Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2017 i PC Gamer

HIGHS No Man’s Sky The Path Finder update adds bouncy vehicles for planetary exploration. Final Fantasy XV Gorgeous footage of the latest Final Fantasy running on a GTX 1080 Ti has surfaced, so a port seems likely. Dino Crisis Resident Evil 7 producer says a remake with modern tech is an “exciting prospect”. Uh, yes please. Steam Link Sometimes it’s nice to play a game while sinking into the sofa. Shadows of the Empire The rough Star Wars interquel finally makes its way to Steam. LOWS Duke Nukem Duke’s presence in the new version of Bulletstorm doesn’t excite us. Cloud Saves If your big game’s on Steam, it really should support cloud saves. Conan Exiles Adjustable penis slider or not, does the PC really need more buggy, half-finished Early Access…

Phil: Once there was Steam, and it was... pretty bad, actually. But over the years it grew and improved, and eventually attracted competitors. Now, you can buy games through Origin, Uplay, GOG, Itch.io, GamersGate, Humble, Green Man Gaming, GameShart – so many digital distributors that only one of that list is made up. Many web stores simply sell Steam keys, but others offer a full Steam alternative, client and all. Given the size of the market, is Steam still the daddy? Andy: For ages I resented having to buy non-Steam games. There’s something nice about having your entire game collection in one place, and having to download another client felt like a chore. I still feel that way sometimes, but Uplay and Origin – the two I use most often…

YOU CAN EXPECT EVERY URUK TO REMEMBER AND REACT TO ITS ENCOUNTERS WITH TALION NEED TO KNOW RELEASE August 25 DEVELOPER Monolith PUBLISHER Warner Brothers LINK www.bit.ly/2m1JoId You remember Talion, right? Dead chap. Gondorian. Possessed by the wraith of the elven smith Celebrimbor. Yeah, that’s him. I always thought of him as a covert operator, dropping from the rafters to shank an Uruk captain in the back. A true ranger of Gondor. But the stealthy Talion of my recollections is nowhere to be seen when I visit Monolith HQ for an early look at the followup to Shadow of Mordor. The action opens on one of the least sneaky things imaginable: an all-out assault on one of Sauron’s fortresses. And Talion isn’t crouching in a shrub or parkouring onto a…

The warrior of light heads east, picks up katana. GIANT KNIGHT SUSANO LOOKS LIKE HE’S GOT SOME STORMY SEAS TRAPPED IN HIS SWORD NEED TO KNOW RELEASE June 20 DEVELOPER Square Enix PUBLISHER In-house LINK http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com FFXIV’s newest expansion is fast approaching and the hype train is picking up speed thanks to a glut of new info from the recent European Fan Fest event and the latest story updates in-game. War is coming and it’s about to take you to some unexpected places. In-game the story has been ramping up to a confrontation with the domination-hungry Garlean empire over the state of Ala Mhigo, which it invaded 20 years ago, forcing its citizens to seek refuge in Eorzea. Tensions have been simmering in the background since the game…

At the Olympia in London, the PCG Weekender returned for its second glorious year. The crowds got hands-on with Dawn of War III , Halo Wars 2 , Tekken 7 and many more, and turned out in force for our developer presentations across two stages. It was a weekend that had something for everyone. For the PC Gamer team, it was the rediscovery of Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast in the Weekender’s retro gaming area, where Phil made it his mission to kill Samuel, because it would be funny. The developers from The Creative Assembly, Relic, Foundry 42, Failbetter, Playtonic and many more took to the stage to discuss their creative processes – if you missed the show, you can…

There’s never been a better time to play free PC games, given just how many of them are released every single day. Thousands exist on platforms such as Game Jolt and Itch.io – so many that it can be difficult to spot the gold when it comes glittering by. Every so often you need to celebrate not only classics from the past, but also more recent gems that haven’t gained quite as much attention. In that spirit PC Gamer presents our now yearly edition of the Top 50 Free Downloads, an unordered list of the best games you can download without needing to open your wallet – no, not even for microtransactions. We haven’t been able to fit every great freeware game we know of in here, and there are…

