Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

Luna’s Twitter thread explained that, for Minecraft archival group Omniarchive, 1.1.1 was treated as a kind of holy grail. Miraculous, then, that one of their number happened to stumble upon a tweet she made in 2010 that simply read “oooooohhhhhhh Minecraft update!”. The timestamp on that tweet lined up exactly within the period the elusive patch would have been available. The first person to DM Luna about the tweet was met with silence (she writes that she may have “just having a bad day”). But months later, a second notification prompted her to plug in an old USB hard drive and give it a look. Lo and behold, there were several Minecraft builds, one of which matched the time of release for 1.1.1. A little digging in the files later,…

Having mastered cheese wheels with Skyrim, Bethesda has had to create a new franchise to take its food tech to the next level—and what a detailed sandwich was featured in a recent Starfield trailer. It seems emblematic: There’s a more grounded, NASA feeling to the technology shown, even if this RPG takes place 300 years into our future. Concept art shows rustic frontiers, gleaming sci-fi cities, and alien environments, in a game that’s basically Skyrim in space. See that alien mountain? You can probably go there, but you could also follow the main faction—the explorers of Constellation—and unravel the secrets of the universe. CORE BLIMEY Howard also says that Starfield will be a slightly more hardcore roleplaying game than recent Bethesda titles, with more options for players to express themselves.…

As with every recent From Software game, Elden Ring will be a mixture of the familiar and the different, with some changes to Souls combat and world design. It’s set in an open world, though don’t expect traditional RPG towns—there are six main areas complete with dungeons and bosses. There is stealth, but there are exciting new options in combat, including skills you can freely swap between weapons. Mounted combat’s on offer too. Speaking of which: In the trailer your horse does a double-jump! Metal! RELEASE January 2022 DEVELOPER From Software PUBLISHER Bandai Namco LINK bit.ly/3yqH5mu…

Games like Hot Wheels Unleashed were abundant in PC gaming’s beige era. You’d pop a demo disc into your Voodoo 2 tower and find an Airfix Dogfighter or a ReVolt, in which toys raced across suburban bedrooms. They were never going to hold your attention like Richard Burns Rally, but it was an afternoon of giggles. Enter Milestone’s straightforward Hot Wheels racer. Once again a magical and unknown force has imbued collectable toys with sentience—and also rather thoughtfully arranged a number of tracks around college campuses and skateparks—and your mission is to race one of those toys to victory. The full release will include a track builder and 12-player online multiplayer, but for this preview, simple quick races were my main event. They walk a line between the exuberant loop-de-looping…

This Italian airbase has turned into Hell. The seared, metal carcass of a plane dominates one of the airstrips, surrounded by craters and puddles of blood. The hangars are now just skeletons, and next to them screaming men dance as they burn. There’s so much shouting, with soldiers yelling orders and warnings as they move between fleeting cover. Then, a rocket-propelled grenade, and the soldiers are gone. And through it all I have this inappropriately goofy grin on my face because, finally, I’m playing Company of Heroes 3. The scene, my first fight in the campaign, is the Company of Heroes I remember, but with the intensity dialled way up. There’s more destruction and noise and chaos, and the busyness of the battlefield speaks to the long list of new…

1 GUN EMPLACEMENT Well, this is hardly bigger than a regular two-person tent, and that big gun looks like it takes up a lot of room. 2/10 2 BARRACKS OK, this is a little better, but you’ll also need to share it with a bunch of other sweaty soldiers, some of whom likely snore. 4/10 3 TANK DEPOT On the upside, you get to share this tent with a tank! On the downside, you have to share this tent with a tank. 5/10 4 HQ You’ve got plenty of room for activities, be they work or leisure, and a medical tent in case you fall into nettles. 10/10…

