Innehållsförteckning för Issue 294 från PC Powerplay

It’s a well known fact that for several years I was indisputably the best jet bomber pilot in War Thunder. All my mates said so. Ergo: fact. But with the arrival of 4th gen vehicles in the game it’s now entered the modern era, and that means I need to enter the modern era, too, and start fighting like a Maverick, not a jet airline pilot. This is one of my all-time favourite games. It’s free. Kinda. And the battlefield intensity is incredibly satisfying. Even the starter WW1 vehicles are tops, so check it out. I might see you in the skies. Or a crater. ben.mansill@futurenet.com Ben Mansill takes his bomber where fighters fear to fly. Then quickly dies.…

Gamescom is the sort of place where, in 2018, somebody claimed that an attendee, while queuing to play Fortnite, did a poo in a bag and left it there, and enough people believed this story that the PR for Epic had to tweet “this did not happen”. Even though it wasn’t true, the fact that so many people thought it was true is, in and of itself, a damning condemnation of the entire thing. It was with some trepidation then that The Spy visited this year’s event. Because even though it was consistently 33°C, and filled with the sort of people that other people think would do a poo in a bag, it’s also filled with the kind of insider knowledge that The Spy craves. The Spy can watch in…

INJUSTICE 2 All those unlockable bits and bobs needed a good team to make navigating the menus easy. JUST CAUSE 3 Thankfully, Rico’s careless attitude to getting the job done didn’t translate to the UI and UX. TRIALS RISING Guess who you have to thank for UI navigation not being one of the trials that you need to fight here? CALL OF DUTY VANGUARD Good UI and UX is essential to the flow of a fast-paced shooter like your average Call of Duty.…

Five seconds into my demo of The Callisto Protocol and I’m already slapped with a (very successful) jump scare. A mutant appears from nowhere, tentacles brutally ripping out of its chest as it lets out a blood-curdling scream. Protagonist Jacob hesitates, and the tentacles slosh back into its body. But that’s no sign of safety. It morphs, in an unsettlingly believable way, growing larger, badder, and a whole lot scarier. Developer Striking Distance want to keep you on your toes. The team pulled inspiration from Alien Isolation’s stalking antagonist to ensure you almost never feel safe. “Things track you in our game, the grunts sometimes find a way,” chief technical officer Mark James tells me. “They don’t always attack you, they’ll move into a grate and you’ll hear them around…

PLAYED IT I’m not great at parking in real life, because I’m paranoid about hitting other cars. Here is a game where you’d fail your parallel parking test because a giant magnet threw you into a laser barrier, or the sea, which isn’t something I’ve had to worry my insurers with. Yet. You Suck at Parking is a simple blend of isometric racer and, well, parking, but not as you know it. Drive your tiny but clearly overpowered car round a treacherous Trackmania-style circuit of obstacles against the clock and with dwindling amounts of petrol, before trying to leave your car in the general vicinity of the marked bays. Handling much like a fairground bumper car, each turn is likely to become a doughnut spin, but critically there’s no reverse…

RELEASE Summer 2023 | DEV Telltale Games, Deck Nine Our favourite badass pansexual polyamarous space pirate is coming to videogame land thanks to this Telltale prequel series, which will explores Camina Drummer’s life before the events of sci-fi TV series The Expanse. Getting actress Cara Gee involved is exciting since her performance is so much of what people love about the character, but also casting you as a desperate scavenger, poking around spooky derelicts, sounds great on its own. Deck Nine has done well in recent years with Life Is Strange: Before The Storm and True Colours, here’s hoping this is another winner.…

RELEASE TBC | DEV Ironbird Creations While it’s stylistically distinct (though equally colourful), favouring pop beats in an otherworldy opera house, this 2D-3D hybrid action game reminds me of the outlandish El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. Switching perspectives, altering the scenery. The game treats its world like a stage to be decorated as befits the scene. You play as Jolene, armed with a sword, hellbent on rescuing her mother from a supernatural theatre. It’s a fun premise but there’s tough competition in the character action genre – here’s hoping this contender can hold its own.…

