Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2020 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered It’s getting the 4K treatment in an imminent remaster. Commandos The series is returning with a brand new game. Minecraft To help during the coronavirus pandemic, Minecraft now has free educational worlds to help kids. LOWS Last Oasis The launch of sandbox MMO Last Oasis was so rocky that the game had to shut down for a week. Bethesda The company won’t be hosting a digital showcase to replace its E3 show, because of the pandemic. EVE Online A veteran EVE player was caught hauling nearly $5,000 worth of in-game goods by space pirates. They lost it all.…

PLAYED IT Rugar, my beefy warrior in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, is a lot like the game he inhabits. Rugged, clumsy, ambitious – he’s great at smacking people with his huge axe, at least when he isn’t falling off his horse or hitting a tree, but he really dreams of sitting on a throne and ruling the world. He might get there. His peers similarly dream big. A long list of conniving nobles squabble over this Early Access sandbox, crisscrossing the picturesque map with their armies as they rush towards sieges, battles and other emergencies. It’s a world that never rests, with borders constantly being redrawn through wars and deals between monarchs. The map wouldn’t look out of place in Total War, but it doesn’t exist exclusively to be conquered.…

NEW INFO Despite bearing the kind of name that calls to mind free-to-play browser games, a developer demo reveals this unusual strategy title ticks all sorts of PC Gamer boxes. Turn-based combat? Check. A mapconquering meta-layer reminiscent of the Total War series? Check. Hell, it’s even got cards. Well, sort of. The developer is keen to stress the game doesn’t feature deckbuilding or anything like that. Your hand of cards is simply an easy UI shorthand for your leader’s powers and abilities, both in-battle attacks and buffs, and out of battle boosts to things like recruitment and resources. It’s an elegant solution, reducing some of the visual fiddliness strategy games can fall victim to. In a set-up reminiscent of the Heroes of Might & Magic or King’s Bounty games, you…

PLAYED IT Imagine if other lifeforms examined the human race. They’d be pretty stumped by the way we do things. Bundle these observations togetherm and you’d get A Monster’s Expedition, an adventure that shows us what humanity seems like from the perspective of curious monsters. In A Monster’s Expedition (Through Human Exhibitions), you play as a faceless monster sporting a cute backpack who traverses groups of archipelagoes. Figuring out how to cross the water to get to each island is the core of the puzzle-solving, and involves pushing objects around the small space. Each individual island has several different exits, and solving a puzzle in different ways leaves you free to explore and wander the rest of the game’s world. The little dude you play as has a lot of similarities…

When I first encountered the Nemesis in Resident Evil 3, a monstrous bio-weapon sent by the Umbrella Corporation to hunt and kill protagonist Jill Valentine, I felt my pulse rise. This towering stack of ugly muscle can move alarmingly fast, snag you with a pair of slimy tentacles, and even use weapons, including a colossal rocket launcher. You can outrun the Tyrant in the Resident Evil 2 remake fairly easily. Wait for a gap to open up, then slip through it. The worst he can really do is give you a firm slap. But running can’t save you from the Nemesis. It stalks you relentlessly through the zombie-ravaged streets of Raccoon City, and always feels one step ahead of you. Seeing something that big and scary move so quickly is really…

Somebody clearly took a look at the choice-driven adventure genre, and said, “Can I king it?” Yes, you can! You see, while Reigns seems like a logical reference point—you play as a king, making various decisions that affect both your subjects and members of the nobility—Brave At Night’s game delivers a meatier, more traditional gaming experience. While this allows me to become invested at times, it comes at a cost to the central idea of choice. To begin with, it’s all pretty straightforward. Entertaining lords and smelly peasants alike in the throne room, I listen to their wants and needs, and decide whether I feel like improving their dull lives. It’s not quite as simple as that, of course. I only have a limited supply of gold, and the ominously generic, Soylent…

Why it’s still impossible to get anything done in MIDDLE-EARTH: SHADOW OF MORDOR I didn’t want it to happen like this. I intended to focus on the story. But, instead, a few hours into a new game, I’m chasing a creature called Kothug Maggot-Nest around a slag heap as revenge for laughing at me when I died. If the orcs in Peter Jackson’s trilogy felt this good to kill, the extended cuts would just be nine hours of uruk butchery tutorials led by Aragorn and chums. It’s a measure of both my feeble self-control and the enduring excellence of Shadow of Mordor. I feel more like a round dog in a sausage shop than a steely Gondorian ranger out for revenge. It’s literally impossible for me to stay on target,…

