Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2016 i PC Gamer

HIGHS The Sims 4 Maxis has finally removed gender restrictions from its popular life simulator. Skywind Some fans are remaking Morrowind in the Skyrim engine and itlooks incredible. Overwatch Every day we learn some new trick or counter in Blizzard’s brilliant online FPS. GTX 1080 We’ve benchmarked it and Nvidia’s newest GPU is, as promised, an absolute beast. Hitman Tracking down those elusive targets is stressful, but we can’t resist trying. LOWS Halo Microsoft is releasing Halo creation tool Forge on PC, but not the game itself. Eh? Overwatch The petition to stop Reaper’s ultimate getting Play of the Game starts here. Warcraft A sea of bad reviews means the reputation of videogame movies remains low. Homefront The Revolution is the final nail in the coffin for the Homefront series.…

1 EVE: VALKYRIE  The control input makes sense, the seated position of a pilot is easy to buy into, and the game encourages the player to keep swivelling their head, commanding their attention. 2 ALIEN: ISOLATION  Fear is a powerful emotion, and it serves as a great distraction. Creeping locomotion but rapidly moving enemies are a smart choice in this singleplayer horror game in which tension is constant. 3 FANTASTIC CONTRAPTION  This game doesn’t need much movement and is bolstered by the Vive controller, which gives the player extension into the world. Goals and tons of interactivity give the sense you’re in a magical workshop. 4 PARANORMAL ACTIVITY  Body tracking, slow locomotion, extension and fear! Paranormal Activity co-opts the player’s sensory experience so fully that it just might send them…

THE QUESTION IS WHETHER IT WILL STILL BE IMPRESSIVE THE 100TH TIME AND BEYOND NEED TO KNOW RELEASE October 29 DEVELOPER DICE PUBLISHER EA LINK www.battlefield.com My initial reaction to Battlefield 1 ’s announcement was one of incredulity. Is a WWI shooter really a good idea? Does it even matter when the FPS genre spent so long recreating WWII? How has the games industry broken numbers so completely that Battlefield 1 is the sequel to Battlefield 4 ? There was also excitement. Modern military shooters have reigned supreme for over a decade – so long that most FPS series are turning to the near future in order to spice things up. By looking to the past, Battlefield will be doing…

NOW I’VE GOT A WEAPON AND A REPLACEMENT PAIR OF SHOES I SIGN UP FOR A FIGHT NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Fool’s Theory, IMGN.PRO PUBLISHER IMGN.PRO LINK www.seven-game.com Handcuffed, I’m led into processing to receive my new clothes and visa. As my fellow inmates and I step into the decontamination chamber, one prisoner instigates an unprovoked assault on another. I intervene, attacking the aggressor. Moments later, I regain consciousness outside of the facility. My shoes have been stolen. As welcomes go, it’s not the warmest. But that’s life on Peh – a prison island within the post-apocalyptic Vetrall Empire. Life inside the Peh colony is bleak and hostile. NPCs react to my presence with a kind of dismissive disdain. In their eyes, I’m the lowest of the low.…

Good news! Blizzard has made another Blizzard game. It’s clearly something the company excels at, as evidenced by the fact that Overwatch is an excellent new shooter. It offers just the right balance of skill-based action, tactical decision-making and knockabout fun. Turn the page to found out why it’s a game we’ll be playing for a long time to come. Elsewhere, you’ll find plenty more games worth your time – many of them designed to take up a significant chunk of it. Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is flawed but enjoyable, Doom is fast and furious, and Blood and Wine is a sumptuous farewell to one of last year’s best games. All in all, it’s yet another great month in what has already been a fantastic year for PC gaming. Long may…