HOW WE 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 reviews 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 of a significant game, our expert will revisit it…

“ YOU GET A SENSE THAT THE GALAXY IS FILLED WITH REAL PEOPLE” Andromeda’s best moments all wait deeper into the game NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A galactic adventure featuring shooting, talking, exploration and a bit of kissing. EXPECT TO PAY £40 DEVELOPER BioWare PUBLISHER EA REVIEWED ON Intel i7-6700K, 16Gb RAM, GeForce GTX 980, Windows 10 MULTIPLAYER Online co-op LINK www.masseffect.com Ten years ago, the first Mass Effect packed a seasons’ worth of TV science fiction into a videogame and put you in the role of both director and lead character. Its sequels took your decisions and span the consequences into series-spanning story arcs, held onto the characters you liked and developed deep relationships around them. There is a reason that…

EL SUENO BOSS The Cartel’s kingpin. When he’s not murdering people, he’s talking gibberish on the radio. LA SENTERA INFLUENCE High priestess of a church dedicated to Santa Muerte, the Holy Death. Pretty goth. LA YURI & EL POLITO SECURITY Doctors, lovers, torturers. It’s nice when your partner shares your interests. EL CEREBRO SMUGGLING Special power: being smart. A bad supervillain, but a decent submarine designer. MADRE COCA PRODUCTION Son ODs on cocaine, so she punishes farmers by forcing them to make cocaine. Dumb.…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £2 DEVELOPER Accidental Queens PUBLISHER Plug In Digital You’ve found a phone. It’s unlocked, and has four recent messages from an increasingly panicked dad. The owner, it seems, is missing – having disappeared on this, the night of their 18th birthday. A mystery! And one that can only be solved by digging through the owner’s texts and, later, finding clues that let you guess passwords. A Normal Lost Phone is one of a growing number of adventure games about poking through personal data. But where Orwell and Mainlining make the invasion of privacy a central part of the story, here it feels incidental – and more uncomfortable for it. It’s hard to reconcile the story being told with the things you’re required to do…

SILENT WINGS 3 120MM HIGH SPEED FAN Be Quiet! £20 Another £20 fan hit our testing block this month. Stylish, black, quiet, and as impressive as Noctua, Be Quiet!’s Silent Wings 3 impressed us with its noise cancelling, swappable mounts, low operating speeds and high static pressure at 28 dB(A). www.bequiet.com KRAKEN X52 NZXT £140 With an infinity mirror, 240mm AIO, braided cable, and solid performance, it’s hard to imagine that there’s a nicer looking liquid cooler out there. The LED ring, fully customisable through NZXT’s CAM software, provides those perfect finishing touches to any aesthetically minded system builder. www.nzxt.com SOUND BLASTERX SIEGE M04 Creative £70 Creative’s first foray into the world of pointer peripherals, this mouse features PixArt’s tried and true PMW3360 optical sensor, on top of the usual…

MOTHERBOARD Z270 Gaming M5 MSI £183 Both the M5 and M7 in MSI’s latest gaming series look stunning and offer an expansive feature set. A solid purchase either way. PROCESSOR Core i7-7700K Intel £319 Four cores, eight threads and the ability to turbo up to 4.5GHz make this CPU more than capable of gaming at the top of the range. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1080 FTW Gaming ACX 3.0 EVGA £630 Slightly overclocked out of the box, cool and quiet – features that make this the perfect high-end 1440p and 4K killer. COOLER Kraken X62 NZXT £139 The Kraken is the culmination of three of our favourite things: an infinity mirror, a 280mm radiator and slick braided cooling. MEMORY Savage Black (4x8GB) 32GB @2666 HyperX £263 Take advantage of that CPU…

KATHARINE BYRNE THIS MONTH Rocked silently in a corner, pondering the apocalypse. ALSO PLAYED DmC: Devil May Cry ROBBING A PAIR OF OLD-AGE PENSIONERS OF THEIR LAST FEW TINS OF BEANS WAS MY ONLY HOPE We seem to dine out on human misery a lot these days. Whether it’s binging on Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events or gobbling up the latest headlines parped out by that human wotsit across the pond, we’re served a constant diet of schadenfreude. Yes, these creations may one day end us all in nuclear death – the wotsit more so than Netflix – but at least we can chuckle as we turn to ash. There are no such laughs to be had in This War of Mine, however. Here, any babbling bundles of comic…

