Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2020 i PC Gamer

ROBIN VALENTINE Specialist in Taking small steps Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Warmed up to the idea of moving to Mars. The magic of the original Kerbal Space Program wasn’t in watching its boggle-eyed astronauts gleefully explode, or even in the careful, crafting of your next rocket, itself likely doomed to a fiery end. No, the magic was in the way the game pushed you to reach for greatness. You will get to the Mun, it whispered. No matter how many of these green idiots we have to sacrifice to get there. How appropriate, then, that its sequel should be so ambitious, reaching even further into a sprawling universe of simulation. We were invited to stare deep into the wondrous void of the game so far, and we returned with stars…

HIGHS Fortnite Travis Scott’s in-game concert attracted 12.3 million players. Fallout 76 Bethesda has confirmed it’s looking to add pets to the game. American Truck Simulator  The trucking sim now lets you roll down your windows and enjoy the sounds of nature (and the highway). LOWS WWE 2K21 WWE 2K20 was such a disaster that the series is now on hold indefinitely. Call of Duty: Warzone Cheating has become such an issue in Warzone that console players are opting out of crossplay. Doom Eternal Mick Gordon doesn’t seem pleased with Eternal’s soundtrack after it was poorly mixed without the composer’s involvement. Allegedly, he might not return.…

Step out onto the promenade of Imagination Island and you’ll catch a glimpse of an expansive vista in the hazy glow of the morning sunlight, filled with roller coasters, food stands, and a cathedral that would give the Sagrada Família a run for its money. It’s a Minecraft world built by creator collective BlockWorks, and every inch has been constructed to showcase the most dramatic change to Minecraft’s graphics since it launched a decade ago. The Minecraft with RTX update flaunts its new suite of ray-traced effects – including reflections, global illumination, shadows, and refraction – powered by an all-encompassing path tracer. “After Quake II RTX, we knew it was possible,” says Oli Wright, Nvidia GeForce devtech engineer. “So it seems natural to go that way for Minecraft. It’s going…

The big gimmick in the JRPG-inspired Cris Tales is being able to control time. Say you’re fighting an enemy clad in metal armour. Cast a water spell on him, fast forward time, and the armour will be rusty and useless. It’s a neat idea in a game full of them. Hero Crisbell can see the past, present and future all at once, both in battle and while exploring the game’s beautiful, delicately hand-animated world. Inspired by Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, Persona, and the Paper Mario series, the game mixes tactical turn-based combat with side-scrolling, semi-3D exploration. Crisbell’s time manipulation powers are useful in a scrap. Poison an enemy and you don’t have to wait for it to sap their health: just jump forward in time and they’ll take all the…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A city-scale turn-based tactics game about squashing resistance outfits EXPECT TO PAY £17 DEVELOPER Firaxis PUBLISHER 2K REVIEWED ON Intel i5-4670K CPU, GTX 970, 8GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK xcom.com You join me in medias res as the members of my squad hang precariously from rappel lines at the windows of a warehouse. All this is because a resistance group has been conducting some troubling experiments on the premises, and it’s now time to shut them down. Humans, aliens, and hybrids have reached an uneasy peace Each breach point has pros and cons. I assign my human-alien hybrid Cherub to the most dangerous entrance. His massive shield should protect him from return fire. I assign my shotgun-wielding badass, Godmother, to a breach point that…

Third baseman Bobby Bashe steps into the box, tapping home plate with the tip of his bat hard enough to make the camera shake. All season long, Bashe has been my best base-stealer (despite his chunky body) and one of the league’s leading home run hitters, capable of turning a close game into a rout with one big swing. I don’t know what I’d do without him on my roster, but I’m about to find out – this is the last game of his career. There’s also a small chance a player will develop a situational trait The managerial aspects of the Super Mega Baseball series have always been a bit weak, but the outstanding new franchise mode in Super Mega Baseball 3 lets you tinker with your roster over…

