Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2016 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE June DEVELOPER Fiddlesticks PUBLISHER Curve Digital LINK www.huethegame.com The world of Hue is in a state of perpetual monochrome until a researcher, your mother, creates a mysterious ring that gives the wearer the ability to see color. But then she mysteriously disappears and it’s up to you, the titular Hue, to use her magical color-seeing powers to solve puzzles, avoid deadly traps, help people and discover her fate. PLAYE DIT This indie platformer is being developed by a new studio called Fiddlesticks, made up of former QUBE devs, and mixes clever puzzles with a bold, vivid art style. It’s not out until summer, but I spent some time with an early preview build, and it’s already showing a lot of promise. At first it feels like…

Set in the EVE Online universe, Valkyrie is a space combat game designed specifically for VR. It features intense Star Wars-like space battles, but it was something a lot more mundane that really sold it to me. During a battle in an asteroid field, I flew away from the action briefly to follow a mining barge I saw moving slowly through the spinning rocks. PLAYED IT NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2016 DEVELOPER CCP Games PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.evevalkyrie.com I flew alongside it, watching it through my side window, and could hear the deep, thundering roar of its engines. I really felt like I was in the shadow of a colossal physical object. Then someone blew me up with a homing missile. I’ve played a lot of virtual reality games and…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE May 24 PUBLISHER EA DEVELOPER DICE LINK www.mirrorsedge.com I’ve been to three E3s, and 2015 was the best one by far. Not only were Fallout 4, Shenmue 3 and a Final Fantasy announced, but I played a Mirror’s Edge sequel that kept all the good bits of the original. Catalyst is a surprise to me, because the consensus was that the original sold modestly, and business sense says that’s how sequels don’t get made. This open-world follow-up is somehow the real deal. You jump, you run up walls, you climb, you slide. This is Mirror’s Edge, all right—the only thing that takes some getting used to is that protagonist Faith has slightly different reaction animations while you’re platforming. And I might only be picking up on…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE June PUBLISHER Activision Blizzard DEVELOPER Blizzard LINK www.battle.net I suspect Blizzard can’t do wrong with its new team shooter, Overwatch—with more than seven million people registering interest for the beta, it’s in safe territory. Nonetheless, it’s heartening to see Blizzard try to do right by the game. When the beta returns, it’ll be a lot closer to the launch version, including a new progression system that’ll unlock rewards as you play, but nothing that’ll affect game balance. In other welcome news, Blizzard has confirmed all maps and heroes released postlaunch will be free. IT’S HEARTENING TO SEE BLIZZARD TRY TO DO RIGHT BY THE GAME…

Getting into the support groove in OVERWATCH Blizzard recently added definitive skill stats to the Overwatch beta. Previously, you only knew how many kills you had participated in—a truncation of kills and assists that helped players focus on how much they’d contributed, rather than how many of ‘their’ kills had been ‘stolen’. I was worried at first that the change would alter the tone of the game, but it hasn’t. The number of killing blows you land is actually the stat that’s easiest to ignore, because it’s the one with the fuzziest relationship with the only end-of-game result that matters: whether you won or not. Competitive shooters often have a problem with players chasing high scores over victory, and at first I thought Overwatch did as well. As I’ve sunk…

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 TOTAL $ 938 MOTHERBOARD H81M-P33 MSI $46 A bargain-priced microATX board that pairs nicely with the Pentium G3258, letting you overclock into 4GHz+ territory. PROCESSOR Pentium Anniversary G3258 Intel $70 Ludicrously cheap and overclockable, the dual-core G3258 rivals far more expensive processors in gaming performance. GRAPHICS CARD AMD R9 380 2GB Sapphire $200 AMD’s R9 380 is a…

