Innehållsförteckning för Issue 284 från PC Powerplay

So last month I pondered how little time I had for flight sims... and then along came Star Wars: Squadrons to show me that if that sim is set in space... well. I’ve been clocking a lot of time in the cockpit of a U-Wing or TIE Fighter, so I guess that’s who I am now. I also never quite got around to buying Crusader Kings 3, though I still look at it longingly on Steam. I don’t know what’s holding me back. Actually, I think I do - for some reason I thought now might be a good time to give Warframe a try, and $diety help me, I think I’m falling down the rabbit hole. I have the wiki open all the time, I’m running missions in every…

PAX Australia in 2020 was about as different for MEGHANN O’NEILL as it could get. Her usual routine involves travel, a hostel bed, lunches at the Casino, drinks with other reviewers, a cheeky panel here or there, her son melting into a beanbag and seeing more than a hundred, local, indie games. This year, even finding thirty Australian, PC games showing at PAX Online proved a challenge and this is why you will see more games from overseas studios, yet still published by Blowfish and Fellow Traveller, among the collection. With the help of JAMES ELLENDER, PC Powerplay conducted Zoom interviews over three weeks. Many less hands were shaken. Interestingly, almost every pre-release game has a demo this year, and it is nice to be able to link them to…

There aren’t many things that have made the past five years a great time to be alive, but for fans of stylish actionplatformer Metroidvanias, it’s a golden age. Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, the Ori games… all of them weaving their own particular path through the ability-expanding, area-unlocking, backtracking joys of this odd little subgenre. Haak, as it currently exists, doesn’t do this. The path it carves is straight down the middle, doing absolutely everything you’d expect and not a smidgen more. And yet. Even in Early Access, it has the power to anchor me to my desk. I work through the entire thing in two sittings. If I hadn’t been forced out the door by necessity it would have been one. Partly because everything Haak does, it does with style.…

Perhaps you like to jump in and out of online shooters, and you’re looking for something like Call of Duty to dip into a few times a month. This is not that game. On the other hand, if you’re looking for something that would jump out of the monitor and slap you around the face, you’ll be in oorah! heaven here. It’s a game that would only hold your hand in order to crush it. The fact that Squad marched around Early Access for almost five years before official release might tell you something. Like many games that linger in public development for long periods of time, the final version is an awkward, sharp-edged puzzle for anybody approaching it for the first time. There’s a tutorial, including a large area…

PRICE $TBC ONLINE rog.asus.com It’s two big firsts for Asus this issue, with their first Asus-switch-powered keyboard on the previous page, and now the new Delta S gaming cans, which include a whole mess of audio buzzwords. Built-in quad DAC! MQA rendering! Switch and PlayStation compatibility! It’s all very exciting, but the other thing Asus is touting – a lightweight 300gm design – is where things go just a little bit sideways... Which is a serious shame, because the Delta S headset sounds fantastic. Annoyingly, for best performance, you do need to download and install the ROG Armoury Crate software, so if you’re not a fan of Asus’ coding smarts, you might be wary. But once installed, you start to discover a truly formidable array of options. From here you…

PRICE $399 ONLINE www.benq.com In terms of top-line specs, the EX2510 is a 24.5-inch, Full HD, IPS, 144Hz gaming monitor with ‘HDR’ technology. The Mobiuz is also much smarter-looking than most budget monitors, thanks to a solid, classy stand, sharp lines, a colorful design flourish and a very thin bezel. The stand itself can be manipulated to generous degrees, offering -5°/+20° tilt, 20°/20° swivel and a height adjustment of 130mm. However, it rotates only to only a negligible degree – one that helps slightly with cable insertion but little else. Those connections consist of two DisplayPort 1.2 sockets, an HDMI 2.0 port and a 3.5mm audio jack. They’re hidden behind a removable panel at the back and cables can be tidily channeled through a gap in the stand. Unsurprisingly for…

It’s a tragedy that Warcraft III got an HD remaster – albeit a half-assed one – but if I want to play Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War I need to download widescreen hacks and an app just to remap the controls and get it into a playable state. Blizzard’s seminal RTS no doubt deserves all the praise it gets, but all these years later Dawn of War feels like the strategy game that really pushed the genre into new and interesting spaces. It’s not just the glorious, violent battles that erupt constantly across each mission, but the way Dawn of War cleverly trims the fat to create a strategy game that feels innovative and exciting even 16 years later. I didn’t appreciate that the first time I played it, though. For…