If you’re looking for Dungeons & Dragons without the dice rolls then Dark Alliance is for you. It’s an intense, combat-focused action-RPG where you slay monsters, collect loot, and fight alongside a party of powerful heroes—but without the usual trappings of a traditional RPG. There are no walls of dialogue or deep, lengthy quests to be found here. Just a lot of goblins and other foul beasts to kill, and some very impressive looking locations to do it in. In Dark Alliance we follow the Companions of the Hall, a legendary band of adventurers led by D&D favorite Drizzt Do’urden, as they search for a magical MacGuffin called the Shard. Armies of villains and monsters from all corners of Faerûn—the titular ‘dark alliance’—are lusting after the Shard and the power…

To put it bluntly, this game is some of the most fun you can have on PC right now. It’s a riveting, theatrical medieval warfare game that’s equally about martial arts mastery and roleplaying as a Middle Ages buffoon. Sometimes you spend 30 intense seconds expertly dueling another player with swords, other times you’re skewered by a ballista bolt while shaking your fist and declaring that you’re “power incarnate”. At the center of Chivalry II are 64-player team objective-based matches. These are multi-stage battles that see castles sieged with rolling towers and ladders, peasants slaughtered, and caravans ambushed. They all start roughly the same way: Both teams lined up and sprinting at each other with swords, axes, polearms, maces, bows, and more. I approach these charges by smashing the ‘yell’…

Clumsy titling aside, Sniper: Ghost Warrior: Contracts 2 wastes no time getting to the good stuff. You’re Raven, a killer-for-hire dispatched to the Middle Eastern state of Kuamar to prevent a war. Your target is Bibi Rashida, Kuamar’s de-facto head-of-state after her husband was assassinated. Rashida’s military response threatens to destabilize the regions and cripple Western economies. Your job is to clean this up by taking out Rashida herself. All this is communicated in a direct, matter-of-fact briefing that encapsulates Contracts 2’s pragmatic, no-nonsense design. Having gradually refined Ghost Warrior over five games, CI Games clearly understands the experience it wants to create. Contracts 2 delivers it with a quiet confidence that I thoroughly appreciated. Your efforts to dismantle Rashida’s regime is spread across five missions so big they’re referred…

If you’re interested in narrative-driven games, there’s a theoretical game you’ve already dreamed about. An impossible fusion of deliberately crafted stories and pure systems-driven anecdotes that lend themselves to stories of your own like procedurally generated bricks. Wildermyth is that game. It is real. And it is wonderful. Campaigns start with a few randomized heroes. They’re just a jumble of pieces, an old police composite. But soon, things will start to happen. They’ll rescue a chicken while traveling. Your hunter will refuse to enter a village or explain why, and a prompt will ask if you want to press them. Two of them will form a rivalry, and get bonuses to their critical hit (‘stunting’, a far better term) chance as they one-up each other. Across multiple chapters, you’ll explore…

Just looking at Cruelty Squad can make you queasy, but it passes the most essential immersive sim tests with bright, nauseating colors. I used classic vent routes to stealthily assassinate a bouncy castle made of flesh one playthrough, switching to a rocket launcher, and using my guts as a grappling hook for a more direct approach the next. I stacked barrels to climb over entire buildings, and picked off targets with sniper shots from across the map. Cruelty Squad is Deus Ex if it were made today, the natural product of furious people exhausted by wealth inequality, police militarization, and the stubborn structures that keep humanity rolling towards total annihilation of the soul. But Cruelty Squad wants to have fun before the end. It’s a stealth action game that props…

It only takes until the login screen for Emily is Away to dredge up powerful, confusing memories. It’s a mix of nostalgia and despair, like unearthing a time capsule and finally realizing where your cat went. I decide to use the same name I did on my first AOL account: RuralMG. Apparently I wanted people to think I was a white supremacist rapper at a livestock auction. In my defense, this was from a time when the internet came on discs. In keeping with the self-loathing trip up my own ass, I decide to behave how I would have done in the noughties. Two messages in, and I have already promised Emily that I will be there for her, under any circumstances. It’s an absurd commitment, but it’s also Future…

