Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Riot act A League of Legends rhythm game and an RPG surprise-launched on the same day. Pass it on Xbox Game Pass on PC has hidden games, including Crysis. Nintendo bashes Bowser (again) 52 year-old Doug Bowser, has pled guilty to piracy-related charge, but now has a new civil suit against him. War never changes Battlefield 2042 launched into a wave of community negativity—though it isn’t unusual for the series. The Matrix Sleeps Epic’s been working on The Matrix Awakens and… it’s only on consoles. Old problems New World has had a slightly torrid time of it recently with duping glitches. Now, it’s battling an invasion of bots. LOWS…

RELEASE 2022 | DEV Relic Entertainment | PUB Sega | LINK community.companyofheroes.com Heading into Company of Heroes 3’s multiplayer pre-alpha, I’ve got a plan. “I’ll start with a comp stomp,” I tell Relic, hoping to nab myself an easy victory in an AI skirmish. I spend most of this first match fighting with the AI over a single capture point in a village square that rapidly becomes unrecognizable as the ground is turned into craters. I’m playing as the USF Airborne battlegroup, one of two currently available for the US faction, and one of four in the build I’m playing. While the singleplayer campaign lets you build your forces out of whatever companies and detachments you want, even creating hybrids with US, UK, and Commonwealth units, the multiplayer battlegroups are…

RELEASE August 2022 | DEV Volition | PUB Deep Silver | LINK saintsrow.com An open-world title where you and your friends do crimes? You never know, maybe it’ll catch on. The last few Saints Row games, featuring aliens, virtual reality worlds, super powers, and a musical adventure through literal Hell, weren’t exactly grounded. This reboot will be reining things in (a bit) and rebooting the story, in the new fictional city of Santo Ileso. The biggest setting in the series so far, you—as ever, playing a fully customizable character dubbed only ‘the Boss’—will work with your crew of trendy hipster criminals, Neenah, Kevin, and Eli, to dominate it. But with three established gangs already in charge of the streets, this takeover will be easier said than done. You’ll get a…

RELEASE Spring 2022 | DEV Tango Gameworks | PUB Bethesda | LINK bethesda.net/en/game/ghostwire-tokyo The latest horror game from original Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami’s studio sees the Tokyo population vanish, replaced with haunting apparitions and a malevolent figure cackling away on the giant screens plastered around Shibuya Crossing. Exploring the deserted city in first person, you’ll learn to master magical elemental abilities to tackle this ghostly threat. As you do so, you’ll learn more about the sudden disappearance, and the mysterious and frightening ‘Hannya’ occultists who seem to be the culprits behind it. As ever in a Tango Gameworks’ jam, the real fun is admiring/hiding from the twisted creatures you come across, with trailers showing us spindly and faceless men in suits, a ghostly woman wielding a large pair of…

If there’s one thing Destiny players love more than the game itself, it’s complaining about Destiny. Sometimes it’s just gamer bluster, but often it’s a perfectly understandable response to how close Bungie can get to looter shooter perfection and just miss the mark. The Witch Queen promises a new zone, the introduction of weapon crafting, and a new glaive weapon type. Hopefully I and the other baying wolves of the Destiny community will find what we’re looking for in Destiny 2’s fourth expansion. RELEASE February 22, 2022 | DEV Bungie | PUB In-house | LINK bungie.net…

RELEASE November 2022 | DEV Bethesda | PUB Bethesda | LINK bethesda.net/en/game/starfield Back in 2018, Bethesda announced that it was planning to release a game that wasn’t Skyrim. A brand new IP, in fact; still a Fallout/Elder Scrolls style RPG, but this time, in space. It’s a typically ambitious project for the studio, so much so that it’s only had time to re-release Skyrim once since Starfield was announced. In the 24th century, a big ol’ space kerfuffle known as the Colony War takes place. The game begins two decades after things have settled down, as your typically customizable character embarks upon “an epic journey to answer humanity’s greatest mystery”. It looks set to be one heck of a huge game, with plenty of choices. “It’s all the paths you…

RELEASE Spring 2022 | DEV Fatshark | PUB In-house | LINK playdarktide.com It feels like just yesterday we were talking about Darktide in our 2021 preview, but Fatshark’s 40k-based successor to the Warhammer: Vermintide games was delayed out of last year and into this one. Hopefully the extra time has given Fatshark room to dial in its improvements to that chaotic combat we’ve come to love. The fresh look and new weapon balance inherent to the shift in setting should be an interesting change from Vermintide. 40k’s megadark, heavy metal album art aesthetic is perhaps even more suited than regular Warhammer to just turning off those fiddly high-functioning parts of your brain and mowing down some gribbly monsters with your friends. The premise cues that up perfectly, casting you as…

