Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2018 i PC Gamer

HIGHS Campo Santo Valve acquires Campo Santo and In the Valley of Gods. Go back and read about the game in issue 316. Stardew Valley 2016’s best meandering farm RPG now lets you play with friends. Get ready to maximise your parsnip yield. Graphics Cards The absurd GPU prices are finally starting to stabilise as manufacture catches up with demand. LOWS DeusEx Eidos Montreal confirms that the immersive sim series isn’t dead. For now, though, its on hiatus. Dota2 Valve is hoping to earn over $85 million from The International’s Battle Pass. $85 million! For hats! Blockchains “What if videogames, but blockchain,” is the subject of every third email sent to PC Gamer. Stop.…

1 Quintin Smith got so excited while attending the STALKER: Call of Pripyat preview event that he let out a noise “somewhere between a squee and a yelp”. We wonder what noise he’s making now that GSC Game World has revealed it’s working on STALKER 2 again. The latter was first announced in 2010 but the studio closed before the project came out. The resurrected project is now due in 2021. ISSUE 202, July 2009 ON THE COVER Left 4 Dead 2 IN THE CHARTS Evacuate the Dancefloor – Cascada 2 In our feature on exciting upcoming games we were looking forward to Half-Life 2: Episode 3 - “ETA: 2010.” Oh well, at least we got Portal 2 right(ish)! 3 Writer Graham Smith took on The Sims 3 review. By…

“MANY GAMES CHASE THE PHYSICAL CAMERA EFFECTS IN A BID TO APPEAR CINEMATIC” Post-processing is the catch-all term for the series of effects applied to the frame of a videogame to make it appear in the intended manner. While these effects can encompass everything from anti-aliasing to ambient occlusion, they are frequently used to replicate the viewpoint of another medium entirely: cinema. The visual cues typically associated with physical cameras are becoming more commonplace in games. This is primarily due to advances in rendering technology and techniques, because the nuances of a physical camera are much more complex to replicate than they might initially seem. The differences start with an essential discrepancy in how the cameras in our games even work. “Imitating real-world cameras is hard,” says freelance engine programmer…

GRAND THEFT AUTO V We’re on a new run through the online heists, and it’s equal parts brilliant and infuriating. WARHAMMER: VERMINTIDE II We nearly gave up on this. Once you earn better gear, though, it gets good. SEA OF THIEVES It’s too expensive with too little to do, but the cooperative sailing feels so good. DESTINY 2 We’re still playing this most weekends – if only for a quick Crucible game or two. GHOST RECON: WILDLANDS It’s not great in singleplayer, but that’s because it’s highly tuned for co-op hijinks.…

1 NINE Thousands of years in the past, a priest activates an artefact in a gladiator arena, turning a group of prisoners into shrieking zombies. Four fighters are sent in to kill them before a roaring crowd. 2 VOYAGE OF DESPAIR Centuries later, aboard the Titanic, the same device is activated, turning the crew and passengers into zombies. It’s up to the same four heroes to stop them. Rogue icebergs are the least of their worries. 3 BLOOD OF THE DEAD Little has been revealed about this mission other than a shot of a cell block that looks a lot like Alcatraz. I wouldn’t be surprised if the heroes’ dimension-hopping powers took them to the famous prison island.…

NOT THE BEES! Enzyme Samples can be found in the Silverwing Apiary. Don’t forget to calm those bees with the smoker first. PHYLL YOUR POCKETS Discarded flasks of Chlorophyll Solution can be found dotted around Arcadia. Or preferably on dead Splicers. BOTTLE IT Distilled Water is in plentiful supply in the Worley Winery. Check out the cheese and bullet-hole Pac-Man tribute upstairs. FRESH AIR Put the key ingredients into a U-Invent machine to create the Lazarus Vector that will restore the vegetation and air supply.…

