Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2015 i PC Gamer

HEARTHSTONE/ STARCRAFT II /ASUS ROG Summer 2015 July 30 - August 1 Sixteen of the world’s best Hearthstone players convene in Helsinki to compete for a $25,000 prize pool. Meanwhile, there’s $15,000 up for grabs in the concurrent StarCraft II tournament. DOTA 2 /The International 2015 August 3 – 8 With a record-smashing prize pool of over $15m, fortunes will be made at this year’s International. The week-long format means that all 16 teams will play on the main stage in KeyArena, Seattle. HEROES OF THE STORM /2015 HWC - August North America Open August 8 – 22 Heroes’ nascent competitive scene continues to grow. A healthy $35,000 prize pool is part of the draw, here, but these North American teams are really competing for a shot at the Heroes…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Spring 2016 PUBLISHER EA DEVELOPER DICE LINK www.mirrorsedge.com I completed Mirror’s Edge four times, so I know the game stupidly well – and Catalyst feels almost exactly like the Mirror’s Edge of 2008. The platforming seems identical, and my muscle memory and sense of timing from the first game served me well during my first hands-on at E3. My demo took place in a tiny snippet of what is apparently a seamless open world. It consisted of a series of rooftops and three tasks to perform: a speed run, a chain of combat encounters and a challenge to climb to a high point. The run was standard Mirror’s Edge and the climb encouraged me…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2016 DEVELOPER Giant Squid Studios PUBLISHER 505 Games ALINK ww.abzugame.com YOU CAN HITCH RIDES ON SOME OF THE BIGGER CREATURES, SUCH AS MANTA RAYS 1 “There are a lot of interesting and powerful systems we designed in the game,” Nava says. These include shoals of fish that can be composed of thousands of individuals, and procedural kelp – two words rarely seen together – that sways convincingly with the current. 2 Wonderfully, if you school with fish and swim to the surface, you’ll leap out like a dolphin. You can also hitch rides on some of the bigger creatures such as manta rays, turtles, and goliath groupers, swaying to subtly influence their direction. 3 After some initial floundering, the controls feel intuitive. On an Xbox pad…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2016 DEVELOPER FromSoftware PUBLISHER Bandai Namco LINK www.darksouls3.com Dark Souls 3 gave me emotional whiplash at this year’s E3. First, anticipation: its existence was leaked, and I wondered if it could be real, so soon after Dark Souls 2 . Then, celebration: it was real, and coming to PC! Then, apprehension: Dark Souls 2 was great, but lacked that certain something director Hidetaka Miyazaki brought to the first game. At last, Miyazaki stated that he was co-directing the game, with a hand in worldbuilding and level design. Praise the sun. I got to see half an hour of Dark Souls III in a small demo room at E3, with Miyazaki himself walking us through it. The world…

AND: Shaun Prescott, AU Editor Richard Cobbett, Freelancer Jody Macgregor, Freelancer Ian Birnbaum, Freelancer Omri Petitte, Freelancer…

ELITE: DANGEROUS It sounds like the nuts and bolts of No Man’s Sky’s trading system is at least in the realm of Elite’s. Plus, y’know, it’s set in space and there are spaceships. SALT The well-liked Early Access island-based explore-’em-up features procedurally generated islands, loot and pirates. BEYOND GOOD & EVIL The idea of scanning and uploading details of creatures reminds me of Jade photographing animals in Ubisoft’s colourful classic. TERRARIA No Man’s Sky has mining and destructible environments, with a strong element of survival to consider. You can craft from what you find.…

00%-10% A game of absolutely no value. Are you playing one of these games? Take 3d6 emotional damage. Examples Big Brother 11%-39% Yikes. Technically broken, or so fundamentally flawed that it’s ultimately not worth any time or money. Bad. Examples The War Z 40%-49% This game is functional, but majorly flawed and disappointing. Examples Firefall, Star Trek 50%-59% Mediocre. If it has any interesting ideas, they don’t work well. Might suffer from bugs or technical issues. Examples Primordia, Painkiller: Hell & Damnation 60%-69% An interesting idea poorly expressed, or a derivative idea executed averagely. Comes with caveats. Examples SimCity, Mortal Kombat X 70%-79% Good, but not a classic. This score is a recommendation, just not a glowing one. Examples Broken Age, Shadowrun Returns 80%-89% A great game with exceptional moments…

