Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2019 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

When you pilot a yacht in Just Cause 3, you don’t think about the sound of the engine—at least consciously. Your brain acknowledges that, yes, this sounds like you’re behind the wheel of a yacht, and the illusion is created. But recording the sound of that boat’s rumbling engines, and the roar of the ocean as it moves through it, involved a real 60-foot yacht, a man named Watson Wu, multiple microphones and a lot of puke. “For the onboard yacht sounds, multiple microphones were rigged at the front, the side, in the engine room, and at the helm and rear,” says Wu, a sound designer and field recordist who works in TV, film and videogames. “We had to leave the engine room door open to capture the audio, so…

Cash payments. Exclusive development support. Marketing features with increased visibility. These are just a few of the incentives that may be offered to a developer in return for committing to a new platform early. An ecosystem needs projects supporting it, and devs need to ensure that they have a substantial audience to sell their games to. However, when a platform is actual hardware that takes up space, the costs and considerations developers face can vary wildly. “I first got to try the Magic Leap 1 as part of a contract early in 2018, and I immediately knew that I wanted to find a way to work with the device,” says veteran independent developer and consultant Ryan Evans. “[Magic Leap] lets you imbue everyday objects and spaces around you with new…

I read last month’s letter about how the gaming world has become overly critical, even entitled, and would like to add that I believe gaming journalism needs to take some big responsibility for this. PC Gamer is the number one PC games magazine, and has raised several generations of gamers. It is common for a game you don’t like to receive an overly negative, insulting review about a game. The Crew and The Crew 2 come to mind—your reviews were so nasty it beggars belief. Maybe it is time to step up and start being more responsible 100% of the time, rather than 95% of the time. James Phil: This is something we think about a lot. We do write far fewer negative reviews, largely because there are so many…

PLAYED IT It was all going well until my potato farm exploded. There I was, erecting a few villager houses on the outskirts of my burgeoning mill town, when suddenly, ka-blam! Fire and mash everywhere. I’m still somewhat mystified by this turn of events. I mean, how do you blow up a potato farm? The scene is chaos. People are screaming, and several buildings have caught fire. I deploy the volunteer fire brigade to douse the conflagration, but the local newspaper pounces with a front page story on my ‘inadequate’ response to the potato farm explosion. The one that occurred five minutes ago and was the least predictable event in history. I could edit the paper to make myself look better, but as an advocate of press freedom, I let…

Hell is a roguelike, it turns out. Repeatedly clearing rooms, dying, and trying again ought to be a suitable form of punishment in the afterlife, but Lord Hades accidentally made it too much fun. Every arena in Hades’ randomly generated dungeon is full of enemies to smash. Forget the meditative pace of Supergiant’s previous games like Bastion and Transistor, this is a beautifully drawn third-person action game about dodging attacks and battering ghosts. Every time you die (which happens a lot) you march out of a pool of blood and have a catty exchange with Lord Hades himself, who happens to be your dad. He’s angry at you, in part because you’ve left your bedroom in a mess, but mainly because you want to leave his kingdom forever. New rooms…

I’m driving a bus down a mountain road. Flashes of black void flit across the screen arrhythmically. I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to be there. About halfway down, I’m told there’s a bomb wired to the bus that will detonate if I drop below 34mph. Unfortunately I also have to follow checkpoints around some tricky corners. I clip a barrier and never recover my speed. Boom! I’m driving through a… er… forest? There are trees that look like big house plants. I’m on a flat piece of AstroTurf overlooking a bowl. I drive over the ramp at the end and aim for the center of the target on the floor below. I miss and get a bronze medal. Welcome to car darts. I’m driving into a black hole. Or…

One of the most remarkable things about this Resident Evil 2 remake is that it makes zombies—the slow, shambling, groaning kind—exciting again. The undead in this game are incredible, horrible things: Shuffling lumps of bloody meat who batter down doors, tumble through broken windows, and lunge hungrily from the shadows. They’re physical, clumsy, and an absolute joy to kill—if you have the ammo to spare. Shoot a leg off and they keep coming, dragging themselves along the floor, reaching at you with pale, clawing hands. Turn a corner, and as the beam of your flashlight catches their glassy white eyes they screech and trudge towards you, arms outstretched, jaws slung with glistening blood. They don’t sprint or explode or sprout thrashing parasites like they do in newer Resident Evil games:…