1 HOUSE OF LOCKED SECRETS Set in the Thief universe, this puts you in the role of a reformed – well, to begin with, at least – cutpurse, who stumbles upon an intriguing monastery in the nearby mountains. Who could resist? www.bit.ly/DarkMod1 2 THOMAS PORTER 0 The first in the seven-part Thomas Porter series, this short prologue tasks the titular hero with acquiring some smuggled herbs. And by ‘acquiring’ I mean you’re going to steal them. www.bit.ly/DarkMod2 3 NO HONOR AMONG THIEVES Play The Tears of St. Lucia first, then follow it up with this huge three-mission pack made by some of The Dark Mod’s greatest modders. It’s set in a massive cathedral – classic Thief territory. www.bit.ly/DarkMod3…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASED September 1999 OUR REVIEW 91% EXPECT TO PAY £15 LINK www.ageofempires.com When I was young, I had too few games but too much spare time. Now I’m an adult, I have the opposite problem, and I’m sure you do as well. That changing relationship with games means I now see them as things to be ticked off as quickly as possible, rather than to be got into as deeply as I used to. Having just five or six games as a younger man meant I would endlessly pore over them, repeating skirmishes in Red Alert , or missions in X-Wing . Everyone has done something similar, I’m sure, whether it was installing endless Doom WADs or…

PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in Cartels, drones Twitter @Octaeder This month Braved the wilds of pretend Bolivia for our Ghost Recon review, and had only an OK time. TONY ELLIS Specialist in Writing books, goodbyes This month Announced he’s leaving us next issue, after years of service to PCG. Do send your best wishes so we can embarrass him on his final day. CHRIS THURSTEN Specialist in Space, smoochin’ Twitter @CThursten This month That didn’t take long! Expat Chris returns to review Mass Effect: Andromeda for us.…

AS THE OLD SAYING GOES, IF YOU WANT SOMETHING DOING, EXPLOIT A MILLENNIAL The Spy can’t be everywhere at once, nor would The Spy want to be. Many places are downright unpleasant, and others are just kind of boring. On principle, The Spy refuses to enter any office where someone called Brenda is telling coworkers about her weekend retreat to Malaga, or any country garage containing a group of dads purring in appreciation over a recently restored 1972 Vauxhall Viscount. You have to have principles in this business, and if the only way to track down information key to the retrieval of the Prince of Monaco’s pomeranian is to venture through the rehearsal room of a Mötley Crüe tribute band then, sorry Ruffles, but you can stay dognapped. As such,…

YOU GET A GOOD SENSE OF BEING CONNECTED TO A PHYSICAL SPACE NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Summer DEVELOPER Miga PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.hevngame.com The year is 2128 and Earth is overheating, overcrowded, and generally an unpleasant place to live. This inspires Sebastian Mar to take an interstellar mining job at Barnard’s Star, a system six light years away from Earth. The game is set on an isolated planetoid orbiting the star, on a mining base operated by Sebastian’s paymasters, Nonomi. This being a dystopian science fiction story, there seems to be a sinister side to the corporation’s interstellar activities. “As Sebastian you’ll navigate the physical and political dangers of Nonomi’s highly controversial celestial mining efforts,” according to Seattle-based developer Miga, founded in 2013. “Inspired by classic immersive sims such as…

THE BLEND OF MODERNITY AND VINTAGE GAME PHILOSOPHY IS STRONG NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Summer DEVELOPER Milestone PUBLISHER In-house LINK www.gravelvideogame.com From sunny Pacific islands to the forests of Alaska, Gravel offers exuberant open-world racing. Milestone has moved to Unreal Engine 4, and the difference is immediately visible. But while Gravel clearly utilises the capabilities of the new tech, it has its roots firmly in Milestone’s past – namely the classic ’90s racer Screamer . Irvin Zonca, head of game design at Milestone, explains: “Our head of programming created Screamer. So in my office there is the original design of the Screamer games. I took it off the shelf and put it on the table and it stayed there…

