Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2022 i PC Gamer

Sound design, music composition, voice direction… Paul does it all, and pretty much anything else to do with audio that you can think of. He’s a free agent with experience in games, film, radio, advertising, and more; and he’s currently single-handedly working on No Man’s Sky’s audio for Hello Games. Paul had an unorthodox route into the game industry. Using a BBC course in TV directing as a springboard to radio work and composing, he went for a job interview at the now-defunct Perfect Entertainment, mainly for job interview practice. He didn’t get the job, but while he was there, he passed a tape of some of his self-written music to their composer. A week later, Paul signed on for unemployment benefits. An hour or so after this, his phone…

EARLY ACCESS NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY TBC at time of writing DEVELOPER Crate Entertainment PUBLISHER In-house LINK farthestfrontier.com PLAYED IT I’ve played plenty of medieval survival city builders before, and the one I’m playing now is from the makers of bleak apocalyptic ARPG Grim Dawn. So I feel like I’m being practical, not pessimistic, when one of the first things I tell my citizens to build in my little town is a graveyard. It turns out to be the right move. Farthest Frontier doesn’t take its time putting my little peasants in mortal danger: they’ve only just started hammering together their first building, the town hall, when one of them is attacked by an vicious wolf. I’m pleased to see they’re a tough group, quickly swarming the predator…

It’s bizarre to look at Final Fantasy XIV’s last 12 months and witness a game that has been suffering from success. It’s a stark change for a game that, for a large part of its early life, was simply suffering. “Final Fantasy XIV is a project that got off to a very problematic start,” director and producer Naoki Yoshida admits. It’s a well-known tale in games: a messy, unfun MMO crippled by conflicting ambitions across its team. “There were issues not only within the project itself, but also in terms of the company structure. All these issues erupted with Final Fantasy XIV. The consequences were that we lost the trust of our fans, our gamers, and the media.” When Yoshida (lovingly nicknamed Yoshi-P by the community) puts it like that,…

I honestly believed that Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered would struggle on keyboard and mouse. The web-swinging and slugfests of Insomniac’s open world Spidey game feel so specifically tailored to a PlayStation controller that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could feasibly translate it to the PC’s traditional control scheme. Yet not only is the game perfectly playable on keyboard and mouse, in some ways it’s superior to the PS4 experience. Swinging through the New York skyline was always the best bit of Insomniac’s title – with the Ratchet & Clank studio delivering possibly the best movement system in any game of the last decade. Traversing Manhattan as Spidey is equally enjoyable on PC, only now you press and hold left-shift to start and maintain a swing, interspersed with deft taps of the…

Rollerdrome is a game about performance. There is combat, but it’s not about winning, as such. It’s about style. The attitude you bring to it. Efficiency is a byproduct of mastering its violent dance – really, you’re here to look good. It might be my favourite action game since Devil Daggers. A single-minded, stylish, and evocative beast that pulls you along for a ride it’s hard to let go of. Let’s just say I’ve had more than one after midnight session of Rollerdrome, chasing those high scores. The main character, Kara Hassan, finds herself thrown into a gladiatorial contest… with roller skates. Think Running Man on wheels and you’re there. In essence the game is pretty simple: you skate and shoot. The joy of it is that while it builds…

It’s all going bad on the planet of Kwalasha. I’ve just sent dozens of the Federation’s finest to their deaths to restart the planet’s mining operation, only to discover that the miners have drilled into an Arachnid nest. This needs a counter-response, but the mines are no longer Command’s priority. Instead, they redirect my unit to a prison, where they want my forces to hold back a bug assault long enough to see through the execution of a dissident, which is being broadcast live. My soldiers man the defences to prepare for the bug assault, but there’s barely enough room on the walls for my soldiers to raise their weapons, hindering their ability to shoot. This makes them sitting ducks for the hulking tanker bugs, whose incendiary spit eats through…

FREE GAMES COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH Climbing in games is too often a frictionless activity, with Nathan Drake or Lara Croft scrambling up sheer walls with no sense of gravity or danger. The most we can expect is an occasional QTE, with a quick hop back to a checkpoint if we miss a handhold and plummet out of bounds. Toy Cavers, by contrast, nails what I want from climbing in games. While not attempting to be a simulation, climbing nevertheless feels weighty and perilous. You can feel the tension and slack of the rope, and the mass of the other climber when they’re dangling from it. Yes, you play as two climbers in this retro-styled platformer, who are wielding axes and tethered together by a length of…

