Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2017 i PC Gamer

THE DISCUSSION IS OVER, BUT WOULD IT WIN IN A FIGHT VERSUS AQUAMAN? LET US KNOW @PCGAMER Samuel: Square Enix announced a multi-game deal with Marvel in January, with Crystal Dynamics working on an Avengers game and the Deus Ex devs at Eidos Montreal reportedly making Guardians of the Galaxy. How do we feel about this, as well as the fact that Deus Ex – also made by Square Enix – is now on hiatus? And what do we want from this deal in particular? Andy: I love Deus Ex and have never really been into Marvel (except Guardians of the Galaxy, which I love), so this news has left me feeling a bit sad. I’m sure Crystal Dynamics will make a really solid and probably quite good action adventure…

PLAY TOO MANY CARDS AND YOUR OPPONENT WILL HAVE THE ADVANTAGE NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2017 (open beta) DEVELOPER CD Projekt Red PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.playgwent.com Card games aren’t my thing. I don’t enjoy Hearthstone , and Magic: The Gathering makes me sleepy. Gwent is different – not in function, but in conception. It’s the Trojan Horse of collectible card games, having already infiltrated my consciousness through its presence in The Witcher 3 . Gwent is the perfect minigame for an open-world adventure – an entertaining pastime that encourages you to seek out fellow enthusiasts in order to expand your deck. I played it obsessively. This standalone incarnation is more complicated, but not overwhelmingly so. At…

Baldur’s Gate beckoned players in with beautiful graphics, a heavy focus on story, and some of the genre’s most beloved characters. It looked fantastic, thanks to the Infinity Engine’s method of displaying worlds. Huge rendered maps with overlaid sprites allowed for exquisite detail without the predictability of tiles. It wasn’t just D&D reborn, but a new start for the genre. RPGs were finally cool again. Replayed now, it’s the complexity that jumps out. Baldur’s Gate was based on AD&D Second Edition, and it doesn’t hide the fact. It wants you to know its dice rolls. It wants you to know terms like THAC0 (“To Hit Armour Class Zero,” aka, the likeliness of a hit landing). It often pushes you to areas you’re not ready for. Roll a mage…

Regular readers will have seen the sidebar to my left so many times that it barely registers. This issue, there’s a good reason to pay it some heed. We’ve spruced up our score guide, slightly tweaking things to make those numbers at the end of our reviews more useful. For instance, we’ve clarified the language of the 70-79% bracket to more clearly explain that games in this range are recommendations. We’ve also expanded the lower end of the bracket, because we want you to know precisely how rubbish a bad game is. Visit page 82 for an example of this in action. Also this issue, we’re trialling the return of the half-page review. We want to continue to highlight smaller, weirder games you may have missed. Let us know what…

BLUE Reasoning, wisdom, and mysticism. Pursuing understanding for its own sake will see your blue tide increased. GOLD Compassion, self-sacrifice and empathy. By putting others before yourself you’ll be associated with the gold tide. INDIGO Equality, justice, and the greater good. By managing to maintain a strict moral code, your indigo tide will be increased. RED Emotion, passion and action. Encouraging strong feelings in others – from anger to lust – makes you see red. SILVER Silver is associated with glory-seeking, admiration, and fame. Bigging yourself up in conversations advances silver.…

Ancient freighters, delicately balancing above the abyss NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A Jules Verne-inspired submarine adventure. EXPECT TO PAY  £15 DEVELOPER Arachnid Games PUBLISHER Gambitious Digital Entertainment REVIEWED ON Windows 10, 16GB RAM, i7 6800K, GeForce GTX 1080 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.diluvion.com/ diluvion Diluvion is about drifting through the depths of the ocean in a dangerous, steampunk-inspired setting. In this RPG-infused exploration game, humanity now finds itself desperately surviving underwater, trapped beneath impenetrable ice after a great flood centuries ago. Settlements and towns are nothing more than a collection of haphazard-looking metal structures, clinging to glaciers and rocks in an attempt not to be lost to the deep. You become the captain of your first submarine, and must build up your crew and upgrade your vessel…