NEW INFO With CRPGs in a renaissance over the last few years, there couldn’t be a better time for Warhammer 40K to enter the genre. You’re cast as the titular rogue trader, a merchant given special dispensation to forge out into the galaxy in search of profit and adventure. As you go, you’ll build an eclectic party, including a Space Marine and an Aeldari Ranger, so you should get a real taste of the universe while you chat and fight your way across it. In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war… and dialogue choices. RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Owlcat Games PUBLISHER In-house LINK bit.ly/3qdMBHn…

Ban Souls-likes. Please, for the love all that is holy, ban them. I cannot think of a sub-genre that has so thoroughly burnt itself out in so short a time while producing so little of value. Numerous imitators have come and gone while the very games they’re trying to ape continue to be made. What good is a middling Dark Souls clone when Dark Souls is right there? This very year we had Elden Ring for goodness sake! Of course, there is one beloved From Software property you can’t play on PC (at least, outside of some wonky streaming options). Bloodborne has long been demanded for the platform and so, maybe, Thymesia has a place here? Offering players a taste of an experience beyond their reach? If it’s a taste,…

On the face of it, this is a hard sell to the videogame crowd. There’s no direct control over an avatar. You complete QTEs and make choices, and… that’s about it, really. Yet the limitations of the format are transformed into strengths here. You may initially mourn the loss of the ability to spin on the spot and jump around on tables during poignant dialogue, but once you’re playing? You’ll want little more than to see what happens next. The story concerns two very different families brought crashing together during a small-town motel siege. To explain much more than that would run the risk of spoilers which, in a game like this, could tear holes through the experience. As a motion comic, there’s almost no full animation present. Instead, what…

In Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window, you spend most of the film unsure if the bloke in the opposite building is a killer or not. Home takes a similarly long time to reveal its hand. Is it just a game about doing chores, or will it turn into a horror game? Not that it ever gets too intense – on either side of the equation – and I like it for that. As a child staying in their house alone, you have to tick chores off a to-do list, and there’s a cosy, homely feel to the game as you gather laundry, take the rubbish out and feed the dog. The backstory is fun: you’re too young to go to an escape room, so your folks have set you up some…

Lego City Undercover feels like an anomaly. It only came out in 2013, but that feels like a lifetime ago. A modern version of the game would crowbar in Hollywood talent to voice Chase McCain, the wisecracking celebrity cop who feels like a warning from the past about the rise of Chris Pratt. More telling, however, is the fact your in-game interface is based on the Wii U, something that feels slightly tragic and amusing at the same time: the controller equivalent of drinking mercury to cure syphilis. And although it often feels like you’re being forced to solve crimes with a dead man’s Etch A Sketch, it rarely detracts from this smart, often surprising open world experience. The inherent Nintendosity extends to the way it bombards you with ideas.…

If games were established and self-referential enough to have their own version of SNL, Virginia might feel like a parody. It’s handcrafted from all the things that make Steam reviewers testy: it’s short, story heavy and contains more than one woman. But even if the lack of dialogue occasionally makes Virginia feel like a two-hour cold open, there’s enough atmosphere here to make it worth investigating, especially if your idea of a good time is sitting in a diner contemplating life’s unspoken complexities. 64…

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT If you visit the Steam page for early access survival MMO Last Oasis, you’ll find an article bluntly titled ‘Last Oasis Sucks’. It’s not written by a disgruntled player, nor an opinion piece pulled in by Steam’s news aggregator. It was written by Last Oasis’ developer. Last Oasis is a nomadic survival MMO where players construct and travel in land-crawling fortresses called walkers. It entered Early Access in March of 2020, promptly experienced some major server problems, and three days later went offline and offered refunds. Last Oasis resurfaced, but concurrent player counts have wavered between a few thousand and a few hundred since, and its Steam reviews have remained firmly ‘mixed’. But players weren’t the only ones struggling to enjoy it. “When I say it…