Yes, this is a good selection. Plenty of attack power, and a good range of tanking and support. Just remember to switch things up if your opponents are easily countering. No, no, no, you’ve gone horribly wrong. Where’s your support? Where’s your tank? How are you going to keep Bastion alive with no shields? This is a massacre waiting to happen.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An open-world shooter set in America under oppressive North Korean control. EXPECT TO PAY £40 DEVELOPER Dambuster Studios PUBLISHER Deep Silver REVIEWED ON Windows 10, i5 3570k, 8GB RAM, GTX Titan MULTIPLAYER 4-player co-op for a selection of missions LINK www.homefront-game.com Homefront is a mash of the past 15 years of shooters, full of story contrivances and designs I’ve played and criticised before: the bad NPC chatter (one guy just shouts “America!”), the dystopian graffiti, the ‘keep the tank safe’ mission. It’s not totally bungled – I had fun for the first half of the ten-hour-plus campaign – but there are a lot of crumbling buildings, uninteresting guns, and repeat objectives to put up with as your silent protagonist steals Philadelphia back…

1 REGATTA BAY This purple-lit up market locale looks more like a space movie setting than anywhere else in the game. 2 ZEPHYR TRANSIT HUB An intersection between areas, and your base of sorts, overseen by handsome older gentleman Noah. 3 DEVELOPMENT ZONE An area under construction. Run on the ground, and hear what Faith’s trainers sound like on gravel. 4 SHIMMERING HEIGHTS Imagine if someone tried to turn a city into a nightclub. That’s this screen-filled and well-lit location. 5 DOWNTOWN Your basic, familiar Mirror’s Edge backdrop of white walls with the occasional splash of blue.…

FINAL FANTASY VI The best of the 2D games. The PC version is based on a mobile port, but you can mod it to look like the original. FINAL FANTASY VII A grim sci-fi setting and an absolutely cracking final act of giant monsters, meteors and set pieces. A classic. FINAL FANTASY VIII This tale of warring nations features a more real world-inspired setting than usual and experimental systems. FINAL FANTASY IX Another good port from Square Enix. The third in the set of first era 3D games, and less dour than VII and VIII. FINAL FANTASY X I played this for 400 hours on PS2, and now I can do it again on PC until I die. You may think I’m joking, but I’m not. FINAL FANTASY XII This…

   It’s all rad, but never quite bad (in a don’t-tellmy-dad sense) NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A fast, furious first-person shooter on Mars. EXPECT TO PAY £40 DEVELOPER id Software PUBLISHER Bethesda Softworks REVIEWED ON Nvidia GTX 980 Ti, Intel Core i7-6700K, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER Co-op and PvP LINK www.doom.com Doom is an action comedy that reveres every FPS trope it had a hand in creating. The Doom Marine is vindication, violence, and masculine excess personified. In the opening minutes, he rises from a sarcophagus and pops the heads of several possessed Martian zombies. In the next room, the Doom Suit rests, surrounded by candles and demonic insignia. I feel the same reverence. From there, it’s a rude journey to shut Hell the hell up. Abated…

1 VIM! POP FACTORY Search it carefully to find some promotional power armour. It’ll keep you safe from rads while turning you into a walking billboard. 2 THE DOCKS The Cranberry Island Docks will yield a map and kick off an unofficial quest that (eventually) leads to a hidden treasure. 3 THE WRECK An NPC lives in the wreck of a plane, though I’m not sure which is more interesting: his clothing or his hobby. 5 MURDER HOTEL Someone’s been murdered – not a rarity in Fallout. But you’ll get to play a true detective at the Cliff’s Edge Hotel. 4 MYSTERY Who or what is the legendary Shipbreaker? Detect the radio signal, and follow it to its source. Note: bring a big gun.…

WILDCAT CONTROLLER Razer £120 Primarily designed for the Xbox, this can also be used on PC, making short work of Broforce and other controller-happy games. Comfortable, ergonomic and extremely versatile thanks to extra rear buttons, it’s a delight to use, yet the price is enough to make anyone . www.razerzone.com 72 % MY CLOUD EX2 Western Digital £147 You know what’s nice? Access to your media, anywhere in the world, streamed from your own private server. My Cloud EX2 is a dual-bay-ready network-attached storage device. Backup Windows, backup your games, store your media for streaming, record game footage directly to it. www.wdc.com 90 % AV1200 POWERLINE TP-Link £70 And what’s the best way to stream all that data around your house? Your mains wiring. That insane level of bandwidth,…

