Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2019 i PC Gamer

HIGHS The Outer Worlds Obsidian is making a new sci-fi RPG and it’s exciting news. Even if it’s just Alpha Protocol in space, we’ll take it. Journey This beloved, and formerly PlayStation exclusive, exploration game is finally making its way to PC. Epic Games Store Steam’s monopoly on PC gaming hasn’t been seriously challenged since, well, forever. LOWS Alien: Blackout In a post-Alien: Isolation world,the words ‘shooter’ and ‘action-packed’ are slightly worrying. Battlefield V DICE had to roll back its new TTK values after player backlash. Fallout 76 Bethesda shipping a cheap nylon bag with its $200 special edition, rather than the promised canvas one, did 76’s reputation no favours.…

MAGIC It isn’t clear why this code works, but any modifications to it could completely break the game. Bethke uses this tag (and large wizards drawn in ASCII) to mark ‘M A G I C’ code segments that should not be touched. UPDATE It works right now, but it could be modified to make your life and code changes easier in the future. This tag identifies any code that currently works but that requires small changes to fit best practices. REMOVE From placeholder sounds that need to be replaced for launch, to features that may eventually be eliminated, ‘Remove’ helps Bethke keep track of suspect code segments within thousands upon thousands of lines of code. KLUDGE Unlike Magic, Bethke’s ‘Kludge Hammer’ uses visual aids to mark code that handles complex…

I’m replaying Skyrim for about the 50th time with the intention of getting every achievement in the game for a second time round. I have a problem. Kristian Presumably your problem is that Bethesda still hasn’t released The Elder Scrolls VI. Hitman 2! Especially as you can play Hitman 1 levels through it too. Catching up on two games at once. LeXmas Tree Stay away from Phil’s leaderboard scores or else he will be sad. I’m currently playing MGSV, and it’s the strangest gaming experience I’ve ever had. Not sure what that means? Neither am I. Dani Sometimes horses are just on fire, OK? It’s fashion. Playing through Diablo III since I picked up the Necromancer. I forgot how fun it is to play an arcade-y lootfest. Thomas Helms Any…

While Sable has dominated the ‘inspired by the French artist Moebius’ game chat since E3, Aquamarine has been gently pottering about, sporting its own take on the cartoonist’s aesthetic. You, an unnamed space traveller, have crash-landed on an ocean planet and must survive strange creatures and a significant lack of food while you try to recover your ship. In this tiny pre-alpha demo of the roguelike food is scarce – frustratingly so – but the crystals which you use to fuel your escape pod’s shields and movement seem abundant. As a result I tend to starve to death but with a full tank of fuel. My second most common demise is via the electrified tentacles of a sort of water-dwelling duck-billed… caterpillar?…

THE PERMAFROST HAS MELTED, UNLEASHING A TERRIFYING ALIEN VIRUS. AN EERIE MIST ROLLS ACROSS THE PLANET, COMPELLING PEOPLE TO WANDER INTO THE OCEAN, WHERE THEY EMERGE AS HIDEOUS, MUTATED MONSTERS. THE WORLD IS A MESS, AND IN TURN-BASED STRATEGY GAME PHOENIX POINT, IT’S YOUR JOB TO CLEAN IT UP. When the game starts in 2047, most of humanity has been killed, abducted, or transformed into alien monstrosities,” says lead designer Julian Gollop, who is perhaps best known for creating the original X-COM series. “But there are a few isolated groups that have managed to survive.” “The Phoenix Project organisation you’re the leader of is very diminished,” he says. “You’re being attacked on all sides by various different powers. But out of the ashes of the devastation…

Alientrap’s Apotheon illustrates its ancient Greek story with imagery influenced by black figure pottery. But before becoming a 2D platformer clad in the motifs of ancient Greece, Apotheon was an open world sci-fi project set on a space station; a story of godlike beings manipulating humans from on high. “Eventually we cut away the space parts and just decided on making a game about Greek mythology itself,” says Alientrap cofounder and creative director, Jesse McGibney. “By that point, it seemed like a no-brainer to use the art style that was most associated with those myths; black figure pottery.” For a while McGibney was torn between black figure style (black figures on a red background) and red figure style (a later style with…

