Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 286 i PC Powerplay

Even zombies! After last issue’s news of a co-op Warhammer 40K title, it would appear that everything is coming up Milhouse for fans of blowing up evil hordes with friends! Pretty much right as we went to press, Aliens: Fireteam was announced, and as a diehard fan of everything Colonial Marine (well, except for that last game), I am super hyped for this one. It was too last minute to include in this issue in any real way, but instead we have the very next best thing... Zombies! Back4Blood, this issue’s cover feature, is looking like a solid spiritual successor to Valve’s hit game Left4Dead. Zombies may be starting to get a little tired as the go-to for so many games, but killing them in co-op is always fun. So,…

This month, I got thoroughly obsessed with The Curious Expedition 2. After finishing my two page review, which you will find in A Collection Aside, I started reading what other reviewers thought of it. On average, I was more positive than many. Almost all mentioned the uncomfortable colonial context, although interpretations varied. Rock Paper Shotgun referred to it as a “machine for making rip-roaring adventure stories” which makes sense to me. And, many reviewers compared it to The Oregon Trail, which I had heard of, but never played. And so, I played The Oregon Trail. It was awesome. I decided to be a banker from Boston because the carpenter from Ohio and the farmer from Illinois sounded poor. I bought significantly more than the recommended amounts of food, clothing and…

It’s telling of Left 4 Dead’s quality that there still isn’t a co-op shooter that has quite outdone it. Unlike many popular multiplayer games of 2021, Left 4 Dead doesn’t ask you to theorycraft a build or study a meta. There’s nothing to understand beyond a few core principles: shoot and keep moving. That purity is why it was a foundational game for my friends and I over a decade ago and why we still squad up to mow down zombies 13 years later. We’ve seen plenty of fantastic games riff on Turtle Rock Studios’ original template since the series was unceremoniously shelved in 2009, but only now are its original creators jumping back into fray. With Back 4 Blood, Turtle Rock is staking its flag in the ground and…

PHANTOM BRIGADE Already playable in Early Access, this turn-based strategy game pits towering mechs against each in crunching battles across adorable little forest towns. The twist is that you can see four seconds into the future, allowing you to outmaneuver your enemies. DARKEST DUNGEON II The relentlessly difficult but sadistically rewarding roguelike returns as an Epic exclusive some time in 2021. The biggest news we know so far is that it will be 3D, while retaining the original’s brutal turn-based combat and hellish gothic world. CHIVALRY 2 With Mordhau and Mount & Blade II, there are a lot of very good ways to dally in medieval combat on PC. Chivalry is one of the classics though, and the sequel looks pleasingly brutal as you kick, dismember and slash your way…

TRAIN STATION Freeman arrives in City 17 by train, meeting oppressed citizens and enslaved Vortigaunts, all watched over by the ever-present digitised mug of Wallace Breen, the human face of the Combine invasion force. CITY SQUARE Emerging from the train station, Freeman gets his first glimpse of the Citadel, the sinister headquarters of the Combine. The city’s distinctive Eastern European architecture is especially prominent here too. CITADEL Freeman eventually makes his way into the Citadel, confronting Breen and his alien lackeys. Inside we see the Combine forces being created, including a production line of War of the Worlds-inspired Striders. SECRET LAB One of the few safe places in City 17. Here Freeman is reunited with Isaac Kleiner, a colleague from Black Mesa. And if you pay attention you’ll learn a…

I’ll never forget my first real fight against another player in EVE Online – it had taken me, a fresh-faced noobie at the time, almost a month to scrounge up the ISK to buy a beloved Catalyst destroyer, and now I was about to lose it fighting a player in a vastly more deadly assault frigate. As my shields evaporated in a single volley, I began shaking so severely from the adrenaline rush that I couldn’t accurately use my mouse anymore. Dying in EVE Online is intense. Unlike most other MMOs, where you can simply respawn with all your stuff and carry on with your quest, a destroyed ship is gone forever. That loss stings if you don’t have the ISK to immediately purchase a replacement. But while I raged…

It’s easy to forget about where we came from in PC gaming, especially when we’re arguing over gigabytes of memory and teraflops of performance. But there’s actually a lot that we can glean from the annals of GPU history – the colossal leaps in power that GPUs have taken in under 25 years goes some way to explaining why today’s top graphics card costs $1,499. You have to walk before you can run, and there were many attempts to nail an image resolution of just 800x600 before anyone could dream up the pixel count required for the latest games at 4K. Yet you’d also be surprised by just how many features so prevalent in modern GPUs were first introduced back at the dawn of the industry. But let’s start right…