THEY’RE BACK COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH Overcooked is a liar. It wants you to believe it’s all bouncy text and goofy smiles and gently strumming guitars. But beating beneath its starched white apron of falsehood is a shrivelled heart, poisoned by malice and condemnation. Friendships don’t just wither here; they’re chopped, boiled, baked, fried, blended, then scraped into the food refuse bin. You might argue that this is my fault and not the game’s, and that it says more about my ability to work efficiently as part of a team than it does Overcooked’s design. Allow me to throw an onion at your head by way of reply. If reality TV cooking shows have taught me anything, other than the right way to cook scrambled eggs, it’s that…

Rounding up the theme of comradeship we have My Friend Pedro: a game about a man who embraces murder at the behest of a sentient banana. It’s a shaky excuse for endless gun violence. It’s amazing when it works and even better when it doesn’t: like when I backflip over two goons, miss both of them, then land headfirst on a floor between them. It’s the action game equivalent of sneaking up behind a guard, trying to snap their neck, and just making them look very quickly to the left. 78…

It doesn’t happen very often now. Cyberpunk 2077 came the closest in recent years, with its knack for a hype-baiting E3 sizzle reel and complex lighting up the wazoo. Before that, Metro Exodus and Battlefield V got some of the old nerve endings tingling too. But truth be told, there hasn’t been a bona fide, upgrade-your-PC-at-all-costs-to-play-this-seismic-new-title moment in PC gaming for a long time now. So long, in fact, that you might even consider those days to be over. And that’s quite a profound moment, when you think about it. On the other side of the divide, console platform holders Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft buy first-party studios and pay them to put out irresistible games. Titles that extol the virtues of each new console release, and make a life without…

NOW PLAYINGTHE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW L ast issue I talked about what I see as the future of fighting games – accessible, broad appeal action, shorn of barriers like complex inputs. Turns out that future may be arriving faster than I thought. Multiversus pits characters from across Warner Bros stable of IPs against each other, resulting in playfully incongruous match-ups like Arya Stark vs Batman, or Tom and Jerry vs LeBron James. The Smash Bros influence is clear, both in the ‘everybody’s here!’ roster and in the fighting, where dealing damage is just a means to the end of knocking your opponent clean out of the arena. But within my first couple of matches, it became clear this is far more than just a cheap clone or IP-led…

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT The Mittani, a legendary and polarising figure in EVE Online, has stepped down as CEO of two in-game ‘Goon’ organisations that control a significant portion of in-game space. The resignation happened in the aftermath of allegations he failed to address persistent sexual harassment and misconduct in the organisation. “My people, I’m afraid that the sheer amount of smears being flung my way across the galaxy are simply too much to handle at a personal level,” The Mittani wrote. “[The accusations are] becoming simply too radioactive to continue leading Goonswarm without my presence being a net negative for the wider tribe.” THE ALLEGATIONS AGAINST THE MITTANI ARE COMPLEX “The accusations that I am aware of are unsubstantiated falsehoods, and I did not sign up to be…

1 month STEELRISING RELEASE September 8 | DEVELOPER Spiders Scrappy RPG developer Spiders are back with a strange clockpunk tale that sees you playing a robotic woman fighting her way through Paris during the French Revolution. EVIL WEST RELEASE September 20 | DEVELOPER Flying Wild Hog We should’ve banned developers from using the word ‘West’ years ago. This one’s unrelated to Hard West, Weird West, West of Loathing, or West of Dead. DELIVER US MARS RELEASE September 27 | DEVELOPER KeokeN Interactive An atmospheric and perilous adventure across the surface of the red planet, as you journey to discover what became of missing colony ships. 3 months MARVEL’S MIDNIGHT SUNS RELEASE October 7 | DEVELOPER Firaxis Games The creators of XCOM bring their turn-based strategy expertise to a superhero RPG…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE September 6 DEVELOPER Zen Studios PUBLISHER Saber Interactive LINK circuselectrique.com PLAYED IT This game gives you two main tasks: explore London, having turn-based battles reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon, and put on shows at your circus. Both require a surprising amount of strategy, whether you’re chaining combos in battle, or looking for the perfect chemistry between performers to ensure your show is a hit with the crowd. Of course, I threw almost all of that out of the window and decided my circus would be entirely made up of clowns. The preview build dropped me in at the start of the game, and after being introduced to the world of Circus Electrique, where an electrical event called The Maddening turned everyday Londoners into killers, it’s time to…

