Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2016 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

I’m always excited about the PC Gamer Top 100. Not just because the idea of an annual 28-page feature makes my team pull the same tired, slightly annoyed expression—I do enjoy that, admittedly—but because it spotlights what rude health PC gaming is in. This year’s Top 100 has a different feel to last year’s, the top 20 in particular refreshed by a bunch of new entries. That’s great, because it shows our tastes as a team are changing to reflect an influx of new, brilliant PC games. Enjoy. samuel.roberts@futurenet.com @Samuel WRoberts TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Tweet us @PCGamer Our team of writers JOHN STRIKE Specialist in FPS, slow-mo This month PC Gamer’s design hero once again smuggled Max Payne into the Top 100. And his beloved Battlefield…

HIGHS GTA V Redux A fan-made mod that manages to make Los Santos even prettier. Inside We won’t be able to forget that brilliantly weird, disturbing final act any time soon. Evolve The troubled 4v1 shooter has been given a new, free-to-play, lease of life. Amplitude Sega adds the Endless Legend dev to its impressive strategy stable. GPUs Finally, some powerful graphics cards that won’t break the bank. Rocket League Daft novelty arena Neo Tokyo shouldn’t really be in the ranked cycle. Low stock All these new GPUs are great, but they’re rare like precious diamonds. CS:GO gambling The dodgy world of Counter-Strike gambling has been rightfully exposed. Overwatch The robot brain that decides each play of the game needs an upgrade. Team Fortress 2 The long-awaited addition of matchmaking…

REMOTE HACKING This augmentation lets you hack electronic devices from a distance, and you can upgrade it to increase its range. Use it to disable security cameras from afar or open code-locked doors while concealed. TITAN Thanks to a neodymium skin underlay matrix, which is made of nano-meshed rare earth magnets, the Titan augmentation gives you a brief but massive armor boost when activated. TESLA This is a targeted electrical discharge system, which is a fancy way of saying it fires tiny arcs of electricity at people and stuns them on impact. Upgrade it and you can zap four enemies at once. FOCUS ENHANCEMENT This augmentation is located in your nervous system and gives you an increase in accelerated awareness, improving your reaction time. Which basically means you can slow…

Achild is hunted through a shadowy forest by masked men. He snags his foot on a branch and falls over, and one of the figures lunges at him, pins him to the ground, and chokes him to death. In another incident, the child stumbles into the headlights of a truck and a masked man guns him down with a rifle. Later on, he’s chased by a pack of snarling dogs who catch him and tear him apart in a vicious frenzy. Inside, the new game from Limbo developer Playdead, is full of these moments of shocking, indifferent, and slightly perverse violence. Even though you know dying means being spirited back to a generously placed checkpoint, the brutality you’re forced to watch gives your mistakes extra weight. That you’re playing a…

NOW PLAYING I DOWNLOADS I UPDATE I REINSTALL I WHY I LOVE I MUST PLAY As a child I unleashed my inner omnipotent psychopath on the unsuspecting Sims. More specifically on the slightly less blocky humanoids of The Sims 2. I spent my pocket money on whatever expansion I could get my hands on. Add some H&M clothing? Bought it. Decorate using Ikea furniture? You better believe I got that one. EA could have released a Variety of Grasses expansion and I would have counted out my pennies so my Sims could enjoy luscious lawns—that’s how enthralled I was with the game. I returned to this game expecting to get bored. My constant playing of it relied on my own imagination to create scenarios, build houses and generally just muck…

“I started to misremember it as dumb and lightweight” In 2008, when EA tried to resurrect the Red Alert series with Red Alert 3, its marketing focused on the tongue in cheek, deliberately ludicrous story. Trailers showed George Takei, Tim Curry and JK Simmons chewing the scenery of their respective Empire, Soviet and Allied war rooms. Official descriptions heralded the return of the “humor” and “popcorn style story”. It’s fitting that Red Alert, of all series, should be the subject of such revisionist history. NEED TO KNOW RELEASED October 2000 PUBLISHER EA DEVELOPER Westwood Studios LINK www.bit.ly/commconq WELCOME BACK, COMRADE GENERAL How to play on Windows 10 “American OS weak like turtle without shell. To bring glory to Mother Russia, download Aqrit’s ddwrapper from www.bit.ly/ra2wrap. Extract ddraw.dll and aqrit.cfg into…