VANGUARD Balanced, versatile, and easy to master, Vanguards are perfect for beginners and can hold their own against more powerful classes. ASSASSIN Nimble and deadly, Assassins make up for their weak defence with rapid attacks that can totally overwhelm an unwary opponent. HEAVY These burly tanks can take a lot of damage, but their attacks are slow and more obviously telegraphed than the other classes. HYBRID Hybrids mix traits from the other three classes. They’re difficult to get to grips with, but extremely powerful in the right hands.…

Narrow corridors are scarier than darkness. There’s always the fear that perspective is playing a trick on you, and the corridor is actually getting narrower. And the air is thick like custard, and you can’t look back because you know doors are shutting behind you, none of your clothes fit right, jokes aren’t funny and everyone can see exactly how stupid and scared you are. I’m assuming everyone else feels this way. Thirty words left, quick, review: procedural boat-based narrow corridor explorer that tries to be hide and seek, but is more running away. Atmospheric, but procedural generation leads to more frustration than timelessness. Opaque. Slow. Good sound. Not great. Monsters!…

1 DUAL PSU The X21 is another one of those monster notebooks, requiring two dedicated power supplies to function at maximum performance. 2 TOBII TROUBLE An interesting glimpse of the future, but Tobii eye tracking doesn’t support SLI, so it’s limiting in games. 3 COOLING Impressively quiet, and steadily cool, the X21 comes with five fans and multiple pipes to transfer all that troublesome extra heat away from the chassis. 4 PORTABLE? Whether the X21 is truly portable is debatable, but it does come in a reinforced, super-padded case to protect it on its travels. GAMING LAPTOP ACER PREDATOR X21 www.acer.com £8,000 (approx) Just let that pricetag sink in for a second. £8,000. That’s a horrendous sum of money. Beyond anything I’ve ever witnessed for a single product in the PC…

MOTHERBOARD H270M Bazooka MSI £90 Kaby Lake has landed and the 270 series chipsets with it. MSI’s Bazooka H270M is a perfect fit for our new CPU. PROCESSOR Pentium G4600 Intel £83 Two cores, four threads and a lot of single core IPC performance. This core performs just as well as an i7-7700K in games. GRAPHICS CARD RX 480 G1 Gaming 4GB Gigabyte £181 The RX 480 is still our budget GPU of choice, making quick work of the vast majority of games at 1080p. MEMORY Fury Black 8GB @2400 HyperX £59 DDR4 packs higher speeds, better energy efficiency, and larger capacities. 8GB is still perfect for most games, too. POWER SUPPLY EVGA 500W 80PLUS Certified ATX12V/EPS12V EVGA £52 A reliable PSU with enough juice to run your CPU and…

SAMUEL ROBERTS THIS MONTH Took a raft upstream into certain death. ALSO PLAYED Resident Evil 7, Red Alert 2 UNFORTUNATELY THIS GIVES SCOUT PARASITES, AND HER HUNGER BAR STARTS DETERIORATING QUICKLY It’s day one of Scout’s journey up the river with her dog, Aesop, and she’s just been mauled to death by wolves in a forest after her raft got battered by rocks. I’m starting again. While the colourful presentation of The Flame in the Flood and the presence of a dog suggest a warm journey across a flooded United States, it’s actually one of the cruellest survival games I’ve played. There is a campaign mode with a presumably happy ending at the other end of the river, but reaching it requires hours of horrible deaths. Scout can die of…