INVERTED CONVEYOR It’s a conveyor, but upside down. Gravity still applies, so you’ll need lifters to keep something up there. TELE PORTER Moves blocks from A to B. One a time, and severing any joins in the process – so you’ll need a plan for reassembly. LASER Destroys blocks at a distance. Far more versatile than the eviscerator as it can be connected to sensors. PAINTER Changes the colour of the block that passes in front of it. Used to facilitate some of the new puzzles. COUNTER A smart sensor! Thank you! If you need to separate out a certain percentage of your blocks, this helps enormously.…

Everyone’s talking about Her Story, the new FMV adventure. In the world of re-reviews, that translates to a re-review of a Tex Murphy game, the slapstick FMV comedy puzzle PI. This is the third Murphy game, where the series had settled on a genre, at least – no platforming or flight sims here. So if you want a large, clickable world full of endearingly shit acting from anyone in the office who wasn’t too shy, UaKM is... good? Maybe that’s going overboard with the gushing praise, there. It’s some hours spent familiarising yourself with our shared FMV history that you may not grow to regret.…

MOTHERBOARD Z97-A Asus £115 A reliable mobo from Asus, as usual. Doesn’t have gaming-brand bells and whistles, but can overclock just fine and has an M.2 slot. PROCESSOR Core i5-4690K Intel £179 Nearly the performance of an i7 at a better price. Fantastic gaming performance and great overclocking potential. No-brainer. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 970 4G MSI £270 Offers the best price/performance ratio right now, and MSI’s model is cheap and overclockable with a quiet cooler. COOLER Hyper 212 EVO Cooler Master £25 If it ain’t broke... the Hyper 212 EVO is a great cooler for the price. Save a bit of money in your mid-range build. MEMORY Vengeance Pro 1866MHz DDR3 (16GB) Corsair £90 Corsair reliability, speed that doesn’t cost too much, and 16GB for use down the line. POWER…

The Spy understands that change is a good thing. A change of trousers; change for the bus; even a spot of regime change, if it’s a suitably slow Thursday. Even so, The Spy understands that change is also scary. Think about the things you’d never want to change. A defused bomb. A sleeping grizzly bear. The games industry as you remember it ten years ago. Well, good news! The games industry agrees with you (the bear’s mind is its own). Novelty and innovation will always lurk on the periphery of this business. You can hear it calling to you on Kickstarter, in the sound of people trying out virtual reality for the first time, even in the deafening silence that used to be known as the human Peter Molyneux. Here’s…

1 RELENTLESS OPENINGS Persuading players to binge-play earlier on rather than introducing natural quit-out points (empty to-do lists, chapter breaks) could become key. To some extent, designers will want to create that momentum in their games regardless. 2 MORE PADDING An obvious fear is that the creators of short-form games might resort to the collectables, accessories and busywork that characterise Assassin’s Creed, for added length. Or, they could include procedural elements to encourage replay. 3 SMOOTHER RUNNING On the upside, the risk of a refund could motivate designers to sand down rough edges such as dodgy UIs or difficulty spikes, for fear of trying the user’s patience. But what about games designed to be obscure, such as Dark Souls? 4 MORE MICROTRANSACTIONS If buyers won’t pay for the full game,…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2016 DEVELOPER Ubisoft Paris PUBLISHER Ubisoft LINK ghost-recon.ubi.com Every E3, Ubisoft reveals something big to get people talking. Last year it was Rainbow Six Siege , the year before, The Division , in 2012 it was Watch Dogs , and this year it’s Ghost Recon Wildlands . As with those reveals, it’s a little bit pie in the sky at the moment, but this looks a little more colourful and ambitious than the usual Clancy fare. This is an open-world game that looks like a cross between regular tactical team shooter Ghost Recon, Arma 3, MGSV’s freeform action/stealth approach and Just Cause’s chaos and scale. A mishmash of game types bolted on to a…

Smite takes the gods of antiquity and recasts them as spell-slinging, lane-pushing heroes. The game has slowly risen to become the third most popular MOBA in the world, boasting a young but thriving competitive scene, and it’s unique among free-to-play games of this type for allowing you to spend a one-off fee to unlock every character, forever. This issue, we’re giving you permanent free access to the Roman warrior-lady Bellona, along with her excellent premium ‘Battle Maiden’ skin. Bellona caused a stir when she landed earlier this year. Based on a lesser-known Roman goddess of war, she uses an array of melee-range powers to transform her sword into a hammer, whip, or shield. Her ultimate, Eagle’s Rally, involves leaping into battle with a massive flag that stuns nearby foes and…