PCPP INVESTIGATES Stardew Valley is the golden child of farming sims. Inspired by Nintendo’s Harvest Moon, it’s gone on to sell more than 20 million copies since 2016 and kicked off a torrent of imitators on PC. Why haven’t we had that moment for the monster-taming genre? Pokémon clones are abundant, but none have had a sliver of Stardew Valley’s success, yet alone Pokémon’s. If there’s a formula for reimagining classic Japanese series as modern indies, monster tamers haven’t found it. “An RPG where [players] can create their own adventure based on the characters they know is of course appealing,” say Jochem and Marcel, the indie developers behind this year’s Coromon. The challenge for indies is, “Players would often rather stay with what they know than trying out new games,”…

1 month A PLAGUE TALE: REQUIEM RELEASE October 18 | DEVELOPER Asobo Studio Amicia and her brother Hugo return for another medieval journey through rat-infested lands as they try to find a new life for themselves. GOTHAM KNIGHTS RELEASE October 25 | DEVELOPER Developer: Warner Bros Games Montreal Batman is dead, and it’s up to a team of his former sidekicks and allies – Nightwing, Batgirl, Robin and Red Hood – to keep order across Gotham City in this co-op action-RPG. CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2 RELEASE October 28 | DEVELOPER Infinity Ward No, not the one from 2009. Or the remaster of that game from 2020. This new sequel in the rebooted series is… well, it’s this year’s Call of Duty. 3 months COMPANY OF HEROES 3 RELEASE…

Reviewer’s system specs: CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core, M-Board: MSI MAG X570 Tomahawk WIFI, RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 64GB (2×32GB) 3200MHz, GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio 10GB, HOTAS: – Virpil T-50CM2 Angry red tracers strobe past the cockpit as I pull the Tomcat into a wide barrel roll. The MiG on my six tries to follow the move as we corkscrew towards the ground at over 800kph, 23mm cannon fire again cuts through the air where I had been just milliseconds before. Looking back over my shoulder I can see the MiG, a Flogger is closing, it’s diving slightly faster than I am. I slam the stick hard over reversing my roll while kicking down on the rudder, the move pushes the MiG out over…

It’s hard to overstate just how important Firaxis’ XCOM reboot was. In the years since its release, the turn-based strategy genre has experienced a renaissance that owe a huge debt to Firaxis’ clever mix of old and new. But what if you’re trying to make the successor to a different turn-based classic? Then, it seems, XCOM’s legacy can be a hindrance. “We found that, no matter what we did, everyone played just like they played all the other games like XCOM,” says Brad Logston, senior producer for Jagged Alliance 3. “They weren’t playing it like Jagged Alliance. We didn’t even know how to fix it. We were doing things like tweaking AI, tweaking weapon damage ranges, all these different things. Nothing was really working.” The solution may seem small, but…

The year is 1881 and I’ve turned the islands of Hawaii into an anarchist paradise that long ago disposed of the king. Our industries are modest, but they are all owned by the workers, giving us one of the highest standards of living in the world. For the most part, we did this without firing a shot. PLAYED IT Victoria 3 is, even more than its 2011 predecessor, a grand strategy game about shaping a society. Covering the years from 1836 to 1936 on a detailed world map, it models every single individual person alive at the time. That might sound absurd, but it’s not an exaggeration. They’re organised by culture, religion, and profession into groups called ‘pops’ that all get their own 3D portraits, but when you see that…

RELEASED TBC | DEV Everstone This gorgeous Chinese open world action game takes cues from Wuxia cinema like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, though I also see shades of Zhang Yimou’s Shadow. That means players will employ martial arts with a hint of supernatural powers, including running gracefully across water or gliding through the air. It’s a genre basically untouched in videogames, so Where Winds Meet feels like it’s been a long time coming. It’s not all action though: the developers say that you’ll be able to learn trades like medicine and practice as a doctor, if you’d prefer to lead a peaceful life.…