This spin-off has all the style and confidence of Persona 5, plastered with bold colours and glittery character animations that give each scene the liveliness of a manga panel, down to the menus. A smooth, jazzy soundtrack establishes a psychedelic ’70s spy movie energy, even though we’re dealing with teens taking on criminals throughout Japan. There’s even a 30-hour story with most of the original cast returning. It walks and talks almost exactly like Persona 5, a game that isn’t even on PC yet. But Strikers isn’t Persona 5, and the comparison isn’t flattering for it. Its social elements and combat aren’t as fully-featured or its characters as deeply considered as Persona 5’s, so any expectation of parity will lead to disappointment. Strikers is a wild but bloated visual novel…

The cavalry is here, y’all! Actually, the cavalry has always been here. We started with the cavalry. This ain’t no Ancients-era Field of Glory game. Gone are the legionaries and barbarians, replaced instead with ranks of spearmen and the thunderous charge of knights in enough armour to make a toaster blush. Field of Glory II: Medieval delivers an authentic tabletop miniatures wargame experience, but just like a historical wargame whether you like that experience is going to be all about whether you like the rules. This is a wargamer’s wargame. There’s no nice music. The graphics are barebones. The UI is pretty basic. You’ll want to memorise hotkeys. What there is are 50+ hours of historical scenarios and campaigns. The famous battles give you a prearranged battlefield and let you…

PRICE $240 ONLINE www.rog.asus.com If you exist in the niche that is triple-screen gaming, you most certainly have that niggling itch inside your brain that bezels suck. And suck they do! Buying monitors with narrow bezels only helps a little bit – they’re still bloody there – two black immersion busting lines that you can never de-focus. But, this! It’s a legit solution with benefits that outweigh the relatively insignificant drawbacks. In the box are two 40cm long plastic lenses (so, max monitor size is 27-inch) and a pair of nice spring-loaded brackets to hold the top and bottom in place on your screens. The lenses have two elements, one on each side of a fine line down the middle where they meet. Installation is a one minute task, plus…

For a few days now (and probably longer by the time you read this – no, wait, it literally just got freed), a cargo ship by the name of the Ever Given has been stuck in the Suez Canal. It’s not really clear how it happened, with several explanations competing pending the results of an official investigation, but the thing that matters is this: It’s a giant boat and it’s stuck in a vital artery of global trade, threatening the stability of the world economy. Also, it’s become something of a meme.... Naturally, therefore, somebody’s put it in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Enterprising YouTube and TikTok poster donut_enforcement has obligingly shared a video of it in action. “What’s cool about Microsoft flight sim 2020,” said poster donut_enforcement in response to a…

Hitman 3 is an enormous PC game – at least if you own Hitman 1 and 2, which Hitman 3 can import to bring the entire trilogy into a single package. That sounds like a recipe for an install size big enough to make an SSD cry, because Hitman 2, with the first game’s levels imported, is currently 149 gigabytes. Hitman 2 is one of the mightiest storage hogs on PC, second only to Call of Duty. But Hitman 3 will actually shrink instead of grow, retroactively optimising the first two Hitman games into a dramatically smaller package. How did IO Interactive manage to halve the install size? We asked the developer to break down the technology and techniques it used to cut 80 gigabytes out of the trilogy. “With…

We all love that feeling when we’ve gotten away with something, and Nerial’s upcoming adventure game Card Shark is the epitome of that mischievous excitement. Playing as a quick-handed cheater in 18th century France, you’re tasked with climbing high society by beating nobles in games of cards. Together with your partner and accomplice, the tricky Count of St Germain, you travel from location to location across France swindling politicians and royals out of their riches through a number of deviously clever card techniques. “It’s a story of intrigue where people backstab each other,” Card Shark’s Nicolai Troshinsky says. “There’s conspiracy, lying, people pretending to be other people – all that sweet stuff” You’d think in a game about swindling the rich, you’d get to play the Robin Hood figure and…

The Epic Games Store celebrated its second anniversary recently. You can be forgiven for not setting a calendar reminder. The store’s impact on the PC gaming landscape has been fascinating, but controversial – a suspiciously philanthropic entity that’s provided gamers with dozens of wonderful freebies, fledgling developers with financial security and a foot-up in a tough industry, and Steam with some proper competition. It’s also pissed a lot of people off. From fairly trifling complaints about having to use a separate launcher other than the de facto PC darling Steam, to the slightly less trifling issues around aggressive platform exclusivity and its poor infrastructure when compared to Steam. All of this can make for a confused tangle of feelings about the Epic Games Store, and even two years on the…