PHIL SAVAGE THIS MONTH Ended a virtual life, and 0.0007% of a real one. ALSO PLAYED Overwatch, Elite Dangerous I PICK A TARGET – AN OLD WOMAN ON THE DOCKS – AND FIRE AN EXPLORATORY ARROW AT HER I’m only 32. Based on average life expectancy, I’ll be alive for another 433,620 hours. I can afford to waste some of them playing an MMO. But which one? I pick The Elder Scrolls Online. I last played in the beta, and didn’t enjoy it at all, but I’ve heard it’s improved. I create a character aligned with the Aldmeri Dominion, and rush through the tutorial – stopping only to speak to John Cleese as he mumbles his way to another VO cheque. Escaping Coldharbour, I’m sent to an island. I run…

If you’re reading this, there’s a chance you’ve just realised you’re secretly very excited about securing lucrative trade routes around the Mediterranean, fabricating claims on provinces, or sending armies marching across the globe. Yes, you’ve developed an appetite for grand strategy. The good news is that we’re here to help, with this beginner’s guide to strategy’s grandest of subgenres. START HERE TOTAL WAR: SHOGUN 2 The Total War series has consistently been a solid entry point into grand strategy, offering light but broad faction management and gargantuan, exhilarating tactical battles. The best of the bunch for beginners is Shogun 2. It’s one of the most focused games in the series thanks to a comparatively small campaign map with geography that creates interesting limitations, as well as factions with a clear…

MARCH 2016 The Division releases, players enjoy the setting, loot, and combat, but quickly get tired of the grind and aimless endgame. AUGUST 2016 The Underground DLC releases, bringing the new PvE content and continuing the narrative. AUGUST 2016 Ubisoft delays the next two DLC releases to fix bugs and address balance and quality of life issues based on player feedback. NOVEMBER 2016 Patch 1.4 releases, adding World Tiers and showering players with a friendly loot system. NOVEMBER 2016 Survival DLC releases, a new mode where players fight each other and the cold in a race to the centre of the map. JANUARY 2017 Last Man, the last DLC of Season One, enters the PTS and accentuates the issues with PvP balance and clouds the future of The Division.…

PHIL SAVAGE Sure, I’ll probably never own a house, but at least they’ll never take my Steam library away from me. (Please Valve, don’t take it from me.) GUILD WARS 2 www.guildwars2.com Every couple of months, I return to Guild Wars 2 to play a new chapter of the ongoing ‘Living World’ update cycle. Each episode only takes five or six hours, and then I’m done – finished until the next set of missions arrives. It’s not typical MMO design, but I appreciate when a multiplayer game doesn’t try to ruin my life. THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION elderscrolls.bethesda.net/oblivion It’s often seen as the disappointing middle child of the Elder Scrolls series, but I nonetheless recently returned to Oblivion and was reminded just how good it is. There’s a mission…

PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in Overwatch, wrastling Twitter @Octaeder This month Had the time of his life making jokes about print media vs YouTube on p90. Ho ho ho! Ho. JOHN STRIKE Specialist in Banners, so many banners This month Had the unenviable task of stitching together daft, hi-res photos of the PC Gamer team pretending to do sports. CHRIS THURSTEN Specialist in Farewells, the good times Twitter @CThursten This month Chris leaves us this month after 5.5 years on PC Gamer, and joins us for one last daft team feature.…

THE SINGLE LEAKED BIT OF ART MAKES IT LOOK LIKE TAXI DRIVER STARRING A WIZARD The Spy abides by few rules. The strictures of international diplomacy, the law, and the unspoken conventions of a late-night game of Twister all mean little when the safety of the world is at stake. Or, at the very least, the safety of somebody else’s videogame secrets. It’s always been very unclear what kind of spy The Spy actually is, even to The Spy. One of the rules The Spy truly respects is ‘never wear a floral-print trenchcoat to a funeral’ – and yet events may conspire to undo all of The Spy’s good intentions. Reborn into our lives in 2011, the Deus Ex series went from well-regardedlegend-let’s-not-talk-about-Invisible-War to shining proof of the promise of…

