Innehållsförteckning för Issue 310 från PC Powerplay

HIGHS Scroll up The project to remake Morrowind in Skyrim just got a progress update. Aw, rats The gigantic rats you have to kill in so many RPGs are real – they’re 85cm long and called subalpine woolly rats. Wicked wikis Indie Fallout wiki joins forces with the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, ensuring a bright future for RPG lore. A load of Sith Lucasfilm declared creative bankruptcy with an AI-generated Star Wars film. Now you see me An Apex Legends writer got laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote was revealed. Life is a battlefield The Battlefield community’s good vibes nosedived after Dice announced there’ll be no class weapon restrictions in Battlefield 6. LOWS…

QUAKE-UP Blue’s News’ first masthead still proudly celebrated Quake; the game’s logo would remain in use on the site for years. SIMPLE AND CLEAN The site’s first original logo was small and simple, a concession made to cut down on load times. HEARTFELT Soon enough, the site’s gag logos would become a tradition, and one that persists to this day every April Fools. GAME CHANGER Readers will catch the temporary game crossover logo. The site’s archived them all the way back to Unreal.…

Sometimes a game represents more than just another product on the horizon to consume. In the case of Eriksolm: The Stolen Dream – an upcoming stealth adventure from small Swedish studio River End Games – it feels like a glimpse at the future of mid-budget games, and a potential intro to stealth for genre newcomers, too. With the game due for launch before the year’s end, River End Games let me have a poke around a polished but short preview build as well as a chance to sit down and have a chat with creative director Anders Hejdenberg, front-man for this newly formed studio of just 17 full-time industry veterans, working on a budget that he described as, “Quite cheap, compared to other mid-range productions,” in lieu of divulging actual figures.…

ELECTRODRIVER Essentially a machinegun that fires ninja-stars and lets you rain lightning down on your enemies. What’s not to like? STAKE GUN A surprisingly challenging weapon to handle in Painkiller’s intense co-op mayhem, but the drill-bit mod is gloriously silly. ROCKET LAUNCHER Its classic stopping power can be customised in numerous ways, while the ice-chaingun alt is very tasty. HAND-CANNON Painkiller’s new gun can be fitted with a scope for precision killing, or an electrically charged attack.…

FAR CRY 4 Far Cry 4 sees you at the Big Bad’s dinner table as horrible things go down, and it’s implied you should escape and begin your adventure. However, you can wait and resolve your story. FAR CRY 5 Far Cry 5, rather than arresting Joseph Seed as he clearly wants you to, you can let discretion be the better part of valour and leave Hope County before everything falls apart. FAR CRY 6 In Far Cry 6, you can decide you just aren’t going to get involved in the revolution, and end up on the beach listening to the news of what you opted out of. I appreciated the game more for that lack of agency. RDR 2 Yes, the Van der Linde gang was being set up,…

MORGAN PARK Specialist in Dumping fools Currently playing Skin Deep This month Lured console gamers to sit on a trash chute with pictures of Marcus Fenix. Bon voyage! PHIL IWANIUK Specialist in Caressing rubber Currently playing Japanese Drift Master This month Was found butt-naked in bed with a pair of Zestino drifting tyres. Oh Phil, not again. KERRY BRUNSKILL Specialist in Unethical science Currently playing The Alters This month Cloned herself to write two reviews at once. Kerry 2 wanted to be paid in cheeky Nando’s. TYLER COLP Specialist in Speed looting Currently playing Elden Ring: Nightreign This month Secretly opened all our bags of Tangfastics and took all the cola bottles. What a bast… MATT ELLIOTT Specialist in Kojima’s nonsense Currently playing Death Stranding This month Tucked into Kojima’s old-fashioned Hollywood buffet. Death Stranding…

In the fight against Elden Ring: Nightreign’s riff on Mothra, I never expected it would eventually touch down and mount the head of its partner, a giant stick bug with claws, like a mech. For the rest of the fight they were operating in unison, a kaiju cowboy with orbital lasers piercing the sky. That’s a problem pesticide can’t solve, but, it turns out, three guys with bows absolutely can. There’s nothing like fighting a boss in a FromSoftware game that is designed to be a joke with you as the punchline – and defying fate with your own ridiculous strategy. Elden Ring: Nightreign is a game about losing a fistfight over and over until you luck your way into the opportunity to bring three guns. The most peculiar game FromSoft…