ALPHAFLEET GOONSWARM FEDERATION “Shield Maelstroms with artillery cannons, the most powerful salvo out of all battleships in EVE Online. This allowed Goonswarm to play in the big league again. The huge volley damage, in conjunction with a large spy network, was used to headshot fleet commanders with no hopes of them receiving repairs in time. – Mister Vee ARMORGASMS CURATORES VERITATIS ALLIANCE “Take the Phantasm – a tanky cruiser, the main weaknesses of it being electronic warfare – and flip it on it’s head. If you predicted your opponent’s plan, you mauled people as each Phantasm could lock out two other ships from being able to do damage if it was flown perfectly.” – Jin’taan PANIC GEDDONS NULLI SECUNDA “Armageddons were cheap and had two unique properties: a fast lock…

If you didn’t play the first Pillars of Eternity , that’s fine In 2015, Obsidian took the best parts of beloved classic RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment and built one of the best modern RPGs on PC. Pillars of Eternity plundered the genre’s deep combat, rich dialogue and reactive stories, and made its own mark with an incredibly well-realised setting. Now Obsidian is taking us to a new corner of its world: the Deadfire Archipelago, a chain of islands far to the east of the relatively green and pleasant Dyrwood. You are the Watcher, a hero who is either, depending on who you ask, cursed or blessed with the ability to peer…

VAILIAN TRADING COMPANY A powerful mercantile order with a special interest in harvesting and refining the Deadfire Archipelago’s abundance of luminous adra. ROYAL DEADFIRE COMPANY A company with a long history of trade and conquest. It believes that through engineering and organisation it can bring civilisation to the Deadfire. PRíNCIPI SEN PATRENA The most feared pirate group in the Deadfire, with smugglers, mercenaries and black market merchants among its fearsome ranks. HUANA A race of Deadfire natives. The arrival of foreigners has divided the Huana, with some believing it brings prosperity and others thinking it’ll end their civilisation.…

PENGO A penguin who’s mislaid his troop of explorers. P-p-pick them up for a reward. OCK This cephalopod combines stickers, as long as you bring him three or more. SERENDIPITY A gentle giant, this kindly whale can give you an extra life or more time. TOGO Ditto’s helpful museum curator will tell you where to go (in a good way). FLOPP Mormo’s biggest fan, this creep will sell you some decent, pricey kit. ARFUR Too old to retrieve them, the lighthouse keeper can still open beached crates.…

1 ARMOUR AND SYSTEMS The health bar is split into segments – white represents armour, orange represents internal systems. 2 HEAT! When heat builds up, your mech risks taking damage or shutting down completely. Environmental effects and the brace action can help mitigate it, and you can use flamers to force your opponent into hot spot. 3 STABILITY When this bar fills up, mechs fall down. The exclamation point indicates that this mech is already unstable: another hit should do it. 4 DESIGNATIONS You can see both a mech’s type and its pilot’s chosen training path above its head. This is vital info: a Defender gets bonuses when they shoot without moving, so you’ll want to consider flanking them.…

POLLY GEIST Her dating path is probably the one with the most sex. How does that work with a ghost, anyway? VERA OBERLIN Want to know what it’s like to spit-swap with Medusa? Vera loves turning losers to stone. DAMIEN LAVEY If you like things spicy, go for Damien – an intense personality burning with rage and hellfire. LIAM DE LIONCOURT Liam is the typical monster hipster: the one who loves Infinite Jest and cold brew coffee. MIRANDA VANDERSHIFT A spoiled mermaid, with a genocidal streak that her cuteness hides pretty well. SCOTT HOWL More like a puppy than a werewolf, Scott is the lovable jock in possession of infinitely more brawn than brains.…

