Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2020 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

RYU STREET FIGHTER V When Capcom reduced the length of Ryu’s crouching medium kick they undermined classic Ryu play, and the competitive scene stopped playing him. ORNSTEIN AND SMOUGH DARK SOULS A bug causes boss hitboxes to invisibly persist in the world after you kill them. Normally it doesn’t matter, unless you fight two at once… PATHFINDER APEX LEGENDS Pathfinder’s hitbox was originally larger than his body, making him the easiest character to hit. After fixes, his thin legs made him seem one of the hardest. NERGIGANTE MONSTER HUNTER WORLD Nergigante’s palm-slam attack can flummox newcomers who don’t know that when its arm is damaged, it grows spikes which make the hitbox bigger.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE November 19, 2020 DEVELOPER CD Projekt Red PUBLISHER In-house LINK cyberpunk.net When you create a character in Cyberpunk 2077, you get to choose from one of three life paths, which are basically origin stories. You can be a street kid, a slick corporate agent, or a wandering nomad. This not only determines your starting location in the story, but your relationship with Night City itself. PLAYED IT “It was tricky to design,” says Tomasz Marchewka, lead story writer. “We wanted to give you as much freedom as possible, so you can decide what kind of cyberpunk you want to be. You can choose how you look and, to some extent, who you are. But then we decided, wouldn’t it be cool if you had a few…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY $35 DEVELOPER Gato Studio PUBLISHER In-house LINK thewaylanders.com This impressively ambitious fantasy RPG, currently out in Steam Early Access, could be the thing to fill that Dragon Age-shaped hole in your life. That’s not only because former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw held a consulting role—from combat to its dialogue, plenty will feel pleasingly familiar to long-time Bioware fans. PLAYED IT Currently The Waylanders promises between ten and twelve hours of content. More of its story, as well as additional character skills and classes, will be added progressively. The version available at launch is in a very rough state, something developer Gato Studio is transparent about. It’s so rough I didn’t make it past the three-hour mark—inevitably a fatal error would take my game out…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A port of the enhanced PS Vita version of one of the best PS2-era JRPGs EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER Atlus PUBLISHER Atlus REVIEWED ON Intel Core i3-8350K CPU, 12GB RAM, GeForce GTX 1060 MULTIPLAYER No LINK atlus.com/atlus-titles/persona4-golden/ Starting a new school is a difficult time for anyone. But the teenaged protagonist of Atlus’s sprawling JRPG has it particularly tough. Having moved from the bustle and bright lights of Tokyo to the supposed rural calm of Inaba, he’s barely unpacked his bags before a series of gruesome murders shocks the sleepy town. So he bands together with a group of classmates, each holding supernatural powers, to investigate this disturbing phenomenon. First impressions aren’t especially promising. This is, after all, a port of a port:…

Fantasy and deck-building games go together like Magic The Gathering and financial ruin, and that’s one of many reasons Slay the Spire is so wonderful. It doesn’t make sense at first. It’s bacon bits in your banana milkshake. But the elements here are blended to perfection, which makes nailing absurd and unlikely card combos satisfying in a way that the physical equivalent so rarely is. And, best of all, those stacked attacks won’t make a human player swipe their cards off the table in petulant rage. The game’s roguelike elements mean that every massively-OP combo also feels like just reward for the horrors you’ve experienced. Look upon my orbs and tremble, AI nemeses. 90…

TYLER WILDE THIS MONTH Hit the deck-building jackpot. ALSO PLAYED Half-Life: Alyx, Persona 4 Golden In a recent meeting, someone described Monster Train as “a card game for people who’ve already put 200 hours into Slay The Spire”. It’s a good description. Slay the Spire has an understated elegance that makes Monster Train’s four-level arenas, multi-stage battles, and glow effects feel garish and convoluted. I won’t think about Monster Train decks at night the way I did with Slay the Spire. But it’s fun and new, and when a good idea and good luck come together, it feels almost as satisfying. One difference is that you can play minions in Monster Train. With the right card upgrades, some of the demons you can plop down are hilariously buff. On one run, I had a guy with…