PIRATE Pros + An exciting life of crime + Fly fast, extremely powerful ships in small gangs + Can get rich if you rob a wealthy player Cons - Being a criminal makes you a big target - Can go long stretches without a good ambush - Good ships are expensive SOLDIER Pros + Get to fight alongside thousands of players + Ships losses are often reimbursed by your alliance + Easy to make friends with your teammates Cons - Battles sometimes last up to 16 hours or longer - Bureaucracy can be annoying MERCHANT Pros + Can play whenever you want + Can become outrageously wealthy with some effort + Not many risks Cons - You’ll definitely need to make a spreadsheet - Kind of dull career - You’ll…

Left 4 Dead represented a turning point in how I socialise through games. In 2008, LAN parties were still around and I had a good group I’d play games with at my old IT gig at the University of Montana. We’d take over the office after-hours and run through a list of custom Warcraft III games (a lot of the original DotA before I realised what a mistake I was making), some Quake and Unreal, Counter-Strike and the like. The common thread: all competitive. Worse, so was everyone in the room. Things got heated, and after a lifetime of football and wrestling coaches teaching me how to boil blood, I shut down the moment someone took a game too seriously. I still do. Left 4 Dead changed the mood completely.…

Conquests of Camelot introduced me to the merciless difficulty of old Sierra point-and-click adventures just a few minutes in. As King Arthur, I filled my purse with coin in preparation for a long journey to find the Holy Grail, picked up a magical lodestone from Merlin to guide me, and gave Guinevere a kiss before heading out the gates of Camelot – or trying to. The castle gate fell onto my head as I rode under it, crushing me to death. “It is terribly unwise to start a sacred mission without the blessings of the gods,” Conquests of Camelot admonished. Later I’d be gored by a wild boar, skewered on the lance of the Black Knight, and fall through thin ice, freezing to death. As in most of Sierra’s adventure…

The Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 release date may keep running away from us like a startled deer, but here’s another chance to enter the World of Darkness at least. Concerned with werewolves rather than vampires (clue’s in the name), it’s an action-RPG where the ‘RPG’ bit is pushed to the sidelines until it’s almost invisible. It’s earnest, a little bit shonky, clearly wriggling through some budget constraints… and proof that one rough but fun game is worth a hundred glossy but dull ones. It’s not a game to wow somebody who happens to walk past while you’re playing. The character models have arrived fashionably late from 2010. Still, Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood is refreshingly keen to throw you straight into the action. The game starts off with…

With the exception of Spelunky 2’s moles, it’s been a long time since a game has wrung quite as many swears ou of me as Gods Will Fall. I’ve turned the air blue with eulogies to fallen comrades, cursed its pantheon and effed and jeffed my way across its god-infested island. Make no mistake: this is a good thing. Most of the time, anyway. The main target for this barrage of f-bombs are the ten deities at the game’s centre – a cruel and unusual bunch who rule over humanity with an iron fist. Time to enact the title of the game, with a plan that has the fatal flaw of involving a fleet sent across the sea to attack a group of celestial beings who have control over the…

A slick and stalwart stealth puzzler, Disjunction is Splinter Cell by way of Hotline Miami. Assuming the roles of three different characters, you must navigate your way through an array of fast-paced, fiendishly devised levels, slipping through shifting mazes of vision cones as you attempt to unravel a typically twisty cyberpunk conspiracy in a near-future world. It has style in spades, but can also be infuriating. The game doesn’t always play to its strengths, and sometimes seems to enjoy wrong-footing you. Disjunction kicks off as a hard-boiled detective story, with cybernetically enhanced-sleuth Frank Monroe investigating the possible framing of a local community leader for the murder of a policeman. As with any good cyberpunk story, this simple case soon spirals into something much bigger. Two more player characters are introduced:…

In a lot of ways, Cruelty Squad puts Cyberpunk 2077 to shame. After seven years of hype, CD Projekt’s magnum opus has largely been forgotten. But awareness of Cruelty Squad is growing fast, and this sinister sci-fi pustule has all the hallmarks of a sleeper hit. This first-person shooter resembles a Deus Ex clone, where you assume the role of a futuristic assassin who infiltrates megastructures to rub out the enemies of an evil corporation. You can scurry through vents or take the direct approach, and monies earned can be invested in bionic implants that let you leap great distances and make you more resilient to bullets. But what makes Cruelty Squad special is the aesthetic – everything about the interface is deliberately repulsive. Environments are plastered with sickly colours…