There’s a simple delight to JRPG character customisation. Extend that to an entire squad of characters on a tactical grid? Now you’ve got your classic strategy JRPG. Extend it to an entire army of several dozen squads? That’s the rework you get in Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga. Setting out a buffet of customisation around your army is enough to shake up a genre that was becoming one-note – even if the generic story does it no favours. Symphony of War’s spin on the strategy JRPG is all about the squad. Each squad is made up of as many as nine units, each placed into a formation that you create on 15 squares – and the boundaries between them – for about 15 distinct positions. Whereas other games emphasise…

Our oceans may be clogged with plastic trash, but here’s a small silver lining: all that garbage is keeping me alive. In open world survival game Raft, which spent four years in early access before hitting 1.0 in June, I used tons of floating trash to turn a tiny wooden raft into a floating base of operations – a big, cluttered, oddly shaped floating base, but it’s packed with life-saving amenities and I’ve slowly come to love it like a home. Just like my raft itself, Raft the game took quite a while to fall in love with. The first few hours were so rough I probably would have just quit if I weren’t writing a review. With just four squares of wood to stand on, I slogged through the…

W ith parallels to Russia’s horrifying invasion of Ukraine, Paper Soldiers is a game about saving a land from a tyrannical ruler. You do this, across a short campaign, by building a deck. In each area you have to deploy cards tactically to both manage your resources and repel the king’s forces. There are a smattering of stages, each one on a 5x5 grid consisting of medieval farmland, wilderness, and town tiles. These tiles accept cards, which are randomly drawn every turn from your deck and which can be plonked down to replenish your dwindling resources. The placement matters greatly, because if a resource depletes to zero you’ll lose the game. For example, the farmer produces four food – when you drop his card onto a wheatfield tile –…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick the parts you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price. Mid-range build You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through. Advanced build You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart. BUDGET BUILD Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank B660M Pro RS ASRock £115 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. Core i5 12400F Intel £170 There’s no iGPU on this chip but it’s a little cheaper as a result, and will work great for this particular build. GeForce RTX 3050 Nvidia £239 This…

I think of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate as the last true Assassin’s Creed. Although there have been three mainline entries since its 2015, not to mention the DLC they’ve come with, Syndicate stands out as the last time this universe felt like it wanted you to be a cutthroat killer rather than a historical warrior. I played Assassin’s Creed Syndicate at its original release, and loved it dearly. It gets the spirit of London right, with a good helping of the series’ ridiculous historical sprinkles. Of course you can just meet Dickens on the road as you’re talking about the Templars. Of course! It’s not like London, even in Victorian times, would be huge and bustling, and pictures of people were rare enough that it would be hard to say…

MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED Brace yourself for a bizarre series of statements. There’s an official Doom game that’s a turn-based RPG yet still an FPS. It’s a game that was designed and developed for mobile phones by id Software co-founder John Carmack in the era before smartphones became available. It’s been essentially unavailable to buy or play for over a decade since the ancient phone hardware quickly became obsolete, so it’s largely been forgotten. Also, it’s… kinda awesome? Doom RPG is one of those weird game concepts that sounds like it wouldn’t work at all, but instead works amazingly well, and so it’s doubly mystifying and tragic that it died so quickly and was never officially remade for other platforms. It’s a real Doom game! Why would…

Special Report PCG INVESTIGATES NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT The highlight of July’s Brazil International Games (BIG) festival was a surprise for everyone, especially the event’s blockchain sponsors: game developer Mark Venturelli’s viral talk ‘Why NFTs are a Nightmare’. In an interview afterward Venturelli said something about the convention that I’ve kept thinking about since I left Brazil, “I don’t feel I have hurt BIG by talking shit about NFTs because BIG does not need these guys,” he said. “It’s the other way around. Our biggest event here in the Brazilian industry is not going anywhere.” Outside of Venturelli’s talk, which was a brilliant takedown of the design and politics of blockchain games, BIG didn’t make international headlines. It’s not an E3 or a Gamescom, but that…