I was just about hip-deep in corpses and spent shotguns shells when I read the writing on the wall. Scrawled in blood, a message: ‘Don’t go in the ruins.’ I heard a raspy noise behind me. It wasn’t quite an animal sound, but it wasn’t human, either. I turned and found something much worse than a bad guy. A closed door marked Ruins Access. The raspy breathing came again from just behind it. I felt an actual chill run down my back. Dusk is a homage to late ’90s corridor shooters like Doom, Quake and Half-Life. It’s also a love letter to weird cultist horror films like The Hills Have Eyes and Deliverance. More importantly, it’s great. Waking up hanging from a meathook is at least the third-worst way to…

I first saw Pikuniku at EGX. On a show floor you can’t appreciate nuance, so I’ll be honest: It was the bright, round characters which drew me over. I stayed because I could kick things with my character’s little red legs. I didn’t have enough time to do much more than that so, when it came to the review, it was such a lovely moment to realize it wasn’t a Wattam-style interactive toy, but a little dystopian tale wearing a Mr Men and Little Miss storybook aesthetic. After an opening cinematic where a pink cloud offers you free money, you, a little red blob with legs, wake up in a cave on a hill overlooking a town. A useful exposition ghost prompts you to head into the fresh air so…

PHILIPPA WARR THIS MONTH Took the ‘vE’ part of ‘PvE’ very seriously. ALSO PLAYED My Time At Portia Sometimes life gives you lemons. And by ‘life’ I mean ‘Early Access pirate MMO Atlas’, and by ‘lemons’ I mean ‘a spawn point at the bottom of a vast and unforgiving ocean populated by sharks’. I guess I must now try to make some lemonade. And by ‘lemonade’ I mean ‘commit to this stupid spawn point and spend over two hours swimming west to find land instead of starting over’. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I was supposed to be in one of Atlas’s freeports—safe island zones where players can feel out the game’s systems and start leveling up before heading out on their first craft. The tutorial backs me…

In 1999, the year Discworld Noir was released, its London-based developer Perfect Entertainment was permanently shut down. A costly legal dispute with Psygnosis over unpaid royalties was instrumental in its demise, and the final year of the game’s development was plagued by staff shortages, rescheduled deadlines, and late salary payments. To make matters worse, its publisher, GT Interactive, was having financial troubles of its own, with losses of $90 million leading to the company being massively downsized and sold to French publisher Infogrames. As a result, Discworld Noir was never released outside of Europe, and eventually faded into obscurity.…

PLAYED IT Despite the number at the end of its name, you’d be forgiven for assuming Rage 2 has little to do with its predecessor. The original Rage was dry, mostly linear, and often described as ‘solid’—a critical shorthand for ‘yeah, this is good, but…’ The sequel feels brash, vibrant, and silly. In short, Rage 2 is the sort of game that has Andrew W.K. playing over its trailer. “The first thing I wrote on the whiteboard when I met with the team was ‘more crazy than Rage’,” says Tim Willits, id’s studio director. “Time and time again we told those guys, ‘Everything is on the table. Everything is possible.’ If they’d wanted to make 12-foot cockroaches that you ride, we’d have done it. We don’t have them, but we…

PLAYED IT You’re a Hearthian, a curious, four-eyed amphibious being from a small planet in a weird solar system full of mystery. Not so much a civilization as a single village, the Hearthians inhabit a crater on their planet’s surface, using wooden walkways and shacks to build up and around the limited space. They also build rockets. And you’re their latest astronaut. My first experience of Outer Wilds was with the free alpha build that would go on to win the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the 2015 IGF Awards. While the final version boasts a new art style and other improvements, the core idea is still the same. You travel this strange solar system, exploring its idiosyncratic planets and uncovering its many secrets. And then you die, and do…