Storage may not get the blood racing in the same way a CPU or graphics card does, but it’s an increasingly important component of any gaming system. With next-gen consoles looking to make the most of their PCIe SSDs, it seems reasonable their games will put a greater emphasis on storage. As it is, there’s a lot to be gained from moving up to speedy SSDs, from games loading quicker to day-to-day operations just not taking as long, and Windows booting almost instantly. When we’ve looked at SSDs before, you’d find this list stuffed with SATA-based drives from top-to-bottom, with potentially only one or two PCIe SSDs at the high-priced end. It’s now increasingly hard to recommend the old school 2.5-inch SSDs, simply because there isn’t much of a pricing…

73 KANE & LYNCH 2: DOG DAYS RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION 2 Andy: Kane & Lynch 2 is terrible, and I love it. It’s a completely one-note, unimaginative third-person shooter. The two lead characters have no redeeming qualities. The story is thin like wet crêpe paper. But man does it have style. The grimy documentary aesthetic—where everything looks like it was filmed on a cheap handheld camera, and uploaded to YouTube with poor compression—is what keeps you playing when you’d otherwise switch off and never touch it again. A disgusting, charmless game, but somehow irresistible. It knows it’s a dumb, ugly shooter, and it leans into it, hard. 72 LOST PLANET 3 RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New Robin: The third game in a mediocre series, this sequel made bold changes…

Hundreds of members of the games industry have written about their experiences with sexual assault and harassment by peers and colleagues on social media in recent weeks. In many cases, their allegations have quickly been echoed by others with similar experiences, reinforcing patterns of inappropriate behavior. These stories coincide with a similar spate of allegations of abuse in comics, pro wrestling, and other industries. A document collecting the allegations, initially shared in a Medium post titled ‘Survivor Stories of Harassment/Abuse/Assault within the gaming live-streaming industry’, now contains hundreds of accounts of abuse. While the initial accusations were made about streamers, this inspired others to come forward from across the industry. A NUMBER OF UBISOFT EMPLOYEES HAVE BEEN ACCUSED OF SEXUAL ASSAULT A number of Ubisoft employees have been accused of…

There’s an England beyond Piccadilly Circus and the thatched roofs of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. A country where the residents wear tracksuit pants rather than tweed, and drink their coffee from enormous Sports Direct mugs. Where unfortunate nicknames stick for life and neighbors gossip about the local soak. That’s the England that Greg Pryjmachuk knew, and sought to recreate in Landlord’s Super. “These towns are at the mercy of global actions,” he says. “I worked in my town’s concrete industry up until 2008 when the economy made it go kaput. There was a guy in my local boxing gym who was a real talent, but got into a car accident, and the corrective surgery for his leg couldn’t be done through the NHS. There’s a real prison of poverty…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2021 DEVELOPER Amplitude Studios PUBLISHER Sega LINK humankind.game You start Humankind as a nomadic tribe in the Neolithic era. The wilderness around you holds pockets of treasure: a resource deposit here, a volcanic pool there. As I move my tribe across the map I’m rewarded for discovering the Great Blue Hole, a circular underwater ravine. I’m discovering the world, and I haven’t built my first settlement yet. PLAYED IT Amplitude’s strategy games have been getting better and better since the studio formed in 2011. The Endless Space series introduced some truly bizarre factions to the space 4X formula, but Humankind owes more to the studio’s fantasy game, Endless Legend. Humankind has many similar features, in the way that your cities grow district by district, and battles taking place…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Game of Thrones meets Days of our Lives EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Paradox Interactive PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700 CUP @ 3.60GHz, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, Windows 10 MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK bit.ly/2YHSOwH Play enough Total War and somebody in one of the internet’s shrouded back alleys will offer you up some tasty Crusader Kings II. “Did you enjoy how your heir became a sinister embarrassment in Medieval II? Ooh, then you are going to totally love this.” The more characterful elements of Creative Assembly’s grand strategy game feel like a gateway drug for Paradox’s deeper, more humane family affair. The only problem is that it’s an extremely difficult drug to understand. Is it a suppository? Do I inject it? Maybe…