War Thunder got its long-awaited ‘New Power’ update last month, updating the game’s engine and vastly improving its graphics in the process. According to the update notes, the skies will look prettier and more realistic, as will bullet contact, explosions and fire. Aircraft destruction has been revamped, as well. Most of the graphical buffs focus on realism: ground vehicles will now have more realistic shell hits, destroyed ground vehicles now look even more on fire (both inside and out), and the “shape of the penetration now depends on the angle of impact” when missiles hit ground vehicles. Meanwhile, armour-piercing shells will now protrude from tanks. There are new war machines involved as well, in the form of 15 new aircraft, 14 new tank models, as well as battleships and aircraft…

I was a frank four-year-old. At the house of a preschool friend, I remarked, “What a mess,” and was never invited back. At the more empathetic age of 42, I can appreciate that the collection of paraphernalia I’d witnessed was the manifestation of a complex and difficult issue; hoarding. I don’t have a healthy relationship with The Sims, but I struggle to define it. It’s not an addiction, because my engagement now lasts mere hours after the release of a gameplay heavy expansion. Am I a fan? A collector? A hoarder? Some amalgamation of these things? As always, when I fired up The Sims 4 recently, I noticed a new expansion; Eco Living. I was so annoyed with myself for yoinking it, I immediately yoinked the Nifty Knitting stuff pack,…

As someone who’s played space simulator Elite Dangerous for hundreds of hours, it’s a strange sensation seeing a blue sky in a game that is usually dominated by the inky, star-speckled blackness of space. Odyssey, a major expansion coming in 2021, introduces planets with thin atmospheres to the game’s colossal scale replica of the Milky Way. And better yet, you can touch down with your ship, leave the safety of your cockpit for the first time ever, and actually walk on these, and other, worlds. This is something Elite Dangerous players have been dreaming about since the game first surfaced on Kickstarter in 2012. “Some elements of Odyssey, in terms of actually walking on planet surfaces, have probably been, at least conceptually, there since the very beginning of the game’s…

If you tuned into 3D Realms’ Twitch channel this September, you could be forgiven for thinking you were peering through a portal into 1997. The publisher held the inaugural Realms Deep event, two days of lightning-fast frags and chunky gibs, weapon sprites and the kind of character models where you could count the polygons by eye, all with a soundtrack that can only be described as ‘pumping’. Dave Oshry, CEO of New Blood Interactive, describes it as “our own E3 for retro shooters”. It’s a party for developers who believe the first-person shooter was perfected by the turn of the millennium and, rejecting all those heretical texts which followed, have spent the past half-decade striving to resurrect the look and feel of the ’90s golden age. This might sound like…

What’s the oldest horror game that can still make you jump today, or send that acidic tingle of unease up your spine? Dogs bursting through the windows in the original Resident Evil spring to mind, while the PC faithful may point to another glass-breaking moment – the first monster you encounter in the original Alone in the Dark. The last notable horror game before that, Sweet Home on the NES, probably finds itself just on the wrong side of the 1990s to maintain much impact today. But in that overlooked period between 1989 and 1992, a British studio in the quiet town of Sutton Coldfield made some serious horror headway. Adventure Soft, founded by father-son team Mike and Simon Woodroffe, rebranded itself as Horror Soft, and over the course of…

This direct follow-up Amnesia: The Dark Descent had enormous expectations to meet. Judging by the number of times my housemates heard me shout at it, I’d say that Amnesia: Rebirth succeeded. Navigating cramped corridors with no way to directly combat the abominations pursuing you may not be as novel today as it was a decade ago, but it’s as terrifying as ever, and Rebirth takes the series to even more disturbing places. It’s almost impossible to say anything specific about the plot, characters, or locations without spoiling the expertly-crafted story. Here are just the basic details, then: the beleaguered protagonist Tasi Trianon, brought to life with a superb performance by Alix Wilton Regan, finds herself marooned in the Algerian desert in 1937 with, appropriately enough, amnesia. Trekking through a huge…

While Partisans: 1941 may look drier than a towel in Death Valley, a game with more brown in it than your average furniture warehouse, one should never judge a guerrilla fighter by the condition of their outfit. Behind Partisans’ mud-stained trousers lies a capable real-time tactics game with some radical ideas and heart in abundance. The game involves controlling a group of Russian resistance fighters dedicated to being a thorn in Hitler’s side while his armies sweep across the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa. From your base situated deep in the forest, your ragtag band embarks on a series of increasingly daring raids against the Wehrmacht. The core is similar to most other real-time tactics games. Each mission sees you pick several of your partisans to complete an objective in…

