Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2019 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

As we glide towards E3 season, the gaming community is braced for a glut of trailers, announcements, and other marketing gubbins. Some of these digital bids for your attention will sink with barely a retweet, but others will tear round the internet at high speed, passed from tweet to tweet, chucked onto Facebook feeds, dissected in subreddits, and more. But how do companies navigate virality and use it to their advantage? That’s where firms like Pulsar come in. Marc Geffen, Pulsar’s vice president of US strategy and research describes Pulsar as an audience intelligence company. “Ultimately, we help clients connect the dots between what their audience says on social media, how they think while conducting a search, and what they actually do on their website.” This involves pulling data from…

It’s been three years since Night School Studio released its bewitching comingof-age debut Oxenfree. Its next game, Afterparty, looks even stranger and more surreal. We meet Lola and Milo, two recently deceased best friends who wind up in Hell. Their only chance of escape? Beating the Devil and his horde of demons in a drinking contest. FIRST LOOK Yes, you read that right. Satan has a taste for booze, and demons like to party just as much as teenagers do. It sounds like Disneyland for burnouts, where lurid cocktails replace rainbows and monsters prowl the streets instead of cute animals. Fitting considering the inspiration that had been brewing for a number of months before development began. “The core concept came from a series of conversations that Adam [Afterparty and Oxenfree…

“I love being part of car culture,” says Dan Greenawalt when I ask him about the future of the Forza series. “I don’t go to car shows just to see the hot cars, I go to socialize with other people who love cars as much as I do. I like to be with my tribe, and with stuff like the concert in Fortnite, games are becoming a tribal hangout. I love that Horizon is exploring that, with people hanging out and competing online. And with Motorsport we have esports, which is another way of connecting. In the future we’ll be exploring these concepts, looking at communities, and finding out a way to turn that into similar experiences in our games.”…

Most people don’t know how it feels to flick the back end of a rally car out on the approach to a blind turn. As a result, Dirt Rally 2.0 requires a greater level of abstract thought to assess its ‘simulation’ cred than, say, Project Cars 2 . You might not have sent a McLaren P1 up Eau Rouge, but you still know how a road car feels on a road. Snarling Group B rally cars speeding across loose surface? Not so much. That’s why Dirt Rally 2.0 exists. Since its earliest outings under the Colin McRae banner, Codemasters’ rally series has traded on ‘feeling’ just right. The way its cars squirm and shift through corners, the way you can keep them just about under control while they power through turns at strange, unnatural…

Do you know who I admire? Anika from Eastshade . Anika lives in a little hut between the port of Lyndow and the city of Nava in the game. She’s obsessed with owls. Can’t get enough of them. When she’s not sitting in her hovel she’s tramping through the ferns making hooting noises. I, on the other hand, am playing a traveling artist. I came to Eastshade to paint pictures in tribute to my mother via a type of in-game screenshotting. It’s this art focus which sets Eastshade apart from other games which muddle about in those high fantasy settings. The game opens with your character being shipwrecked. You wake up in a cave just outside the tiny port of Lyndow and start to explore, quickly accumulating a to-do list, idly picking…

Broken Sword 3 is here almost by means of an apology—I’m sorry for not loving you more back in 2003. You were nowhere near as bad as I thought. It’s a thoughtful, heartfelt 3D modernization of point-and-click games that works surprisingly well—classic adventure puzzles blended with George and Nico’s ability to climb almost everything. It’s endearingly daft—it starts with a patent lawyer crashing his plane and a journalist clambering across balconies to get her story, but the two leads have enough charm to carry it off. It’s like a BBC radio play of the Uncharted games, which is absolutely one of the highest compliments it’s possible for me to pay. 78…

I like a good joke as much as the next person, but for nearly four months Warframe’s community has been keeping their own dumb joke going, and now it’s taken on a magical life of its own that even Warframe’s developers have had to acknowledge. Welcome to Fortuna 69, the hottest and weirdest night club in Warframe. When Warframe’s Fortuna expansion launched on November 8, 2018, players flooded into the titular underground city to meet new characters and take on a new quest before heading out into the frozen Venus wasteland. Though Warframe shares a lot of DNA with traditional MMOs like World of Warcraft, everything is on a much smaller scale. When thousands of players flock to social hubs like Fortuna, they’re first required to choose a numbered instance of it to help…

