Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2019 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Street Fighter V Edmond ‘E. Honda’ Honda, has finally come to Street Fighter V. Black Mesa After years in development and many, many delays, the Xen chapters of Half-Life remake Black Mesa are finally out. World of Warcraft Good news for Worgen and Goblin players—Blizzard is updating the character models for both races. Epic Games Store We don’t mind the Epic Games Store, but it needs an update. First step: Being able to sort your games. GTA Online With games under scrutiny over gambling mechanics, putting a casino in Los Santos is tone deaf. Call of Duty Modern Warfare can’t decide if war is Hell, or just cool as Hell. You’d think they’d have figured it out by now. LOWS…

A lot of games have extra-difficult ways to play. You can finish Deus Ex without killing anyone, sneak through Dishonored without being detected, and play Thief with zero combat. Phil and I each played about 90 minutes of The Outer Worlds, Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming RPG, and I can already predict the toughest way to complete it. It’ll be making it through the entire game without ever telling a lie. It’s got to be nearly impossible, because in just this short session alone the two of us bluffed constantly. I lied to a drug dealer who hired me to track down his missing stashes, telling him I couldn’t find them so I could keep the drugs for myself. Phil lied to a weeping mother about the fate of her missing son, and claimed to be a professional athlete…

“I think I’ve got him,” our sniper hisses over comms. A shot rings out and I see his bullet lash across the map. “Oh,” he says. “That’s just a rock.” We laugh, but then fall silent, suddenly worried. There’s no way the other team didn’t see the bullet, and the highly visible bullet trail exposes our sniper’s position. In Ghost Recon Breakpoint’s multiplayer, the team that spots the enemy first stands a great chance of winning the round. It’s a four vs four team deathmatch mode with a heavy emphasis on stealth. Our cover is broken, so it’s time to change position. We move in pairs, carefully darting from cover to cover. The map is a shipping yard full of large corrugated containers and cranes. The main PvE side of…

1 UNATCO HQ The entrance to the underground headquarters of UNATCO. When you’ve dealt with the attack on the surface, you’ll return here for a debriefing. 2 MAINENTRANCE This leads into the statue complex. If you want to rescue fellow UNATCO agent Gunther Hermann you’ll have to infiltrate it. Luckily there are several ways in. 3 NORTH DOCK Here, you’ll find Harley Filben, a UNATCO informant who will hand over the keys to the complex. You’ll have to deal with a couple of armed guards first. 4 SHIP The sunken wreck of an old freighter. Break the cargo hold open with a crowbar, and you’ll find some gear, including a shotgun. Don’t run out of breath. 5 STATUE OF LIBERTY This iconic landmark was partially destroyed in a terrorist bombing…

The walk to Kyoto’s Miyako Messe convention center from Kiyamachi street takes me over the river that bisects Kyoto, where in the morning cyclists pedal along a serene shaded path, and in the evening hundreds of developers gather with six-packs of beer from 7-Eleven to talk Bitsummit. It’s a gaming event like no other I’ve been to. It has an energetic but laid-back vibe even in its seventh year, as it’s grown large enough to draw Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft into the same convention hall. But indies are still very much the stars, and they’ve come to show off their games and make a splash they might not be able to at a bigger event like E3. “In the beginning, it was much smaller scale. Almost like an indie meetup,”…

Before you even think about entering a race in European Truck Racing Championship’s career mode, you need a licence. Earning one involves a series of challenges designed to teach you the basics of navigating one of these weighty monsters around a track without overheating, oversteering, or toppling over. And it’s worth paying close attention to these tests, because this is very different from other racing games. If you’re used to playing more traditional racing sims such as Forza, where you can slam the handbrake and drift effortlessly around a corner, you’ll have some adjusting to do. These trucks will spin out at the slightest provocation and my first hour of the game was spent misjudging corners and twirling to an embarrassing standstill. And then you have the wellbeing of your brakes…

You may have heard of PICO-8, but are you familiar with TIC-80, a ‘fantasy computer’ with a similar set of harsh restrictions? These include a teeny screen resolution, severe code restrictions, and a limited color palette, and of course people have overcome them to make some extraordinary things. Shadow Over the Twelve Lands is such a game, somehow cramming a full-fat, first-person dungeon crawler in the style of Might & Magic into a 240x136 window, and a 64kb code file. It’s an impressive technical achievement, but it’s also an eminently playable game in its own right: a throwback to a bygone age. Like the old games, you’re practically dumped on the overworld, with just the clothes on your back and a bit of gold that won’t go very far. After…