MOUNT & BLADE Released: 2007 The original but not the best. Supplanted by Warband. M&B: WARBAND Released: 2010 This standalone expansion is the pinnacle of the series so far. M&B: WARBAND – NAPOLEONIC WARS Released: 2012 A multiplayer expansion set in the Napoleonic Era. M&B: WARBAND – VIKING CONQUEST Released: 2014 This expansion had a poor launch, but is better now. M&B: WITH FIRE AND SWORD Released: 2011 Proof that guns aren’t a great addition to the formula.…

SCOTTMW15 The mark. A small-time pilot with a reputation for exploitation and abuse. SCOOTER MCCABE A smooth-talking con artist sent to take down Scottmw15. NEERAH OTOMEYA Scooter’s spy character he used to operate from the inside. CIRCO MAXIMO A days-old player lured to EVE Online by its new free-to-play programme. ALEXYA FISULFATIA An on-again-off-again newbie who decided to give the game one more shot. MARKONIUS PORKBUTTE Spymaster in the Goonswarm Federation and KarmaFleet founder. THE MITTANI Leader of the Goonswarm Federation, the largest alliance in EVE Online.…

Something I’ve yet to mention is the role of console RPGs. The reason is, as far as the PC was concerned, they weren’t as popular or influential. JRPGs such as Final Fantasy VII changed the game for consoles. But its PC version, released in 1998, was one of the worst produced ports most players had seen. Final Fantasy VIII didn’t do much better. One of the few games that really embraced the console style was Tom Hall’s Anachronox, made by Ion Storm, which mixed Japanese RPG design with cool, imaginative science fiction to fine, if somewhat janky, effect. It was about the last real game to try to do so. This all changed with the Xbox, the first truly successful Western console.…

CHRIS THURSTEN Specialist in RPG, exits Currently playing Torment: Tides of Numenera This month Left the PCG office, but not our hearts. Or our review pages. PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in Sports, entertainment Currently playing WWE 2K17 This month Turned heel and spent the month taunting OXM, despite them being lovely. HOLLY NIELSEN Specialist in Adventure, depths Currently playing Diluvion This month Considered escaping in a submarine, but was put off by the shonky UI. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Fighting, fantasy Currently playing For Honor This month Played the videogame equivalent of your dad’s embarrassing historical fanfic. DANIELLA LUCAS Specialist in MMOs, JRPGs Currently playing Final Fantasy XIV This month Realised it was dangerous to leave the house, so stayed in and raided. JAMES DAVENPORT Specialist in FPS, survival Currently playing…

MIGHT Smashing, lifting, and hitting things really hard – these are the tools of a hands-on castoff. SPEED Everything from climbing to grabbing a coolant tube from a transdimensional engine. INTELLECT Persuading others, assessing devices and uncovering latent memories all require smarts. CYPHERS One-use devices that can charm, conceal, and kill. Carry too many at once at your risk. THE TIDES Tap into the raw power of the Tides to enact your will, if you can brave the consequences.…

AROUND THE MOON (1870) features people being sent to the Moon by being fired out of a giant space gun. Enough said. OFF ON A COMET (1877) has a comet touching earth and scooping a few people with it on the way. The involuntary explorers slowly figure out where they are and have to find a way to escape. THE CHILD OF THE CAVERN (1877) a town surrounding an underground loch, a mysterious orphan who has never seen daylight and a trained snowy owl. What more of a setup could a game need? PROPELLER ISLAND (1895) a string quartet find themselves playing on a huge man- made island in the Pacific Ocean, entirely inhabited by the incredibly wealthy. Two factions threaten the island’s future, can the string quartet unify them?…

Manned missions incorporate survival and base-building NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A space simulation sandbox. EXPECT TO PAY £21 DEVELOPER Bohemia Interactive PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Radeon RX 480, Intel i7-5820K, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER Up to ten LINK www.takeonmars.com I’ve been playing Take On Mars on and off since it was released through Steam Early Access in 2013. This slow, strangely relaxing game about trundling around the Red Planet, taking soil samples, appealed to me the same way Euro Truck Simulator does. But over the years it’s mutated into something else entirely. Understated realism has been quietly pushed aside to make way for manned missions incorporating survival, base-building, and advanced technology. Admittedly this is more immediately entertaining than scooping up soil.…

