PC Gamer (US Edition) December 2022

ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Was too busy painting orks to play any videogames. Heading into my first meeting with Subnautica studio Unknown Worlds about its then-secret new game, I thought I knew what to expect: another slick survival game. That would’ve been great—but I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised by what I saw instead. Moonbreaker brings the best of tabletop wargaming to the digital realm—not just the turn-based strategy, but also the joy of collecting, painting, and making your army your own. As a noted Warhammer nerd, I couldn’t be more excited. robin.valentine@futurenet.com TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com The PC Gamer team FRASER BROWN Twitter @FraserIBrown This month Was the only person even more delighted than me to be messing about with miniatures on the job. WES FENLON Twitter @wesleyfenlon This month Took a trip…

If you visit the Steam page for early access survival MMO Last Oasis, you’ll find an article bluntly titled ‘Last Oasis Sucks’. It’s not written by a disgruntled player, nor an opinion piece pulled in by Steam’s news aggregator. It was written by Last Oasis’ developer. Last Oasis is a nomadic survival MMO where players construct and travel in land-crawling fortresses called walkers. It entered Early Access in March of 2020, promptly experienced some major server problems, and three days later went offline and offered refunds. Last Oasis resurfaced, but concurrent player counts have wavered between a few thousand and a few hundred since, and its Steam reviews have remained firmly ‘mixed’. But players weren’t the only ones struggling to enjoy it. “When I say it sucks, I mean I’m not having…

Stardew Valley is the golden child of farming sims. Inspired by Nintendo’s Harvest Moon, it’s gone on to sell more than 20 million copies since 2016 and kicked off a torrent of imitators on PC. Why haven’t we had that moment for the monster-taming genre? Pokémon clones are abundant, but none have had a sliver of Stardew Valley’s success, yet alone Pokémon’s. If there’s a formula for reimagining classic Japanese series as modern indies, monster tamers haven’t found it. “An RPG where [players] can create their own adventure based on the characters they know is of course appealing,” say Jochem and Marcel, the indie developers behind this year’s Coromon. The challenge for indies is, “Players would often rather stay with what they know than trying out new games,” they say. There have…

James Chaytor and his teams have worked on Apex Legends, The Elder Scrolls Online, multiple Call of Duty titles, Microsoft Flight Simulator and far more than could ever be listed here. Yet Chaytor’s story begins before Sprung Studios; even before his videogame work. UI and UX are important elsewhere, too. After working his way up to creative director in a web marketing firm in the late 1990s, he began consulting with UK mobile company Three, which at the time had just rolled out 3G. Chaytor helped the firm with the challenge of making new kinds of content usable on small devices. It was at this point that he founded Sprung Studios, and expanded its services to more clients. But by 2009, the recession had hit budgets hard and companies were pulling…

It’s all too easy to compare the continued existence of Dead Island 2 to the zombies it features. Lurching on for years, long after it seemed dead, passed from one studio to another. In spite of the name though, Dead Island 2 is practically a new game. According to David Stenton, when development was taken over by Dambuster in 2018 it was “built from scratch”. The only thing they kept was zombies and its LA setting. “That serves the ‘paradise gone to hell’ pillar.” Though the genre in which it sits feel like it never dies, with zombie games still releasing on the regular. What does something like Dead Island 2 bring to the table? What even is the identity of this series? Speaking to Stenton and James Worrall at Dambuster,…

It’s the third mission of the game, and, if this was Homeworld 2, I’d be screwed. Right now, I only have access to recon ships and interceptors – basic fighters that, per Homeworld’s rock, paper, scissors design, are weak against the bigger, meaner frigates. And I’ve been tasked with securing an area protected by two bigger, meaner frigates. But I’m not playing Homeworld 2. I’m playing its successor, a game that Blackbird Interactive describes as being 20 years in the making. A game that takes concepts once considered back then, but dismissed because the technology of the day just wasn’t up to the task. I’m playing Homeworld 3, a space RTS that’s all about terrain. Those frigates are guarding a small segment of a colossal, derelict ship, which acts as the battlespace…