MOTHERBOARD Z170-A Pro MSI £81 Our budget build’s gone through an upgrade thanks to this new Z170 chipset. Plenty of expandability to upgrade in the future. PROCESSOR Core i3-6100 Intel £96 Grants access to that brilliant Z170 chipset, is super energy efficient, and delivers meaty performance even in AAA titles. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon R9 380 XFX £128 AMD’s R9 380 is a refreshed R9 285, but it still packs enough power to handle 1080p gaming at a decent price. MEMORY HyperX Fury Black 8GB @2133 Kingston £29 DDR4 packs higher speeds, better energy efficiency, and larger capacities. 8GB is still king for most games however. POWER SUPPLY EVGA 500W 80PLUS Certified ATX12V/EPS12V EVGA £33 A reliable PSU with enough juice to run your CPU and a reasonably power-hungry GPU. SSD…

TONY ELLIS Specialist in Words, D-Dog This month Ruined his life for the third consecutive month by insisting on S-ranking every mission in MGSV. Just give it up, Tony. Play Doominstead. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Aliens, cyberpunk Twitter @ultrabrilliant This month Played Duskers, which easily matches his criteria of being a bit like the film Alien. PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in Mercy, no mercy Twitter @Octaeder This month Played Overwatch for three days straight for our review. Sees bright colours in his dreams.…

THE ENTIRE GAMES INDUSTRY IS LEAKING FASTER THAN AN OIL TANKER Shenanigans! Treachery! Deceit! The Spy has been undone. Alas, dear reader, the games industry has got wise to The Spy’s continued adventures and responded in the most devious of ways. Publishers from far and wide have gathered in LA. Their mission: to prevent The Spy from releasing a bounty of rumours by spilling their own beans. They call this operation “E3”, a name that, The Spy can only assume, stands for the Espionage Eradication Extravaganza. It’s a downright despicable act. To think of all those fine rumours The Spy had uncovered, all now wasted across a week-long bonanza of narcissistic whistleblowing (or “series of announcements”, as the participants are calling it). The Spy spent days navigating a series of…

PRAGUE IS A HUGE URBAN SPACE FILLED WITH MISSIONS, SECRETS, AND NPCS NEED TO KNOW RELEASE August 23 DEVELOPER Eidos Montreal PUBLISHER Square Enix LINK www.deusex.com Adam Jensen wakes up in his apartment, pulling the covers away with the mechanical arms he famously didn’t ask for. Since the events of Human Revolution he’s relocated to Prague, but his taste in interior decoration is as fine as ever. He climbs out of his ornate antique bed and orders an unseen computer to open the blinds. They slide apart at his command and cold morning light spills into the room, banishing the gloom and revealing the old slate rooftops of the Czech capital stretching into the distance outside. This is one of the new city hubs in Mankind…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2017 PUBLISHER In-house DEVELOPER Snapshot Games LINK www.phoenixpoint.info When I spoke to X-Com co-creator Julian Gollop at the inaugural PC Gamer Weekender earlier this year, he told me that his next game after the excellent Chaos Reborn would be something more in the mould of his cult-classic, turn-based, extraterrestrial-themed strategy series. Phoenix Point is indeed something in the X-Com vein, but it’ll have a very different look and feel. Phoenix Point is “an XCOM-style game with a dynamic interaction between strategic planning and turn-based tactical battles”, as Gollop puts it to me in the form of a handy email blurb. He describes an alien threat that’s always evolving…

BALANCE DEVELOPMENT WITH KEEPING YOUR DRIVERS FROM STRANGLING EACH OTHER NEED TO KNOW RELEASE September DEVELOPER Playsport Games PUBLISHER Sega LINK www.motorsportmanager.com Grand Prix Manager put us in charge of a Formula One team, but we’ve been without a similar game for well over a decade now. As the publisher of Football Manager, the gold standard in the sports management field, Sega is well positioned to bring us Motorsport Manager , a much-expanded version of the mobile app of that name. It’s your job to develop your cars and drivers in order to win races and championships. You choose upgrades for your headquarters and cars, decide which drivers get which new parts and, crucially, balance the whole operation to keep your…