RELEASE 2023 | DEV Petroglyph Games This RTS puts players in command of either the Allied Nations or Central Powers as they battle over Europe during the First World War. Play time is split between turn-based decision-making and real-time fights, with battlefields deteriorating the more they’re fought over and weather playing a major role. It comes from the developer of the well-received Command & Conquer Remastered, and even features music from C&C original composer Frank Klepacki. Though, er, I’d imagine this’ll have a rather more serious tone than that series.…

Every summer I tell myself that this is the year I’ll get out more and maybe touch some grass in interesting places, and yet every summer I run out of time and feel that slight melancholy of not meeting expectations. Thankfully Camp Canyonwood has hit Early Access and I can experience the (hopeful) joys of endless summers until I’ve finally met my wilderness goals. PLAYED IT You play as a new camp counsellor who has been brought in to work on a rotting campsite and look after a group of children by making sure they have fun so you can get paid at the end of it. Teach them to fish, catch bugs and forage so they can earn badges and hopefully leave your camp a good review. As you…

At first, it looks like this is going to be a remarkably short game. Things start with you, as a cowering little lamb, being led to your death as a sacrifice. Within ten minutes however, you’ve already exacted violent revenge on your would-be murderers and pledged your adorable allegiance to the mysterious being that returned you to the land of the living. You start a cult of your own; a cult where all the members are super-cute creatures. This is Animal Crossing if Tom Nook craved power instead of money. The first half of the game involves growing, caring for, and – of course – indoctrinating your cult. You’ll need to take care of the basics before getting too ambitious, though. Your adorable little cultists need food to eat, places…

Where does art come from? What makes creating a film different from writing a letter or inventing the toaster? Does it come from within us, or is it, sort of, all around us, y’know? This is the realm of philosophy that Immortality delves into as you unravel its FMV-led mysteries. It is presented less as a game and more as a box set of forgotten (and fictional) French model and actor Marissa Marcel’s filmography. Players begin with a question posed in the Short History of Marissa Marcel, written by Immortality director Sam Barlow: what happened to the actor? Why has she been absent for 20 years? Why were none of her movies released? Where is she now? Luckily, the answers may lie in the large cache of film Barlow and…

Before survival games came along and asked us to fill our pockets with the entire contents of a forest, adventure games were the most item-hungry genre around. But there’s value in stripping it back to just the mouse cursor and some puzzling things, as Myst proved. That trend continues in adventure game Her Trees. There are no keys or other items to collect. Instead, your inventory is letters of the alphabet – A to I – which you have to type in as the solution to every puzzle. Finding these passcodes is the tricky and quite ingenious bit, as clues are hidden in every orifice, in twisty bones or bits of twig, in empty pint glasses or torn-up missives. Sometimes the letters themselves are hidden, waiting to be revealed as…

Art of Murder is one of those lesser-known point-and-click franchises that’s lost enough momentum over time to eventually become a hidden object game. It’s mostly busywork, diminished by messy puzzles, vague clues, and dialogue that makes most text-to-speech programs sound like Gary Oldman in an Oscar-winning turn. Protagonist Nicole Bonnet isn’t inspiring, either: more like a sentient pantsuit trying to fool people into thinking it’s alive. The lowest point comes when a kidnapped Nicole has to scoot a chair around a noisy room without being heard; a puzzle so atrocious I decide it’s best to leave her there forever. 64…

Modern flight sims like Microsoft Flight Simulator, plus well established combat sims and games like War Thunder and DCS set a new bar for virtual aviation. In the case of Flight Sim, it leverages the company’s cloud empire to fuse satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to create a spitting image of the globe. Picking up one of our best flight sticks amplifies the realism, enabling accurate control over dozens of aircraft. While there an abundance of joysticks, yokes, and flight accessories are there to choose from, especially on PC, we’ve condensed the best of them all, in one place. Thrustmaster remains a market leader with the best joystick technology for the price, with the Thrustmaster T.16000M FCS HOTAS our recommended pick for 2022. However, those playing on Xbox Series X…

