Innholdsfortegnelse for Xmas 2022 i PC Gamer

Martin is senior community manager for World of Tanks, and is in fact in charge of community managers in the European region. This follows a journey of ten or so years, a journey he began when he decided to switch focus from graphic design in the printing industry to videogames. In his early teens, he discovered what he describes as the “magic” of multiplayer games via LAN gaming and internet cafes. When he later in life decided to focus on games professionally, it was something of a challenge. “I come from the Czech Republic,” he says, “and in central Europe it was not as easy, right? Unless you had a lot of experience.” So, he started a ‘quest’ to gain that experience, which began with IRL community management. Martin would,…

FIRS LOOK A s developer Beard Envy gears up to show me Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop, I realise I actually have no idea what this game is about. I’d been pulled in by the incredibly vague trailer, touting a surreal kaleidoscopic vibe straight out of Cartoon Network’s renaissance era. As a complete sucker for that stuff, I was curious, yet worried that would be where my interest ended. But as it turns out, I had nothing to fear. Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is all about spaceships in some far-flung southern American future. You’re fixing them up and paying rent in the hopes Uncle Chop won’t straight-up murder Wilbur, the humble repairman you play as. He’s a strange little dude, a sort-of human sporting a multi-eyed fox head who can fart…

EARLY ACCESS PREVIEW PLAYED IT S top me if you’ve heard this one before. An alien race is threatening Earth. Three major powers send fleets into space in the hope of finding a new home for humanity among the twinkling points of light in the night sky where it can thrive and build and frolic under alien suns. What actually happens is that your fleet comes out of the wormhole in the Pegasus Galaxy (presumably UGC 12613 beloved of Stargate Atlantis fans) to find an unwelcoming star system surrounded by alien armadas. Yay! The Pegasus Expedition is a 4X, placing you in command of a human faction, its leader making a rousing speech before blast off. Luckily, humans have jumpgate tech, so they can travel interstellar distances fairly easily, but…

hile browsing the gallery of convicts that form Darktide’s character creator, I can’t help but be reminded how different the human perspective of Warhammer 40K is. For most people, the towering Space Marine is their touchstone for this setting, clad in immaculate MK IV plate armour, inscribed with battle honours, and adorned with fluttering oath papers. There’s nothing of that here. The closest thing these rejects have are their tattoos; symbols of hive gangs or ex-Imperial Guard slogans etched in a shaky hand in the bowels of some prison ship, or the trenches of a forgotten warzone. This is the human reality of 40K, rarely seen beyond Black Library books, and I love that Darktide recognises that. Another thing I really like is the shovel. The moment I see it…

Despite not having taken a survey, I feel pretty confident that nobody at PC Gamer is more afraid of spiders than I am. They petrify me – unless they manage to get on me, at which point I flail around like I’m on fire. And I’d rather be set on fire than feel a spider crawling over my skin. Given this, it’s ridiculous that I’d put myself in a situation where I had to review a game that was full of them. But for a survival game as good as Grounded, I’m willing to live through one of my worst nightmares. Sometimes the best path to victory is cheating a little bit Grounded is a time travel device, dragging me back to the garden where I used to spend long,…

FREE GAMES REVIEWSCOOL TITLES FOR NO CASH by Tom Sykes Cards and the Old West go together like fireside beans and competitive farting, so it’s not a stretch to see them as the premise for this text-based adventure. Card Cowboy is a narrative sandbox that sets you off on a revenge mission – a stranger has seduced your mum, murdered your dad, and perhaps worst of all kicked your dog – but how you achieve it really depends on what’s in your hand. Luckily, said stranger has set up camp at the edge of the map. To confront them, you have to travel from node to node, resolving events with the aid of your cards, while acquiring a hand you can draw on for your showdown. There’s an event at…

OLD GAMES REVISITED Many consider it poor form to begin a review with an anecdote. But, at the same time, I urgently need to tell you that I just conjured a hair dragon from a swirling portal so it could swallow whole an angelic cherub golem. Also, my clothes disappeared. This partially describes Bayonetta’s delirious proposition: finding a balance between desperate titillation and scandalous power fantasy. The lengthy cutscenes would have you believe it’s more complicated than that. They present a story that’s both crudely drawn and dizzyingly confusing. Clumsy, fuhgeddaboudit spivs reside in a setting cribbed straight from Dante’s Divine Comedy. None of it makes much sense, most of it is a struggle to comprehend, and ‘sexy amnesiac witch’ sounds like something from a list of forbidden bedroom roleplays.…