After discovering PowerQuest, Dave Lloyd’s collection of Unity prefabs for making point and click adventures, MEGHANN O’NEILL created an adventure game for Global Game Jam. It’s small, but complete, and you can find it on itch.io with the title, The Kid Who Stole Christmas. She isn’t absolutely fixated on adventure games this issue, but she has reviewed two, with a fresh eye. It’s also interesting to note that all of these games sell for the same price; $28.95, because they’re all quite different in structure, scope and in terms of production. If indie game prices are on the way up, that’s pleasing, but we’re also committed to bringing you the information you need to be able to decide if something is for you. THE CURIOUS EXPEDITION 2 DEVELOPER Maschinen-Mensch PRICE…

If the fragmentation of your PC games libraries makes your gamer sensibilities short-circuit, then GOG Galaxy’s launcher could be the answer. The DRM-free store’s gaming platform can be used as a pretty frontend for gathering your Steam, Epic, Origin, Uplay and even PlayStation and Xbox games into one easily navigated library.…

The magic of Half-Life 2 lies in how it tells its story. In most games developed in the early 2000s you’re forced to endure endless exposition about the world and the state it’s in – usually in the form of cutscenes. In Half-Life 2, a few scraps of old newspaper stuck to a notice board achieve the same goal; and in a much more evocative way. In the secret laboratory of eccentric scientist Isaac Kleiner, this entirely missable detail refers to a “seven hour war”, Earth surrendering to the invading Combine, and villain Wallace Breen being declared administrator of Earth. It’s everything you need to know in one unassuming texture file – but also, importantly, it leaves enough of the finer details out to let your imagination run wild. This…

I don’t think city-building games, despite the perspective of looking down on all the tiny people and making decisions that can bring them happiness or ruin their lives, really make me feel like a god. I usually feel more like a Peeping Tom mixed with an exasperated parent. I delight in just spying on my citizens to see what they’re up to, and getting annoyed when they need something from me. “Fine, I’ll build you a hospital! Now stop bloody complaining all of the time so I can get back to blissfully squinting at all the little cars driving around.” SimCity 2000 was a revelation to me. I’d played the original SimCity, but SimCity 2000 swapped from the top-down view and 2D graphics to an isometric perspective, which made my…

I have no idea where we’d be without Sid Meier’s Civilization. Its influence has been an overwhelming constant for decades, defining generations of strategy games and developers. If Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley hadn’t decided to let Napoleon, Montezuma. and Alexander the Great duke it out, swallowing up the world and dropping nukes on each other, a huge chunk of gaming history would never have happened. Turn-based strategy existed long before Civ, but it’s Civ’s brand of turn-based strategy that became the model that most of the genre ended up following. It’s not just 4X games that owe almost everything to Civ. You can’t help but stumble across its DNA everywhere, whether you’re playing Crusader Kings, Total War, or Age of Empires, which dreamed of being a real-time Civ. It…

The grappling hook, which everyone knows is gaming’s best mechanic, has a new star. Olija features an eldritch harpoon that grapples on to enemies and orange-eyed black tentacles, and you can teleport to it with a slash. It’s a simple design which sits at the centre of this dark action adventure as both a combat tool and a way to traverse its levels, and which constantly delivers a sense of choice and movement. It’s not without issues. The harpoon can be fiddly because it requires two separate double-inputs, first to throw it, and then to push in its direction while hitting the throw button again to teleport. Hit throw without a direction and it’ll return. In battle, it’s easy to find yourself fighting without the harpoon, which is your main…

PRICE $819 ONLINE www.andaseat.com.au If you’re looking for the ultimate geeky gaming chair then this is it. Rival brands such as Secret Labs offer various special edition variants of their chairs that incorporate designs from content like Cyberpunk 2077 or Game Of Thrones, and while they do this well, it doesn’t hold a candle to the effort that has gone into the AndaSeat Marvel range. The chair design is immediately identifiable as Spider-Man, and includes a lot of nice finishing touches, such as the ‘eyes’ located on the headrest, formed from solid textured plastic to emulate the appearance of Spider-Man’s mask. The colors are bright and scratch-resistant, with accompanying memory foam pillows to support your head and back should you need them. We found the Anda Seat SpiderMan Edition gaming…

Like many people, I recently finished season 2 of The Mandalorian and was left with a hunger for more Star Wars in any form. I rewatched the original trilogy, read a selection of graphic novels and books (including Steve Perry’s brilliant Shadows of the Empire), and – and best of all – decided to replay BioWare’s classic Star Wars RPG Knights of the Old Republic. The last time I played KOTOR was around the time of its UK release in the autumn of 2003, and it was the perfect antidote to the disappointing prequel trilogy. George Lucas was two films deep by this point. Attack of the Clones was released the year before and I was not a fan, to put it mildly. But here was this videogame, set 4,000…