We’re all grown-ups here, and this isn’t the first survival game to render male and female genitalia in detail. However it is, as far as I know, the only survival sim in which you tweak the size of your character’s personal areas while they hang nailed to a cross, their breasts or scrotum flapping in the breeze as if being teased by a vacuum cleaner. Half-Life had the train. Oblivion had the sewer exit. Conan Exiles has this. Despite 15 months in Early Access there are rough edges all over This is a game about surviving in a hostile world by manipulating its resources until you live in relative comfort. Unlike most in the survival space, it’s also…

If you haven’t got round to playing Portal, you should, because it’s one of the best games ever made. If you have played Portal, play it again – it’s remarkable how modern it still feels. It has few peers in terms of either puzzle design or comic timing, and leaping through a big glowing hole only to emerge from a different glowing hole is as revelatory now as it was a decade ago. In many ways, it feels like we’re still catching up with it. Portal’s tight shortform structure is perfectly at home on Steam today, whereas once upon a time Valve felt compelled to treat this remarkable game as bundle filler. Somebody should make another one of these, but they haven’t, because it is hard.…

RAM might not be the most exciting purchase any of us will ever make for our PC, but it’s an essential component. Getting the right amount of it at the right speed does make a difference to your PCs performance. For this month’s test we’re delving into the depths of DDR4, to see how much RAM you need, how fast it should be and just what the deal is with RGB RAM. 1 KINGSTON PREDATOR  www.hyperxgaming.com £175 The more expensive Kingston Predator kit in this test is a premium option with a fancier design and faster timings than the Fury, and it only costs around £15 more, making it a tempting upgrade. The design of these modules is particularly pleasing. The heatspreaders have two layers of aluminium, with a matte finish…

The other competitors in the race 1 GOOGLE The Bristlecone chip from the search engine giant boasts 72 qubits. Each additional qubit doubles the processing power of the chip. 2 IBM The manufacturer’s 16-qubit quantum processor is a prototype for upcoming commercial systems. It’s currently beta testing online access. 3 D-WAVE Its 2,000-qubit quantum annealing processor uses a different process to ‘true’ quantum computers, but you can actually buy one today. 4 UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND The university has developed a specialised piece of kit called an ‘Ion Trap’. Charged particles can be suspended in magnetic fields and used as qubits.…

MOTHERBOARD Strix X470-F Gaming Asus £175 Get the most from the new AMD Ryzen 2700X with this matching X470 motherboard that’s packed with features. PROCESSOR Ryzen 7 2700X AMD £290 Easy to overclock and with huge performance out of the box, AMD’s new flagship CPU is the one to go for. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce GTX 1080Ti Turbo Asus £750 The GTX 1080Ti isn’t cheap so any chance to knock money off the price is one we’ll take. This Asus version does just that. COOLER Kraken X62 NZXT £140 The Kraken is the culmination of three of our favourite things: an infinity mirror, a 280mm radiator and slick braided cooling. MEMORY Vengeance LED RGB 32GB @3200 Corsair £390 Ryzen is the one processor that does benefit hugely from higher frequency memory.…

HOTEL DUSK: DARKRIDE Creator: FSFRanger A ghost train set in an old hotel that reminds me of The Shining, with jump scares, eerie sound and a nerve-wracking plunge into a dark cellar. ALIENS: THE RIDE Creator: HN An incredible rollercoaster based on the film, complete with a giant animatronic alien queen, HR Giger-style architecture and some atmospheric lighting. JIANGZHOU Creator: HeltRoy A sprawling theme park based on an ancient Chinese city. The castle in the centre is particularly impressive, as is the fireworks display that colours the night sky. MOONRAKER Creator: Bhamilto1x A ride based on the silly, and better-than-you-remember, Bond film. The ride follows the events of the movie, taking you from the canals of Venice to, eventually, outer space.…