The Three Kingdoms campaign is set in ancient China, 190 AD. The Han dynasty has collapsed, and Dong Zhou has captured the child emperor. Now the warlord lurks in the palace, bullying anyone who stands against him. Every cruel overlord needs a Darth Vader, so Dong Zhou convinces the greatest warrior in the land, Lü Bu, to slay his own foster father and become Dong’s enforcer and heir. The resulting family dynamic is… difficult. At a glance, the Total War formula appears unchanged. On the turn-based campaign map you guide your faction’s research, upgrade settlements with new buildings, conduct diplomacy, and move armies around like pawns to capture enemy settlements. When armies clash, you can take charge of your forces in huge real-time battles set in gorgeous battlefields. However, after…

For hours after playing Overland, I felt guilty about leaving my dog behind. Rita didn’t deserve to be abandoned. She’d helped me find a vital fuel can the day before, giving my car enough juice to finally leave the east coast behind. When I abandoned her she was waiting patiently behind the car, and there was no real reason for me to rush. But Overland’s quiet post-apocalypse puts me on edge, and that constant simmering tension made me leave the area before I needed to. There’s no going back. Overland is a simple game. You’re headed west through procedurally generated slices of Americana, each a small turn-based mission with scarce resources and weapons to scavenge. You start with one survivor and can recruit others. Each can only hold an item…

The best sim games don’t just make it satisfying to succeed, but also make it fun to fail, and Oxygen Not Included, from Don’t Starve developer Klei Entertainment, does both extremely well. Deep within an asteroid hurtling through space, you activate a 3D printer and give birth to a handful of living Duplicants: cloned workers you’ll use to carve the interior of the space rock into a functioning colony. Your Dupes will dig tunnels, carve out chambers, build structures, and assemble machines to extract clean water, oxygen, and other resources from the asteroid. Soon your colony will be humming along, but it won’t take long before you wish your Dupes were robots instead of human clones. There’s no bigger wrench you can throw into a smoothly running machine than a…

I’ll never forget the screaming. We’d just locked down checkpoint C, a three-storey townhouse in a war-torn village, and the six of us had taken up positions guarding all windows and entry points, waiting for the counterattack. First a silence, then a racket of assault rifle bullets and panicked shouts. We were repelling them. The timer had almost expired. Then a squadmate threw a speculative incendiary grenade at a doorway, and the screaming started. The area was being contested, and the insurgent contesting it had just been set alight. The round ended with six of us watching in mute horror as he crawled, wailing, through the fire, into the hallway where he eventually expired. This unscripted moment from one of Insurgency: Sandstorm’s eight-player co-op matches against waves of AI forces…

Aerial combat games can be split down the middle, more or less, according to which half of the ’90s they hark back to. Is it an ode to After Burner, all effortless loops and rolls? Or is it the kind of rigorous flight sim that flew so high in the decade’s latter half, almost invariably taking its name from a plane (see Falcon 4.0, B-17 Flying Fortress, et al), where even correctly retracting your landing gear is a real achievement. You don’t need me to tell you that Ace Combat 7 is the former. You can see by the screenshots, by the very name, that this is about getting you up in the air and feeling like Maverick ASAP, laws of physics be damned. It’s the latest in a 23-year-old…

PHIL SAVAGE THIS MONTH Returned to the ’90s. ALSO PLAYED Destiny 2 I fell out of love with Forza Horizon 4 after, presumably broken by a magazine deadline, I became convinced I should try to climb the ranked multiplayer ladder. This is despite not enjoying ranked multiplayer’s finicky team-based game modes and race types. The whole thing was such a singularly miserable experience that I stopped playing the game entirely. I’m returning now to check out the first expansion, and also because it’s petty to hold a grudge over a game mode that I optionally inflicted upon myself. Forza Horizon 4’s first DLC map, Fortune Island, proves to be a bit of a disappointment. The titular fortune is earned by solving riddles that lead to chests containing credits. In a…