I have the distinct memory of bumping into an NPC in Grand Theft Auto 4. The citizen dropped his phone, which he’d been using to take a photo of a building. He groused about my rudeness, and then, rather than picking his phone up off the ground, he simply took a second phone from his pocket and resumed taking pictures. One of the easiest ways to see how deep the simulation of NPCs goes is to interrupt their routines. Someone is walking down the street and you stop them. Do they eventually continue on their way, or do they stroll off in a completely different direction? And where do they go when you follow them? Nowhere? Somewhere? Do they travel aimlessly in circles or do they actually have a start and end…

Here are three words I never thought I’d write: Bloodlines is back. It’s been almost 15 years since Troika Games’ vampire RPG first launched, winning and breaking hearts in equal measure. Bloodlines remains one of the most stylish and intricate first-person RPGs ever made, with a truly remarkable amount of depth and dynamism baked into its dark and seedy Los Angeles. But Bloodlines’ premature launch also meant it was riddled with bugs. After years of community support, it is still a challenging game to grapple with. Bloodlines is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of PC gaming. What if Troika had been given another six months to sharpen Bloodlines’ fangs? What if the game hadn’t launched on the same day as Half-Life 2? What if the likes of Leonard Boyarsky and Tim Cain and Brian…

Back in 2002, a small team of developers decided they wanted to create the most cutting edge driving simulation possible. “We were going to learn about cars and work with manufacturers,” says Dan Greenawalt, a member of that ten-person team and now creative director of the Forza series. “And we studied books, including Race Car Vehicle Dynamics by Bill and Doug Milliken.” Books like this, explains Greenawalt, are the foundation of rigid body physics simulation, which is the basis for every kind of driving-based sim, from videogames to the bespoke F1 simulators used by McLaren and Ferrari. “We started from that same foundation, but we also wanted to make a game that anyone could play.” Greenawalt has been working on driving games for most of his career, from Project Gotham Racing to…

Devil May Cry 5 is a 16-hour exploration of the hundreds of ways a magical man might hit a demon. Nero hits demons with robot arms like a hyper-aggressive Inspector Gadget. Dante hits demons with two halves of a haunted motorbike. V lets demons do the hitting for him. All things considered, Devil May Cry 5 is one of the best games about hitting demons ever made. You switch between Nero, V, and Dante across DMC5’s 20 missions. A demon called Urizen is using a bad tree called the Qliphoth to drain the city of all its blood, and it’s up to the trio to fight through his minions to stop him. The story is preposterous, genuinely funny at points, and supported by earnest performances and quality performance capture. Though the areas you…

1 An overall approximation of power. Raising your overall power will help you in higher difficulties. 2 This is a description of the basic function of the item and doesn’t change regardless of loot tier. 3 Masterwork and Legendary items come with a special perk, often changing how you fight. 4 Modifiers are randomly generated and cannot be changed, so hopefully you get some good ones. 5 This, along with the color, indicates rarity. At level 30, it’s only Masterwork and Legendary that matter.…

It’s usually difficult to enjoy a poor game in the way it’s possible to enjoy a poor film. Alpha Protocol, however, is as close as it gets. You know it�s bad, I know it�s bad, Obsidian probably knows it�s bad, and yet despite this, everyone with a soul deserves to play it at least once. It’s gaming’s Plan 9 From Outer Space; The Room with elbows to the throat. I realize I’m going to love it the moment I hear the doddering espionage soundtrack in the menu. It’s the music that would play as you took the lift to James Bond’s luxury shag-pad. Everything about this suggests the game takes itself completely seriously, and that just makes me more excited. This earnestness continues on the Agent Select screen, which reads…

I know it’s naughty to start a review with an anecdote, but I just found a fat dead old man wedged in my clock, and I need to tell someone. Also, it let me click on his nipples. Rusty Lake Roots is the Inside No 9 of adventure games—a sinister, hand-drawn nightmare that feels like being trapped inside grandma’s scariest painting. But it’s also an enjoyable adventure game, with calm, meandering puzzles that almost make you feel guilty for figuring them out so quickly. Did you really just decide to write a love letter to your future wife using her nosebleed juice? Yes, you did, you pervert, and so did I. Points knocked off because I can’t play fullscreen. 81…

