Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

Cultivate a successful esport—or so the theory goes—and reap the benefits elsewhere in your game. I’ve heard several variations on this idea over years of esports writing, where companies sometimes talk about pro gaming in similar terms to supermarket loss leaders—unprofitable in themselves, but able to attract players who then spend money on the game. But a new partnership between Emory University and publisher Hi-Rez Studios aims to put that theory to the test. “We’ve always believed that watching esports helps our game business,” says Todd Harris, Hi-Rez cofounder and president of its esports broadcasting subsidiary, Skillshot Media. “There was an appetite in the community to play, [and] publishers started to support that with prize money and structures and casting and production.” He goes on: “Publishers did that because the…

Imagine a game in which every kill is accentuated by a crash of cymbals. Every punch punctuates a hip jazzy tune, while the tempo picks up at an exhilarating pace. Particularly skillful assaults are accompanied by a cacophony of clashes and drum beats. FIRST LOOK And as goons surround you with guns and flamethrowers, wholly ignorant of your strength and fury, you make quick work of them. You slam, clobber and thrash until they’re a mushy pulp—all the violence under a pop art sheen. This is what Ape Out, a smash-’em-up fuelled by frenetic action and a snazzy soundtrack, looks like in its playable demo. Turning the brutal rampage of a gorilla into electrifying music, players can, to an extent, dictate the game’s pulse. They can kamikaze through levels to…

There are some intimidating enemy factions in Scavengers, a strange hybrid that’s part-survival game, part-competitive shooter and part-cooperative exploration game. There’s the Scourge, an alien horde that sprouts from the ground, and the Outlanders, a band of rogues hardened by an eternal winter. Neither is as powerful as a bear. FIRST LOOK It’s a single bear that finds our lowly group; four survivors shot down from a space station to explore an Earth claimed by decades of catastrophic climate change. It’s a single bear that chases us until we run into another group of players in a shootout with an Outlander camp. As the final blizzard moves in, and the extraction point is marked 500 meters away, it’s that single bear that leaves us for easier prey and cleans up…

THE PERMAFROST HAS MELTED, UNLEASHING A TERRIFYING ALIEN VIRUS. AN EERIE MIST ROLLS ACROSS THE PLANET, COMPELLING PEOPLE TO WANDER INTO THE OCEAN, WHERE THEY EMERGE AS HIDEOUS, MUTATED MONSTERS. THE WORLD IS A MESS, AND IN TURN-BASED STRATEGY GAME PHOENIX POINT, IT’S YOUR JOB TO CLEAN IT UP. When the game starts in 2047, most of humanity has been killed, abducted, or transformed into alien monstrosities,” says lead designer Julian Gollop, who is perhaps best known for creating the original X-COM series. “But there are a few isolated groups that have managed to survive.” “The Phoenix Project organization you’re the leader of is very diminished,” he says. “You’re being attacked on all sides by various different powers. But out of the ashes of the devastation of the virus, which…

The Collage Atlas is a game I tend to think of more as a digital papercraft theateR. Cut-outs of bushes and lampposts—each drawn in black ink using 0.03mm fineliner pens—emerge from the rough white watercolor paper ground. Arranged in layers around a central gap, these create a garden walkway, leading towards an intricate, wrought iron-style pen-and-paper gazebo. “I draw everything on paper then scan each element,” explains the game’s creator, John Evelyn. He then cuts them out in Photoshop and removes the paper texture. “I take the bare line art and back it with a high res photo of a blank sheet of my paper.” 3D elements work more like paper construction projects. “I print the flat UV map outlines (like flattening the foil wrap off a chocolate Santa), then…

Like a reverse-world version of Hideo Kojima’s solar-powered dungeon-crawler Boktai, Capy’s uncompromising roguelite demands to be played in total darkness. Here, you’ll find yourself instinctively leaning in to better make out your minuscule character and their surroundings. It may not do much for your posture, but you’ll feel a physical connection to your brave adventurer, likewise peering anxiously into the gloom. An indulgently slow opening sees the camera descend towards a tiny speck that becomes a sailboat, tossed around by a roiling sea. Eventually, it lands on a beach from where you begin a long climb to the labyrinth you’re here to explore. There’s a whiff of self-importance about the whole routine, but this is Below’s way of letting you know that you need to be patient. Calculated risk is…

A teenage girl steals an x-ray machine in order to perform gruesome experiments on her body. It’s a hell of a premise, but that’s par for the course for Deconstructeam, whose varied back catalogue includes a cyberpunk pottery game. The studio describes 11:45 A Vivid Life as a ‘narrative experiment’ paving the way for a bigger project, and I’d wager the experiment has to do with the game’s unusually subjective method of storytelling. Protagonist Laynie essentially decides her own story in this point-and-click. She feels that her skeleton isn’t her own, and the obvious solution is to x-ray parts of her body, and then to cut out any foreign matter she finds. You’re in charge of the scanning, via a cumbersome minigame that you have to repeat far too often, but Laynie…