REMAPPING 1 The default key assignments for build commands are far away on the function keys. Reassign the floor, fall, and ramp commands to keys within reach. F, C and Z are good candidates, and exploring your extra mouse buttons won’t hurt. WHO NEEDS FRIENDS? 2 You may be tempted to drop at a popular named location not far from the path of the party bus. Try landing away from people at unnamed locations to find some the best loot spots in the game, free of that pesky gunfire. ALWAYS BE HARVESTING 3 It’s hard to stick by the unofficial mantra ‘just build’ without any resources to build with. Smash whatever is around as often as possible. Without resources you won’t make it through a fight, let alone even reach…

Matilda di Canossa – the real one – had a fascinating life. By the age of 31, the Margravine of Tuscany had survived (and was even rumoured to have ordered) the assassination of her first husband, Godfrey the Hunchback, whom she despised. In 1077, King Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire stood barefoot in the snow outside her castle for three days, seeking penance from the Pope, whom she was protecting. Over the decades, she would rebel against Henry many times, and even secure military victories against his armies. DUKE OBERTO SUDDENLY DECIDES HE WANTS TO KILL THE KING My Matilda di Canossa – the Crusader Kings II one – is essentially a turbocharged version of her historical counterpart. She’s the Queen of Sardinia and Corsica (a kingdom that…

I enjoy the ‘well, screw it’ whimsy of trying to navigate conversations I’m great at sweet talking people into getting what I want, but surrounded by burly men with big guns, I can’t be too sure of the right thing to say. Without a colour-coded guide, heart symbols or success percentages, a well-intentioned misstep could force me into a gunfight. I’m out of stimpaks and must tread carefully. It’s a typical day in the wasteland. I played the first Falloutwhen it was already a classic, and it introduced me to ‘darker’ games – for me, anything without an elven forest or a bloodless death. Its candour about violence, sex and humanity surprised me at the time, but I felt welcomed into the wasteland by the game’s sardonic humour and tongue-in-cheek…

In 2001 I played the demo of Operation Flashpointfor the first time, courtesy of PC Gamer’s cover disc. A month later, after the release of the full game, I found myself in love with its multiplayer and at the start of an intriguing journey that I’ve been on ever since. In prehistoric times, hosting a multiplayer mission in GameSpy with a 56K modem was like trying to race a camel whilst tied to a bungee rope. In 2001 Operation Flashpoint’s map editor was exceptional but, given my 56K connection, the only way I could play my homemade missions publicly was if I sent the files to people with better connections so they could host them. That was how our clan really began, and a year or…

PHIL SAVAGE “Hey guys,” exclaims the YouTuber. He is angry about a noob; his gesticulating fury earning hundreds of thousands of views. But will his soul ever know the serene peace of an afternoon playingCiv V in his slippers? I think not. I do not smash that like button. INTO THE BREACH www.subsetgames.com An excellent game about nudging aliens around a grid. Each mission lasts just a few turns, and each turn is made knowing exactly what your alien opponent is about to do. But even though perfection is possible, most campaigns are full of tough calls and sacrifices as you make the best of many bad situations. WARHAMMER: VERMINTIDE II www.vermintide.com My first hours with Vermintide II were fraught – particularly when my team wiped thanks to the hot…

NHS senior staff today slammed Two Point Hospital administrators for what it claimed was a gross misuse of scarce resources. The comments came in response to Two Point’s new ward, which is designed to treat ‘lightheadedness’. The condition, according to hospital spokesman Gypsum Fantastic, is a “wacky and fun, albeit serious” disease that causes patients to grow a lightbulb for a head. The UK’s chief medical officer, Delay Thompson, claimed that the affliction was obviously made up. “Where would the brain go?” he asked. “How would you breathe?” he continued, growing increasingly exasperated. “What about the cheekbones? Are they still in there? Wouldn’t they just smash the glass?” The director of the hospital, Hamilton Meathouse, refused to comment, in part because his mouth and eyes and face had disappeared, replaced…