Dawn of War III’s spectacle is extraordinary. I’m in a 3v3 multiplayer match where too many players have picked Eldar (two on each side). The enemy’s Wraithknight – a gigantic walker and the Eldar’s super unit – is patrolling near the central lane where I’ve been gathering a small ambushing force, that includes my own Wraithknight. I send my army after it, thinking this is an ideal opportunity to soak up its fire with my super unit while my squads of melee-focused Howling Banshees, basic Dire Avengers and heavy Wraithlords get to work on taking down its enormous health bar. Unfortunately, I follow the sprinting giant into a trap: two huge Eldar armies are waiting for me just north of my base, including an enemy Wraithknight and a…

When you look at the most popular survival games on the Steam marketplace, it’s easy to notice a particular trend. Whether you’re surviving the Jurassic jungles of Ark: Survival Evolved , the hostile planets of Empyrion – Galactic Survival , or the exposed genitals of other players in Rust , if you want to play a survival game, you’re probably going to play an unfinished one. Steam Early Access is billed as a way for players to “get immediate access to games that are being developed with the community’s involvement.” That’s a fancy way of saying paying upfront for games that aren’t finished. And when it comes to survival games, very few are. That hasn’t stopped the genre from becoming one…

Mass Effect: Andromeda is ‘divisive’, which is a term critics use when they have different opinions based on their subjective tastes. This, of course, is normal. Some people don’t like Half-Life 2. Some people think Dragon Age 2 is the RPG of last decade. There are even people, some of them probably reading this magazine, who think Myst is good. To them: I apologise for using Myst as the punchline to this paragraph. Chris, for the most part, likes Andromeda, which isn’t to say there aren’t issues. Aside from the occasional bug or animation glitch, though, his review reveals that BioWare has made another grand adventure, and with the best combat in the series to date. It’s a slightly muted issue in terms of review scores, but that doesn’t mean…

2149 CE The first humans jump through a Mass Effect relay. This includes Alec Ryder, future Pathfinder. 2183 CE Somebody called Shepard becomes a Spectre, and saves the Citadel from a Reaper called Sovereign. 2184 CE A privately operated plan to colonise the Andromeda galaxy starts to recruit its first candidates. 2185 CE Shepard is secretly resurrected by Cerberus. The Andromeda Initiative departs the Milky Way. 2186 CE The Reapers invade the Milky Way in force and are repelled, for better or worse, by Shepard’s galactic alliance. 2819 CE Over six hundred years later, the Andromeda Initiative ark ships arrive in the Heleus Cluster.…

ANGUS Quiet and sensitive, Angus works in the local video rental store, which is still in business somehow. BEA Your best friend in school until the 7th grade. Seems to have matured way beyond her years in your absence. GREGG Loud, mischievous, and excitable. His greatest loves in life are knife fights, doing crimes, eating pizza, and Angus. GERM Germ Warfare (real name Jeremy) lives in a house in the woods. He likes retro videogames and watching your band.…

REBEL OP Race between two towers to turn them off before the timer runs out. This is definitely how towers work. RAID The resistance needs helicopters and you have the power to steal them. Earns you lots of resources. MAJOR INTEL Someone’s carelessly left an important file lying around in Bolivia. Find it to unlock a new story mission. STORY Kill, capture or rescue someone so that someday later you can kill, capture or rescue someone else. SKILL POINT Unlocking new skills requires resources and skill points. One of the more useful collectibles. WEAPON Dead men drop temporary guns. If you want the permanent type, steal it from a crate. Logical.…

It’s the basis for a solid twitch shooter, but it doesn’t feel great NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Wave-based arena shooter with a skill system, a la Bulletstorm. EXPECT TO PAY £11 DEVELOPER The Foregone Syndicate PUBLISHER Adult Swim REVIEWED ON R9 Fury X, i5-3570K CPU, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER N/A LINK www.desync-game.com It’s hard to criticise a difficult game, because the assumption usually made is that you’re only frustrated because you’re bad at it. And to be clear: I am bad at Desync . It’s an abstract, neon first-person shooter about creative killing – with the emphasis on movement and positioning. I’ve died loads, and haven’t progressed very far. This isn’t, however, why I’m not smitten with Desync .…