SP120 RGB Corsair £53 (Three pack + controller) Corsair’s SP120 series fans are a happy medium between the HD Pros and the more basic ML variants. Featuring smooth LED lighting and stellar performance they bring the bling while keeping your system cool. www.corsair.com MEGA MAT XXL PREMIUM ELITE TACTICAL OcUK £22 It’s rare I go out of my way to compliment a mousemat. However, OcUK really nailed it on this one. This neoprene surface comes in a massive 89x45cm, perfect for any large desk, and with stitched edging. Great any large desktop, available at a decent price. www.overclockers.co.uk XEK-VARDAR F1-120 (1150RPM) EKWB £14 What if you just want a fan that does the job, and does it well? EKWB’s Vardar may fit the bill. Perfect for radiators, these high pressure…

MOTHERBOARD Z270-A Pro MSI £112 Despite the low price, the Z270-A Pro supports a single M.2 PCIe SSD, and memory with frequencies up to 3800 MT/s. PROCESSOR Core i5-7600K Intel £220 Only a five percent incremental increase in performance on Skylake, but if you haven’t upgraded in a while, now might be the time. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1070 8GB Dual Asus £390 Exceedingly powerful, this 1440p gaming GPU will keep your framerates high in all the latest AAA titles. COOLER Kraken X31 NZXT £70 To get the most out of a good CPU you need a cooler to match. The Kraken X31 is powerful, quiet and great for overclocks. MEMORY Savage Black 16GB @2400 MHz CAS 12 HyperX £120 Thanks to insanely low timings, these two 8GB sticks of DDR4…

ANDY KELLY THIS MONTH Held his breath and wondered where everyone went. ALSO PLAYED Owlboy, Conan Exiles A boy falls asleep in class, and wakes to find the class empty and the school haunted by strange creatures. As far as hooks for a horror game go, that’s pretty good. Detention is a point-and-click adventure developed by a small team based in Taiwan. It’s set there in the 1960s, when the country was under martial law, an episode I don’t think a game has touched before. The localisation does a good job of explaining some of the more obscure references, but really this is just a good old-fashioned ghost story with a sinister, subdued atmosphere. You can’t fight the creatures. To get past them you have to hold your breath, but…

1 MEGA CITY ONE MOD A new, alternate-universe Gordon adventure So Gordon Freeman has left early retirement, collected his gravity gun from the shed (it needed a going over with a wet wipe), and embarked on another adventure in Combine Country. Mega City One is a pretty sizeable mod based on an entry to the Source engine mapping tournament, The Hammer Cup. Its creator, Crowbar, has since revisited, expanded and otherwise improved his work, integrating it into a singular story set in an alternate timeline. The difficulty has been rebalanced for Mega City One, and yep, ‘rebalanced’ is a euphemism here for ‘made much harder’. Half-Life 2’s hardierenemies have migrated to the early sections of this three-hour-long journey, while your rusty first-person platforming skills will be…

1 START GETTING COMFORTABLE WITH FAILURE Complex systems and a challenging learning curve mean failure is just part and parcel of the experience, but it can be just as rewarding as victory. 2 SET YOUR OWN GOALS Victory is just a distant, and frequently insignificant, objective, so it pays to set your own. Become a queen. Get disgustingly rich. Colonise a new land. 3 LEARN TO LOVE MENUS You’ll be seeing a great deal of them, along with a mountain of charts and lists. They are your advisors, generals, ships and enemies, and what you’ll use to create your bold plans.…