Samuel Roberts SPEC OPS THE LINE This adaptation of Heart of Darkness is a shooter that dares to make murder into a rote, exhausting activity, to underline a wider point about the effect of war on soldiers. It is half-successful in doing that. The choice of Dubai as an escalating warzone and the unsettling sense of moral ambiguity made Spec Ops memorably bleak, and also rendered the likes of CoD worthless to me by comparison. Tim Clark HER STORY Having grown up on police procedurals like Prime Suspect and Inspector Morse, the genre’s almost total absence in games has long been frustrating. Her Story’s trawl through chopped up interviews with a single suspect scratches that itch in a particularly British way. It’s more than just a didshedoit – by the…

GET INVOLVED To get started, load Minecraft and connect to 85.236. 100. 145:26665. At first you’ll be limited to the spawn area so wait for an administrator. Somebody will make sure you’ve got the build access you need to visit the world proper. If not, check out the community site at www.pcguk mc.enjin.com to get in touch with the mods directly. THE INDEX GUILD WARS Server Desolation EU Port www.pcggw. com WORLD OF WARCRAFT Server Steamwheedle Cartel EU Link www.pcgwow. enjin.com STAR WARS: THE OLD REPUBLIC Server Desolation EU Link www.pcg-mi. enjin.com I feel like a broken record every time I say this, but the PC Gamer Minecraft server really is an extraordinary community experience. It’s been through a number of regenerations over its long life. The…

I’m going to be honest with you: Infinifactory was not our first choice for lead review. I spent half a week struggling with the PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight before Warner Bros pulled it from sale. In a parallel dimension I’d be about to love it for its strengths as a stealth and combat game and loathe it for its unforgiveable flaws. But you can no longer buy it, so I’m not. Fortunately Infinifactory is one of the year’s best games, and Batman’s absence means you’ve got no excuse not to figure that out for yourself as we head into these quiet summer months. Elsewhere, Dani’s returned from the wilds of Eorzea with good news about FFXIV’s new expansion. Nothing makes up for Batman’s absence like a ride on…

CHRIS THURSTEN Specialist in Action, strategy Currently playing Infinifactory This month Remained secretly terrible at building factories. ‘Secretly’. DANIELLA LUCAS Specialist in MMO, RPGs Currently playing Final Fantasy XIV This month Eulogised the strange, beautiful lands of Eorzea. At length. JORDAN ERICA WEBBER Specialist in Platformers, RPGs Currently playing Lego Minifigures This month Challenged the hardcore/casual gaming divide. PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in MMO, action Currently playing Ronin This month Tried turn-based parkour in real life. Not as impressive as it sounds, honestly. CHRIS LIVINGSTON Specialist in Simulation, RPG Currently playing The Magic Circle This month Finally got to play a game that’s supposed to be unfinished. SAMUEL ROBERTS Specialist in RPG, action Currently playing The Evil Within This month Took a break from redesign stress with a horror game. JON…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The first expansion of the formerly troubled, but now utterly excellent, MMO. EXPECT TO PAY £30 DEVELOPER Square Enix PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON i5-3230 CPU, 8GB RAM MULTIPLAYER MMO LINK eu.finalfantasyxiv. com/heavensward There are a lot of expectations to live up to when your game bears the Final Fantasy name. They all need to have epic, twisting storylines, magical landscapes, and plenty of Moogles. It’s all part of the DNA of the series. But despite the MMOs of the collection possessing all of these things, there are many who still don’t consider them to be ‘proper’ Final Fantasy games. Those people are missing out. FFXIV has long been trying to balance the trappings of a traditional…

1 BOOST Helps you to whack the ball with some vigour, but also allows for excellent mid-air acrobatics when applied during a jump. 2 JUMP Hop up to hit high balls, or block lobbed balls for epic saves. Press twice for a probably-impossible double jump. Heck, it’s all impossible! 3 DODGE Flip forward, sideways and backwards for an extra boost of momentum, which will send the ball flying impressively. 4 SLIDE Powerslide around the arena to change direction easily and knock shots sideways. Also: looks cooler than disco cucumbers. 5 RAM Fill your boost meter with powerups and slam into an enemy vehicle, destroying them utterly. It’s not even a cardable offence.…

