Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2020 i PC Gamer

Unfortunately, I was not blessed with the greatest patience in life, and this carries through to videogames. I like punchy combat and quick fights – games that require me to think about strategy are not usually my vibe. But when I spied the loopy characters and tongue-in-cheek art style of Meteorfall: Krumit’s Tale, I was charmed from the off. It’s a deck-building roguelike that takes place in one of the weirdest settings I’ve ever experienced in a game: inside a cardboard box. You have been summoned to battle through this card-based dungeon by a mysterious shopkeeper named Krumit, and he has asked you to complete his quest to retrieve some magical items. It’s a mystery what you get in return. The honour of being one of the few to playtest…

GRINEER Centuries of cloning have ravaged the bodies of this mutant army, leaving them no choice but to rely on cybernetic implants to overcome their disorders. CORPUS A cult of capitalists unified by an obsession for Orokin technology, the Corpus prefer to use robots to do their dirty work for them and not get their hands dirty. INFESTED The remains of an ancient Orokin bioweapon, the Infested are Grineer and Corpus troops infected with technocytes that have turned them into monsters.…

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. 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…

Yes, the venerable classic is being wheeled out again – not quite new, but definitely improved. It wears its two decades well, but the years are still there hidden beneath polish and new art and myriad tweaks. Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition wavers between remaster and remake updating nearly everything from the art to the AI, but reverence for the original means that the changes, though broad and welcome, are somewhat restrained. This remaster makes it easier to appreciate why the original had the impact it did. Finally, in 2019, Age of Empires 2 lets you tell your villagers to automatically reseed farms! No more returning from a war to find the fields fallow and my villagers twiddling their thumbs. This might be the most exciting change for me,…

I’ve been playing the same game of Football Manager 2012 for seven years now. I won everything with English league side Walsall – UEFA Champions League titles, Premier League titles, you name it – and then proceeded to adopt a similar managerial approach at every club thereafter. For the first time in the series’ history I feel like I can’t do that with Football Manager 2020. Instead, I’m being forced to think more strategically about how to achieve lasting success. The result of this is a new feature called Club Vision, which vastly expands your interaction with the board from season to season. From the minute you join a new team, you’re hurled into a meeting to discuss the specific objectives you need to focus on, from achieving a certain…

AMD has been gaining ground on Intel since Ryzen appeared in 2017, and today it’s easy to justify buying CPUs from both companies. If you’re using a 4th generation (Haswell) Intel CPU or earlier, or an AMD FX-series CPU or earlier, it’s time to start thinking about upgrading. For our testing, we use Nvidia’s fastest GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card. It’s overkill, but at 1080p it shows the largest difference in gaming performance you’re likely to see. Just remember that next year’s RTX 3070, or the following RTX 4070, could end up beating today’s 2080 Ti at a relatively affordable price. Upgrading your graphics card is a piece of cake compared to swapping out your CPU and potentially motherboard and RAM. We’ve also used high-end G.Skill Trident Z and…

1 STONEHENGE The neolithic equivalent of a Psion Organiser, Stonehenge isn’t much use for anything except knowing the date of the solstice, and the only Crysis it knew was the Bronze Age Collapse. 2 ABACUS Appearing as long as 4,700 years ago, the abacus was probably invented in Sumer, modern Iraq, to carry out addition and subtraction in the base-60 number system. 3 ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM A 2,000-year-old analogue computer used to calculate the positions of stars and eclipses, the mechanism’s 30 bronze gears were pulled out of the Aegean Sea in 1901. 4 ANALYTICAL ENGINE A proposal by Charles Babbage, first described in 1837 but not built, this computer used punched cards to store programs, and had memory capable of storing up to 1,000 40-digit numbers.…

MOTHERBOARD Strix X470-F Gaming Asus £180 Get the most from the new AMD Ryzen 2700X with this matching X470 motherboard that’s packed with features. PROCESSOR Ryzen 7 3800X AMD £380 AMD continues to tear it up at the top-end of the CPU market, and this 8-core, 16-thread monster laughs at the word ‘bottleneck’. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 2080Ti Black Edition EVGA £1,113 EVGA’s custom design is considerably cheaper than Nvidia’s reference card, and with great cooling. COOLER Kraken X62 NZXT £100 The Kraken is the culmination of three of our favourite things: an infinity mirror, a 280mm radiator and slick braided cooling. MEMORY Ripjaws V 32GB @3200 G.Skill £172 G.Skill is always a safe bet for lightning fast RAM, and if you can do without the RGB frills this 2x16GB…