S ometimes my ambition for the day is to have a piece of hot buttered toast. Then I remember Drunk on Nectar, a game which “aspires to become the most comprehensive nature experience ever made”, and try to lift my ambitions slightly. Developer Venugopalan Sreedrahan posts updates for Drunk on Nectar announcing features like the ability to mate and reproduce as a monarch butterfly or changes to jumping spider transit. Meanwhile, last night a badger ran at me, and I tweeted about it. I’ve decided that if I can’t be the sort of person who sets out to replicate the glory of nature, I can be the sort of person who plays it. Currently I am a Japanese tiger beetle. They’re those leggy ground beetles with wing casings the colors of oil…

I t’s been ten years since the last STALKER game—2009’s Call of Pripyat—yet the Zone remains one of the most evocative, mysterious, and fascinating settings on PC. This expanse of radioactive wasteland, located between the borders of Ukraine and Belarus, was devastated by the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in 1986—and, according to the game’s fiction, another incident in 2006. It’s a bleak, nightmarish, but strangely beautiful landscape, teeming with mutants, weird anomalies, freak storms, radiation, and warring factions. The ruined cities, swamps, tunnels, bunkers—and the Chernobyl plant itself—have become home to stalkers, the Ukrainian government’s name for anyone trespassing in the Zone illegally. Some stalkers are there purely for the adventure, but others are there to profit from finding, smuggling, and selling the many strange radioactive objects that can be found littering the…

1 PICK A STRONG ANTIVIRUS Let’s start with the most obvious protection layer on your PC—antivirus software. Bitdefender, Norton, and Webroot SecureAnywhere are among the most trusted suites, but Windows’ built-in Defender Antivirus is robust too 2 DOUBLE DOWN WITH MALWAREBYTES It pays to take the belt and braces approach to harmful software by installing Malwarebytes in addition to your primary antivirus software. It’s designed not to trip up other protection programs. 3 SCHEDULE REGULAR SCANS Running a single deep scan in each of the above programs isn’t a long-term defence strategy. Instead, schedule both your AV and Malwarebytes to scan all your storage at a convenient time—in the middle of the night, say, if you leave your PC on. NEED TO KNOW DIFFICULTY Easy TIME 3-4 hours VITAL LINKS…

Long running cult favorite Dwarf Fortress is coming to Steam and Itch.io. After 12 years as a freeware project supported by donations, brothers Tarn and Zach Adams, who make up Bay 12, are working with Kitfox Games to launch a $20 version which offers a new tile set, enhanced graphics, and audio. The free ASCII version isn’t going anywhere and will be updated and released on the Bay 12 web page, it’s just going to be called Dwarf Fortress Classic. The reasoning behind the Steam and Itch.io version is tied to healthcare costs for the developers. Essentially they’re trying to find a way to continue working on the game while ensuring financial stability in the face of health concerns As per the official Bay 12 blog, “We don’t talk about this much,…

Picking a faction in a 4X game usually requires a lot of consideration. But this time I didn’t even have to think about it. My options were restricted to Space Dwarves, Space Bugs, Space Americans, or a group of stoic warrior women with an environmentalist streak who ride laser-packing dinosaurs. Was there really any choice? PLAYED IT The Amazons are clearly the best, but I’m probably not giving the rest a fair shake. Every faction has unique units, techs, and a playstyle that makes them all tempting. The insectoid Kir’Ko, for instance, have a penchant for psychic trickery, taking over minds during the turn-based tactical battles. But—laser dinosaurs! My army of nature-loving warriors was led by Sappho Tori, a premade character that I tweaked only a little bit, providing her…

You’re probably wondering what the hell ‘barotrauma’ means. In simple terms, it refers to injuries caused by changes in water or air pressure. For divers that can mean burst eardrums or drowning. The latter is what Barotrauma is mostly concerned with, being a game set in a leaky submarine where a watery death awaits the crew if they don’t work together. FIRST LOOK Set in an alien ocean on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, Barotrauma is reminiscent of FTL, but on a much larger scale. You view your sub from the side and can freely wander around it as one of several classes including captain, engineer, mechanic, and medic. There are dozens of interaction points around the sub such as lockers, water pumps, engines, and other mechanical stuff that keeps the thing…

1 WHITE HOUSE Your base of operations, and a strangely boring space to be in. Being president is overrated. 2 AIR & SPACE MUSEUM The highlight of the game, with firefights set in a planetarium that’s inexplicably been left on. 3 THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL I’m not sure why there’s a level set here, but it’s surrounded by the nicest area on the map. 4 AMERICAN HISTORY MUSEUM The Vietnam exhibit is the highlight, but it’s another level full of nice details.…