HALF-LIFE 2’S POISON ZOMBIES I’d add a weakness: poison! Problem solved. GTA 4’S ROMAN Not really a monster, but I’d like to board up his mouth. SPELUNKY’S BATS No more flying at an angle. Maybe no more flying, period. BIOSHOCK INFINITE’S HANDYMEN Their weakness is their heart, so I’d add 10 more. FALLOUT’S DEATHCLAWS Remove the claws. Or maybe the death. Both? LEFT 4 DEAD’S WITCH She’s sensitive to noise, so I’d remove her ears. Maybe even her whole head.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Puzzle game meets dating sim meets cynical wanking aid. EXPECT TO PAY £7 DEVELOPER HuniePot PUBLISHER In-house MULTIPLAYER None FIRST REVIEWED N/A LINK www.huniepop.com You want sex with a Honey? You need to feed, water and gift those Honeys. Recognise that each Honey is different. MILF Honeys love forthright sex chat. Naive Schoolgirl requires modesty, optimism, and fruit. Coffee Shop Girl likes boastful pricks. But all Honeys like it when you ask, then remember, how big their tits are. In conversation, your job is to abandon your own personality, because Honeys are appalled by anything unlike themselves. So a young player, keen to learn about Honeys, must discard sincerity and equip himself with a persona. You must galvanise fear into calculating disrespect. After all,…

APEX M800 Steel Series £170 This is a mechanical switch keyboard (with an enormous spacebar) that doesn’t feel like one. The ultra-low travel – just 3mm with a 1.5mm actuation point – feels like a scissor switch, but has the solidity and accuracy of a mechanical. If you’re not a fan of the feel of mech switches this will suit, but it’s super-pricey. www.steelseries.com GOLEM SERIES K50E i-rocks £38 Yup. Golem series. Now, it’s not quite as ugly as that might infer, and i-rocks has really tried to deliver a decently priced scissor switch keyboard that feels more sturdy than most. There’s some satisfying resistance to the keys, but that membrane is still going to wear out faster than any mechanical switch. www.i-rocks.com SILENT BASE 800 be quiet! £90 It’s…

MOTHERBOARD Maximus VII Hero Asus £160 Fantastic overclocking and stability, with a great UEFI BIOS from Asus and M.2. Bonus: on-board power, reset, CMOS, etc. buttons. PROCESSOR Core i7-4790K Intel £263 Intel’s top quad-core CPU: performance on a par with its much more expensive X99 chips and great for multi-threaded applications. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 980 Gaming 4G MSI £415 Right now the GTX 980 is the best value single-GPU card for ultra 1080p and 1440p gaming, bar none. COOLER H90 Corsair £75 Quiet even under heavy load, the H90 gets the cooling job done with a single 140mm radiator, easily fitting a variety of cases. MEMORY Ripjaws X Series DDR3-2133 16GB G.SKILL £116 16GB of fast, reliable RAM at 2133MHz. For a high-end build, it’s worth the step up. POWER…

1 BLACKBEARD’S SHIP Prison ships are particularly miserable, given the watery fate that awaits you even if you do manage to escape. As if that wasn’t enough, this one adds pirates. www.bit.ly/Escapists1 2 USS LOCKWING A genuine space prison, with all the shiny grey floors and walls you would expect. Escaping this is going to be tricky, what with space famously lacking an atmosphere. www.bit.ly/Escapists2 3 STALAG LUFT III Creator Vic Ramone reckons his map is “probably 99.99%” identical to the German POW camp featured in the Steve McQueen classic, and that’s good enough for me. www.bit.ly/Escapists3…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASED 2012 PUBLISHER Square Enix DEVELOPER Io Interactive LINK www.hitman.com Our review was brutal. Tom Francis rightly criticised the long-awaited sequel for being a step backwards from the magnificent Blood Money . Expectations were high, and Io Interactive delivered a game too obsessed with story and scripted set-pieces to provide the assassination sandbox we wanted. Despite this, I’ve always had a soft spot for it. It’s a rubbish Hitman game, sure, but it’s an enjoyable 15-hour chunk of mostly good action-stealth, with a few missions I think are among the best in the series. When a new Hitman graced the cover of our last issue, I decided to reinstall Absolution to see if time has been kinder to it. The biggest mistake Io made was thinking…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASED October 9, 2007 OUR REVIEW 96% EXPECT TO PAY Free, Steam LINK www.teamfortress.com Team Fortress 2 has some great battlegrounds, and – unlike pre-Global Offensive era Counter-Strike – its community never settled for just a handful of favourites. Some, such as ctf_2fort, cp_dustbowl or pl_goldrush , are more easily found than others. Its seemingly endless server list always contains a few packed-out servers for just about every map. Even Hydro . My favourite is Harvest, a community-made map taken on by Valve as an official part of the game. It’s a King of the Hill map, a mode introduced two years into TF2’s now almost decade-long…