Somewhere, in an alternate universe, there’s a version of this game that’s pure Cronenburgian terror. Where the theme tune is replaced by low droning, and we learn, in explicit detail, answers to all the questions Octodad makes us afraid to ask: Was there ever a human husband? Where did the children come from? What happens to the people who discover the truth? Body horror elements aside, Octodad is still absurd fun. It’s never simple enough to feel like a normal game, but not so erratic that it becomes irritating. And despite the opening, I love the premise—even if there’s something stressful about all those humans staring at you, trying to work out what’s wrong. 78…

This is my last Now Playing for PC Gamer. In fact, it’s the last thing I’m writing for PCG full-stop, at least for now. You never know, I might write a Now Playing for issue 400, before complaining about the cover price on Instagram (this is an inside joke). An office PA annoyingly threw all my old PC Gamer issues out, so I’ve been perusing the few I’ve got at home. I’m reading them while I’m supposed to be packing to move. We did slightly too many lists when I was editor, but darn, each issue was packed with features. I think I gave editing this magazine a solid shot, for a 25 year-old with no qualifications who didn’t know what he was doing. I give my editorship 81 per…

The developer behind PC Building Simulator has released a playable prototype of its next project, Woodwork Simulator, which is exactly what you think it is. I’ve had my fill of novelty simulator games on PC, but this isn’t something that’s played for laughs—it actually lets you make things out of wood, and it’s way more compelling than I thought it would be. I was absolutely hopeless at woodwork in school. Once I tried to make a CD rack and ended up with a shapeless wedge of pine with globs of hardened glue leaking out of the cracks. Several people laughed at it, including the teacher. I was alright at sanding, though. That thing might have been a mess and too narrow to hold a CD, but boy was it smooth So…

It’s been eight years since Valve released a singleplayer game. Hopes of seeing the Half-Life series completed have all-but vanished, and we’re unlikely to see another Left4Dead or Portal. Yet while Valve the developer may have turned toward enormously successful MOBAs and enormously unsuccessful card battlers, its last great singleplayer game still has a surprising amount of life left in it, courtesy of its community. Since Portal 2 made its debut in April 2011, the community has designed more than half a million custom test-chambers, with dozens of new chambers being added every day. The majority of these are singleplayer chambers (although that still leaves over 100,000 cooperative chambers if you and a buddy have got a lifetime to kill). It’s an enormously prolific community, to the point where it can be hard to know where…

Though Steam is still the dominant retail force in PC gaming, the scene is starting to fragment. EA has Origin, Ubisoft has Uplay, Microsoft has an arcane catacomb of systems that loosely resembles a storefront, and with the arrival of the Epic Games Store we’re opening more launchers than ever. At PC Gamer our taskbars are busy with quick-launch icons for different clients, and it’s enough to make us keen for the PC gaming equivalent of a universal remote—one client to rule them all. This is the problem that GOG have set out to solve with GOG Galaxy 2.0. “We took a look at a couple of popular titles,” says designer Piotr Karwowski. “Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends, Overwatch, Rainbow Six: Siege, Destiny, Sea of Thieves, League of Legends, Dota, World…

Would it be reductive to call the first Surge ‘Dark Souls with robots’? Probably, but let’s be real—that’s what it was. Not that Deck13 didn’t have a few ideas of its own, like being able to target different parts of an enemy. But it was pretty much Dark Souls with robots. As for the sequel, it’s more of the same in many ways, but already shaping up to be a better, slicker game. The first big change you’ll notice is that you can now create your own character, replacing the rather bland forced protagonist from the original game. You can also select a backstory, although I’ve yet to determine how this will be reflected in the game. Characters include a war veteran suffering from PTSD, an arms smuggler, and a corporate suit. However, whichever background…

Blacksad is a series of Spanish-created, French-published graphic novels about a cat in a long coat who solves mysteries. I read the first volume earlier this year. They’re simple and compelling noir mysteries set in a world of humanoid animals, and if you can forgive a few eyebrow-raising female character designs, I give them a strong recommendation. This game is impressively faithful to the tone of those books, and it’ll probably remind most people of Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us, given that you’re solving a mystery while interacting with talking animals. But while Blacksad: Under the Skin uses a similar cinematic presentation to recent Telltale games, it also contains the kind of puzzles you’d expect from a traditional point-and-click adventure, for better or worse. You play as John Blacksad (yes,…

