Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2018 i PC Gamer

PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in Japan (in the ’80s) Twitter @Octaeder This month Could finally claim that the hundreds of hours spent playing Yakuza games were for work. What is a PC game? No, stick with me here. Metro Exodus is releasing for all platforms, but, perhaps in part because of the developer’s history, or perhaps because we love a well-paced shooter about a bleak, harrowing world, it feels like a quintessential PC title. Also this issue, we review Yakuza 0, a game with a strong console heritage that nevertheless feels at home on PC thanks to Steam’s growing catalogue of Japanese curios. We also unveil Steel Division 2 and Desperados, both games from genres that are PC to the bone. My point, rather obviously, is that the route a game…

HIGHS No Man’s Sky Since the Next update,HelloGames’ space explore-’em-up has been one of the top-selling games on Steam. Dragon Ball FighterZ The anime fighter was the most watched game of Evo 2018 thanks to a nail-biting tournament. Fallout: Miami Another cool-looking mod project? Yup. This one promises a “DLC size” chunk of post-apocalyptic Florida. LOWS Microsoft Store No, there’s no news, but Microsoft’s digital shopfront is still a mess. Steam Games designed to scam people have been appearing on Steam. How about a little quality control, Valve? The Culling II Had a launch so bad the developers removed it from sale and went back to working on the original game.…

ISSUE 192, October 2008 ON THE COVER Spore IN THE CHARTS Sex on Fire - The Kings of Leon 1 Tom Francis got to grips with the cover game, Spore, in our extensive review. Well, we say ‘review’; it was partly an extensive review and partly an extensive rogue’s gallery of player-made creations ranging from gigantic sentient chairs to the rather more predictable penis-shaped offerings. His verdict? Despite some difficulty niggles, an “annoyingly adorable” 91%. 2 Despite making for a nice film, Wall-E did not make for a great game. Mike Channell summed up the experience as spending 20 quid making yourself miserable. 3 Craig Pearson attempted to answer the question, “What if videogames but real life?” by investigating whether we have any IRL equivalents of gaming staples such as…

“WHEN IT VANISHES OFF THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN, IT GETS MOVED BACK UP TO THE TOP” The water cycle is one of the first scientific concepts you learn about. Water evaporates from the surface of the Earth, rising, accumulating and condensing before returning to lakes and oceans in forms, such as rain, before beginning the process all over again. I don’t have to explain what rain is to you. You know rain . It’s a part of many of our daily lives, and among the most common stylistic elements in fiction. Considering its familiar nature, it’s surprising how little we know about how rain is created in videogames –and how widely these approaches can vary. VFX artist Aaron Miller speaks to me about how Fireblade…

FORZA HORIZON 3 Strikes a balance between arcade and realism, with a massive roster of cars. DIRT RALLY You can no longer buy Dirt 2 digitally, making Dirt Rally the de facto best rally game. TRACKMANIA 2: CANYON Enjoy the wild imagination of its community’s eccentric, twisting tracks. RIDGE RACER UNBOUNDED A bizarre racer, where you’re encouraged to crash into obstacles to go faster. ASSETTO CORSA Probably the best pure sim racer around, with meticulous attention to vehicle handling.…

1 A standard red dot sight is ideal for midrange engagement, but you can clip on scopes that are as long as the entire weapon for long-distance aiming. 2 If you want to hit moving targets at range easier you can upgrade the crossbow limb to throw bolts at much greater speeds. 3 The watch here tells you the time in-game, while the little blue light ignites to tell you when you’re visible, which is useful for stealth. 4 When you first find the crossbow you can only fire one bolt between reloads. Grab a loading canister, however, and you can shoot three.…

LEVEL: 3-5 Watch out for: Plate shortages – you’ve only got two, and you can’t throw them. Tip: Drop everything to grab the plates. LEVEL: 4-4 Watch out for: High winds across the bridges. It’s all too easy to lose your completed dishes. Tip: Exercise caution when you’re switching sides. LEVEL: 5-4 Watch out for: Those portals can waste valuable seconds. And pancakes are tricky to make. Tip: Chop the chocolate – it’s easy to forget about. LEVEL: 6-5 Watch out for: Well, you can hardly miss half the kitchen sinking every so often. Tip: Only fry meat just after the water has risen.…