PHILIPPA WARR Specialist in Gatherings This month Wrote about multiple games in which you have to kill people during a fancy party. This doesn’t bode well for our next office do. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Engagement Twitter @ultrabrilliant This month Asked Activision difficult questions, like: “Does a shooter really need 50 types of grenade?” STEVEN MESSNER Specialist in Compulsion Twitter @stevenmessner This month Steven, a man who has written 14 features about EVE, has written a feature about obsession. In EVE. FRASER BROWN Specialist in Edicts Twitter @FraserIBrown This month Built an island full of people who didn’t like him. There’s probably a Twitter joke in this.…

Event Game release Esports PC Gamer Other 5 JUNE VAMPYR Dontnod Entertainment impressed with thoughtful adventure Life Is Strange, which used a Telltale-style episodic branching narrative to tell a beautiful, quietly tragic story. The studio’s next game is an RPG about vampires wandering around Victorian London. So far, previews have been mixed, so keep an eye out for reviews. 8 – 10 JUNE RLCS WORLD SERIES This event will showcase the world’s best Rocket League players, flipping their way to a share of a $250,000 prize. 9 JUNE EA PLAY PRESS CONFERENCE E3 kicks off with EA Play – part-showcase of EA’s games; part-excuse for execs to hang with sports stars. 10 JUNE XBOX E3 BRIEFING Microsoft is next, with a conference dedicated to Xbox (and PC gaming, which they…

SCENE BUFFER The scene or ‘albedo’ buffer could be considered as the ‘raw’ frame. The unlit colours, models and textures currently within the player’s viewpoint, that will eventually be transformed and processed into the final image. DEPTH BUFFER The depth buffer is a greyscale image that is generated to determine how far away in-game objects are within the context of the player’s current viewpoint. Darker objects are determined to be closer to the player. NORMAL BUFFER The normal buffer shows the directions that polygons are facing in a frame (such as the faked ripples on a character’s jacket, for example), so they can be suitably lit or adjusted in the final image. SPECULAR BUFFER This determines how light interacts with a surface or material. If something needs to appear shiny…

SPREADING TROPICOOUT ACROSS MULTIPLE ISLANDS MAKES THE GAME NEATER I promised the Tropicans joy. That was my main policy as Tropico 6 ’s El Presidente. I would make Tropico the happiest land on Earth, filling the tropical archipelago with places to drink and dance. There would be rollercoasters and stadiums, bringing with them jobs and smiles. My people responded by booting me out of office. It was the election speech that would topple my regime. I insulted the cigar-chomping capitalists, cosied up to our comrades in the Soviet Union, and then told my people, from the balcony of my palace, that I’d take care of them, or at least show them a good time. But they weren’t buying what I was selling. If I’m honest, I could…

THERE ARE NO OCEANS OF VOMIT IN THIS LEVEL, THEME HOSPITALFANS My hour with the first level of Two Point Hospital is comforting more than anything else. Like playing Cities: Skylines – or any other modern spiritual successor that aims to breathe new life into a mistreated management sim classic – it’s lovely to immediately know how to play a game like this. The opening moments of a Two Point Hospital game feel pretty similar to Theme Hospital. I build a reception desk, a GP’s office and a pharmacy. I hire a few doctors and nurses to staff them. I drop in some waiting benches for my patients. From there, I add another GP’s office, another pharmacy and a staff room with…

DIE BY THE SWORD 1998 One of Treyarch’s earliest games. Interestingly, it lets you independently control your character and weapon arm. TRIPLE PLAY 2000 1999 Treyarch developed a few baseball games, but this was the only one that ever made it to PC. Good luck finding a copy and getting it to run. ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN 2005 Time has nearly forgotten this Spidey game, based on the Ultimate comics run, but it’s actually a decent open-world superhero game. CALL OF DUTY: WORLD AT WAR 2008 Treyarch’s first CoD remains one of the best, returning to WW2 with some memorable setpieces across the Pacific and Eastern fronts. CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS 2010 The first chapter in Treyarch’s Black Ops series tells one of the better CoD stories, mixing in elements of…