Other titles in this almost entertaining shop-building series where you sell weapons to RPG heroes: Get On With You! We’re Doling Out Fetch Quests Now?!, Oh God! We’re Nanites Coursing Through A Cybernetically Enhanced Protagonist, Shall We Upgrade His Eyes Or His Legs!?, and You’ve Exhausted My Conversation Options, All I Have Left To Say Is That You Can Sleep Here For 20 Gil, And I’m Beginning To Feel Weird Repeating Myself!? Anyway, I can say without much bother that this is a passable idea, but it feels designed by engineers, and… well, there’s just not that much to it.…

MOTHERBOARD H270M Bazooka MSI £89 Kaby Lake has landed and the 270 series chipsets with it. MSI’s Bazooka H270M is a perfect fit for our new CPU. PROCESSOR Pentium G4600 Intel £75 Two cores, four threads and a lot of single core IPC performance. This core performs just as well as an i7-7700K in games. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX 480 4GB Powercolor £182 If you’re gaming at 1080p, 4GB of RAM and a Polaris GPU will keep your framerates well up into that 60fps sweetspot. MEMORY Fury Black 8GB @2400 HyperX £65 DDR4 packs higher speeds, better energy efficiency, and larger capacities. 8GB is still perfect for most games, too. POWER SUPPLY EVGA 500W 80PLUS Certified ATX12V/EPS12V EVGA £59 A reliable PSU with enough juice to run your CPU and…

JOE DONNELLY THIS MONTH Viewed the world through the eyes of a Snake. ALSO PLAYED Resident Evil 7 IT’S GONNA TAKE MORE THAN A CARDBOARD BOX TO SAVE MY BACKSIDE THIS TIME, I THINK It wasn’t meant to be like this. It was supposed to be routine – sneak into the Camp Omega detention centre, locate the prisoners, extract them, and bail. Simple. “This is an infiltration mission,” Miller told me rather condescendingly over the walkie before I set off. “You’ve got to stay out of sight.” Easy for him to say, sitting in his cosy Militaires Sans Frontières operations centre goodness knows how many miles away from the frontline. Me, I’m out in the field, holed up behind this conveniently placed stack of plywood in the pissing rain after…

MIODRAG KOVACHEVIC THIS MONTH Punched villains with his bear hands. ALSO PLAYED Dariusburst Chronicle Saviours, Alien: Isolation. IF THIS WAS A COMIC BOOK, SOME NEW-AGE HERO WOULD HAVE TOLD ME TO GO BACK TO RETIREMENT You never forget your first MMO love. The game that clicked with you, that made you forge the most friendships, that made you cry the most tears. My college gaming days were dominated by Champions Online, where I spent more than 3,200 hours across almost four years. 2016 marked the year I moved out of my home country and while spending the last month reminiscing about days gone by, I asked myself, “What’s Champions Online like now?” I log into the client and the game greets me as I left it: no music, the resolution…

ANDY AND I GET INTO OUR OWN PLANE. IT’S ON FIRE AND WE CRASH SHORTLY AFTER Brought together by their love of knockabout open-world shenanigans, the PC Gamer team has infiltrated near-future Bolivia. It’s a more serious assignment than they’re use to. Ghost Recon Wildlands is ostensibly a game about highly trained special-ops agents completing objectives in an efficient, professional, and – most of all – silent manner. We’re going to be taking on missions in some of Wildlands’ hardest and hairiest zones. The only problem: Phil is the only member of the team who’s played the game. Phil: I spend a couple of hours unlocking new missions in the hope of finding stuff that will be (a) exciting, and (b) manageable. My plan is to see if I can…

THE FORGOTTEN This added the post-Roman Italian republic, Slavs, Indians, Magyars and Incas to the selection of factions, as well as seven campaigns and Twitch integration. THE AFRICAN KINGDOMS Four new races join the fray, including the Portuguese, who bring the organ gun siege unit. You also get four new campaigns. RISE OF THE RAJAS As well as extra civilisations, the latest expansion brought us ballista elephants, which are actually elephants carrying giant crossbows.…