It’s a deeply old-fashioned game – by design, of course It seems like a simple job. Travel to a nearby town and rescue a few villagers who have gotten themselves lost in the local coal mine. But when your rookie knight arrives in the snowy hamlet of Karthas, he learns the true horror of what has happened. Something terrible has been awakened in those deep, cavernous mines – something evil – and it’s a good thing the knight has brought his sword along with him. Chasm is a side-scrolling platformer in the Metroid mould, with games such as Castlevania, Zelda, and Spelunky coded into its DNA. The titular chasm is the mazelike network of tunnels that yawns beneath Karthas, from the dusty coal mine just below…

1 BOWLING Theater Square Alley is the place to go to knock down pins and acquire a chicken. 2 SHOGI On Senryo Avenue, find a game that’s like chess only I don’t really understand it. 3 MAHJONG Nakamichi Alley hosts a building full of people who are into moving tiles. 4 KARAOKE A bar on Pink Street North will let you fantasise about being a rock god. 5 OUTRUN You’ll want the SEGA arcade on Nakamichi Street. The other one has Space Harrier. 6 DISCO Become lord of the dancefloor as you bop though this tough minigame.…

If Dexterity Ball 3D is here representing the bulk of marble games on Steam – neon, space lasers, aggressive difficulty spikes – then Polyball represents a more modern style. It’s nice to look at and listen to, with levels set in forests and moody caves as well as, y’know, volcano hellscapes and wastelands. It’s full-featured and sits somewhere between Trackmania and minigolf. There’s multiplayer and support for custom maps, too. It’s let down by its camera and, although this’ll be more divisive, by difficulty – it made me realise that I sort of want a ball game without the pressure, right before making me hop up a series of slanted metal grates in a big brown canyon.…

1 FIRST TO 5GHZ The Core i7-8086K is Intel’s first CPU to hit 5GHz without user overclocking, though it’ll only reach this in single-core tasks. 2 GAMING KING The blistering clock speed of this chip means that it comfortably tops our performance charts for gaming. 3 MULTICORE MONSTER It may only have six cores compared to the eight of AMD’s flagship processor, but this still translates to impressive performance. 4 OVERCLOCKING You are likely to get slightly better results with this than with an 8700K but an all-core overclock to 5GHz is probably still the limit. INTEL CORE I7-8086K www.intel.com £380 MONITOR To mark the 40th anniversary of Intel’s landmark 8086 microprocessor, the company has released the limited edition 8086K, which is an overclocked version of the i7-8700K. With its 5GHz…

MOTHERBOARD Z370 Tomahawk MSI £130 This is a nice-looking bit of kit at a good price. Couple that with two M.2 slots, and it’s the perfect place to house that Core i5. PROCESSOR Core i5-8400 Intel £162 Better default gaming performance and a lower price puts this chip ahead of the AMD Ryzen 2600X. GRAPHICS CARD GTX 1070 SC Gaming ACX EVGA £370 Again, we’re making a saving this month on our choice of graphics card. This time you can expect a chunk of savings. COOLER MasterLiquid Lite 240 CoolerMaster £40 This 240mm, dual-fan, all-in-one liquid CPU cooler is ludicrously cheap, but performs well and stays quiet, too. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) @2666 Corsair £153 16GB is the minimum amount of RAM we’d recommend for a system of this…

Back in 2016, Final Fantasy XIV released its first ‘Deep Dungeon’, The Palace of the Dead. Featuring 200 randomised floors full of traps, curses and beasts for your party of four adventurers to challenge itself against, you never quite knew what you’d come up against. Patch 4.35 brings a new Deep Dungeon, Heaven-on-High, with new twists and a beautiful east Asian design aesthetic – albeit this time across just 100 floors. After being thoroughly impressed by The Palace of the Dead, I went into this patch expecting similar tales of near-death and derring-do – being bundled together with three other people of the exact same class, but still managing to scrape through by the skin of our teeth despite limited resources. It’s an incredibly hard act…