Space whales. It’s a combination of words that leaps off the page at you, but the closest thing to an antagonist this gentle city-builder has aren’t to be feared: they’re only after your vegetables. Before We Leave is a non-violent city-building/4X game that wears its hexes proudly, a tiny bucolic sphere of them (plus 12 hidden pentagons to make it geometrically possible) hanging in the void whose inhabitants initially only know how to grow potatoes. The citizens of your new civilisation emerge from the ashes of an old one – a bunker that looks rather like a repurposed missile silo. This not being Fallout, your priority is housing, and it’s a rather wonderful world to emerge into, all fertile plains and rocky highlands. Humanity has been underground long enough for…

Have you ever noticed that one peasant’s shack in an RPG is much like any other? Assets repeat, necessarily so, otherwise games would take millennia to be developed. Well here’s a tiny glimpse of a world where nearly every asset is unique. Every distinct room is cluttered with items, remnantsif you will, of life on Earth, in all its technological, religious, banal and slightly terrifying glory. Made in RPG Maker, this feels like a traditional SNES JRPG, but without the battles, NPCs, or villages. You play as a person who has decided to delve into a subterranean structure, for reasons hastily explained by the rather insubstantial ending. But let’s cast that aside and focus on the other character, you: an archaeologist sifting through millennia of junk. Each level of the…

The Haunted Island is one of those games that sends me into a spin regarding how much game is enough. It’s funny, well-written, and lets you judge a dance competition between cartoon animals. Lovely. On the other hand: it takes about the same amount of time to complete as a buffet lunch. It’s also a reminder of how long it takes to make games. If this was an episode of Brooklyn 99 I’d have binged the next three seasons instead of waiting months for episode two. The puzzles are really simple but it’s characterful enough that it rarely drags. Like a Lindt bunny it’s small and sweet and you’ll wish it was bigger. 68…

You’ve got to put the work in to stay at the top of your game, and in a world of ever-evolving PC peripherals that means being wised up to the latest tech trends. The humble mouse may feel like a given – you’re bound to get by with the off-white office rodent you found in the shed – but some off-cut kit isn’t going to convince your friends and family that you’re living your best gamer life. And that’s all we really want, isn’t it? With a new gaming mouse announced what feels like every other week, there’s one for every hand, player, and genre of game available to purchase. The problem is sifting through the hundreds of products that don’t fit the bill, in order to find that golden…

1 SPERM WHALE The brain of a sperm whale weighs about 8kg. These ocean giants can live for 70 years and reach 16m in length. 2 ELEPHANT Elephant brains weigh just over 5kg. They can also live up to 70 years, and recognise themselves in mirrors. 3 BOTTLENOSE DOLPHIN With a brain weighing up to 1.7kg, dolphins demonstrate their intelligence by having fun times in the water. Aww. 4 HUMAN These apes with anxiety can only muster a pathetic 1.5kg brain, although the weight depends on body size.…

THIS MONTH Led men to their deaths, then reloaded. ALSO PLAYED Doom Eternal, Call of Duty: Warzone Join me now on a journey through time and space. To a time when it seemed like there was suddenly more space. When first-person shooter developers, wielding the power of the new millennium’s 3D technology, began to push back the borders of their levels. It began in the military simulators, which plonked players down in open terrain and asked them to crawl on their bellies through hostile territory. Games like Operation Flashpoint offered extraordinary freedom to commandeer vehicles and tackle scenarios from any angle. But they were also cruel; a single bullet could put a stop to your experimentation. Though it’s not often credited as such, Halo: Combat Evolved marked the shift of…

We had a long wait for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord to finally reach us – about eight years, by my count. And the moment it finally arrived in Steam Early Access at the end of March, the modders pounced. Mods for Bannerlord began appearing almost immediately, and continue to arrive every single day. The Mount & Blade games have always been flexible, and the newest entry is no different. And already we’ve seen some highly creative mods, including a trio that are all based around the same theme: yelling. A mod called Screamerlord, for instance, lets you use your voice to give orders to your troops while in combat. Your real voice! The name is a bit misleading because you don’t need to actually scream – just talking into…