Best to save The Hex for the smallest review in this spread, just so I can talk about how great it is without having the word count to spoil anything. It fits with this month’s theme of being backwards glancing without being slavishly retro, with six different sections that lampoon classic game genres. But it’s so self-aware that it’s practically sitting in the room with you, watching you play. Which is actually a chilling thought. Maybe it’s still here? Have five more points, just in case. 79…

1 ARMS RACE You can see from the hero’s arms that he belongs in the Blood Dragon universe. In Hellraid, the Dying Light hero just gets chucked into a fantasy world—with his watch and all—like a poor person’s Bruce Campbell. 2 UNUSUAL INTER FACE Blood Dragon’s UI was designed to fit the neon faux-’80s theme, so even when we’re browsing its menus we’re still immersed. Hellraid just uses the base game UI, which jars with its fantasy theme. 3 FUN STORY Blood Dragon was never going to be a fully fleshed story, so it plays into its silliness to great effect. Hellraid’s story mode takes itself too seriously, where it should have gone all in on Army of Darkness nonsense.…

HIGHS Team Fortress 2 An update put a cap on the bot issue, leading to a huge spike in players. Halo modding The Master Chief Collection’s latest update brought back a host of modding tools from the first game’s original 2003 port. Dark Souls: Nightfall A fan-made ‘sequel’ to From Software’s dead hard RPG is coming this December with remixed levels. LOWS Oculus Rift Facebook’s attempts to cram ads into VR games led to such massive backlash that its test developer backed out of the trial. Far Cry: Goldeneye After three years, Ubisoft took down one fan’s ambitious remake of GoldenEye 007 within Far Cry 5. Dogmeat River, the dog who provided the face and motions for Fallout 4’s Dogmeat, passed away in June.…

In 2007, on the eve of what is now known as the Great Recession, a market risk analyst decided to quit his job and embark on a career which, from a risk mitigation perspective, his colleagues would have advised against “I was young,” Terry Cavanagh says. “The whole indie developer thing was just starting to really kick off. I saved up some money and decided to give it a go.” It didn’t go very well. After many failed starts and projects that didn’t pan out, Cavangh ran out of money. He borrowed some cash from the bank to keep going, then ran out of that too. “I’d come to the end of the whole thing, where I just had to say, ‘This is not working out, I have to go…

What were the keys to Left 4 Dead’s long-lasting success? One was how well it worked as a ‘hangout game’—a way to catch up with friends over an exploded zombie head or two. Another was its immense modding scene, adding huge longevity and variety to an already super replayable experience. And these are the two pillars of spiritual successor The Anacrusis, from former Valve developers, which trades zombies for aliens in a retro sci-fi setting. “When my co-founder Dr Kimberly Voll and I started talking about this, we were talking about gaming as a social space. And thinking, if you stood back and thought of games that way versus games as an activity, what would you do and how would you approach it?” says Chet Faliszek, who worked at Valve…

Arkane does vampires with the out-of-nowhere Redfall, which is a very Arkane take on Left 4 Dead. Each of the four vamp-battling heroes has their own supernatural or high-tech skills. That means creative use of abilities as you explore the town of Redfall, which is awash with superpowered vampires after some scientists made a boo-boo in a nearby lab. Another way it differs from Left 4 Dead is that Redfall will be open world—a world that will change in mysterious ways from one playthrough to the next. RELEASE Summer 2022 DEVELOPER Arkane Austin PUBLISHER Bethesda Softworks LINK beth.games/3dKKZi6…

This is a whip-smart platformer about escaping an underground prison, your key to freedom lying in the hands of a god who demands relics. To get your mitts on these items, you’ll need to traverse four floors of a procedurally-generated temple filled with horrible death traps. Falling rocks, giant swinging hammers, hidden spikes, moving stone floors, bottomless chasms—all the classic booby traps are here and ready to take you out. Thankfully, you’ll be joined by the ghosts of up to 20 other players who have all previously died in the temple you’re attempting to complete. This ghost system is what makes Phantom Abyss unique. Watching how previous players approach each trap lets you see which route works best, and which will leave you splattered in a bloody mess. Seeing ghosts get…