Psychonauts 2 is coming to PC, thanks to a successful campaign on Fig, the not-aswell-named-as-Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. Double Fine was looking for $3 million to make the game, and at the time we went to press was well over 80% of the way there with days to go. So, it might not happen, but it seems very likely that you’re getting a sequel to the oft-talked about 3D adventure. Probably. Psychonauts was a platform adventure starring the psychically-powered Raz, who escaped from his family’s circus to join a psychic summer camp with the eventual goal of becoming one of the titular secret agents. The sequel will be set inside Psychonauts’ HQ, which will be a mini hub world, and the game will include new and existing abilities for Raz. A…

USER REVIEWS Dota 2. Rosh has a Santa hat and I guess other stuff changed. Tony Heugh That’s certainly one way to describe patch 6.86. CS:GO, because of the insane skill gap. And chickens. Hayden Burns Be honest, it’s just the chickens. Rainbow Six Siege. It’s fun and exciting to play. My favorite game right now! Phillip Breen It’s fun bashing out walls with a sledgehammer. And in the game. I’ve been burnt-out lately, so it’s been Clicker Heroes while depressingly drinking beer. Necrospunk This is maybe the saddest thing we’ve ever heard. You could at least play Candy Box. Cities: Skylines. What a dope game. I’ll eat up any DLC it has! Harry Bojangles Make sure you buy it before you eat it. It’s only fair. Fallout 4. It’s…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2016 DEVELOPER Caged Element PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.gripvideogame.com The Rollcage series felt very much of its era—that weird late-’90s/early-’00s hinterland defined by The Matrix, the X-Files’ troubled post-Duchovny years, and an inexplicable number of people being really into Blink 182. Psygnosis’s original combat-heavy arcade racer felt less clean and futuristic than its main rival, Wipeout. And while it was never as popular, its dark, industrial aesthetic earned it plenty of fans. PLAYE DIT Grip is positioning itself as Rollcage’s spiritual successor—two of its team worked on the original games—and, despite being built in Unreal Engine 4, it isn’t doing much to modernize. It’s the same chunky, flippable cars, the same sparse, rocky tracks full of tunnels and machinery, and the same drum ’n’ bass soundtrack from…

In Mankind Divided, Eidos Montreal is doubling down on the elements of Deus Ex it brought back to life in Human Revolution. The series’ fourth title has new ways to experiment with AI, super-detailed environments filled with double the amount of non-player characters and, at the center of it, Adam Jensen, your ever-evolving cybernetic superbeing. It’s layering systems on top of those of the first game, getting closer to the original intent of Deus Ex, while the new team puts its own contemporary spin on the series. “There’s a lot more freedom in your abilities, you can punch people more than two times without running out of energy,” gameplay director Patrick Fortier told PCG’s Tom Senior a few months back. “You’re free to chain lots of things together, so like…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Late 2016 PUBLISHER EA DEVELOPER BioWare LINK www.masseffect.com The part of Mass Effect: Andromeda I’m most excited about is seeing that universe more fully realized. With the Mako returning, and the move to the Frostbite engine, Andromeda will be as big a leap from ME3 as Inquisition was from Dragon Age II. Here’s everything we know. The combat will be familiar, but will build on what we saw in ME2 and 3. Characters from the old trilogy won’t be returning, because the story is set in an entirely new galaxy. Expect an all-new cast, then, with familiar species from the first trilogy. Co-op multiplayer has been strongly teased for a return, too, by senior development director Chris Wynn. As of August, the game was just entering…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2016 PUBLISHER In-house DEVELOPER Amplitude Studios LINK www.yourvision-theirfuture.com The original Endless Space was Amplitude’s first attempt at making a 4X strategy. It showed. Despite a few clever ideas and a gorgeous UI, it never felt as essential as the bigger, uglier Galactic Civilization series. Endless Legend was a vast improvement— ever more beautiful and packed full of well considered tweaks and changes to an otherwise unadventurous genre. For Endless Space 2, Amplitude plans to push things further still. To do this, the team is introducing a new internal politics system. Rather than representing your empire purely through numbers and influence, each ideological bloc within your territory will vie for power. If you want to transition towards a scientifically driven empire, for example, the most effective method…