Putting you in the paws of a cat in a neon-drenched city devoid of humanity, but filled with androids who appear to have TVs for faces, Stray is anything but formulaic. This open world adventure tasks you with making your way across the grimy metropolis in order to reunite with your lost family. Accompanying you is B12, a helpful robot who can translate the language of his fellow machines for you. The furry main character was heavily inspired by the studio founder’s own cats, Murtaugh and Riggs. All together now: awwwwwwwwwww! RELEASE 2022 | DEV BlueTwelve Studio | PUB Annapurna Interactive | LINK stray.game…

RELEASE June 2022 | DEV ACE Team | PUB Nacon | LINK bit.ly/3DsQuMK The next delightfully odd title from ACE Team, creators of this year’s The Eternal Cylinder but also known for the Zeno Clash games, which this title shares a world with. As in Zeno Clash, this is a brawler, but there’s now the option for third-person as well as first-person punching. Fights are also now heavily affected by a preceding dice game, which can change the rules and add significant and strange new modifiers to the brawl. You’re taking control of a lad named Psuedo, a gross but charming looking dude who’s no less a misfit than the other strange denizens. If you’re going to be punching them in the face, they may as well have interesting faces,…

One mark of a great videogame is how clearly you remember it. A decade on from Dark Souls, there are still parts of its flame-cursed world I can readily map out on paper—their layouts, threats, and variables hammered into me by a combination of fabulous aesthetics, surgical perspectives, and brutal trial and error. I already have a similarly crisp memory of parts of Elden Ring, FromSoftware’s blend of Souls dungeons and combat with an open world and day/night cycle reminiscent of Breath of the Wild. One of the first areas you’ll reach in the early Limgrave region is a crumbling encampment backed by candle-strewn hearses. Guards in red peer into campfires. Others roam the paths, accompanied by wolves. It’s a tidy little murder-maze with some familiar AI behaviors—as in Souls,…

Style and substance feel opposed in Solar Ash, Heart Machine’s follow-up to the acclaimed Hyper Light Drifter. It has an abundance of the former, but a vacuum where the latter should be. Visual novelty and slickness keep it skating along but it never manages to fill that void, no matter how many outlandish set pieces, stylish transitions and beautiful landscapes it conjures. You play as Rei, a ‘voidrunner’ who plunges herself into a blackhole to activate a MacGuffin called the ‘Starseed’, which we’re told can save her planet, which is currently caught in the singularity’s grasp. Inside this black hole is a dreamlike landscape rendered in soft clouds and goopy surfaces, all of it in bold colors. This is the ‘ultravoid’ as the game calls it. It’s delightfully tactile, with…

The word ‘expansion’ feels almost too small for what Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker is. Not only is it essentially a full length JRPG, 50 hour JRPG in its own right, but it’s also the culmination of a storyline that’s been ongoing for over ten years, which myself and millions of other players have been following through regular updates that whole time. Rather than simply an add-on, it feels more like the final book in a long-running fantasy series. So, to get to the big questions—yes, Endwalker is a fantastic send-off to the Hydaelyn/Zodiark saga (two ancient beings locked in a light versus dark conflict involving many crystals—Final Fantasy fans know the drill) that celebrates all that came before; and yes, it leaves the door wide open for new adventures that…

Smashing a goon’s head against the wall before launching his buddy out of a window doesn’t sound strategic on paper, but the turn-based combat of Fights in Tight Spaces transforms even the simplest enemy encounter into an intricate puzzle where the only solution is your fists. Although its roguelike trappings can detract from the overall experience, these moments where everything comes together in a glorious display of violence always shine through. Stepping into the well-polished shoes of an international super spy tasked with dismantling criminal syndicates, the basic plot does little more than loosely string together the five separate worlds in which the action occurs. Divided into semiprocedurally generated levels, each world has you fighting through a number of tightly enclosed locations that range from densely packed subway carriages to…

