Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2023 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Word up The first ever public voted Oxford word of the year is ‘goblin mode’. Heavy stuff The Team Fortress 2 community has been begging for more support, Valve finally released an update improving its creator tools. Epic upgrade A recent Fortnite update moved it onto developer Epic’s Unreal Engine 5.1 toolset, and it looks ace. Dream on In 2021, streamer Dream was exposed as a Minecraft cheat by MinecrAvenger. Now they’ve been exposed as a cheat too. Sneaking suit An all-black suit for CoD Warzone rose up the Steam best-seller list due to its camoflaging properties. Great PARP Miles Morales’ emotional story beats will no longer be interrupted with airhorn, after a bugfix. Shame. LOWS…

Aliens: Dark Descent From the makers of Battlefleet Gothic: Armada comes another grimdark strategy game, this time with xenomorphs. You’ll manage the tactics, resources and health of a squad fighting in real time across open levels. RELEASE 2023 Hyenas Creative Assembly’s first FPS since Alien: Isolation takes place in space, but is otherwise a very different prospect. Compete with rival players to extract retro merch from the vaults of spaceships built for Martian billionaires. RELEASE 2023 Kerbal Space Program 2 The smiling mascots of this space flight simulation sandbox can’t conceal the launch pad drama, which has seen the project switch studios and slip from its original planned release in early 2020. Approach with caution. RELEASE February 24, 2023 Under the Waves The bottom of the North Sea is the…

This year already looks like it’ll be bringing some heavy-hitting RTS games with it. What’s that? You’d be interested in playing one from a studio that includes developers who worked on StarCraft II and Warcraft III? Especially if it was free? Well, it’s funny you should say that actually… Set in a post-apocalyptic future fusing elements of sci-fi and fantasy, you’ll be blasting monsters with high-tech weaponry across a regularly updated campaign, alone or with up to two others. eSports are being integrated with both 1v1 and 3v3 tournaments, and—importantly—Frost Giant has committed to avoiding both play-to-win mechanics and NFTs.…

If you think you want a remake of the original Assassin’s Creed, then time has softened your memory of its mind-numbingly repetitive structure and arbitrary, flag-chasing investigations. Mirage is the better option: a return to stealth, urban parkour, and the Middle Eastern setting that folds in the more sophisticated mechanics and storytelling of the series as we know it today—embodied by protagonist Basim, formerly a supporting character in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Expect a renewed focus on targeted murder over RPG-style adventure, enabled by a clue-gathering phase and the busiest toolbelt an assassin has ever had. Ubi’s found room for some blatant noughties nostalgia, too—you’ll flit between Assassin bureaus, as Altaïr once did, and even visit a mountain fortress in the mode of Masyaf. This one’s based on a real-life Iranian…

The world of Atlas Fallen is ruled over by a cruel god, who demands that its people harvest and offer up ‘essence’ to it. The gauntlet which rather unexpectedly starts talking to you has other ideas. Turns out its plan involves repeatedly whacking giant monsters with shapeshifting weapons, either alone or with a friend. Traversal looks fun, incorporating what can only be described as sandsurfing. Combat meanwhile is fast and flashy, with a momentum system that rewards relentless attacks with powerful moves, at the cost of increased damage from your enemy. This sandy adventure could turn out to be a glass act.…

This retro-future science-fiction game, based on a novel of the same name, looks like it could be a serious sleeper hit next year. Boasting exquisite visual design, with loads of detailed, analogue props, it invites players into a mystery on a remote world, Aegis III, in the space boots of Yasna, an astrobiologist out to search for her lost crewmates. A narrative focused first-person adventure, you’ll be tackling heady cosmic themes by figuring out how to use an arsenal of science gadgets, all exquisitely animated with chunky interfaces. There’s something a little reminiscent of Alien Isolation or Observation to it—dense sci-fi with tactile interaction. How much you like the sound of poking around dusty exosolar caverns using an electron spectrometer for clues will determine how much this game is for…