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…

PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in FPS, assassination Currently playing Overwatch This month Reviewed more games about murder. We should give him a farming sim next. TYLER WILDE Specialist in FPS, Philly Currently playing Homefront This month Discovered that it’s always bland, grey and repetitive in Philadelphia. SAMUEL ROBERTS Specialist in JRPG, rooftops Currently playing Mirror’s Edge Catalyst This month FInally reviewed a game that wasn’t a Final Fantasy. Also one that was. CHRIS LIVINGSTON Specialist in RPG, irradiation Currently playing Fallout 4: Far Harbor This month Has been glowing a lot more since his trip to New England. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Indie, walking Currently playing Lumo This month Planned to walk up a mountain in order to tweet from the highest point in Britain. JAMES DAVENPORT Specialist in FPS, demons…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A varied collection of isometric platforming challenges. EXPECT TO PAY £15 DEVELOPER Triple Eh? PUBLISHER Rising Star Games REVIEWED ON GeForce GTX 970, Intel i7-5820K, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.triple-eh.net Lumo is a platforming game in the purest sense, inspired by the earliest, rawest examples of the genre. You jump, dash, and weave around a room full of obstacles for no reason other than they’re there. Then when you reach the other side and go through the door, another room is waiting for you. It’s a test of timing, dexterity, and lateral thinking, with a disarming charm that hides the ruthless cunning of its design. And it’s bloody hard too. Each screen is a self-contained diorama of death. There are laser grids,…

1 Graffiti which reads “Made in Korea, burnt in the USA”. To be fair, this is a close one, but an American writer would typically use “burned” in this case. 2 A location called “gassed car park”. It’s a parking garage, pal. 3 A billboard that reads “restaurant and take away”. That might fly at the Philadelphia Fish & Chicken Bar in Glasgow, but in Philadelphia you’d order “takeout”.…

MOVEMENT At first you have to unlock some of Faith’s abilities from the first game, such as performing a roll from height, but a couple of them are new to the series. Longer slides and faster pipe climbing, for example. COMBAT Groan. Aside from the ability to ‘scramble’ so equipment screeches briefly, allowing you to land a free hit on any in a certain radius, this tree basically just gives you a few damage boosts. GEAR This is the smallest of the three trees, and is basically upgrades magrope, most of which are gated off by the story anyway. This is probably the least useful of the three upgrade paths.…

This leisurely and lucrative mission has become a race against time NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A tense strategy game where you explore spooky spaceships using drones. EXPECT TO PAY £15 DEVELOPER Misfits Attic PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Intel i7 x980 3.33GHz, 9GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.duskers.misfits-attic.com Something is chewing through a door on the derelict space station Volgograd. I’ve been exploring the station room-by-room for long minutes, with my fleet of drones, and so far it’s been a safe and worthwhile excursion. Now, though, I feel like I’ve overstayed my welcome. I quickly command my scouting drone to return to my docked dropship, but just as it speeds past the door that is being chewed through, I hear a loud beeping.…

I’m confident Hitman is the Blood Money successor I wanted NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Kill people, but not all of the people. This month in Morocco. EXPECT TO PAY £7 DEVELOPER IO Interactive PUBLISHER Square Enix REVIEWED ON Windows 10, 8GB RAM, i5-3570k, GTX 970 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.hitman.com Each new Hitman level brings not just a new location, but a change in tone. Paris was a soiree of elites – the fashionistas below and the information brokers above. Sapienza was light and airy – the sort of place that could accommodate an exploding golf ball. This third level, set in Marrakesh, is something else entirely. It’s the setting for a political conspiracy: a general’s attempt…