Now here’s a premise to chill the blood. A game built not just on the British predisposition towards abject misery, but the idea that it’s grown so intolerable that we’re forced to self-medicate. We Happy Few crafts a great alternate reality, set in a post-war Britain where Germany won then stole all the children. It’s a place painted with the counter-cultural weirdness and threatening surrealism of the likes of The Prisoner and A Clockwork Orange. But then? Then it makes me fight bees in randomly generated fields. It’s almost like We Happy Few is willing me to have a hateful time, like some kind of clever and utterly misguided metacommentary. I search around in endless bins to find the necessary equipment to keep my blood sugar up. I fail to…

The subject matter and middling scores should inform you that this month’s theme was intended to be ‘England’. But it ended up being ‘London’, so The Occupation is here for anyone who’s ever traveled further north than Milton Keynes. It’s a sharp immersive sim that has you unraveling a mystery over a fixed time. You interview people, look through bins, go places you shouldn’t—Dishonored with pondering, not stabbing. I’m glad this game exists, even if the constraints and trespass anxiety bring me out in a damp sweat. 71…

Kyle Katarn, his beige henley, and that single brown shoulder pad have been part of my life for a long time. I first played his final video game appearance: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (technically Star Wars: Dark Forces IV: Jedi Knight III: Jedi Outcast II: Jedi Academy) in the third grade, and I’ve drifted to and from his adventures ever since. The Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series has been foundational to PC gaming. Indeed, Dark Forces was the first FPS where you could look up and down. It feels like a bit of an afterthought in peoples’ minds these days though, perhaps due to being relegated to the non-canon dustbin of Star Wars history with the rest of the Expanded Universe. It’s a shame, because the entire series is worth a…

NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY Crusader Kings III is a grand strategy game filled with earthshaking wars, vendettas that can play out over generations, assassinations, intrigue, drama, and tangled narratives that promise a new twist around every corner. But sometimes you just want to chill out by going fishing, or have a drinking contest in a smelly pub with a pal. Right? There are already plenty of distractions in Crusader Kings III. You can initiate events like great feasts or hunts, and they’ll play out with a few narrative choices along the way. You can make decisions like founding a witch coven or a holy order, try to escape prison or build a monument,…

NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY 1 FUR REAL Skyrim’s regions are split into warm, cool, and freezing. Wear warm armor, pack torches, and bring plenty of food. 2 TAVERN TALES Always note your closest inn before traveling. There you can warm up, buy food, and sleep in a bed that resets your tiredness. 3 STIR GRAVY Uncooked meat can give you food poisoning in Survival mode. Keep Cooking Pot spots in mind to keep going for longer.…

INSPIRATIONS AND CONNECTIONS IN GAMES If you’re yet to start Far Cry 6, I have a recommendation for you. Once you’re on the far side of its tutorial—and find yourself sitting between the pincers of a vast, curved Caribbean island named Yara—head straight east to El Este. There, the farms harbor teenage terrorists, and the mountain has become an old people’s home for former revolutionaries. It’s the perfect staging ground for inter-generational conversation and conflict. A place where the elderly have plenty to teach, but are too tired to pass it on—and the young have righteous anger, but no desire to listen. As protagonist Dani, your job is to bridge the generational gap, connecting student killers with the jaded veterans. It’s a process that’s clumsy and often funny—a relatable tragicomedy…

RELEASE Jan 2022 | DEV Ubisoft Montreal | PUB Ubisoft | LINK ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/rainbow-six/extraction At last, opposing Rainbow Six factions have stopped trying to shoot one another in the face, and all it took was an alien invasion. Extraction is a strictly PvE experience—Operators have been lifted out of Siege, given a little tweak here and there, and dropped into this 1-3 player alien hunting simulator. By offering a mixture of offensive (such as Hibana and Sledge) and defensive (including Vigil and Pulse) characters, Extraction allows for a balanced team. With 13 mission types and 12 ‘containment zones’, there’ll be plenty to do, and it’ll rarely be as simple as spraying bullets all over the place. In fact, going loud will tend to bring a horde down on you, which will…

Arkane’s next project has a deliciously inviting horror premise. Vampires created in a science experiment gone wrong have cut off the town of Redfall from the rest of civilization, and are feasting on its inhabitants. However, four survivors armed with high-tech vamp-busting tech, and some eyebrow-raising powers of their own—squad member Layla’s telekinesis sure looks like a lot of fun—are ready to take on the town’s pointy-toothed threat. The ability to play through this as a four-person co-op squad should add a new flavor to Arkane’s distinctive immersive sim thrills. RELEASE Summer 2022 | DEV Arkane | PUB Bethesda | LINK xbox.com/en-GB/games/redfall…