Arkane enters the fray of cooperative shooters, with a vampiric twist. The genre has become a little more crowded with 2022 having brought us Back 4 Blood and the sublime Warhammer 40,000 Darktide, but Redfall has a few extra tricks up its sleeves to potentially help it sink its fangs into the competition. It’s an open world for one, letting up to four players explore the titular town of Redfall, Massachusetts to hunt down the undead. Each playable character has unique abilities and gear, with customizable loadouts, and the mix of powers looks to bring Arkane’s immersive sim credentials into the mix, combining the Left 4 Dead formula with the more open problem solving of something like Dishonored. Hopefully that leads to dynamic vampire hunting, rather than just a lot…

Warhammer 40,000 eats people. I don’t mean that it will consume your life, or that your home will be taken over by the countless models that you don’t have time to paint. No, I mean the setting itself is fueled by corpses—whether it’s the soldiers of the Astra Militarum dying in crusades, the Administratum clerks toiling over documents, or the criminals forced into permanent sentence. It’s a truth that Warhammer 40,000: Darktide understands; whether it’s you or the Poxwalker you’re about to cleave in half, you’re both just meat in some god’s army. In a not-so-different life, that medicae servitor, tending to the wounded while encased in machinery, might have had your face instead. Plainly stated, it sucks to be a human—or an ogryn—in 40K. You probably told some sergeant…

Working-man pilot Jacob Lee has crash landed on the dead moon of Callisto, after his cargo ship is boarded by a notorious terrorist group. First, he discovers his colleague has died a gruesome death during the crash. Next, Lee is arrested, and he has a long life spent in the moon’s Black Iron prison to look forward to. But then the prison falls afoul of some mysterious disaster that turns its inhabitants into crazed mutants. The stakes are clear: Lee is in deep shit and must dig himself out of it. The Callisto Protocol wastes no time cementing the terror of its setting. Now we just need to walk through corridors for 15 hours and butcher our way through it. Boy, are there corridors. The opening hours have everything: claustrophobic…

There’s a bit in James Cameron’s classic sci-fi moisten-’em-up, The Abyss, in which a team of deep sea divers inhale a new type of liquid oxygen. It’s a tortuous process that eventually allows them to visit areas inaccessible to divers using normal breathing apparatus. And it’s very similar to relearning the controls in Mirror’s Edge. There’s something about getting your claws around the game’s controls that feels stilted and unnatural, especially for a game with impeccable visual precision. It’s impossible to look at Mirror’s Edge and not know exactly where you want to go. But the first 15 minutes of stop-start confusion makes you feel like a lonely grandma trying to navigate TikTok. In fairness, it’s not necessarily the game’s fault; more that everything we’ve played in the years since…

Ayear after CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 2, the studio followed with the Enhanced Edition, an enormous update with the patch notes to prove it. A 102 item changelog detailed everything from corrected item descriptions to “fixed reverb in sewers in Chapter 3”, on top of a lengthy list of more substantial additions: new quests, cinematics and ending sequences. A fledgling CD Projekt had done the same thing with the first Witcher in 2008, and though I can’t find it online, I swear I once pored over a multi-page PDF describing every change made to that first adventure. I don’t know if any developer is more committed to documenting the minutia of changes to a massive game (other than Bay12 Games with Dwarf Fortress, which is in a league…

The best bits of Bethesda RPGs don’t demo well. At least, that’s the self-soothing mantra I repeated while watching Starfield’s lackluster summer showcase—15 minutes of impactless shooting and Todd Howard in a leather jacket. A slight variant on Fallout 3’s lockpicking system wasn’t enough to shake the sense that it was still 2008. Yet the bigger picture—and it’s a very big picture, comprising over 1,000 planets—offers reason for hope. This is an apparent return to Elder Scrolls openness, the freedom to ignore the urgency of the main plot and define yourself by which factions you join. You’re first invited to sign up to Constellation, a group of space explorers based in New Atlantis, Jemison—a capital city which resembles a cross between Fallout 4’s Boston and a Packard Bell computer from…

