Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2024 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

A longtime fan of anime and manga, Karina Bastos always knew she wanted a creative career, but wasn’t sure exactly what; until, that is, she saw what games had to offer. “I started to see how videogames help you bring to life things that [were previously only] on paper,” she says. Brazil offers little in the way of major game development studio work, so she began by taking advantage of mobile and marketing artwork opportunities. This gave her a chance to experiment with different types of art, and she found herself particularly drawn to character work—so that’s what she began to specialize in. Bastos is keen to point out that, while the early part of her career working on smaller projects allowed her a hand in design, generally speaking 3D…

When I first embraced my inner-demon in medieval tactical RPG Beast, I was not expecting to become a kind of satanic, horned Wolverine, ripping enemies to shreds with razor-sharp claws. My foes were equally surprised, as blood spurted out of their veins with comic book exaggeration. As I dashed around the gridless map, the miserable setting—a dimly-lit village ravaged by plague and war—and grim violence was undercut by my character’s howls and barks. “Woof woof woof!” I yelled as I cut down another soldier. Despite the laughs elicited by the barking protagonist—a war veteran returning home after a decade of Ottoman slavery—Beast is a deliberately miserable game. Anti-hero Anton is a gloomy, scarred and vengeful lad, and after a hellish ten years he’s come back to Carpathia during what’s basically…

On Doom’s 30th birthday how do you feel now, in 2023, about the original game and its legacy? I’m just blown away that the game is still relevant. People can still play it, and people are so active in it. I don’t know of any other game that comes from so long ago like that that has a community that is engaged on a daily basis, making content for it, and playing it—and the fact that I can even get viewers on Twitch while I’m building levels is nuts. We knew that Doom was going to be a good game, but we never expected it to live for so long. We thought, “We’re going to make Doom II. It’ll be better than Doom I, and when we’re done with Doom…

Fraser Brown: CDPR will probably never be able to escape the stink of Cyberpunk 2077’s botched launch, but what a way to end things. Phantom Liberty’s new district, Dogtown, and its cast of CIA analogues, militants and ne’er-do-wells allowed the game to go out on a high note, with a gripping yarn balanced between a slow-burning thriller and a balls-to-the-wall action movie. You get to meet the NUSA president, and much more importantly: Idris Elba. The devs smartly weave this expansion into the base game rather than sticking it on at the end or making it a standalone romp, allowing it to elevate the rest of Cyberpunk 2077, a game that is light years ahead of the launch version thanks to the accompanying (and free) 2.0 update. Proper police chases,…

Jacob Ridley: A blend of entertaining horror and surreal scenes, Alan Wake 2 manages to keep you along for the ride through every twist and turn. You might find yourself trapped in the Dark Place and a never-ending talk show, but you can always rely on quality case work and a fine attention to detail to figure out what the heck is happening in the woods in Washington. Fraser Brown: I’d be happy to play an entire game as Saga, Alan’s new FBI buddy. I don’t like playing as a cop, and the FBI are the worst kind, but I’m a sucker for a game that properly lets you get stuck into the investigative side of police work. Connecting clues with string and profiling characters with Saga’s supernatural skills was…

Harvey Randall: Remnant 2 came at a difficult time, landing in the middle of some absolutely smashing games—though it’s still one of my favorites from this year. It crushes its predecessor Remnant: From the Ashes in every conceivable way, while still being the most inventive of 2023’s Souls-like offerings. One moment you’re blasting your way through a plague-stricken techno hellscape, the next you’re battling a fairy king in a shining storybook castle. Its levels are procedurally arranged, but they still manage to feel textured, with hand-crafted encounters and secrets to discover. One unlockable archetype even spawned a whole ARG-style hunt and a Discord server of dataminers hellbent on uncovering it. The RPG side to this multiversal shoot-’em-up is stellar, too. You can combine two of its classes (called Archetypes) at a…

Phil Savage: Since 2016, Mimimi Games has been single handedly keeping the stealth tactics genre alive. Its first game, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, spent years in our Top 100 off the strength of its clever cast of characters—all of them adding fun tactical twists to the job of sneaking silently through a huge, hostile map. Its second, Desperados 3, did justice to one of the major games of the genre’s early ’00s heyday. This year, it released Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, and it’s easily the studio’s best work. Previous games had some quirky abilities, sure, but this time you’re in charge of a band of undead pirates with a full suite of magical powers—every character widening the possibility space of how you approach the challenge ahead. The…