REFLECTIONS By tracking the path of a ray to and from an object, it’s possible to generate dynamic reflections with accuracy. GLOBAL ILLUMINATION With ray tracing, indirect lighting bouncing around a scene can be generated in real-time. SHADOWS With information on how an object is illuminated, soft and hard shadows can be achieved with nuanced detail. REFRACTION By casting a ray through an object, such as a lens, it’s possible to accurately portray how it would alter light.…

It took Crytek’s latest game, Hunt: Showdown, to teach me how to play its very first. The studio’s 2004 debut, Far Cry, had seemed like a devolved stealth game – a stunted halfway point between Doom and Dishonored. But there’s a satisfying throughline from where the company began to where it is now. In Hunt: Showdown, a particularly brutal twist on battle royale, noise is deadly. Gunshots telegraph your position not just to the zombie mobs that roam the map, but to other players hungry for the same bounty you’re after. Yet sometimes you have to open fire to survive the toothy advances of a hellhound. Far Cry functions according to the same principles. This was a time before silent melee takedowns – when your machete was a clumsy last…

We awarded F1 2019an impressive 91 percent in our review last year. Codemasters elevated its racing series with the inclusion of F2 racing, and a fun, story-driven career mode. Not much changed in terms of visuals or handling, but the package was a big improvement over previous entries in the series – and the next game is taking things further. Now you can play through a whole ten-year career across multiple seasons, starting in F2 and working your way up to F1. But the big difference this time is being able to make your own team by creating a driver, hiring a teammate, choosing a sponsor, building facilities, and even selecting your engine supplier. This is probably the most dramatic overhaul of the game’s career mode to date, taking the…

I don’t know much about astrophysics, aerodynamics, or anything else to do with rocket science, but I do know how to tell when someone is trying very hard to avoid saying the words ‘kerbal orgy’. New studio Intercept, which has taken the reins on KSP, is busy crafting a sequel, coming next year, that includes intergalactic travel, multiplayer and helpful tutorials for science-challenged players like me. Reading between the lines of my first look at Kerbal Space Program 2, the kerbals themselves are getting busy too. Over the course of two days I spoke with the dev team about what’s new in Kerbal Space Program 2, what’s changed, and just as importantly what’s not changed, to preserve the wonderful sense of accomplishment and discovery that defined one of PC gaming’s…

There are no warp drives in Kerbal Space Program 2. So how will you reach far-flung star systems? The developers have consulted experts and heavily researched plausible future tech that could make interstellar travel possible. These rocket concepts represent some of those possibilities. The ‘holy grail’ of propulsion tech, these ‘torchship’ engines are both high thrust and fuel efficient. The fuel type is still a secret. These engines use metallic hydrogen, which could be twice as powerful as current rocket propellants. KSP2 predicts how magnets could keep its 6000 kelvin heat from melting down the engine.…

1 The chevrons next to each district represent unrest. Districts are colour coded too. Angler’s Point is just about to boil over. 2 You can assign different types of field teams to each district. Security teams reduce unrest every Friday, for some reason. 3 Operations are easy resource grabs. You don’t even need to fight to pick up this extra elerium. 4 Purple missions will further the story and help you to close in on each resistance group.…

There are moments in SnowRunnerwhen I’m stuck halfway up a mountain, wheels churning pointlessly in the slop, that I wonder if all the struggle is worth it. The more I fight it, the worse it seems to get, and I can’t even winch myself out because the nearest tree or rock is justout of reach. But, somehow, I always (well, usually) manage to heave my off-roader out of the sludge. Whether through dumb luck, determination, or just sheer pig-headedness, I jostle myself free, and the feeling of victory is immense. At least until I get stuck again down the road, which is inevitable in these wild, unpredictable stretches of mud, snow, and pain. You’ll feel hopeless, annoyed, and on the verge of rage quitting This is the SnowRunner experience. You’ll…

Bushido Blade has cast a long shadow. For me, at least, if no one else. Here was a fighting game that didn’t require you to memorise a massive list of combos, and that echoed the swift, tense brutality of the best sword duels in films and on TV. In that polygonal PS1 classic, you could die in a single strike, and deal similarly deadly blows to your opponents. Therefore blocking, evading and the angle of attacks were all paramount, as one wrong move was all it took to invite disaster. A few games have offered glimmers of Bushido’s essence in the years since, but the closest yet is First Cut, which is essentially Bushido Blade but in 2D. You can duel with a friend offline, or you can take on…

