Innehållsförteckning för Xmas 2024 från PC Gamer

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE November 7 DEVELOPER Tower Five PUBLISHER Microids LINK microids.com Giant ants have a long history in videogames, all the way back to 1989’s Cinemaware classic It Came From the Desert, but while they may look gigantic, the ants in Empire of the Ants are normal sized. They’re just very close, and packed with all the detail Unreal Engine 5 can manage. So what you get are heads, thoraces and abdomens that are sharp down to the little hairs that protrude from them. Mandibles gnash and gape, legs skitter, antennae wave and slugs leave trails of slime. The tiny world is rendered with care, light bouncing off carapaces and the shadows of towering plants creating a contrasty place to explore – though there’s a fair…

The bad news is that Path Of Exile II’s Early Access debut won’t be the full game, as initially hoped. The good news is, even limited to half of the main story and six of the planned 12 classes, this is shaping up to be one of 2024’s best action-RPG releases. THE MONK DOESN’T HAVE MUCH IN THE WAY OF DEFENSIVE OPTIONS That’s saying a lot, given that PoEII will be going up against a refreshed and expanded Diablo IV, as well as recent rivals like Last Epoch and No Rest For The Wicked. But with a dozen hours of a near-finished build under my belt, I’m confident in that assessment. With just weeks to go until the launch of Grinding Gear Games’ ambitious ARPG sequel, I was invited to…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A procgen immsim starring a PI. Potentially other abbreviations too EXPECT TO PAY £20 DEVELOPER ColePowered Games PUBLISHER Fireshine Games REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 3700x, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 MULTIPLAYER None LINK store.steampowered.com/app/986130/Shadows_of_Doubt Shadows of Doubt is a procgen immersive sim that’s a love letter both to noir crime fiction and any videogame that’s ever had an 0451 code in it. Its voxelised cities are shrouded in darkness even at midday, and every building is connected by a network of traversable air ducts the game spins up when you load in. You’re a PI: a private dick with no money, no flex and a police scanner, picking up murders and kidnappings the corrupt local cops won’t solve and piecing them together yourself…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Incredulous Interactive LINK incredulous.itch.io You know all those pictures of people seeming to lean on the Tower of Pisa, or hold monuments in the palms of their hands? Well it’s all a matter of perspective, as you’ll discover when you play this sweet, short puzzle game, which has you staging cute, Pisa-style photographs. It’s rare for a puzzle game to have no standout gimmick just the very real, but no less magical science of forced-perspective photography. In each scene, you’re given a person and a landmark to capture, along with the outline of the necessary shot, and then you’re left alone with your camera to recreate it. How to turn the Washington Monument into a pluckable little baguette, or Mount Rushmore into…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £5.20 DEVELOPER NEXT Studios PUBLISHER NEXT Studios Finally, we have Unheard, a game that’s the direct opposite of The Quiet Man in that it’s a) about using sound instead of visuals, b) playable and c) has a story that ChatGPT wouldn’t be ashamed to share. Yes, I know I’m berating The Quiet Man again. I’ll stop now. Anyway! Unheard. You unravel mysteries by listening to sounds and conversations. The pitch is that you’re an acoustic detective who returns to scenes of various crimes and pieces together exactly what happened. It’s a thoughtful concept, and I especially like it because ‘acoustic detective’ sounds like the name of a band who’d be nominated for the Mercury Music Prize but probably not win. By replaying audio and…

Ergonomics. We think about it when we sit in an especially comfortable (or uncomfortable) chair. We give it a moment when we wrap our hand around a nicely shaped mouse. And then it leaves our sphere of awareness again, to make room for CS2 callouts, the names of Doom WADs we downloaded in 1997, and figuring out what was actually going on in Alan Wake 2. A TANGLE OF RIPPLES AND PROTRUSIONS NOW SURROUNDS THE OPERATOR’S HAND Which means we don’t often stop to consider the longstanding design conventions that govern what a computer mouse looks like. And nor did I, if we’re being honest with each other. Until one late-evening YouTube rabbit hole took me to a video called ‘I Built the World’s Comfiest Mouse’. The resultant 3D printed…

CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMINGNOW PLAYINGTHE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW FRASER BROWN THIS MONTH Chilled out underground with my new earthen buddies. ALSO PLAYED  Thanks Goodness You’re Here, Star Wars Outlaws There are two immutable facts you should know about me: I will always find a way to mention my dog in pretty much every conversation (done!), and I will always come back to World of Warcraft. Usually at the start of the new expansion, but this time I actually returned to Azeroth at the start of the year, and it’s maintained its hold over me month after month. It is a prison from which I will never escape. Dragonflight ended up being one of my favourite expansions, up there with Wrath of the Lich King and Legion, but…

NOW PLAYINGTHE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW MATT KILLEEN THIS MONTH Finally found a protagonist to match his talents. ALSO PLAYED Doom (2016), EA FC25 Beta, Rome 2: Total War I never wanted to be Han Solo. I was very young when I saw Star Wars for the first time, and his type of misbehaviour was completely alien to me. Why wouldn’t you do the right thing, straight away? Don’t get me wrong, I was happy he shot first and all, but my Star Wars journey was different. I was the good farm boy turned hero, who became a one-handed zero, before dropping his lightsaber and refusing to fight. A lot of midi-chlorians have flowed under the bridge since then. The Jedi in the stories that followed became overpowered, oversaturated and more…

REINSTALLOLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 1989 PUBLISHER SNEG DEVELOPER Strategic Simulations LINK gbc.zorbus.net Years before Baldur’s Gate came along, the CRPGS made in the Gold Box engine, including Curse of the Azure Bonds, were my introduction to the Forgotten Realms. Which is why I’ll always associate the setting with women in impractical armour and names that can’t be taken seriously. In Curse that’s the priest Gharri of Gond, though a few years later Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures would introduce the unforgettable Lunit Bdufe a name that makes Drizzt Do’Urden seem downright mundane. The Gold Box games also introduced me to factions like the Zhentarim and the Red Wizards of Thay, two of the organisations in Curse of the Azure Bonds trying to control you via the magic tattoos of the…

1 month MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR 2024 RELEASE November 19, 2024 | DEVELOPER Asobo Studio The latest iteration of the long-running and increasingly scarily accurate flight simulator promises new aircraft, flight modes, engine graphics and more. STALKER 2: HEART OF CHORNOBYL RELEASE November 20, 2024 | DEVELOPER GSC Game World After many delays, the much-wanted survival-horror FPS is launching in the penultimatel month of 2024. Explore and fight in a dystopian nuclear exclusion zone. INDIANA JONES AND THE GREAT CIRCLE RELEASE December 8, 2024 | DEVELOPER Machine Games Indy’s back with a new whip-cracking adventure that is set between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Hype! 2 months SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION VII RELEASE February 11, 2025 | DEVELOPER Firaxis Games The latest…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE October 22 (Early Access) DEVELOPER Torn Banner Studios PUBLISHER Torn Banner Studios LINK nmrih2.com As the zombie horde surrounded me just moments after taking down my two remaining teammates, the writing was really on the wall. Armed with just a kitchen knife, it was clear I stood no chance, but I was going down swinging, hoping for a miracle… it didn’t come. Being so close to success in the final area, after adventuring across the giant No More Room In Hell 2 map for over 45 minutes, made the failure even more depressing. I’d finally managed to team up with a couple of other survivors, we’d looted a couple of locations such as an abandoned church and building yard to get some weapons that should have…