WHO WATCHES THE SPY? Sliding through air ducts like a greased ferret down a drainpipe, you navigate silently towards a lavish, wood paneled office. Behind a portrait of Lord Percival Nintendo, the founding father of videogames, you find a safe. You enter ‘0451’ on the keypad. It opens, revealing a briefcase marked by a single piece of masking tape onto which the word ‘INTEL’ has been crudely scrawled. Another successful mission. Or is it? For a lesser spy—note the lowercase ‘s’ and lack of definite article—the contents of such a briefcase would be implicitly trustworthy. Soon, the information within would be spread far and wide. However, The Spy is no mere spy. The Spy is The Spy. And as The Spy, The Spy recognizes the need for care and diligence,…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2017 DEVELOPER Sloclap PUBLISHER Devolver Digital LINK www.absolvergame.com Absolver is the best thing I saw on day one of E3. Its third-person melee combat is a furious mix of Jedi Knight’s approach to stances and dueling, and the combo customization of cult PS2 fighting game God Hand. Its precise, satisfying action affords plenty of opportunity for player expression, too. I think it could be one of the next big indie hits. The first ten minutes of my hands-on took me through a tutorial fighting AI enemies, teaching me how block, parry attacks from both sides, and feint. And that’s just the tip of all there is to learn. You can customize your moveset in the pause menu at any time. I was using a PS4 controller,…

ALEX VEGA A former pilot with the Belltower private military company, Vega is one of Jensen’s contacts with the pro-aug Juggernaut Collective. TALOS RUCKER A humanitarian aid doctor and the leader of the Augmented Rights Coalition. A hero to augmented people and a terrorist to the government. JIM MILLER The surly branch director of Task Force 29 in Prague and Jensen’s boss. Formerly a member of TAG, an Australian counterterrorism unit. DAVID SARIF A wealthy entrepreneur once at the forefront of augmentation technology with his company Sarif Industries. He now takes a back seat. VIKTOR MARCHENKO A heavily augmented member of Rucker’s ARC. He’s outspoken and has radical views about the oppression of augmented people. VÁCLAV KOLLER An underground augmentation expert who has a workshop hidden beneath a book store.…

Every Paradox grand strategy game tries to capture the essence of an era: the rivalries and discoveries that defined it, the way they reshaped the world. In Hearts of Iron IV, all roads lead to global destruction as players race to use the tools of progress to win a spectacular international deathmatch. In that respect, this latest offering is a scenario rather than a sandbox like the rest of Paradox’s strategy lineup. It’s a very big, very complicated scenario that can play out many, many different ways, but it’s not the open-ended playground of Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis. Those are games where the Iroquois can conquer the world, or the Vikings can become the militant defenders of the Zoroastrian faith. Here, your options are more stark: as Germany, do…

If you’ve ever worked in a bar, there are certain things you’ll have experienced: sticky surfaces, people complaining you haven’t poured the Guinness right, and ‘regulars’ who expect you to know their usual order because they’d rather be leering at the waitresses than taking an extra 15 seconds to belch “Coors please” in your general direction. Valhalla, as it’s known for ease of reading and typing, boils it all down into something called “Cyberpunk Bartending Action”. This mostly consists of talking and serving drinks. Cyberpunk, yes. Bartending, yes. Action? Definitely not. Valhalla is a passive game of listening to people’s woes and occasionally slinging something alcoholic in their direction. Make drinks, don’t mess up, get paid, pay your bills and buy yourself nice things so you can come back into…

