Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2024 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

While studying computer science with an emphasis on game development, Tobias Graff worked part-time for some of Germany’s biggest mobile gaming companies. Soon after that, he founded Mooneye with some friends from university, entering the industry full time; and later, the company branched out into publishing games from other developers. In 2016, Mooneye launched a Kickstarter for its first game, Lost Ember. It was successful, and so other people came to Graff and the team for advice on building a successful campaign. They were happy to help, but there was only so much they could do. “We were basically working nonstop on the game; we couldn’t really afford to take time off to help other developers,” says Graff. After Lost Ember’s release, which was also a success, Mooneye immediately started…

In the mid-20th century it seemed that new science, from DDT to nuclear power, would save us all. By the time the ’70s rolled round, the legacy of ignorance, corporate greed and government arrogance was clear. So it was, in one beautiful corner of the Pacific Northwest. Amongst the redwoods and fir trees, research into a potentially limitless energy source—LIM—unleashed a series of increasingly deadly anomalies. In the end the government evacuated the population, walled off the whole peninsula and left it to descend into eldritch chaos. This is the setting for Pacific Drive, a debut first-person driving-survival-adventure game by Seattle-based Ironwood Studios, a proudly anti-crunch group with an eclectic track record in the industry. A humble delivery driver, you get sucked into the exclusion zone by an escaping red…

After almost 15 years, League of Legends remains one of the most popular PC games in the world, boasting over 100 million players every month. But keeping a game fresh and exciting for that long is no easy task, especially with so many people to please, so Riot Games has taken some risks with the new 2024 season. Updating League of Legends is not simple at the best of times. With millions of players to keep happy, each patch has to improve things in some way but not break everything that players love. Throughout most of the year the risks are minimal for a new patch, with one arriving every two weeks Riot tends to keep them relatively small, making balance changes and introducing one or two new things at…

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In Last Train Home, a military management game and tactical RTS, you’re in charge of the Czechoslovak Legion as the Russian civil war breaks out. Unable to return home by going west, you make a desperate plan: capture an armored train and traverse Siberia. Your management of the journey is both on the train, assigning jobs and doling out supplies, and on the battlefield, controlling units of ten soldiers in pausable, tactical RTS battles. Last Train Home is not so much concerned with historicity as with giving you a glimpse into the desperate mood of a time and place. The Czech legionaries don’t want to fight on either side of the Russian Civil War. They really just want to go home, but nobody wants a large band of unaligned armed…

You can see why the original House Flipper was such a hit. Its cozy fantasy of home ownership and fulfilling work was a soothing balm after a miserable day at the office, and that fantasy is only strengthened in this sequel. The basics remain the same: jobs appear in your email, from cleaning tasks to full-on home renovation, and you can use the profits to buy properties from the auction house, ready to be glowed up and flipped for a profit. Accept a job and you’ll appear outside the house with your bag of tools. Bin bags to collect the rubbish, one measly cloth to wipe down the surfaces, a roller for painting, and so on. I haven’t played the previous game, but the interface for managing these tools seems…

The Two Rivers Hypothesis is pure aesthetic and atmosphere, with little beneath that—but what aesthetic and atmosphere. It’s a game where you pilot a submersible around a dark and flooded facility, exploring tunnels until you discover the ending. But it’s not a simple case of pressing WASD and waggling the mouse around. No, it’s all mouse-driven, with on-screen buttons for moving the craft in the cardinal directions, going up and down and turning, as well as moving the camera. Controlling the craft is an exercise in mild frustration, then, that feels appropriate for the bulky thing you’re steering. It should feel cumbersome to explore this place, inciting fear as you blindly turn a corner and drive it down another pitch-black corridor. As you find your bearings, you’re assailed by emails…

Our final tenuous link to order is Wilmot’s Warehouse, a game that looks, at first glance, like playing a corrupted cartridge from a 1990s console. A migraine pretending to be a videogame. But it’s also so compelling it’ll make you want to organize not only your own underwear drawer, but your partner’s, too. At its simplest, it’s a game about a cheerful square, Wilmot, who gets deliveries of brightly colored icons and has to arrange them in a warehouse with some semblance of order. But it’s also not that. At times it’s like a therapist is opening up your head and explaining, in great detail, why you never get anything done. As soon as you start batching items by type, you begin to understand which bits of your brain are…