There was a time, far back in the World-That-Was of 2013-ish, when the thought of a buddy comedy set during the destruction of the Warhammer world would have felt impossible. Warhammer Online was dying. Mediocre 40k games erupted onto Steam like boils. And then Vermintide appeared, clutching a brace of ideas borrowed from Left 4 Dead, and Warhammer fans once again began to believe in the power of prayer. It’s also a reminder of how much fun online gaming can be It’s still great fun. Skaven enemies fall apart in satisfying, cold sausage chunks. The randomised swarming elements make every level worth replaying. And the stern difficulty feels like a genuine test of your planning and teamwork, especially when the game starts peppering you with specialist enemies. But for me,…

Continuing with the theme of ‘animals’, Aviary Attorney is a game about bird lawyers navigating the political turmoil of 1840s France. It’s a dense, amusing visual novel in which you have to win cases using smart cross-examination and evidence gathered from your investigation on the streets of Paris. It sounds pretty goofy, but the characters are actually really well realised, and it’s possible to get things horribly wrong as you struggle to piece together exactly what happened in each case. This makes it a rare bird indeed: a game where you have to live with your decisions, rather than simple starting again until you achieve the perfect outcome. 75…

THIS MONTH Celebrated the career of a rally legend. ALSO PLAYED Over the Alps I recently acquired a Logitech G920 steering wheel for my PC, which inspired me to revisit the brutal, brilliant Dirt Rally 2.0. And while I’m still working on keeping my car on those rugged, muddy tracks for more than ten seconds at a time, I’ve been enjoying the game’s recent Colin McRae-themed DLC. McRae was a household name in the late 1990s and early 2000s, not just for his talent behind the wheel, but for the series of superb rally sims he lent his name to. You can trace the DNA of Dirt Rally directly back to the Colin McRae Rally series, which makes this a fitting game in which to honour his career. The DLC…

NEED TO KNOW DIFFICULTY Easy TIME Three hours VITAL LINKS  Best camp locations: bit.ly/354DTPX How to recruit allies: bit.ly/3ePPdnx Fallout 76 tips guide: bit.ly/2xX0WQD RECLAMATION DAY 1 Establishing your camp is one of the first things you do in Fallout 76. Get started by hitting Z in Pip-Boy mode. You can hit the same key to move to different camping spots, but there’s a mounting cost in caps for doing so. LOCATION, LOCATION 2 Save caps by placing your camp far from Vault 76, the only other place you can fast travel to for free. Try to set up near a body of water so you’ve got a ready supply, and on high ground so you’re overlooking any invaders that come for you. JUNK MAIL 3 Pilfer everything that you…

After a year of rumours, the Viking is finally out of the bag: Ubisoft has unveiled Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. It’s taking the murderous series to 9th century England where our Viking hero Eivor will duke it out with Saxons led by the King of Wessex, Alfred the Great. Ubisoft announced the new game in a pretty unconventional and slightly exhausting way, livestreaming the creation of some concept art. We were expecting a trailer, which did eventually follow, but first we had to sit through an eight-hour painting session as Boss Logic painstakingly put together a teaser, frequently going back and tweaking castles and boats as we waited for confirmation that it was what we expected. THE VIKINGS WERE PRETTY EXTRA, AND EIVOR’S THE MOST EXTRA OF THEM ALL Valhallacontinues the…

SUBSET HAD PLANS FOR PILOTS DRIVEN SLOWLY MAD BY TIME TRAVEL You might have imagined, as I did, that the making of Into the Breach was punctuated by home screenings of Kaiju films – the Japanese monster movies defined by the image of Godzilla stomping through a metropolis that seems to shrink in his shadow. The game’s Vek even bear a resemblance to Godzilla’s co-stars in the latest round of remakes: lumbering insects that loom over the tallest tower blocks. Ask Subset Games, though, and they’ll put an enormous foot through that theory. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than a few minutes of a proper Kaiju film other than Pacific Rim,” says co-designer Justin Ma. “And I thoroughly disliked that movie.” The world of Into the Breach came…