HIGHS Rightly proud After a mod removed all Pride flag’s from Spider-Man, the two largest mod sites in the world banned it. Stadia’s USP Destiny streamer Luckstruck9 used 11 Stadia accounts to keep checkpoints open for other players. Hell freezes MacroBioBoi finally completed the world’s first ever solo Hell pacifist run in Diablo 2: Resurrected. LOWS Overbotch Overwatch pro Myunbong was surprised to find out he’d been fired from New York Excelsior via Twitter. Maddening Madden 23 on PC doesn’t come with the new ‘FieldSense’ system present on consoles. Stop this nonsense. Dead and buried Netflix has already cancelled its Resident Evil TV show after just one season, following poor reviews.…

THE UNSUNG HEROES OF DEVELOPMENT James Chaytor and his teams have worked on Apex Legends, The Elder Scrolls Online, multiple Call of Duty titles, Microsoft Flight Simulator and far more than could ever be listed here. Yet Chaytor’s story begins before Sprung Studios; even before his videogame work. UI and UX are important elsewhere, too. After working his way up to creative director in a web marketing firm in the late 1990s, he began consulting with the mobile company Three, who at the time had just rolled out 3G. Chaytor helped the firm with the challenge of making new kinds of content usable on small devices. It was at this point that he founded Sprung Studios, and expanded its services to more clients. But by 2009, the recession had hit…

Kideogames owe a lot to their tabletop counterparts, especially when it comes to turn-based strategy and tactics. But one of the best parts of fielding armies of little warriors often gets overlooked in the digital realm: model painting. Moonbreaker, from Subnautica studio Unknown Worlds, has rectified this frequent omission and then some, giving us something that feels pure tabletop on your PC. Moonbreaker is a sci-fi-fantasy tactics romp in which you build a crew of unique characters, paint them just like you would real miniatures, summon them into 12-minute battles, and try to defeat the opposing crew’s captain. Your goal is simple, then, but beyond that is a whole lot of complexity, drawing from sources as diverse as Warhammer, the board game Cosmic Encounter, and Magic: The Gathering. And the…

If Brazil is famous for one thing, it’s the laugh. Or maybe the Amazon – that whole rainforest is kind of a big deal. Or Pelé, legendary football player. Or right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro? Or the Caipirinha, the national drink? Look, Brazil is the fifth biggest country in the world: it has a lot to be famous for. Brazilian gamers will point to its history of Sega Master System clones and bootleg game cartridges, creative workarounds for outrageous import prices. But if you ask PC gamers, it’s gotta be huehuehue. The Brazilian Portuguese version of hahaha became a meme in early MMOs, and later in League of Legends, as the games attracted huge numbers of Brazilian players. Huehuehue became a trolly way for others to mock Brazilian players, though the…

It’s the third mission of the game, and, if this was Homeworld 2, I’d be screwed. Right now, I only have access to recon ships and interceptors – basic fighters that, per Homeworld’s rock, paper, scissors design, are weak against the bigger, meaner frigates. And I’ve been tasked with securing an area protected by two bigger, meaner frigates. But I’m not playing Homeworld 2. I’m playing its successor, a game that Blackbird Interactive describes as being 20 years in the making. A game that takes concepts once considered back then, but dismissed because the technology of the day just wasn’t up to the task. I’m playing Homeworld 3, a space RTS that’s all about terrain. Those frigates are guarding a small segment of a colossal, derelict ship, which acts as…

This is a strange one – I’m not totally convinced by Minecraft Legends yet. Perhaps it’s the odd cel-shaded art style, or my own inexperience with strategy games. It’s very obviously Minecraft, but at the same time feels quite a bit alien – like a sort of genre uncanny valley. It’s not as if the series has struggled to contort itself to genres outside of survival before. Minecraft Dungeons did reasonably well for itself, even if it didn’t work for me, and I had a great time with Telltale’s narrative-driven Minecraft Story Mode. Perhaps it’s because I’m watching someone playing rather than navigating it myself, but it’s hard to get a feel for how it’ll work as a strategy game. Where standard Minecraft thinks block by block, Legends zooms out,…