There’s a warning about Life is Feudal that’s seemingly built into its very title—that little play on the word ‘futile’ that’s a tad too perfect to be an accident. Be grateful for it. You could end up like me, fully confident that months of sampling other survival sims like Rust and ARK: Combat Evolved had prepared you for what this medieval themed variant has to offer. But after spending several minutes combing the beach I’d washed up on for the flint the tutorial told me I could use to make an axe (along with some branches and plant fibre), I knew I was wrong. This was real. A little too real.  There’s a lot to admire about that devotion to realism, particularly as it allows interactions with objects that most…

Alexander Graham Bell, one of several historical celebrities I’ve met within mere moments of setting foot in Victorian London, has given me a rope launcher. With it I can quickly grapple my way to rooftops, and create ziplines between buildings to zip across. It provides an alternative to freerunning across rooftops, which feels the same as it does in other Assassin’s Creed games: fun and dynamic at first, but ultimately a bit routine, and sometimes even exasperating. Which is not a bad way to describe Assassin’s Creed Syndicate itself. Syndicate offers other new toys and features, mostly cribbed from other open-world games but still enjoyable enough to freshen the proceedings, at least for a while. Horse-drawn carriages enable GTAesque hijacking. You can direct thugs from your gang to do some…

Your love for or frustration with Chaos Reborn hinges on one question: do you feel lucky? It’s a game of surprising depth and complexity, where wizards wage war by casting powerful spells and summoning hideous beasts—but it’s also one where, almost guaranteed, your dragon with a 90% chance to clobber the enemy in the next hex will fail miserably five times in a row, only to be casually annihilated by a passing goblin. Summoning or casting a spell, you only have a percentage chance of it actually working. But that chance is malleable in a couple of basic ways. You can cast magic to slowly bring the general aura of the map over to either Law or Chaos, making your spells and summons more effective, and you can spend mana…

Why I can’t stop stealing in FALLOUT 4 Seems to be growing well,” I tell the malnourished farmhands before ripping their gourds from the ground and stuffing them down my trousers. Strangely, they’re cool with this, so I try selling the grotty vegetables back to them to see what happens. They buy them. They actually buy back the gourds they saw me steal. Fallout 4’s wasteland is my own personal pick ‘n’ mix. A kidnapped baby isn’t the driving force behind my exploits in this nuclear-ravaged world. No, my primary motivation is building an increasingly epic looter’s paradise loaded with disco balls and pictures of kittens and musical pressure pads that play La Cucaracha badly when you walk on them. The boy comes second after I finish my dance floor,…

Far Cry Primal is set around 12,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Mesolithic period. This was, historians tell us, a time before the invention of almost all of the mod cons that characterise previous Far Cry games. Guns, vehicles, wingsuits, hang gliders, mini-helicopters, rickety towers, purple suits and dubstep—the stone age world had none of these. PLAYED IT Despite everything that’s absent, one of the most surprising things about playing Far Cry Primal is that it feels so remarkably familiar. Its open world is filled with side-quests, emergent events and outposts. New (or, more accurately, ancient) protagonist Takkar moves exactly like Far Cry 4’s Ajay—even down to the rope that functions just like Far Cry 4’s grappling hook. Stealth is similarly identical. Sneak up to an enemy and…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE January 15 DEVELOPER Night School Studio PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.nightschoolstudio.com When you first arrive on Edwards Island, it doesn’t look like much. You step off the boat into a lifeless, abandoned coastal town, with shuttered shops and an empty car park. You’re here with a group of teenage friends to hang out for the weekend. You sit on the beach, play dumb games, share embarrassing stories, and drink beer. PLAYED IT But then you decide to investigate a mysterious cave and things suddenly take a turn for the supernatural. You have a radio and activating it brings up a dial. Stand in just the right place and tune to a certain frequency and you’ll hear ghostly, otherworldly sounds—a clue that there’s something strange about this place.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE March 11 DEVELOPER Io Interactive PUBLISHER Square Enix LINK www.hitman.com I’m dangling from a lighting rig three floors above a packed fashion show, dressed as a sheik. If a model or the mark himself should look up, their last sight will be of Agent 47’s junk, or whatever it is he keeps down there. Probably another weapon. But they don’t and, modesty preserved, I haul myself onto the rig to start planting explosives. Regrettably, security is more observant— there’s a shout from an opposing window, and a buff, dark-suited guard raises an assault rifle. A sheik, however, isn’t the sort of person you shoot on sight, even if he’s using restricted property as a jungle gym. The guard hesitates and instead calls me over, but a…

