Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2015 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

Warcraft is now functionally an MMO property, so there’s definitely space in the market for a grand fantasy strategy game. It’s an oddly under-represented theme in the strategy space and it’s more or less been that way since Warcraft 3. Here, then, at last, is The Creative Assembly, bringing its powerful mix of turn-based and real-time strategy to Games Workshop’s Warhammer license, one of the most recognizable fantasy universes in the world. This month, we bring you a first look at Total War: Warhammer. Once you see the screenshots, you’ll realize how much you need fantasy strategy on that scale in your life. Head to page 30 for that now. It really is amazing stuff. Impressive too, but perhaps quietly so since it was in Early Access so long before…

“Specialists are finally adding some personality to multiplayer” READ ME DEVELOPER Treyarch PUBLISHER Activision LINK www.callofduty.com I’m playing Seraph, a female assassin raised in Singapore’s quarantine zone—one of nine Specialists who can bring a unique weapon or ability to a multiplayer match. I pick up the enemy flag and quickly get out of sight, powersliding 15 feet into a nearby building. It’s a lot like the slide in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, but faster and longer. Inside, I shoot another player in the back. It’s still Call of Duty, where sometimes you get kills because you’re lucky. On the other side of the building, I choose the left route back to base. I can get across a long stretch of it by wall-running over an abyss, which is quicker…

The orcs aren’t best suited to sieges, relying on such crude techniques as rock lobbers, Doom Divers and giants to break their way in. Flying creatures are a huge new addition to Total War. This is an undead dragon ridden presumably by a Vampire Lord. Arachnarok spiders are Night Goblincontrolled monsters topped by a squad of goblin archers. Good luck, dwarf cannons. The celestial wizard prepares his slow-casting Comet of Casandora, which can devastate friend and foe alike. Caveat caster! A light wizard’s sanctum. It looks like The Creative Assembly are planning to include all eight human schools of magic and their wizards. A vampire. You can tell because of (a) complexion (b) pallor (c) bloodstains at mouth. Or he could be an estate agent. This light wizard read a…

Waxworks Release date 1992 While very obscure now (though available on GOG), for the first half of the ’90s, Waxworks was the go-to game for scenes of gore. It picked up what Horrorsoft had started with earlier games, most famously an adventure based on chesty horror-hostess Elvira, and used the premise of a cursed wax museum with four increasingly creepy themes to go crazy with slashed throats and melted faces. The Lurking Horror Release date 1987 Sometimes, text is enough to put the willies up a whole generation. This was one of the first games to be inspired by the Cthulhu mythos, and Infocom’s only horror game. You start out trying to retrieve a lost term paper in a twisted version of MIT, and quickly get caught up in full-on…

The Cat Lady Release date 2012 Indie games tend to dip into horror and darkness more freely than commercial ones, and that’s just fine when they’re like this—a game of suicide, cancer, murder and depression that’s neither too short for the mood to sink in, nor long enough to lose its effect. Bleak, but brilliant, and dripping with gore and scares. Alien Isolation Release date 2014 The Alien game that fans have been waiting for since 1986, not least because while it does have other enemies to deal with, it’s the only Alien licensed game that treats a single xenomorph as a deadly threat. It’s a game of high-stakes cat-and-mouse through vents, corridors and rooms, where that familiar hiss and claw in the back could come at literally any moment.…

1 Launch phase Add the biggest fuel tanks and give them the biggest engines in the hope of getting off the ground. Keep boosting until your apoapsis is above 70km. Try not to explode. 2 Orbital phase Once you’re out of the atmosphere, it takes less thrust to make bigger adjustments. You can use smaller engines like the ‘Terrier’ or ‘Spark’ to help conserve fuel for your journey. 3 Landing phase By now, you’re probably running on fumes, so you’ll need to be creative. This second, smaller rocket has been stuck on the first. Once orbiting Mun, it can detach for descent.…

Need to know What is it? A sci-fi shooter inspired by classic Nintendo games. Influenced by Metroid, Castlevania Reviewed on GeForce GTX 970, Intel i5-3570K @ 3.4GHz, 16GB RAM Alternatively Mark of the Ninja, 90% Copy protection Steam “What I can only describe as a spaceboomerang” Developed by one man over five years, Axiom Verge is a remarkable feat of game-making. Not only because creator Tom Happ did all the art, music, programming and design himself, but because it’s damn good too. It’s inspired heavily by the Metroid series, but it doesn’t feel like a ripoff. The DNA of Nintendo’s game can be felt in every pixelated corridor—the compelling exploration, the backtracking, the eerie otherworldly atmosphere, the tough bosses—but it has plenty of ideas of its own too. You play Trace, a…

