by giving you a fishing rod and a lure to cast into the cosmos. You take aim and cast, and if successful bring back a snippet of story, in this novel and whimsical narrative adventure. You’re Padraig, a fisherman who has swapped plaice for deep-space message recovery. Camping out a little planetoid, you have to trudge round with your fishing rod, using it to fling a probe into anomalies. Somehow, these space phenomena have recorded snippets of private chats, and a company named The Foundation wants you to hoover all of them up. It’s all in a day’s work to find the anomalies as they appear in the sky, and manage your strength…

THEY’RE BACK There are two plots in Rage. The first involves an asteroid colliding with the planet, environmental disaster, the collapse of civilisation and a brave, US marine lieutenant who awakes from stasis to help save humanity. The second is simply ‘what if muscle cars plus apocalypse?’ So it’s massively familiar stuff, then. The story is so rote that it almost feels like a team of great minds sat down and named everything in a way that means you never have to actually think. Sinister, technologically-advanced organisation trying to maintain control at any cost? Let’s call them The Authority. Rebellious forces fighting against them? That’s The Resistance. Winged stick boomerang? It’s a wingstick. It’s one step away from calling the protagonist Hiro Gunman. I’m not sure if it’s really clever…

TECH REPORT Sony’s Gran Turismo movie hit cinemas this summer, telling the remarkable story of Jann Mardenborough’s transition from talented sim racer to decorated racing driver. It’s significant for several reasons, not least of which being the idea that a two-hour movie about gaming is now considered summer blockbuster material. But what we’ll remember the most about it is that it represents that last moment such a story would be out of the ordinary. In the near future, this would just be a story about a racing driver getting his break. F1’s new generation of drivers are as well-versed and as passionate about sim racing as they are about Formula One itself. That’s not hyperbole – McLaren’s Lando Norris has several times gone on record to say he prefers virtual…

CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW D ungeons & Dragons 5th edition has plenty of written rules – but it’s got its fair share of unwritten ones, too. These days, there are tabletop taboos that are simply not broken in polite company. The thing is, Baldur’s Gate III breaks pretty much all of them. It goes without saying that Baldur’s Gate III is an exceptional RPG, and for my money the best adaptation yet of D&D to the digital realm. But there’s definitely some friction between Larian’s well-honed approach to RPG design, and what a 5e player might expect. In the early history of D&D, absurdly lethal traps were a staple – at some tables, you’d keep a stack of spare…

W hat makes Napoleon a compelling subject? Is it that he came from nothing and conquered everything? Or is it the fear he inspired in his opponents? “My enemies are many, my equals are none,” he declares in Creative Assembly’s sixth Total War. Through my clicks and taps I embody the general himself in the game’s opening Italian campaign, the first of several following Napoleon’s career. It’s April, 1796, and I’ve assumed control of a stalled invasion of Northern Italy aimed at Vienna. The map is a close view of the region, which contrasts with the globe-spanning schemes of its predecessor Empire. If sceptics don’t like the difference in scale, I’d point to the texture it brings: regions which barely register in Empire stretch across the screen. Turns represent not…