RELEASE February 17, 2022 | DEV Creative Assembly | PUB Sega | LINK totalwar.com After two glorious Total War: Warhammer games and a cavalcade of DLC featuring most noteworthy factions from Games Workshop’s universe, many of us were left asking what could possibly be next for the third and final game in the trilogy? Of course, there are many Warhammer factions whose units and lore aren’t as well documented, as well as the semiabstract realms of those colorful Chaos Gods, but would Creative Assembly really venture into this strange new territory? Why but of course it would! And it’s doing it with the exponentially growing confidence of a studio that’s been intertwined with the world of Warhammer for a good seven years now. The new factions are a motley mix…

RELEASE February 2022 | DEV ArenaNet | PUB NCSoft | LINK bit.ly/3GhmdC5 The venerable MMO Guild Wars 2 is about to receive its third expansion pack as it enters its tenth year of life. End of Dragons will see players return to the land of Cantha, a vibrant fantasy counterpart to China, for the first time since the Factions expansion to the first Guild Wars released in 2006. The plot will center on the lore of this isolated land, formerly isolated from the rest of the world for one hundred years, and prominently features a great sea frozen into solid jade by some mysterious magical force. In addition to the new zone and story content, End of Dragons is adding further level 80 specialization options to each of its base…

RELEASE 2022 | DEV Intercept Games | PUB In-house | LINK bit.ly/3GmV019 The last few years have led many of us to fantasize about quitting this planet altogether and shooting ourselves into space. So, what better game to look forward to than one which demands significant attention to detail in order to distract you from daily life, and allows you to live out the fantasy of space travel? You’re once again tasked with overseeing a whole space program (clue’s in the name), the little green Kerbals wisely or otherwise trusting you with their lives. Following feedback from the first game, new tutorials and improved UI will (hopefully) better help players understand what they’re supposed to do and how the heck they’re supposed to do it. Those already comfortable with the…

We can certainly hope that Larian’s early access RPG will see its 1.0 release this year. This continuation of Bioware’s legendary series has had its first act available to the public since October 2020, and the preview has been impressive. Larian has taken the improvisational, tabletop-inspired combat of their Divinity series, and transposed it perfectly into the D&D 5th edition rules set, with various updates across 2020 and 2021 already expanding the content available and tightening up all the dice-rolling action. If it can stick the landing, this is on track to be a modern classic of the genre. RELEASE TBC | DEV Larian | PUB In-house | LINK baldursgate3.game…

RELEASE February 8, 2022 | DEV Sloclap | PUB In-house | LINK sifugame.com Arevenge tale that sees a kung fu student hunt down the people who killed their father, this brawler seeks to recreate the action of classic martial arts cinema in videogame form. There’s more than a little Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee in its DNA, though the influence of recent hits such as The Raid and Old Boy is also evident in some of its slick setpieces. Sloclap’s combat is based on the Pak Mei style of kung fu, and the footage we’ve seen places an emphasis on controlling space, dodging and parrying blows, and using the environment to your advantage. Bottles, mops, and baseball bats can all be utilized to gain an advantage in battering whatever thugs…

This sequel to 2016’s Salt and Sanctuary continues its quest to capture as much of Dark Souls’ essence as possible in a sidescrolling format. As a Marked Inquisitor, you’re charged with roaming the land slaying malevolent magic users and using their meat and bones to craft new weapons and armor. Delightful. There’s no end of Souls imitators these days, but the first game really stood out from the crowd for its world design and attention to detail. Here’s hoping this follow-up is an even more impressive effort. RELEASE Q1 2022 | DEV Ska Studios | PUB In-house | LINK ska-studios.com…

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Perhaps the thing I love most about Gray Matter is that in this world, a sign exists somewhere in England that has ‘Oxford’ in one direction and ‘London’ in the other. No distances. No other info Just that. And this sign being rotated by bad weather is a silly premise for an otherwise nicely grown up adventure game. It’s the sort of setting that feels like it should be a show from the mid-90s: Ex-goth, magician, and con artist Sam ends up accidentally working as an assistant for acclaimed but damaged neurobiologist David Styles. It’s unpretentious and cosy, from the gentle puzzling, wonderful music, and elegant writing, the point-and-click equivalent of an ill-fitting old sweater on a frosty day. 73…