Could there be anything worse than unpaid internships? How about unpaid internships where you have to clear basements filled with monsters? Unfortunately, that’s your employment sitch in the corporate dungeon crawler Going Under. At least brawling your way through the bowels of an office building is good exposure. You play as Jackie, a young woman who’s started an internship as a marketing assistant at Fizzle Beverages. Your very first task is to clear out a bunch of goblins who have been nicking the company’s office supplies. It’s not an ideal first day at work, but it could be worse: you could be making the teas and coffees. Fizzle Beverages’ basement isn’t just any corporate storage space – it also happens to be the cursed ruins of countless failed tech start-ups.…

You’re introduced to Union City, the setting for this sequel to cult point-and-click adventure Beneath a Steel Sky, in the first act, and it’s an impressive sight. After trudging through a sandstorm in the Gap – a post-apocalyptic name for the Aussie outback – hero Robert Foster crests a sand dune and finds the city looming ominously over him. A forest of skyscrapers and smokestacks stretches for miles into the sky, circled by an impenetrable wall, and the scene is well and truly set. A boy, Milo, has gone missing, and the trail has led Foster here. Beyond a Steel Sky is, as you might expect from Revolution, a fairly typical adventure game. You talk to people, pick up items, and solve multi-stage puzzles to progress. The two hours I…

1. Your kerbals! 2. Individual g-force meter. 3. Velocity and altitude – These can be toggled to show velocity of a set target, and ground level instead of sea. 4. Atmosphere depth indicator. 5. Throttle. 6. Nav ball – A gutter around the nav ball makes the orientation markers easier to keep track of. 7. Orientation controller – As your ship moves, this model will point towards prograde, retrograde, etc to show your orientation. 8. Pause button – Take a break, or watch a tutorial. 9. The staging stack – Now in the same place as in the Vehicle Assembly Building. 10. Go button – No longer just an invisible hotkey. 11. Time zoom – Especially important for long flights.…

Gears Tactics and I share the belief that a sniper rifle should practically be an extension of the hand of god, so mighty it feels almost unfair. Late in my campaign I could fire off seven rounds in a single turn, chaining together shots that gave me free actions for every kill. This is the power fantasy version of a tactics game, and pitch-perfect Gears of War, down to the cranial pop of a Longshot’s bullet landing a critical headshot. Tacticshas a linear campaign, told with very pretty Unreal Engine cutscenes. It’s easily the best-looking tactics game I’ve played, and it’s hard to oversell how precisely this game translates Gearsinto an overhead turn-based perspective. Each of the five classes have skills that combine in clever ways Gears Tactics is an…

Whether it’s Blade Runner’s rain-soaked Los Angeles or the planet Coruscant in Star Wars, there’s something evocative about the image of a futuristic city crisscrossed with flying cars. And in the gorgeous, voxelbased Cloudpunkyou get to be a part of one of those teeming skyways, driving a beaten-up hover car and delivering packages in a dystopian, multi-tiered city called Nivalus. This is a game almost entirely about exploration and conversation This vivid, intricate metropolis is genuinely stunning to look at. A bustling sprawl of neon signs, roaming spotlights, colossal billboards, and hover cars scurrying back and forth between monolithic skyscrapers. It looks great up close too. Lower your car to street level and you’ll see pedestrians milling around noodle stands and seedy nightclubs. In the air: advertising blimps, trains streaking…

Streets of Rage is so deeply ’90s, its main characters are named Axel and Blaze, the kinds of names that made 12-year-olds whisper “whoa, cool”. Streets of Rage 4 is the game I imagine those kids creating if they grew up to be talented videogame developers, and wanted to remake the thing they played as kids. Streets of Rage 4 does not try to reinvent the basics – you walk to the right, you punch guys; sometimes, for a change of pace, you throw them. Homage is clearly the point here, and it is a beautiful homage: this review could perhaps be the words “Don’t worry, it plays fine” followed by 100 screenshots of Streets of Rage 4’s characters and stages, and you’d get the point. Would you please just…

