Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2016 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

In this issue, Wes Fenlon goes behind the scenes at Oculus VR to talk to the creators responsible for one of the two headsets currently hitting the market. This feels like unprecedented territory on PC—whether the Oculus Rift or Vive takes off, it’s a fascinating new frontier for PC users. As you’ll discover for yourself, they’re already producing games that offer an experience unlike anything else we’ve seen to date. Check out our Oculus studio visit, and impressions of the first software, starting on p34. EDITOR samuel.roberts@futurenet.com @Samuel WRoberts TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Tweet us @PCGamer Our team of writers WES FENLON Specialist in VR, SSDs Twitter @wesleyfenlon This month Bravely played every Oculus Rift launch game in order to deliver his verdict on the best ones.…

The Spy has heard that war never changes. It’s a line of thinking The Spy isn’t convinced by. After all, war is no longer fought in a big field, between two armies firing flintlock rifles at each other until too many of one side fall over. That’s one change right there. At best, you could argue that mankind’s base urge to organize into broad social and geographical structures, and the desire to see that collective rise to dominance over other, similar groups leading to tensions that spill out into open conflict hasn’t changed. That makes for a somewhat less pithy catchphrase, of course. Why is The Spy contemplating the changing face of war? Because of rumors that EA’s Battlefield is going to do something different this year. A Battlefield 5…

EISENHORN: XENOS You play Inquisitor Eisenhorn, and follow him through the story of the first book in the Eisenhorn trilogy, and into battle. Expect to be smacking those Xenos in cinematic brawls. BATTLEFLEET GOTHIC: ARMADA Based on the tabletop game, Battlefleet Gothic promises to show you the galaxy and let you explore it while thumping enemies with your collection of ships. SPACE HULK: DEATHWING An FPS where you stomp around an abandoned spaceship in the boots of a Space Marine. Acquire skills, abilities and loot while trying to survive against aliens. WAR HAMMER 40,000: DARK NEXUS ARENA Dark Nexus Arena is a MOBA with one word too many in its title. It’s a 4x4 scrap through the Wych Cult arenas. You can play as a Khorne berserker in it. Sold.…

The PC remains the greatest platform for free games, and not because of The Pirate Bay. Every day, new freebies are added to places like Itch. io and Game Jolt, and we do our best to bring you the most worthwhile examples. Many are fun distractions that you’ll have forgotten about an hour later, but some will linger in your memory, wheedling their way into your unconscious and demanding much more of your time than you might otherwise have expected. It’s those games that are suitable candidates for our Top 50 list, which collects the very best in freeware entertainment. The following are drawn from decades of PC gaming, and cover pretty much every genre you can imagine, save dancemat-based rhythm games, which remain cruelly under-represented on our platform. We’ve…

I’m cornered by three strangers. They can see the loot I’m carrying on my back. I expect them to shoot any second—instead, all three start doing jumping jacks in unison. Welcome to The Division, where fitness comes first. I joined in and they helped me extract my loot from the PvP Dark Zone. We spent the next hour parading through central Manhattan, helping out strangers in need and hunting down rogue soldiers in a series of vigilante revenge quests. NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An open-world co-op cover shooter with RPG dressings. EXPECT TO PAY $60 DEVELOPER Ubisoft PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Nvidia GTX 980 Ti, Intel Core i7-6700K, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER Varies LINK tomclancy-thedivision.ubi.com Enemies flanked or sent explosives my direction with abandon Yet with or without impromptu…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A remaster of the third-person shooter that popularized cover. EXPECT TO PAY $30 DEVELOPER Epic Games (original), The Coalition (remaster) PUBLISHER Microsoft REVIEWED ON Windows 10, 8GB RAM, i5-3570K, GeForce GTX Titan MULTIPLAYER Co-op and competitive LINK www.bit.ly/1QM7RfV My criticisms of Gears of War haven’t changed much, which is exceptional for an Xbox 360 game from 2006. Long after it first redesigned third-person shooting into a chunky, cover-to-cover alien meatgrinder, Gears is still fun as hell and doesn’t feel dated. It’s aged wonderfully, tasting just a bit better, even, because it sticks out among modern shooters as thicker, stronger, and simpler. Active Reload adds golf swing timing to magazine swaps But it’s grown some pretty gross mold, too. This new Ultimate Edition is one…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Far Cry, but in the Stone Age. EXPECT TO PAY $60 DEVELOPER Ubisoft Montreal PUBLISHER Ubisoft REVIEWED ON GeForce GTX 970, Intel i7-950, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.bit.ly/1UnaLKu The sting bomb ‘grenade’ is basically just a bag filled with angry bees Walking through a moonlit forest, I see a glowing orange light in the distance. Curious, I head towards it. Then I notice it’s heading towards me. It’s a bear, and it’s on fire. I leap out of the way and the beast thunders past, roaring in pain. It disappears into the undergrowth and I hear human voices echoing through the trees. Hiding in the shadows, I watch a group of hunters from a rival tribe chase after it. They corner it, a…