Throughout my years of gaming, I’ve made plenty of daft decisions. I once picked a fight with Gandhi in Civilization IV, for instance, and decided to complete Aliens: Colonial Marines. Somehow though, I find myself making my most boneheaded choice yet when faced with a race back to the dropship in Deep Rock Galactic. At the end of every level of this co-op shooter, you need to race from where you are to the ship that’s coming to pick you up. There’s a time limit on this, and a swarm of monstrosities standing between you and being rescued. It should be simple. Except, on this run, I go haring towards our ship in a straight line, while my buddy is off on the path we had already made throughout the…

At the start of Chicory: A Colorful Tale, the paint that flowed from my magic brush felt like more of a tool for traversal than anything else. But as my abilities grew and I brought more and more color back to the world, I was encouraged to paint more. As I pondered puzzles, trees were turning green, lakes, and rivers blue, my protagonist, Tiramisu, brown, yellow, and pink. Later, instead of a colorless world to restore, the game gave me a blank canvas and asked me to paint a portrait of Chicory, a cape-wearing hare. Taking the limited tools at my disposal into account, I was pleased with my efforts: Blotchy, but at least discernibly lagomorphic. Chicory’s painting of Tiramisu was somewhat more accomplished, but I’m guessing whichever artist was…

SEA OF THIEVES Lots of lovely fish to catch, and the water you pull them out of is the most beautiful in all of games. NEW WORLD Forget grinding out quests and going to war. I got to level 23 by basically just fishing. FAR CRY 5 Extremely relaxing, though there is a good chance of being mauled by a mountain lion while fishing. TORCHLIGHT Not that complex, but the fish you catch can turn your pet into a bat, spider, or fire elemental. Neato!…

EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY The year of 2004 was an auspicious one for videogames. In fact, it was perhaps, a bit too auspicious for Troika, a small CRPG development house headed by ex-Black Isle veterans. Troika had to release an embattled, over budget, and unfinished game of a niche genre right smack dab in the middle of a legendary autumn, which also boasted Halo 2, Half-Life 2, and Metal Gear Solid 3. Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines never stood a chance really, and ended up selling only 72,000 copies in its initial release. Afterwards, Troika struggled to find backing for subsequent projects, and were forced to close their doors in 2005. The tapes…

All-in-one coolers have come a long way. What was once a niche product with some dubious piping has become ubiquitous among PC builds, even edging out the humble air cooler that has served us well all these years. There’s a good reason for this: With modern silicon’s dynamic performance levels, maintaining excellent cooling is more important than ever, and a double or even triple fan liquid cooler has proven itself more than up to the task of dealing with excess heat. Though it must be said, their success may be down to the opportunity for sheer panache they offer: All-in-one coolers usually come with excessive RGB lighting. Of course, a good quality AIO cooler ultimately comes down to its ability to keep your rig cool and quiet. But there are…

After years of struggling to combat hacks and DDoS attacks that at times have rendered Titanfall unplayable, Respawn Entertainment has decided it’s time to throw in the towel. The studio said in a statement that it has stopped all sales of the game, and will remove it from subscription services on March 1, 2022. The decision to end Titanfall sales follows a back-and-forth battle with hackers that dates to 2019, resulting in a ‘mostly negative’ user review rating for the game on Steam. Players sometimes overstate a given game’s ‘hacker’ problem, but in this case it was absolutely endemic. There were flashes of hope earlier this year—Respawn told players that “help is coming” in April—but by mid-May the situation was as bad as ever, and in mid-July Respawn community coordinator…

Take an orc on the wild side, as Lou Reed didn’t sing, in the next instalment of gaming’s most violent sport. Somehow, everybody’s still taking a god named Nuffle seriously, and so Blood Bowl continues. The latest turn-based, ultraviolent take on football will be soothingly familiar to fans—but with some new content thrown in. A more fully featured solo campaign, greater customization, four new races, systems based on the latest version of the board game’s rules, new skills, and a new competitive mode should make for a freshly gruesome experience. RELEASE 2022 | DEV Cyanide Studio | PUB Nacon | LINK cyanide-studio.com/blood-bowl-3…

RELEASE February 4, 2022 | DEV Techland | PUB In-house | LINK dl2.dyinglightgame.com Parkour zombie-bashing is finally back, as developer Techland looks ready to finally release its long-awaited sequel, which sees you plonked in the middle of the ‘Modern Dark Ages’ and shaping the fate of one of humanity’s last surviving settlements: The City. Said city, which is split into seven districts, is just as key to this sequel as running away from flesh-eaters, and you’ll be able to make choices that will significantly affect the environment you play in. For instance, turning the water pumps on for one district means draining another, giving you a way to explore that new area… and meeting the zombies that have previously been dormant for years. The city is also subject to an…