Fraser Brown: Baldur’s Gate III is probably my all-time fave. I gave it the highest score I’ve ever slapped on a game during my time at PCG (97), and playing it again I’ve only found more things to love. The ingenious, complex systems keep spitting out surprises, and countless compelling story beats are hidden away for second, third and fourth playthroughs. It’s so impossibly rich and detailed, and so much care has been taken with the characters, that I find it hard to envision a game that could top this. Robert Jones: Simply put, the fantasy RPG of the decade. What Larian Studios achieved with Baldur’s Gate III is incredibly, monumentally special and, honestly, something so rare and magical that I wouldn’t be surprised if it took another two decades or…

Mr Platformer takes a very strange turn, but for most of its runtime it’s just a good platform game, with a simplicity that’s refreshing in an era of Metroidvanias and platforming roguelikes. With its low-res art and short, challenging stages, it plays like Mario if it was demade for the Apple II. Each stage is themed around a platforming facet, be it Pitfall!-style vine swinging, Mario-esque swimming, or hunting keys in an underground environment, but every time you reach the final stage, there’s a curious horror vibe—and then you’re thrown back to the start of the world map. Things are different now, however. Completed stages have been wiped from the map, replaced with others. And when you beat a stage, a timer counts down—but to what? Even now that I’ve…

PC gaming has never really had a mascot. You could argue that it’s Commander Keen, or perhaps even Kate Archer from No One Lives Forever. But in terms of a cute, cartoony avatar with universal appeal, the closest we’ve come is Gordon Freeman braining aliens with a crowbar. A Hat In Time isn’t a PC exclusive, but there’s something about it that feels like it should be. The protagonist, Hat Girl – literally a human girl in a hat – could easily sit alongside the likes of Sypro, Ratchet, or Gex. And the entire feel of it, from the bouncy, buttery platforming to the eccentric sense of humor, directly references the first and second wave of 3D platformers. This might be to do with the game’s development history: it was…

Let’s just take a second to reaffirm the reality we find ourselves in with PC gaming as we approach 2024. We load up a game we quite fancy playing, set the graphics preset to maximum, and then start the game. If the frame counter that we constantly have running reads anything below 60, at any point, we then stop playing the game and decide we must pay somewhere between $1,000-$1,500 on a chunk of circuit boards to make that number go up to 60 again. And that’s not just a bit of self-deprecating humor. That’s the behavior loop that the hardware industry’s actually counting on. It’s been three years since Cyberpunk – how many newer games offer higher fidelity visuals? And how much more performance did you get from CD…

Foxhole is a sandbox-style war MMO that has been available in Early Access since 2017. The schtick is one persistent and gigantic war game where thousands of players battle for one of two factions, but with the twist that the logistics, resource and supply side of the armies is just as important as firing guns and piloting vehicles. Like many of the best social games great stories happen as a matter of course, and a recent example was a 48-hour long battle between an isolated island called Silver, cut-off from all logistics support and supplies, facing down an endless invasion force. Foxhole’s two factions are the Colonials and the Wardens, and in this case the Colonials held Silver island, part of a larger area called The Oarbreakers Isles. The Colonials…

The bones of the survival genre are well defined. You cut a tree to get sticks. You hit a rock to get flint and stone. You open a crafting menu and turn these things into tools and weapons and a campfire. Is that a critter in the distance? Harvest its meat for food and its skin for leather. Whether it’s Valheim or Ark or even Minecraft, the skeleton remains the same—instantly recognizable, like a T-rex in a museum. The question, then, is what else is going on? What meat is clinging to those bones? What skin is holding it together? Valheim has vikings, Ark has dinosaurs, and Nightingale has fae. Set in 1889, in an alternate history where humans coexist with magical creatures, Nightingale opens with disaster. A toxic miasma,…

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, and it’s fair to say this one was fairly unanticipated too. There’s a backstory to The Inquisitor that may cause some to cross themselves in disbelief, but also a vampiric investigation with enough third-person action and adventuring to attract a new crowd of the faithful. This particular inquisitor has nothing to do with Monty Python or Warhammer 40,000. His story traces back to the climactic event of the Christian gospels, that moment on Golgotha we’re all taught about at Sunday school, when Jesus gets down off the cross and sets about making his displeasure at his unpleasant treatment abundantly clear. Remember that? If this all sounds a bit far-fetched, it’s because it’s based on the work of a Polish fantasy author. Such things have a…

