Innholdsfortegnelse for Xmas 2017 i PC Gamer

For years, Far Cry has sent you to exotic locations full of wild animals, armed militia and rolling grenades. For the next game in the series, Ubisoft is trying something different. Far Cry 5 takes place in Montana, a remote part of the USA under siege by a family of cultists. Is it a change for the better? Andy finds out in this month’s cover feature. Also, this issue, our bumper review section is filled with enough great games to see you through the rest of the year. It begins on page 58, with our six-page verdict on Destiny 2. TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com…

“WHAT SHOULD’VE BEEN A SIMPLE FIX TOOK HOURS AND HOURS OF BACK AND FORTH” The ‘domino effect’ is a term introduced to me by Bill Gardner, lead designer of BioShock and BioShock Infinite , to describe an intriguing aspect of game development. It’s a term for the pitfalls of the iterative nature of game making, and the fact that the further along you are in development, the more likely it is that changing even a small aspect of a game can break massive sections of the entire project. David Pittman, cofounder of Minor Key Games and creator of indie immersive sims Eldritch and Neon Struct, explains why: “A mechanic in isolation may look simple, but the intersection of mechanics creates a complex system…

HOUSE HOUSE HAVE BEEN REFERRING TO THE PROJECT AS ‘SLAPSTICK’ It’s a lovely weekday morning in the village and you are a horrible goose, says the pitch for House House’s upcoming nature caper currently referred to as Untitled Goose Game . The trailer swept across social media like nits in a playground, the delightfully spiteful protagonist honking its way through a to-do list of mischief. There are suggestions of stealth, of problem-solving, and of the ability to be a butthead to humans. I spoke with Nico Disseldorp – one of the quartet which makes up House House – about how Untitled Goose Game is shaping up. House House have been referring to the project as ‘slapstick’. “It plays like the kind of physical comedy you might see…

SUCCESS IS ABOUT FIGURING OUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WANT, NOT WHAT YOU WANT Rise of Industry reminds me why I’m not an entrepreneur. Seconds after learning I could open both wineries and distilleries I devised a ‘perfect’ plan to devote two different towns on one map to wine and whiskey production respectively. ‘The Battle of the Booze’, I called it. No one on the map actually seemed interested in spirits based on the tooltips scattered across the map, but I shrugged it off. If I just built it, I figured, they would come. I blame it on growing up in the ’90s. Take a moment to marvel at my well-intentioned hubris. Rise of Industry is an attractive sim that covers both logistics and production, so I went all…

The game experiments with an open world structure The Evil Within 2 revels in its grotesqueness. In the opening five minutes, you’re forced to watch a young girl burn to death. Later, you repeatedly observe a man’s head explode by gunshot. Then you witness a scene so horrifically graphic I worry recounting it will cause me to bring up my lunch. It’s punctuated by stomach-churning moments throughout – this is a psychological horror game determined to terrify beyond jump scares. For the most part, it works. And, while cheap frights are served by the game’s zombie natives on occasion, its tortured antagonists, manifestations of guilt-driven grief and open world elements present a far more ambitious game than the original. Like its forerunner, it struggles at times with the…

1 BE A SOUS CHEF A grouchy chef enlists your services as his second-in-command. Throw ingredients at him until food happens. 2 BE A BOUNTY HUNTER A bounty board lists multiple criminals and monsters. Take them out for rewards, but bring lots of friends. 3 BE A LITTER PICKER For some strange reason, coins are frequently scattered across the city. Trade in any you collect at the casino. 4 BE A RAPTOR RACER Get on you mount and have a race. But only when the city’s front gate isn’t under attack by cactus monsters.…

It’s so varied that I never once got bored of it While 2014’s magnificent The Stick of Truth skewered Tolkien, Skyrim , and high fantasy, The Fractured but Whole is an anarchic send-up of superheroes – from comic book cliches to endless money-spinning movie franchises. You play as the mute New Kid, whose heroic deeds in the previous game are forgotten because, well, the kids are playing a different game now. Tutored by the Coon (alter ego of Eric Cartman), you begin your adventure as a lowly sidekick and must earn the right to establish your own superhero brand and potential Netflix series. Yet no matter how hard you work, he’ll still always refer to you simply as ‘Buttlord’.…

