Inhoudsopgave van December 2024 - PC Gamer

During the early stages of the Covid pandemic, Mickole Klein Nulud was spending a lot more time at home than usual, due to lockdowns. He was watching a lot of entertainment, and that sparked something inside him. “[After watching] some of those media, I got really inspired. They reached into my heart.” “What we did, was take inspiration from the people we knew growing up,” Nulud explains, “especially in school. I guess that’s how we made them feel real. It’s not just the characters, actually, it’s almost everything in the game. Getting things from our experiences growing up here in the Philippines.” Using something old and real to create something new and fictional is clearly an effective method; at least when it comes to creating characters who resonate with the…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASENovember 20, 2024 DEVELOPER GSC Game World PUBLISHER GSC Game World LINK stalker2.com I am, unfortunately, a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to videogames – especially ones like STALKER. In my heart, I know that atmosphere has precious little to do with graphical fidelity, that a skilled artist can make a deeply immersive game with naught but a few pixels, some shillings, cardboard, and elbow grease. But there’s a reason I’ve never properly sunk my teeth into STALKER: Shadow of Chornobyl despite all the praise it’s gotten – and I have to admit it has quite a lot to do with presentation. The game never looked bad for its time, and its immersive atmosphere is rightfully lauded – but its visuals have had a short…

RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER WolfEye Studios PUBLISHER TBA LINK wolfeye-studios.com Here’s the good news: WolfEye – the Weird West studio from Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio – has a new immersive sim coming. Ready for the bad news? That’s about 85% of what we know about it. WolfEye is keeping its cards very close to its chest right now, to the point that it’s not even telling us the name. Still, we have managed to wring some details out of the man himself. In a chat with PC Gamer, Colantonio said to imagine the game as being somewhere between 2017’s Prey and Fallout: New Vegas in structure, but “still with the values of previous games we’ve worked on… its mobility and that kind of physicality, the level design, the world-building of…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Valve PUBLISHER Valve LINK s.team/a/1422450 The ‘launch’ of Deadlock has been one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in this industry, with tens of thousands of players playing a game that officially didn’t exist. Even now, with secrecy restrictions lifted, there are no marketing, trailers or even enough screenshots to meet Steam’s own rules. Despite the lack of an official announcement and the game still, at the time of writing, being an invite-only beta, Deadlock has captured a significant audience thanks to being a mash-up of hero shooter and MOBA that seems to be pleasing both groups of players. At the highest level, Deadlock is pretty simple, it’s a third-person shooter with a roster of 21 characters that all have a unique…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Roguelike deckbuilder wherein you try to cheat at blackjack EXPECT TO PAY £12.80 DEVELOPER Purple Moss Collectors PUBLISHER Yogscast Games REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme, 16GB RAM, AMD Radeon Graphics MULTIPLAYER No LINK yogscast.games This roguelike deckbuilder is a game with its tongue so far in its cheek that it would be in danger of losing that tongue if someone were to, say, punch it in the face. Unfortunate, given that this fun, clever riff on blackjack is often facepunchingly frustrating. If you’re a living saint who knows nothing about the sinful world of gambling, blackjack is a game wherein you and your opponent take turns drawing from individual decks of playing cards. You’re both trying to get a score that adds…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERThe Big Onion Institute LINK bit.ly/CoagulationGame Saddled with an enormous debt, you can hardly pass up the opportunity to become a Clot Management Specialist on a living meat planet known as Carrion Prime. It’s exactly as fleshy as you’re expecting, as you oversee a blood pumping operation in this stressful horror game. It all starts simply enough, as you push the button to start the pump and then hang back, just in case anything goes wrong. At first it’s leaks from nearby pipes, which are easily fixed with your wrench, and then unsettling blockages (toothy fish, mostly) that need to be plucked out and fed into the nearest grinder. But the scariest part is having to put on a diving suit and ride…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£11.40 DEVELOPER inkle Ltd PUBLISHER inkle Ltd If my crime is killing people who probably deserved it, then lock me up now. Malcolm, my husband, went into the deep for being a philandering proto-fascist; Clarrisa was a mewling adulterer; and Lady Armstrong took her martinis dirty, like a dog licking vomit out of sock. Disposing of them is a public service. Reading this back, I wonder if Overboard! is bringing out the worst in me. It’s a compact, immediate, amusing take on the golden age of detective fiction; the best of Dorothy Sayers, blended with the pace and charm of 80 Days, garnished with some revealing self-analysis. It’s perhaps worrying that I got away with murder on my first attempt, even if I did get…