Honestly, Age of Empires III comes from an era of 3D games that don’t exactly beg to be remastered. It’s a game where increased resolutions serve to highlight the half-baked animations that were previously hidden among pixels. So a remaster of this is like watching historical reenactments in 4K only to find that they’re performed by animatronic soldiers. Yet while there’s not much gained in this definitive edition, not all is lost either. Series fans will know the drill in Age of Empires III: plonk down a town centre anywhere on a map, build villagers, and scurry around extracting food, wood, and gold from the earth that you use to build armies, improve your technologies, and wipe out your enemies. One of the most joyous things about Age of Empires…

PRICE 5800X: $699, 5950X: $1249 ONLINE www.amd.com When AMD launched its first generation Ryzen processors in 2016, we applauded the massive performance uplift they brought, particularly the strong multithreaded performance. One area it tended to lag behind Intel in, though, was in single threaded performance and gaming. Though the Zen+ and Zen 2 generations closed the gap, Intel was always able to compete by refreshing its Skylake architecture with significant frequency increases. AMD believes it has reached the inflection point where it has achieved undisputed leadership. The company claims that its CPU options win in not some, but all the relevant categories, including multi-threaded performance, single threaded and gaming performance, performance per watt and value for money. Big claims indeed! Should your next upgrade be AMD? We have the Ryzen…

PRICE $169.95 ONLINE https://au.turtlebeach.com While there are more premium gaming headsets currently available for Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S gamers, Turtle Beach’s Stealth 600 Gen 2 delivers exceptional bang for your buck, thanks to its excellent sound quality and robust features. Apart from its dedicated PS4 version, Turtle Beach offers a Stealth 600 Gen 2 model that’s designed specifically for Xbox consoles, meaning users can pair the gaming headset directly to their Xbox One or Xbox Series X/S without the need for a USB dongle or optical connection – it’s as simple as pairing a controller. Moreover, the Xbox version works just as well with Windows 10, although you will need to purchase an additional Xbox Wireless Adapter (RRP $29.95) in order to pair the headset to your PC.…

Intel’s upcoming Rocket Lake CPUs prove it is in a crisis of existential proportions. The next six months will decide both its fate and the future direction of the PC as a whole. Hyperbolic? Much? Actually, no. It’s a somewhat speculative interpretation, to be sure. But tales of Intel’s woes have become so routine of late that the very existence of Rocket Lake and what it implies has been largely overlooked. Rocket Lake says very, very bad things about the viability of Intel’s entire business model. And that, in turn, makes it very significant for the PC as a whole. Rocket Lake, of course, is Intel’s next desktop CPU architecture. It’s essentially a 14nm backport of Intel’s 10nm Sunny Cove CPU core architecture, as seen in 10th Gen Ice Lake…

In September, Among Us entered the all-time, record-setting peak player club on Steam. According to Steamcharts, 388,385 people played Among Us simultaneously, more than GTA V on its Steam debut. And that’s not even counting the millions on iOS and Android. How did Among Us become such a sudden phenomenon, nearly two years after it launched? So big that it became the most-streamed game on Twitch in September, and its developer cancelled plans for a sequel to keep working on it? There’s more to it than just viral Twitch popularity. A few key things made Among Us a massive hit: free mobile apps, extremely low PC system requirements, and the Mafia. I’ll explain that last one first. The game at the heart of Among Us has actually been around for…

1 SPACE BAR It wouldn’t be a sci-fi game if it didn’t feature a futuristic bar or club. This neon-lit watering hole looks like a good place to pick up not-quite-legal missions. 2 SETTLEMENT This gives a good idea of the ‘Wild West in space’ feel Frontier wants its settlements to evoke. These will be dusty, rundown, and probably very dangerous. 3 SECURITY ROOM This is a security office in one of the galaxy’s many star ports, in a populated area of space. Compared to the settlements, law and order reign supreme here. 4 APEX INTERSTELLAR This is a newly introduced shuttle service that you can use to travel between star ports and settlements without having to fly there in your own ship, for a fee.…

As an AI overseeing the colonisation of Mars, things are going swimmingly with my fleet of robots and drones. Only when the human colonists arrive do things take a turn for the worse. Humans need water, food, air… plus one of them may be trying to sabotage the colony. Humans suck. Don’t think of Per Aspera as SimCity on Mars. Your colony isn’t a single metropolis it’s way, way bigger, and it will eventually extend across the entire surface of the Red Planet. The end goal isn’t just to mine resources and build structures that can support human life, but transform the planet itself into a habitable environment through terraforming. Melt the polar ice caps. Increase the temperature. Create a breathable atmosphere. Research new technologies that will allow you to…