RELEASE 2022 | DEV Two Point Studios | PUB Sega | LINK twopointcampus.com Two Point Studios’ previous release, a slapstick hospital management sim, was a surprise hit whose anarchic sense of humor belied a complex and demanding little game. Two Point is now looking to bring the same sort of experience to the halls of higher learning. Campus promises a great deal of freedom with how you can lay out your school, and the developer has stated that it wants to encourage player creativity. Pre-release content indicates Two Point’s sense of humor is as present as before. For example: You can send your students to ‘knight school’ where they learn the ways of chivalry as opposed to business management. Other oddballs you can make out from Two Point’s trailers include…

Producing a sequel to a game almost two decades old isn’t that strange nowadays. Nor is such a game happening thanks to crowdfunding. The level to which the developer of this space RTS seem to be allowing backers to steer development, however, is intriguing. Backer survey responses have shaped both writing and gameplay design, with Blackbird listening carefully to what they’ve been told are the most important parts of Homeworld to its fans. Will all that community input result in a better game, or is it a case of too many cooks? We’ll find out later this year. RELEASE Q4 2022 | DEV Blackbird Interactive | PUB Gearbox | LINK gearboxpublishing.com/game/homeworld-3…

RELEASE Late 2022 | DEV Firaxis Games | PUB 2K Games | LINK midnightsuns.2k.com There’s going to be a whole bunch of spandex-clad Marvel characters to command here and, as it’s a combat-focussed title being developed by Firaxis, it’s going to bear some resemblance to the game the studio is best known for; Sid Meier’s SimGolf. No, wait—I meant to say XCOM. Loosely based on the comic series Rise of the Midnight Sons, a whole bunch of heroes have come together to defeat Hydra and the demon Lilith. That team includes enough variety to please everyone, from cinematic successes including Captain America, Iron Man, and Wolverine, to comic fan favorites like Blade and Ghost Rider, to more obscure picks such as masters of the arcane Magik and Nico Minoru, and…

RELEASE 2022 | DEV Rocksteady | PUB Warner Bros | LINK suicidesquadgame.com/en-gb Capturing the gleefully violent and irreverent tone of the comics, this videogame debut for DC’s anti-villain team sees them being sent on a mission into Metropolis to neutralize some pretty heavy threats. While the squad might not know what they’re up against to begin with, the title gives us a pretty big clue at who is in their crosshairs. There’s plenty to be excited about with this one. For starters, it marks a return to the Arkham-verse which developer Rocksteady created, and the thought of them getting their hands on the wider cast of DC characters should have any fan delighted, considering the stellar job they did with Batman. It also boasts four-player co-op, allowing you to take…

LIKE THE ANIMATIONS! You can see the benefit of From’s time with Bloodborne and Sekiro. The swinging and stabbing is poetry in motion. DISLIKE THE SATEALTH You can click to crouch in bushes, for infrequent backstabbing. It does the job mostly, but it’s perfunctory and charmless. LIKE THE SWAG! Nobody does eldritch outfits like From. The Raya Lucarian set makes you look like a weaponized theme-park mascot, for instance. DISLIKE THE LEDGE MANTLING Or rather the lack of it. What’s the point of an open world littered with sloping, ridged surfaces if I can’t haul myself over a wall?…

In 1985, brothers James and Jim Thomas penned a film script, The Hunter, about an otherworldly creature armed with near-magical powers of camouflage. The script has a counter-intuitive take on the concept of invisibility. Rather than a mere blank spot, the Hunter exists as traces of motion without coherent form, designed to produce “a dizzying, subliminal experience” and “an intensely visual, highly emotional confrontation for the viewer.” During production, special effects teams used ‘inline mattes’ to superimpose concentric images of background foliage onto an actor. This fake translucency turns the landscape itself into an aggressor: When the Hunter or, as we know him today, the Predator finally attacks, it’s “as if the entire wall of the jungle were rushing in”. Paid homage to in every halfway-stealthy game from Crysis to…