I liked to think of us as boogeymen. A tale Alliance mothers would tell wayward children to make them behave. “If you don’t finish your herb baked egg, Kreck and Kanhoji will drag you to Kalimdor!” The reality was so wonderfully disappointing it needs explanation. Kanhoji was my fourth attempt at a World of Warcraft character. My first was a Tauren Shaman called Ahanu. He didn’t like healing, so he died lots, and never left The Barrens. Then came a dwarf called Amundr, who I abandoned at level 40 because mail armor looked wrong on a hunter. Finally found the character who defined WoW for me. Kanhoji was a gentleman rogue. I decided he was a retired cook from a pirate ship, the name of which I’m too preemptively embarrassed…

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 $935 MID-RANGE BUILD Our recommended build for playing the latest games TOTAL $ 1,722 ADVANCED BUILD Go above and beyond with a PC powerful enough to end worlds TOTAL $3,340…

When Adam Jensen visits eccentric augmentation specialist Václav Koller in his secret Prague workshop, he thinks he’s going in for a tune-up. But he wakes up to discover that Koller has uncovered a selection of experimental augmentations that have been lying dormant in his mechanical body. The catch? They use a huge amount of power, and Jensen has to choose which of his regular augs to disable to use them. Not only that, but Koller has triggered a factory reset in Jensen’s systems that means he’s back to square one. All those upgrades you carefully selected in Human Revolution? Gone. But don’t worry, because you still have your praxis points, meaning you can respec Jensen to either exactly what you had before, or something completely different. These are two great…

For a game based on a film that made $2 billion at the box office and one of the world’s biggest toy brands, Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens feels surprisingly uncynical. It retells the story of Episode VII with charm, humor, and self-awareness, rendered lovingly in Lego bricks. And even though it’s a simplistic, easy game aimed at younger gamers, older Star Wars fans will still get something out of it. It opens with the Battle of Endor, which is a clever way of adding classic versions of Luke, Vader, Han, and the rest of the gang to the game’s vast stable of playable characters. You stomp around in an AT-ST, battle stormtroopers as Wicket the Ewok, and fight alongside Vader as Luke to take down the Emperor. It’s…

Critics often use words like “floaty” or “imprecise” to describe sidescrolling platformers that don’t quite nail the feel of jumping. These are words for games that are almost great— let down by the constant, nagging annoyance of a core interaction that doesn’t feel good enough. So yes, Trials of the Blood Dragon’s platforming sections feel floaty. And yes, they’re imprecise. But neither descriptor quite covers it. Here’s one that does: abysmal. It’s as if Trials—a series of games about riding bikes through perilous obstacle courses—is a poor fit for running, gunning, and jumping. This one is a continuation of 2013’s Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. Its two protagonists—Roxanne and Slayter— are the children of Rex Power Colt, the original’s Michael Biehn-voiced lead. They, too, are cybercommandos in a neon cyberpunk…

It’s been a little over two years since Smite was pulled out of beta and slapped on the table as Hi-Rez Studios’ entry into an already bustling genre. Unlike other games that have tried to compete and failed (we salute you, Infinite Crisis and Dawngate), Smite’s still trucking along, and is deep into its third season of content, each one shaking the game up and improving it in different ways: it’s a very different game to the one announced way back in 2011. Always hot on the heels of its brothers and sisters that dominate the field, Smite has kept up with the blistering pace of MOBAs through both its theme, the recognizable identities of Norse, Roman, and other gods, and by giving the genre a third-person perspective. No top-down…

ANDY KELLY BIOSHOCK 2 www.2kgames.com/bioshock Yeah, the original’s a classic, but BioShock 2 is a worthy sequel. Laying traps for incoming waves of Splicers was a fun way to experiment with the combat systems, and playing as a Big Daddy gave you a different perspective on Rapture. An underrated game that’s better than its predecessor in many ways. THE LONG DARK www.intothelongdark.com I’ve played a lot of survival simulators, but this is the only one I find myself returning to. It’s a wonderfully stylish, atmospheric game that’s both brutal and beautiful. A recent update added challenges, including one inspired by The Revenant where you’re hunted by a giant, furious bear. THE ADVENTURES OF SQUARE www.duskers.misfits-attic.com I always dreamed of a game that looked like the retro-futuristic computer interfaces from Ridley…