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. To this end, we’re selective about what we review, and try to focus on the notable, interesting, exciting or surprising. DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT DLC might be new missions for a game, or it might be a single new item. If we think you want to know about it, we’ll review it. EARLY ACCESS Any released alpha, beta, or otherwise unfinished game that you can currently pay for. For these games, we won’t assign a score, but we will tell you whether they’re worth your time. THEY’RE BACK Whenever there’s a bargain or re-release of a significant…

Let’s get it out of the way. Yes, that’s an anthropomorphic pig and a duck, and yes, you can play as a fox, too. Ha! But you’ll forget their inherent ridiculousness as you start to explore Mutant Year Zero’s skeleton-strewn Sweden and face its stern tactics challenge. Very quickly Bormin was simply my gruff stalwart tank, Dux my sharp-eyed, crit-dealing sniper, and Farrow my sneaking shotgunner. God, I love that gang. Each character’s skill tree pushes it into specialisms Let’s get the other thing out of the way: the setting is third-hand Stalker. But again I forgot it as I got to grips with Mutant Year Zero’s meeting of real-time exploration and turn-based strategy. Here’s the idea: the world is divided into lots of discrete but…

Jagged Alliance: Rage is in love with busywork. At every stage of the game I’m bombarded with basic maintenance tasks, survival elements, weapon degradation and looting – so much looting. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was more variety to the combat, but sadly I found myself using the same few tricks over and over. The story is as deep as it is original – which is to say not at all It works like this: you take your two mercs (you won’t unlock another for hours) and liberate a jungle island one turn-based combat encounter at a time. Each merc is a bundle of skills and quirks. This is the game’s biggest strength, as each character feels different, if not exactly balanced. Raven is a sniper…

I think I may have been a little hard on Crazy Machine Elements when I reviewed it back in cough-let’s-notdiscuss-it. It’s a puzzler where you fit pieces into Rube Goldberg machines and manipulate physics to complete objectives. It is also, I suspect, a game for children. My critique was that it didn’t allow you enough freedom to build your own solutions – a staple of games like World of Goo or Crayon Physics. But I’ve softened towards it since, and now I see the fun in figuring out what’s missing from a prebuilt machine. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle full of things that bounce and break: I’d have loved it when I was a kid.…

There are two main ways to test out a screen. The first is by playing games on it. Subjectively testing gaming performance isn’t going to give you the lowdown on the specifics of a screen, but it will let you test the aspect ratio, native resolution and any games-centric technologies they have. Side-by-side testing is also good for keying into the differences between each panel. Objective testing can be great, but is also more difficult. To do it properly, you need hardware for testing latency, colour accuracy, and other metrics. Most gamers don’t have access to any of this. The days of retail space for such things are dwindling, but if you can get a look at a screen before buying it, plug in your laptop and check out the…

MOTHERBOARD Z370 Tomahawk MSI £148 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 £210 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 £420 Again, we’re making a saving this month on our choice of graphics card. The 1070 is perfect for gaming at high refresh rates. COOLER MasterLiquid Lite 240 CoolerMaster £45 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 £105 16GB is the minimum amount of RAM we’d recommend for a system of…

It’s a surreal experience to spend hundreds of hours confined to Warframe’s procedurally generated corridors only to step out into the massive, frozen wasteland of Orb Vallis. It’s a winter wonderland of new enemies to kill, resources to harvest and cute monsters to capture as part of Warframe’s Fortuna expansion. Released in November, Fortuna is a transformative update that once again sees Warframe boldly step into a new direction from the claustrophobic free-to-play loot shooter it started as back in 2013. It’s a direction I hope to see Digital Extremes stick to, because Fortuna is one of the best updates Warframe has ever received. This isn’t the first time Warframe has dipped its cybernetic…