They’re a generous lot, my employers in Forza Horizon 4. Bonuses I have been given over my time in the game include buckets of praise every time I make other road users fear for their lives, an actual house in exchange for a minor favor, and pretty much an entire garage full of cars. Actually, scratch that: It’s more like a car dealership. I’ve got everything from retro bangers that Simon from The Inbetweeners would turn his nose up at, through to an expensive supercar that spits fire from its exhaust in a fashion that makes me suspect it’ll fail its next MOT. Still, I’m not satisfied. The reason? My outfit. While it was easy to make my Drivatar look at least vaguely like the real me (I’ve got a…

The new year is here, but my pick for the best gaming monitor hasn’t changed. The best gaming monitor is the Asus ROG Swift PG279Q. It combines 1440p with 144Hz refresh rate, overclockable to 165Hz, and has G-Sync to keep your gameplay smooth. Asus and Acer have recently (finally!) launched new 27-inch 4K HDR 144Hz G-Sync monitors—essentially 4K HDR versions of my top pick here. Those monitors are fantastic, but they also cost around $2,000. So unless you have just won the lottery, I stand by my Asus PG279Q recommendation. The great thing about displays is that, unlike graphics cards where their lifespan is usually only a few years, a good display can keep you going for the better part of a decade. With such a long lifespan, it pays to…

Epic Games, riding on the success of Fortnite, is taking a shot at Valve with its very own digital distribution platform. The Epic Games Store differs from Steam in a number of ways, but mainly in the fact that developers who sell their games on it receive a much bigger cut of the profits. It’s an alluring prospect in the financially uncertain world of game development, and a shrewd move by Epic. Compared to Steam, which offers developers a 70/30 split for games that earn less than $10 million, the Epic Games Store offers an 88/12 split. Devs who use Epic’s own Unreal Engine 4 will even have their 5% engine royalty waived for sales on the Epic store. “In our analysis, stores charging 30% are marking up their costs…

As consumers Let me start by saying thank you. I’ve been a subscriber since I could read, and I convinced my mother to sell her Apple Mac for a Pentium III so I could play Baldur’s Gate. You guys have always been my go-to. This has been bothering me for some time now, and something has to be said. Let me preface this with the fact I understand there is a time to complain. However, it seems to me that comment sections and forum threads have become full of entitled kids and man-children that seem to love to have a cry about everything. As consumers, our vote and biggest say is our cash. Yet the trend seems to be to make our own minds up about what a game or…

In March 2017 a video was uploaded to YouTube titled ‘Petscop’ with a description that read, “The game I found.” Little did I know that what was shown would go on to become one of videogames’ greatest mysteries, one that would inspire a small group of indie developers to recreate it. PLAYED IT For them, it all began with that single anonymous video upload in which a mysterious narrator, who would come to be known as Paul, discusses a PlayStation game he found. As he explores this strange and unfinished game, he finds and catches pets by solving a series of rudimentary puzzles. Despite this innocuous beginning, it soon becomes clear this isn’t your average game as things start to take a darker turn and Paul, following the instructions on…

Haiku Adventure is the work of James Morgan and Ceri Williams. It channels their conversations about growing up on islands and their shared connection with nature into a game. The art style draws heavily on the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print tradition and, although still in development, will be featured in an exhibition at the William Morris Gallery. The exhibition, which runs from Feb 26 to May 26, is fitting since it was an earlier show at the gallery that brought ukiyo-e prints into the equation. “The prints seem to acknowledge that capturing a truly accurate representation of nature is an impossibility,” says Williams, “and instead shows a stylized view that gives a fleeting impression of how the natural environment is experienced.” He adds that the absence of a single point…

It’s odd to think that Luna—a game with such rich textures and which plays out its gentle story in a variety of interactive terrarium-style spaces—was ever intended as a solely 2D game. Porting it to VR happened about halfway through development after the team experimented with taking a version of Luna to the Oculus platform. “The tactile quality of the art lent itself to VR,” says Luna’s art director Glenn Hernandez. “But this meant that we could no longer replicate my concept paintings in the VR realm since the 2D camera was very curated.” Instead, Hernandez would greybox the basic forms of the environments, and the team would see how different arrangements felt in the headset. Modeler Allena Hail would then add definition to the greybox using Hernandez’ paintovers for…