1 BERTIE THE BRAIN Played noughts and crosses and was built for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. After two weeks on display, it was taken apart again. 2 TENNIS FOR TWO A two-player game running on an oscilloscope, designed in 1958 for display at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s annual public exhibition. 3 THE LUNAR LANDING GAME Written in 1969 for DEC’s PDP-8 ‘minicomputer’, the game was originally text based. Subsequent versions, like Lunar Lander, added graphics. 4 DEEP BLUE A supercomputer built to beat humans at chess, Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game series in May 1997.…

Creature sounds can come from anywhere, really,” says ArenaNet senior sound designer Joseph Clark. As game worlds grow in size and density, so does the diversity of sounds for their animal inhabitants, but you may not realize that their voices have a variety of origins as well. “Friction is one of our best friends for sound design,” Clark says. On one particular occasion, one of his co-workers was dragging a trash can from their office to the hall, and noticed that it made a “great purring, guttural sound”. That’s when Clark’s ears perked up and he knew it was time to grab the microphone. Everyday sounds can often become the voices of videogame creatures with a bit of editing after the fact. Clark shared a video for one in Guild…

PLAYED IT On top of the dam I’ve just taken from a bunch of ruthless gangers, a Ranger Major dies horribly. As the game describes it, her intestines fall out just before she expires. Grim. Meters away, I recruit a cat wearing a fedora to my team. Events can go from dark to light very quickly in Wasteland 3. This latest RPG in the series is set in deepest, darkest Colorado Springs, a place where gang members string up their victims and paste threatening, bloody messages onto any spare wall they can find. You take care of these villains in turn-based combat reminiscent of XCOM, but with a gritty, survivalist feel. You bolt mods onto guns between combat encounters, and take down your foes with found weapons scrounged from the wasteland.…

FIRST LOOK Yes, it’s another XCOM-inspired squad-based strategy game, but Company of Crime sets itself apart with its focus on melee combat. Set in London in the 1960s, where guns weren’t readily available, you’ll punch, kick, and headbutt your way through the underworld as a crook or a copper—either building a criminal empire, or bringing one down. There are guns in Company of Crime, but using them comes with a heavy price. As you commit a crime—roughing up the owner of a bar, say, or robbing a jewelry store—a so-called heat meter will rise, eventually resulting in the police showing up and making your life much more difficult. Throwing a few punches will only tickle your heat level, but pull out a gun (this is in the UK, remember), and the law will…

PLAYED IT I‘m not sure I understand Rock of Ages 3: Make & Break, on a fundamental level. It exudes playfulness and joy from every pore as a game about crashing a boulder through paper doll dioramas should. But it stamps out that energy with some incredibly frustrating course design and confusing creative tools. ’s an excellent pitch, on paper at least. Little scenes from myth and history run through by a massive rock with a dumb grin or, if you’re gambler, a wheel of cheese precariously balanced on its rim for maximum velocity—dumb grin also included. Rock of Ages 3 turns these boulder runs into time trials, races, elaborate games of skee-ball, obstacle courses, and castle sieges. It just doesn’t embrace the basic joy of being a huge, tumbling mass of…

CASINO Here’s where you can bleed Chicago’s gamblers dry; unfortunately this includes your own goons, who might develop a gambling addiction. DISTILLERY This is where you make the booze, deciding if you want to stock up on anything from poison to high shelf liquor. HOTEL The hotel racket hasn’t been implemented yet, but it will eventually bump up the amount of punters in an area, filling up local businesses with thirsty visitors. BROTHEL You can create your very own red light district, but not a very clean one. Watch the money and the STDs roll in. SPEAKEASY And this is where you sell your booze. What you serve is up to you, but you should tailor it to the neighborhood’s character. Just watch out for your gangsters turning into alcoholics.…