Another throwback to an early period in Assassin’s Creed’s evolution, Skull and Bones has had a much longer and stormier journey than Mirage. Intended to expand on the celebrated ship combat and ocean exploration of Black Flag, it’s previously been a session-based team shooter and a Rust-style survival game. Now it’s more akin to Sea of Thieves—an open world in which the Indian Ocean is shared by 20 players, each taking on contracts to transport contraband or track down treasure, with the aim of achieving greater infamy and captaining bigger ships. Before finally, of course, sinking each others’ ships.…

Regardless of whether you’ve been looking forward to this for the last three years or not, we can surely all agree that a game where one of the characters can turn into a bear is worth a second look. It’s been a while, but it’s almost time to return to the somewhat inappropriately named land of Sanctuary. It’s going to be the grim, loot-tastic Diablo ARPG experience fans know and love (to be disturbed by), but there will be changes. Customization features are being expanded, for example; individual armor pieces can be dyed, and you’ll be able to mould character faces to your liking. In terms of direct effects on gameplay, there will be three new stats: angelic, demonic, and ancestral power. Angelic power dictates the duration of positive effects,…

This sequel to the beloved, hand drawn hack and slash platformer is as highly anticipated as it gets. Set in a fantasy world inhabited by (adorable) bugs, this delightfully gloomy adventure evokes Dark Souls in its structure of safe points, boss fights, and unlockable shortcuts. Building on the original with a new protagonist, Hornet, it brings fresh fluid movement to the format with the character’s graceful gliding and sliding thanks to her ability to weave threads of silk (hence the title). There’s a real heft to her animations in spite of how speedy she is. Rather than a journey into the deep, Hornet is on a quest to the kingdom’s peak, battling various imaginative foes en route through a dense, metroidvania world. With visual splendor in spades, Silksong is set…

The citybuilder, as first established by Will Wright, was about taking a green Californian field and turning it into a fume-belching industrial hellscape. It’s a premise that’s rather lost its feel-good factor in our more environmentally conscious age, and even direct successors like Cities: Skylines have leaned into geothermal power plants and electric cars. Terra Nil flips the concept entirely, asking you to restore a blackened wasteland to its former natural glory. Purify the soil, grow coral reefs, and introduce parrots, fish and flamingos. Then recycle all your buildings, and leave the map looking as if you were never there at all.…

Ablatant spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio, BOmb Rush Cyberfunk embodies the style and pace of the classic skating game, but puts more emphasis on player expression. You choose your character, customise your outfits, and create your own graffiti in an open-world city. You won’t just be rollerblading—you can hop on a skateboard and a trick bike too. And, of course, there’s a full trick system for putting all three to work with grinds, slides, wall-runs, and all sorts of other fancy motions my old thumbs probably won’t be able to pull off. Style is all-important—you’re not just showing off, you’re gaining a reputation. Get well-known enough in each district, and you can challenge its ruling gang for control of the territory. All rather more civilised than guns and knives,…

Horror is hard to do right, especially when not relying on jump scares. It’s why the original Silent Hill games are regarded as classics, while their many sequels and imitators are largely forgotten. Despite being the debut release from tiny two-person studio Rose-Engine, sci-fi horror adventure Signalis joins that coveted pantheon as one of the best in the genre, and a personal favorite from a jam-packed year. Signalis will feel familiar to anyone who played PS1 survival horror games. Viewed from an overhead perspective, there’s a labyrinth of interconnected rooms to explore, many locked doors, logical and more abstract puzzles, and an assortment of monsters to shoot. Inventory space is at a premium, healing is finite, and the game can only be saved at safe-rooms. Aesthetically, it refines that PS1…

These days we’re used to games looking like Pixar designed an advert for the NRA. The likes of Fortnite and Overwatch casually mix bouncy, cartoon visuals with lethal assault weapons and we struggle to raise an eyebrow. But when Borderlands was originally released, it stood out against a canvas of muddy shooters with box art full of bald men standing with their backs facing the camera. Visually, Borderlands still feels like rubbing popping candy in your eyes. The environments can sometimes feel brown and uninspiring, like finger food at a children’s party, but the character design is always impeccable. Even when you accidentally end up hating a character, such as in the case of Claptrap, you can’t help but admire the way they look. Throw in those splashy, explosive text…