CHRIS THURSTEN This month Enjoyed the marvelously immersive experience of being a dickhead. Also Played Dota 2, Pillars of Eternity READ ME RELEASED April 2015 OUR REVIEW PCG 267, 92% BUY IT $60 MORE www.rockstargames.com/gtav GTA V’s first-person mode provides a striking sense of presence. As an experiment, I decided to spend an entire in-game day like that. Weaving through traffic on my high speed bike is amazingly evocative. I ride fast but carefully. Passing trucks loom large and I’m acutely aware of how vulnerable I am. Outside a liquor store I pull on a hockey mask, which obscures my peripheral vision, and burst in. Raising my SMG, I force the clerk to fill a bag with cash. I back out, ‘feeling’ for the exit as I keep my gun trained…

Yes, it’s another Source Filmmaker film. A long one, too. It clocks in at 21 minutes, and is part of machinima maker Winglet’s ‘Fedora Chronicles’ series. Some of the animation is bit off, but this is still an amazingly well constructed work. www.bit.ly/TF2LaLS 1 It’s stab time As tends to be the case in TF2 shorts, it all starts with a plan. Live and Let Spy is voiced entirely using the game’s existing dialogue, all spliced together. It mostly works, and there’s an impressive amount of it. 2 Let us move The RED team executes their plan—stealthily infiltrating the BLU base. And, when that doesn’t work, noisily murdering its guards. There are a lot of different hats on show, and a throwaway joke about crates. 3 You doomed us all…

Turtle Beach’s focus has historically been on the console headset market, but nonetheless it has a number of choice offerings for PC, like this wireless, 7.1 digital surround model. At $170 it’s one of the pricier headsets on the market, but you can’t fault its feature list. In addition to that Dolby DTS Headphone:X surround (which sounds very immersive and precise) there’s a 15-hour battery life and Bluetooth compatibility, so you can hook the Z300 up to a mobile device too. Perhaps you’re wary of going wireless because you don’t want some 2001 obelisk-looking monstrosity of a receiver on your desk, or to have to worry about battery life and range. Well, you’re right to be—but the Z300’s among the best at alleviating those concerns. The stated 15-hour life held…

These offer a lot of cushioning and clear sound reproduction for the money, without any gimmicky bass boost. The earcups are quite big so they’re unlikely to sit flush against your head, which means audio does leak a little and external sound leaks in. The fabric covering the cushioning at both headband and earcup contact points does fray quite easily, too. The mic’s perfectly capable, and although the 1.5m cable’s short it’s unlikely to give you much hassle. If you’re into flashy bonuses, you’ll like the LED lights around each cup, which you can set to one of 16.8 million colors using the bundled Engine software. An odd addition. If you’re after a sub-$50 pair of earphones, you’ll quickly forget that the Raw Prism was a budget buy. SPEC •…

CLICK pcgamer.com LICK facebook.com /pcgamermagazine SHOOT steamcommunity.com /groups/pcgamer WATCH youtube.com /pcgamer FOLLOW @pcgamer SEND letters@pcgamer.com PC Gamer FutureUS 4000 Shoreline Ct. Suite 400 South San Francisco, CA 94080 Charged with liberating slaves In spite of a few bad apples that treat early access release as a lazy way to get money by releasing an unfinished game, I am greatly in support of the opportunity given to players in alpha/beta releases to shape and influence the evolution of game development. However, there is one thing that really winds me up. The forums for many of these games seem packed with beta fanboy apologists. Basically, people who seem more keen to apologize and find excuses for issues with gameplay by finding convoluted (and usually absurd) reasons as to why the discovered bug…

BioShock: Fort Frolic The whole game is dark and tense, but nothing beats the hands-on cruelty of Sander Cohen and his pleasure palace of artistic horror. It’s the mix of sadistic glee and the shadows behind the showmanship that truly made this episode. It’s BioShock’s darkest corner and most memorable hour. Limbo: The Spider OH DEAR GOD THE SPIDER. Every arachnophobe’ s worst nightmare in pixels. Huge, deadly, and oh, the animation. The spindly arms unfolding to give chase, the savage lunges, the... the everything. The single most horrifying arachnid ever committed to the screen, bar none. Halo: The Flood What could be so terrifying that even a Spartan starts feeling nervous? That would be the apocalyptic logs that introduced The Flood to the world—a threat to which the only…