1 The cover is dedicated to Medieval II: Total War’s expansion, Kingdoms. Tim Stone’s feature takes the form of a series of overheard conversations, as Tim breaks into Creative Assembly through a complicated horse disguise, and escapes while dressed as a nun. Magazines were weird in the past. You’d never find something like that now. (Er, do not look at the section above.) 2 Oblivion expansion Shivering Isles gets a muted 75% from Tom Francis. This “underwhelming and dreary hackfest” is too conventional for his taste. 3 We always get a bit antsy when we bring up emulation, as if we know we’re doing something naughty. Here, though, the team just goes for it, with a complete history of emulation on PC. Each entry lists some essential games – although…

1 A NEW BEGINNING Old School RuneScape offers a dose of sweet, sweet nostalgia, replicating the original game but with players getting a say in its development. 2 DEVELOPMENT Runescape continues its gradual growth, with Jagex introducing the very first raid to Old School RuneScape. Well, better late than never. 3 STEP UP Modern RuneScape is the third iteration of the game; more user-friendly and considerably flashier than its predecessors. 4 COWS AND CONVERSATIONS You can expect cutscenes, voice acting and dialogue choices not typical of an MMO. Oh, and one undead bovine.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Summer PUBLISHER Devolver Digital DEVELOPER Reikon Games LINK www.ruinergame.com Influenced by cult cyberpunk anime and Hotline Miami , Ruiner is a violent, fast-paced shooter dripping with style. It’s being developed by Polish indie studio Reikon, whose founder, Kuba Stylinski, previously worked on all three Witcher games at CD Projekt Red. Now he’s started his own studio, and Ruiner is his first project, with Devolver handling publishing. The action takes place in 2191 in a futuristic metropolis called Rengkok. Here, wealthy people living comfortable lives plug into virtual reality to experience pain, fear, and other strong emotions. The sinister secret behind this business is that the emotions come from the suffering of…

Minion Masters is an online PvP game where you gather an army of minions then fight in real-time with other players. It’s the product of BetaDwarf, developer of Forced. While the game is currently in Early Access, it’s in a pretty advanced state already, with unlockable arenas, matchmaking leagues, progression systems, friend listings, replays and more. You can’t currently play Minion Masters without spending £15 on a package on Steam, but this key gives you full access to the game, without having to pay (the game’s premium upgrade is sold separately). It’s your chance to get involved with the game and even provide feedback on the beta, if you so wish, knowing that your progress will carry over to the finished game. This key comes courtesy of online retailer Bundle…

ELDAR WRAITHKNIGHT TALDEER Can move way faster than the other super units Has a charging attack that will knock all enemies down in a line Uses a focused beam that is deadly to infantry SPACE MARINES IMPERIAL KNIGHT SOLARIA Has a chaingun attack that can decimate enemy infantry Sets off rockets that can be targeted anywhere in its surrounding area Uses a flamethrower for close-range attacks ORKS BEAUTY DA MORKANAUT Can deploy Gretchins to fix itself as it goes Can fire a rokkit fist at enemies Can generate a forcefield on the battlefield…

1 ARK: SURVIVAL EVOLVED Players must tame dinosaurs and build impenetrable fortresses if they hope to survive on a Jurassic island. 2 ASTRONEER A bubbly and charming aesthetic hides a hardcore survival experience where players explore and colonise alien worlds. 3 SUBNAUTICA Pilot submarines in an alien waterworld, scavenge deep trenches and try to avoid the beautiful yet vicious creatures that dwell there. 4 DON’T STARVE A look reminiscent of Tim Burton movies, and a dark and quirky game. Don’t Starve Together lets you run from tentacle beasts with a friend. 5 EMPYRION – GALACTIC SURVIVAL Players design and fly their own spaceships and space stations. Build your own X-Wing!…