Discworld is a series of fantasy novels by the late, great Terry Pratchett, famous for its slapstick humor and scathing social commentary. And at the heart of some of its best stories is Ankh-Morpork, a massive walled city rife with corruption, pollution, and social division. While the first two Discworld adventure games, starring hopeless wizard Rincewind, were colorful, lighthearted capers, Discworld Noir uses the rain-soaked streets of Ankh-Morpork as the backdrop for a shadowy crime thriller, taking stylistic cues from film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction. It’s a familiar detective story, but set in an irreverent fantasy world filled with trolls, ghouls and vampires. Our cynical, world-weary hero is Lewton, a former member of Ankh-Morpork’s famous City Watch turned private eye. A beautiful, mysterious woman, Carlotta, walks into his office…

There’s a specific kind of relaxation that I associate with hidden object puzzle adventures. HOPAs are that endless stream of games, often aimed more at tablet than browser, about collecting and using objects. They get their name from the way the player is repeatedly given a cluttered scene, and is tasked with finding particular objects within it, like a visual wordsearch. But they can also involve minigames, simple skill challenges, and so on. As a very general description, they’re the beach read version of point-and-click adventures. The relaxation I feel when playing hidden object puzzle adventures is similar to that which I get from jigsaw puzzles, origami, crochet, romance novels, crime procedurals, Rubik’s Cubes, and more. It’s the type of relaxation where your hands or eyes are kept busy as…

Bungie kicked off 2019 with news that it is ending its publishing relationship with Activision eight years into the decade-long arrangement. Bungie always held the IP rights to the Destiny franchise, but Activision will transfer the publishing rights, leaving its fate entirely in the hands of its developers. But what does that actually mean for Destiny? Well, right now it just means an optimistic subreddit. After all, Activision so easily falls into the role of evil corporate overlord (in no small part due to earnings call banter like, “While Forsaken is a high-quality expansion, with strong engagement and new modes of play, it did not achieve our commercial expectations, and there is still work to do to fully re-engage the core Destiny fanbase”). It’s thus easy to see Bungie as…

FIRST LOOK The sea and the sky trading places, Escher-esque architecture, and the trout-pouted Innsmouthers that call it home—Oakmont’s travel brochure would certainly be a sight to behold. Luckily, its visitors are not looking for respite, least of all detective Charles Reed. Reed is the only survivor of an obviously supernatural disaster. More archetype than distinct character, he occupies the role of ‘man haunted (literally and metaphorically) by that past event’. Visions draw him to the waterlogged streets of The Sinking City’s eerie town, slap-bang in the middle of Lovecraft country. Clearly the flooded corners of Oakmont hide more than just phantasms and tricks of the light. After investigating a disappearance, Reed encounters Joy, the sole employee of Oakmont’s library. Through lips that have been sewn shut and pained whispers,…

Project Reality is a popular mod for Battlefield 2 that places a greater emphasis on teamwork and makes it more realistic. Squad, developed by former members of Project Reality’s core development team, is an attempt to make a standalone game in the same mould. The result is a shooter that isn’t as accessible and explosive as Battlefield, nor as intricate and sim-like as Arma. It’s somewhere in between, and it wears it well. Like Battlefield, Squad has large maps, combined arms, and a focus on objective play. But within this huge, writhing mass of war are smaller squads, communicating, working under a leader and dismantling the enemy’s grip on the map piece by piece. Well, that’s the idea anyway. If a team isn’t communicating or doing what the squad leader…

My name is Hashur, and I am a mutant. I have four arms, two wings, and the surprisingly useful ability to expel a cloud of corrosive gas out of my pores. I also have a very slim chance that, at any moment, I might spontaneously combust. Right now, I’m bartering with a sentient beanstalk named Yurl. It’s not going very well because I have very little water, the de facto currency of those who live among the jungles of Qud. I’m out of water because I spent it all buying a book from the mayor, who also happens to be a towering albino ape named Nuntu. I needed that book because it’s the only way I can find the procedurally generated cure to Glotrot, a disease that will rot out…