Here’s something nice and comforting about track racing: you know what’s going to happen next. While nearly every other genre is constantly trying to defy and subvert your expectations about what lies just around the corner, some even introducing procedural generation so that even the game doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, in sim racing it’s about doing the same thing, over and over again, but better. IT ANALYSES YOUR LAPS AND TELLS YOU SPECIFICALLY HOW TO IMPROVE And that gives it a unique advantage: it’s easier to teach someone how to be quick around a track than it is to teach them how to win a round of Counter-Strike 2 or score a goal in FC24, because there are fewer variables. When you’re hotlapping for a new record…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW ROBERT JONES THIS MONTHLooted with wild abandon. ALSO PLAYEDWH40K: Space Marine 2, Kingdom Come: Deliverance I should have seen it coming really. The moment Kay Vess, space scoundrel, approached a very, very familiar-looking crack in a rock face and, with an all-too-familiar side-on animation, proceeded to squeeze her body through it, pausing mid-crack to take the familiar look back. Yes, Lara Croft lives once again and, being candid, it’s not just this incredibly similar animation that makes me feel like I’m playing Crystal Dynamics’ fourth entry in its Tomb Raider series, most likely called Galaxy of the Tomb Raider, rather than Ubisoft’s new Star Wars: Outlaws game. Kay Vess, galactic tomb raider, can do plenty of other things that feel incredibly Crystal…

FIRST LOOK RELEASE September 10, 2024 DEVELOPER Atlus PUBLISHER Sega LINK p3re.jp/en/expansion Atlus has remade Persona 3’s Aigis-centric epilogue, which means a lot of Persona 3 Reload’s combat and very little of its social stuff. This was a bit controversial the first time it was released in 2007. If you love the game’s combat, or are just super invested in Aigis, then there will be something here for you. But if the idea of slogging through a dungeon as Aigis doesn’t tickle your fancy, you might want to hold off.…

COVER FEATURE Kingdom Come: Deliverance II Kingdom Come: Deliverance did something that no other RPG had tried to do before when it released back in 2018: create a game based in a fully-realised medieval world that prided itself in depicting the times and the lives of its characters in a very realistic way. Here was an RPG in which Henry of Skalitz, the game’s raised-by-ablackmith peasant protagonist, was no ‘chosen one’ superhuman fantasy hero, cutting down foes with ease left, right and centre, but instead a regular guy who needed to approach medieval life and the decisions he made in it with both eyes open to the world around him. Insult a noble? Then there’s going to be genuine consequences for the lowly Henry. Get caught stealing bread? Henry’s…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A 4X-RTS hybrid full of massive space battles EXPECT TO PAY £42 DEVELOPER Ironclad Games PUBLISHER Stardock Entertainment REVIEWED ON Intel Core i9-13900k, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK sinsofasolar empire2.com Forgive me father, for I have sinned. A lot. Sins of a Solar Empire 2’s journey to launch has been an extremely confusing one. It technically left Early Access on the Epic Games Store (very quietly) a while ago, but that 1.0 version was actually missing some big things, like the final faction, and in sore need of some polish. Now it’s finally arrived on Steam, though, and I have some good news: it’s brilliant. The dynamism inherent in each map is the headline attraction. Sins 2’s solar systems…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A subterranean mining and crafting sandbox EXPECT TO PAY £16 DEVELOPERPugstorm PUBLISHERFireshine Games REVIEWED ON Intel i7-9700K, RTX 4070 Ti, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER8 player co-op LINK fireshinegames.co.uk/games/core-keeper I wish I’d kept track of how often I said, “What the heck is that?” while playing Core Keeper. It must have happened a dozen times in the first dozen hours alone, like when I came across a conch shell the size of a school bus or stumbled upon a subterranean castle 20 times the size of my base. And let’s not forget when a caterpillar as big as a passenger train came stampeding through the tunnel I was exploring. WTF? Core Keeper’s got a lot in common with survival games like Valheim, plus plenty of Minecraft…

COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?An adventure puzzle game in which you save the world by sliding its shattered tiles around EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERboomo PUBLISHER boomo REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK bit.ly/SliderGame Somehow, Slider has turned the worst parts of adventure games into one very fine puzzle game – and a generous one, given the lack of a price tag. I’m talking about sliding tile puzzles, which tend to be shoehorned into adventure games for reasons unknown, inciting audible groans whenever I’m forced to complete one. Why am I playing – and enjoying – Slider, then? With its monochrome, top-down world comprised of sliding puzzle pieces? Primarily, it’s because of how charming it is. It has such…

THEY’RE BACK OLD GAMES REVISITED NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?The loot Sam Lake’s brain would drop if it died in a videogame EXPECT TO PAY£11.40 DEVELOPERRemedy Entertainment PUBLISHERRemedy Entertainment REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-7700, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK store.steampowered. com/app/108710/ Alan_Wake Is it possible to forget you’ve written an entire book? The premise of Alan Wake, on the surface, seems absurd. But I’ve started re-re-reviewing games for this column that I’d literally covered only months before, so perhaps it’s feasible. Maybe I’ve already re-reviewed Alan Wake and this is actually a clever metacommentary (I have, but it was years ago, so it’s fine). That’s the level of cleverness that Alan Wake aspires to: the sort of cosy, self-referential attention to detail that makes you…

We’ve experienced a new form factor take hold of PC gaming over the past few years: the handheld gaming PC. Advancements in onboard graphics chips and chip manufacturing technologies means we now have the low power, high performance processors required to make a fully-fledge gaming PC able to fit inside the pockets of a man with very sizeable pockets. That’s progress. It all kicked off with the Steam Deck. There were a handful (get it?) that arrived prior to that, except they weren’t very good. Nowadays a smorgasbord of Windows-based handhelds are available thanks to the performance offered by AMD’s Ryzen 7 7740HS and Ryzen Z1 Extreme – effectively the same chip – powered by the 780M iGPU. But where do manufacturers go next? New and improved Ryzen AI chips…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick these parts if 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 MOTHERBOARD B660M Pro RS ASRock £103 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400F Intel £170 With ten cores, six of them the Performance kind, this Raptor Lake Core i5 is fantastic value and a great all-rounder. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX…

MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED NEED TO KNOW RELEASEOctober 24, 2006 PUBLISHERActivision DEVELOPERRaven Software LINK marvelmods.com Superhero fatigue? We’ve all felt it. Marvel’s star-studded roadmap of blockbuster movies and videogames has no end in sight, and you had better get used to the cape and cowl if you don’t want to miss out. My issue is, Marvel can never resist bringing out the big guns. It’s all Wolverine, Spider-Man, Captain America – yawn. Where’s my Diablo-lite APRG where I can play as my favourite comic book hero, mustachioed SHIELD agent Dum Dum Dugan? Never mind, I found it. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance had a healthy lineup of 23 playable characters when Raven Software released it in 2006, and the novelty of building your own Marvel team-up in couch co-op…