CHRIS THURSTEN Specialist in RPGs, BioWare Currently playing Mass Effect: Andromeda This month Parachuted back into PCG for Operation: BioWare Review. LEIF JOHNSON Specialist in Strategy, chiefs Currently playing Halo Wars 2 This month Tried hard to love a console-focused RTS. Can the relationship last? It’s complicated. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Indie, strolls Currently playing Night in the Woods This month Went full Andy Kelly. Reviewed two indie darlings and a hardcore simulator. JON MORCOM Specialist in Stealth, swearing Currently playing Styx: Shards of Darkness This month Was sad Styx was too decent for a ‘Sharts of Darkness’ pun. PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in Sandbox, ghosts Currently playing Ghost Recon Wildlands This month Played stealth dad to the PCG team. Read about it on page 116. TYLER WILDE Specialist in FPS,…

It’s a valiant fight, packed with flashy animations and music NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An RTS set in the Halo universe, with a console bias. EXPECT TO PAY £50 DEVELOPER 343 Industries, Creative Assembly PUBLISHER Microsoft Studios REVIEWED ON Windows 10, 16GB RAM, GeForce GTX 980 MULTIPLAYER Up to 6 LINK www.halowaypoint.com Ican’t help but admire the crew of the Spirit of Fire. For almost three decades they’ve been locked in cryosleep (in some uncomfy looking chambers), yet when the ship’s dying AI finally sends out a wake-up call, they pop out into action, hardhats already donned. By the time the ship’s scruffy Captain Cutter starts making inspiring speeches to an awestruck scientist in the map room, I would have been still rubbing my eyes and debating whether…

DARK ELVES If they insist on parading around shirtless... it’s knife time! Or wait until they’re admiring the view of a chasm below then push. DWARVES They’re armoured up so your knife is out of play. Vomit on their food to poison them or crown them with a booby-trapped alarm bell. Oh, the irony. ROABIES They’re blind but have acute hearing. Isolate them one at a time, stab them then sit back and enjoy the ensuing explosion of yellow. VESPIDAES Waste a throwable bolt on them if you must. Otherwise dodge, roll, leap – anything to get away from these annoying little bastards. TROLL Avoid. Just... avoid.…

I once sat in a bush and spent 20 minutes killing soldiers on a bridge NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A stealth sniping game set in Italy in World War II. EXPECT TO PAY £40 DEVELOPER Rebellion PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Windows 10, Intel Core i5-3570, 8GB RAM, Nvidia GTX Titan MULTIPLAYER 4-player co-op, 12-player competitive LINK www.sniperelite4.com As a stealth game, Sniper Elite 4 isn’t as playful or full of gadgets as Hitman or MGSV . You can lure enemies out of cover with sound and set explosive traps on bodies, but there are no boxes to hide in and no non-lethal options. I wouldn’t expect any in a game that delights in slow-mo X-ray shots of…

Thanks to Twitter recommendations, I’ve been playing Dandy Dungeon on my phone. Basically, it’s a funny, warm-hearted story with a knowing script slathered on top of another microtransactionhungry loot-drop fruit machine. Onion Games’ Yoshiro Komura was also responsible for Little King’s Story – a comprehensively likeable (and microtransaction-free) Wii port that’s a little bit Pikmin, a little bit Animal Crossing. For a while, the King’s disease was debilitating shittyportitis, but it’s had some aftercare, so now you can wallow in the colourful quirk without feeling like you’re being made to suffer like some kind of videogame Jesus for your format god.…

1 RYZEN 5 Expect to see Ryzen 5 drop later this year, with better single core, a stunning price, and hopefully solid 1080p performance. 2 SUPPORT Ryzen has support for up to 20 PCIe lanes – 16 dedicated to the GPUs, and four isolated for PCIe SSDs. 3 TEMPERATURE Temperatures are a mixed bag, with the top end chip and a decent AIO cooler idling at 50-60 degrees, yet only reaching 70-75 degrees under heavy load. 4 OVERCLOCKING Overclocking also seems nonexistent, but we’ve seen overclocks up at 4.1GHz, which gives Intel’s Core i7-6950X a run for its money. CPU RYZEN 7 1800X www.amd.com £500 With Ryzen it looks like AMD is finally back with its A game. The plucky processor manufacturing underdog has brought to the table a 14nm eight-core,…