LEGENDS OF RUNETERRA A new digital card game that forgoes booster packs and aggressive microtransactions. ARCANE An animated TV series developed in-house at Riot that tells the origin story of two League of Legends champions. PROJECT L A League of Legends fighting game developed by EVO’s co-founder that probably won’t be out for a good few years. PROJECT F Not much is known about this game other than it’s meant to be multiplayer, but it sure looks like a Diablo-esque action RPG.…

Hi, I’m Jeff Asbestos. Not so long ago I was like you: a plucky young go-getter, brimming with moxie, looking for the right corporate environment in which to make a difference. But I was adrift. That’s not a metaphor – many influential management texts endorse plain speaking, so it’s important you know I was literally adrift in an unpowered spaceship. For nearly 70 years I unconsciously orbited a planet far from Earth, one of thousands of hopeful workers seeking employment in Halcyon, a colony owned and operated by distinguished corporations. The spaceship had broken down during the final leg of its journey, and recovery would have compromised the financial stability of the Halcyon Holdings Corporation Board. In truth I’m grateful for my time in stasis, because on the day I…

STEVEN MESSNER Specialist in Sci-fi MMO shooters that aren’tDestiny. Twitter @stevenmessner This month Wrote a cover feature while en route to New Zeland. Dedication. TYLER WILDE Specialist in Asking nervous Blizzard devs about China. Twitter @tyler_wilde This month Headed to BlizzCon 2019 to carry out a professional vibe check. WES FENLON Specialist in Honey I Shrunk The Kids type scenarios. Twitter @wesleyfenlon This month Visited Obsidian to check out their huge (or, er, tiny?) new project. JEREMY PEEL Specialist in Holistic games journalism. Twitter @jeremy_peel This month Looked for connections everywhere – starting with Double Fine.…

Why read the news when you can create the news? “But, The Spy,” you’re probably thinking, “how can I – a person who is sat reading this magazine – create videogame news?” Well, Daniel, the answer is simple: you just lie. Here is The Spy’s step-by-step guide to fabricating rumours that SEO-focused gaming verticals will find too irresistible to resist. Step 1: make a throwaway Reddit account. For added points, make sure the name is an obscure reference to an anime show. This will give you an air of mystique and credibility that many sites will find hard to ignore. NOBODY IS GOING TO BELIEVE YOUR TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE GTA VI RUMOURS Step 2: Choose the right game. Nobody is going to believe your too-good-to-be-true GTA VI rumours, but something a little…

Lieutenant Kim initially comes off cold and judgemental. It’s hard to blame him. The detective RPG Disco Elysium begins with what probably feels to him like some cosmic joke. He arrives in Martinaise to solve a murder case and is met with a decomposing victim, no suspects, and a hungover, amnesiac detective as his temporary partner. Kim remains aloof throughout the investigation, but an empathetic enough detective can manage to uncover brief moments of vulnerability from Lt Kitsuragi. Those hard-earned interactions have been enough to make him the game’s breakout star. Which was not at all what the team at developer ZA/UM expected. KIM’S HIGH VOLITION SKILL MAKES HIM IMPERVIOUS TO PRYING “Honestly, we’re surprised people like him so much,” says lead writer Robert Kurvitz. “Of course, we always adored…

Diablo IV’s crypts are more hateful than Diablo III’s. They’re darker and dustier with Bloody Piles that explode like popped blisters in slow-mo. It’s also shinier, but in a dour way. Lightning shimmers across wet stone and fleshy creatures, and it sometimes rains, dynamically generating muddy puddles. Path of Exile feels cheerful by comparison. I’m hesitant to draw any big conclusions about Diablo IV because I imagine it’ll be quite different whenever it releases, and Blizzard says that probably won’t be soon. The demo was quite easy, for one thing. I’d guess Blizzard didn’t want players getting frustrated, especially those who had to stand in a long line at BlizzCon, so they outfitted us with strong characters. I played the 20-minute demo twice, once as the Druid and once as…