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT You can’t fault Ben Starr’s commitment to the bit. Since lending his voice to Clive Rosfield in Final Fantasy XVI, Starr has cemented himself as a fan-favourite voice actor: from shitposting on Twitter, to cosplaying as Tifa, to becoming a whole-ass meme thanks to a particularly bright light at The Game Awards. I couldn’t help but ask about all of it when I sat down to chat with him ahead of Final Fantasy XVI’s PC release. “I didn’t know what was going on because I was like, ‘I’m gonna put my phone away, I’m just gonna enjoy the night…’ And yeah, this guy tapped me on the shoulder, and went, ‘Excuse me, you’re a meme’. Then I looked at my phone and it had just…

Special Report PCG INVESTIGATES NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT Videogames don’t usually get second chances. They come out, they succeed or fail, a narrative sets in, and that’s it. There are exceptions: No Man’s Sky, Final Fantasy XIV. But those games were saved by the developers and propped up by a dedicated community. If a game is abandoned, slagged off, forgotten… it’s largely out of luck. Until recently Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite was all three. But Twitch streamer and fighting game personality Maximilian Dood loves the Marvel vs Capcom series so much, he’s put together (and is bankrolling) a development team to rescue its unsuccessful final entry. The mod they’re producing is called Infinite & Beyond, and it’s trying to give a forgotten gem another chance. To understand why this…

PLAYED IT NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Far Out Games PUBLISHER Konami LINK deliveratallcosts.com Talk about a surprise .When I signed up to attend a Konami preview event, it was almost entirely to get some time with the Silent Hill 2 remake and Metal Gear Solid Delta. I knew nothing about the third game on the docket: chaotic, isometric delivery sim Deliver At All Costs. By the time I left, DAAC was easily the game I was most excited about. No shade towards MGS or SH2, but my Mercenaries-loving self has felt a constant hunger for massive environmental destruction and physics-based ludicrousness for the last 19 years, and DAAC delivers both in spades. SAME-DAY DELIVERY Deliver At All Costs is a ’50s pastiche that puts you in the…

Sigil, The City of Doors, isn’t like other cities. It’s not a place of orderly brick walls and cobbled streets, fuggy taverns and candlelit keeps. It’s not inspired by myths, fairytales, or folklore, and it can’t be contained in a single aesthetic; steampunk, biopunk, dieselpunk look sensible and uniform next to Sigil’s rusting, jagged architectures; an inn may look like a chitinous fossil, a shop of curiosities may be framed by massive blades that look like they were designed to deter the grasp of a wrathful deity. And that alley over there? Watch closely, and it may just give birth to a new street before your eyes. Even though you can eventually become familiar with Sigil’s web of dreamlike rules – where a door might be a bloodstained cloth, or…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A modern re–imagining of that RTS with all the Minotaurs. EXPECT TO PAY £23 DEVELOPER World’s Edge, Forgotten Empires, Tantalus Media, CaptureAge, Virtuos Games PUBLISHER Xbox Game Studios REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7 9700K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK store.steampowered. com/app/1934680/ Age_of_Mythology_ Retold/ How are the mighty fallen. RTS was the beating heart of PC gaming once, now surviving on the platform’s periphery as indies, remakes and remasters. Enter Age of Mythology Retold, not a 100% faithful translation of the 2002 original but, as the name indicates, a modern interpretation. This is a particularly tricky kind of alchemy to pull off, and although there are some tonal mis-steps such as the voice acting it largely succeeds in knowing…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A bombastic third-person shooter/brawler set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. EXPECT TO PAY£55 DEVELOPERSaber Interactive PUBLISHERFocus Entertainment REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 MULTIPLAYERYes LINK focus-entmt.com/en/games/warhammer-40000-space-marine-2%20 Over the course of its roughly eight-hour story campaign, Space Marine 2 presents the Warhammer 40,000 setting at a whole new level of spectacle. It feels huge, authentic, and visually sumptuous – the kind of proper, grown-up, big-budget experience fans of the tabletop game have been dreaming of for years. But the sad truth is that I was tired of actually playing it before those eight hours were even up. It’s disappointing, because the game does make a fantastic first impression. As Space Marine warrior Lieutenant Titus, returning from the first game, you’re dropped…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPER Gumpy Function LINK bit.ly/SuperDassalo I can’t be alone in missing licensed platformers (right?), even if their quality was variable, to put it kindly. So I was happy to fire up Super Dassalo Land, a new game playable on GB hardware, but also in your browser. What’s it licensing? An actual person, comedian Tommy Dassalo, who has been shrunk down and inserted into his notebook. Stages reflect the inside of his head, with World 1 being themed around ramen, and World 2 reflecting his late-night obsessive phone use. Part Comix Zone and part Mario, it’s a hyperactive, funny throwback with some good ideas that doesn’t outstay its welcome. We’ve got to talk about the pixel art, which (like most of the game) was…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£16.75 DEVELOPEROut of the Blue Games PUBLISHERRaw Fury A good journal can bring purpose and humanity to a game. Instead of a dry list of completed missions, the likes of Arthur’s notebook from Red Dead Redemption 2 become a tactile record of everything you’ve done: a personal list of bludgeonings and robberies, punctuated by the occasional sad drawing of a bison. When I pitch the ‘best journals in games’ listicle, Norah Everhart’s will certainly be on there. It looks beautiful but it’s also an essential way of recording clues. This is handy, especially for anyone (me) without the capacity for differentiating seven different types of triangle. Best of all, the clues Norah the Explorer records are arranged in a way that makes it obvious when…