CONTROL POINT Pyros love it! Heavies, Soldiers, Demos and Scouts, too. The control point features plenty of cover, but wide open doors can make it pretty hard to defend. CENTRAL COURTYARD Outside of the Control Point, expect to see Engineers building turrets against the barn wall. Scouts and Heavies regularly patrol here. THE SHED The big medipack inside this little structure can be a lifesaver for Scouts and Medics. Long sightlines down the rest of the map also make this a Sniper hotspot. FARMHOUSE INTERIOR An ostensibly safe through point for Spies and Engineers becomes violently explosive thanks to any passing Demomen and opportunistic Pyros. FARMHOUSE ROOF Rocket-jumping Soldiers are regularly found up here. Snipers will also make use of the upper windows, but to do so risks being a…

BE A PART OF SOMETHING EVE ONLINE www.eveonline.com A dense, complex, and beautiful-looking space MMORPG that’s not as difficult to learn as some people may have you believe. It can be tough to enjoy on your own, and the learning curve is near-vertical, but join a beginner-friendly corporation like Brave Newbies or EVE University and you’ll see what EVE is really all about. TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT TAKE ON MARS www.takeonmars.com Based on real science, this simulator lets you build your very own Curiosity-style rover and explore the surface of Mars with it. It’s a slow, uneventful game, but the haunting atmosphere of the red planet makes it strangely compelling. A thriving mod scene, using Steam Workshop, lets you break away from the realism if you want to. SWITCH YOUR BRAIN…

HIGHS Rocket League It turns out all we needed to love football was futuristic cars. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided The footage of the game’s Dawn Engine looks completely nuts. MGSV: The Phantom Pain Looks like a GOTY contender based on the amount of game they’ve shown off. Dragon Age: Inquisition DLC Upcoming DLC is abandoning last-gen consoles – this hopefully means bigger and better new quests. Chime Sharp Brilliant rhythm action puzzler gets a successfully Kickstarter-funded sequel. LOWS Assassin’s Creed Syndicate The port will apparently be better, but it means we’re getting it after consoles. Shenmue III Successfully Kickstarted but missing some of its more exciting stretch goals. Bad survival games After playing three rough survival games in a row, Andy’s burning out on the genre. Deadpool Average tie-in returns…

Yes I WANT TO SING BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY AT 4K WITH A GUY IN JAPAN. No MUSIC GAMES WITH PLASTIC INSTRUMENTS BELONG ON CONSOLES. THE DEBATE IS OVER, BUT WHO HIT ALL THE RIGHT NOTES? LET US KNOW @PCGAMER Ben: Unstable nuclear energy aside, music is the greatest power in the world. It can make you think about how wars are bad (that’s just my opinion), or offer a new perspective on big butts – one that you simply cannot lie about. Why don’t more PC games take advantage of this incredible and frightening force? Music games are for absolutely anyone, and there’s no better multiplayer experience than forming a band and covering your favourite tunes in your bedroom so no one in the real world can judge you. You should…

Not a patch on consoles Great. Finally got my rig updated and a slew of AAA games to play. Let’s see, how about Batman: Arkham Knight. Hmm. Lots of issues, bad PC port being fixed, patch coming. OK, how about Pillars of Eternity. Oh Patch 2.0 with lots of UI changes coming very soon. Think I will wait. Well, I loved Witcher 1 and 2, and so here we go – Witcher 3! Oh, patch 1.0.7 coming soon. Some big changes and lots of fixes. Better wait. Jane Mutter Patience is a virtue. And also an unfortunate consequences of doing your gaming on the PC, sometimes. This is how it can be. Oh well. PCG Don’t call it a comeback I know this topic has been talked about loads, but…