THIS MONTH Spied on the neighbours for a personal vendetta. ALSO PLAYED House Flipper With its Welcome to The Game titles seeing you painstakingly trawl the dark web for codes hidden in its disturbing sites, Reflect Studios has web-based horror down to a fine-tuned, almost obnoxiously detailed art. This time sidestepping the dark web to focus on a local neighborhood watch group, Scrutinized is so ripe with unsettling details it includes a no-death Detective Mode so you can take them all in properly. Detective Mode shifts gears from a survive the night style set-up to good old-fashioned investigative fun. Like a really messed up hidden object game. Scrutinized already has less enemies to worry about than Welcome To The Game 2, but even playing with no enemies it’s still thematically…

Cometh the hour, cometh the bombastic marketing campaign from Nvidia. Acronyms are thrown at you and you’re encouraged to nod along at comparison wipes in games while RTX and DLSS are toggled on and off. This one’s got 9728 CUDA cores—how many’s yours got? No no, that won’t do. You need this new one now. And it’s yours for $1,200. No matter how hard Nvidia’s PR teams have worked on the launch of team green’s new RTX 40-series cards, there’s still just one spec that stands out and it’s the price. The flagship 4080 card costs nearly twice that of its predecessor, the RTX 3080, which retailed for $699 at launch in September 2020. Of course, buying a graphics card for something close to MSRP in 2020 was as likely…

Call of Duty’s now been part of the gaming scenery for two decades, and ever since the original Modern Warfare (2007) took it into the stratosphere, it has become a regular blockbuster release. That cadence matters, and the sheer size of the series has meant that CoD has become a focal point for Microsoft’s proposed $65 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. There were two years between the first two games: ever since, it’s had a yearly entry like clockwork. No other shooter releases like this, but that reliability became a huge factor in CoD’s growth. Over the last decade especially it has come to inspire fierce loyalty among its huge fanbase before, in 2020, Warzone offered a free-to-play CoD and saw huge success. This year’s mainline entry was Modern Warfare…

There’s no shortage of war games waving their proverbial arms in your face and screaming “look at me, I’m realistic”. For this game, set during the First World War, the claim seems more than just marketing blurb—the developer has even partnered with the Imperial War Museum in London. Although largely a traditional RTS, The Great War: Western Front won’t exclusively involve directing action on the battlefield. Part of the experience involves playing the part of theatre commander, managing morale and researching technology that will feed into the war. It’s acting as field commander that will see you ordering units around and adapting tactics moment to moment. Persistent battlefields present a challenge that most similar games do not. You’ll deal not only with varied weather conditions, but also with environments that…

The latest entry in the never-ending series takes players to a medieval fantasy world where kingdoms use big crystals and the summoning of weird monsters to maintain their power. Cue our protagonist… Clive. Huh. A very normal name for a dude in a Final Fantasy videogame. Anyway, he’s on a quest for revenge which will see him through what appears to be a grimdark take on your usual Final Fantasy affair, channelling some of the grit and self-seriousness of The Witcher or Game of Thrones. It’s coming to PS5 in June, but a PC release date is yet to be announced, so we may have a longer wait ahead of us.…

THE NEW VISUALS TAKE SOME GETTING USED TO HOWEVER, DOING AWAY WITH THE ICONIC SEPIA TONE IN FAVOUR OF A MORE VIBRANT ENVIRONMENT After the Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes, the legendary fourth game is getting the same treatment, reimagining the lauded classic as something shinier and faster paced. Having survived the events of Raccoon City, Leon Kennedy is now (the game takes place in the year 2004) tasked with rescuing the US president’s daughter from a cult in remote Spain. Thus begins a horror action adventure that’s like few others. Based on recent hands-on time, the game doesn’t deviate much from the original, focused more on adding new bells and whistles than messing with the core formula. It’s the kind of polish that Capcom makes look effortless these…