Remnant 2’s third DLC, The Dark Horizon, released earlier this year – and it represents a victory lap for Gunfire Games, a dev that has made a game I’ve been a pretty large advocate for. It’s felt like a bit of an oasis in a sea of live service speculative tailspins – Gunfire decided to simply release three quite-good DLCs in the span of a year at a reasonable price point, with nary a battle pass in sight. “THE ORIGINAL PROTOTYPE HAD MORE SURVIVAL GAME ELEMENTS” In addition to getting an early peek at The Dark Horizon, I also got to sit down with CEO and game director David Adams, as well as co-founder and development director Ben Gabbard, to talk about the history of the game and its design…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A city builder and society sim set in a frozen world £38 DEVELOPER 11 bit studios PUBLISHER 11 bit studios REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-9700K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti MULTIPLAYER No LINK frostpunk2.com Citizens of New London: as you prepare to banish me from our city forever, I hope you understand that I always had good intentions. I never meant to run out of food, let hundreds of you perish from cold, or have the streets patrolled by giant fascist robots who stomp entire buildings flat while trying to prevent a single starving child from stealing a chocolate bar. Things just… got outta hand. Coal, which has kept the city’s generator burning, is dwindling But before I step…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The first expansion for Bethesda’s space exploration RPG, complete with a fractious cult to investigate and their newly explorable homeworld EXPECT TO PAY £26 DEVELOPER Bethesda Game Studios PUBLISHER Bethesda Softworks REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-12700F, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MULTIPLAYER No LINK bethesda.net/en/game/starfield Starfield’s vision of the future was just too timid. The squeaky clean corridors of New Atlantis did less for me than the crime-riddled backwater of Riften, and the average planet’s points of interest were spread so thin I felt like I was bushwhacking through miles of desolate space just to find something memorable. So I went into Shattered Space with some anticipation: maybe a more focused experience would allow me to see the potential that Bethesda…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Another RPG in a long-running and diverse series EXPECT TO PAY £45 DEVELOPER Square Enix PUBLISHER Square Enix REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700, XVIGB RAM, Intel HD Graphics 630 MULTIPLAYER No LINK shorturl.at/ijfw9 When you picture what a Final Fantasy game is, what does your mind jump first to? Shiny, pretty landscapes? Even prettier hair? Cute little creatures? Final Fantasy XVI really doesn’t fit that mould. With high-stakes action combat and a much darker tone, FFXVI flips all of your expectations upside down. The world of Valisthea feels as grubby as Game of Thrones. Both have medieval(-ish) worlds full of warring nobles vying for power with a cruel approach to their citizens’ welfare, and both face impending doom – in Final Fantasy XVI’s case,…

COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A multimedia experience recounting the history of a fake kids show, based on actual Knightmare EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Minus One Publishing PUBLISHER Minus One Publishing REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYER No LINK bit.ly/FrontiersMind Knightmare is one of those shows that can be quite difficult to explain, as it was basically a dungeon crawl shown on primetime kids TV. Its mixture of computer imagery, live actors, grisly traps and a team of children yelling “sidestep” could almost have existed just in someone’s feverish imagination. It’s been repurposed as such in the spooky Frontiers of the Mind, which takes Knightmare and adds unethical psychic experiments. The show – fictionalised here as Maze…

OLD GAMES REVISITED NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The game that makes Axe Cop look like Serpico EXPECT TO PAY £12 DEVELOPER Square Enix, Human Head Studios PUBLISHER Square Enix REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER No LINK store.steampowered.com/app/790540/ THE_QUIET_MAN/ The thing about re-reviewing loads of old games is that most of them are good in a boring way or bad in a boring way. I am pleased to report, then, that The Quiet Man is so terrible it surprises and delights me. It’s a child’s magic show where the cards are on fire and the doves all smashed. You play as Dane: essentially a My Chemical Romance DLC costume for Jill Valentine. He’s not so much a character, as a series…

Intel launched its first NUC mini-PC in 2013, so compact computing is nothing new. The ability of such tiny machines to competently run games, however, is a fairly recent development. Mini PCs are driven by laptop-level Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), comprising a power-efficient CPU and an integrated graphics chip, and advances in the latter have helped the form-factor shrug off the cheap productivity suit and party. In this regard, AMD’s 2023 Radeon 780M iGPU set a new standard. Still, expectations should be managed. For mini PCs which rely on an iGPU for gaming, we’re talking 30+fps at 1080p for AAA games at medium settings, though they really can shine with less-demanding indies. Three of the machines on test here add a discrete laptop GPU to the mix, enabling higher performance…

NOW PLAYINGTHE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW ROBERT JONES THIS MONTH Reclined on the Anvil of the Void while reading PC Gamer. ALSO PLAYED  Doom (2016), Doom (1993) Ah, the Deep Roads, my old friends. I see you’re still as drawn-out and frustrating as ever. Good job, then, that I’ve got a dual-wielding warrior queen at my side in the form of Leliana, who continues in my most recent playthrough of Dragon Age: Origins to be my MVP. Barely a fight goes by without Leliana emerging literally coated with enemy blood and with a body count to her name that surpasses anyone else in my party. Right now, for example, my two-handed sword-wielding hero Natasha looks to her left only to watch as Leliana, specced here as a dual-wielding…