You must go through all the steps, including paying your respects I’ve just hooked a cadaver up to an embalming machine. First I made an incision with a scalpel, then I dragged a tube called a cannula to the carotid artery and connected the rest of the tubing for fluid delivery and drainage. As the machine comes to life I start tracing patterns with my mouse over the body. This simple action is there to represent the way a mortician massages the body to evenly distribute preservation chemicals. A Mortician’s Tale is a curious project. It takes the death positive movement, especially the work of people like Caitlin Doughty and The Order of the Good Death, as its inspiration and marries it to the simple inputs you’ll find in those…

I’m scoring FIFA higher because it reliably works online Ostensibly, FIFA and PES are trying to simulate the same sport. In reality, both of these games approach football in a radically different way: it’s like the difference between watching Brazil and Germany play actual football. They’re both undeniably good at what they do, and pretty good fun to watch, but they’re each playing a fundamentally different game, with their own unique approaches. FIFA’s long passes are far riskier and its players move slower, resulting in far more emphasis on rapid, short passes. When this works it’s fantastic; you can get into a mindset where you’re pinging Xavi-esque passes around without even looking because your mind is two or…

It turns out that I can’t play the original Hotline Miami without thinking about how much I hated the sequel, which is a shame because otherwise I might have listed this among my favourite games. Now it slides into place alongside a set of other things that seemed very sexy in the period between 2011 and 2013, the majority of which involve Ryan Gosling and a lot of pink and blue light. To be fair to both Hotline Miami and 2011-era Ryan Gosling, however, the issue is not the original material but the influence that it subsequently had. Given the subsequent surge of modern retro, hyperviolent action games and films where Ryan Gosling is an emotionally unavailable man fixated on crimes or jazz or whatever, it’s…

This month’s forgotten neon thing of the month is very neon. The Polynomial is a music visualiser where you fly around inside a nebula made out of the souls of MP3s. It stands out among visualiser games for the fact that you’re not on rails: you fly around inside the game like a spaceship, firing lasers into monsters that are like bad Pac-Mans. It doesn’t matter what the monsters are. It doesn’t matter if you shoot them, either. The Polynomial is a little sparse in that regard, but it is very neon.…

THE GAME IS CONSTANTLY EXPANDING, REVEALING NEW SECRETS AND TREATS ANDY KELLY THIS MONTH Toiled on an imaginary farm for imaginary profit. ALSO PLAYED Resident Evil 2 Once I used to play Euro Truck Simulator to rinse my brain of the anxiety and stress of modern life. Now I exfoliate it with Stardew Valley , a wildly addictive farming simulator by ConcernedApe. In the past I’ve lost hundreds of hours to the likes of Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon on Nintendo consoles, and this scratches all the same itches. It’s the kind of gentle game that you can play while listening to a podcast or binging on a Netflix show. But also has enough variety…

MY OPPONENT DROPS A GOLEM, A HUGE UNIT THAT STOMPS ACROSS THE FIELD I expected a match of Wargroove to last about 15 minutes when I visited Chucklefish’s offices recently. Turns out it takes more like 30-60 minutes in this turn-based strategy game. I found myself spending far too much time fretting about exactly where to move a unit, or whether to buy an archer or save my money for a stronger knight. Such caution isn’t unwarranted in Wargroove. The deeper you get into a game, the more fraught it is to leave a unit one square further behind enemy lines than you’re comfortable with. You might be putting that knight or spearman in range of a trebuchet, or an archer. Your goal in Wargroove is…

hen you think of Far Cry, your mind is filled with images of faraway jungles, misty mountains and exotic tropical paradises. Which makes Ubisoft Montreal’s decision to set the fifth game in, of all places, rural Montana a peculiar one. But, surprisingly, it totally works. The rocky mountains, rolling grass plains and shimmering lakes of the Treasure State are every bit as intimidating, vast and beautiful as Kyrat or the Rook Islands. “Far Cry has typically been an odyssey that takes you to distant shores,” says Dan Hay, creative director of Far Cry 5 (and who was also executive producer on Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4). “You’re away from home, the rules are different and you feel disconnected from your regular life. So bringing the series to a…