MOTHERBOARD Z270 Gaming M3 MSI £140 Likely the best value-for-money board out there, the Gaming M3 comes phenomenally well equipped, and with a cool aesthetic. PROCESSOR Core i5-7600K Intel £216 Only a five percent incremental increase in performance on Skylake, but if you haven’t upgraded in a while, now might be the time. GRAPHICS CARD Windforce GTX 1070 8GB Gigabyte £386 The 1440p killer, Gigabyte’s GeForce GTX 1070 will run quiet, cool and absolutely keep you at 60fps, even at WQHD. COOLER Kraken X31 NZXT £70 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 HyperX £130 Thanks to insanely low timings, these two 8GB sticks…

PHIL SAVAGE THIS MONTH Briefly found enlightenment. Was a jerk about it. ALSO PLAYED Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun I stopped playing Overwatch months ago – long before the addition of Sombra, and the seemingly endless ARG that teased her arrival. Now I’m back. Why? It’s definitely not because of the reveal that Tracer’s smoochin’. I am not that shallow. A few games in, and my account levels up. I’m level 25 now, which means I can play ranked mode. I ignore this option for a while – I’ve heard stories about Overwatch’s famouslysalty player base – but the temptation is too great. I queue up for my first competitive match. It goes badly, as do many of the subsequent matches. I’m not convinced this is my fault. I…

1 CAYNE FREEWARE Download this, if you’re able The Brotherhood’s acclaimed Stasis was a bit of an oddity in the world of pointing-and-clicking, thanks to its gorgeous isometric environments, gory body horror, and Dead Space-style science fiction setting. Cayne continues its legacy. That first game’s comparatively fortunate protagonist is swapped for a heavily pregnant woman who wakes up with no memory of how she came to be where she is, or why there’s a tiny person hitching a ride inside her womb. When the game’s first puzzle is fighting off a Big Daddy-style monster intent on extracting your unborn, you know you’re in for something a little darker than the usual adventure game fare. Things only get worse…

ARCANE FEVER, MUCH LIKE SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, IS A TERRIBLE THING You’re a child, walking down a bright, sunny road. It’s idyllic, until it’s not. When you meet up with your father, things get dark, quickly. It’s a strong, unsettling opening for Enderal , an enormous total conversion for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that dazzles with its quality and professionalism. It’s not perfect, but Enderal is leagues ahead of what I thought possible from an amateur team working with an almost-six-year-old game. The opening sums up this running theme of imperfect but impressive. It’s well crafted, but poorly paced. The eerie cold open is revealed to be a dream, after which you’re still a long way from getting…

“He’s not a blank slate, he’s just incredibly boring” NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2003 PUBLISHER In-house DEVELOPER Konami LINK www.konami.com Eike Kusch leaves a restaurant in the fictional German town of Lebensbaum. As he walks down a cobbled side street, he has the uneasy feeling that someone is following him. Then, in a flash, an unseen figure stabs him in the back and he slumps to the ground, dead. Game over. Or is it? Kusch wakes up in a strange, otherworldly void. A grandfather clock ticks loudly as he picks himself off the floor, then an odd being calling itself Homunculus appears before him. In an eerily calm, slightly sinister voice it says it’s giving him a second chance at life. It hands him a device called a Digipad, which…

NO MAN’S SKY www.no-mans-sky.com Like many people, I lost interest in No Man’s Sky and drifted away. But the recent Path Finder update, which adds a brilliant photo mode, has tempted me back. Combined with the new creative mode, which gives you infinite fuel and resources, it’s turned the game into an incredible space photography simulator. FIREWATCH www.firewatchgame.com I replayed Campo Santo’s beautiful debut on the Steam Link, Valve’s home streaming box, and it’s a fantastic couch game. It has a slow, easy pace, maps well to a controller, and my girlfriend – who never plays games at all – was hooked on the story, and ended up watching me play through the whole thing. WORLD OF WARCRAFT www.worldofwarcraft.com It’s older than time itself, but Blizzard’s MMO is still going…