Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2021 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Was reminded of some of the boys he used to play rugby with at school… for some reason. There’s something wonderful to me about an idea as ridiculous as ‘what if orcs played football?’ enduring for 35 years and counting. Thriving, in fact, with a new edition on the tabletop and a new PC game out this year. Of course, you need more than a sublimely silly premise to make a good strategy game, which is why we’ve gone behind the scenes of Blood Bowl 3 to test its turn-based chops, grill the developers, and even chat to the guys at Games Workshop about their bizarre creation. robin.valentine@futurenet.com TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com…

HIGHS Accept Cookies Final Fantasy XIV director Naoki Yoshida showed off his lalafell black mage in a seven-hour Twitch stream while baking coffee cookies. Total domination The Total War series has sold over 36 million copies. Prepare for Titanfall Respawn has announced it will be bringing Titanfall content into Apex Legends, beginning with season 9. LOWS Sub standard Blizzard’s changed how it sells WoW game time, so players can no longer just pay for 30 days up-front: It has to be a minimum of 60. Among duds The long-awaited Airship map arrived for Among Us and… it’s not great. The huge space makes it trivial for imposters to win. Cyberfunk Cyberpunk 2077’s latest patch fixes 484 issues—and it’s still buggy.…

1986 1st edition. Adapted from Warhammer Fantasy Battle—a skirmish wargame with a ball. 1988 2nd edition. Introduced Dungeonbowl, an underground version of the sport. 1991 Kerrunch. A spin-off aimed at beginners, with simpler rules 1994 Third edition. Introduced the turnover rule, became recognisably Blood Bowl. 2001 Living rulebook. A free PDF annually updated, the rules previous videogames used. 2011 Blood Bowl: Team Manager. A card game—basically Football Manager with orcs. 2016 Blood Bowl 2016. The rules didn’t change much, but it was a board game again. 2020 Blood Bowl Second Season. Rewrote the rules to help new players, nerfed wood elves.…

PYROMANCER Specialties: Medium range, damage-over-time The Pyromancer only regains health when an enemy afflicted by their fire abilities is killed. That may sound strict, but it’s easy to get to grips with. TECHNOMANCER Specialties: Long range, support, healing The Technomancer is easily the most survivable class in Outriders. Any damage dealt with their weapons triggers health regen, so keep firing. TRICKSTER Specialties: Mobility, execution, close-range. The Trickster has, appropriately, one of the trickiest ways of regaining HP. They have to kill enemies up close, so shotguns are ideal. DEVASTATOR Specialties: Defense, close-range, stuns The Devastator is like the beefier version of the Trickster, trading agility skills for fortifications that make them the tankiest class in the game.…

It’s easy to root for Abe. The Mudokons have been enslaved for centuries by the Glukkons. Mudokons are worked to the bone, drugged, and punished for any insubordination. It is up to one Mudokon to spark an insurrection and free his people from their chains. This is the plot of the 1998 Playstation cult classic Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus, and many of the same core story beats are preserved in this 2021 ‘reimagining’, Oddworld: Soulstorm. Veterans of Exoddus will recognize Soulstorm’s basic rhythms from the jump. This remains a 2D stealth puzzle game, in the traditions of Gunpoint or Mark of the Ninja, or the many other games that took initial influence from Oddworld all those years ago. Abe is a wimp; he can’t really fight, nor can he absorb more…

RPGs trend towards bloat. People want bigger worlds, more stuff, greater choice. But as in any genre, the things that are missing can end up defining the experience far more than what’s there. After adoring the first game, I’ve dived into Legend of Grimrock 2, and it’s reminded me of one of my favorite absences in gaming: Neither game has any merchants. You can’t trade or barter. There isn’t even any money. Any gold or jewels you do find are just dead weight—if you can drag them to the end of the game, you’ll earn an achievement, but really they serve no function. That’s got to be almost unique among RPGs—I struggle to think of another without any means at all of buying or selling goods. And it deftly solves…

When Warframe first added ship-to-ship space combat back in 2019, it was easily one of its most ambitious updates ever. The free-to-play loot shooter had experimented with zero-G fights with Archwings a few years earlier, but Railjack was much akin to Sea of Thieves. Players form a crew and explore dangerous asteroid fields surrounding various planets aboard a ship called a Railjack, with multiple stations each player can take control of. Or they can eject themselves into space and board enemy ships, destroying them from the inside. But as cool as Railjack is, it fell woefully short of what players expected. For one, it was just too complicated. That’s what Warframe’s latest update is trying to fix. Called Corpus Proxima and The New Railjack, this update completely overhauls Warframe’s ship…