Hinterland Survival games are bigger than ever on PC, but it’s a saturated market. For every DayZ there are dozens of unimaginative, derivative zombie games released to exploit this sudden surge in popularity. Sitting quietly among all this chaos is The Long Dark. It’s a survival game, sure, but one that follows its own path, making no attempt to ape its peers. It’s a philosophy that mirrors that of the studio making it. And the result is one of the most interesting, stylish and understated survival games you can play today. The decision to base Hinterland on Canada’s Vancouver Island—an unusual setting for a game studio—was a personal one. “My wife and I didn’t want to raise our family in the city,” van Lierop explains. “But once we’d established ourselves…

There are no Clint Eastwoods in Hard West, no cigarillochewing badasses who stare down the sherriff’s posse in the middle of the street. That’d just get you killed. It’s more like I’m controlling the Wilhelm-screaming extras in a big western shootout, popping up and firing one shot at a time, turn after turn—a lot of staying put and shooting at squibs in the dirt. Hard West is told in a series of short frontier stories, which play out as choose-your-own-adventure text prompts on an overworld map and turn-based combat scenarios. The former part is quite good. The voiced narration is excellent, the writing efficient, and the decisions you make interestingly affect later combat. In one story I sent my posse too far into a crumbling mine and busted a character’s…

Proudly wielding THE STICK OF TRUTH SAMUEL ROBERTS THIS MONTH Killed Kenny nine times while waiting for the credits to roll. ALSO PLAYED Ephemerid: A Musical Adventure, Overwatch I’m crawling up Mr Slave’s ass and screenshotting things I can’t legally put in this magazine. I’m near the end of The Stick of Truth after powering through it from start to finish in one weekend, and I’m currently battering my way through some unspecified white stuff with a flaming katana, while Butters Stotch politely comments on our very pink surroundings. The Stick of Truth is a perfect digital representation of the South Park universe that hits every right note, from the broadest strokes (ManBearPig, Kenny dying) to the most granular details (funny flavor text for every item, Big Gay Al calling…

1 TRIBES FREEWARE It’s time to dig out your trusty jetpack How here’s something special. Hi-Rez Studios has made the entire Tribes series available for free, including a couple of games that don’t even feature the word ‘tribes’ in the title. There are six games that have just had their price tags nixed by Hi-Rez: Earthsiege and its sequel, Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2, plus Vengeance and a rogue PlayStation 2 game named Aerial Assault. There are more tribes here than in a Bruce Parry documentary —and if you got that reference without the aid of Wikipedia, feel free to give yourself a gold star. As many of the Tribes games are purely multiplayer affairs, you might have trouble finding a match by regular means nowadays. Fortunately, there are irregular…

MID-RANGE GRAPHICS CARDS Pick the perfect pixel-pusher for your PC The graphics card is the hero component of your gaming PC. Above all else this is the part that makes your games look awesome. Or, on the flip side, this the component that needs replacing when you notice stuttering performance in the latest games. While we’d all like to have a graphics card with X-factor, the reality is that most of us will never be able to afford a Titan X or Fury X. Don’t let it get you down: the cards at the mid-range of the market are stupendously powerful these days, as the selection on the next few pages will attest. The question is: which one is the best? Q&A Nvidia or AMD? At the top of the…