BEFORE You’ve got a nice little town here, nestled in the idyllic countryside. It’d sure be a shame if something were to happen to it. Something like a pitched battle happening in the middle of it, for example. DURING It still looks nice if you enjoy dynamic destruction. Shells leave holes in roofs, bullets demolish buildings, and vehicles get consumed by fire. Truly explosive sound design is the icing on the traumatic cake. AFTER Smoke blots out the sun, vehicles and soldiers have been replaced by craters, and it’s devoid of life. The collapsed buildings and blackened hills tell the story of the fight and what caused the destruction.…

The great irony in the Ttitle of Dungeons & Dragons’ most popular setting is that we’ve never been allowed to forget it. Since the 1980s, when the genre we’d recognize as the RPG was born, any year without a release that takes us to the Sword Coast, or Icewind Dale, or the dungeons beneath Waterdeep has been an exception. If history is made up of stories that exist in the collective memory, then the city of Baldur’s Gate is as real as Los Angeles or New York. Strange, then, to think of a time when the Realms existed only within the bounds of a single head, situated somewhere in the suburbs of Toronto in the mid 1960s. The author Ed Greenwood invented the setting in his childhood daydreams, scribbling stories…

When I was little, I had a crate of Lego pieces. Once new sets had been built and enjoyed, they were dismantled to become more fuel for the crate, a seemingly bottomless well of colorful, constructive opportunity from which entire worlds could spill forth. Lego has been incorporated into dozens of games since the mid-1990s, but none of them bring the magic of my crate to life like Lego Builder’s Journey. Each of the dioramas that make up Lego Builder’s Journey is shaped by a single goal—to bring your character from one side of the level to the other. There is, however, no prescribed solution to any puzzle. In true Lego style, you’re free to use the blocks provided any way you like. It’s often an iterative process, but one…

It’s uncanny how much World of Warcraft Classic still feels like a wormhole to a bygone era of gaming. I was certain that the magic of its 2019 launch would have dissipated, but was wrong. I joined a group of strangers to take on one of the new dungeons, and what should’ve been a twenty-minute run turned into a four-hour marathon. When I slumped into bed at 3am, I didn’t just have some new loot for my undead Warlock, but a whole new guild of friends to play with. That’s the enduring black magic of Burning Crusade Classic, a free expansion to WoW Classic servers that fully recreates the first expansion, originally released back in 2007. It’s a crucible of soul-crushing grinding and unforgiving combat that smashes players together like…

At the risk of sounding like an NPC from The Witcher, I grew up in a village that had as many buildings with thatched roofs as tiled ones. So the sight of glittering skyscrapers framed against the night sky always fills me with wonder. That’s why part of me would have loved 198X if it was just synth music and slow pans across pixelated cityscapes. But it’s more than that: a short, affecting look back at arcades that nails their capacity to spark a lifelong obsession with games. And, more unusually, it actually gets the difficulty level right. Instead of breezing through each level, you genuinely get the sense you’re hunched over a coin-hungry cabinet in a sticky-floored videogame sanctuary. 81…

We all have our ‘end of a long day’ games that we relax in without the faculties of reflexes or a fully switched-on brain. For me lately, those games have been Dave Gilbert’s Blackwell series. They’re 2D point-and-click adventures in the old-school mold—they wait patiently as I click their scenes down to every last detail, they’re 100% voice acted, and their jazzy soundtracks envelop me like steam rising from a New York subway. I came to the Blackwell series after playing Gilbert’s latest game, Unavowed, set in the same universe where the supernatural murmurs in the shadows of a beautifully observed New York City. And while Unavowed may well be the best point-and-click ever made, it’s fascinating to see Gilbert and his studio Wadjet Eye Games climb towards that creative…