This open world RPG comes from former Bethesda and Obsidian developers, veterans of Skyrim and New Vegas. While there’s little to go on save an animated trailer, we know it’s set in a “fictionalised medieval Portugal”. Studio founder Jeff Gardiner says the game was inspired by a trip to the country just before the COVID pandemic, and cites everything from alternate history fiction to Elden Ring as an influence. We’ll have a while to wait before we see the results of that mix, however, as the game is still in early preproduction at this stage. FIRST LOOK RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Something Wicked Games PUBLISHER In-house LINK bit.ly/3Q5iKeu…

RELEASED TBC | DEV Brace Yourself Games, Tic Toc Games After the delightful Crypt of the Necrodancer and Cadence of Hyrule, developer Brace Yourself is now back with a new rhythm game. This one takes the action to a modern setting, and while there’s still the promise of it being an RPG battler, it’s presented in more traditional rhythm game form than the dungeon crawling format that defined Crypt, with a Guitar Hero-like scrolling road of notes to hit. It certainly still boasts the easy charm and catchy music of its predecessors, and mini-games including rhythm-based yoga look like they’ll inject plenty of silly fun.…

RELEASE 2023 | DEV Neowiz Games, Round 8 Studio It’s hard to see past the pitch of ‘gritty Pinnochio by way of Bloodborne’, especially when the influence of From Software’s game is so obvious in motion. Yet, to its credit, there’s certainly some imagination on display in its steampunk machine enemies, heavy metal puppets who spray thick oil in place of red gore. The boy himself isn’t made of wood, he just has a mechanical arm, but a talking lantern appears to be a hint of Jiminy Cricket, who in spite of the grim setting is as chirpy as ever. Lies of P is a bizarre mix, but I can’t deny it looks super slick in action.…

Just about anything can be made better by the addition of the supernatural. Pirates of the Caribbean exploited a winning formula with its ghostly buccaneers, Stranger Things puts the demons in D&D, and Hard West has hit a home run with its tales of the weird Wild West. An XCOM-like tactics game, except when it isn’t, Hard West 2 brings some up-to-date ideas to the poker table. It starts with a train, as many of the best things do. You’re robbing it, naturally, and having done your research you’re sure there aren’t many guards. ‘You’ in this case are Gin Carter, a horse-riding, hatwearing, six-shooter aficionado who’s the nominal leader of a band of outlaws. This train heist is gonna make him rich, you’ll see. With him are Laughing Deer,…

COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH Comedians Bonachera and Garza are partners, onstage and off. It’s a recipe for tension that De Tres al Cuarto duly delivers on – and if you’re wondering what the title means, it’s a Spanish phrase referring to something of low value. The game is partly a hands-off adventure game where you learn about their relationship, and watch it unfold over several nights, but it’s also a series of interactive comedy gigs. Playing as Garza, the younger and newer half of the double act, your job is to supply the punchlines to Bonachera’s setups, building up his routines or delivering knockout follow-ups as the game allows. You’re restricted by cards, which are dealt out during every gag, and for your every response you’re given three cards…

OLD GAMES REVISITED Most of the time, videogames let us hide behind a haze of false efficacy, fooling us that we could do astonishing things like reload a gun or do a chin-up. But Disco Elysium is different. It knows us. And, worse still, it knows we know it knows us, and it uses that cursed information like an emotional blackjack. It’s never more obvious than in the moments where you try to pick the dramatic, cool options. Yes, there’s a chance you’ll defeat that wall of fascist muscle with a breathtaking disco spin kick; it’s just a gratuitously small one. Meanwhile, if you try to deal with anxiety-inducing horrors the game flings at you as you would in real life, it’s no less merciless. On my first playthrough I…

Most of the games this month are on the business end of law enforcement, so it’s nice to mix things up, even if most of your time with Phoenix Wright is spent exonerating innocent people rather than catching guilty ones. There’s a strange compulsion with Ace Attorney games, almost like a romcom with court procedure. Most of the time, you know exactly what’s going to happen and when, but it doesn’t matter. You just live for the moments when the music swells, a man in a magnificent blue suit points dramatically, and everything falls into place in a deeply satisfying way. Nobody needs to know it was all guesswork. 80…