TECH REPORT As hard as it is to conceive now, 25 years ago both computing and the internet itself were new and poorly understood entities. There were constant ads on TV for internet literacy courses in which frowning 40-somethings were guided through tasks like sending an email by a grinning technician in a colourful polo shirt and a headset mic. This sudden onset of life-changing beige machinery was happening so quickly, and none of us had the slightest idea how any of it worked. Which is how it came to pass that when my supposed friend Luke Woodroffe told me, one day on the school bus, that I could just download a better graphics card for my PC, I didn’t immediately disregard the notion. It was as simple, he told…

NOW PLAYING CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING ROBIN VALENTINE THIS MONTH Introduced “cowabunga” into his regular vocabulary. ALSO PLAYED Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers I ’ve been seeing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles everywhere, lately. There’s a new TV show out, my favourite board game just announced a TMNT crossover, and hell, I couldn’t even walk through town without seeing a bunch of luminous green tie-in bath bombs in the window of Lush. Some would argue I’m just proving very susceptible to a big marketing push for the series’ 40th anniversary, but I choose to believe it’s fate. As a kid, the Turtles kind of passed me by – clearly now the universe is telling me to course-correct. Of course, I’m only truly capable of processing things when they’re in the…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW JOHN STRIKE THIS MONTH Lost count of the total crotch-kicks in Sharpe. ALSO PLAYED Co-pilot on the M6. Other than the usual ‘finding work and starting a family’, moving from the north to the south of England has been a 17-year challenge to find just one decent meat and potato pie. Cornish pasties just don’t cut the mustard, and chains such as Greggs won’t admit accountability (despite frequently allowing pigeons to wander into their premises). Over the past two decades I’ve had no other choice than to purchase and transport meat and potato pies across multiple county lines. It is with tremendous enthusiasm then, I discover the game Thank Goodness You’re Here! and get to play out my pie-craving lifetime side-mission in…

REINSTALL OLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 1998 PUBLISHER Eidos DEVELOPER Looking Glass Studios LINK gog.com/en/game/thief_gold For 15 years, I’ve felt like a fake immersive sim fan. My relationship with Thief, one of the earliest imm-sims and PC stealth games, resembled the stereotype of an adult trying to finally finish that copy of Moby Dick they keep by the bed: I kept Thief and its sequel, The Metal Age, permanently installed, would try to begin a new playthrough of one or the other every few years, and I’d always stall out somewhere in the campaign, usually about a quarter of the way through. I’ve developed a history, love, and nostalgia for Thief and Thief 2, but I’ve never rolled credits on either – until now. After gelling…