You’ll find three Editor’s Choice awards in this month’s reviews section – each attached to a game from a genre with a rich PC history. RPG fans get to enjoy Pillars of Eternity II, a wonderful evolution of old-school Infinity Engine games such as Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. Management sim fans get Frostpunk, a city builder that asks tough questions like, “Would you like to eat those dead people?” And turn-based strategy fans get to dig into the complex world of BattleTech – where cerebral tactics and big, punchy robots meet. But what of the consistantly underserved RTS fan? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered too. Zero-K is a huge, free real-time war-’em-up that offers a huge campaign filled with strange, varied units. It’s the ’90s all over again.…

CHAUNCEY This little pig, who I found snuffling around in the mud, grants my entire party a +1 bonus to dexterity, which is nice. ABRAHAM A hound with golden fur who reduces the recovery penalty for everyone’s armour. How? I daren’t ask. PETER Whenever this black cat is following us, the party’s area of effect attacks deal 15% more damage. Now that’s lucky. KAZ A stray Shiba Inu I adopted who grants the party a +1 bonus to stealth and survival as she tags along behind us.…

I wish everyone was just like you,” I mutter to my steampunk automaton as it stiffly lurches toward my coal mining plant, leaving big, round footprints in the snow. I have grown weary of the humans inhabiting my city. They get hungry, angry and sad, they fall ill from the cold and skip work, they can lose their limbs to frostbite and can’t work. They suffer and die, and worse than that, they make me suffer because they have their own thoughts and opinions and fears. My steambot, though: it just works, only pausing occasionally to refuel. It’s an ideal citizen. At times I felt like a villain for doing the right thing In Frostpunk’s version of the 1800s, the entire world has become a subzero, arctic wasteland. After fleeing…

COMMAND CENTER Pick missions here. Look out for employers that pay your travel fees to new sectors of space. BARRACKS Train (and fire) your roster of mechwarriors. The skill system changes how each mech works in battle. MECH BAY A series staple. Design and kit out your mechs up to a tonnage limit, and deal with damage sustained in battle. ENGINEERING Upgrade the ship. Fixing up the Mech Bay and medical facilities will help you recover from battle faster. NAVIGATION Plot your course from system to system. Pay attention to planetary conditions as well who lives there. CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS Check up on finances, rename your mercenary company and pick a colour scheme.…

MOTHERBOARD B360M-DS3H Gigabyte £70 It lacks overclocking options, but the new B360 chipset is far cheaper than Z370 and perfect for this budget build. PROCESSOR Core i3-8100 Intel £99 A great processor for out of the box gaming performance. Opt for the AMD Ryzen 1300X if you’d like to overclock. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce GTX 1060 3GB Inno3D £240 The GTX 1060 3GB is the clear choice of graphics card for this price point, and at the moment Inno3D is offering the best value. COOLER Hyper 212 Evo CoolerMaster £25 We’ve dropped the controller from this build and added in a better CPU cooler, for a quieter, cooler system. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 8GB (2x4GB) @2400MHz Corsair £99 DDR4 prices are still high, however this Corsair pair is a good value option.…

THERE’S ALSO ANASSASSIN’S CREED GAME ON THE LIST, BECAUSE OF COURSE THERE IS The Spy understands that sometimes you’ve just got to accept inevitability. This year’s E3 approaches like a black hole, warping light and gravity as it looms into view. All of this month’s whisperings point in one direction: towards the coming trailer apocalypse, the committee-approved banter armageddon to be conducted by CEOs wearing blazers over Ready Player One T-shirts. It’s been a quiet year so far, as big money games go, and that places even greater weight on the industry’s sweaty Los Angeles cataclysm. Thank heavens for Walmart Canada, then, which has stepped in to release pressure by accidentally posting a big list of unannounced games. Indeed, fans of the end of the world will be pleased to…