Katamari Damacy is ridiculous. It’s a vast amount of good ridiculous, with a smattering of bad ridiculous, which serves to remind you that it’s a game that’s very much from a previous console era. You, the minuscule Prince of the Cosmos, must help your father, the incredibly buff King of the Cosmos (also unsubtly well-endowed thanks to a pair of spray-on trousers) repair the night sky. There is no prophesy to fulfil, no monster to thwart. Instead, the sky was ruined by your father partying a little too hard the previous night and now he’s grumpily pressing you into service to fix it. If you stop to examine the story, it’s pretty bleak. The King treats his son terribly, gets out-of-control drunk, and won’t face up to his responsibilities. But…

A few years ago, Games Workshop loosened its grip on the Warhammer 40,000 setting, and the result has been a glut of small-budget games set in the grim darkness of the far future. The quality has been mixed, but every so often a game like Mechanicus comes along that uses the opportunity to explore a previously neglected corner of the Warhammer universe, and makes it all worthwhile. The Adeptus Mechanicus are, in many ways, the perfect encapsulation of what Warhammer 40,000 is about, a bizarre Gothic fusion of tech and religion. They are the chief scientists of the Empire, but treat science like a religious cult. Mechanicus translates this unusual faction into a tactics game, and does so wonderfully, oozing character from every pore. There’s no such thing as cover,…

Parkitect is pleasant to the point where it turns into a problem. Its gentle pace and inoffensive aesthetic makes it easy to get sucked into and spend a good amount of time with, but its desire to please also makes Parkitect rather risk averse. In a year that has witnessed some bold and innovative management sims, Parkitect plays too safe to stand out from the likes of modern hits such as Megaquarium. The game negotiates a pleasing balance between building and maintaining your theme park. Beyond the constraints of budget and available rides, you are free to create your park however you like. You can fill your park with standard rides and user-created coasters, or get hands-on with every detail, sculpting terrain, tweaking the turns and loops of every coaster,…

As anyone who has ever been on Tinder will surely testify, romance and horror often go hand in hand. That might be why Atelier Sento’s The Doll Shop works so well, as it takes the dating sim genre and carves out its beating heart. In this beautifully illustrated point-and-click, you play as a doll-maker in a remote Japanese village that has been tainted by tragedy, and that’s currently being blanketed in endless snow. As with Atelier Sento’s other freebies, right away it’s the artwork that will draw your eye here. There’s a tangible sense of depth to the village environment, which features a thick stack of parallax layers and a roving camera that swoops around the diorama-like scene. When your insular doll-maker enters a building, the perspective flattens as the…

It’s fine, OK. It’s fine. It’s just… let’s not forget it was you who initiated. “Request medic.” You said that. You requested health, so I placed a medical crate. And sure, I’ll admit that it wasn’t a wholly altruistic act. I was trying to complete Battlefield V’s Tides of War objective to heal 400 points of damage with crates. This was a marriage of convenience. You needed health. I needed someone to heal. And then you ran past my health crate, and what? Died? Was that your plan? I don’t think that was your plan, but it’s what happened. I’m not going to revive you. There was a medical crate right next to you, and you charged past it and now you’re dead. I don’t blame you, per se, but…

After another year that felt as if it’s hidden a few extra years inside of it, it’s the season to be grateful that I’m warm and cosy inside when outside it’s anything but. Time for the game that takes the meaning of winter blues to a whole new level. The very premise of Frostpunk always made me apprehensive to pick it up. It’s not just a city builder about building, a management sim about management. Instead, it’s about compromising and watching well-laid plans fail. As realistic as that is, I just want my little virtual citizens to be happy and whole. On the outside, there’s no reason for my instant attachment. Frostpunk doesn’t let you zoom in closely to your citizens. They’re just a bunch of grey-cloaked Johns, Jameses, and…

Every other day, it seems that some band of intrepid dataminers finds hidden, outdated, or mysterious content buried in the code of our favorite games. This isn’t negligence. Instead, it’s a peek into a little known reality of game development: That unused code is left in databases because it’s too risky to remove. Defender’s Quest DX dev Lars Doucet compares disabled (rather than removed) code to a nest of cords. “You can’t say for certain what is plugged in to what without taking a lot of time to figure it out.” This is especially true if you didn’t write the code, for instance if you’re working on a large team. Deleting old, seemingly obsolete code can risk breaking something important. “A DEDICATED ENOUGH COMMUNITY (HI, DISCORD) IS GOING TO FIND…

The Outer Worlds is not just sci-fi: It is exuberantly sci-fi. Blood-red trees pepper valleys of strange cylindrical rocks and alien shrubs. A spaceship rumbles overhead, coming in for a landing at the nearest spaceport. Rings grander than Saturn’s carve an arc across the horizon, and a field of stars shines impossibly bright in the afternoon sky. It’s a world I already know I want to explore: The colorful vistas of No Man’s Sky, but in an RPG that looks and feels very Fallout, just a million miles away and pre-nuclear armageddon. FIRST LOOK It’s a good time to be the creators of Fallout. Not Bethesda, the studio behind the disappointing Fallout 76: It’s a bad time to be Bethesda, with new Fallout 76 problems popping up every day. But…