It’s here in reviews that months, sometimes even years of accumulated potential collapse into a final, realised form. The wonderful thing is even we, as journalists practically pickled in the brine of previews and hands-ons, can never quite predict what form a game will take when it solidifies on our machines. While that leaves the door open to disappointments, it allows for lovely surprises too – and keeps us forever on our toes. For instance, in a month that sees the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, a massive Star Wars game and the revival of strategy classic Age of Empires II, I bet you still won’t be able to guess which humble game got the highest review score this issue……

This confident follow-up is an unambiguous improvement across the board and a triumph of wargame design. From the campaign structure to the simple mechanics and customisable armies, Unity of Command II brings renewed vigour to World War II strategy. One of my high bars for a strategy game’s sequel is that I can unreservedly recommend the game over its predecessor. Unity of Command II is one of those games, though I was initially wary of all the new mechanics added to an otherwise delightfully simple wargame. I found great pleasure in capturing railway depots Unity of Command II has the same baselines that made the first UoC a success. Every division on the battlefield is made up of sections called steps, each represented by a little dot below the unit’s…

TARTARS A cavalry archer civilisation that gets lots of bonuses for mounted archers and a unique unit that earns you gold. BULGARIANS Thanks to free militia upgrades and a half-price miniature castle, the Bulgarians start off pretty strong. CUMANS The Cumans get battering rams early. One of their unique techs gives them ten elite versions of their mounted archers. LITHUANIANS They love relics. For every one they collect, cavalry get an attack bonus. They start off with a food stockpile too.…

This inevitable sequel is a decent game, a rich and vibrant open-world racer with a day/night mechanic and thrilling police chases. Imagine the sun-drenched fun of Burnout: Paradise mixed with the duelling of Need For Speed: Rivals, and you’re two thirds of the way to understanding what Need For Speed: Heat is about. All you need to add is the most obnoxious cast of characters ever squeezed out of the sphincter of creation. I find Need for Speed’s hyperactive, aggressive tone to be tiresome I swear by Vin Diesel’s right foot, the fighting roster of Mortal Kombat XI is less inherently punch-able than Need for Speed: Heat’s pathologically irritating racing drivers. They don’t so much talk smack as talk grievous bodily harm, all macho posturing and narcissistic self-absorption. At one…

To be honest, ‘you can possess a wombat and force it to do your bidding’ ought to be a strong enough pitch to sell this game to you on its own. But there’s so much more to the experience than marsupial mind control. The fundamental premise of being able to jump into the body of any creature you see is intriguing enough. Tie it into a story with heart and a surprisingly intricate understanding of life, however, and you have something that’s truly special. Mooneye has a deep love and respect for nature, something that becomes apparent within seconds of the player taking control. Taking my first steps as a wolf, I’m pleasantly surprised at how realistic the movement is. The environment, from these first moments right up until the…

MOTHERBOARD B360M-HDV ASRock £69 ASRock’s B360M board definitely qualifies as ‘no frills’, but it’ll still get the juice out of your CPU without bottlenecks. PROCESSOR Core i3-9100f Intel £77 An incredibly nippy quad-core CPU for the price, Intel’s 9th gen budget chip skips integrated graphics for affordability. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 2060 GAMING EVGA £330 Compact, great value, and part of NVIDIA’s latest GPU generation, this EVGA model is the budget gamer’s best friend. COOLER Hyper 212 Evo CoolerMaster £28 Even a budget build can benefit from a good CPU cooler, letting you enjoy a quieter, cooler system. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 16GB Corsair £69 16GB of RAM gives you plenty of breathing room when running multiple programs, and Corsair’s selling this kit cheap. POWER SUPPLY CX-M Series CX550M Corsair £68…

ISSUE 209, January 2010 ON THE COVER Star Trek Online IN THE CINEMAS Avatar 1 They say that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it, which is why we should take a stark, honest look at this issue’s Star Trek Online coverline. “Set nerdgasm to stun!” we wrote. On the cover of a magazine. It’s… not even a pun. It’s gibberish. Thank you for your continued patronage in spite of this fact. 2 You can’t buy the highest scoring game of this issue – Colin Mcrae: Dirt 2, 88% – digitally any more, because of the licensing issues. How easily our past vanishes… 3 The Top 100 is always a fun way to make some controversial statements about the state of PC gaming. In 2009’s list,…