The mirror image of Unpacking, Pack is a little game about cramming your possessions into a suitcase, focusing purely on the puzzle aspect of making sure everything fits, and there is no overflow. It’s a bit like Resident Evil 4’s inventory Tetris, only without the grid that would make the process a whole lot easier. Actually, a better point of reference might be Ultima VII, with its inventory system comprised of physical bags, stuffed with little items you had to constantly move to find other little items. Pack improves upon the physical inventory concept by not allowing items to overlap. As you drag them into the suitcase one by one, they have to occupy their own little space in it and not get too close to the edge or to each…

Truth told, I didn’t really get on with Blue Prince; the spatial aspect to the puzzling combined with the lightest whiff of randomisation frustrated me rather than pushed me forward. Still, that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy banging my head against a brick wall now and again. Library of Ruina is part visual novel, and part digital card-and-dice game. As my stable of brutal bibliophiles slaughter combative guests and get slaughtered in equal measure, I’m fairly certain I’ve found a real page-turner just for me… even if some of the challenge stems from straight up obfuscation. Brief text-based tutorials leave a lot to be desired, but thankfully book bashes spell either victory or defeat quickly enough you’ll want to go again. Say you’re up against a nightmarish Abnormality – a monstrous…

BIG BEN Big Ben is a real nuisance in the main game due to his inexplicable ability to breathe fire, but now you’re free to take out your frustrations by doing it yourself. ROO Roo is a kangaroo with boxing gloves and apparent combat training. As if they needed any help to flatten their opponents. ROCKET Rocket has a jetpack, which makes me wonder how Mr X’s crime syndicate is funded. I might go rogue too, in his shoes; what benefit could outdo a jetpack? SOUTHER Souther might look like Freddy Krueger with his red sweater and gnarled face, but he sets himself apart by wearing gloves with big claws on them.…

I woke in a pool of sweat, my heart racing, in my bed at the Englischer Hof inn in Meiringen, Switzerland. I’d dreamt of Betty Sue’s suicide again, the young woman I’d failed to save from the Console Gaming Collective. “Dick, we’ve gotta stop meeting like this,” she’d said. And now I saw her in my dreams over and over again, pulling the trigger, falling forever… I needed to numb the pain. The store down the street from the inn was open, and while the shopkeeper raised an eyebrow at a foreigner buying Scotch before noon, I emerged with that relief. The market town nestled in the Bernese Highlands was growing with life as I set off to my dead drop point, an antique donations box at Meiringen’s famous English…

This month Needed to correct his new subjects’ grammar. It’s ‘Romani ite domum’, not ‘Romanes eunt domus’. This month Became Bath’s raffish Beef Baron, secretly smuggling in steaks under the nose of lawman Rex Banner. This month Built a colossal factory staffed by a million tiny robots. It’s output? Whoopee cushions. This month Built a collar from CPU fans that dramatically blows air through his hair at all times. Vogue!…

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, The Spy tried the whole ‘Sith’ thing, once. Korriban was nice enough if you like hot climates, which The Spy does, and there’s no doubt that the brutalist architecture of the Sith Academy makes for some dramatic Insta snaps, all art deco lines and distressed stone. The wielding of dark force powers to do mischief was also a jazz, like that one time when The Spy force blasted Darth Jar-Jar into a Shyrack nest to the applause of all Sith Academy initiates. But the thing with the Sith is that, eventually, they’re going to revert to form and go full Sith. Like, The Spy likes the Sith, but they can kinda be too Sith, right? All the powerplays, backstabbing and attempted…

I do not typically recommend completely tanking a city’s economy, potentially ruining the lives of all of its citizens and being heralded as a complete idiot, as a way to learn a valuable lesson. But this is exactly what happened to me in Anno 117: Pax Romana, and I came out the other side really vibing with the direction Ubisoft is taking it in interesting ways. The latest entry in the long-running city building series has been kicked back to the golden age of the Roman Empire, but as I began my first foray into colonising antiquity, it didn’t feel a million miles away from my sojourn as a governor in Anno 1800. Everything from the moment-to-moment city-building to the broad structure of establishing a small, sustainable colony before setting off across…