Need to know What is it? An open-world pixelated western adventure game. Influenced by Classic westerns, classic videogame design Reviewed on Windows 7, Intel i7 x980 3.33GHz, 6GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 Alternatively Wasteland 2, 83% Copy protection Steam If you’re miffed that Red Dead Redemption never came to PC, Westerado: Double Barreled might help scratch that itch, albeit on a much smaller scale. It’s an openworld pixel-based western adventure where you’re a cowboy on the hunt for the man who murdered your family. While doing favors in exchange for clues to the killer’s identity, you can interrogate, accuse, draw your gun on, and shoot anyone you want, even in the middle of a conversation. Finally, the thing I’ve always wanted in a game is in a game. Some of…

CHRIS LIVINGSTON This month Was barely able to contain himself in the name of virtual romance. Also Played GTA V, Crusader Kings II READ ME RELEASED April 2015 OUR REVIEW N/A BUY IT $10 MORE www.magicnotion.com/matchmaker I’m running a dating agency. It’s a real hands-on business: not only do I find my clients a match but I oversee their entire date. I pick their entree, control their conversations, even choose their wardrobe and hairstyle. My motto: “I will find you love even if I have to completely change everything about you.” Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker reproduces a lot of real-world dating situations I can relate to, such as trying to hold in a noisy fart (and blaming it on someone else when it fails), feigning interest in someone’s job, pretending I don’t…

WHAT’S NEW IN THE BIGGEST GAMES READ ME FIRST REVIEWED July 2014, 86% DEVELOPER Hi-Rez PUBLISHER In-house REQUIRES Dual core CPU, 3GB RAM, 512MB GPU LINK www.smitegame.com COMMUNITY www.smitegame.com Despite having become one of the world’s most popular MOBAs since its release last year, Smite still feels a bit like a hidden gem. In part, that’s something Hi-Rez actively encourages. In a genre characterized by cold business logic, the game’s developers are forever active on Twitch, YouTube and Twitter, expressing an endless, energetic and irreverent enthusiasm for their game. Calculated or not, there’s no doubt that this enthusiasm translates into a substantial amount of work on the game itself. In January, Smite entered Season 2—a program of updates and esports events that will culminate in next year’s Smite World Championship.…

As origin stories go, the Cloud II’s may not be getting the big-budget effects movie-treatment this summer, but it’s interesting within the remit of gaming audio. Swedish peripheral maker QPad released the QH-90 headset in early 2013 to widespread acclaim. Comfortable, clear, reasonably priced—it was arguably the best package out there. Memory mogul Kingston struck a deal with QPad to release a modded version of the QH-90 under its own branding—the HyperX Cloud. Aside from a color palette swap, the only meaningful difference was a greatly amplified bass response. That’s usually a recipe for muddy, distorted gaming audio, but the HyperX Cloud improved upon the QH-90’s stellar sound quality, losing none of its crystalline high-end tones while boosting low end power. “The sound quality is as good as I’ve heard…

This is the epitome of the prevalent, slightly misguided idea that when it comes to drivers, bigger is always better. No manufacturer offers bigger drivers in their gaming headset. The benefit, ostensibly, of supersizing the hardware is a meatier bass sound, and the Strix has that. However, it comes at the cost of versatility. Listen to a classical music recording with a wide dynamic range with Kingston’s HyperX Cloud II and you’ll pick up on every tiny sound. Listen using the Strix and the top end of the piano and the poor triangle player are lost in the muddiness of the mix. It’s possible to clean up the sound by creating custom EQ levels and third-party software, but there’s no setting that turns the Strix into a Cloud II. However,…

The Spy always shoots first. The Spy leaves honor to dead men and doesn’t give a damn about your rules. The Spy is deadly, pragmatic, a survivor, and banned from half a dozen different regional pool championships. The Spy doesn’t care. The Spy is a scoundrel, and far from scruffy lookin’. The Spy would really like it if you came away with the impression that The Spy was a little bit like Han Solo. The Spy would like that a great deal. We may have to settle, however, for videogames. Visceral Games—of Dead Space and Battlefield: Hardline—is working on a story-driven Star Wars action game for EA. It’s helmed by Amy Hennig and Todd Stashwick, who both worked on PlayStation adventure Uncharted 4. Uncharted, as you may be aware, was…

Horror and gaming have always gone hand-in-hand. It’s the easiest way to get an emotional reaction, but it’s also where the braver developers go to push the limits, to show that games don’t just have to be for kids. Admittedly, their reasons for doing so have historically been less about art than publicity. The first 15-rated game in the UK? Dracula, on the ZX Spectrum—but its creators were hoping for an 18. Nevertheless, important battles were fought and won, which ultimately gave gaming the same freedom to shock and appal as any other medium. And where would gaming be today without Doom? Join us now, as we explore the genre’s dark history on PC.…