With a title like that, and heroes named Sonny Featherland and Marty MacChicken, I was always going to buy this game eventually. Then along came another Epic Games Store sale with those $10 vouchers, and it was mine. Is it what I was expecting? Not really, because I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, which is exactly why I bought it. Chicken Police is a noir detective adventure where all the characters are animals. And Chicken Police has a sense of humor. Well, as long as you can get past the horrific implications of things like one of the main characters wearing a leather jacket. Chicken Police—as you’ve probably noticed from the screenshots—essentially photoshops animal heads onto human bodies. I honestly can’t tell if the most hilarious and absurd moments…

Folding@Home, the distributed computing project that’s taking on COVID, cancer, and all kinds of other diseases through the power of unused graphic cards and idle CPU cores, has been in the headlines a lot recently, not only for creating the world’s first exascale supercomputer, but for its recent paper in Nature in which it set out potential targets for new drugs within the spike protein of SARS-Cov-2, which the virus uses to burrow into our cells and cause COVID-19. But what if your thinking transcends Earthly disease and wants to roam wider? What if you want to join Tim Curry’s Anatoly Cherdenko in spaaaace? Well, with the demise of SETI@Home, you’re no longer able to hunt for signals from alien civilizations, but you can probe the mysteries of gravitational waves…

One woman’s habit of never deleting files may have made her a legend in the Minecraft archival scene, after it was discovered she was still holding onto an ultra-rare piece of the game’s history. In 2010, Minecraft was still in alpha, updating on an almost weekly basis as the game found its feet. One of these builds, Alpha 1.1.1, added fishing rods and ducking, but also came with a nasty bug that crashed the game with a gray screen. A mere 3.25 hours later, that issue would be remedied by Alpha 1.1.2. Between its brief lifespan and buggy release, the previous patch was all but forgotten. Not so by Minecraft’s archival scene though. Blocky historians have spent years trying to account for every part of Minecraft’s development history, and Alpha…

Shirley Curry, the ‘Skyrim Grandma’, became a YouTube celebrity in her 80s. Wit and a welcoming tone earned the videos where she explores Skyrim thousands of devoted followers. She’s not the only grandma gamer on YouTube, though. She’s one-quarter of the Grand Dames, four women who meet virtually once a month to record a livestream tea party. They have their own merch, including branded teacups, and a following who see their age not as a novelty but a feature. They bring a huge amount of life experience to their videos, and aren’t afraid to speak their minds. “The Grand Dames started last year at PAX Online, the very first online PAX, and the title of our PAX panel was Tea With Grandma Gamers: Grandmas Talk Shit About Games,” explains Dame…

With the Avengers already doing their thing, Square Enix is giving us another superhero group to muck around with, this time from Deus Ex studio Eidos Montreal. These heroes are pretty different from Adam Jensen, however, who you’d never see hanging out with a murderous raccoon. Yes, it’s the Guardians of the Galaxy. A roguish band of space adventurers might sound like a good fit for yet another co-op live service affair, like Marvel’s Avengers, but Eidos Montreal is thankfully sticking to what it knows: a singleplayer game with a narrative bent. It’s a linear misadventure that will see you jetting off around the galaxy as Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord. Senior creative director Jean-François Dugas tells me that playing against expectations was a big “driving force” for the team. Games…

Battlefield 2042 RELEASED October | DEVELOPER DICE The next Battlefield is going back… to the future, although it’s a game that seems to be hearkening back to its past. There’s no single-player campaign in 2042 and no battle royale, but the traditional 64-player count has been upped to a whopping 128. It’s making big changes to the series by replacing classes with specialists: Defined characters a la Rainbow Six Siege. Each comes equipped with a nifty gadget, such as a turret, a grappling hook, or a robot dog. Two new modes have been teased: One a ‘love letter’ to fans, while the other is a squad-focused mode named Hazard Zone. STALKER 2 RELEASED April 2022 | DEVELOPER GSC Game World The sequel to the post-apocalyptic FPS is finally coming, and…