Seven years on, this is still a great immersive sim When I think of Human Revolution , I think of black and gold. Few big-budget games have such a distinctive look, but that’s part of what makes Eidos Montreal’s prequel so immediately striking. As a Deus Ex fan, I was sceptical when I heard a new game was in development. But then I saw those first screenshots, of a futuristic Detroit bathed in shades of black and gold, and knew the series was in good hands. “That’s the first thing I said when I started on the project,” said art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête when I interviewed him back in 2011. “I wanted the game to be very distinct. You see one screenshot and…

ANDY KELLY Why do we play games? I get asked that a lot. And my answer is: because they are there. NO MAN’S SKY  www.nomanssky.com No Man’s Sky has been given a new lease of life courtesy of its NEXT update. Improvements include more interesting planet generation, a reworked interface, an optional third-person view and, best of all, the addition of proper multiplayer. Inviting a friend to a cool planet you’ve found is a great feeling. YAKUZA 0  www.yakuza.sega.com The Yakuza series finally makes its debut on PC. Taking place on the streets of Tokyo and Osaka, this idiosyncratic action game fuses extreme violence with a dramatic and touching story. If you’ve always wondered why people go so crazy for the Yakuza games,thisistheperfect entry point into the series. OKAMI HD…

Jeremy Peel at PCGamesN published a great story in January 2018 about the internal strife and reappropriation that dogged Epic during its first post-Gears years. Things get complicated whenever you talk about massive corporate rescaling, but essentially, shortly after Fortnite’s announcement, the braintrust at Epic realised that the traditional business model of shipping a new game every two or three years was quickly becoming untenable. Epic looked at the ridiculous success of League of Legends – a game published by Riot, another independent company – and wanted to create something equally self-sustaining. And so it partnered with Tencent, the Chinese multimedia conglomerate, who purchased a 40 percent stake in the company. The goal from the start was to make Fortnite Epic’sfirstgames-asa-service initiative, to build a product that would generate cash…

TOM SENIOR Specialist in Moscow (in the post-apocalypse) Twitter @PCGLudo This month Battled bears, cultists and heat stroke to bring you our cover feature. PHILIPPA WARR Specialist in Space (specifically the bit located in Guildford) This month Was given an entire universe to explore. Chose to visit Hello Games to talk about their space game’s new update. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Detroit (in the dystopian robo-future) Twitter @ultrabrilliant This month Went back to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Yes, reader, he asked for this. FRASER BROWN Specialist in Eastern Europe (in the 1940s) Twitter @FraserIBrown This month Continued his ongoing campaign to write about every strategy game.…

Game jam Event Game release Esports PC Gamer 29 AUG-2 SEPT DREAMHACK MASTERS STOCKHOLM DreamHack’s esports spin-off pits 16 of the best Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams in the world against one another as they try to scoop a share of the $250,000 prize pool. The live event takes place in Stockholm’s Eriksson Globe arena and also forms part of the first Intel Grand Slam. 31 AUG - 3 SEP PAX WEST Seattle plays host to the West Coast arm of the bustling behemoth that is PAX. Don’t forget PC players can BYOC for a spot of LAN gaming. 1-15 SEPT MUSIC JAM Music takes centre stage as creators explore new approaches to music games. Expect anything from FPS musicals to Beethoven RPGs. 14 SEP SHADOW OF THE TOMB RAIDER Become…

REFLECTIONS Rain creates damp, reflective surfaces, like puddles or a trenchcoat’s ‘sheen’. The glossy edges and blurring needed to replicate this effect are expensive to calculate due to the need to ‘accumulate’ light from several angles. LIGHT REDUCTION When it rains and the sky darkens, the world has less light. Physically-based rendering now makes it easier to reuse assets under different lighting, but some previous approaches required textures to be radically changed! SO MUCH CODE Whether it’s raindrops, rain sheets, or splashes, VFX and particle systems require coding assistance. Code to calculate where the ground is so splashes are properly generated, layer raindrop effects in order, and so on. DYNAMICISM Turning rain effects on and off can be easy, but having the world itself (from clothing to city streets) transition…