Subnauticaengrossed me completely with its vast, detailed ocean and engaging sci-fi mystery. If you feel similarly, then you’ll want to play Deepdive, which compresses its ocean down to a lake, while flattening it to two dimensions for good measure. There’s no sense of mystery, unfortunately. In fact, there’s no plot in this at all; just the sea and a diver eager to explore its depths. This short, sketchy approximation has mimicked its forebear remarkably well. Your little diver feels suitably vulnerable as you propel them around a hostile, teeming ocean. Your ultimate goal is to descend to its deepest point, and to do that you’ll purchase upgrades back at your lifeboat: you can enhance your speed, oxygen, inventory space, etc. Money is earned by scanning lifeforms, and by digging up…

Even with the tutorial’s laconic, Sam Elliott drawl explaining the basics to me, I still manage to mess up my first kill in theHunter. I clip the deer’s neck then have to spend ten minutes following blood trails to find it. But it doesn’t matter. As it turns out, pursuing a terrified deer through miles of dense undergrowth is exactly the introduction you need to this curiously zen-like animal murder simulator. So much of what I enjoy about this game happens between kills: the cautious tracking of animals, the signs of other nearby life and the focussed dedication you feel following a single target. It makes theHunterone of the most unique stealth games I’ve ever played, and certainly the slowest. I’m constantly at war with my own impatience. Animals are…

If Goat Simulator was a restaurant, it’d have a great name and inedible food – the game equivalent of the Abra-Kebabra on your corner that got shut down for serving human hands. It’s nothing more than an enticing name and 30 minutes worth of tepid, physics-based distraction, but somehow less endearing. Coffee Stain Studios even warn buyers that their money would be better spent on a pile of bricks. It’s not a hateful or exploitative game – just not nearly as good as the ‘very positive’ reviews suggest. 37…

Intel loves a good codename. Who remembers Dragontail Peak? Or Lizard Head Pass? Or even 2008’s White Salmon? Great days. All of those refer to motherboards, but Pohoiki Beach is different – it’s a new way of building computers that’s based on the human brain. Neuromorphic computing – literally ‘nerve shaped’ – uses insights from neuroscience to create chip architectures. By simulating the way human brains work in silicon, calculations can be carried out faster while using less energy. The training of neural networks can be carried out more efficiently too, with only one viewing of an object necessary for the net to recognise it forever. Mike Davies, director of Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab, sees it more clearly, “Neuromorphic computing entails nothing less than a bottom-up rethinking of computer architecture,”…

THIS MONTH Actually did learn how to make bread, eventually. ALSO PLAYED Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Gears Tactics As I write this, my country is still in lockdown. Perhaps that will have lifted by the time you’re reading – if so, hopefully you can still empathise. Heading into this period of enforced self-isolation, I felt a strange pressure. There seemed to be an expectation that, with more free time on our hands, we’d all make a sudden burst of progress with our hobbies – we’d learn how to code, or finish painting our Warhammer figures, or conquer our gaming backlogs. And for some reason learn how to bake bread. But far from feeling a surge of productivity, my tendency during lockdown has been to retreat into easy comforts. With…

It’s hard to overstate what a big, risky decision it was to add a tenth class to Hearthstone. In the six years since the game launched, the developer had consistently played down the idea that adding another hero was a serious possibility, citing obvious problems with how to design a unique identity and balance it around and against the existing classes. But a lot has changed about Hearthstone in the last year or so. Since the arrival of a new leadership team led by game director Ben Lee, who joined from CD Projekt Red, the cadence of nerfs – and buffs! – has increased, the cost of collecting cards has come down thanks to the duplicate protection across all rarities, and a new mode was finally added in the form…

LUMBER MILL Wood is an immensely useful crafting component, and bots in the Gilman Lumber Mill continually stack up the stuff. Build your camp near here for ready stocks. MORGANTOWN STATION As well as offering you vendors with which you can offload your junk, this train station also offers a recurring public event, which can net you a stash of items. WHITESPRING RESORT A popular spot as patrolling robots give you automatic defences, this golf course also offers shops and vendors if you head inside. You’ll have plenty of neighbours too.…