BORN YESTERDAY 1 “First we simulate the circumstances of a planet’s birth,” says Ross of the planning phase. “You must first know what materials went into making it, how old it is, what its neighbours are doing and which stars are nearby.” SCIENTIFIC METHOD 2 Real scientific data fuels the generation. “I studied research papers on the density, age and masses of stars across the different parts of the Milky Way,” says Ross. “My background as a scientist helped with this.” COMPUTER LOVE 3 Using this scientific data, a tool called the Stellar Forge is used to create the planet. “Surface liquids, ground and tidal activity, be it a gas giant or a terrestrial world. All of this happens in a fraction of a second on your CPU.” SPACED OUT…

INCOMPATIBLE GENRES MUSH TOGETHER STYLES OF PLAY THAT SHOULDN’T WORK I spent a part of this month digging through submissions to the latest Ludum Dare game jam. The theme of LD41 was incompatible genres – challenging entrants to mush together styles of play that simply shouldn’t work. For instance, Nightclub Showdown, which turns a disco shootout into a turn-based strategy. In essence, you’re the scene’s choreographer, choosing how to deal with waves of enemies. Grab a human shield, for example, and you’ll be safe to line up a slower headshot. Also this month I returned to Destiny 2 ahead of its WarmindDLC. It’s in a slightly better place than when I left the game – the weapon tweaks and balance changes resulting in better-paced action. I particularly enjoyed the new…

“THE LONG-TERM VISION IS FOR YOU TO BE ABLE TO BUILD STELLAR-SCALE CONSTRUCTS” Introversion’s Prison Architect is a compelling simulation game that continues to evolve years after a massively successful alpha release. In space building game Order of Magnitude , the scale of simulation is grander, but you’re still controlling an environment rather than the people directly. Instead of a prison, you’re in space, trying to ensure humanity survives after a terrible event on Earth. “The high level concept is the Earth has been destroyed – meteor, planetary disaster, whatever,” says Introversion cofounder Mark Morris. “We haven’t figured that out yet. You have to build a colony, probably on the moon, to reboot humanity to start off with.” Introversion is still figuring out…

FACTIONS WILL ALSO NEED TO CONTEND WITH AN EVENT CALLED THE RECKONING The thing which pushes me from mildly curious about Rendto actively interested in Rendis not that it takes the survival genre and uses RPG systems to sand off the rougher edges. It’s not even the idea of a 20v20v20 factional battle that plays out over months. For me it’s the idea of riding a spider around to get to hard-to-reach places. In my imagination those hard-to-reach places are ‘under the fridge’ and ‘on top of the bookcase’, but in Rend I think it’s probably ledges atop steep slopes where your arachnid will come in handy. Spiders aren’t the only mounts mentioned during my chat with Frostkeep Studios by the way,…

The rumours are true: the traditional Call of Duty singleplayer campaign is dead. There’s no lavish, indulgent six-hour collection of cinematic story missions in Black Ops 4 . Now the story is threaded into multiplayer, the mode that, let’s be honest, is the real reason that fans of the series keep buying it year after year. It’s a bold, and perhaps inevitable, move by developer Treyarch, but for the veteran Call of Duty studio it’s just another way of telling a story. “If you’ve been following the Black Ops series, you’ll know that we never tell a story the same way twice,” says co-studio head Dan Bunting. “In the first game, your companion throughout the campaign was a figment…

ANDY KELLY Specialist in RPG, pets Currently playing Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire This month Collected a big sack of cats to bring along on his adventures. CHRIS LIVINGSTON Specialist in Sims, morals Currently playing Frostpunk This month Accidentally found himself turning into Half-Life 2’s Dr. Breen. CHRIS SCHILLING Specialist in Indie, repetition Currently playing Swords of Ditto This month Awoke once again to vanquish an editor with his review. KATE GRAY Specialist in Visual novels, teen wolves Currently playing Monster Prom This month Lived the typical high school dilemma: werewolf or vampire? PHILIPPA WARR Specialist in Multiplayer, death stares Currently playing Murderous Pursuits This month Dreamt of locking most of social media on a big death boat. PHIL IWANIUK Specialist in Survival, *ahem* Currently playing Conan Exiles This month…