PHILIPPA WARR Specialist in Terror from the Deep This month Tracked down yet another selection of amazing indie game artists and demanded a look inside their sketchbooks. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Apocalypse Twitter @ultrabrilliant This month Ticked ‘write a feature about Euro Truck Sim 2’ off his PCG bucket list. WES FENLON Specialist in UFO Defense Twitter @wesleyfenlon This month Told us he was going to visit The Outer Worlds. He meant California. JAMES DAVENPORT Specialist in Interceptor Twitter @my_beards This month Was stalked by a friendly developer across the frozen wilds.…

It is a period of upheaval. Epic Games, following a whiplash-inducing change of fortune (from ‘might go up in flames’ to ‘the little Bezos that could’), has won its first significant victory against Steam. Indeed, perhaps the first significant victory against Steam. That is to say: the store wars have begun and it turns out that the thing that Valve’s previous competitors were missing was a money hose of Fortnite’s girth and throughput. A money hose sufficient to offer developers a more generous cut of sales, to secure a raft of decent exclusives, and presumably to hire actual human beings to do the curation and support stuff that Valve would rather defer to a theoretically excellent robot. The Spy would like to pause here to acknowledge…

FOOTBALL Invented in 1953, football is played with the feet. It was rebranded as ‘soccer’ in 1994 when socks became mandatory after an outbreak of verrucas. RUGBY Rugby is a live-action metaphor. It speaks of the importance of gathering eggs for one’s social group, then incubating them in a nest of powerful thighs. GOLF This alleged ‘sport’ began as a mod for the older ‘sport’ of sword-fighting. Players would slash away at an opponent until one of them fell into a big hole.…

As consumers Let me start by saying thank you. I’ve been a subscriber since I could read, and I convinced my mother to sell her Apple Mac for a Pentium III so I could play the shit out of Baldur’s Gate. You guys have always been my go-to and you’re epic. This has been bothering me for some time now, and something has to be said. Let me preface this with the fact I understand there is a time to complain. However, it seems to me that comment sections and forum threads have become full of entitled kids and man-children that seem to love to have a cry about everything. As consumers, our vote and our biggest say is our cash. Yet the trend seems to be to make our…

The Outer Worlds is not just sci-fi: it is exuberantly sci-fi. Blood-red trees pepper valleys of strange cylindrical rocks and alien shrubs. A spaceship rumbles overhead, coming in for a landing at the nearest spaceport. Rings grander than Saturn’s carve an arc across the horizon, and a field of stars shines impossibly bright in the afternoon sky. It’s a world I already know I want to explore: the colourful vistas of No Man’s Sky , but in an RPG that looks and feels very Fallout , just a million miles away and pre-nuclear armageddon. It’s a good time to be the creators of Fallout. Not Bethesda, the studio behind the disappointing Fallout 76: it’s a bad time to be Bethesda, with new…

You’re a Hearthian, a curious, four-eyed amphibious being from a small planet in a weird solar system full of mystery. Not so much a civilisation as a single village, the Hearthians inhabit a crater on their planet’s surface, using wooden walkways and shacks to build up and around the limited space. They also build rockets. And you’re their latest astronaut. My first experience of Outer Wilds was with the free alpha build that would go on to win the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the 2015 IGF Awards. While the final version boasts a new art style and other improvements, the core idea is still the same. You travel this strange solar system, exploring its idiosyncratic planets and uncovering its many secrets. And then you die, and do it all…

REBELSTAR RAIDERS 1984 An early turn-based strategy game, Rebelstar Raiders is a multiplayer sci-fi game where players control opposing squads of soldiers. LASER SQUAD 1988 Another turn-based game, this time featuring a variety of tactical missions including assassination, hostage rescue and infiltration. UFO: ENEMY UNKNOWN 1994 Also known as X-COM: UFO Defense in North America, this was the world’s first taste of what would go on to become a hugely popular series. X-COM: APOCALYPSE 1997 A deeper, more complex take on X-COM, with self-adjusting difficulty and rival factions, including the alien-worshipping Cult of Sirius. CHAOS REBORN 2015 A remake of Chaos: The Battle of Wizards (an early Gollop project), this strategy game features warring wizards and challenging combat.…