The way that In Other Waters imagines humanity’s first encounter with alien lifeforms is a bit different from other sci-fi stories. Beneath the waves of the planet Gliese 667Cc is a thriving eco-system brimming with strange alien lifeforms. The vivid descriptions of a scientist and a minimalistic computer interface tell a story of awe and trepidation, creating a serene underwater adventure like no other. You play as the AI of an exo-suit piloted by xenobiologist Ellery Vas, a scientist who has come to Gliese 667Cc to study the alien lifeforms of this uncharted ocean. These strange beings aren’t the only mystery though, Ellery is also trying to solve the disappearance of her fellow scientist, Minae Nomura. The story follows Ellery as she traces her lost colleague’s footsteps through the depths of this…

In the very near future, a woman on the London Underground coughs up blood and is rushed to a facility its employees refer to simply as The Complex. Her body has been invaded by nanocells, an advanced technology with the potential to revolutionize medical science, if only its creators—and our protagonist, Dr Amy Tenant—could sort out that whole coughing up blood thing. Four years ago, Tenant worked as a warzone medic in a fictional totalitarian state called Kindar. With talk of a supreme leader and references to human rights violations, it’s not difficult to identify which country inspired the game’s writer, Lynn Renee Maxcy, who was a writer for TV series The Handmaid’s Tale. Now Tenant is with Kensington Corp, a British biotech company who has hired interns from war-torn…

You know that feeling in a skill-based action game, when you feel like you’re getting good at something, then you get to the next section and a bigger, badder enemy pummels all the confidence out of you? The Talos Principle is like that, but with brainpower. Are we going there? Yeah, we’re going there: It’s the Dark Souls of thinking That horrible analogy is another way of saying that I can deal with the general, problem-and-solution puzzles that underpin The Talos Principle, but that leaves me without the mental capacity to solve the deeper mystery within the game. There are loads of moments where I feel like I’ve worked something out through my own endeavor. And I can get past some obstacles with logic and by trial and error. But the text-heavy metanarrative of the…

PRE-GAME 1 Resist the urge to go AFK in the pre-game lobby, as you might in Fortnite or PUBG. Because here the kills you get progress your battle pass and weapon XP—a nice reward for getting your trigger finger warmed up. LAGGING BEHIND 2 Up to a certain point in the match, you can redeploy after death if you win a 1v1 face-off in the Gulag. Spray paint your rival before you fight, and practice in the close-quarters Gunfight mode to get the edge and make a return. GOLD DIGGER 3 Warzone is all about making money. Locate Buy Stations to spend your hard-earned CoD dollars on gear, killstreaks and even bringing a teammate back from the dead. Spend your first moments in the game amassing as much cash as…

Between its world-dominating battle royale Fortnite, and its industry-shaking digital storefront, Epic Games has hardly been quiet over the last few years. But now it’s adding yet another string to its bow—it’s starting up its own multiplatform publishing label. And, as you might expect, it’s starting with a promise to do things differently. As a publisher, it’s already planning to release games from the developers behind The Last Guardian, Limbo, and Control. Remedy has already worked with Epic, as Control is a limited exclusive on its store, but under this deal Epic’s going to be responsible for a lot more than just the distribution. According to Epic, it will be covering up to 100 per cent of development costs for the games it publishes, including salaries, QA, localization, and marketing,…

Lair of the Clockwork God is a hybrid creature, but not a fancy mythical one like a centaur or chimera. Instead it has the smug face of a point-and-click adventure, and the bouncy bottom of a platformer. You’ll recognize many of the influences fondly pastiched during the course of the game: Monkey Island, Sonic, Celeste, and Super Meat Boy. But the very best thing about it, the comedy, is a black box. Where did Ben Ward and Dan Marshall—the writers, designers and stars of Clockwork God—learn to be funny? Let’s be honest: They didn’t get it from games. They certainly didn’t get it from Borderlands. “It’s odd, I don’t really think of myself as funny,” Marshall says. “I only ever just say silly things as a way of disguising my social anxiety. It’s a…