The arrival of a new 4X game is a special event in the PC gaming calendar, like a solar eclipse passing across a world split up into tiny hexes. It’s rare enough to feel monumental, yet comforting in its cyclicality; a sporadic dose of complexity reminding us PC gamers that, despite our growing propensity for couch gaming, there are some pleasures that remain unique to us. One year there’ll be a Civ game, another year there’ll be a Gal Civ and then an Age of Wonders . Fill any gaps with meaty DLC, and repeat the cycle. But between 2012 and 2017, a trifecta of games from an upstart French developer shook up this 4X hegemony. Amplitude Studios’ Endless…

Tooth and Tail shares more similarities with Pikmin Many developers have tried to hammer the real-time strategy genre into a form that works well with a controller, but few attempts succeed. However, Tooth and Tail completely bucks this trend by not trying to be something it isn’t. It embraces the controller rather than treating it like an obstacle that needs to be worked around or bypassed entirely. A revolution is taking place in a land of critters. Tooth and Tail’s lavish, pixel art world calls to mind a mix of Animal Farm and Redwall. Dragging all of these adorable squirrels and owls to their deaths are a group of charismatic leaders, the only units you can directly control. Leaders can build, order…

Waging psychological war on orcs is more fun than fighting them The orcs are the real stars of Shadow of War . Decorated with skulls, piercings, and plates of battered armour, these toothy brutes sneer, jeer and brag like rowdy drunks. And before you fight them they delight in detailing all the ways they’re going to kill you, gut you like a fish and present your head to Sauron. It’s almost endearing how much they obviously love being orcs and serving their Dark Lord, which is more than can be said for the game’s dreary human characters – and that includes hero Talion, an undead Gondorian ranger with all the joie-de-vivre of a concrete bollard. The lauded nemesis system, first introduced in Shadow of Mordor, is back…

Unfortunately, combat is only half the Overgrowth experience It is obligatory that every article on Overgrowth start with a bit on how long it has been in development, so here’s mine. When Wolfire Games first started work on its rabbit beat-’em-up, both George W Bush and Gordon Brown were still in office, the first Android phone had not yet launched, and there was only one Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. The Humble Bundle was a spin-off project from Overgrowth , that is how much the industry has changed while this game’s development trundled on. So, after nine years of continuous, open development, you probably want to know what Overgrowth is, and the answer is this: Overgrowth is fast. Overgrowth is…

The arrival of 4K was greeted with much fanfare, but it has taken a few years to become affordable. Now, however, prices have dropped and graphics cards have become powerful enough to run at 4K resolutions, making it a great time to invest. There are caveats, of course. Upcoming screens will be able to run at 144Hz, making for a much smoother experience. They’ll also be monstrously expensive. If you’re on a budget, the current 60Hz screens are the way to go. For this test, I’ve picked a broad spectrum of models to give an idea of what’s available now. Q&A Which LCD panel type should I get? It’s always the same question when buying a monitor: IPS, TN or VA? And the usual rules apply: IPS is best for…

THIS WAS A RACE TO FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO KILL ME BEFORE I COULD STARVE PHILIPPA WARR THIS MONTH Was let down by rafts, trees, food and snakes. ALSO PLAYED Watching a lot of League of Legends I haven’t starved. That’s what I cling onto every time I try to get somewhere with Klei’s rock-hard survival game, Don’t Starve . I’ve died a gazillion other ways, but I haven’t starved and therein lies a mighty victory for pedantry. There were the shadow monsters, which is how I remembered about sanity. There was that encounter with those snakes, which taught me that poison doesn’t wear off. There was the decision to avoid disturbing the bees, which saw me channel my thwarted desire to poke something with a spear…

I SHRIEK AS CUSTOMERS WALK OUT WHILE I’M TRYING TO COOK TEN DINNER ORDERS KIMBERLEY BALLARD THIS MONTH Burnt her wrist on the hob trying to make an omelette. ALSO PLAYED A Mortician’s Tale, The Botanist My mother introduced me to the delights of cooking at a young age. Whether it was making delicate little butterfly cakes or filling the house with the scent of freshly baked cookies, my childhood was happiest in the kitchen. Two decades later and I’m downloading Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!. People have warned me about the challenge that awaits, but come on. I’ve thrown dinner parties before (as in I’ve served three people chilled beer and fish tacos around a cramped table) and I can make a hollandaise sauce without it curdling. How hard can…