Bagged a Steam Deck but found it lacking certain features? Well there are heaps of accessories waiting to deliver perfect solutions to common hurdles. The challenge is picking the good stuff out from the false-economy rubbish. Thankfully there are some well-established manufacturers now delving into making Steam Deck accessories, from hard cases, to docks with M.2 SSD slots. There are certain peripherals that existed before the launch, too, that might be worth highlighting. We’ve taken a look here at a few of the options, so you can feel better informed about rounding off your portable gaming experience. We won’t have you pairing yours with accessories that won’t do it justice. While we’ve been awaiting official Valve accessories, these are some that filled the void. Quantum TWS earbuds JBL £129 Simply…

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. Radeon RX 6600 AMD £256 AMD’s…

My Rocket League inventory looks like the inside of one of those antique shops full of vintage pins, Raggedy Ann dolls, and ceramic beer steins. I have a floppy cow udder hat, eight variants of wheels with 3D elf faces on them, a Game Awards statue, a Wonder Woman flag, various animal miniatures, a Hot Wheels sign, and hundreds of other items that no one actually uses, including me. I could trade some of them in, selecting five unwanted items at a time to smush into one rarer one, but I hate deciding what to keep and what to scrap. It may be trash, but it’s trash I’ve collected over seven years. It has sentimental value! And what if I want to make a Christmas-themed car one day, only to…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE November 10, 2015 PUBLISHER Bethesda DEVELOPER Bethesda LINK fallout.bethesda.net Fallout games and aliens are no strangers. In Fallout 2 a crashed flying saucer can be found with two alien skeletons inside. In Fallout: New Vegas, another spaceship and more aliens can be spotted. Fallout 3 has DLC that actually lets you board an alien spacecraft called Mothership Zeta. And in Fallout 4, there’s yet another crashed flying saucer, and one angry alien survivor. Maybe it’s time the aliens stopped flirting with the world of Fallout and just got down to business. Maybe it’s time for a .full-scale alien invasion. That’s where the Zetans! mod created by modder RascalArt comes in. They know we’re here, and we know they’re here. It drops the pretence and lets…

CD Projekt is on the comeback trail. Ever since the botched launch of Cyberpunk 2077 the studio has been quietly improving Night City, stopping only to confirm a new Witcher is in the works. A new update says core studio CD Projekt Red has been working on two AAA projects since the beginning of 2022, and revealed a boatload of future projects in development elsewhere. Necessary caveat: we won’t see some of these for ages. We already knew the ‘mainline’ series is continuing with the game codenamed “Polaris”, but CDPR now says this is the first in a trilogy which will release “in a six-year period starting with Polaris”. The idea is that the first will be the foundation for the second and third, which CDPR thinks will “streamline development”.…

1 month THE CALLISTO PROTOCOL RELEASE December 2, 2022 | DEVELOPER Striking Distance Studios A spiritual successor to Dead Space from some of that game’s original creators. Escape a prison full of mutants on Jupiter’s second-largest moon. MARVEL’S MIDNIGHT SUNS RELEASE December 2, 2022 | DEVELOPER Firaxis Games Create your own superhero to lead a team of iconic Marvel characters through turn-based battles in this strategy RPG from the creators of the modern XCOM series. HIGH ON LIFE RELEASE December, 2022 | DEVELOPER Squanch Games Inc A colourful shooter from Justin Roiland, creator of Rick and Morty. Depending on your sensibilities you’ll either find its rapid-fire dialogue very funny or intensely irritating. 3 months FORSPOKEN RELEASE January 24 | DEVELOPER Luminous Productions A modern day New Yorker is transported to…

A confession: I’m not very good at building with Lego. This is a revelation as much as it is an admission, something I really only figured out while playing Lego: Bricktales over the weekend. It’s one thing to place random Lego bricks in an aesthetically pleasing way; it’s another thing entirely to, as Bricktales bids its players to do, construct architecturally-stable structures out of nothing but bricks and basic guidelines. The game starts off simple enough. You are a young builder who has been summoned to an abandoned theme park by your wacky inventor grandfather, known forever as Grandpa. Grandpa has built a portal that can take people to other locations, but first, you have to help him restore power to his basement lab after an accident fried all the…

My first attempt to reach space in Dual Universe ended in disaster. I’d purchased a Space Bike, which is the cheapest space-viable craft Novaquark’s ludicrously ambitious space sim offers, with the intent of doing a test flight from the planet Alioth to one of its nearby moons. But through a combination of ignorance and ineptitude, I failed to escape the planet’s gravitational pull, and ended up crashing 60 kilometres away from the nearest transportation. The opening hours of Dual Universe are a pretty miserable grind In Dual Universe, distance is measured at a 1-to-1 scale, and without the resources to repair my bike, I was faced with the prospect of a two-hour trek back to civilisation. Having already battled with the game’s byzantine systems at seemingly every turn, I tempted…