Since its release in the summer of 1999, Deus Ex has become one of the most beloved games on PC. Set in a bleak cyberpunk future, Ion Storm’s ambitious first-person RPG, which was directed by Warren Spector, features deep systems, sprawling levels, emergent play, and a thrilling, conspiracy-laden plot. But one afternoon in Austin, Texas, where the game was developed, designer Harvey Smith and other members of the team were convinced that the game they’d been working on for years was destined for failure. “We brought in Caroline Spector, Warren’s wife, and she was the first person outside of the team to play it,” says Smith. “She got off the boat at the dock, and she picked up a box and threw it into the water. She got into the water and…

It’s the hottest day of the year in Tokyo, and Tetsuya Mizuguchi is wearing shorts. The creator of Rez and Lumines has an office for Enhance Games in trendy Shibuya, the full-body Rez VR synesthesia suit standing just inside the door like the world’s most intense mannequin. The office suits him—the room is a hodgepodge of half a dozen desks as casual as he is now, but an unassuming wall panel opens up like an I-shit-you-not secret door to a couple more rooms. One of them is dedicated to The Chair. I’ve just pounded two bottles of cold green tea, one to stave off jetlag, and the second to restore some of the fluid I’ve sweat out in the summer heat, when Enhance Games’ Mark MacDonald tells me I’ve got to try The Chair. I’m here…

My favorite level of Automachef is simple—there are only two recipes, a chicken sandwich and a burger, but the kitchen is the size of a toolshed. Forced to make do with only one grill and one food processor, I establish loops of conveyor belts to shuffle ingredients around. With all available space filled, I sit back and click go, only to realize I’d forgotten the machine that takes customer’s orders. Time to start over. Automachef is a production line game—that is to say it’s a game about carefully arranging conveyor belts, mechanical arms and other doodads along a grid to guide ingredients through various stages of cooking, mixing and packaging. As the name might suggest, this one is about food. Specifically fast food—heart attack burgers, fried chicken, and greasy BLTs will power…

Wizards and witches are famed for their ability to transform stuff into other stuff, but we almost never get to do that in games. We’re too busy flinging fireballs and setting ice traps to turn princes into frogs, to turn donkeys into kings, probably because those spells don’t have much utility in combat. As a game without combat, Transmute! is free to focus on the silly stuff, the faintly ridiculous magic that would see you kicked out of Oblivion’s mage guild. So you can’t enchant a sword, but you can turn cats into computers, transform yourself into a pickaxe, and restore ghosts to their living selves at the click of a mouse. A puzzle game that looks like it should have been released on a cassette tape, Transmute! features cute,…

This might be a terrible idea. Subnautica, while beautiful, manages to combine two of my greatest fears: Massive sea monsters and confined spaces. I’m not sure what I find more upsetting—being devoured by a leviathan or hiding in a cramped escape pod. On the upside, I love aquariums, battered cod, tartar sauce and survival games, so let’s remain positive. Hopefully it’ll all balance out in the end. I manage to set myself on fire during Subnautica’s intro, in which my escape pod is jettisoned from a damaged spaceship, the Aurora. I’m assuming flames will be less of a problem moving forward. From my bobbing pod, the only things I can see are an endless expanse of water and smouldering wreckage of the spaceship. There’s no land in sight. My first thought…

After the sporadic dread of Subnautica, going back to Abzû is calming like watching a four-hour video of an aquarium while sat in a champagne bubble bath. There are moments on the first playthrough that feel like they’re going to descend into nautical horror, but it never does. It feels like the creatures here are part of an ecosystem, rather than just a game—it’s a celebration of oceanic life. The story does get hamfisted towards the end—which at least provides purpose for those of us not captivated by shoal formations—but it’s still a relaxing, transcendental experience in places. Only the weighted blanket of David Attenborough narration could make it more relaxing. 85…

Lots of people will tell you that how a game plays is all that matters, and that’s an admirable attitude that I’d love to say I agree with. In practice, though, I’m a snob. You may have crafted the stickiest, most entertaining core loop of all time, but if it’s attached to an ugly game, I’m probably not going to play it. There is one exception, and it’s One Finger Death Punch. It’s a brilliant two-button action game in which you, a kung-fu stickman, beat down hundreds of attackers. If they attack from the right, you press the right-mouse button. If they attack from the left, you press the left-mouse button. Sometimes attackers swap sides, or require more than one button press to take down, but that’s about it. It’s…