Ron Gilbert never really said he wouldn’t ever make another Monkey Island. The series’ creator certainly came close. In 2013 he penned a now infamous blog post asserting that he couldn’t return to the point-and-click series unless a list of specific circumstances were met. In fact, so thorough was the list that it effectively put an end to hopes of another Gilbert-led adventure with Guybrush Threepwood. And yet fans still never quite gave up hoping. And why would they? The Monkey Island games are famed for being subversive and silly. The series has something far brighter than a glint in its eye, and exudes an excited sense of mischief throughout. Through their jokes and puzzles, each Monkey Island game has delighted in toying with expectations. All that considered, many hoped…

I’m not a frog, I’ve recently become pleasingly frog-like. I can croak like a frog, I can perform a froggish sproing-jump, and I can even thwip my tongue out of my mouth and grab items with it, or use it as a grappling hook to pull myself up cliffs and swing myself from ledge to ledge. As a tiny human sea captain in adventure game Time on Frog Island, I’ve spent so much time here I’ve actually become an honorary amphibian. The original name of Time on Frog Island was Trading Time and that still fits the game like a glove. Shipwrecked on a colourful island that’s home to a society of bipedal frogs, I’ve been frantically running around trying to trade things with them. To fix my busted ship…

FREE GAMESCOOL TITLES FOR NO CASH While I’m sure that some parodies are made with outright derision for their subjects, it’s hard to imagine them being as effective as this exquisite ribbing – a game that has clearly been made out of love for The Witness. The Looker is a next-level parody game that understands what makes The Witness great – and simultaneously a subject ripe for mockery. Happily, it’s also a good puzzle game in its own right. We should probably start with a potted history of The Witness. In Jonathan Blow’s first-person puzzler, set on a mysterious and open-ended island, you advance by solving maze puzzles on computer screens. The Looker shares its robust low poly aesthetic, philosophical audio diaries, and, naturally, its maze puzzles, although here there’s…

THEY’RE BACKOLD GAMES REVISITED I wonder how many monstrous combinations the Yooka-Layee team went through before settling on a chameleon and bat. Vulture and tortoise? Too wizened. Peacock and skink? Too flashy. Eagle and rattlesnake? Too much like a frightening man’s forearm. In the end, the choice seems to have been made because bats puns are simple and slurping butterflies with an extendable tongue feels amazing. Blomp! It’s interesting playing a game built on foundations laid 24 years ago. Banjo-Kazooie passed me by completely and chameleons give me night terrors, so I’ll admit I’m not the target audience. Despite this, Yooka-Laylee has an endearing start. It looks great – an oversaturated explosion of tropical colours, like rinsing your eyes with full-fat milkshake. And the presentation is uplifting, with bright, bouncy…

TECH REPORT In 1965, Coco Chanel said, “Mode passes, style remains,” and while the iconic fashion house founder probably didn’t have RGB standing desks or Razer Boomslangs in mind as she said it, it’s just as pertinent to our own strange little corner of cultural expression as it is to high fashion. Over the last decade we’ve seen a very distinctive visual theme emerge from PC hardware, one drenched in multicoloured lighting, scribbled with tribal designs like a lower league rugby player’s arms, and built from black plastic into severe, angular shapes. The gamer aesthetic had us all in its thrall throughout the 2010s, but now manufacturers are steering away from it in favour of sleeker, more sophisticated product designs. Its days may be drawing to a close. It existed…

We’re at the final boss of the Vault of Glass raid, and the damage is looking good. It’s been a tough 40 minutes as the team learns how to call out Oracles and cleanse debuffs, but it feels like we’ve got this. Except something’s missing. “Who’s got Imminent Detain?” Silence. Then, six overlapping bubbles surround the team, wiping us all. The boss had just a pixel of health remaining. For the past few months, I’ve been running a handful of the PCG team through Destiny 2’s raids. Our ragtag band has assembled with a mix of experience – both of the raids and the game at large. Guides writer Sean is a self-proclaimed Destiny 2 addict, but has never stepped foot in a raid. Senior hardware editor Jacob is a…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW Wreckfest has Steam Workshop support, so before trying any normal race, I of course subscribed to a bunch of random mods. My first race took place on Team Fortress map 2Fort, and while I was still in the pre-race menu, all the other cars formed a car tornado around my car, which was actually a golf cart. They flung it into the water immediately after the race started. I decided to use fewer mods, so my next race took place on a remake of a Need for Speed 3: Hot Pursuit track and my car was Lightning McQueen from Cars, but the physics were normal. I set the number of laps to ten, figuring it’d be most fun to race until everyone…