The history of Doom is more than just the tale of how John Romero and John Carmack came together to create a PC gaming phenomenon. The history of Doom is the history of id Software and the history of the FPS itself. From the 1993 original to 2020’s Doom Eternal, each new Doom game developed by id Software has both reflected the culture of the studio at the time, and moved the needle of the FPS in some manner. Doom RELEASED 1993 DEVELOPER id Software The development of 1993’s Doom is one of the most well-documented projects in the medium’s history. After John Carmack discovered a way to mimic the side-scrolling effect of Super Mario Bros 3 on PC, Carmack worked with John Romero, alongside game designer Tom Hall, to…

Robert Jones: Even knowing Fatshark’s heritage in needing to seriously keep developing its games after release, I was still absolutely mad as hell when Warhammer 40,000: Darktide launched. The game was not only so janky and broken that, one time, it took me seven crashes with restarts to finish a single run, but it also shipped with key chunks of the game missing. It wasn’t just me who was spitting with rage, either, with thousands of reviews on Steam at launch leading to the game getting a ‘Mostly Negative’ badge of shame. Despite this, though, I could see the potential for the game and noted that at the time. When it worked I had a blast. A year later and Darktide, while still recognizably the same game, has gone through a…

Robert Jones: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was bigger and better than Fallen Order in every way, but it was how it seemed to honor the Star Wars PC game greats of old like Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Knights of the Old Republic that got me well and truly hooked. I can take or leave the Souls-lite combat mechanics, but the dynamic movement options, rewarding exploration, as well as cinematic presentation and storytelling just delivers what I want from a Star Wars adventure. The fact I finished this game in one sitting speaks volumes to just how well it clicked for me. Now if we can just have dark Force powers unlocked in the inevitable third game, Kyle Katarn can retire for good. Sean Martin: The funny thing is I…

Chris Livingston: I love open-world games, but such a familiar formula has been established that so many of them wind up feeling predictable. Collection quests, treasure hunts, minigames, gliders for getting around… these things aren’t bad, but they’ve grown a bit stale. Tchia has these elements too, but puts such a fresh spin on them they feel brand new. Soul-jumping is the highlight of the traversal system, and means that in addition to the gliding every other game has you can also leap into a nearby bird to go from drifting to actual soaring. Tchia can fling her soul into everything from fish to deer to rocks, making each trip across the island an exercise in kinetic improv. Its minigames are wonderfully inventive and original, too: rock stacking, cliff diving,…

Tyler Wilde: Thanks to the deeper-than-usual tutorials and practice modes, I finally understand Street Fighter basics that have eluded me for decades—I seriously never knew what people meant by ‘cross-up’ before this game (I have not historically been very good at Street Fighter). That alone has made Street Fighter 6 exciting for me, but I also like the goofy story mode. I made a character based on me—with slightly larger biceps, sure, and yeah, inhuman quads, but basically me—and watching my new Street Fighter self meet Chun-Li felt weirdly like actually meeting a celebrity. Better, really, since Chun-Li taught me how to fight, but the one time I met Jack White he didn’t teach me how to play a vintage guitar. Wes Fenlon: Street Fighter 6’s story mode is goofy. I’m…

Attention citizens! You may have noticed two exciting new features in our fair city. The first is the Large Hadron Collider, an extremely massive and expensive scientific facility that will inspire an interest in education and boost our tech industry! The second new feature is that, due to the heavy infrastructural demands of the collider, every sewer in the city is backed up and none of your toilets will flush. Not to worry! To fix that I’ll just buy more land so I can build additional groundwater pumping stations and water treatment plants—or at least I would do that if I hadn’t spent every last penny on that big collider thing. Time to mess with some budget sliders and take out a huge loan I’ll probably never be able to…

In the first playable moments of Alan Wake 2, you control a naked, balding, middle-aged man stumbling in confusion around a forest. After a few seconds of staring at his hairy butt while I guided him around, it dawned on me that this wasn’t going to be your typical big-budget videogame. Even by Remedy’s own quirky standards, Alan Wake 2 is idiosyncratic. You could call it self-indulgent, even, as it dives headfirst into its every strange idea. Weaving a winkingly meta journey through all corners of the studio’s lore, at times it feels like watching Remedy get high off its own fumes. Which is exactly what makes it so entrancingly brilliant. The game picks up 13 years after writer Alan Wake’s disappearance at the end of the first game, following…