It takes around five seconds—enough time to choose the hunter character with a pet corgi—to fall in love with Enter the Gungeon. I could just write ‘corgi’ 100 more times and stick a score on the end. But Devolver’s twin stick shooter is good enough to deserve more praise than I have time to bestow. It’s fast, intuitive, and gorgeous, with crisp pixelated book-scattering animations that make me want to get banned from even more libraries. It’s the sort of game where the first hour feels like it’s teasing you to leave all those other games behind and spend the next 400 hours thwonking NPCs with your crossbow. And we got all the way through this without a ‘pet the dog’ joke. 86…

ROBIN VALENTINE THIS MONTH Opened up my eyes and saw the signs. ALSO PLAYED Orcs Must Die 2, Murder By Numbers Developers tend to take things too literally. Most games are a pretty direct simulation of the activity they represent. In shooters, you aim and click to shoot. In racing games, you steer your car and press a button to accelerate. It’s why many games revolve around violence—it’s a straightforward thing to translate to the screen. But it’s a shame that so few developers take a more abstract approach. Take Signs of the Sojourner—it’s a game about conversations, but it doesn’t consist of a series of dialogue choices—it represents social interaction through a card-based puzzle game. Different cards have different symbols, and your goal is to match with the person…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASED September 10, 2010 PUBLISHER Carpe Fulgur DEVELOPER EasyGameStation LINK bit.ly/30LzS36 It’s undoubtedly right to assume that Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is one of the more important indie games that you’ve never have heard of. You see, it was the first Japanese PC game ever released on Steam, and its success helped kickstart a chain of events—including the release of Dark Souls’ own hugely popular PC port—that proved there was an enormous demand for Japanese games on PC and not just consoles. Recettear’s developers thought it’d only sell 10,000 copies, but instead it sold over 500,000. You wouldn’t know it by playing Recettear today, though. Ten years is a long time, especially for an indie game, and Recettear’s adorable charm and engrossing loop of dungeon delving and bartering…

Way back in 2012, you could buy a quad-core/eight thread CPU with a 3.5GHz base clock and a 3.9GHz turbo. In 2018, you could also buy a CPU with a 3.5GHz base clock and a 3.9GHz turbo, but this time it had 16 cores, and processed 32 threads simultaneously. It was a Threadripper 2950X, and was more than twice the price of 2012’s Core i7-3770K. What’s going on there? Shouldn’t Moore’s Law, which back in 1975 (although the concept was first thought of in 1965) stated that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years, have ensured that 2018’s CPU was running at 28GHz? Sure, you can pick up a 5GHz i9, but Intel’s 2020 Core i3-10100 manages four cores/eight threads at 3.6/4.3GHz, still…