It’s been a few years since I practised my Immelmann turns and barrel rolls in World of Warplanes , but any fears about being out of the loop were put to rest when I jumped into World of Warplanes 2.0 and realised that everyone was in the same situation. This is, effectively, a new game. And in many ways, a much better one. The old World of Warplanes was a dogfighter. You had to learn how to fly a roster of planes, sure, but once in a battle, the objective was simply to destroy as many enemies as you could, and survive until the end of the match. This is no longer the case. Conquest is the new primary mode in 2.0 and…

VISCERAL’S STAR WARS PROJECT HAS THUS BEEN REASSIGNED This month saw the closure of Visceral Games, the EA studio behind Battlefield Hardline and the Dead Space series. Visceral’s Star Wars project – codenamed Ragtag – has thus been reassigned. The linear adventure is being reworked into a “broader experience”. EA’s Patrick Söderlund described what the company is aiming for as “an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come”. His statement sparked discussion of whether single-player games are viable. Interestingly, one of the people refuting that ‘death of single-player’ narrative is Zach Wilson, a senior level designer at Visceral. According to a report by gamesindustry.biz, Wilson notes that the…

THE JAM’S ORGANISERS REMAIN CONFIDENT THIS IS BUT THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING BIG Splash Jam isn’t your typical game jam. For starters, the 48-hour event takes place on an eight-deck cruise ship. It departs from Tromsø, Norway – the third largest urban area north of the Arctic Circle – and travels 700 miles to southern Trondheim. Towering fjords and snowy mountain ranges line the journey, and, free from light pollution, meteor showers are as ubiquitous as the crisp sea air. If you’re lucky, you might even see the Northern Lights. For game developers, balancing inspiration with distraction can be as tough as creating the games themselves. Partly inspired by Train Jam – a 52-hour pilgrimage that runs from Chicago to San Francisco – Splash Jam 2017 marks the event’s second…

LINE UP YOUR SLOW-MO MEGA SLASHES TO DESTROY PIECES OF OGRE ARMOUR The pick-up-and-playability of Extinction – an ogre-bothering fantasy action game from the studio behind Divekick and season two of Killer Instinct – is undeniable. In under five minutes I had rescued two dozen citizens, obliterated as many mobs and was scampering up the back of a 150-foot tall jerk, ready to administer a fatal blow. The point of Extinction is not to save the world, but to save as many people as you can while ogres and other ne’erdowells are bashing it to bits. Prioritising action is important – do you deal with the ogre destroying the city to give you more time for the civilians…

WORLD BUILDING In its current state, it sounds like Chucklefish has already designed the complete world – now it is creating interesting scenarios for the characters to be in. WIZARD TINDER You can date other students in Spellbound, but it might not go to plan – Chucklefish is making it more true to life, and you can be dumped. Hooray! BORROWING FROM ZELDA Right now, Chucklefish is looking to older Zelda games for an action-oriented combat system. I sense it’s still a long way from release, though, and that this could change. MAKING MAGIC Chucklefish is prototyping magic, crafting, potion making and farming systems, and finding ways to tie them all together into something satisfying. Spellbound is the working title for the next game from Starbound…

It’s effortless to play and packed with distractions With Heart of Thorns , ArenaNet laid out a template for new expansions. Its follow-up, Path of Fire , follows that formula almost exactly. A new way to traverse the world? Check. New masteries? Check. New specialisations? Check. A new land, events and storyline? Check, check and check. Despite this, Path of Fire kicks against the template, showing how versatile this approach to expansions can be. Take, for example, the public event system, which populates the map with objectives that scale based on the number of people working to complete them. Heart of Thorns was built around map-wide meta events, pulling everybody on a single instance together to complete a series of…

The New Colossus still has some of the best guns in any FPS game In one particular cutscene in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus , a pretty serious conversation between two characters on BJ Blazkowicz’s stolen U-boat base is interrupted by someone who’s just finished using the toilet. That’s the tone of the game encapsulated, really: moments of genuine sincerity punctuated by the silliest of jokes. It was something that MachineGames introduced with The New Order and it permeates the sequel. Like with The New Order, this is a fun wrapping for a first-person shooter where you kill many Nazis. This time Blazkowicz and his friends have gone to the Nazi-occupied USA, with the intention of teaming up with a few…