Steel Division 2 doesn’t just put a single division under your control. It gives you command of an entire army. Set during Operation Bagration, the World War 2 Soviet campaign, the battles are connected by huge campaign maps. It’s an RTS housed inside a turn-based wargame, with everything recreated on a 1:1 scale, from the size of the tanks to the maps. One minute you’ll be commanding tens of thousands across 150x100km warzones, the next you’ll be so close to the action that you’ll see tank treads churning up dirt as they charge towards the enemy. Eugen Systems’ game director, Alexis Le Dressay, sends in columns of Soviet vehicles, clogging the arteries that flow into Minsk. They are on their way to liberate the city, but only if they can…

It’s not often that you hear about indie games coming out of China. But one such title is Eastward , the debut game from Shanghai developer Pixpil. A retro-style adventure, it’s set in a dystopia where the population is sparse and monsters are on the rampage. A digger called John meets a girl named Sam and joins her on a quest to save their world. Pixpil may have started out as a tiny studio (with just three people in 2015) but it has huge ambitions. A game that combines ancient customs with fears of the future, Eastward drops you into an underground metropolis of densely woven streets, bars and shops. The natural world found outside the city limits is revealed to be just as dark and dangerous,…

Zone of the Enders 2 is still impossibly cool. It should not be this cool, because 15 years have passed since its mech designs, anime cutscenes and laser particle effects first wowed on the PS2. It should not be this cool because it stars a character named Dingo Egret, and the word dingo may be spoken more in ZOE2 than in any other game in history. But here we are: this lavish remaster looks remarkably sharp as Zone of the Enders 2 arrives on PC for the first time, and it’s the best reason I’ve had to put on a VR headset all year. I spent four hours learning how to pilot Jehuty, Dingo’s codpieced mech, in a new first-person VR mode designed for…

JARED ON HANZO “I don’t even care to play him [now] – he’s almost too easy. Easy to avoid flankers by just leaping away from them. Easy to melt tanks with Storm Arrows. Easy to win duels against any DPS character, except another Hanzo. Easy to teamwipe with the Zarya-plus-Hanzo ultimate combo.” NICO DEYO ON MERCY “Valkyrie isn’t a bad ult per se, but it lacks the impact and character that old Resurrection did. It’s an easy ult to charge up quickly to boost the team healing or DPS, but its overall power and ability to turn fights is not even close to what Resurrection was.” NICOLE WESTBROOK SMITH ON SYMMETRA “If they’d just changed her right and left-click and her turrets, she would’ve been fine. Her teleport is [still…

This month’s review section promises a showdown: your spare time versus not one, not two, not three, but FOUR games good enough to earn a coveted Editor’s Choice badge. Until reading through our writers’ verdicts I’d been torn between the gleeful grind for garb that is Monster Hunter: World (a potential replacement for my erstwhile Destiny habit) and finally finishing The Banner Saga series of games. Then Phil started extolling Yakuza 0’s virtues and Chris became absolutely enamoured of Dead Cells… I think the sublime ridiculousness of Yakuza might just have tipped the balance. Just don’t let me re-read They’re Back. The siren call of Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed might be too much to resist again. LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK Email us via letters@pcgamer.com with your reactions,…

If you’ve ever woken up after a wild night out and cringed as a friend recounted every embarrassing thing you did in excruciating detail, you’ll likely resonate with Unavowed . Except the main character didn’t drink too many caipirinhas at happy hour and get thrown out of a club for being sick on the dancefloor; they were possessed by a demon who used their body to go on a murderous rampage across New York City. Unavowed begins as the demon is being forcibly extracted from you on a rain-lashed rooftop. In this dramatic intro you decide whether you’re a man or a woman and choose from three backgrounds – actor, cop or bartender – each of which has its own origin story and unlocks dialogue options later…