This is the most fun I’ve had with The Witcher 3 ’s combat NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The last expansion for fantasy RPG, The Witcher 3. EXPECT TO PAY £16 DEVELOPER CD Projekt RED PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Intel i7 x980 3.33GHz, 8GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.thewitcher.com Have you ever wanted to get drunk with a vampire? The Witcher 3 ’s Blood and Wine expansion gives you that opportunity, and lets you ask all the important questions. What’s it like to die and come back? What’s it like to live for centuries in a world that mostly wants you dead? How does the bat thing work? The brooding, complicated undead are just one…

Fancy losing another dimension of freedom? In Core, you don’t move at all. It’s DDR for trees. Point a laser in one of four directions, and tap-destroy pixels that fly by in time to the music. Simple! Too simple! Because with such a bare premise, and such limited control, the game is forced to resort to the behaviour of an arsehole in pursuit of a challenge. Dots wilfully misbehave, and the too-few levels are too long to make rehearsal anything like a pleasure. A power-down that rotates your controls 90 degrees is the very essence of bewildering bullshit. Bit. Trip Core is gruelling for gruel’s sake, and there’s a reason no one eats gruel.…

1 STEALTH ASSASSIN The G752VY is nowhere near as loud as the Scan and Cyberpower notebooks, nor the ultra-slim Aorus, thanks to that chunky chassis and mobile components. 2 SOFTWAREZ One of the drawbacks of a manufacturer-built machine is all the pre- installed bloatware. McAfee regularly needed to be put in its place during testing. 3 G-SYNC I’ve become so used to the slick gaming performance you get with frame-synchronisation that I really miss it when it’s not there. Thankfully more and more laptops are capable, like this one. 4 GAMING GEAR The backlit, chiclet keyboard is gamer-focused with a 30-key rollover and comes with a host of programmable macro keys too. It’s even got a dedicated gamecasting button. ASUS G752VY   £ GAMING LAPTOP In theory, you can take the…

MOTHERBOARD Z170 Pro Gaming Asus £111 The latest revision of our favourite gaming motherboard, with an M.2 PCIe x4 slot, Intel network port, USB 3.1 and SLI support. PROCESSOR i5-6600K Intel £195 Intel’s new Skylake processor is nearly as fast as an i7 for gaming. Comes with some important memory/storage speed boosts. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1070 FE Nvidia £400 The new king of midrange, this card is perfect for high refresh rate 1440p gaming, and gives you a monitor upgrade path. COOLER Kraken X31 NZXT £60 To get the most out of a good CPU you need a cooler to match. The Kraken X31 is powerful, quiet and great for overclocks. MEMORY Savage Black 16GB @2400 MHz CAS 12 Kingston £60 Thanks to insanely low timings, these two 8GB sticks…

1 STREETS OF TIM ALLEN Perhaps the best mod here, Streets of Rage 2 Except It Makes That Weird Tim Allen Noise When People Die, to give it its full title, makes changes that are probably fairly clear from the title. www.bit.ly/MegaHub1 2 BEYOND ZERO TOLERANCE The unreleased sequel to the surprisingly acceptable 16-bit FPS Zero Tolerance, which is also on the Workshop. Both games were previously declared freeware by the developers, so Sega please leave this up. www.bit.ly/MegaHub2 3 SHINING TACTICS A hefty mod for Sega’s Shining Force 2, which revamps the strategy RPG with new story elements and characters, and revised classes, among other things. A great way to revisit a classic. www.bit.ly/MegaHub3…

N’ZOTH THE CORRUPTOR Brings back your dead Deathrattle creatures for an instantly dominant board state. FANDRAL STAGHELM By turning the “Choose one” mechanic into “Choose both”, offers potentially crazy value. CALL OF THE WILD Creates an instant three- creature board with Charge, Taunt and a damage buff. RAGNAROS, LIGHTLORD Much to the consternation of lore nerds, has proven a key part of the new grindy Paladin decks. TWIN EMPEROR VEK’LOR Two 4/6 Taunts for 7 Mana? One of the biggest reasons to run a C’Thun deck. THING FROM BELOW This monstrosity can often be played for free, provided you’ve spammed enough totems.…