Wibbly wobbly wibbly wobbly. You have entered a time warp. It’s 1998, and you’re the proud owner of a Pentium II PC with 64MB of RAM and maybe a 3Dfx Voodoo 2 if you have rich parents. What do you play? Hexen II! All day long! Coming back to the present, and Graven is a spiritual successor to Hexen II, which was, confusingly, the third game in a series, which means Graven is Heretic IV. Or something like that. The great year of 1998 is everywhere in the graphics, and the game looks like a lost expansion pack to Daggerfall but with a modern, minimalist HUD. There’s clearly some modern Unreal technology at work rather than the Doom engine, as textures are crisply pixelated all the way up to 4K rather than…

Games have always been looking for ways to make conversations as compelling as the combat. Why can’t a tense negotiation feel as gripping as a tough-as-nails boss fight? That’s the question Griftlands seeks to answer. It makes for a compelling roguelike, thanks to great writing and characters, but doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its chatty deck-building systems. The titular Griftlands consist of chaotic, almost post-apocalyptic sci-fi settlements ruled by corrupt cops and criminal syndicates. Brutal it may be, but it sure is pretty. There’s a smart economy to where the embellishments are made to ensure that the game can deliver on its scope without any rough edges. Character sprites get lovely gestures and expressions that complement the writing while the overworld map is littered with icons. Its…

LEGO ISLAND 1997 Lego Island focused on the adventures of hapless youth Pepper Roni and a crime spree. LEGO FUN TO BUILD 1995 Released in Japan on Sega’s educational Pico console, Fun to Build pushed the envelope. LEGO STAR WARS 2005 The game that spawned dozens of crossovers. LEGO CREATOR: HARRY POTTER 2001 Let players use Potter-themed blocks to build. THE LEGO MOVIE VIDEOGAME 2014 The embodiment of modern Lego as a crossover-fueled powerhouse. LEGO UNIVERSE 2010 Lego’s attempt to cash in on the MMO craze lasted barely 15 months.…

Friends sob quietly as they lower the coffin of your true love into the damp earth. Above the tears, you hear the subsong of crows in the bare November trees. Dignified. Sombre. Then, you hear it. It’s hard to parse at first. But soon, the rhythm and cadence become unmistakable: Somebody is armpit-farting Take Five by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, here, at the funeral of your beloved. It’s that wag Thimbleweed Park! *Parp-parp--paparp-parp!* Thimbleweed Park makes jokes when you just want information. It makes jokes inside jokes inside jokes, like a turducken of mild amusement. It makes jokes when you’re logging off because you’ve heard too many jokes. It’s desperate to be loved, like a lonely widower listening for the rattle of your keys so they can step into the…

The mantis shrimp has the fastest predatory strike in the ocean, lashing out in less than 800 microseconds. But compared to the speed I move when closing an unwanted popup ad, the mantis shrimp is like a narcoleptic grandmother after a Sunday roast. That’s why I love Kingsway, an RPG set entirely within the operating system of a pretend PC. For the first time in my life I feel like I’ve trained for something. From the crackling hard drive sound effects to the blocky blue progression bars, everything feels like it was created from a snapshot of my earliest PC gaming experiences. The only thing that could heighten the feeling was if it came packaged with a Packard Bell air freshener. 77…

In deck-building games, less is more. That is, you’re usually working towards a small deck, taking every opportunity to jettison cards and thinking carefully before adding anything new. You’re looking for predictability. You want the cards that make up your game-winning combo to come up, so you don’t want your draw diluted with things that don’t fit. In games like Slay the Spire, the ideal deck might be as small as five cards, creating one reliable sequence you can pull off every turn. That sense of refining a deck down to its purest essence is a tactical thrill, but it’s not very conceptually fun. Your instinct is to want to grab every cool new thing that comes your way, to feel like the possibilities are expanding before you. Being miserly…

THE CRAB PULSAR The Crab Pulsar is the remains of a supernova widely observed on Earth in the year 1054. PSR B1509-58 An image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory of PSR B1509-58, a spinning neutron star. SXP 1072 This pulsar is in another galaxy—SXP 1072 is in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. RCW 103 A supernova remnant 9,000 lightyears from Earth, this cloud contains one of the slowest pulsars ever discovered.…