Inkle’s sci-fi archaeology adventure, Heaven’s Vault, is one of the most promising detective games that I have played in recent years. Instead of a murder to solve, you’re playing as archaeologist Aliya Elasra, investigating sites of historical interest, and using inscriptions and relics to discover an ancient civilization. PLAYED IT The demo build focuses on an overgrown ruin, hidden away on a lush moon. As well as artifacts to collect for further study, you will discover inscriptions which you can use to build a little library of translations for the ancient civilization’s hieroglyphic language. When figuring out the language I was using a mix of context, guesswork and common sense at first. For example, I’d eliminate any of the translations which resulted in nonsense. Then I’d see whether any of…

Conrad Roset’s main focus for the poetic platformer Gris was on creating an illustration that players could get lost in. Roset is an artist and illustrator whose work has been exhibited in galleries, featured in magazines and books, and commissioned by brands like Adidas and Zara. Gris was his opportunity to create a world, swapping the static for the fluid. The game unfurls as a tale of loss and sorrow—a dreamy experience that’s more about evoking a kind of wordless enchanted bittersweet mood than offering up a thesis. As such, the imagery is the star of the show. Shapes cluster into plants, buildings form out of collections of columns, platforms, and staircases. A gigantic bird shifts between a recognisable silhouette and an animated fluid mass. Gris picks up motifs from…

As I write this, 35,000 people are playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 on Steam. That’s more than Artifact, Valve’s new card game, and giants like Garry’s Mod, The Witcher 3, and Football Manager. It might seem like an anomaly, but anyone who’s spent any time in this sim’s recreation of Europe will understand completely. Czech developer SCS Software released Euro Truck Simulator back in 2012, and the game has since developed a cult following—including several members of the PC Gamer team. But why? Fundamentally, because it’s good. It has satisfying driving physics, a vast, atmospheric map, and a peaceful, stress-free way about it that you can lose an evening to. Fans of the game often describe it as hypnotic, and it really is. But as the small development team added…

The Just Cause series has a knack for holding your attention in short bursts. It can cause you to grit your teeth as you wingsuit so close to mountains that you can taste the snow spray, and grapple-hook up to helicopters to escape the mushrooming flames of exploding bases. It also gives you the freedom to tether a goat to a balloon, hook yourself onto it, and float off into the stratosphere. And yet, thanks to some sparing improvements—mostly in the way of chaos-causing gizmos—Just Cause 4 is still capable of charming me. For all its annoyances, it still says to me, with a mischievous twinkle in its eye, ‘Yeah, but do other games let you do this high caliber of silly stuff?’ Which of course they don’t, unless you…

Let’s get it out of the way. Yes, that’s an anthropomorphic pig and a duck, and yes, you can play as a fox, too. Ha! But you’ll forget their inherent ridiculousness as you start to explore Mutant Year Zero’s skeleton-strewn Sweden and face its stern tactics challenge. Very quickly Bormin was simply my gruff stalwart tank, Dux my sharp-eyed, crit-dealing sniper, and Farrow my sneaking shotgunner. God, I love that gang. Let’s get the other thing out of the way: The setting is third-hand Stalker. But again I forgot it as I got to grips with Mutant Year Zero’s meeting of real-time exploration and turn-based strategy. Here’s the idea: The world is divided into lots of discrete but connected areas as you set out to find a member of your…

Heroes are Artifact’s defining element. You get five per deck, and three of them start on the board—one in each of the three lanes. There are four colors that make up the cards in your deck—red, green, blue, and black. If you want to play a red card, you need a red hero in that lane. Heroes assault your opponent’s towers and protect yours, and they bolster your deck with signature cards. You protect them and they protect you. When they die, you’re usually sad. Much like a game of Dota, winning in Artifact is all about making sure your heroes are in the right place at the right time. Regardless of their starting positions, which are chosen at random, heroes will shift from lane to lane over the course…

You’ll be reading this in January, when Twitter is banging on about New Year’s Resolutions and Easter eggs are competing with Valentine’s plushies for shelf space. But I’m writing this in mid-December, when every surface is covered with Game of the Year notes and the local Christmas market has run out of my favorite cheese and macarons. I’ll get into why this December framing is important to Yoku’s Island Express in a moment. First, I just need to say that I understand macarons are a pain to make, but only if you’re intent on making them look nice on Instagram. Everyone else should get the option to buy the singed, mismatched, ‘which real human has time for this ageing egg whites nonsense’ macarons, which still taste fine. Yoku’s Island Express…