“You always feel like you’re on the knife-edge of failure” NEED TO KNOW RELEASED 2005 PUBLISHER Sierra Entertainment DEVELOPER Irrational Games LINK www.irrationalgames.com Before Irrational dragged us down to the briny deep in Bio Shock , it took us to the mean streets of fictional East Coast city Fairview. This is the setting for SWAT 4 , the tactical first-person shooter the studio developed two years before its underwater epic took critics by storm. SWAT 4 deserves just as much praise, and perhaps isn’t as widely celebrated as it should be. This oversight is not helped by the fact that, until recently, it was difficult to (legally) acquire digitally. But now the game and its expansion, The Stetchkov Syndicate,…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASED May 13, 2016 OUR REVIEW 88% EXPECT TO PAY £40 LINK www.doom.com You know how at Sony and Microsoft’s E3 conferences, you can hear people actually whooping in the audience? I used to hear those people and wonder if they were for real, or the product of some kind of crowd hose used to spray generic NPCs onto real life venues. At Bethesda’s 2015 E3 conference in Hollywood, I was sitting next to one of those guys in real life. He’d brought his girlfriend. When the first footage of Doom was revealed, he screamed “oh my God!” When Doomguy chainsawed through a monster in first-person, I swear he grabbed his girlfriend’s hand really tight and shouted “oh shit!” with a hysterically over-the-top cadence that I’ll never…

1 Command & Conquer 3 dominates, here, with special attention paid to the series’ wonderful and terrible FMV. “He doesn’t over-act,” Tim Edwards claims of Kane, “he just kind of sneers his lines straight to camera.” 2 Kieron Gillen gives 87% to Stalker, despite its launch day wobbles. 3 A huge ‘how to be good at games’ feature includes a poorly drawn map of how to be good at football. The sheer hubris of it is mind-blowing. We never tried to explain sport to anybody ever again. ISSUE 173, April 2007 ON THE COVER Command & Conquer 3 IN THE CHARTS Acceptable in the ’80s – Calvin Harris…

1 RAPID’S REVOLUTION  Football Manager helped Colorado Rapids build a budget squad that knocked cash-rich LA Galaxy out of the Major League Soccer playoffs. 2 INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT  Barnet goalkeeper Kai McKenzie-Lyle made his debut for Guyana’s national team in 2016 after his eligibility was discovered through Football Manager. 3 THE LEGENDARY BAKAYOKO  Sports Interactive’s founders have connections at Everton. Is it a coincidence that the club signed Championship Manager cult hero Ibrahima Bakayoko? 4 KICK IT OUT  Football Manager is being used by academics to help research how race might affect such things as pay and refereeing decisions.…

A CREATURE WITH A FACE OF STAGGERED, TWISTED TEETH EMERGES FROM THE PAINTING NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Late 2017 DEVELOPER Cyanide Studio PUBLISHER Focus Home Interactive LINK www.callofcthulhu-game.com Horror games where you spend much of your time getting acquainted with the insides of cupboards are all the rage. Detective games where you make deductions based on clues you discover around you? Not so much. And yet this unconventional pairing seems oddly befitting of a game based on HP Lovecraft’s world of cosmic horror. Call of Cthulhu is a first-person horror/ investigation hybrid, emerging from the murkiest depths of human comprehension by way of French developer Cyanide Studio. It’s had a shaky development, and the DNA of original developer Frogwares (makers of the Sherlock series) is still evident in the footage…

CALRADIC EMPIRE A diminished, once dominant empire, now locked in a three-way civil war. Specialises in: Armoured cataphracts and skilled archers. VLANDIANS Raiders of the Empire’s western coast. Have now established a kingdom on imperial land. Specialises in: Knights wielding swords and lances. STURGIANS Natives of the northern forests, and traders and adventurers from the far north. Specialises in: Infantry fighters in shield-wall formations. ASERAI Desert people who farm at oases, springs and the shores of the great southern lake. Specialises in: Fast-moving medium cavalry with spears. BATTANIANS Inhabitants of northwestern Calradia, holed up in the mountains after imperial expansion. Specialises in: Forest warfare, and use of longbows. KHUZAITS Swept out of the eastern steppes and seized a chain of frontier trading city-states for themselves. Specialises in: Deadly, fast-moving horse…