Wherever possible, we finish a game before finalising the review. We review each game on its own merits, and try to match it to a reviewer who’s a passionate expert in the field. The main aim of the reviews section is to help you make buying decisions. ALPHAS & BETAS This means we’ll review any released alpha, beta or otherwise unfinished game that you can currently buy. For these games, we won’t assign a score, but we will tell you whether they’re worth your time in their current state. DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT DLC might be hours-long new missions for a game, or it might be a single new item. Either way, if we think you want to know about it, we’ll review it. THEY’RE BACK Whenever there’s a bargain or re-release…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A block-based puzzle game about factory construction. EXPECT TO PAY £18 DEVELOPER Zachtronics Industries PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Intel i5-2500K, 16GB RAM, GeForce GTX 970 MULTIPLAYER Leaderboards only LINK www.zachtronics.com/ infinifactory When I wrote our review of the alpha version of Infinifactory back in February, I felt like I should give it a score. That version of the game was an accomplished puzzle game, my favourite in years, with a campaign you could see from start to finish. It felt done. Playing the finished version of Infinifactory today feels like playing the game and its first expansion pack. It’s more done. Let’s recap. Infinifactory is a creative puzzle game where you turn…

1 DO A QUEST Talk to this guy in Ishgard for a quest. While it’s designed to unlock the ability to fly for the normal chocobo you got earlier, it’ll unlock it for ol’ Tubby, too. 2 AWAKEN HIM Next, head to Tailfeather where this farmer’s boy will send you out to awaken your chocobo’s instincts by summoning it to battle alongside you. 3 GET A FEEL After you’ve done this you’ll be sent on errands to a few different locations so that your feathered friend can get a taste of the wind in its beak. 4 FLOAT FREE Head back to Tailfeather to complete the quest, and then BOOM. Your fat rolls will be free to ripple beautifully in the breeze. Lovely.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A Lego-themed MMO for kids, also appropriate for adults. EXPECT TO PAY £25 DEVELOPER Funcom PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON I7 960 @ 3.61GHz, 6GB RAM, HD 4870 X2 MULTIPLAYER MMO LINK www.playmini figures.com Right now I’m in outer space fighting aliens with my Paleontologist, Galaxy Trooper, and Little Red Riding Hood... I mean ‘Grandma Visitor’. The Paleontologist ‘defender’ is my favourite with her special attack of mini dinosaurs, but the Galaxy Trooper’s guns do more damage. As for the Grandma Traveller, she’s my ‘builder’, but mostly I like that her special move is to ride a wolf. This is no TT Games adventure set in some third-party franchise. This is Lego in a Lego world. The hub, ‘Lego Centre’, is a shop with shelves…

Oh God dammit, scratch that entire review on the other page. It was just first-episode syndrome. Episode 2 is confident, funny, and delivers precisely the kind of intimate comic brutality that the shooters couldn’t. This is what I was after. Even the characters have either found their feet, or bedded down in my brain. Yes, the puzzles are still spoon-fed with do-this-now icons, but as a journey from the end of Ep 1 to the start of Ep 3, Atlas Mugged is an evening of top rank storytelling. I’m scoring this one to make good on the other page, OK? Sorry, everyone. Averages make everything better.…

MOTHERBOARD H81M-P33 MSI £34 A bargain-priced microATX board that pairs nicely with the Pentium G3258, letting you overclock into 4GHz+ territory. PROCESSOR Pentium Anniversary G3258 Intel £48 Ludicrously cheap and overclockable, the dual-core G3258 rivals far more expensive processors in gaming performance. GRAPHICS CARD AMD R9 380 2GB Sapphire £159 AMD’s R9 380 is a refreshed R9 285, but it still packs enough power to handle 1080p gaming at a decent price. COOLER Hyper 212 EVO Cooler Master £25 A legendary cooler, still the best for its very reasonable price. Overclock to your heart’s content with this. MEMORY Crucial Ballistix Sport 1600MHz (8GB) Crucial £40 Cheap, low-profile, and reliable. Does its job. The best 8GB you’ll find. POWER SUPPLY EVGA 500W 80PLUS Certified ATX12V/EPS12V EVGA £33 A reliable PSU with…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Out now PUBLISHER In-house DEVELOPER Facepunch Studios LINK www.playrust.com If society collapsed, the world might look a bit like Rust . This permadeath sandbox from the creator of Garry’s Mod reduces people to their most basic functions: feed, survive, defend, kill. New players start their inevitably short lives on a beach, nude, with nothing to their name but a rock and a torch. The rock can be used to cave in other survivors’ heads, or to mine materials for crafting and building. But on these savage procedurally generated islands, death is everywhere, and you’ll spend a lot of your time being shot from afar by better-equipped players, bludgeoned by endless rocks, and falling off cliffs. Rust has been in…