“It’s a reminder: we did this, and it was amazing” Need to know What is it? A solar sandbox playground and serious sim combined. Influenced by Physics, NASA Reviewed on Core i5 CPU, 970 GTX, 8GB RAM Alternatively Minecraft, 96% Copy protection None I still remember the first time I landed on Mun—planet Kerbin’s closest moon. It was on the back of many failures, of countless times where my design, planning or ability fell short. One rocket would be too heavy, another too inefficient, another too explosive. I’d mess up my landing, splattering my little green astronauts all over the moon’s jagged craters, or I’d fail to break out of Kerbin’s atmosphere entirely, spinning them out into a watery grave. One time a craft ran out of fuel 5,000 meters above…

Need to know What is it? A turn-based stealth strategy game with a cyberpunk spin. Influenced by Blade Runner, Netrunner, Shadowrun, other things that run Reviewed on Windows 8, Intel i5 CPU, GeForce 660 Ti, 8GB RAM Alternatively XCOM: Enemy Unknown, 87% Copy protection Steam “No evil organization hides its server farms at the Eiffel Tower” The spy movie, it’s been said, is a fantasy about tourism. The spy skips all the fussy details of travel—the discomfort, the bewilderment, the checked baggage restrictions—and cuts right to the landmarks. If the spy is a fantasy tourist, then the hacker is a virtual one: ducking through the back alleys of cyberspace. For the elite hacker-spies of turnbased Invisible, Inc., the act is almost frictionless. They beam straight into the inner sanctums of evil…

Need to know What is it? A rhythm-based roguelike that demands coordination and perseverance. Influenced by Rogue, Dance Dance Revolution Reviewed on Intel i5-2500K, 16GB RAM, GeForce GTX 970 Alternatively The Binding of Isaac, 83% Copy protection Steam Unlike many games that carry the label, Crypt of the Necrodancer is a roguelike that is actually quite a bit like Rogue. You control a lone hero in a grid-based dungeon, pushing back the fog of war square by square as you explore each randomlygenerated set of chambers. As you journey deeper you gather gear, spells and consumables to help you survive encounters with monsters who behave according to predictable routines. If you die, you start over from the beginning. In a traditional roguelike, your greatest asset is the time you’re afforded to think,…

DO Share the wealth Have extra cash? Throw it all over the place! It’s what team players do. Even better, create an endless fountain of cash by throwing it back and forth. Drop your weapons Do you really need two shotguns? Well, yeah, sort of, but your team might need one of them more. Hit backspace to drop extras. DON’T Kill the last Zed When the Zed counter hits one, call it out to your team. Let them run toward the shop so they have extra time. You’ll be a hero to them. Weld random doors shut Welding the door to the shop shut just before your team runs through it isn’t funny. (OK, actually it is kind of funny, but don’t do that.)…

For the money, you’d expect this headset to set the benchmark for sound and build quality. But while that was true on release, manufacturers like Kingston have since achieved greater levels of luxury, for much less. It’s the surround sound capability you’re really paying for. The Recon 3D unit is a soundcardmeets-controller which connects via an optical cable and an additional USB slot to your PC, and provides staggeringly impressive digital surround sound. Not even the HyperX Cloud II can compete. On that soundcard you’ll also find a Recon mode button, which accentuates all nearby in-game sound cues. It makes things sound very odd, but if you take your FPS gaming seriously, it’s welcome. The price remains the obstacle to championing this set over others. SPEC • Frequency response 20Hz-20KHz…

If the RIG Surround has one vice, it’s presenting a multitude of handy features in the most complicated manner possible. The USP of this wired, well-constructed headset centers on a hub, which can be used to connect to your PC and a mobile device simultaneously. Pop the central button on that hub, and you switch audio sources and mic inputs in a flash. It’s a nice idea, but the reality of sitting there ensconced in cables of varying connection type leaves you wondering how much of a problem it ever was to have to take off your headset when someone called you. The presentation is just messy: the hub’s too light to stay in one place, and a pair of volume dials, one within another, feels needlessly fussy. Perhaps most…

It’s a tricky spot to fight from, very much towards the budget end of the group test, but not the outright cheapest. I don’t envy the Ensense—but it isn’t doing much to endear itself to me with those looks. Ouch. If you can get past the barrage of sharp angles and bright colors, there’s more than meets the eye here. Its name refers to a force feedbackaping tech that accentuates low-end vibrations for a more ‘visceral’ gaming experience. Or something. It’s every bit as gimmicky and absurd as it sounds (imagine playing a game with an electric toothbrush in your mouth and you’ve basically got a grasp of what’s on offer), but luckily it can be turned off to reveal a surprisingly wide and precise virtual surround space. In fact,…