Uncharted, I’ve missed you. The reckless personalities, lush environments and ridiculous action set-pieces are unlike anything else we have in games, and coming back to the series with this PC port of the fourth game and its standalone expansion (The Lost Legacy) has been a pleasure. I’ve always loved Nathan Drake because he’s a morally grey hero who, with a cheeky quip and mischievous smile, can get away with almost anything. Where Lara Croft claims she’s just an archaeologist, despite her chaotic exploits, Drake and crew are self-confessed thieves, mercenaries and rogues, with silver tongues and dark pasts. In his wake, history is destroyed one collapsing temple at a time, but in the end he always makes the right choice… and ends up no richer than when he started. They’re…

Before the Marvel movies, before Uncharted, there was one master of the post-trauma quip. His name was George Stobbart and he was a patent lawyer from Idaho. Over time, George became more rugged and cynical before reverting to type for Broken Sword 5. But this iteration of him, drawn by Dave Gibbons and voiced by Rolf Saxon, is one of the most relatable and understated characters in gaming. There’s something reassuring about the fate of civilisation being placed in the hands of a man who’s happy to make gentle jokes while tied to a chair in a burning room. The plot doesn’t have the same conspiratorial wallop as the first game, but this is still thigh-slapping stuff. It’s the sort of game that celebrates the varied functionality of everyday objects.…

TECH REPORT At the end of September, Google Stadia VP and general manager Phil Harrison published a blog post that announced the platform’s rather abrupt closure. “While Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation,” says the former Xbox boss, “it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.” That blog post was the first that many developers working on Stadia games had heard that their destination platform was soon to vanish from existence. Cue much consternation and a spree of multiplatform announcements, including one from Tequilaworks about its upcoming Gylt, previously a Stadia exclusive. In some ways he news has taken the industry by surprise, not just because…

CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING Thank Gabe for my Steam Deck. If it wasn’t for Valve’s handheld miracle, I’d know nothing of the joys of Vampire Survivors, thus allowing the vampires to win. Before the Deck arrived, I’d heard of Vampire Survivors, of course, but it was hard to see the appeal, even amid its growing popularity. There are few places as saturated as the indie roguelike space, and it just looked like another ugly, pixely time sink designed to kill me over and over again. My Steam Deck’s arrival heralded a new obsession: trying to play every game I can think of on the device. I’ve tried everything from Cyberpunk 2077 to World of Warcraft, and I’ve been surprised by how many unverified games work. Vampire Survivors is verified, though,…

S pore is one of those games I’ve been long curious about, but never got around to playing. I know enough, however, to recognise that this is basically a Poundland version of it. Well, not even Poundland; it costs a grand total of 79p. As a result, this might be the only game I’ve ever played where I would have been happy to have paid five times the asking price. This game is janky, unpredictable, thoroughly imperfect, and I love it. It’s a bundle of contradictions. There are dozens of little touches that I adore. The way that the screen is black and white until you place eyes on your creature; the fact that one of the maps (a literal sandbox) has multiple footballs, two huge buckets for goals, and…

Talking to Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer forced me into a harsh realisation: I have the handwriting of a peasant. Decades of education and the internet’s infinite resources at my fingertips, and yet my messy chicken scratch would fit right in with a 16th century Bavarian peasant’s in Pentiment. It’s some consolation that Sawyer says his would, too. In our defence, the printing press is a bit more established in 2022 than it was in the 16th century, when your writing spoke volumes about your education, social class, and profession. That granularity is why Obsidian partnered with design firm Lettermatic to create six unique fonts for Pentiment, each telling you something about the characters you meet and talk to while trying to solve Pentiment’s mysterious murders. “Handwriting was changing a…

PLAYED IT W hen I think of Dead Space, I picture voiceless engineer Isaac Clarke creeping through the mining ship Ishimura, his face always obscured by the glowing green bars of his helmet. His only company is the gurgling roars of necromorphs and warnings finger-painted on the walls in blood. When I visited EA to play a few chapters of the upcoming remake, I wondered why Motive Studios did away with that lonely mood. It turns out my memory just sucks. It’s true that Isaac doesn’t speak in the original Dead Space – he does in the remake, sparingly – but he’s no loner. He’s got a girlfriend, for crying out loud, and his crewmates and others bug him with video calls throughout his ordeal on the Ishimura. Even the…