When I last grappled with Grand Theft Auto V’s Chaos Mod, which throws random events into the game like a rogue barista pouring hot sauce and spider eggs into your skinny caramel latte, Michael had just been teleported into Los Santos’ military base. As you can imagine, the famously congenial US Military doesn’t take too kindly to a murderous middle-aged thief appearing in their top-secret compound (at least, not one who isn’t wearing his uniform, oh-ho!) and soon the base is lit up like 17th century London after a certain baker left a certain oven on. A solid cliffhanger, neatly set up for me to begin this entry with a daring escape from one of Los Santos’ most secure locations. It would be a shame if, say, Michael got annihilated…

FOR SCIENCE! LEGENDS OF RUNETERRA playruneterra.com The new Lab of Legends mode brings solo adventures to this competitive card game. There’s something wonderfully subversive about the way it takes the same cards you use in the tightly balanced PvP mode, and lets you stack wacky new effects onto them as you build crazy combos to beat the AI with. SHOW OF FORCE STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT II bit.ly/2Rf2MpD Matches of Star Wars Battlefront II don’t so much put me in mind of the movies as they do childhood memories of bashing my action figures together. With the microtransactions stripped out, what’s left is just a huge toybox of chaotic fun across every era of the series. Slight and silly, but joyful. SLIDEIN THE JACKBOX PARTY PACK 7 bit.ly/3wEUZ4H There’s a real…

MOTHERBOARD A320M-A Pro MSI $69 Everything you need and nothing else. This MSI motherboard is simple, but it works. And that’s all we can ask for at this price. PROCESSOR Ryzen 5 3400G AMD $150 Capable budget CPU and GPU in one tiny package, and it also comes with its very own CPU cooler. GRAPHICS CARD None This build is tailored to today’s GPU shortage. But don’t fret, once cards are back in stock, you could slot one in to this PC for an upgrade. COOLER Wraith Spire AMD Free with CPU The Wraith Stealth is a great cooler made even better by the fact it comes free with our choice of chip. Budget heaven. MEMORY Vegeance LPX 8GB (2x 4GB) DDR4-3000 Corsair $65 For gaming we only really need…

JODY MACGREGOR Twitter @jodymacgregor This month Said a lot of unprintable things about a set of virtual dice while checking out Blood Bowl 3. WES FENLON Twitter @wesleyfenlon This month Investigated why Metallica’s new stuff sounds like a Legend of Zelda soundtrack. ANDY KELLY Twitter @ultrabrilliant This month Got through an entire preview of the Gollum game without making a ‘my precious’ joke. TYLER WILDE Twitter @tyler_wilde This month Learned to hate certain specific medieval weapons of war in Chivalry 2.…

ACTIVISION WAS SITTING ATOP ITS NEW CALL OF DUTY EMPIRE, AND RAVEN WAS TO BE ITS SCAFFOLDING Putting out a Wolfenstein game ought to be the highlight of any developer’s career. It was the making of MachineGames and Gray Matter Interactive, which became the backbone of Treyarch after Return to Castle Wolfenstein—not to mention id Software, whose tribute to a prison-break game launched the FPS genre. But for Raven Software, it was a disaster. There was nothing wrong with the game, as such: Wolfenstein (2009) is a perfectly serviceable shooter, with an arsenal of impossible weapons built for colorful Nazi evisceration. But it was also a doggedly faithful sequel to Gray Matter’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and by that time the b-movie blankness of BJ Blazkowicz seemed terribly old-fashioned. The eight years between…

Name your favorite scene in a western, and the developers of Grit almost certainly have an idea for it. “The thing that really sealed the western theme for me is when we got horse combat working well,” says co-creator Bob Berry. “I was like, this isn’t just PUBG in the West anymore. It feels like a very different game now, and it’s fun.” In some ways Grit’s unabashedly familiar. One hundred cowboys parachute out of a zeppelin (their parachutes look like cloth wagon covers out of The Oregon Trail) and loot their way across a giant map while a dust storm circles them. But the idea is that it’s a western first and foremost. You can have a high noon-style duel—when you die, you can shoot it out with one other cowboy to get…

Games Workshop gave up on Blood Bowl for a long time. A fantasy football game for teams of 11 to 16, it was never going to move as many miniatures as wargames you have to buy entire armies for. An official player committee was given the task of updating its living rulebook, which they did until 2009, when Cyanide released its first videogame version and essentially became the custodians of Blood Bowl. Cyanide organized tournaments online, created new teams like the heavily armored Bretonnians and acrobatic bear-taming Kislev Circus, and helped keep Blood Bowl alive. Today, Games Workshop is a different company, one with more time for hobbyist board games. The tabletop version of Blood Bowl was resurrected in 2016, and the rules overhauled in Second Season in 2020. Cyanide’s…