While Fortnite, Epic’s worldconquering battle royale game, has yet to establish itself as a top-tier esport, that didn’t stop 2.3 million people tuning into the recent Fortnite World Cup across YouTube and Twitch. A whopping $30 million in prize money was up for grabs at the lavish tournament, which was held in New York City’s Arthur Ashe Stadium on July 26-28. The biggest winner of the tournament was 16-year-old Kyle ‘Bugha’ Giersdorf, who won the solo tournament on the final day, and pocketed $3 million. That’s a lot of cheese for being good at a computer game, but indicative of how popular Epic’s brightly colored shooter has become. Bugha’s victory made headlines around the world, and not just in the gaming press. THE BIGGEST WINNER OF THE TOURNAMENT WAS KYLE ‘BUGHA’ GIERSDORF Other…

Monster Hunteris hilarious. I’m wading through a chest-high snow drift as a sinister fin roams around the clearing. The piranha-like Beotodus swims under the snow looking for an opportunity to explode from beneath. My instincts tell me to unsling the enormous sword-axe on my back and fight back, but instead I’m chugging cocoa from a flask. Just in time the animation finishes, I dive roll sideways as Beotodus erupts from the snow with a spinning tail attack. The monster’s body clips me, and I fall backwards onto my butt. A bit of health lost, but it could be worse. The main thing is I have another window I can use to stuff my face. I pull out an enormous chunk of meat and watch the circling fin again as I…

Humankind On ground level, the street that houses Amplitude Studios is a uniform block of contemporary cafés, flats, and office buildings. But stand on the eighth floor balcony, and the first thing you’ll notice is the 1930s. The concrete dome of the Église du Saint-Esprit glints under a Parisian sun, and beyond stands a strange urban mountain, the artificial peak of the Parc Zoologique de Paris. Downwind, on a breezy day, you can smell the monkey faeces. These are the monuments of a people who left their mark on the world. Achievements that survived assimilation into the cultures that followed, becoming part of the fabric of a nation. They are emblematic of Humankind, Sega’s new Civ rival from the makers of Endless Legend. “The reason we created Amplitude was to…

A few hours on the Shinkansen from Tokyo, and you’ve left behind a city of 14 million people and the bulk of Japan’s big game studios. But what Kyoto lacks in size it makes up for in heart and history. This is the home of Nintendo, neighbor of Capcom’s Osaka, and the capital of Japan for a thousand years. Take a 20-minute stroll from Nintendo’s headquarters, and you’ll be at the foot of the Fushimi Inari shrine, built about 500 years ago. History lives comfortably side-by-side with modern business, and the utterly relaxed, contemplative atmosphere that it gives Kyoto is probably why it’s home to Japan’s most prominent indie studios founded by foreigners. Once you’re there, it’s simply hard to leave. “Greatest city in the world,” says Mark Lentz, who…

Wolfenstein: Youngblood shifts the focus from the previous games’ bubblegum catharsis of killing the most hateful people alive to killing them as efficiently as possible. The Nazis have health bars now, and a true pistol shot to the head or axe to the throat won’t always cut it. You and a friend (or computer) need to level up to more effectively chip away the white portion of their health bars to get to the red portion, the blood and guts inside. Over the course of my playthrough, I noticed my gaze would increasingly drift away from the glorious violence and up towards the health bars. Youngblood is grisly and indulgent, and an incredible setting, but burdens the player with calculations of time and efficiency rather than gift them another cosmic victory…

Revenge is a dish best served cold, the ancient Klingon saying goes, and nobody knows this better than penguins. Having made the interstellar journey to this dusty backwater planet alongside my rugged band of frontier fighters, the penguins quickly proved themselves admirable fighters in our war against the vicious psychic bugs who showed up first. As my troopers fell prey to the insects’ virulent battle vomit, the ten-foot penguins swooped in to tear the bugs apart with trisected beaks. Age of Wonders: Planetfall is the long-running fantasy series’ sci-fi spin-off, the Alpha Centauri to Age of Wonders’ Civilization II. Fans of the series will find Planetfall immediately familiar, as it maintains Triumph’s now well-established ‘faster 4X’ dynamics peppered with XCOM-style tactical battles. What Planetfall has that’s new is a cast…