Friends, I have a disease. Not, uh, not one of the bad ones, I mean a disease of the mind. In any management-esque game, I am incapable of planning until it’s too late, until I have layered one haphazard system on another to an extent that I can’t easily go back to the drawing board. I need to slap things together and see how things work to make a plan, but to implement the plan I need to tear apart the ramshackle monster I’ve built and do it all over again. Is this the worst torment a human being has experienced in history? Yes. And yet, I keep playing these games. Today’s game: Outworld Station, a rather pretty assembly-line builder that hit Early Access last month. The premise is simple –…

HOW WE REVIEW We review each game on its own merits, and try to match it to a reviewer who’s a passionate expert in the field. The main aim of reviews is to help you make buying decisions. To this end, we’re selective about what we review, and try to focus on the notable, interesting, exciting or surprising. DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT DLC might be new missions for a game, or it might be a single new item. If we think you want to know about it, we’ll review it. EARLY ACCESS Any released alpha, beta, or otherwise unfinished game that you can currently pay for. For these games, we won’t assign a score, but we will tell you whether they’re worth your time. THEY’RE BACK Whenever there’s a bargain or re-release…

You’ll remember the drift events in classic Need for Speed. During that era when the games were soundtracked by crunk songs, told quasi-Fast and Furious tales and reached Christmas number one in the charts, NFS introduced drifting as a sort of side-show. There was a totally different physics model underpinning it, one that made ordinary driving nigh-impossible but allowed for some outrageous skidding about in search of a high score. JDM understands the nostalgic appetite for that era of NFS game – you can tell that by its car collection of noughties NFS cover stars. But its ambitions are far higher than the throwaway drift events in EA’s racers, and in fact higher than those games in their entirety. Is it versatile enough to make ordinary driving and drifting alike feel…

BANANA Throw to squish on impact and create a perfect slip trap, or eat first for a quick snack that replenishes Nina’s health. WALKIE TALKIE The ultimate multitool of Skin Deep used to track guards, call off alarm states, or create a spark for explosions. BLACK PEPPER Throw or otherwise damage to create a cloud that causes enemies to sneeze, opening them up for attack. TRASH CHUTE A mainstay of every feline barge, the trash chute will flush anything (or anyone) on top of it into the vacuum of space.…

Nintendo has changed its online user agreement in multiple consumer-unfriendly ways just before the launch of the Switch 2. Chief among them: Nintendo asserts the right to render your console “permanently unusable” if it determines you’re in violation of the agreement. No game or hardware modding, no extracting ROMs – something Nintendo asserts we cannot do, even though it is a legally protected consumer right in some countries – and no dual booting to another OS. I’m getting a clear message: you spent $766 on this hardware, but Nintendo does not think you own it. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to jailbreak or modify a console, or extract a ROM from a game you own: many original Switch games run better via PC emulation than on the original console, and…

Cosy isn’t the word I’d usually reach for when discussing the hot and sweaty labour that comes with running a medieval forge. But even in its Early Access form, Blacksmith Master’s unlikely combination of hard metalwork and decorative drapes brings a pleasantly relaxing vibe to all that smelting and hammering. My little workshop’s comfortably nestled inside an established town, and bustles with activity from dawn to dusk. One blacksmith saws wood while another assembles a sickle at a workbench. An assistant might be hauling ore into my workshop while another lugs a sack of goods over to a merchant waiting by their cart. Being able to keep track of a dozen different moving parts just by looking over the workshop floor is more than helpful, it makes it easy to believe…

Paradox has finally unveiled the worst-kept secret in strategy gaming: Europa Universalis 5 is coming. This reveal also means I can talk about my failed attempt to unite the British Isles under Scotland, my conquest of Byzantium as the Ottomans, and how even after many hours of unravelling this behemoth it still makes me feel like a stupid child. While Crusader Kings is the series that really introduced Paradox’s complex brand of grand strategy to the wider world, the long-running Europa Universalis series has always been the company’s flagship. But the 12-year-old Europa Universalis 4 is already so dense and wide-ranging – especially when you take into account the vast number of DLCs – that it’s pretty reasonable to wonder what a sequel could really offer. So cutting to the chase: it’s…

