PC Gamer (US Edition) April 2022

It’s not easy to be upbeat at the moment. With everything going on in the world, it’s natural to feel that there’s little to look forward to. But that only makes it more important to take stock of what a great year ahead it is for PC gaming. Let us be your beacon of positive thinking this month, as we show the things you should be psyched about for 2022 and beyond—from upcoming games, to hardware innovations, to the trends taking the industry in new directions. The future’s bright, and the future’s now. robin.valentine@futurenet.com TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com…

WES FENLON Twitter @wesleyfenlon This month Led the way on a feature so full of positivity he had to kick a puppy afterwards to balance himself out. CHRIS LIVINGSTON Twitter @screencuisine This month Couldn’t get settled in The Settlers without some horrible AI coming along and burning his town. FRASER BROWN Twitter @FraserIBrown This month Customized himself a horrific daemonic form. If only he could give it a proper sleep schedule. DAVE JAMES Twitter @Not_the_GK This month Solved the GPU shortage crisis by figuring out that you don’t need a new one after all.…

Project Zomboid was first released as a tech demo in April 2011, before releasing on Steam in November 2013. It had a rocky ride in those early years, with a big game leak and the theft of two laptops containing a bunch of code which hadn’t been backed up: developer The Indie Stone would, rather winningly, go on to give an industry talk titled How (Not) To Make a Game. Indie Stone now need to write another presentation: How to turn your passion project into a viral hit ten-and-a-half years after release. Since December 2021 Project Zomboid’s player numbers have gone through the roof: The cause is a major update that overhauls the game from the ground-up. Build 41 introduced a new animation and movement system, vastly improved multiplayer functionality, a…

HIGHS Catholic tastes The Vatican played the Undertale song ‘Megalovania’ as jugglers performed in front of the pope. Direct line To Hell Someone rigged up id’s Doom to be played via rotary telephone. Cheaters never prosper Tencent is winning massive payouts from companies that sell cheating software. Final Fanta-NFT Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda is the latest exec to drink the NFT Kool Aid. Stolen EVGA GeForce RTX 30-series cards have now turned up… in mining rigs sold from Vietnam. Norton my watch Norton antivirus is now installing Ethereum crypto-mining software on users’ machines. LOWS…

The ’90s Lara Croft still lives. While Crystal Dynamics reinvented Lara as Girl Rambo, dedicated fans are keeping her original lycra-clad incarnation fighting fit thanks to the editing tools included in 2001’s Tomb Raider V: Chronicles. Community hub TRLE.net hosts over 3,000 new adventures to play added over the years, many full-length games packed with fresh environments and enemies. For more than 20 years fans have been mastering and refining Chronicles’ tools, which let you export standalone games for easy sharing. Tomb Raider’s 25th anniversary has brought out the very best, though even 2021’s most notable releases are still just a sampling from a vast vault of treasures. Movement At The Monastery by Australian developer Lochie is an example of what ‘classic’ Tomb Raider looks like today. Challenging even for veteran players,…

It’s a nostalgic time for Chandana Ekanayake, who spent much of his early career living inside The Matrix. He joined Shiny Entertainment at the height of red pill fever, when the studio was swept up in the Wachowskis’ plans for crossover movies, comics, anime, and games. “The first thing I got to do was read the scripts for the sequels,” Ekanayake recalls. “They were still shooting it. The Wachowskis were very much involved and writing stuff for the game. It was an Expanded Cinematic Universe, before that was a thing, really.” Working as a character modeler on Enter the Matrix, Ekanayake was sent 3D head scans and photos of Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. He pieced together red leather trench coats using drawings and samples from Kym Barrett, the legendary Australian costume…