PC Gamer (US Edition) November 2021

“at its heart it’s just a big, earnest celebration of games”

I love when we get to do the Top 100. For all the drama it can cause (please be nice on social media), at its heart it’s just a big, earnest celebration of the games we love. Getting to write 100 effusive entries is a treat—and hopefully you’ll enjoy reading it just as much. But even as huge as the Top 100 is, we’ve still got space for loads of other great features — including a dive into Dying Light 2: Stay Human, a game whose mix of zombie action and RPG-like reactivity is more tantalizing than a fresh, juicy brain… PRINT EDITOR robin.valentine@futurenet.com TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com…

the pc gamer team

JAMES DAVENPORT Twitter @FraserIBrown This month Took a week off for once, though he just played 4Xs and moaned which is what he does here anyway. SARAH JAMES Twitter @vision_burn This month Pushed her frankly unhealthy love of wolves to its absolute limits with Valheim mods. RACHEL WATTS Twitter @rachel_wattts This month Kept telling us about her ‘boyfriend dungeon’. Save it for the weekend, Watts. ANDY KELLY Twitter @ultrabrilliant This month Sadly leaves us for pastures new! We’ll miss you, you wonderful, brilliant traitor.…

official idiots act

The Challenger 2 is a British tank that’s been in service since 1994, and has seen service in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Iraq. It’s also found in War Thunder, Gaijin Entertainment’s free online game. There’s a commitment to accuracy in War Thunder: Realistic vehicle and weapon physics, which players partake in spirited discussions about in the forums. The Challenger 2’s debut, for instance, sparked a thread 319 pages long (and growing). Things got out of hand in early July, however, when one player demonstrated slightly too much commitment to realism. The player, who claims to be a Challenger 2 commander and formerly of the British Army’s Armored Trials and Development Unit, complained the in-game model is inaccurate and more vulnerable than in reality—then, to prove it, posted classified images from the…

highs & lows

HIGHS Gabe Gear A pleasant surprise about the Steam Deck was the reasonable cost of $399 for the basic model. Doggone Snoop Dogg’s Twitch stream was muted for days without him realizing. Fighting Fantasy Final Fantasy XIV is on a tear, with Square-Enix even briefly running out of digital copies. Crypt-no Reports from China indicate crypto-miners are beginning to try and sell used cards in bulk. Bad code Microsoft employee Volodymyr Kvashuk exchanged Xbox gift codes for $10 million in Bitcoin over 2017-2019: He’s just been jailed for nine years and fined $8.3 million. Last-gen FIFA FIFA 2022’s PC version lacks the ‘Hypermotion’ animation system. LOWS…

analog flick

Boomerang X is an arena shooter that shouldn’t work on a gamepad. You’re able to toss a mystical bladed boomerang like its an extension of your body, dragging its wide arc through multiple enemies, recalling it whenever you like, and even magnetizing yourself to its current location. This is a game where you can’t stop moving, where success is found dancing through the air, whipping the camera around to poke at half a dozen goo monsters from across the map in a single leap. Mouse-aim is almost required. Even with decades of experience with my trusty mouse and keyboard, I found it pretty demanding. So in an effort to bring Boomerang X to as many people as possible, the team at Dang! turned to an emerging, experimental gamepad control scheme as…

bionic man

Back in the ’90s, everybody told Bioware that the western RPG was dead. “That’s the best news you can hear,” cofounder Trent Oster laughs. “That means that there is absolutely nobody looking at your market space, and you can roll in and do fun things.” It also meant, however, that the studio was short on good examples to follow. Bioware’s model for a great D&D game, Pool of Radiance, had come out in the late ’80s and looked dated. By 1995, the studio was instead playing Warcraft, the pioneering real-time strategy game. That’s why, when you click on a Baldur’s Gate party member, you often hear a funny, fourth-wall breaking quip in the style of early Blizzard—a “Yes, oh omnipresent authority figure?” or “Stop touching me!” Warcraft is also why Baldur’s Gate…