Does an open world work for Halo? Since its announcement, that question is one that’s been constantly asked of Halo Infinite. Six years after Halo 5 left the series on a sour note, 343 Industries has dusted off the Master Chief’s armor for a throwback to Bungie’s original—nostalgic for a time when Halo was just a big green man, his blue, holographic girlfriend, and a wide open ring full of possibilities to explore. What this results in is a game that could be a true return to form for Master Chief—but I’m just not convinced Halo really needed to be an open world. Let’s make one thing clear though: This is some darn fine Halo. Having played Halo 3 with the lads every weekend for the last year, Infinite comes…

Having six degrees of freedom is not as freeing as it might appear. Take spaceship combat, the exciting process of spewing lasers at enemies. For every successfully landed shot, there’s a whole lot of endlessly swerving to keep those fighter ships in view. It can be exhausting; sometimes I dread the arrival of a fleet, rather than being excited for the dogfight. Enter Chorus, a game that makes spaceship combat fast and thrilling. Rather than constantly tilting your ship to follow the enemy, here you have a touch of physics-defying magic that lets you ‘drift’ like you’re in a sports car. Pretty soon you’re using your Jedi-esque powers to disrupt shields and batter the enemy with Void-powered attacks. With its physics and suite of useful abilities, Chorus is the most…

There are those who twist the lands of Farming Simulator 22 into an arcadian paradise, producing endless pallets of foodstuffs every season like a terrifying Monsanto baron. I do not belong to that camp. At best, I am a filthy casual. My plough inherited from the bronze age, my cultivation skills cannot nurture anything more fragile than the hardiest of cereals, and I frequently sell my labor to the richer neighboring homesteads. And yet, here in this yeoman muck, Farming Simulator has finally clicked in my brain. There is so much joy in scraping by. Farming Simulator 22 is somehow the 11th entry in this franchise. All of the games are developed by the Swiss studio Giants Software, which lovingly renders a punctilious, businesslike interpretation of heartland warmth. Upon beginning…

There are many things in life that we accept as normal in Britain despite being weird. Punch and Judy shows. Why drinking cow milk is fine, but pig milk isn’t. I get the same feeling when I fire up Assassin’s Creed, and remember the entire series is built on memory-hopping, past life sci-fi. The Animus is the child beauty pageant of videogame plot devices. Happily, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate doesn’t waste much time in the future. We get some info about Abstergo, a bit of Danny Wallace in knitwear being cheerful, and then we’re swiftly off to the past to kill strangers. And what a version of the past it is. It’s Victorian London as glimpsed in a commemorative snowglobe, with as many glib Britishisms wedged into its impressive space as…

One thing games so often seem to struggle with is the balance of bastardry. It’s always easier to be nice than nasty, with bad behavior usually netting short-term gain but missing out on long-term rewards. Right from the start, Vampyr offers a different choice: The more people you kill, the more directly powerful you become. The problem is you’re playing a doctor, and apparently the hippocratic oath doesn’t end with undeath. More excruciatingly, in order to lure people into the shadows and drink them like milkshakes, you have to get to know them first. Lumpen combat gets in the way of an otherwise distinguished bloodsucking sim, but Vampyr deserves credit for making me reconsider playing nice. 70…

The thing I love about Stellaris, Paradox’s grand space 4X, isn’t the strategy—it’s the stories that organically emerge from its galaxies of warring aliens. But I started finding those stories would run out of steam earlier than I wanted. The problem was the empires I was encountering. Being randomly generated, they often don’t have clear, memorable features—you see one interstellar megacorporation, holy crusade, or scientist enclave, and you’ve seen ‘em all. In the early game, when you’re only interacting with a few at a time, it’s easy to read personality into them, but as you meet more and more they blur together, and by the mid game I’ve given up trying to keep them straight. DO IT YOURSELF The solution? I started making my own galaxies—or, at least, their populations.…

WALKING WOUNDED 1 There’s no automatic health regeneration in Survival mode, so invest in Restoration spells early, like Healing and Close Wounds. Also, enchant your armor with health regen properties if you can, and swig plenty of restorative potions before and after battles. PLAGUE ISLAND 2 Survival mode also adds new diseases and makes existing ones more serious. Ailments like Bone Break Fever and Brain Rot can now get ‘Severe’ and then ‘Crippling’, with more negative effects. Cure with potions or at a shrine for 100 gold. SICK NOTE 3 Keeping track of all the potential buffs and (much more likely) debuffs Survival mode imposes on you can be overwhelming. Check them all under Active Effects in the Magic Menu, or you can view them on your HUD with the…