Final Fantasy XIV used to be my favorite MMO that I hated to recommend. Playing it requires an enormous investment of time—at least a few hundred hours to get caught up—and even though I love it, I worried that others might ultimately find that long journey boring and unsatisfying. But after beating Final Fantasy XIV’s latest expansion, those worries are gone. Shadowbringers is the Avengers: Endgame of Final Fantasy XIV, an emotionally stirring climax that draws on six years of character development, storytelling, and worldbuilding to weave an epic, dimension-spanning story rooted in the relationships of its chief characters. If you’re not familiar with Final Fantasy XIV’s story, it’s difficult to describe Shadowbringers’ premise without spoiling everything that comes before. With three expansions and hundreds of hours of story under its belt,…

Predicting a dystopia surely only a few decades away, Albion transports you to a grim industrial Britain where strange machines hum incessantly, and where giant tentacles slink through the streets, feeding on god knows what. You’ve come to this realm to, oh you know the score, to read stray notes and press a few buttons. It’s an indie first-person horror game, but a good one. Albion stands out immediately thanks to its monochrome color scheme, and a setting that feels like Sheffield by way of Silent Hill. Blood streaks line the streets, of course, and pulsating tentacles have punctured many of the houses. But Albion saves its greatest horrors for its interiors. Enter a house, and you’ll be greeted by menacing pipes, by barricaded rooms that spew out static when you draw…

One of the best things about going back to a game like Sunless Sea is learning how weird all your previous choices were. Apparently, past me thought it’d be a great idea to name my captain Beatrice Klump and send her out into Underzee on a quest for immortality, accompanied only by a comatose ferret and a chipper cannoneer. A sense of doom surrounds Ms Klump like wasps around a dustbin, but that’s partially the point. In Sunless Sea, it’s not if your captains die, but when and how that matters. Surprisingly, it’s not going as badly as one might expect. A travel writer who’s also a probably-murderer pays Beatrice handsomely for dropping him off at various deserted outposts. And I establish a solid income by snitching on various ports to the admiralty.…

Diving back into Man o’ War is like finding a box of miniatures you painted when you were 12—mostly bad, but with some pleasant surprises. It’s been updated since I played it last, adding new factions like Tzeench (capricious birdwizards) and Slaanesh (sexy goatcrabs). And it still manages to distract, thanks to a fine map, great music, and the odd stirring sea battle. So it’s still not amazing, then, but like the miniatures it provides an entertaining few hours of guilty indulgence. 68…

I’ve recently started playing Hades again after having stayed away from it since launch. Supergiant Games is one of those precious few game developers whose games I will buy sight unseen, but initially I thought that not even they could make me enjoy roguelikes more than I do. Which isn’t all that much. Then something magical happened—I got better. I know, I know, that’s the point of this type of game. And yet I often feel like roguelikes come with a skill floor that’s just too high for me to not be frustrated, and frustration gives me no reason to continue playing. But the updates kept rolling in, and with them a variety of skills and ways to meaningfully combine them that made me feel like I could perhaps actually do this.…

1 PLAY THE TUTORIAL Most management games come with a tutorial and I’d recommend using it, even if you wait with certain parts of the tutorial until they’re relevant. This way you’ll know the most common scenarios. 2 CHECK THE MAP Know your surrounding area in order to find resources or map out the shape of what you’re building. That way, your creation won’t end up looking haphazard, and you’ll keep transport routes short. 3 DON’T OVERDO IT The temptation is always to build everything immediately, but you need to make sure you have the resources and the need for new buildings or machines first, otherwise you’ll just end up wasting money.…

Twenty years ago, a new science fiction world was born, as relatable as it was outlandish. The Matrix was a rallying cry for anybody whose internet life had become more real to them than their daytime drudge; a freeing fiction that overlaid our own world like a sheet of graph paper and made sense of its unexplained repetitions and irregularities. As much as it was a nightmare or warning, it was also vicarious fantasy—it was pasty Keanu Reeves, asleep at his PC while Massive Attack plays in his headphones, clinging to the side of a building for dear life, eventually bending reality to his will. On some level, everybody watching wanted that call from Morpheus. To wake up, to know kung fu, to move like they do. That’s what Enter The…