1 KARMAFLEET A member of the largest alliance, Goonswarm Federation, KarmaFleet is exceedingly well-organised with an impressive infrastructure aimed at helping new players. 2 PANDEMIC HORDE The yin to KarmaFleet’s yang, Pandemic Horde is a ragtag bunch of newbies for players who thrive by taking the initiative and making their own fun. 3 BRAVE NEWBIES INC Though diminished from their former glory, this group pioneered the idea of a new-player-friendly corp and can still be found slugging it out against EVE’s biggest empires.…

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. ALPHAS & BETAS This means we’ll review any released alpha, beta or otherwise unfinished game that you can currently buy. For these games, we won’t assign a score, but we will tell you whether they’re worth your time in their current state. DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT DLC might be hours-long new missions for a game, or it might be a single new item. Either way, if we think you want to know about it, we’ll review it. THEY’RE BACK Whenever there’s a bargain or re-release of a significant game, our expert will revisit it…

It demands time and patience that many players won’t have NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A medieval brawler featuring samurai, vikings and knights, oh my. EXPECT TO PAY £40 DEVELOPER Ubisoft Montreal PUBLISHER Ubisoft REVIEWED ON GTX 1070, Intel i5-6600K, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER Up to eight LINK www.forhonor game.com If you showed a historian this game, in which samurai, Vikings, and knights fight each other, they’d spit out their tea and politely ask you to leave. It makes no sense for these people to be fighting for control of the same continent, but it doesn’t really matter. They’re fighting because it’s cool, and there’s something endearing about the way the game takes a gleaming broadsword to historical accuracy to make as enjoyable a celebration of medieval combat possible. There’s…

CYDONIA MENSAE This area of flat- topped mesa-like structures has been popular with scientists since the very first Mars landing. ISIDIS PLANITIA A desert plain located inside a giant impact basin. You might stumble on the wreckage of the ill-fated Beagle 2 here. LOW EARTH ORBIT Some missions take place above our own planet, including one where you visit the International Space Station. NORTH POLAR REGION The coldest places on the planet, with temperatures dropping to as low as -150 degrees Celsius. Wear a jumper. VICTORIA CRATER A vast impact crater that’s 70 metres deep, and named after one of explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s ships rather than the monarch.…

Trying to reproduce 1987’s Dungeon Master? Be warned: people no longer drop to their knees and grunt like eroticised oxen at the whiff of a 3D world. ICED eliminates most of the nuance of that 30-year-old game – spells, equipment, character progression, designed levels – and goes all in on scary darkness. But are rats scary? Is moss scary? Is the slow movement scary? Is the same eyeball in the wall, over and over, scary? Is the oddly anachronistic cigarette lighter scary? Do you know what, I’m not entirely convinced this game is scary. In fact, I d go as far as to blow a long raspberry at it. Thrrrrrrpst.…

THE OMEN DESKTOP TOWERS ARE A GATEWAY TO GAMING IN THE BEST SENSE FIND OUT MORE ONLINE hp.com/go/omenbyhp TWITTER @OMENbyHP HASHTAG #DominateTheGame The OMEN by HP range of gaming PCs is perfect for serious gamers – those who care about getting the absolute best out of their rig that they can. The Omen X and Notebook range cover a couple of aspects of this family, while the Omen Tower caters for the hardcore gamer who is a little more cautious about what they spend their hard-earned cash on. Built on a legacy of high-end gaming PCs, Omen has the DNA of the Voodoo PC brand coursing through its electronic veins. Or ‘hardware’, if you will. There’s heritage behind what is otherwise a new range of gaming PCs, and that’s something…