“The way enemies explode into chunks is gruesomely satisfying” NEED TO KNOW RELEASED December 1997 PUBLISHER Activision DEVELOPER id Software LINK www.idsoftware.com The original Quake was a muddy medieval world of knights, Lovecraftian horrors, and grim castles. But the sequel, cleverly titled Quake II , goes in a different direction entirely. You’re a space marine, naturally, who has crashlanded on an alien world called Stroggos. In a desperate attempt to prevent an invasion, Earth sent an army to the distant planet, but the Strogg knew you were coming and your arrival was a slaughter. The dropships were shot down by anti-air defences and pretty much everyone died, except you. And so, in true id Software FPS style, it becomes a solo mission. There’s…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASED June 2012 OUR REVIEW 71% EXPECT TO PAY £4 in a Steam sale LINK www.specopstheline.com Uncharted is voice-and-mo-cap actor Nolan North’s most famous work, casting him as Whedonesque, likeable treasure hunter Nathan Drake. One common criticism of that PlayStation hero is that he’s presented as a positive, empathetic protagonist who experiences no trauma from his actions, despite gunning down hundreds of baddies. That’s now a very tired point, but it’s also why his casting as Captain Walker in 2012’s Spec Ops: The Line was such a smart call. Walker starts that game as an action hero too, sent into sandstorm-ravaged Dubai to find out what’s happened to former brother-in-arms John Konrad and his battalion, the Damned 33rd. That’s all the…

PHIL SAVAGE You know how at sporting events, there’s always someone in the crowd holding up some weird sign? Mine would say: “I like games, yes.” STARDEW VALLEY www.stardewvalley.net A farming RPG set in a quaint, happy village full of smiles. Plant crops, catch fish and craft goods, all while nestled in the warm glow of local capitalism. It’s all a little too cheery for my tastes, and yet I’ve played Stardew Valley for almost 40 hours. Either it’s really good, or I’m losing my mind. I suspect both. HITMAN www.hitman.com Here’s another game that’s taken up around 40 hours of my time. This one only has three levels. The Hitman series has always favoured replayability, and the latest is clearly no different. It’s packed full of extra missions, from…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE October 10 DEVELOPER The Coalition PUBLISHER Microsoft LINK www.gearsofwar.com One of Xbox’s heavier hitters is coming to PC this year, hopefully in a more convincing form than the flawed Gears remaster launch we got earlier this year. This is a fresh start of sorts for Gears: it’s made by a new studio, The Coalition, rather than Epic, and sees you playing as Marcus Fenix’s son, JD, for all those people deeply invested in the Gears or War lore. Microsoft announced at E3 that cross-platform play is a thing with Gears of War 4, and, like the other Xbox games in these pages, you’ll sadly need to use the Windows Store to download them rather than Steam. But it’ll be a nice bonus to get this on…

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, Sonic: Lost World 40%-49% This game is functional, but majorly flawed and disappointing. Examples Firefall, Star Trek, Armikrog 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, Just Cause 3, The Division 70%-79% Good, but not a classic. This score is a recommendation, just not a glowing one. Examples Broken Age, Quantum Break 80%-89%…

“A MIXTURE OF LOVABLE ROGUES, GRUFF VILLAINS AND HEROES” It’s as if Heroes of the Storm went to Team Fortress 2 ’s house party NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A multiplayer first-person shooter, set on a future Earth full of robots and a cowboy. EXPECT TO PAY £45 DEVELOPER Blizzard PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Windows 10, 8GB RAM, i5-3570K, GeForce GTX 970 MULTIPLAYER 6 vs 6 LINK www.playover watch.com Right now, I hate Junkrat. He’s a scrawny, impish explosives expert with a grenade lobbing Frag Launcher. His ultimate ability – a slow charging special attack that fills faster as you do damage and score kills – is a motorised, remote control tyre bomb with a devastating area of effect. Put simply,…

