Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2016 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

I’ve been playing Civ for 20 years now. Civ II was my introduction. I loaded my dad’s save while he went to the store (he was Gandhi), built a nuclear missile and dropped it on London. He was mad. I eventually told him I’d kept his save. It’s been fascinating to see how different designers have left their mark on the series since then. Civ VI builds on everything Civ V eventually became. Find out how on p40. EDITOR samuel.roberts@futurenet.com @SamuelWRoberts TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Tweet us @PCGamer Our team of writers TONY ELLIS Specialist in Words, D-Dog This month Ruined his life for the third consecutive month by insisting on S-ranking every mission in MGSV. Just give it up, Tony. Play Doom instead. ANDY KELLY Specialist…

Something is chewing through a door on the derelict space station Volgograd. I’ve been exploring the station room-by-room for long minutes, with my fleet of drones, and so far it’s been a safe and worthwhile excursion. Now, though, I feel like I’ve overstayed my welcome. I quickly command my scouting drone to return to my docked dropship, but just as it speeds past the door that is being chewed through, I hear a loud beeping. My console informs me that my second drone, which is powering a generator, is being damaged by another something that has crept through an air vent and spread across the room. I quickly drive the drone away from the new biological alien threat, which disconnects the power supply, which means I can no longer remotely…

Square Enix knows how to spoil us. In the space of one month, the publisher has brought both Final Fantasy IX and X/X-2 to PC in a condition far superior to its XIII port from a couple of years ago. These are two gems from the golden era of the series. FFX in particular is the RPG that truly got its hooks into me when I owned a PS2. I’m delighted it’s arrived on Steam, and that the only slightly less worthy sequel X-2 forms part of the package. Final Fantasy X is a turn-based RPG, a mixture of exploration and random battles. As Tidus, an athlete living in the metropolis of Zanarkand, you see your home destroyed by an enormous creature called Sin (basically a big whale with a…

Fallout 4’s HUD has alerted me to an enemy, informing me in red capital letters that I’m facing GIANT HERMIT CRAB long before I’ve even had the chance to see it. As I skirt around some dilapidated buildings, I still don’t see the crab. Is it behind rusty truck I’m facing? No, it’s in the rusty truck I’m facing. It’s using the truck as its shell, in fact. The crab scuttles toward me—if something so huge can be described as scuttling. When I begin emptying my incendiary minigun into it, it retracts into its metal shell and starts flinging its young at my feet to be chewed up by my spray of hot lead. Mother of the year. And hermit crabs aren’t the only giants in Fallout 4’s Far Harbor…

Uncharted is voice-andmo-cap actor Nolan North’s most famous work, casting him as Whedonesque, likeable treasure hunter Nathan Drake. One common criticism of that PlayStation hero is that he’s presented as a positive, empathetic protagonist who experiences no trauma from his actions, despite gunning down hundreds of baddies. That’s now a very tired point, but it’s also why his casting as Captain Walker in 2012’s Spec Ops: The Line was such a smart call. Walker starts that game as an action hero too, sent into sandstorm-ravaged Dubai to find out what’s happened to former brother-in-arms John Konrad and his battalion, the Damned 33rd. That’s all the mission is supposed to be: reconnaissance. But under your control and against orders, Walker engages with the conflict—playing what he thinks is the role of…

Good news! Blizzard has made another Blizzard game. It’s clearly something the company excels at, as evidenced by the fact that Overwatch is an excellent new shooter. It offers just the right balance of skill-based action, tactical decision-making and knockabout fun. Turn the page to found out why it’s a game we’ll be playing for a long time to come. Elsewhere, you’ll find plenty more games worth your time— many of them designed to take up a significant chunk of it. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is flawed but enjoyable, Doom is fast and furious, and Witcher 3: Blood and Wine is a sumptuous farewell to one of last year’s best games. All in all, it’s yet another great month in what has already been a fantastic year for PC gaming. Long…