MOTHERBOARD Z270 Gaming M5 MSI £185 Both the M5 and M7 in MSI’s latest gaming series look stunning and offer an expansive feature set. A solid purchase either way. PROCESSOR Core i7-7700K Intel £318 Four cores, eight threads and the ability to turbo up to 4.5GHz make this CPU more than capable of gaming at the top of the range. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1080 FTW Gaming ACX 3.0 EVGA £633 Slightly overclocked out of the box, cool and quiet – features that make this the perfect high-end 1440p and 4K killer. COOLER Kraken X62 NZXT £144 The Kraken is the culmination of three of our favourite things: an infinity mirror, a 280mm radiator and slick braided cooling. MEMORY Savage Black (4x8GB) 32GB @2666 HyperX £236 Take advantage of that CPU…

DANIELLA LUCAS THIS MONTH Left house, thwarted evil. ALSO PLAYED Stardew Valley, Tales of Berseria IT’S TIME TO PUT DIABLOS IN HIS PLACE AND SHOW HIM I’M THE FINAL BOSS IN THIS SCENARIO On the rare occasions I leave my ridiculous Paissa-shaped house I like to go all out. Frankly, doing fetch quests for Moogles or checking out yet another dungeon isn’t worth stepping out of the door for. Thankfully, after making friends with some sky pirates a few months back they’ve started inviting me to their raves... I mean raids. Their latest venue is this ancient city, Dun Scaith, which you can only reach by airship. Only the coolest adventurers can join the party and rub shoulders with the likes of Mrs Boombastic (yes, really). No matter how tight…

1 BINDING OF POKEMON+ Gotta catch ’em all! And by “catch” I of course mean “explode them with your salty missile tears”. This adds playable characters from the anime, and dresses Isaac’s monsters up as Pokemon. www.bit.ly/IsaacMods1 2 MEI A new playable character who fits quite neatly into the existing roster, Mei is a psychic ghost girl who contorts her tear-based missiles into a spinning circle around her person. www.bit.ly/IsaacMods2 3 LIL’ DELIRIUM Found in angel rooms, Lil’ Delirium is all the game’s familiars put together. Every ten seconds, he switches randomly into a different helper, which should keep things interesting at least. www.bit.ly/IsaacMods3…

THROWING SPAGHETTI AT THE WALL TO SEE WHAT STICKS TAKES TIME IN GAME DEVELOPMENT NEED TO KNOW RELEASE March 2016 PUBLISHER In-house DEVELOPER Ubisoft Massive LINK www.bit.ly/1S8J05d It’s nearly been a year since I first reviewed The Division , and while I had fun, its attempt to tap into Diablo’s and Destiny’s endlessly replayable loot loop was misdirected and tiring. New gear was slow to acquire, characters looked the same between min and max levels, and the open world was an empty mob-killing chore hell. Things started looking up with patch 1.4. The introduction of World Tiers made the entire game replayable on harder difficulties, extending the quest for better gear while making loot drop like candy at…

Handcuff everyone, even if you’re certain they’re innocent Report all injured, deceased, and cuffed suspects/hostages Pick up weapons dropped by suspects who surrender Subdue non-compliant suspects with a taser/pepper spray NEVER Use deadly force unless it’s absolutely necessary Fire on suspects who have surrendered/dropped their gun Let a hostage die, or it’s an instant mission failure Leave a surrendered suspect alone without cuffing them…

SHADOW WARRIOR 2 The tone (bad willy jokes, rather than good willy jokes) isn’t for me, but I respect its armoury of over 70 weapons. GTA ONLINE GTA gives you a ton of options for shotguns and machine guns, but the best of all of them is the silly firework launcher. HALO: COMBAT EVOLVED The differences between the alien weaponry and the UNSC’s more standard firearms is the lifeblood of Halo’s appeal. SAINTS ROW IV The dubstep gun is probably the series’ most famous weapon, and somehow it’s already hideously out of date.…