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT Steam has made a little change to its shopping cart page: a new message that very clearly lays out to one and all that you’re not buying a game – you’re buying a licence. The message itself is brief, “A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam”. A link to the full Steam Subscriber Agreement is also provided. The change follows Valve modifying its subscriber agreement last month to remove a forced arbitration clause. Of course, for practical purposes, all you need to do is forget your Steam password to get a real sense of just how much you ‘own’ your games. You can’t bequeath your Steam library to anyone upon your unfortunate passing either, which of course you…

Diablo is a game about puppeteering your little hero around and clicking monsters until they pop into piles of loot. It’s easy to wrap your head around a loop like that. Blizzard designs both the piñata and the bat we hit it with. But it can be easy to forget just how much work goes into making you believe you’re doing all of this in a dark gothic world with centuries of history. Diablo IV probably reckons with this challenge more than its predecessors. Videogame open worlds are expected to be beautiful and navigable, especially ones where players expect everything to get out of their way as they massacre thousands of demons. The last thing you want to do is get lost on your way to finish a quest. But…

Parcel Corps NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A cycle courier game that wants to be a satirical cartoon EXPECT TO PAY £30 DEVELOPER Billy Goat Entertainment PUBLISHER Secret Mode REVIEWED ON AMD Threadripper 2950X, 64GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK billygoat.tv/parcelcorps France bans work emails after 2pm. Sounds like a pretty good idea, especially if it also includes Slack messages, carrier pigeons, people yelling out of office doors and, most horrifying of all, phone calls. Add to this your mandatory lunch break an hour (or so) earlier, and it sets up the perfect afternoon in the corporate hellscape we inhabit. It also nicely encapsulates Parcel Corps’ attitude to earning the money that keeps us in food, shelter and PC games. That line comes from the game’s…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Powerhoof LINK bit.ly/TerminalCity Makers of modern adventure games have largely decided to follow the LucasArts model rather than the Sierra one, meaning very few of them feature sudden, unforeseeable deaths. Sierra games would kill you just for crossing the street, for examining an object, so it’s a good thing all that has gone away. Right? Sure, it’s less fraught, meaning you don’t have to save the game constantly, but there was an enjoyably cruel wit to those inventive game-overs. Terminal City is a game of constant next times, turning the adventure game into a gauntlet where everyone, where everything, is out to get you. It’s only seconds before your first test: a low pipe that you have to slide under, by typing…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £31 DEVELOPER Monstars Inc PUBLISHER Engage It seems insensitive to follow a game about the absence of sound with a mesmerising aural masterpiece, but apparently that’s exactly what I’m doing, like a cruel relative in a Roald Dahl story celebrating their favourite child. Eat your fish heads and stop crying, The Quiet Man. You’re putting Tetris Effect off her Wagyu beef. If it’s any consolation, it’s much easier to write about why The Quiet Man is terrible than why Tetris Effect is great. It’s a game that has to be experienced, ideally in VR, to understand fully why it’s so special. On the face of things, it’s still just Tetris, which honestly, I really shouldn’t have to explain to anyone. It still feels lovely…

TECH REPORT Don’t worry, the printers haven’t made a mistake and dropped a spread from Console Enthusiast Quarterly in with this issue’s PCG. You are going to see the PS5 Pro mentioned quite a lot in these pages though, because its overdraft-troubling pricing has sent a ripple out across the industry that extends beyond the traditional platform boundaries. In dollar terms, it isn’t the most expensive console that Sony’s ever brought to market. When you adjust PlayStations past and present for inflation, PS3’s $599 launch price works out at $787. And that was the base console, not the upgraded latter-day version that follows in the wake of each generation-setter. That factoid in isolation makes it seem as though critics of the PS5 Pro’s pricing are being short-sighted, or unduly wary…

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 £11 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400FIntel £170 With ten cores, six of them the Performance kind, this Raptor Lake Core i5 is fantastic value and a great all-rounder. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX 7600AMD £249…

MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Various PUBLISHER Many DEVELOPER Several LINK nexusmods.com Mods are the lifeblood of PC gaming. Consoles can keep their pomp and highfalutin talk of convenience, whatever that is, I’m busy turning The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion into a six-way gang war, vaporising myself in the prologue of Fallout 4 and turning Skyrim into a boundless playground of fetishes so hyper-specific they’d give the Borgias pause. I mean, I’m not doing that last one, actually. Don’t put in the magazine that I’m doing that last one. Thing is, though, some mods are so mind-bogglingly niche that you can’t really justify building an entire piece just to cover them. It means you end up with a long list of weird and wonderful…