In my time with Kenshi, I’ve crossed swamps so vast that I haven’t dared return. I’ve been beaten shitless by a pack of goats that were intended to feed my rabble of listless nomads. I’ve been a shopkeeper and a thief, a lone wanderer and a slave, and I’ve been an entire community of people working together to—one day—erect our own city in the wasteland. One day. None of these events were part of questlines. There’s no such regimentation in Kenshi, no tangible sense of scripted behavior, just a web of vicious systems so numerous that they sometimes tangle and fumble and descend into absurdity. Upon creating your squad of up to six starting characters, you’re dumped into a dauntingly large post-apocalyptic world. All of your skills start at or…

Gris is beautiful. It is beautiful in that highly stylized, minimalist way that works well in both 2D platformers and in art prints. It is beautiful in its carefully chosen color palettes and its delicate animation effects. However it is beautiful in ways that both strengthen and weaken it as an overall experience. Gris is a 2D platforming mood piece about navigating grief. You play as a nimble, blue-haired girl, and you must gradually bring color and life back to a world of monochrome ruins. To do this, the girl must jump, float, swim, and slam her way through stunning environments, collecting glowing lights and adding them to the sky above a hub area as constellations. Tonally, Gris inhabits the same arena as Journey, Abzu, Unravel, Flower… perhaps Monument Valley…

Some people will argue the ‘Soulslike’ label needs to die. They’ll tell you it’s overused, hackneyed, and that there are other catch-all terms to describe hybrid ARPGs, which don’t rely on comparison. I think these people are wrong. Ashen, a low-fantasy action roleplayer, closely echoes many of the ideas and systems found in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series. It knows exactly who its audience is, and, for all intents and purposes, is a Soulslike game. In place of Estus Flasks, for example, Ashen gives players sap-filled Crimson Gourds that deliver health boosts in limited supply. In the absence of Souls, Ashen trades in Scoria—a currency farmed from fallen enemies that helps facilitate progression. Gathered Scoria is lost upon death, and can only be regained in your immediate next life. Likewise, resting…

December, 2013. Barack Obama is in the White House. Wrecking Ball by Miley Cyrus is topping the charts. The Harlem Shake is taking the internet by storm. And DayZ, a zombie-themed survival game, hits Steam Early Access. Part-survival sandbox, part-social experiment, the game throws 64 players into a bleak zombie apocalypse, sits back, and lets them make their own fun. Five years later, and DayZ, having gone through an extended Early Access period, is finally out. And, well, nothing much has changed. There’s something comforting about the fact that DayZ is still DayZ, with its clunky controls, buggy zombies, and commitment to making surviving as hard as possible. It’s kinda absurd that, in a 1.0 release, there are still problems that have been stubbornly lingering since the alpha days. But…

Onimusha is a series that burned brief and bright for Capcom. It began in 2001 and was pretty much over by 2006, encompassing four main entries and two spin-offs. The original isn’t the series peak, but it’s a fun relic of the era of survival horror games that was popularized by Resident Evil. I would only play this re-release in 2019 if you’re an old fan, or curious about this generation of games that never had much of a presence of PC. Onimusha is an offbeat series, a mix between historical epic and fantasy that sadly didn’t survive the leap to the HD era like Resident Evil and Devil May Cry did. While the second game—with its innovative trading system, multiple playable characters, and branching storyline—is the series’ only masterpiece,…

ANDY KELLY THIS MONTH Enjoyed a spot of stress-free survival horror. ALSO PLAYED Cultist Simulator, Hitman 2 When I reviewed sci-fi horror game SOMA in 2015, my biggest complaint was that having to play hide-and-seek with its monsters often got in the way of the story it was trying to tell. So, wanting to immerse myself in that world again without the hassle, I thought I’d give Safe Mode a go. This lets you explore the underwater nightmare of Pathos-II without being constantly murdered. The monsters are still there, but they can’t harm you. And I was amazed by how, despite this, it’s still a really powerful horror game. The threat of death isn’t the scariest thing in SOMA. It’s the existential dread and the claustrophobic, suffocating atmosphere. And I…