I’m delighted I’ve lived long enough to see a second Mirror’s Edge. The first game is one of those curios that seem like such a weird thing for a big publisher to make: a free-running game set in a whitewashed dystopia, made by a team best known for shooters where the guns are somehow the worst bit. I was hoping Catalyst would make the first game feel like a tech demo by comparison and it does. But not every one of its issues has been fixed. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is, like its predecessor, a first-person platformer based on free-running. The big switch-up this time is that it’s set in an open-world playground, rather than a series of linear levels. But far from being an open world in the mold of…

Doom is an action comedy that reveres every FPS trope it had a hand in creating. The Doom Marine is vindication, violence, and masculine excess personified. In the opening minutes, he rises from a sarcophagus and pops the heads of several possessed Martian zombies. In the next room, the Doom Suit rests, surrounded by candles and demonic insignia. I feel the same reverence. From there, it’s a rude journey to shut Hell the hell up. Abated by a dull multiplayer mode, a limited level creation toolset, and familiar art direction that doesn’t feel as malevolent or creative as modern technology allows, my journey is otherwise one of playful, indulgent FPS action. Hell is my home now, and I won’t leave until a better source of unadulterated fun guts me out.…

Have you ever wanted to get drunk with a vampire? The Witcher 3’s Blood and Wine expansion gives you that opportunity, and lets you ask all the important questions. What’s it like to die and come back? What’s it like to live for centuries in a world that mostly wants you dead? How does the bat thing work? The brooding, complicated undead are just one aspect of an excellent add-on that every Witcher fan should play. You’re invited to the huge, gorgeous new region of Toussaint by the Duchess, who wants you to slay a creature targeting elite knights in her retinue. A twisting detective story unfolds as Geralt investigates the murder scenes, and begins to hack through a series of interlocking plots. The plot has superb pace and variety…

We need to talk about Yogg. There are 133 other cards in this recent expansion, but I don’t love any of them the way I love Yogg. His full name is “Yogg-Saron, Hope’s End”, and he’s an ancient evil dripping with more tentacles, eyeballs, and mouths than can be strictly necessary outside of Cthulhu cosplay. The Old Gods are all minions that costs ten Mana, meaning you need to build a deck that can last until the late game in order to play them. To motivate you to do so, they each have unique, potentially game-winning effects. But Yogg goes further. Yogg brings the laughs. When you play him, the board is encircled by an eldritch purple mist, and for every spell you’ve cast in the game so far Yogg…

PHIL SAVAGE You know how at sporting events, there’s always someone in the crowd holding up some weird sign? Mine would say: “I like games, yes.” STARDEW VALLEY www.stardewvalley.net A farming RPG set in a quaint, happy village full of smiles. Plant crops, catch fish and craft goods, all while nestled in the warm glow of local capitalism. It’s all a little too cheery for my tastes, and yet I’ve played Stardew Valley for almost 40 hours. Either it’s really good, or I’m losing my mind. I suspect both. HITMAN www.hitman.com Here’s another game that’s taken up around 40 hours of my time. This one only has three levels. The Hitman series has always favored replayability, and the latest is clearly no different. It’s packed full of extra missions, from…

Shenanigans! Treachery! Deceit! The Spy has been undone. The games industry has got wise to The Spy’s continued adventures and responded in the most devious of ways. Publishers from far and wide have gathered in LA. Their mission: to prevent The Spy from releasing a bounty of rumors by spilling their own beans. They call this operation “E3”, a name that, The Spy can only assume, stands for the Espionage Eradication Extravaganza. To think of all those fine rumors The Spy had uncovered, all now wasted across a weeklong bonanza of narcissistic whistleblowing (or “series of announcements”, as the participants are calling it). The Spy spent days navigating a series of featureless gray corridors in order to secure the news of a new Quake, only for Bethesda to “announce” it…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2017 PUBLISHER In-house DEVELOPER Snapshot Games www.phoenixpoint.info When I spoke to X-Com co-creator Julian Gollop at the inaugural PC Gamer Weekender earlier this year, he told me that his next game after the excellent Chaos Reborn would be something more in the mold of his cult-classic, turn-based, extraterrestrial-themed strategy series. Phoenix Point is indeed something in the X-Com vein, but it’ll have a very different look and feel. FIRST LOOK “It’s an XCOM-style game with a dynamic interaction between strategic planning and turn-based tactical battles”, is how Gollop puts it. He describes an alien threat that’s always evolving to overcome your tactics. It may share something with the way the battlefield changes in XCOM 2. The aliens couldn’t be any further removed in appearance and style,…