FIRS LOOK Our team of heroes huddles against a rock, hiding from the deadly blizzard that’s swept into this arena. Dotted around the screen, our opponents do the same, each of the four teams of four taking shelter during this phase as they race to take down a towering troll boss. Only one group of heroes can claim the glory of being first to slay this intimidating beast, but the catch is that despite being in the same place at the same time, noone can see exactly how their opponents are holding up. Evercore is the debut title from Vela Games, a studio headed up in part by two early League of Legends veterans. It subverts several key aspects of the MOBAs that helped inspire it. For a start, the…

EARLY ACCESS PREVIEW PLAYED IT T he security of a pleasant log cabin. Light, warmth, family and friends. Fresh, varied food. Exotic teas. When it comes to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, my survivors are doing pretty well for themselves. They’ve even got a didgeridoo. So why is it that Jack is constantly on the verge of a full meltdown? The cirrhosis probably isn’t helping. Stranded: Alien Dawn starts with your four survivors emerging from a crashed spaceship, out into a world previously untouched by human hands. While it doesn’t take long for me to organise food, shelter and some basic creature comforts, more advanced problems are going to take some time. We’re making bandages out of scraps of cloth. We don’t have the infrastructure to tackle long-term liver damage. Stress…

As a free-to-play successor to Blizzard’s 2016 hero shooter (that also replaces the original game), Overwatch 2 is both reinvigorating and regressive. It’s an exciting new reason to play a game that shaped modern shooters and get a glimpse at why nothing in the last six years has bested it. But its biggest changes and invasive monetisation system threaten to drain the joy out of it until there’s nothing left. Overwatch 2 is Overwatch 1 at 1.5x speed. It’s the same game, but compressed. Two teams battle over an objective in beautifully rendered, near-future locations around the world. Each side has a tank hero, two damage dealers, and two supports. Both teams fight to occupy space on the map with all their various hero abilities and ultimates. It’s an FPS…

There’s no point pretending otherwise: this is Legally Distinct Animal Crossing, a relaxing village-’em-up populated with cute critters and the usual range of things to craft, dig up, fish, chop and sell at the local shop. But even if I did know exactly how this is going to play out within seconds of starting it up, more games of this type can only be a good thing, right? One key departure from Nintendo’s winning formula is Hokko Life’s use of a sped-up internal clock rather than a real one. A nap fast forwards an hour or two and some serious snoozing can make an entire week pass by in a few button presses. It’s a quick and convenient way to get things done, but at the cost of the one…

We’ll finish this month’s list of blade-adjacent titles with a tonal U-turn. We’re leaving the reassuring nuzzle of point-and-click conspiracy behind and replacing it with the strangling hands of Shank: a game where being stabbed in the head is as close as you’ll get to dying peacefully in your sleep. It’s slightly jarring, because at first glance Shank looks like that should be on Cartoon Network after Dexter’s Lab. It’s only when you discover your standard heavy attack is an actual goddamn chainsaw that you realise you’re actually playing hatred shaped like a game. If Danny Trejo brought out his own aftershave, Shank is what it would smell like. It’s a tale of dead pregnant girlfriends and bloodied headbands and elephantine Mexican wrestlers with Betty Page tattoos. Literally everyone, from…

Most PC gamers are looking for cheap deals on RTX 4090s right now. Personally, it’s the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro I’ve got alerts set up for. A 19-year-old graphics card with a total of 128MB of memory, and one that some sellers are trying to ask a grand for. And I’ll tell you for why: firstly, because retro PC gaming is an absolute living nightmare. And secondly, because sellers know that scarcity and specificity let them set their own prices. The idea’s simple enough: buy a machine from a particular year from PC gaming’s storied past, and you’ll be able to play games on it without any need for DOSBox, Nightdive remasters or community patches that add widescreen support but also unwanted changes like a new main menu or a…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW T he sheer atmosphere of Ghostwire Tokyo is hard to beat. Out on the streets of the city, monsters roam by the light of neon signs and glowing phonebooths; inside the buildings, eerie stillness gives way to ghostly manifestations that make walls shift and paintings bleed. It’s all the more chilling for its emptiness. The entire populace has been turned to spirits by a dark ritual, so suddenly that their clothes and belongings are left in little piles wherever you go. As you adventure across the city, the only things that move other than you are ghosts and monsters, and even they are rare. But… there can be such a thing as too much atmosphere, y’know? For as much as Ghostwire…