DREDGE CLAPPER Where to get it: That bell Sparr warns you not to pull later on? Ignore him. Give it to: A high-level Varl who can withstand the aggro increase for the huge strength boost. TRYGGVI’S NECKLACE Where to get it: When your eccentric spearman stops to chat, hear him out. Give it to: Well, Tryggvi. He deserves a chance to showcase his talents. GOLD BRIDLE Where to get it: Pause by Arberrang’s merchant stalls on the second day. Give it to: Useful for anyone, but it fits a horseborn perfectly. Canary’s a good call. MALA PRAYER BEADS Where to get it: You will gain these after a chinwag with Zefr. Give it to: Any ranged units who could use the armour, resistance and accuracy increase.…

In This is the Police , Jack Boyd spent his last days as Freeburg police chief in a frenzy of corruption, trying his best to keep the city clean while also working with the local mafia and collecting as many kickbacks as he could. In an all-too-realistic move, the sequel sees him evade justice and slip into a brand-new job advising the sheriff of a small town’s police force. Which, it turns out, is not an easy retirement at all. In theory, this is a strong setup for a story. The snowy town of Sharpwood has a Fargo-esque vibe that serves as a nice change of pace from the big city of Freeburg. In practice, however, the game has a penchant for rambling Tarantino-like dialogue that goes…

The first thing you do is beat up a gang of street thugs. The second thing? Before the crime drama unfolds, before a real estate turf war earns you hundreds of millions of yen, before you battle your way through the Japanese underworld, you sing karaoke. You tap your way through a rhythm action minigame; the dingy bar transforming into a concert stage as series lead Kiryu imagines himself rocking out to an ’80s power ballad. Welcome to Yakuza 0, ostensibly an open world action game, but one that blends arcade-style brawling with a visual novel’s languid conversations, throws in a selection of weird and wonderful minigames, and wraps it all up in a world where the sublime meets the ridiculous and the ridiculous is sublime. Where one minute you’re…

ROCCAT HORDE AIMO www.roccat.com £90 ‘Membranical’ hybrid keyswitches are the key selling point here. They result in a cheaper, quieter keyboard that still feels more responsive than rubber membrane models. You also get RGB backlighting and plenty of extra buttons. It’s a shame about the plasticky design, though. 75 % CORSAIR VENGEANCE RGB PRO DDR4 www.corsair.com £220 Corsair’s new RAM ups the ante for RGB RAM with ten LEDs in each module. This is achieved without any need for external wiring and can be controlled using Corsair’s iCUE software. With plenty of speed and capacity options, this set is a natural choice for a true RGB build. 85 % GIGABYTE AORUS H5 HEADSET www.gigabyte.com £60 This headset offers RGB lighting and a comfortable over-ear design. A detachable microphone also helps on the practicality…

MOTHERBOARD Strix X470-F Gaming Asus £180 Get the most from the new AMD Ryzen 2700X with this matching X470 motherboard that’s packed with features. PROCESSOR Ryzen 7 2700X AMD £290 Easy to overclock and with huge performance out of the box, AMD’s new flagship CPU is the one to go for. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce GTX 1080Ti Turbo Asus £700 Prices of GTX 1080 Ti’s don’t seem to have dropped as much as other cards but you’re still saving a decent amount. COOLER Kraken X62 NZXT £129 The Kraken is the culmination of three of our favourite things: an infinity mirror, a 280mm radiator and slick braided cooling. MEMORY Vengeance LED RGB 32GB @3200 Corsair £392 Ryzen is the one processor that does benefit hugely from higher-frequency memory. This kit is…

I’m the most casual football fan there is, only following the sport when there’s a tournament on. This year I got hooked on the World Cup and felt the urge, for the first time since playing FIFA 96 on the Mega Drive, to get into a football game. FIFA 18 is surprisingly easy to pick up. After an evening spent getting to grips with basic passing, defending and shooting, I enjoyed diving into more advanced skills such as feints, flicks and stepovers. There’s an impressive amount of nuance in the simulation, although I do find defending tough, which longtime FIFA fans have taken issue with, too. DREAM TEAM The first thing I did, in the official Russia World Cup mode, was take Scotland to victory. As…