If you grew up playing videogames throughout the 1990s, it is likely you’ve still got a soft spot for old-fashioned horizontal or vertical shmups. Legendary shoot ’em ups such as Radiant Silvergun, Dodonpachi, Battle Garegga and more, which pleasingly can now easily be played on PC, were formative gaming experiences, steeping me in the adrenaline-inducing neon rush of bullet hell. Which is why we’ve clicked immediately with Doom: The Dark Ages, which has been recalibrated by id Software to, actually, play very much like a shmup, and especially when fighting its daemonic bosses. Like a shoot ’em up you must stand and fight in The Dark Ages, while weaving through and repelling waves of enemy projectiles and attacks. Simply put, it rocks, and we highly recommend it.…

B- lades of Fire doesn’t do itself any favours pairing Aran, its rugged action hero with godlike powers, a tragic past, and a broken heart, up with a much younger sidekick he insists on calling ‘boy’ and ‘kid’ far too often – but cracking through the Kratos of it all reveals a game that’s trying to leave a more exploration-heavy mark on the cinematic action genre. These are places to be savoured, not slaughtered. The game truly believes that taking the time to explore its rustic fantasy locales, poking around sandy ruins and enormous crumbling castles instead of rushing from one waypoint to the next, is the heart of the experience. So much so that the game defaults to the hardest difficulty setting, the only one that doesn’t allow me to…

Cleaning the house is never on my list of things I want to do, but somehow in games it’s always one of my favourite things. Be that clearing objectives off of a map or organising inventory, tidying is better in game form. Tiny boat game Spilled scratches that itch by having you clean up polluted water to improve the ecosystem. There’s not much to it. You control a small boat that’s tasked with clearing away slicks of oil, rescuing animals and tidying rubbish. As you bring rubbish back to recycling centres you’ll earn coins to spend on upgrades for your vessel. There’s a touch of Powerwash Simulator about it – it’s incredibly satisfying cutting through swathes of black muck and watching the water go from poo-brown to crystal clear and full…

ROBERT JONES THIS MONTH Bickered with Kreia, and it was glorious. ALSO PLAYED Oblivion Remastered, Doom: The Dark Ages What’s the height of Star Wars storytelling? The original trilogy? Ha, simplistic space cowboy nonsense that rips off Kurosawa shamelessly. The prequels? Surprisingly ambitious storytelling, if not particularly well executed. The sequel trilogy? A horrible car crash where all subtlety has been slain. No, the truth is, and always has been, the Knights of the Old Republic series of games. Why? Mature storytelling partnered with uncompromising ideological challenge. Enter KOTOR 2, the weaker game of the pair but the one where the series’ mastery of continuously presenting the player with ideological challenges is most piquant. Here is a game that presents you with constant decisions to be made, continuous moral and ethical…

It doesn’t take much time to pick your average beat-’em-up clean – even Streets of Rage, inarguably among the best games in the genre, is about an hour long regardless of which entry you pick up. The fun is in replaying it over and over, getting through with fewer and fewer continues, and roping your friends in for some co-op button mashing; but even so, every well runs dry eventually. Until rogue fans step in, of course. Streets of Rage X is an OpenBOR recreation of the 16-bit Streets of Rage games by developer Kratus which makes those originals feel minuscule. Each game from the Mega Drive trilogy is a mere ‘route’ on offer here, with each character previously unique to each game now playable in any of them. “But what…

Who would win in a fight? Comics writers know this is what fans argue about and feed those arguments with crossovers and stories like Batman vs Superman. Usually it’s naff stuff where characters just biff each other for a bit and then form a getalong gang as if they weren’t battering each others’ faces in just five minutes ago. The developers of Mortal Kombat obviously weren’t going to do anything so weaksauce. In the Injustice games, Superman’s gone full evil and started a tyrannical regime straight-up called The Regime, which Batman leads a resistance against. The inciting incident of the whole storyline kills off Lois Lane and the Joker, and it gets wilder from there. By the time of Injustice 2, Superman has been imprisoned for his crimes, Clock King’s had…