The most popular graphics card of a generation is rarely the best-performing. Instead it’s the one the most people can reasonably afford. The most popular cards, according to Steam’s monthly hardware survey, are the RTX 3060, GTX 1650, and GTX 1060. Unsurprising, but what’s somewhat more shocking is you have to look pretty far down the list to find any high-end GPUs noted at all. Nvidia and AMD sell higher volumes across the lower rungs of the GPU market. The so-called ‘mainstream’ cards. What constitutes a mainstream graphics card is a constantly shifting definition and not easily defined by price alone. In the early days of PC gaming, $399 was kingly money to spend on an add-in card, whereas nowadays that’s barely more than budget. Blame inflation, and try not to…

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…

Veteran developers from RPG specialists like Obsidian and BioWare had an interesting Twitter exchange recently, and collectively reckon that the temporary death of the CRPG in the early 2000s was down to retailer meddling. A conversation between Nathaniel Chapman (a designer at Timberline with former credits at Blizzard and Obsidian) and Josh Sawyer (studio design director at Obsidian) discussed the role that retail giants formerly played in the life and death of game genres: and not with approval. “I completely forgot how big a deal it was for Best Buy/Walmart/etc buyers to see your game, which determined your shelf space and thus your sales,” said Chapman, in response to which Sawyer noted Walmart had been “prudish” about content in the past (while hypocritically clearing the shelves for GTA). ACCORDING TO…

Escape From Tarkov has some of the most satisfying gun fights in any shooter, with one well-placed bullet being all you need to win a fight and a map design that makes positioning key, so it makes sense to make a game that is all about that experience. Escape From Tarkov: Arena is that game. Built on the same engine as the regular Tarkov and using all the same systems, it could be classed as a new mode that is being sold as a separate title. But this is Tarkov as you have never seen it before. Without the large maps, the focus on looting and the fear of losing your best gear Arena gives you the chance to shoot people to your heart’s content, and it does it incredibly…

The name may conjure images of a goth railway management game in which you transport skeletons between the ossuaries beneath Paris, but in reality Railroads & Catacombs has far more in common with Darkest Dungeon than Train Sim Underworld. Although that actually sounds like an excellent idea for a game. Instead of a carriage or staircase to convey you between areas, here you’re on a train. It’s a rickety locomotive that requires coal, scavenged from your victories in the field, and it gradually fills with characters and extra cars as you travel and upgrade. New recruits come through a portal to replace those lost in the wilds surrounding the track, while decks can be fiddled with or have cards removed by a Railmancer, who has his own carriage. As a…

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora transcends its progenitor series Far Cry with awe-inspiring presentation, a captivating world and tense combat, but at present it’s buried under a mountain of technical trouble and it could take months to unearth a genuinely great game with patches and driver support. When it’s working, navigating Pandora is a total joy: sprinting at mach five across the forest floor and parkouring across the serpentine tree roots that connect dense jungle brush to rock formations suspended in zero gravity. Avatar’s psychedelic Ecco the Dolphin’s color palette meets Starship Troopers’ industrial scifi look is translated beautifully from film to game, and the skyboxes especially are some of the best I’ve ever seen. The sheer density and variety of reactive flora and fauna is stunning. The whole thing is…

We’ve just defeated a cult, foiled a plot, saved a world. A bureaucrat says the triumphant parade has already been organized. We’ll get to ride a battle tank, and halfway it’ll stop and a small crowd will mob us. It’s all stage-managed. The mob has been carefully vetted, as the bureaucrat explains, “Members of the military. Young people, attractive and physically fit. A few healthy children.” In moments like this, Rogue Trader nails the dystopian satire of Warhammer 40,000. When I want people to know how important I am, I have a robot skull in a barrister’s wig that flies around announcing my presence and title. One of the entertainments at a coronation is just ‘shooting prisoners’. SUBTLETY’S FOR COWARDS Rogue Traders are an ideal part of Warhammer 40,000 to…

The Roottrees are Dead stands on the shoulders of Tim Sheinman’s Family, a similarly browser-based detective game that had you investigating a music scene and filling in a family tree of linked musicians. In Jeremy Johnston’s Roottrees, it’s a literal family tree, as you’ve been hired by a mysterious client to decipher the complicated genealogy of the Roottree family, and determine who will inherit the family fortune, after a terrible plane crash. Sitting down in front of this big flowchart late at night, mug in hand, soft jazz music piping out of the browser tab, it really makes you feel like a detective. Sheinman fans will immediately be at home as they fill in names on the family tree, with the game confirming your right answers and adding more documents…