PLAYED IT What’s better than a massive tank? A massive tank with legs. Iron Harvest is a real-time strategy game set in an alternative vision of the 1920s that sees massive tin can mechs march into war alongside squads of desperate soldiers. It looks gorgeous, and it plays like a love letter to Company of Heroes—Relic’s splendid World War II RTS. Each battlefield is packed with objectives to secure. If you capture more mines than your opponent, you can push the devastating mechs out sooner and earn a clear advantage. In a standard skirmish you win by keeping hold of victory objectives—though it’s difficult to see where they are. There are so many points to capture that the minimap—and the game overall—is somewhat tricky to parse. It looks great though. I love to…

It’s not an easy job, working for a prohibition-era Chicago mob boss. Empire of Sin lets you recruit and nurture a gang drawn from a pool of 60 crooks, all eager to make a name for themselves—and a buck or two—in the criminal underworld, but I suspect they would have had second thoughts if they’d known what was in store for them when I slipped into the shoes of the infamous Al Capone. A CLOSE QUARTERS SCRAP IN A FILTHY ALLEY IS NOT AN ELEGANT THING Capone’s one of 14 playable mob bosses, some invented, some historical, and some even related to members of the team—like Elvira, a 70-year-old brothel owner based on John Romero’s great-grandmother. It’s a cast with a lot of big characters, and it features a level of diversity…

For me, System Shock 2 is one of the all-time greats. Tying together sharp storytelling, taut gunplay, and RPG character development, all set on a spaceship that drips with horror-inflected tension, it was the gateway to the immersive sim classics to come, such as BioShock, Dishonored, and Prey. But for its makers, System Shock 2 was a test. It was the first project by a new studio called Irrational Games, a chance to prove it could deliver a game that matched the caliber of Looking Glass, the developer of the original System Shock, Thief, and other PC classics. “It was probably the most pressure I’ve felt in my life,” says Jonathan Chey, one of its three lead developers. “My strongest motivation was not wanting to look like a fool, because we’d never done anything like this before…

While Bleeding Edge may be a 4v4 ‘brawler’, don’t take that to mean that it plays like Ninja Theory’s DmC. Instead, it’s a game of timing, positioning, and cooldown management. But without a complex meta or satisfying combat, it whiffs on the ‘Overwatch-butmelee’ promise. Whereas Blizzard’s shooter ends each match with highlights, I’m yet to see a highlight-worthy feat of skill or teamwork here. I thought I’d be feeling hero fatigue at this point, but I do really love the backstories of Bleeding Edge’s 11 fighters. Buttercup is a biker who’s basically become a human motorcycle, and Kulev is a 125-year-old professor who achieved immortality by transferring his consciousness to a robotic viper that controls his zombified body. The industrial grunge and absurdity reminds me of Borderlands, but Bleeding Edge thankfully stops short…

1 Singstalks are tall fungal stalks that can be found in the central reef. 2 These forests communicate through sonic sounds, and move against each other to create a harmonic hum. 3 Singstalks are comprised of lots of spirallyentwined stalks that weave together to create a thick ‘trunk’. 4 Groups of these stalk forests can be used to slow down fast currents, controlling the flow of water through caverns.…

As I stand precariously on top of a box in a flooded basement, I finally decide that The Great Work is the best possible follow-up to Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Its story is not a continuation from Daniel’s adventure defeating Alexander in Brennenburg Castle, but it’s loosely set in the same universe. Though featuring its own story and puzzles, it occasionally returns to some series favorites, playing off what I already know from the main game. That’s how I feel so sure, before I actually try it, that when I step into the knee-high water surrounding my tiny island of safety, I’ll immediately be chased by the invisible monster that anyone who’s played Amnesia will likely remember. Sure enough, when I dunk my feet in to sprint to the next floating crate, I’m…

The Digital Equipment Corporation began producing the PDP-1 in 1959. By 1962, someone had used the million-dollar computer to create a videogame: Spacewar!. It wasn’t the first videogame, but it was the first that could be moved to other computers. And ‘Quantum Tennis For Two’ doesn’t make such a good headline. Spacewar! even comes with an exclamation mark. The point is, give a scientist millions of dollars’ worth of computing equipment and they will try to use it to play games; and that’s true even today, as IBM researchers developing quantum computers have discovered. Today, you can play Battleships on IBM’s cloud-controlled quantum processor, if you have an account to use it and the right software. As you might expect, Quantum Battleships differs slightly from the simple hit or miss mechanics of the classic…