This month’s theme, rather desperately, is hats. Now, I realize that the helmet the Penitent One wears in Blasphemous isn’t so much a hat as it is a barbed wire vuvuzela of stinging Catholic guilt. But it’s all the excuse I needed to talk about the sort of game that makes Warhammer 40K’s Imperium of Man look like a Christian line-dancing troupe. Blasphemous is horrible, in a way that makes even Dark Souls seem cheerful. At least in Lordran you’ll eventually stumble on a jolly, rotund knight or cackling shopkeeper. In Cvstodia, the best you can hope for is giant babies sobbing blood or floating heads with the flesh sloughing off their faces. But there’s something deeper about Blasphemous’ fervent misery that makes it more grueling. Everyone and everything seems…

The two trends taking the gaming keyboard world by storm today are optical and magnetic key switches. Both claim to offer something similar: a more reliable and more customisable keyboard. Though to the extent they deliver is up to how manufacturers use each one, and some make far better use of these clever new switches than others. Take Wooting. This small company has crafted entirely analog gaming keyboards out of optical switches and has moved on to even better magnetic ones. 1 Two HE WOOTING $195 Tweaker’s delight Wooting aims to offer a properly analog gaming keyboard. That is, a gaming keyboard that can measure the full range of its keys’ motion. As a player you can use this keyboard to alter between walking and running in a game by…

Not many mod projects have 122-page chronicles of their own history, but then not many mod projects are Tamriel Rebuilt, a mod for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind whose aim is to, well, build Morrowind. Because in spite of the name, Morrowind doesn’t actually contain its entire titular province. Unlike Skyrim, the third Elder Scrolls restricts you to a relatively minor slice of its main setting: the volcanic backwater island of Vvardenfell. Tamriel Rebuilt wants to fill in the gaps. And it’s been doing that, slice by slice, for over 20 years. Paradoxically, Tamriel Rebuilt is older than Morrowind itself. Its origins go back to 2001, when a poster on The Elder Scrolls Forums enlisted the community to rebuild all of Tamriel, the entire continent that TES happens on, in…

My first dozen hours with The Front, a multiplayer survival crafting sandbox recently launched into Early Access by Singapore-based Samar Studio, have been a rollercoaster of emotions, at least half of those being disappointment. Despite a promising sci-fi war premise, too much of it feels dispassionately cribbed from its peers. The Front’s store page promises an open world time travel adventure and a war against a tyrannical empire. What you actually get from the current Early Access build (just over a month from launch at the time of writing) is an unpolished fusion of elements from Rust, Ark: Survival Evolved and bits borrowed from Orcs Must Die and Fortnite’s Save The World campaign. With no story to speak of and a bare-bones tutorial, the goal of The Front is to…

Mollie Taylor: Dredge has the most immaculate vibes of any game I’ve played this year. By day it’s a relaxing and serene fishing game, but once the sun sets it turns into an unsettling realization of how isolated your tiny boat is on those big dark waters. Dredge plays to that polarity wonderfully, crafting a delightfully spooky world that has my usual horror-averse self desperate to dig deeper into its mysteries. That doesn’t just come from the seas you sail, but also from the twisted aberrations of different fish you can find lurking around. I’ve never been so psyched to fill an encyclopedia with catches that have a thousand eyes, rotting flesh and bulging boils. Sarah James: This isn’t the sort of game I’d have thought would hold my interest for…

Fraser Brown: There should be too much going on in Dave the Diver. You’ve got a restaurant to manage, fish to collect, mysteries to uncover, big ol’ sharks trying to eat you, and some roguelike elements that would normally stress me out—but this scuba adventure is, miraculously, never anything less than effortless and elegant. It has the chill vibes of a summer holiday spent on a boat, all sunny skies and Hawaiian shirts, and despite my long list of tasks, I never feel burdened or busy. Pure joy. Robin Valentine: Really there’s not much Dave the Diver does that hasn’t been done before. You’ve farmed and fished and waited tables in videogames before, and it doesn’t really iterate on any of those basic ideas to any wildly innovative degree. What…

Ted Litchfield: When I fired up Armored Core VI for the first time, I felt like Milhouse playing Bonestorm in the Simpsons, the protagonist of every ’90s videogame ad physically blasted back into their chair by what they were playing. This is one of the best 3D action games I’ve ever seen, better even than FromSoft’s previous dinger, Sekiro. Armored Core VI is a generous font of flow state kills piloting a ten-meter-tall mech in between the crumbling tenements of an impoverished world. It’s also a surprisingly thoughtful bit of science fiction, casting you as this put-upon cog of an unthinking corporate war machine, the victim of indeterminate, life-altering augmentation surgery who slowly wakes up to their own potential to write the history of planet Rubicon. Armored Core VI has…