1984 KNIGHT LORE You’ve been transformed into a werewolf and you have forty days to explore a castle and find a cure. 1985 CHIMERA A spaceship is about to destroy the planet, and you have to board it and activate its self destruct. 1986 MARBLE MADNESS Guide a marble through a series of punishing obstacles. Why? Don’t question it. Just do it. 1987 HEAD OVER HEELS Help Headus Mouthion and Footus Underium, spies from the Planet Freedom, escape from a castle.…

MOTION SENSE Pro: Red means something’s moving, don’t open the door. Con: Yellow means something might be moving. Don’t open that door, either. SONIC PULSE Pro: Drives away organic threats. Con: Half the threats are not organic. PRY Pro: Can manually open doors without power. Con: You can’t close the door again. Ever. MINE Pro: Plant it and it’ll blow up any nearby threat. Con: It’ll also blow up any nearby non-threat. Such as your drones. TURRET Pro: Shoots enemies. Con: You can’t move while shooting. So if you don’t kill it... nice knowing you.…

This is a game of musical Pong in which you slide up and down to bat away melodic dots. Flux is built around a superior control device – a mouse will always beat a greasy finger, whatever your mum says – so the action starts at a more acceptably decent difficulty. The high visual intensity coupled with the moderate difficulty tricks you into thinking you’re better than you are, a feeling that is never not welcome. At least, until the first boss, which suffers from a perfect AI bug that makes progression impossible. I’m not the only one to notice, and people have been complaining for quite a while. We nearly had another good score, here. Damn it.…

X5 CAMO Aorus £2,200 The latest Aorus is the most expensive machine in this test, but by no means the most powerful. It does, however, sport some tasty components, a sleek chassis and a 4K screen. But the demands of that panel mean you won’t be running games at native resolution, which arguably makes such a high-scale screen unnecessary. On top of this, the slimline chassis ensures this machine sounds like a turbine running at full speed. www.aorus.com CPU: INTEL CORE I7-6700HQ / GPU: NVIDIA GTX 980M / MEMORY: 32GB DDR4 / STORAGE: 256GB SAMSUNG SM951 SSD, 1TB HDD / SCREEN SIZE: 15.6” / NATIVE RES: 3840 X 2160 73 % FANGBOOK 4 SK-X17 G-SYNC ULTRA X2 Cyberpower £1,960 The Fangbook is huge. Like the Scan machine, it’s more portable…

MOTHERBOARD ROG Maximus VIII Hero Asus £174 Fantastic overclocking and stability, with a great UEFI BIOS from Asus. M.2, USB 3.1 and on-board power, reset, CMOS, etc, buttons. PROCESSOR Core i7-6700K Intel £260 Intel’s top-of-the-line Skylake processor. Its new chipset includes important memory/ storage speed boosts. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1080 Founder’s Edition 8GB EVGA £620 Nvidia’s GTX 1080 is the new king of the hill. Although a little pricey, this superfast card is perfect for 4K gaming. COOLER Hydro H110i GT 280mm Corsair £100 Quiet, cool and capable of providing even the most aggressive overclocker with more than enough headroom to hit that 5GHz mark. MEMORY Savage Black 16GB @2400 MHz CAS 12 Kingston £60 Thanks to insanely low timings, these two 8GB sticks of DDR4 are more than enough.…

FOR EVERY SPELL YOU’VE CAST IN THE GAME SO FAR YOGG WILL CAST ANOTHER, IRRESPECTIVE OF COST NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Out now PUBLISHER Blizzard DEVELOPER Team 5 LINK www.blizz.ly/IUHZhT We need to talk about Yogg. There are 133 other cards in this recent expansion, but I don’t love any of them the way I love Yogg. His full name is “Yogg-Saron, Hope’s End”, and he’s an ancient evil dripping with more tentacles, eyeballs, and mouths than can be strictly necessary outside of Cthulhu cosplay. The Old Gods are all minions that costs ten Mana, meaning you need to build a deck that can last until the late game in order to play them. To motivate you to do so, they each have unique, potentially game-winning effects. But Yogg goes…