TRIPWIRE INTERACTIVE After making the Red Orchestra: Combined Arms mod for UT 2004, this studio found fame through the Killing Floor series. TEAM PSYKSKALLAR Psykskallar’s game Cry of Fear originated as a mod for Valve’s original Half-Life before becoming its own standalone title. TORN BANNER STUDIOS Chivalry: Medieval Warfare began life as Half-Life 2 mod, Age of Chivalry, before Torn Banner formed to develop it into its own entity.…

00%-09% Broken or offensively bad; absolutely no value. Example Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude 10%-19% We might be able to find one nice thing to say about it, but still not worth anyone’s time or money. Example Gettysburg: Armored Warfare 20%-29% Completely falls short of its goals. Very few redeeming qualities. Examples Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse 30%-39% An entirely clumsy or derivative effort. There’s little reason to play this game over a similar, better one. Examples Trials of the Blood Dragon 40%-49% Flawed and disappointing. Examples Aliens: Colonial Marines 50%-59% Mediocre. Other games probably do it better, or its unique qualities aren’t executed well. Examples Primordia, Homefront: The Revolution 60%-69% There’s something to like here, but it can only be recommended with major caveats. Examples No Man’s…

Each of the three tether mods – air lifter, retractor and booster – can be tuned to attain the level of silliness you want. Here are the air lifter’s balloon tweaks. GAS Do you want your balloons to go out with a pleasant pop or a big bang? ARMOR Make balloons invulnerable to your bullets, enemy bullets or both. LOCOMOTION Balloons float up by default, but can be set to follow you like a flock of sheep. PEAK ALTITUDE Sets the height your balloons float up to. The sky’s the limit! PEAK EFFECT Should your balloons keep their cargo up there, or simply pop on arrival?…

BORMIN I like my pig to get up close. Major Mutation: Hog Rush Can destroy cover and knocks out enemies for a turn Minor Mutation: Run ’n’ Gun Enables an action after sprinting Passive: Spore Cloud Emits smoke when you’re damaged DUX My duck rains down fire from above. Major Mutation: Moth Wings Sprouts wings and allows you to fly Minor Mutation: Knee Shot Disable an organic enemy’s movement for two turns Passive: Alpinist 50% critical chance when shooting from high ground FARROW Hit hard, um, like a fox? Major Mutation: Frog Legs Jump to any location in range Minor Mutation: Sneak Sneak between cover Passive: Silent Assassin Doubles your critical chance whilst hidden…

AXE – RED A murder machine. Axe has bonkers stats and a signature card that lets him fight three enemies at once. Costly for a reason. TINKER – BLACK Tinker’s crowd control sets him apart. His laser is a menace to heroes, dealing damage and preventing them from attacking. DROW RANGER – GREEN Wins you games simply by being alive. Her ability passively buffs up all of your units. LUNA – BLUE Most of Luna’s strength is centred on her signature card, Eclipse. It starts off weak, but powers up every turn Luna is in play.…

MOTHERBOARD Strix X470-F Gaming Asus £185 Get the most from the new AMD Ryzen 2700X with this matching X470 motherboard that’s packed with features. PROCESSOR Ryzen 7 2700X AMD £299 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 £840 Prices of GTX 1080 Ti’s don’t seem to have dropped as much as other cards but you’re still saving a decent amount. 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 £309 Ryzen is the one processor that does benefit hugely from higher-frequency memory. This kit is…

DEATH’S GATE (PASSIVE) The less health Garuda has, the more damage she deals. DREAD MIRROR Rip the blood straight out of your foes and use it as a shield or turn it into a gory projectile. BLOOD ALTAR Impales an enemy on an altar of talons, siphoning health for Garuda and her allies. BLOODLETTING Garuda sacrifices a portion of her own health to restore some of her energy. SEEKING TALONS Send Garuda’s talons screaming into any nearby enemies.…

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT ALLSTARS* I don’t see how you can call this a Halloween album if you’re going to leave out the best Halloween pop song of our time. BETTER THE DEVIL YOU KNOW KYLIE MINOGUE So many songs included for their mentions of ‘devil’ in the title and you don’t bother with this banger from Kylie? FOR SHAME. BLACK MAGIC LITTLE MIX Little Mix didn’t actually exist until a year after Monster Halloween Hits came out, and Black Magic wasn’t released for another four years, but still.…