MIRROR In the bathroom you’ll find a not-so-subtle clue that Jensen isn’t totally cool with his recently augmented robobody. DESK The desk in Jensen’s bedroom is littered with dismantled watches and electronics. Gotta have a symbolic hobby. BOOKS A book on cybernetic prosthetics sits next to Jensen’s PC, which is essentially the user manual for his new limbs. FURNITURE Jensen’s furniture is tastefully ornate. He may be a cold, augmented cyberwarrior, but he has a favoured aesthetic.…

Okay, who was searching ‘butthole’ on the work PC? IT are asking difficult questions. It’s the same great content, but have we considered making the fonts more fun? That we’re the best website isn’t in doubt, so why not add a couple of trophies for good measure? PC gaming is hardcore, and that means blood. We’re cowards for not admitting this. Not enough is currently made of the fact that joining the PC Gamer Club makes you cool.…

he story of Fortnite begins in a moment of incredible optimism. Epic Games had just closed the book on Gears of War 3, thus wrapping up the most profitable and culturally resonant boom period of the company. They were leaving that publishing deal with Microsoft behind to chart a new path with a cartoony, Minecraft-lite co-op shooter called Fortnite(then stylized as FORTnITE). It was announced via a short teaser in the middle of the 2011 Video Game Awards. The perpetually breezy Cliff Bleszinski took to the stage to offer a few scant details, saying, “We’ve had amazing success with games like Gears of Warand InfinityBlade thisyear, but we decided it was time to switch things up a little bit and do something different and fun. Imagine a world where you…

Tespite its protracted development cycle, the buzz surrounding the game had always been positive. It’s strange to read Game Informer’s glowing cover story four years later – especially when you consider that Fortnite’s eventual Early Access release was still three years away – but it looked good! It was in this feature that EpicannouncedFortnitewouldinclude Diablo-style loot, an RPG progression framework, and most importantly, be free-to-play. Rob Zacny’s impressions at PCGamesN included his thoughts on a team-based multiplayer mode that felt like a “work-in-progress.” Truly, nobody discovered the potential of competitive Fortniteuntil the moment Battle Royalewas released.…

Okay, now we’re getting to it. In mid-September, Epic released a PvP module for Fortnite, titled, unscrupulously, Fortnite Battle Royale. At the time PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was tearing up the Twitch and Steam charts, making a compelling case for being the most popular game in the world. Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene is one of the key figures of the battle royale genre (he was personally responsible for the Arma mods that initially made the mode popular) and the idea that Epic might be encroaching on PUBG’sturf caught developer, Bluehole’s attention. “Fortnite may bereplicating the experience for which PUBG isknown,” read a press release from Bluehole, which also threatened “further action.” “We have also noticed that Epic Games references PUBG inthe promotion of Fortnite totheir community and in communications with the press,” continued…

At E3, Epic took its latest victory lap with the FortniteCelebrity Pro-Am, a tournament where popular streamers teamed up with notable celebrities to take on the field at the Bank of America Stadium in Los Angeles. Ninja won, because of course he did, along with his celebrity partner, the popular masked music producer and DJ, Marshmello. The event garnered an astonishing 1.46 million concurrent viewers, which is better ratings than most cable dramas could hope for. Late 2018 will bring yet more entries to the battle royale genre (even Call of Duty’s getting involved with BlackOps 4’s Blackout mode) - perhaps one will be a challenger for the crown. But right now the future is blindingly bright for Fortnite.…

FORTNITE is free to play, and the microtransactions are entirely cosmetic, featuring no random chance loot box mechanics. An in-game item store sells skins for characters, pickaxes, and gliders, as well as a variety of emotes. Problem is, the coolest skins can cost up to $20 and many cannot be earned through in-game challenges. There are always a few players can earn by completing season challenges, though dozens more cosmetics are locked away behind the purchase of a Battle Pass. These cost just under $10, and give players access to weekly challenges that, when completed, go towards their Battle Pass level. As the Battle Pass level increases, cosmetic rewards are unlocked at specific tiers. Fortnite’s microtransactions and cosmetics are currently not pay-to-win.…