Sometimes, it’s a single mechanic that makes you vibe with a game. The whomp of a crowbar in Half-Life. Grayson Hunt’s gigantic boot in Bulletstorm. In the case of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, for me, it’s the simple act of illuminating dark places with your lightsaber. Forget using your phone; this is an elegant torch for a more civilized age. It’s one of many vague, ephemeral feelings that Fallen Order gets right. One of the problems with Star Wars—and being a Star Wars fan—is that it’s hard to quantify what makes a piece of expanded universe media enjoyable. Rey exploring a crashed Star Destroyer: cool as shit. Rose and Finn riding cosmic donkeydogs: excruciatingly lame. I don’t know why. It just is. But so much here captures the distant,…

With its cheerful, kid-friendly looks and the trend of survival games being a bit more forgiving these days, I figured Fortnite’s new Lego survival mode would be a fun crafting sandbox where you bonk monsters on the head with swords and grab their loot. I was wrong. Lego Fortnite does not pull its punches. You know how your first full in-game day of Minecraft can wind up being a harrowing survival experience? It’s almost the same here. I spawned alone, though into a shared world—a nice feature of Lego Fortnite is once someone has given you their world key, you can play in their world even if they’re not online. Morgan and Tyler W had played a bit already, but were both working (like suckers) when I started. I could…

The Ghostrunner series of games are as cool as they come. The futuristic cyber punk megastructures. The slick first-person combat. The dynamite synthwave beats that fuel every jump, slide and/or wall run. The cyber-assassin protagonist who wields a katana. Even the name itself, Ghostrunner, is ridiculously cool. It immediately offers intrigue. Developed by Polish studio One More Level, the original debuted in 2020 and did reasonably well in terms of sales at 2.5 million units sold globally. While it was great to see a Best Action Game nomination for Ghostrunner 2 at The Game Awards 2023, in a way I still think it’s quite overlooked by general audiences. It’s essentially Blade Runner meets Mirror’s Edge for anyone looking in from afar, something that you would think would be able to…

Recently our heads have been gently vibrating with the tremendous possibilities of DLSS 3 and path tracing. We’ve been imagining the impossibly vivid worlds we’ll soon be prancing about in, rubbing our eyes in theatrical disbelief at what we’re seeing. What a time to be a PC gamer, and an owner of a GPU that costs north of a grand. Thing is: games have looked pretty much the same for the last four years. The last big innovation in PC graphics was ray tracing, an advanced light-behavior simulation that promised us movie-grade CG visuals in real-time graphics engines. What we got in reality were some cool puddles and car bonnets that utterly tanked our frame rate. But that’s OK now, because we’ve got DLSS. It super-samples frames using deep learning…

There’s an epidemic of ugliness in multiplayer shooters, and its cause goes by many names. Skin. Bundle. Drop. Outfit. Coating. Or the most generic: cosmetic. Unassuming at first and quiet by nature, Cosmetic Uglification is a viral affliction infecting the best shooters of our time. When left unchecked, all semblance of aesthetic cohesion is sacrificed at the altar of individual expression, exclusivity and FOMO. Every shooter I love is becoming visual ooze before my very eyes. Signs of cosmetic uglification are everywhere: in spec ops soldiers trading tactical vests for diamond-laced streetwear, elite operators wearing Lara Croft cosplay, commandos going loud in pajamas. As seasons rage on, live service games garner years of stylistic baggage unique to our post-Fortnite world. It’s become normal to watch shooters that once flaunted a…

Hell may be other people, but getting those presumably extremely unmotivated and uncooperative other people to form into a mighty legion and fight for you must be a difficult undertaking. You can make diabolical threats, of course, but they’re already damned and tricky to persuade. Who’d want to rule Hell? Astaroth would. In Solium Infernum (that’s ‘only hell’ for the non-Latin speakers out there) Satan has disappeared, and the remaining top order of demons are left to fight it out for the throne. Hell is, conveniently, divided up into hexes, which turns the infernal regions into the perfect place for a spot of turn-based strategy, with the legions of the damned and their champions zooming about one hex at a time, carving up territory and taking out their frustrations on…

United 1944 was bleeding out before my eyes. The first day I played this WWII-themed squad shooter, there were barely enough players to fill a single server. Each day, the number has dwindled. The life draining out of a young, promising game, barely days into Early Access. As it stands, United 1944 is two surprisingly different games sharing a set of mechanics. One, a 16v16 team shooter that draws equal inspiration from Day Of Defeat, Battlefield, Fortnite and survival sandboxes. The other, a low-stakes take on the extraction shooter formula that doesn’t feel nearly as well thought out as its big-team counterpart. Between them, a game with a lot of potential, at least when there’s enough players to fill a match. In the primary team-play mode, Domination, Axis and Allied…