Baba is You, and its developer Arvi ‘Hempuli’ Teikari, found themselves in the spotlight after a build of the logic puzzler won over IGF Award judges in 2018. With nominations in four of the eight categories, Teikari beat out the likes of Into The Breach to take home the Excellence in Design award, as well as pocketing the Best Student Game prize. Now the full release is here, it’s easy to see what the fuss was about. Baba is You is a spatial word game, of sorts. It combines programming-style commands with Sokoban-esque block pushing to create hugely inventive and varied puzzles. By rearranging the blocks with words on them you can issue new rules for the world or find new ways to interact with the space. You can even totally rewrite…

Once upon a time, the internet was something you went on rather than something that was always there. It was a thing you’d occasionally enjoy, usually in the evenings when it was cheaper; not a fibre optic thread running through every facet of your existence. And Hypnospace Outlaw, a cyber-detective adventure set within a fictional computer operating system, is a nostalgic return to this Old Internet. In the game’s alternate 1999, people climb into bed at night, snap on a high-tech headband, and drift into Hypnospace. This garish low-res internet, inspired by the digital shanty towns of GeoCities, is fully realized. There are hundreds of pages to click around, split into zones that reflect the personalities of their eccentric creators. In Teentopia you’ll find edgy teenagers, nu metal, and drama. In Open Eyed, new…

Like Alpha Protocol, Stories Untold is the sort of game where I’ve made up my mind about it during the opening credits. This time, though, it’s fabulous news. Floating keyboards, brown wallpaper, and music that whispers, ‘remember when you were young? Things were less frightening then’. It’s brilliant. Each section in Stories Untold is essentially a different game. It’s the first one, The House Abandon, that makes me properly engage with the setting and presentation. It’s a neat little story. You’ll see the twist coming but enjoy the creepy journey there. It’s an hit of nostalgia for anyone who ever loaded games from a tape. When I first played Stories Untold, I was slightly disappointed that all the games weren’t different takes on the text adventure, but now it makes perfect sense.…

This was made in 1992, so it’s okay to expect disappointment, right? Nope. I’m a fool. It’s still brilliant. From the glorious, farty music to the opening credits which have Indy tumbling through his university loft in search of a lost statue, this is perfectly pitched. It’s witty, reverential, and wonderfully animated. Solving puzzles with the SCUMM engine feels fiddly now, but some elements remain impressive. 90…

A lmost immediately after finishing the story in Destiny 2, I uninstalled it. I saw the endgame unravel before me—a seemingly endless list of dull chores—and decided I’d had my fill. I got a solid 25 hours out of it, and that felt like enough. Thing is, I play Destiny solo. I’ve never done a raid, and I probably never will. To me it’s a singleplayer FPS that I just happen to share with other players. Taking part in those cooperative world events is about as social as the experience gets for me, and that’s plenty. But almost exactly a year later, I’m back. The recent Forsaken expansion was on sale, which now comes bundled with previous expansions Curse of Osiris and Warmind. And feeling the urge to play a shooter, I…

FINAL FANTASY XII www.finalfantasyxii.com While not as revered as the PlayStation-era games, this is comfortably one of the best Final Fantasies. The world of Ivalice is beautiful, with bustling cities, intricate architecture, and elegant airships. The story is understated and mature, featuring some genuinely likable characters. SHENMUE I & II shenmue.sega.com This weird, wonderful martial arts adventure, previously only available on Dreamcast, is part revenge epic, part mundane life simulator, and there’s nothing else like it on PC. The original is the highlight, letting you explore a slice of 1980s Japan as teenager Ryo Hazuki, searching for the man who killed your father. SOMA www.somagame.com Set in a spooky underwater facility, SOMA is one of the best modern horror games on PC. But if you want to experience the story…

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 $ 1, 238 MOTHERBOARD B360M-DS3H Gigabyte $70 It lacks overclocking options, but the new B360 chipset is far cheaper than Z370, and perfect for this budget build. PROCESSOR Core i3-8100 Intel $125 A great processor for out-of-the-box gaming performance. Opt for the AMD Ryzen 1300X if you’d like to overclock. GRAPHICS CARD NEW ENTRY GeForce RTX 2060…