Our estimation of Kim’s stats INTELLECT: 5 He’s smart – but maybe not smart enough to realise your character’s bad news. PSYCHE: 4 A high Volition skill allows him to keep that poker face. PHYSIQUE: 2 With his scrawny build, he doesn’t exactly have the ‘hero cop’ look. MOTORICS: 1 Kim’s surprisingly butter-fingered and his eyesight’s no good either. SIGNATURE SKILL: AUTHORITY Even with a complete buffoon by his side, Kim exudes a palpable aura of confident cop-ness.…

Let’s get two things about Grounded out of the way right now. First, though Obsidian Entertainment is famous for RPGs like Fallout: New Vegas, Grounded is not that. It’s a survival game. Second, it’s definitely not an officially licensed Honey I Shrunk the Kids game, despite how much it looks like one. The spirit of mad scientist Rick Moranis is coursing through this co-op survival game, which casts you as a teenager, shrunk down to ant size. The world is your literal backyard, and all the typical survival mechanics, like hunger, thirst, and building shelters, are viewed through that tiny lens. Grounded’s setting really helps set it apart from the scores of survival games on PC – it’s cute, and evokes that childlike sense of wonder that small, imaginary things…

OCTAVIA’S MANDACHORD It’s a warframe that comes with a built-in synth so you can buff your friends while making them listen to Darude’s Sandstorm. HELMINTH CYST This infection presents as a pink cyst on your neck and will spread to other players you come into contact with. You can drain it and use the pus to make a puppy. LUNARO Even space ninjas need a day off, and Lunaro is the perfect way to relax. This casual sport is like Final Fantasy X’s Blitzball only without the water.…

Evan Lahti REMNANT: FROM THE ASHES This co-op shooter resurrected something that I thought the internet had killed: trading game secrets and tall tales with your friends. It rolls a semi-unique world for each player – it took me a dozen tries to kill the tree dragon, but my buddy fought a towering ent in his campaign. “Oh yeah, and did you find the guy who sells soup? Talk to him 25 times and he gives you his pocket watch which can…” James Davenport SESSION A 900 Christ Air to Darkslide in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is easier to pull off than a kickflip to noseslide on a low curb in Early Access skater Session. Its control scheme matches a foot to each stick for the most realistic board manipulation…

JAMES DAVENPORT Specialist in Keeping his horse’s coat nice and shiny Currently playing Red Dead Redemption 2 This month Got wild in the west. FRASER BROWN Specialist in Trebuchet maintenance Currently playing Age of Empires II Definitive Edition This month Took a trip in time all the way back to 1999. TOM SENIOR Specialist in Going ‘vwoom, fwish’ Currently playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order This month Became more powerful than we could possibly imagine. RACHEL WATTS Specialist in Embracing eternity Currently playing Manifold Garden This month Stared into the infinite abyss until the infinite abyss stared back, then solved a puzzle. CHRIS LIVINGSTON Specialist in Animal magnetism Currently playing Planet Zoo This month Became proud papa to a litter of digital aardvark babies. TOM SYKES Specialist in Getting bloodstains…

1. Base power, defence, movement, and armour. 2. Next is the actual steps in the division. 3. If a step is hollow, it’s suppressed. 4. Experience, then movement and action points. 5. Whether the unit’s dug in, fortified, or weakened. 6. Below that, you have equipped specialist steps: • Purple are artillery, but suppressed if moved. • Blue are anti-tank units, which give an armour bonus. • Teal are attached speciality tanks. • Orange are Engineers, who negate penalties. • Black are Elite Infantry for attack and defence bonuses. • Green are Recon, for intel gathering bonuses.…

This should have been a brilliant game. In some ways, it is – in bursts. How could it not be? You play as a cat called John who looks like Batman wearing Columbo’s coat; a cat with his own detective agency, who stars in a noir thriller set in 1950s New York that dutifully hits the notes you’d expect. Everyone in the city in fact, is an anthropomorphised animal, true to the acclaimed French comic book series the game is based on. I laughed out loud at the sight of a cat driving a forklift The result is that Blacksad: Under The Skin is essentially a nine-hour fever dream. This fact (and it is a fact) is key to almost every compliment and criticism that can be hurled at the…