ISSUE 197, February 2009 ON THE COVER Dawn of War 2 IN THE CHARTS Just Dance – Lady Gaga 1 Alec Meer explores the year ahead in PC parts. For those of us living a decade in the future, it’s a fun reminder of an era when 1920x1200 resolution monitors were all the rage, and when solid-state drives were somehow even more expensive. Not everything came to pass, though: not only was Intel’s Larambee GPU not an Nvidia killer, it was never actually released. 2 Dawn of War II and Mirror’s Edge both land strong scores in the low-80s range. But the real winner of this issue is Jeff Minter’s Space Giraffe, which earned 92%. 3 “No, if you want to see true gaming greatness, it’s in facing the Fallout…

Every other day, it seems that some band of intrepid dataminers finds hidden, outdated, or mysterious content buried in the code of our favourite games. This isn’t negligence. Instead, it’s a peek into a little known reality of game development: that unused code is left in databases because it’s too risky to remove. “A DEDICATED ENOUGH COMMUNITY (HI, DISCORD) IS GOING TO FIND IT” Defender’s Quest DX dev Lars Doucet compares disabled (rather than removed) code to a nest of cords. “You can’t say for certain what is plugged in to what without taking a lot of time to figure it out.” This is especially true if you didn’t write the code, for instance if you’re working on a large team. Deleting old, seemingly obsolete code can risk breaking something…

Imagine a game in which every kill is accentuated by a crash of cymbals. Every punch punctuates a hip jazzy tune, while the tempo picks up at an exhilarating pace. Particularly skillful assaults are accompanied by a cacophony of clashes and drum beats. And as goons surround you with guns and flamethrowers, wholly ignorant of your strength and fury, you make quick work of them. You slam, clobber and thrash until they’re a mushy pulp – all the violence under a pop art sheen. This is what Ape Out,asmash-’em-up fuelled by frenetic action and a snazzy soundtrack, looks like in its playable demo. Turning the brutal rampage of a gorilla into electrifying music, players can, to an extent, dictate the game’s pulse. They can kamikaze through levels to the backbeat…

There are some intimidating enemy factions in Scavengers , a strange hybrid that’s part-survival game, part-competitive shooter and part-cooperative exploration game. There’s the Scourge, an alien horde that sprouts from the ground, and the Outlanders, a band of rogues hardened by an eternal winter. Neither is as powerful as a bear. It’s a single bear that finds our lowly group; four survivors shot down from a space station to explore an Earth claimed by decades of catastrophic climate change. It’s a single bear that chases us until we run into another group of players in a shootout with an Outlander camp. As the final blizzard moves in and the extraction point is marked 500 meters away, it’s that single bear that leaves us for easier prey and…

DOOM ETERNAL The shotgun has a grappling hook. Let us repeat that. The shotgun. Has a grappling hook. In the debut footage shown during last year’s QuakeCon, we see the returning Doom Slayer’s newfound mobility in action, as he jumps backwards off a ledge, grapples towards a floating cacodemon and gives him both barrels in midair. ID SOFTWARE IS GIVING US MORE OF WHAT MADE 2016’S DOOM SO GREAT Naturally this is very exciting, and not just because it’s a shotgun with a grappling hook. It shows that id Software is giving us more of what made 2016’s Doom sogreat: up-close-and-personal gunplay that encourages you to always push forward, closer to the horde. Doom’s melee system was a revelation, and so the fact that Doom Eternal will offer more ways…

DISCIPLES OF ANU A religious order which believes that weaponising the Pandora virus and its mutations is the key to rebuilding the world. The virus was, according to its scripture, retribution for humanity’s sins. NEW JERICHO A militaristic faction, New Jericho’s goal is destroying the Pandora virus and reclaiming the planet. It believes in human purity, rejecting any form of mutation and restoring order through force. SYNEDRION This faction believes that, having learned from past sins, the world can now be rebuilt as a utopian society, with renewable energy, freedom from persecution and a focus on developing science and technology.…