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PAINKILLER 2004 This FPS is from an era where everything was inspired by Doom. Except instead of legions of demons, you’re slaying Lucifer’s armies. GEARS OF WAR (PC) 2007 PCF was the studio behind the original Gears of War’s PC port. Following its success, Epic acquired a majority stake in the studio. BULLETSTORM 2011 PCF released its last great FPS, Bulletstorm, a few years after its Epic partnership began. The shooter is still remembered for its inventive weapons. FORTNITE 2017 PCF continued to collaborate with Epic and is even credited as a co-developer on Fortnite, one of the biggest games in the world. OUTRIDERS 2021 Looking back at the studios past work, Outriders feels like a combination of PCF’s love for FPS weapons filtered through their work on Gears of…

On paper, Trials of Fire is everything I despise. I don’t like turn-based roguelikes. I don’t like card battlers, and I really don’t like anything involving hexagons—the Poochie of the shape world. Trials of Fire features all of these, which in any sensible reality makes me the last person who should be reviewing it. But if you’ve looked out the window lately, through the haze of coronavirus toward the icecap-melting sun, you’ll have noticed reality died on the way back to its home planet some time ago. As such, I’m unsurprised to discover that Trials of Fire is excellent. Set in a blighted fantasy land, Trials of Fire sees you pick a trio of adventurers from an eventual pool of nine, before embarking upon a series of set quests across…

For years, Rome: Total War was my favourite game in the series. It struck the perfect balance between being a game and being an exercise in history. Total War: Rome Remastered brings back what I’d call the first great Total War game for the modern era, updating much of its outdated UI and scaling it up to 4K and widescreen displays. It’ll be a trip down memory lane for those who loved the original and a more palatable experience for modern Total War lovers. As a remaster, a lot of attention is going to be given to how it looks and sounds, but what you really get out of this remaster is how it plays. The old Rome: Total War didn’t always play well with modern hardware. The new one…

The Las Vegas strip, chunkily but recognizably rendered in PS1 polygons, screams by at a rate of about two lampposts per second. I’d check the speedometer for a more conventional reading, but I daren’t look down. As I weave between the street furniture into oncoming traffic, two squad cars mimic every jerk of my steering wheel. They’re so close behind that, occasionally, the nose of a pursuit vehicle bumps into the rear end of my 1971 Dodge Challenger, nudging the speed still higher. This is fender bender figure skating, and it only ends one way: With a car-totalling crash. The question is whose. Eventually, my slaloming across the central reservation succeeds in sending one panda into a neatly manicured tree outside a casino, and the second crumples straight into the…

There’s a dead end junction, late in Half-Life 2’s airboat segment, that’s fairly easy to miss. It’s nothing special to look at. A concrete run-off with a few shanty houses and a handful of zombies. But this corner, with its distant chirping of crickets and the sunset baking the paneled walls in just the right way, is special enough that I always stop by for a visit when returning to the game. It’s a corner that perfectly captures the fleeting, uniquely melancholy beauty of Valve’s Source Engine. The Source Engine, the software that drove all of Valve’s games from Half-Life 2 through Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, came at a uniquely transitory moment in game development. It was the mid-2000s, and 3D games were starting to look pretty damn good. Ten years…

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JUNE 2011 Justin.tv spins its gaming content off into a new division called Twitch—its popularity leads it to subsume the company. AUGUST 2014 Twitch first starts using software to automatically detect and mute copyrighted music in archived streams. JANUARY 2015 Twitch offers a library of royalty-free music for creators to use in their streams. JUNE 2020 Twitch receives a huge amount of DMCA takedown notices related to copyrighted music in archived content. SEPTEMBER 2020 Twitch Soundtrack is announced—a library of pre-approved music to use in streams. OCTOBER 2020 Streamers are forced to delete archived streams featuring copyrighted music at short notice. NOVEMBER 2020 Twitch issues a sort-of apology for DMCA issues and publishes a guide for creators on avoiding them. FEBRUARY 2021 Metallica’s BlizzCon performance is dubbed over with what…

CAROLINE BECKER A determined resistance leader who spends much of the game staring at a map. Her backstory was retained for MachineGames’ sequels, in which she’s older but power armored. WILHELM STRASSE Occupies a zeppelin over Isenstadt, from which he orders Becker’s capture. He returns as the antagonist of Wolfenstein: The New Order, played by The A-Team’s Dwight Schultz. THE KREISAU CIRCLE An anti-Nazi paramilitary network that first appeared in Return to Castle Wolfenstein. By the ’60s it’s operating out of a giant U-boat, supplying BJ with intel and a sense of family.…