I’ve only watched the first series of Narcos, but I know enough to know that it is a crime show: it features things like police work, with the DEA protagonists capturing Pablo Escobar’s lieutenants, finding evidence etc. Narcos: Rise of the Cartels contains almost none of this and instead tries to tell the story of the Medellin Cartel exclusively through XCOM-style turn-based tactical combat, turning the war on drugs into a literal war. Every unit can heal one hitpoint a turn by not moving Let’s talk about the elephant in the room here: this is an extremely messed up way to depict police work. In the very first scene of the tutorial the game asks the player to ‘bring a gang member in’ – this involves shooting him repeatedly because…

THE CORE I9-9900K IS INTEL’S FASTEST MAINSTREAM CPU, PERIOD The power of your CPU tends to have a tangible, trickle-down effect on the performance of the rest of your components. You can dump truckloads of cash into your graphics card, but without an appropriately beefy processor to push it to its limit, you’re just going to end up bottlenecking your PC’s performance. A CPU isn’t the sexiest component to pick out for your high-end gaming PC build, but without the right chip, your rig is going nowhere fast. You’ll need to check the compatibility of your motherboard before diving in, and don’t forget about cooling either. Core i9-9900K INTEL £500 The fastest Intel processor for games, streams, more 1 For pure gaming, the Intel Core i9-9900K is overkill, unless you’re planning…

Physarium also has the honour of being the first single-celled organism to be on display in a zoo – the Parc Zoologique de Paris. While it might look like a bright yellow growth on a tree, the slime mould is really a collection of cell nuclei that can grow several feet in diameter. And despite not having a brain, it can solve mazes, choose the most nutritious food when presented with several, reform itself within minutes if split in two, and even display a kind of memory. It has 720 sexes.…

MOTHERBOARD Prime Z370 A II Aus £125 Great shielding, full of features, and featuring that – ahem – all important RGB lighting, this is a fine Asus board. PROCESSOR Core i5-8600K Intel £259 Six cores, six threads, good out-of-the-box clock speeds – and it’s overclockable. No performance bottlenecks with this installed. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 2060 Twin Fan Zotac £330 Serious power from the ‘just about affordable’ end of Nvidia’s new GPU fleet, and it’s ray tracing-ready too. COOLER Hydro Series H55 Quiet Edition Corsair £55 Tidy and quiet, the H55 will unlock our CPU’s overclocking potential and look good through your case window while it does so. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) @2666 Corsair £69 16GB is the minimum amount of RAM we’d recommend for a system of this…

Riot’s MOBA may have just turned ten years old, but its new Rise of the Elements update sure makes it feel new and exciting. And by ‘exciting’ I mean chaotic as all hell. First revealed during the League of Legends tenth anniversary celebration – where the developer also announced seven new games including an FPS and a card game – Rise of the Elements is one of the biggest shake ups to LoL’s Summoner’s Rift in years, giving players even more opportunities for big plays and epic ganks. Setting the stage for League of Legends’ tenth competitive season, Rise of the Elements makes Summoner’s Rift feel more dynamic and reactive both during the course of a match and across multiple games. It focuses almost entirely on the Elemental Drakes, a…

For almost as long as I can remember I’ve tried to push games past the limits of my PC. These days that means trying to run them at 4K on a graphics card that’s not up to it. It means bringing framerates to a stumbling halt whenever anything interesting happens, never lowering detail levels beyond ‘medium’. It’s a compulsion that goes back a long way. I was one of the lucky kids who got to use the PC their mum bought for word processing and ‘homework’ to play games on, a 286 with 1MB RAM, later upgraded to a 386 with 4MB, a CD-ROM drive and a Soundblaster 16 sound card. On this latter machine I attempted to run Doom, a game that really wanted a 486. Graphics cards hadn’t…

RACHEL WATTS If you close your eyes super tight and wish really, really hard, all these games will magically appear in your Steam library! A Christmas miracle! YOU’VE GOT MAIL TINY ECHO  mightanddelight.com Might and Delight’s little gem Tiny Echo lets you play as a forest sprite delivering mail to the creatures and spirits of the undergrowth. It’s relaxing, dreamlike, and at one point your tears help bring some dying shrubs back to life. Exactly the sort of wholesomeness I need in my life. A SENSITIVE SOUL DISCO ELYSIUM  zaumstudio.com Disco Elysium accepts me for my true detective persona – a coward who barfs at dead bodies and cries when suspects poke fun at me. But give me a painting or a wall mural and I can conceptualise and empathise…