DAGGERS These are excellent weapons because they attack using Vitality, which starts very high on many characters. Check every market for them. TWO-HANDERS An early game trap, two-handed weapons deny your physical characters much-needed resistances from shields. IMPS They’re hard to nail down, requiring perfect hits to succeed, but they always drop powerful magical loot. Go in with full focus for a cakewalk. FOREST NIBBLERS Despite the cute name, these are actually large weeds with teeth. They’re slow, but they hit hard. Best avoided.…

SURFBOARD A floating platform that any unit can sit on and fire from. Yes, that’s right: you can attack the enemy with an army of surfing mechs. DIRTBAG A unit designed to piss people off. When they die, they disrupt the terrain around them, causing trouble for ground units. NEWTON A tactical turret that deals no damage, but can be set to either repel or attract any enemy that wanders past its gravity field. SUMO An armoured ball of death that can leap into the air and stomp on enemies, tossing them around with its gravity cannons.…

Recently I found myself staring at a ‘what kind of gamer are you?’ meme, intended for people born in this century. At the bottom of the meme was ‘ancient gamer’, defined as enthusiasm for COD 4, Fallout 3, and Portal. I’m not okay with this at all, and I feel compelled to revisit these highly contemporary classics. Except I’m running out of space, so: Modern Warfare? Hit the FPS genre like a meteor, by which I mean it killed a lot of dinosaurs and it wouldn’t be until later that we’d realise that dinosaurs are cool. Profits from nostalgia to the extent that it’s probably the best game in the series. Inexplicably still £20.…

Q&A How much do I need? For non-gaming machines 8GB is plenty, and even many gaming systems can get away with that much. Go for 16GB for a bit of breathing room, though. What about the extras? RGB lighting has spread to RAM. Heatspreaders are also an option. Neither make much difference, though. It costs how much? RAM prices are bonkers at the moment, and there’s not really a way round it. What was our test setup? Core i7-8700K, Z370 motherboard and GTX 1080 Ti graphics card. We tested CPU performance with Cinebench, memory bandwidth with SiSoftware Sandra and gaming performance with Rise of the Tomb Raider at 1080p and high detail settings. Dictionary Speed: Data rate is measured in MHz, from 2133MHz up to 4000MHz+. Peak transfer rate is…

MOTHERBOARD Z370 Tomahawk MSI £110 This is a nice-looking bit of kit at a good price. Couple that with two M.2 slots, and it’s the perfect place to house that Core i5. PROCESSOR Core i5-8400 Intel £162 Better default gaming performance and a lower price puts this chip ahead of the AMD Ryzen 2600X. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1070 SC Gaming ACX EVGA £500 Trying to balance prices, we’ve opted to drop down to an SC Gaming card. Don’t worry, you only lose out on a very minor overclock. COOLER MasterLiquid Lite 240 CoolerMaster £50 This 240mm, dual-fan, all-in-one liquid CPU cooler is ludicrously cheap, but performs well and stays quiet, too. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) @2666 Corsair £180 16GB is the minimum amount of RAM we’d recommend for a…

WhileRCT2 had plenty of scenarios to keep you occupied you could also download extra ones, including three promotional tie-ins to PC mags that no longer exist. Scour the internet and you can still find them, if not the actual mags, but we do wonder: why didn’t PCG get its own theme park? PC GAMING WORLD These guys got the short end of the stick with a dull desert theme and only four letters. PC PLAYER Made by a company of ex-Future employees this is technically a distant cousin of PC Gamer. GAMEPLAY The URL in the park redirects to something else. There’s no glamour in the death of a PC mag.…