“This month’s crop of games is basically a celebration of physics!” That’s what I wrote when I started this review section’s introductory column, anyway. I think it was a comment on how much fun Robert Zak had with the explosions of Just Cause 4 and how joyous my own return to the silly and weird world of Katamari Damacy REROLL was. I can’t be entirely sure because the pear by my keyboard had ripened in the night and I decided to edit that with my face instead of editing reviews with my pen. Now everything is covered in pear juice, including a copy of Rick Lane’s Parkitect review, and physics is entirely to blame. The pear had too many physics and couldn’t be properly contained. LET US KNOW WHAT YOU…

PHILIPPA WARR Specialist in Pear physics Currently playing Katamari Damacy This month Rolled through the universe collecting all manner of tat. And in the game. ALEX WILTSHIRE Specialist in Duck drama Currently playing Mutant Year Zero This month Weaponised a lot of mutant animals for his own evil purposes. And in the game. TOM HATFIELD Specialist in Technocults Currently playing Mechanicus This month Fought a load of terminators from the beginning of time. And in the game. RICK LANE Specialist in Parks (themed) Currently playing Parkitect This month Paid people to cart sausages around in utter secrecy. And in the game. TOM SYKES Specialist in Doll restoration Currently playing The Doll Shop This month Glued broken and terrifying doll faces back together. And in the game. CHRIS THURSTEN Specialist in…

Katamari Damacy is ridiculous. It’s a vast amount of good ridiculous, with a smattering of bad ridiculous, which serves to remind you that it’s a game that’s very much from a previous console era. You, the minuscule Prince of the Cosmos, must help your father, the incredibly buff King of the Cosmos (also unsubtly well-endowed thanks to a pair of spray-on trousers) repair the night sky. There is no prophesy to fulfil, no monster to thwart. Instead, the sky was ruined by your father partying a little too hard the previous night and now he’s grumpily pressing you into service to fix it. The levels are replayable so you can retry them over and over again If you stop to examine the story, it’s pretty bleak. The King…

A few years ago, Games Workshop loosened its grip on the Warhammer 40,000 setting, and the result has been a glut of small-budget games set in the grim darkness of the far future. The quality has been mixed, but every so often a game like Mechanicus comes along that uses the opportunity to explore a previously neglected corner of the Warhammer universe, and makes it all worthwhile. The Adeptus Mechanicus are, in many ways, the perfect encapsulation of what Warhammer 40,000 is about, a bizarre Gothic fusion of tech and religion. They are the chief scientists of the Empire, but treat science like a religious cult. Mechanicus translates this unusual faction into a tactics game, and does so wonderfully, oozing character from every pore. There’s no…

Parkitect is pleasant to the point where it turns into a problem. Its gentle pace and inoffensive aesthetic makes it easy to get sucked into and spend a good amount of time with, but its desire to please also makes Parkitect rather risk averse. In a year that has witnessed some bold and innovative management sims, Parkitect plays too safe to stand out from the likes of modern hits such as Megaquarium . Parkitect’s coaster building feels positively Neolithic The game negotiates a pleasing balance between building and maintaining your theme park. Beyond the constraints of budget and available rides, you are free to create your park however you like. You can fill your park…

Like a reverse-world version of Hideo Kojima’s solar-powered dungeon-crawler Boktai , Capy’s uncompromising roguelite demands to be played in total darkness. Here, you’ll find yourself instinctively leaning in to better make out your minuscule character and their surroundings. It may not do much for your posture but you’ll feel a physical connection to your brave adventurer, likewise peering anxiously into the gloom. Calculated risk is part of what makes Below initially so absorbing An indulgently slow opening sees the camera descend towards a tiny speck that becomes a sailboat, tossed around by a roiling sea. Eventually, it lands on a beach from where you begin a long climb to the labyrinth you’re here to explore. There’s a whiff of self-importance about the whole…

A hideous and deadly, yet decidedly pitiful monster stands before you, waiting to turn your adventuring party to mush after just eight turns. What do you do – and, more specifically, when do you do it – to slay the creature and prevent this terrible fate? Monstrüous is a wonderfully fluid point-and-click puzzler that posits the above question, while revelling in the (often dismal) outcomes of your decisions. Rather than controlling the four-person party directly, your sole interaction is deciding the order in which they perform their special moves. Will you have your amphibian bard dude summon a protective bubble right at the start, or a few turns in when the monster has a mean look on his face? Will you give the princess empowering coffee…