PUBG has a system somewhat similar to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive – except it’s confusing and kind of terrible. In-game cosmetics lurk inside crates which can be purchased for BP, a currency you earn by doing well in matches. Each week, you can buy six crates for BP but their cost scales exponentially. Buy a crate and you have a chance to earn one of several specific kinds of crate with cosmetics inside. Some can be opened for free, others need keys that cost $2.50 USD a pop. And that’s to say nothing of the Steam market options. An event pass launched with the Sanhok map. $10 nets you access to special challenges and a reward track but players have criticised the rewards, XP caps and progression. PUBG’s microtransactions and cosmetics…

PERFORMANCE PUBG’s performance has improved significantly since it first launched on Early Access. While there’s still some room for improvement, our performance analysis indicates that PUBG runs rather well on a variety of CPUs and GPUs. It is, however, a more demanding game than Fortnite. At minimum, PUBG requires a Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB / AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB suited up with a Intel Core i3-4340 / AMD FX-6300. You can squeeze by with less, but you’ll suffer for it. UPDATES PUBG is consistently getting updates that add maps, guns, and much-needed fixes. While it’s no longer in Early Access, there’s still a lot being done. The devs have also been quick to respond to feedback – especially re: microtransactions.…

DERRICK KNOW WHERE TO LAND “One tip is if you really want to win, don’t land at populated areas like Tilted Towers.” I’m with you there, Derrick. Granted, almost anywhere I go I die, but Tilted Towers is quarantine zone for the most reckless, confident, and dangerous Fortnite players out there. I’ll keep a wide berth. AUSTIN THE NEXT NINJA This guy doesn’t only know how and when to build bases, he has a knack for building an audience too. “One tip for winning is you gotta like get a feel for building, and I’m going to start a Twitch account so I may be streaming soon. I recommend start out with a small base, and once the circle gets smaller you kind of want to build bigger. And kind…

SHOUT OUT TO HITMAN 2 DEVELOPER IO FOR MAKING SPYCRAFT IRRELEVANT The Spy has some good news and some bad news. Here’s the good news: The Spy met a friendly genie and now The Spy actually does get a penny every time a game producer says the words ‘ambitious’ or ‘awesome’. Here’s more good news: The Spy is now utterly, unfathomably wealthy. The Spy’s wallet causes nearby billionaires to twist and fade away like stars viewed through the gravitational lensing effect of some vast unseen interstellar mass – and the first time Jeff Bezos hisses and recoils from your sheer affluence, man, it feels good. Here’s the bad news: this situation makes it very hard to be a spy. The ceaseless excitable nothing-speak surrounding Bethesda’s space…

BUS SIMULATOR 18 Drive a bus around a city picking up passengers, printing tickets and giving back the correct change. DEADSTICK It’s not out yet, but I’m excited about it. Pilot planes across a wilderness, battling the elements. EURO TRUCK SIMULATOR 2 Our favourite sim. Deliver cargo around a massive, atmospheric recreation of mainland Europe and the UK. SPINTIRES In this sim you’re tasked with driving giant, unwieldy Soviet ATVs through incredibly rugged, muddy landscapes.…

MAJOR TIMESINKS THIS IS STILL AN ARENA SHOOTER AT ITS CORE While the PC version of Yakuza 0 took up the majority of my month, I did find time to investigate a couple of games with the potential to become major timesinks in the not-too-distant future. The first is Quake Champions, id’s attempt to dress up an old-school arena shooter in a more modern hero shooter’s clothes. I’m enjoying it a lot. Despite offering different characters with unique skills and stats, this is still an arena shooter at its core. You speed around maps, picking up weapons, ammo and armour, and blasting people to death in frantic firefights. The second is Total War: Warhammer, which I’ve been meaning to play for years. I’ve started a campaign as the Dwarfs, and…