1 DUNGEON DECORATOR TOOL Game Maker meets Trading Spaces in Hell Loren Schmidt’s Dungeon Decorator is already a hugely exciting and surprisingly fun game development tool, even if it’s currently lacking in many areas. Saving is a little temperamental, while your browser often gets in the way by hijacking button inputs—particularly annoying when you’re trying to jump. Yep, this is a game dev tool that lets you explore your platformer as you edit. Live editing feels like the future of game development, and it works so well here you’ll forgive the occasional glitch or tiling error. Dungeon Decorator isn’t a program for making your own games, exactly; it’s a tool for making platformers in the Loren Schmidt style. Luckily, he’s making some of the best around. (Stop what you’re doing…

A geomagnetic storm has rendered all technology useless and plunged the planet into a quiet apocalypse. Suddenly humanity is no longer at the top of the food chain and every day is a fight for survival. This is the harrowing premise of The Long Dark, an atmospheric survival simulator created by Canadian studio Hinterland. Your only goal is to stay alive, but this freezing, merciless landscape doesn’t make it easy. It’s a bleak game. But there’s a strange serenity to be found amid the devastation. There are moments when the weather is calm and you have enough food and water that survival briefly takes a back seat. You’re free to enjoy the atmosphere and beauty of your surroundings. You hear the crunch of snow under your feet and the wind…

Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, is talking Windows 10 again. For just over a year now, Spencer has been talking up Microsoft’s return to PC gaming, but until now little has come of it. Recently, however, the company announced that Remedy’s Quantum Break would release on PC on the same date as on Xbox One, and at the Xbox Spring Showcase, MS revealed Forza Motorsport 6 Apex. I was at the Showcase, and asked Spencer about Xbox’s PC plans. PROFILE Phil Spencer has been with Microsoft for 28 years. In 2014 he became the head of the studio’s Xbox division. He is now responsible for games and entertainment across all Microsoft platforms Based on your opening speech this morning, it seems that unification between the two platforms—Windows 10 and Xbox—is…

It was inevitable, really. After an exceptional start to the year, we were due some disappointment. That’s not to say this month’s issue is full of bad games, but there’s little that isn’t held back by design flaws or ancillary problems. Take The Division. It has its fans, but James Davenport was left cold by its uneasy attempt to juggle shooter and RPG systems. The first episode of the new Hitman is better, but has flaws of its own. Despite being a welcome balance between Blood Money and Absolution, the bugs and forced disconnections keep it from scoring high. Yet, even on arid land, there can be growth. See Stardew Valley, the brilliant farming RPG, and this issue’s surprise success story. HIL SAVAGE DEPUTY EDITOR phil.savage@futurenet.com HOW WE REVIEW Wherever…

As a quiet person working in a loud open- plan office, the idea of packing it all in to go live on a farm is something that appeals to me greatly. Stardew Valley has given me that opportunity, albeit in a cutesy, pixelated form and via the death of my digital grandfather. It’s not quite the way I’d choose to acquire a farm, but, let’s face it, the only way anyone affords any kind of property these days is by inheriting it. It’s very much like a Harvest Moon game in that you get your farm up and running by first making a patch of land usable, then planting, tending, and ultimately selling crops to build a stable income. What starts off as a few parsnips snowballs into a steady…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A first-person narrative game set in an abandoned asylum, starring a former patient. EXPECT TO PAY $19 DEVELOPER LKA PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON i5, GTX460M, 4GB RAM MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.thetownoflight.com I wanted more for Renée. The Town of Light isn’t an elegantly made game—it has the unforthcoming quality of scar tissue, of painful ideas soldered haphazardly together—but it’s among the few that left me feeling bereft for the character under my control. Not that Renée’s fate is exactly yours to decide. A fictitious patient of the non-fictional psychiatric hospital of Volterra in Tuscany, she’s returned to the facility some years after its closure to make sense of her experiences. Far more appalling are the signs the world at large has moved on Players…

When I was young and foolish—a mere level 6 Division agent—I decided to venture into the Dark Zone. I’d heard stories about this lawless PvP area: of betrayal, revenge and tense stand-offs. But seconds after entering I was shot and killed. Dejected, I sloped back to the PvE districts, but vowed to return when I was stronger. THE RULES 1 Learn the ways of the Dark Zone. 2 Locate and extract some quality loot. 3 Resist the urge to kill other agents. New York City has been devastated by a weaponized virus, but the government—thanks to a group of super-agents called The Division— has a fragile grip on law and order across most of Manhattan. The Dark Zone, however, is a different story. This closed off, highly contaminated area has…

Dontnod definitely doesn’t want to be pigeonholed. Moving from near-future Parisian cyborgs (Remember Me) to millennia American teenagers (Life is Strange) was one thing—but a Spanish Flu-ridden London in 1918 is a bigger departure. And focusing a talky-RPG on a very traditional reading of vampirism is moving further into the realms of cheese than it normally attempts. You play Jonathan Reid, a high-ranking doctor turned into a vampire against his will. Freshly risen from a mass grave, he explores a London wracked by the lethal Spanish Flu and by another, more insidious vampiric plague. “One side of him is a man of science who wants to heal London’s suffering,” says Philippe Moreau, the game’s director. “The other side is a creature of the night compelled to take lives to survive.”…