“A MIXER OF LOVABLE ROGUES, GRUFF VILLAINS AND HEROES” Right now, I hate Junkrat. He’s a scrawny, impish explosives expert with a grenade lobbing Frag Launcher. His ultimate ability—a slow charging special attack that fills faster as you do damage and score kills—is a motorized, remote control tire bomb with a devastating area of effect. Put simply, he makes things blow up. Things like me and my team of misfits, who, until Junkrat showed up, were seconds away from winning the match. That’s Overwatch, a multiplayer character-based shooter in which 12 players compete across two teams to fulfill whatever objective the map asks of them. I say character-based rather than class-based because that’s an important distinction. Widowmaker and Hanzo are both snipers, but play completely differently. Mercy and Lucio are…

Homefront is a mash of the past 15 years of shooters, full of story contrivances and designs I’ve played and criticized before: the bad NPC chatter (one guy just shouts “America!”), the dystopian graffiti, the ‘keep the tank safe’ mission. It’s not totally bungled—I had fun for the first half of the ten-hour-plus campaign—but there are a lot of crumbling buildings, uninteresting guns, and repeat objectives to put up with as your silent protagonist steals Philadelphia back from North Korean occupiers. The open world is Far Cry-like, but less visually interesting and with no good reason to backtrack once the story has taken you to a new area. Whether in populated or off-limits zones, stealth is emphasized—the patrols are tough, and big firefights lead to death—but I mostly just ran…

Each new Hitman level brings not just a new location, but a change in tone. Paris was a soiree of elites—the fashionistas below and the information brokers above. Sapienza was light and airy—the sort of place that could accommodate an exploding golf ball. This third level, set in Marrakesh, is something else entirely. It’s the setting for a political conspiracy: a general’s attempt to orchestrate the populace into sparking off a military coup. Hitman’s story is starting to take shape. It’s clear that, as in previous games, 47’s hits are connected. There’s a plan, and we’re slowly working towards its unveiling. So far, this overarching plot is told almost entirely through the short cutscenes that play after the completion of each mission. As such, each mission is its own standalone…

NOW PLAYING I DOWNLOADS I UPDATE I REINSTALL I WHYILOVE I MUSTPLAY THIS MONTH Bet the house on black magic. ALSO PLAYED Overwatch, Hitman Changing class in real life is pretty hard and usually requires either obtaining or losing a large quantity of money. Changing class in Dark Souls III is as easy as visiting a slug lady and asking politely. Rosaria, as she’s known, is a sort of surrogate mother, spending her days on a dusty double bed surrounded by empty wooden cots, which I make sure to smash into hundreds of pieces whenever I visit. Rosaria does want something in return, though: one pale tongue. It’s better not to ask why. To coax these rare drops from the darkwraiths that carry them I must wear a covetous gold…

“The way enemies explode into chunks is gruesomely satisfying” The original Quake was a muddy medieval world of knights, Lovecraftian horrors, and grim castles. But the sequel, cleverly titled Quake II, goes in a different direction entirely. You’re a space marine, naturally, who has crashlanded on an alien world called Stroggos. In a desperate attempt to prevent an invasion, Earth sent an army to the distant planet, but the Strogg knew you were coming and your arrival was a slaughter. The dropships were shot down by anti-air defenses and pretty much everyone died, except you. And so, in true id Software FPS style, it becomes a solo mission. There’s a chance you don’t remember any of that. After all, Quake II is not a game renowned for its deep, complex…