With the right setup, Forza is downright incredible to look at I will play Forza Motorsport 7 for years, but I will never drive all of its 700-something cars. I won’t drive every circuit under every possible weather condition, or during every night and day variation. I won’t ever turn off all the driver assists or know how to properly homologate vehicles on my own, which is an actual thing. Instead, I’ll continue my quest to catch them all (the vans, specifically), tricking them out with anime liveries and critiquing their intricate dashboard designs. Forza Motorsport 7 is so vast and all-encompassing that not only can I turn it into a stupid game about vans, I can also make it a game…

You’ve blasted through 1996 and plunged through shooter history I think what I love most about Serious Sam is the fact that no part of it stands up to what you could call ‘scrutiny’. Take the audio, for example: to recreate the experience of listening to Serious Sam , find whichever setting on your Casio keyboard sounds the most like screaming. Then turn the reverb up and hit a key. Then Google ‘free game sfx’ and start clicking files. Explosion? Perfect. Yelling man? Yes please. SHOTGUN_LOOP_v1_xR0gu3Cl4nx_edit? Oh baby. This is videogame-as-Geocities website, an act of throwing ideas at a wall produced at industrial scale. This HD remake, itself pretty old, turns up texture quality and makes a better fist of lighting but can’t…

MSI GEFORCE GTX 1080 TI GAMING X TRIO  www.msi.com £770 GPU We already know the GTX 1080 Ti, is the king of all GPUs. If you’re looking for a high-end, 4K-capable GPU, there truly is no other option. But it’s been a while since we looked at an aftermarket variant. MSI’s latest Gaming X Trio is the first in its new line of triple-fan-cooled cards. Although we’ve seen these designs from MSI before, they were typically only available in the expensive Lightning line. The elegant black aesthetic coupled with intuitive RGB lighting and exceptional fan curves keep it quiet, whilst still hammering the framerates at 4K. GPU: PASCAL / LITHOGRAPHY: 16NM FINFET / CORES: 3584 / MEMORY: 11GB GDDR5X / MEMORY BUS: 352-BIT ASUS MX34VQ  www.asus.com £717 MONITOR If you’re after the…

SAM GREER THIS MONTH Looked at Starbreeze’s back catalogue. ALSO PLAYED Divinity Original Sin II, Death of the Outsider Before Starbreeze became the studio behind FPS cult classics like Escape From Butcher Bay and The Darkness , it tried its hand at action RPGs. Namely, Enclave . It is a very silly game. Enclave is set in a dreadfully typical fantasy world, where the forces of good and evil are separated by an ancient chasm formed in a battle centuries ago. Why are they fighting? Is it hard to build bridges in this fantasy world? Look, it’s not important. The premise, like the story, is paper thin. As best I can tell, it’s simply an excuse for Starbreeze to string…

1 HALF-LIFE CAGED MOD Return to Gordon’s original adventure Thanks to series writer Marc Laidlaw, we finally kind of know what would have happened in Half-Life 2 ’s theoretical third episode. With that loose end wrapped up, we can begin to explore other stories in the Half-Life universe. Stories such as Half-Life: Caged , a big new mod for the original game. Caged is the work of Future Games Select and Cayle George, the latter an ex-Valve developer who worked as a level and game designer on Team Fortress 2 and Portal 2. He knows what he’s doing, then, and as a result this substantial singleplayer campaign is better constructed than many fan-made mods. Your mission, should you choose to…

Was I the only one who used to misplace my stealth tanks? It was a problem I had in 1995’s Command & Conquer , so imagine my woes in 1999 when C& C’s sequel, Tiberian Sun , introduced cloaking devices that made entire bases disappear. Thanks, Westwood. Tiberian Sun is the sequel to C&C, set after the first Tiberium War. It was the first game released after Red Alert, which was conceived as an expansion for the original C&C. Red Alert became so impressive, however, that Westwood marketed it as a standalone game. Tiberian Sun, meanwhile, was teased on Red Alert’s installation disc as a first-person Mechwarrior-style game that would eventually became C&C Renegade. The real Tiberian Sun was spared such…