“TRACER ALLOWS US TO CREATE SOMETHING UNIQUE AND KIND OF STRANGE” The launch of a new Blizzard game usually has some kind of impact on the games that orbit it in Battle.net: World of Warcraft pets, StarCraft II user icons, Diablo cosmetics. When StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void was released last year, Heroes of the Storm gained an entire character in the expansion’s honor. The same thing will happen when Overwatch launches in June—time-skipping adventurer Tracer will make the leap from multiplayer first-person shooter to isometric lane-pusher. It’s one thing to convert a StarCraft II, Warcraft or Diablo character—after all, they all originate in games that control roughly the same way that Heroes of the Storm does. Tracer presents a different challenge. She’s fast, twitchy, and defined by bursts…

JAMES DAVENPORT Specialist in Shooting, shopping Currently playing The Division This month Found Christmas in Tom Clancy’s New York was no fairytale. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Action, owls Currently playing Far Cry Primal This month Was caught stuffing handfuls of bees into various bags. We dared not ask why. PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in Action, murder Currently playing Hitman This month Disguised himself as other games critics. It didn’t work: we all wear the same thing. DANIELLA LUCAS Specialist in JRPG, MMO Currently playing Disgaea This month Assembled a team of ne’er-do-wells. They weren’t difficult to find in this office. TYLER WILDE Specialist in Shooting, war Currently playing Gears of War: Ultimate Edition This month Traveled to work by darting between bits of waist-high wall. EDWIN EVANS -THIRLWELL Specialist in Horror,…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The assassination sim’s first episode, as a standalone purchase. EXPECT TO PAY $15 DEVELOPER IO Interactive PUBLISHER Square Enix REVIEWED ON Windows 10, 8GB RAM, i5-3570K, GeForce GTX 970 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.hitman.com They’ve been shot, stabbed, poisoned, drowned and bludgeoned In many ways this latest Hitman is exactly what I—someone who loved Blood Money and disliked Absolution—wanted the series to do next. This first episode, available as a standalone Intro Pack, contains a couple of smaller tutorial levels and one full-size mission. That might not sound like much, but the Showstopper level, set in a Parisian palace, is a huge, intricate sandbox filled with possibilities for you to explore. Hitman takes Absolution’s accessibility—a slick third-person control scheme, and ‘Instinct’ mode, which highlights targets,…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The PC port of a strategy RPG. EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER Nippon Ichi Software PUBLISHER NISA America REVIEWED ON i5-3230 CPU, 8GB RAM MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.bit.ly/1OkUqhB Graphics options that rely on blurring are a bad fit for Disgaea Set in the Netherworld where all things demonic and treacherous are celebrated, Disgaea is a game where you control Prince Laharl and a ragtag collection of misfits, hired help and explosive penguins. Waking from a two-year nap Laharl discovers his father is dead and other demons are moving to claim his crown. He decides to get proactive by beating up as many demons as he can through the art of grid-based strategy and flashy attacks It’s a quirky setup for a strategy RPG, but…

SAMUEL ROBERTS THIS MONTH Played as the world’s least effective assassin. ALSO PLAYED Freedom Planet, Max Payne 2 I ’m in a changing room with two soldiers, who so far today have seen me dress up in three different outfits: a soldier, a security guard and a flight technician. Now I’m back to change into my soldier’s costume again after a failed attempt to kill my target, Jasper Knight. The plan was to mess with the ejector seat of a test aircraft and shoot him through the roof of the hangar and into the sky with no parachute, which I’ve been reliably informed is hilarious. But I wasn’t paying attention to how to get him into the aircraft, and I’ve been waiting for about 20 minutes in uniform, not knowing…

“Payne lives in a heightened, ludicrous world of neo-noir” Whatever happened to bullet time? I think the death knell of the early noughties’ most overused shooter idea was rung in slow-mo when Matrix Revolutions came out in late 2003. All the style established by the first Matrix film suddenly seemed a bit passé, a lesson no doubt learned by hundreds of virgins wearing long leather jackets to nu-metal gigs. Max Payne was the first game to popularize slow-mo, but Max Payne 2 was commercially disappointing enough to put the series on hold for nine years. Bullet time gradually faded as the go-to idea for every third-person shooter. When Max Payne 3 arrived years later it was unfamiliar, and shaped by the more popular conventions of the genre established in the…

TONY ELLIS I run to death, and death meets me as fast, and that doesn’t leave much room for videogames. These are the ones that didn’t waste my time. STAB IN THE DARK MGSV: THE PHANTOM PAIN www.konami.jp/mgs5 For me this is part stealth shooter, part self-inflicted torture. If anyone spots me on a mission and gives the alarm, I have to restart. I have to be the guy who leaves a wake of stunned guards and slit throats but is never seen. I’m an idiot. Good thing Kojima made such an amazingly engrossing and replayable game. MURDER IN PARADISE FAR CRY 4 www.bit.ly/1kqZsBj I feel oddly guilty for enjoying one of the most Ubisoft games that Ubisoft ever made, but I just can’t help it. The setting is fantastically…