One of the Owonderful, tragic things about Warhammer dwarfs is their terminal decline. A realm that once spanned the Old World has been shattered by the incursion of orcs, goblins and vile ratmen. Most attempts to rebuild their empire end in disaster. It’s an endless cycle of failure, loss and shame, and they’re extremely grumpy about it. That’s about to change. The Age of Reckoning is upon us. The Immortal Empires mode in Total War: Warhammer III offers the most complete and detailed map of the Old World that exists. It stretches far east, to the lands of Grand Cathay, and back west to the New World of Lustria and Naggarond. But the conquest that follows isn’t about scale. It’s about detail. In this feature, we’re going to concern ourselves…

The basic idea baked into a city builder is that I’m creating something to last. So when Against the Storm presented me with the premise that each of my handmade habitats would be wiped away by a terrible tempest as part of an unavoidable, cataclysmic cycle, I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. But it is one of the most clever, engaging, and endearing strategy games I’ve played in years. In the world of Against the Storm, some kind of horrifying, magical disaster has turned the once-idyllic fantasy countryside into a rain-soaked, ruin-strewn morass in which everything outside of the magically-shielded capital, The Smoldering City, is annihilated by hurricane-force gales every year. As the queen’s viceroy, your job is to set out during the brief windows during which the…

Over the pandemic everyone seemed to find comfort in the gentle virtual maintenance of their Animal Crossing islands. Pootling about, talking to villagers, and designing things just so. Nothing else has come close to replicating that weird state of zen that comes with pulling weeds and paying debts. Until now. Disney Dreamlight Valley is very much like Animal Crossing in that you start on a barebones island, hunt down some tools, help out a money-hungry animal (this time it’s Scrooge McDuck rather than Tom Nook) and gradually shape things to your liking. The valley starts off in a right old state, having been overcome by The Forgetting, a curse leading to boarded-up buildings and an infestation of giant thorns. Slowly, you start to clean up, and things go from derelict…

I’m not sure that I’ve seen lore used as a punchline before, but it’s a beautiful running gag in this urban fantasy where witches are real, and they wield submachine guns. Every tidbit about the setting is delivered so matter-of-factly by the noir-style narration that it only highlights its inherent absurdity. Here we have witches that dress like Payday robbers, hiding the green skin of the witch from The Wizard of Oz. And they use Tommy guns because, well, I suspect because it makes for a catchy title. The urban fantasy of The Dresden Files has been mashed down into one half-hour game: a gorgeous, first-person adventure game where you interview suspects and solve simple puzzles across a modern city. You play as a sentinel, investigating the murder of a…

The Tropico games occupy a strange space in the strategy world. They’re bright, wry, and irreverent. They seem frivolous at first glance, like cookie clicker mobile games featuring banana republic dictators. But they’re underpinned by a deep knowledge of political systems and a bleak appraisal of human behavior. Tropico 5 is no different. At times it feels like it should be depressing, but it’s somehow not. You might start off with noble goals, but as soon as your premiership is threatened, your outlook changes. Because who’s going to bring peace, fairness, and prosperity to the people if you’re not in charge? You might want to use your power for good, you’ll eventually end up assassinating old ladies so they don’t threaten your progressive reforms. Power always corrupts. The tone of…

I deliver chainsaw death to the demon horde, all the while Idodging incessant gunfire, balls of fire and flying, shrieking, flaming skulls. Oh, and did I mention I’m doing this in hell, with lava and poison-filled pits all around? This is John Romero’s SIGIL II, the hard-as-nails unofficial sixth episode for Doom, and it’s simply awesome. As someone who played the OG Doom when it released, I played and loved Romero’s first return to making full episodes for the game that made him, John Carmack, and the rest of the id Software team development legends back in the 1990s, with the original SIGIL released back in 2019 dramatically rekindling the original Doom fires. And there was no better fire stoker than Romero, who always brought an extra level of Doom…

Recruitment into game development is a many-tentacled thing in 2023. You might decide to study a degree in one of its specific disciplines, or enrol in the university of YouTube and have a crack at some amateur projects with a view to building up your portfolio. There are masterclasses with legendary industry figures. There are internships and game jams. In 1998, there was UnrealEd. Bundled in with Epic Megagames’ scandalously pretty first-person shooter were all the creation tools Cliff and the gang used to make the game. Just there on the disc. For free. For many of us at the time, that was an offer we couldn’t refuse. For many of us who were also 12 years old and idiots, UnrealEd proved an utterly baffling foray into a scary world…