Robert Jones: Nightdive Studios absolutely knocked it out of the park with the System Shock remake, somehow achieving the near impossible balancing act of remaining incredibly faithful to the groundbreaking original game, which is considered the grandfather of the immersive sim genre, while also totally overhauling many of the original game’s now antiquated systems. And it did this despite making the tough decision to reboot this remake totally during development, too. But it is testament to the dedication and skill of Nightdive’s devs that it pulled it off and delivered a game that today has ‘Very Positive’ review scores on Steam from literally thousands and thousands of PC gamers. Ted Litchfield: I knew Looking Glass Studios’ 1994 classic by reputation alone when I dove into the System Shock Remake, so…

RoboCop: Rogue City’s combat feels like straight up murder: I totally lost it when I punched someone for the first time and RoboCop’s fist flew out with the force of a particle accelerator, instantly atomizing their skull. A few minutes later I had to take a breather after picking up a dumpster and squashing four guys into a corner with it, like it was a malevolent hydraulic press adorned with Oakley and Punisher skull stickers. There is a tremendous sense of physicality in Rogue City. You can pick up enemies by the neck and fling them against walls so hard that chunks of rubble will rain down on their ragdolled corpses. Bullets scatter reams of paper and turn clutter into hurricanes of plastic and metal. Environments are littered with a…

Frasier is back. Yes, in a new TV series, but also in this fan game, which takes the neurotic radio shrink and drops him into a turn-based JRPG. It does sort of make sense—a ’90s sitcom being turned into a ’90s-style game—but is it actually worth playing, beyond the gag of its mere existence? To cut to the chase: yes. This is one of the best fan games I’ve played. The setup is that Frasier is hosting one of his dinner parties, but there’s a to-do list before he is finally ready. He needs his crotchety dad Martin, and his dog Eddie, out of his apartment; he needs his grape scissors back from his brother Niles; and he has to host his radio show down at the station. Cue turn-based…

There’s a technique in movies called the Lewton Bus, first used in Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 horror, Cat People. It works by slowly building tension, then rapidly dissipating it with a jumpscare; in the case of Cat People, the hissing brakes of a bus. The technique, named after producer Val Lewton, has been used in countless films since. The Lewton Bus is so omnipresent, in fact, that directors now use it as a double bluff, following up a harmless jumpscare with another, more threatening reveal. Most of the Resident Evil 2 remake is one long Lewton Bus. It’s the gaming equivalent of hearing a noise which turns out to be a cute cat, which then erupts into a mewling, blasphemous malformation of claws, pus and bloodied furballs. It’s a game that…

I don’t really consider myself much of a tactical RPG guy. The Iclosest equivalent I’ve thrown myself into is the Mario + Rabbids series, looked upon as a watered-down family-friendly take on the genre. It’s not until Marvel’s Midnight Suns that I’ve really understood why people invest countless hours in them. Developed by Firaxis Games – known for XCOM and Sid Meier’s Civilization—Marvel’s Midnight Suns snuck into the end of 2022 in an awkward December release spot that I’m sure didn’t help it garner the recognition it deserves. As a superhero aficionado I try to play most major games from the worlds of Marvel and DC, and yet I wasn’t too fussed about this one. It wasn’t until murmurs of its quality started to be heard around the PC Gamer…

Mark Zuckerberg sits across from podcaster Lex Fridman. In a dark space where only their faces and shoulders are visible, the two engage in a stilted, slightly hallucinogenic-feeling conversation, the two gazing in wonder at each other like stoned teenagers. Only, they’re not really sharing that space. In reality they’re sitting with VR headsets on in different states, using Meta’s eponymous Metaverse to show off the company’s new photorealistic avatars. For a gamer, there are two takeaways from Zuckerberg’s in-Metaverse appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. One: you could not possibly find two less expressive human beings on the planet to show off this technology that’s all about capturing expressive non-verbal communication. Seriously, Louis Theroux and David Blaine would come across like a couple of kids who’ve found a can…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick the parts you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price. Mid-range build You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through. Advanced build You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart. BUDGET BUILD Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank MID-RANGE BUILD Our recommended build for playing the latest games ADVANCED BUILD Go above and beyond with a PC powerful enough to end worlds…