Graven is a spiritual successor to the Hexen games, but it promises a much deeper experience than its predecessors. “Graven is Hexen 3 – kind of,” 3D Realms chief Frederik Schreiber tells me during a recent preview session. It’s the game that Raven Software would’ve made in 1998, if 1998 was now. Schreiber describes Graven as an “action-adventure puzzler, with a few RPG elements here and there”, including quests, spells, and upgrades. It certainly looks like an RPG at the outset: as a priest of the Orthogonal Order, you’re convicted of a crime you didn’t commit and cast into the midst of a heretical conspiracy when your death sentence is interrupted by a divine being who’s not supposed to exist. You wake up on a boat sliding through a thick,…

Hot damn, I love the A-Wing. Until Star Wars: Squadrons, the speed demon of the Rebellion was never my favourite ship. Rogue Squadron made me an X-Wing diehard, and even when I first played Star Wars: Squadrons on a controller, I didn’t appreciate the joy of piloting what’s basically an aluminium foil cockpit attached to an oversized engine. But when I hooked up the HOTAS, the A-Wing made me forget how much Rise of Skywalker had drained my enthusiasm for all things Star Wars. Star Wars: Squadrons succeeds where it’s most important. It’s a thrill to pilot these ships a hair’s breadth above the surface of a Star Destroyer and through stunning nebulae more vivid than I could’ve possibly imagined while playing TIE Fighter in the late 1990s. The campaign,…

EA’s soccer sim has been going through the motions for years now. Ever since FIFA 14 launched, it’s been hard to shake the sense each new entry has acted as a barely reskinned version of its predecessor. It’s an accusation you can definitely lay at FIFA 21’s feet. Though welcome improvements have been made since FIFA 20, this sports package could do with an overhaul. Before I start going studs up on FIFA 21, EA deserves credit for making the on-pitch action feel less sterile and predictable. Far too often, players in FIFA 20 felt like they were stuck on an invisible eight-directional axis – like their movement was inhibited by some unseen force. This time, movement feels more freeform, with unpredictable spaces opening up in a way that didn’t…

During one Noita run, I purchased a spell modifier I didn’t fully understand. One of the core ideas in this roguelike is that you can alter your magic wands, becoming a true arcane master with clever min-maxing. But there’s no safety net if your experimentation goes awry, or if you’re not paying attention. When I next pointed my wand at a wall and clicked, a giant razorblade shot out, cranked a U-turn and ploughed into my wizard. Dead. After doing my research, I believe the modifier I attached to that wand was called ‘boomerang’, and according to the greater Noita community, it’s pretty much useless unless paired with various healing spells. That’s the thing with Noita: even the power-ups are conspiring to kill you. There was a time, in the…

Welcome to the 1930s. The economy has collapsed, authoritarian regimes are gaining power around the world, dust storms are killing crops, and to make matters worse, booze has been declared illegal. But for Tommy Angelo, a lowly cab driver in the city of Lost Heaven, the Dirty Thirties are an age of opportunity. This is the story of his rise from working stiff to mafia big shot. But before you dive into the criminal underworld, you have to spend some time earning an honest living. The first mission in Mafia sees you driving a taxi, picking up passengers, and getting a feel for the city. The Mafia series has always been great at slowing down and giving you a chance to immerse yourself in its evocative world, and this glitzy…

PRICE $809 ONLINE www.nvidia.com The Nvidia RTX 3070 is the third Ampere card to be released and it’s a card we’ve really been looking forward to. The 3080 really surprised us with its inter-generational performance jump and relative value for money. By most standards though, it’s still a very expensive card that’s priced out of reach of most gamers. The RTX 3070 though is available for under $1,000. That’s around half the price of the outgoing 2080 Ti. Since the RTX 3070 purportedly offers performance around the 2080 Ti level, that’s an incredible doubling of ‘frames per dollar’. We have the RTX 3070 Founders Edition on hand for review. Does it deliver on its promise? Of course the RTX 3070 includes all the key Ampere features including improved ray tracing…

PRICE $TBC ONLINE rog.asus.com I’m very picky when it comes to keyboards, and it takes a lot for a new design to ween me off my years long addiction to Corsair’s K-series of boards. And I’m not saying that Asus has done that – at least… not yet. But it must be said that this is one of the very best keyboards Asus has produced, and I was more than pleasantly surprised by just how sturdy the new ROG Strix Scope RX is. Even more surprising is just how good Asus’ new in-house switches are, especially as they’re not the now-standard mechanical switches, but optical mechanical instead! Asus has tended to add all kinds of odd gimmicks to its peripherals, but the Scope RX is pleasantly free from any such…