BLOOD BOWL 1995 Published by MicroLeague. No way of telling players apart by looking at them. Largely forgotten. CHAOS LEAGUE 2004 Cyanide’s unlicensed game was so close to Blood Bowl Games Workshop took them to court. BLOOD BOWL 2009 One amicable out-of-court settlement later, Cyanide was given a shot at an official videogame. BLOOD BOWL: LEGENDARY EDITION 2010 Same game, but with more stadiums and teams. BLOOD BOWL: CHAOS EDITION 2012 The same game again, but with more Chaos teams. DUNGEONBOWL 2012 An expandalone with matches played in tunnels, which were a bit restrictive for football. BLOOD BOWL 2 2015 Cyanide’s sequel was less clunky, but also less complete, with new teams added as DLC. DEATH ZONE 2018 A real-time Blood Bowl spin-off, so unpopular it was folded into Blood…

One of the peculiarities of Sega’s PC port release schedule—releasing the series (almost) chronologically, rather than in the order they were made—is it lessens the original impact that Yakuza 6 once had. It’s no longer a showcase for the new Dragon engine, because Yakuza Kiwami 2 exists. And it’s not as experimental or new as Yakuza: Like a Dragon, whose reworked combat and fresh protagonist make it a great jumping on point for newcomers. Instead, this is Kazama Kiryu’s final game as protagonist—the end of a story that has played out over hundreds of hours across six previous games. Which is to say, if you’re new to the series—or have only dipped your toe into a handful of them—come back to this one later, when you’ve fallen a bit deeper…

The Big Bang is wild when you think about it. All that we have come to understand—space, time, our universe, and life as we know it—are all part of a long chain started from one precise moment. Thinking too much about it is enough to send anyone spinning into an existential crisis, but Genesis Noir takes these grand themes in its stride, creating a cosmic adventure mixed with a detective story that goes down like a smooth glass of whiskey. In Genesis Noir, the Big Bang isn’t only the single biggest event in recorded human history, but a gunshot blast frozen in time, its bullet speeding toward your lover. To stop this event from meeting its inevitable end, you need to explore different pockets of time in the vast expanse…

For the last year or so, I’ve only associated Sekiro with frustration and anxiety. I wrote about beating the final boss using a slow-motion mod when Sekiro released, which led to dozens of death threats in the inbox and mentions, and to a meme big enough to make the news all over the internet, from Vice to the BBC. The voice actor for Liquid Snake, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the XCOM commander all chimed in with takes on the thing. “You not only cheated yourself…” It was funny in retrospect, but not while in the eye of the hurricane. I didn’t touch Sekiro after that. Until now, at least. I’ve been inside for a year. The Snyder Cut exists. Actual Elden Ring footage leaked. Anything is possible, so I might…

ESCAPE ARTIST 1 Assess your situation each time you start a new loop. You’ll only limp back to camp with 30% of your hard-earned resources if you die, so there’s no shame in backing out if things are getting tough. The Lich can wait. BASE CAMP 2 Any feelings of shame from ducking out early will fade when you have more resources to spend back at camp. Prioritize buildings like the Herbalist’s Hut to give you potions and the Field Kitchen to boost your campfire’s healing powers. BAR HUMBUG 3 Keep your eye on the progress bar in the top-left of your screen with a skull next to it. It gradually fills each time you play a card, and it’ll end with the Lich spawning on your camp. To help…

Released in 1999, Freespace 2 is generally regarded as one of the best space sims ever made. But it’s worth bearing in mind that, for a long time, Freespace 2 didn’t have much competition. In the 2000s, space sims almost disappeared completely, with only a handful of notable titles like Freelancer, X3, and EVE Online appearing through that decade. Freespace 2 was the last of the great ’90s space sims, and there appeared to be little new coming out that could challenge it. Since 2010, however, the situation has changed. Space sims have seen a welcome resurgence, with major projects like Elite Dangerous, No Man’s Sky, and Star Wars: Squadrons careening out of hyperspace alongside a swarm of indie titles like Evochron Mercenary, Everspace, and House of the Dying Sun.…

MOTHERBOARD MPG Z490 Gaming Carbon WiFi MSI $270 A heady mix of enthusiast motherboard functionality and build quality that stops short of god-tier motherboard pricing. PROCESSOR Core i9 10900K Intel $529 If you want the fastest gaming CPU, look no further than Intel’s flagship Core i9. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition Nvidia $699 The RTX 3080 is the flagship graphics card of an entire new GPU generation. COOLER Kraken X63 NZXT $150 One of the most stunning AIO coolers rebuilt with an updated pump and, of course, RGB lighting for more pizzazz. MEMORY Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB) @ 3,200 Corsair $164 If you truly want to show off, even your system memory should be aglow in RGB. POWER SUPPLY SuperNOVA 1000 G5 Gold EVGA $214 This…