The success of Dark Souls and Elden Ring flew in the face of received triple-A wisdom—proving that big budget games can be difficult, obtuse, and trusting of their players, yet still find a huge audience. Flintlock is an early result of that new understanding—a story-driven open world of the sort you might associate with Sony, but anchored by a brutal Souls-like combat system. You play as Nor, an explosives expert on the frontline of a war against the gods humanity once worshipped. These former deities have opened the door to the afterlife, which, like a vacuum cleaner stuck on reverse flow, is now spewing an army of the undead into the world of the living. Following a bitter initial defeat, you must travel the world to reassemble the Blackstream sappers—masters…

Adecade since the first game, this gorgeous-looking platformer puts players in the role of Lumina, a young ‘Teslamancer’, who has been left stranded after her airship crashed. To get her back home to safety, you’ll have to explore a massive mechanical tower, battle some intimidating Viking enemies and bosses, and solve plenty of puzzles. All of it is wrapped up in a painterly art style that brings its Scandinavian-steampunk infused world to life. Its brain-teasers are all based on real electromagnetic physics, playing into the scientific themes. Though that does mean you will, in fact, need to know how magnets work—including, apparently, “curved magnets”.…

A new game set in the post apocalyptic world of Hyper Light Drifter, taking the series into 3D with a rogue-lite adventure that can be played cooperatively with friends. You’ve got swordplay, platforming, and hover-boards coming together into the mix of its iconic fantasy and sci-fi aesthetics. It seems much more high energy than the decidedly melancholy vibes of the original, however. The studio’s last game, Solar Ash, did fumble the move to 3D a bit, impressing visually but not quite delivering mechanically. Here’s hoping Hyper Light Breaker fares better.…

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine has a cult following almost as devoted as the game’s zealots, and those poor loyalists have been waiting a decade for a sequel to the hack-and-slashing third person shooter. As the faithful no doubt knew all along, the time is finally upon us, and Space Marine 2 is set to deliver unto thee a scale never before seen in the series. But how will it fare against the new wave of Warhammer games, especially the likes of Darktide? To get a sense of how the sequel is shaping up, I sat down to speak with creative director Oliver Hollis-Leick, who was more than happy to dive into how Saber Interactive aims to build upon the original, and what’s special about telling stories in the Warhammer 40,000…

The team behind XCOM has given me my next mission objective. It’s not to destroy an alien relay, extract a VIP from a hot zone, or board a crashed UFO. Instead, I’m to watch a movie with a friend in Marvel’s Midnight Suns. It’s a western, if the Eastwood-esque figure flashing across the television set is anything to go by, though the particulars of the film’s plot turn out to be entirely unimportant. Movie night is merely a pretext to have a deep conversation with a new teammate, named Nico. We bond over our evil moms: hers a philanthropist sorceress who murdered children, mine a demonic goddess who banished me to a cold grave in the late 17th century. Nico, whose superpower appears to be cheeriness in the face of…

NEED TO KNOW Confession: this month’s They’re Back was always centred around Axiom Verge, but the initial plan was to pick two other grass-adjacent games to go with it. But I’ve already done House Flipper and the comedy lawnmower games leave me cold, so you’re getting three games named after peripheries instead. Axiom Verge has all the hallmarks of a classic indie Metroidvania in that it looks old in a way that old games never actually used to look, and it’s bastard hard in a way that you only realise once it’s too late and you’re already addicted. It’s the platforming equivalent of a multi-course meal in a restaurant, but instead of being fed fresh bread, you’re getting a drill that lets you chop through obstructions. The variety of gadgets…

The dawning of a fresh year is traditionally a time of introspection and inner growth. A time to nurture one’s inner stoic, take an honest inventory of your failings and unfulfilled ambitions, and to give them form. This is a new year. You haven’t done any of the bad things yet. Alright, it’s still so early in January that you’re using the three available hours of sunlight in the day to prepare a breakfast of leftover chocolates and fruitcake, but you’ve got the fire under you. This year, you’re going to do it. You’re going to do… something or other. What nobody tells you about new year’s resolutions until you’re too old and unmotivated to act on it is that the trickiest part is deciding on an undertaking that’s actually…