Most games are about one thing hitting another. A bullet and a soldier’s head; a platform and your foot; a sword and a demon’s arm; a jaw and a Shoryuken. And that means a lot of games are all about hitboxes, the invisible geometry which tells them when things collide. But while they’re ubiquitous, hitboxes also exist in a thorny tangle of hard math and soft player perception. There’s a real art to making them feel great to play with, and there’s real genius in getting them to work right, since computers are surprisingly bad at dealing with collision. The result is that different games take completely different approaches to the ways hitboxes work. In games like Monster Hunter World, your character’s hitbox pretty much matches what you see, so…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE August 25, 2020 DEVELOPER Metronomik PUBLISHER Sold-Out Software LINK nostraightroads.com You know the phrase ‘elevator pitch’? An idea streamlined down until it can squeeze into the space between the elevator doors closing and opening again? I kind of have to wonder if Kuala Lumpur-based studio Metronomik practised its pitch for No Straight Roads while riding all the way to the top of the Petronas Towers. PLAYED IT (And yes, elevator pedants, I do realize that the Petronas Towers houses some of the fastest elevators in the entire world, please do not @ me on this.) The point is: Playing the first couple of hours of No Straight Roads, I found myself assaulted with a whole lot of premise. You play both halves of rock duo Bunk Bed Junction…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A real-time stealth tactics game set in the Wild West EXPECT TO PAY $50 DEVELOPER Mimimi Games PUBLISHER THQ Nordic REVIEWED ON GTX 1080Ti, Intel i7-8086K, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK desperadosgame.com There is no dearth of handy tools in Desperados III, so it’s hard to pick a favorite. The brutal bear trap that clamps its jaws around anyone unfortunate enough to walk over it has to be a contender, but I’m also rather partial to the darts that let you kill two enemies with one blow—through magic, no less. None of them saved my ass quite as often as the humble F5 and F8 keys, however, and the rest of my arsenal would be useless without them. Every one of its stealthy encounters…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A western roguelike twin-stick shooter EXPECT TO PAY $20 DEVELOPER Upstream Arcade PUBLISHER Raw Fury REVIEWED ON i7 9700K, RTX 2080 TI, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK bit.ly/2YeXXxg I’ve never been so pleased to see a witch. Wearing an antlered skull, and emitting the kind of presence you feel long before you see, “like a storm rolling in” according to Ron Perlman’s tar-thick voiceover, in another game she might be an end-of-level boss. In West of Dead, a roguelike set in a lugubrious wild west underworld, your interactions with her are the only persistent progress you can make. It always begins in the bar. However deep you get through the crypts, the snowcapped wilds where dogs prowl, the deepest mines of purgatory, death spits…

On the face of it, things don’t get much grimmer than Darkest Dungeon. It opens with eldrich horror, suicide, and ruin. It’s darker than a burlap sack of smashed toys. There’s even a warning about how terrible things are likely to get. But in practice, it’s so glum that it verges on black comedy. Just when you think things can’t get any worse, they do, often in ways that are so hopeless that it feels slapstick. Not only do characters die, but the horror of their exertions afflicts them with all manner of stress-based maladies. They get fearful, selfish, and phobic. In my playthrough I was forced to put my A Team into fantasy rehab while I sent Team Backup Plan into the wilds to explore. I spent ten desperate…

It feels strange to follow the breathless chaos of Enter the Gungeon with something as glacial as Legend of Grimrock, but such is the breadth and majesty of the underplace-themed distractions available on PC. One minute you’re cartwheeling over waves of glowing bullets; the next, you’re throwing stones at giant snails. Every glistening grey brick here feels like it was fired in adoration of a bygone era of gaming. If you ever wondered why we call them dungeon crawlers, this is the answer. 71…

RACHEL WATTS THIS MONTH Became versed in the most rural of Irish slang. ALSO PLAYED Umurangi Generation, Children of Morta There’s a clever twist to this indie visual novel: The only way to read the story is to erase it. Taking place within a series of diary pages and sketchy images, your mouse doubles as an eraser, and you must wipe out each of the journal’s entries to continue. When I first started to wipe out the written words and doodles, it felt oddly wrong, like I was destroying something precious belonging to someone else. But If Found… uses the act of erasing as more than a destructive force. The diary you’re reading belongs to Kasio, a young trans woman returning home to a small rural Irish town in 1993. After a…

I get sorted into Hufflepuff, because of course I do. I’m 28 years old and playing a Minecraft mod based on a series of children’s books that I loved way too much when I was an actual child, so I guess I just exude Hufflepuff energy. The sorting hat agrees, after peppering me with magazine-style personality quiz questions questions like “what do you most value?” (community) and “which would you rather be?” (trusted). “Hufflepuff!” the grouchy sorting hat yells. The grey scarf tucked into the school wizarding robes I bought in Diagon Alley magically turns yellow. Now that I’m sorted, I’m free to roam the unfathomably intricate rendition of Hogwarts. I immediately get just as lost in the wizarding school’s blocky corridors as I typically do in a standard Minecraft mine shaft.…

1 Intel’s 8086 chip, from 1978, had around 30,000 transistors. 2 Intel’s 80286, from 1982, had around 130,000 transistors. 3 Intel’s 80486, from 1989, hits the million-transistor mark. 4 The Pentium, four years after the 486, takes the count to 3.1 million.…