Having now reminded everyone that mediocre shooters will find you even when you don’t want them to, I’d like to give over the rest of this page to games that are nice. Pineapple Smash Crew is nice: a chunky cartoon Cannon Fodder where you fling space marines into alien-infested derelicts and try not to get them killed. The heart of the game is found in your secondary weapons, like remote-controlled rockets and grenades, with each of your squad of four able to carry one at a time. There’s finesse in managing the use of each, but also reliable arcade charm in simply flinging whatever’s to hand at the nearest monster. Lovely music, too. Very much better than Colonial Marines.…

MOTHERBOARD B360M-DS3H Gigabyte £69 It lacks overclocking options, but the new B360 chipset is far cheaper than the Z370 and is perfect for this budget build. PROCESSOR Core i3-8100 Intel £124 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 Windforce OC 3GB Gigabyte £213 Amidst fluctuating GPU prices, Gigabyte’s compact 1060 model offers the best value. COOLER Hyper 212 Evo CoolerMaster £25 Even a budget build can benefit from a good CPU cooler, letting you enjoy a quieter, cooler system. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 8GB (2x4GB) @2400MHz Corsair £65 DDR4 prices are still high, however this Corsair pair is a good value option. POWER SUPPLY 500BQ EVGA £45 It may be cheap, but this 500W PSU…

“No one actually owns any music nowadays” I had not considered that in this, the sixth Year of Luigi, finding music to play in Audiosurf would be a problem. Turns out I stream everything . The only CD I actually own is Bette Midler’s It’s The Girls album and even then I’d need to stream the tracks from that via Spotify because I don’t have a disc drive on my PC anymore. After exhausting the sole track included with the game (Audiosurf Overture by Pedro Macedo Camacho) I decide to stream Audiosurf Online Radio, which is basically just a Soundcloud playlist. The only song on the playlist is Audiosurf Overture by Pedro Macedo Camacho. I only discover this later when Phil looks it…

Idon’t like noisy games. The ones where someone is constantly prattling on in your ear about your next objective, or some forgettable orchestral score is blaring over everything. It’s nice when a game just decides to shut up for a while, because as someone who primarily enjoys singleplayer games – and, this may be related, an only child – I love being left alone. Some games do loneliness really well, and it’s particularly effective when it’s threaded into the story. In Campo Santo’s fantastic debut Firewatch, protagonist Henry hikes deep into the Wyoming wilderness to escape his troubles. You do spend a lot of the game conversing with fellow watchperson Delilah, but there are long stretches where all you hear is the wind in the trees, twigs cracking under your…

EURO TRUCK SIMULATOR 2 It’s just you, a shipping container and the road. For the duration of the journey, the cosy confines of the truck are your world. EVERYBODY’S GONE TO THE RAPTURE You’re the only living soul in a rural town, exploring its surroundings to discover what happened. The solitude is palpable. GONE HOME A touching tale of broken dreams, rebellion and young love set in a big, empty Oregon house. The ambience make you feel powerfully alone. ELITE DANGEROUS Such is the vastness of the Milky Way the chance of you running into another player is very rare. It’s just you, the stars and the endless void of space.…

FLASH MINIT  www.minitgame.com You have a minute to do what you’re going to do, and then the world resets. There are dungeons, monsters and chatty NPCs – all you’d expect from an adventure – but you can only really focus on one thing at a time. Your life depends on you being economical with your time, so you’ve got to be incredibly precis- STRANDED RIMWORLD  www.rimworldgame.com The colonists devoured their pets, but the ground was still frozen and their bellies were still empty. A timely raid saved the day. The colonists stood their ground and defeated the bandits. They celebrated with bandit meat. Rimworld is a colony sim and brilliant storyteller, but most of the stories it tells are very, very grim. ANIMAL FARM CRUSADER KINGS II  www.bit.ly/crusader_kings2 CKII has…