I’m meeting with Dominik Abé, creative director of Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and founder of Mimimi Productions. I admit I’m only halfway through the campaign. “It’s pretty difficult,” I say. “Sorry,” he laughs. He needn’t apologise. Shadow Tactics is inspired by old-school, uncompromising stealth games like Commandos and Desperados . Given the extent to which Shadow Tactics wears its influences on its sleeve, Mimimi seems like the perfect developer to resurrect the Desperados series. I’m shown a partial playthrough of one level of the upcoming game, as new character Hector is rescued by returning series regular Cooper during a bar brawl. Having dispatched their attackers in a cutscene, the pair must slip past…

Set within a fictional operating system called HypnOS, Hypnospace Outlaw is, initially at least, a game about policing a futuristic internet. But in this future, the ’90s web aesthetic never went away. Browse this faux-web’s many odd pages and you’ll see three-frame gifs, tiled backgrounds, low-res photos, garish text and under construction signs. You’re an enforcer for Hypnospace, a corporation that runs this retrofuturistic internet, and you’re paid for finding content that breaks the rules and censoring it. You get an early taste of this when the copyright holder for a cartoon detective (and also a fish) wants you to search the web for people using the character without permission. And when you find a page full of cute kids’ drawings of the character, you inform…

OH SHIT, A BEAR! I SEE IT FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A FOREST, SILHOUETTED IN MOONLIGHT. IT SCARES AWAY A PACK OF WOLVES WITH A ROAR, AND THEN CROSSES THE ROAD TO REVEAL ITS MASSIVE, MUTATED BULK. IT COULD EAT A PICKUP TRUCK.IT VANISHES INTO THE TREES, AND I REALISE THAT I’M ABOUT TO GO IN AFTER IT... There was a mutant bear in Metro: Last Light too, but this one is much bigger. In fact, everything about Exodus feels much bigger. The game is moving out of the Moscow underground and into the wilderness on a four-season journey into the east. The particular forest this bear lives in is a wide corridor full of squirrelly little side paths and elevated networks of wooden pathways. As I move up…

2011 No Man’s Sky begins life, although at this early stage it’s a spare time project called Skyscraper which Sean Murray is working on solo. 2012 After Joe Danger 2 ships, Murray goes full-time on No Man’s Sky and other members of Hello Games move onto the project. 2013 No Man’s Sky’s first teaser trailer goes live. Six months later, No Man’s Sky makes its E3 debut during the PlayStation conference. 2016 The game releases in August. Three months later the Foundation update adds content such as base-building, new modes and more. 2017 March’s Pathfinder brings vehicles and permadeath, while August’s Atlas Rises fleshes out story and makes other players visible as orbs.…

Overwatch’s new player-rating Endorsements system has, Blizzard claims, led to a dramatic reduction in toxic behaviour. But what do they actually mean? GOOD TEAMMATE You’re a healer who remembers to heal people or a tank stays with the team. You observe spawn room protocol, like watching people dance. SHOT-CALLER You, as you’re playing Zarya or Ana, say “group up” once or twice during the match and sync up your ultimate effectively with your team’s Genji. SPORTSMANSHIP You try to capture the point as Mercy in the last minute, while everybody else on your team is busy trading emotes with the other team’s Doomfist.…

JAMES DAVENPORT Specialist in Monsters, hunters Currently playing Monster Hunter: World This month Knew how/where to find fantastic beasts. PHILIPPA WARR Specialist in Puzzle boxes Currently playing GNOG This month Tried to escape the office by prodding everything. Spoiler: use the lift button. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Law, lore Currently playing Unavowed This month Discovered you can’t kill a demonic hangover with Lucozade and bacon. TOM SYKES Specialist in Arm day, pants Currently playing Muscle World This month Forgot his gym kit and had to do the Traversal Across Ceiling class in his underwear. CHRIS SCHILLING Specialist in Agonising journeys Currently playing The Banner Saga 3 This month Faced down a concerning snake-pocalypse. PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in Excuses for karaoke Currently playing Yakuza 0 This month Finally got paid to…

STATS AND YOU Scrolls let you upgrade one of three stats, but remember: the biggest health boosts come from improving your weakest attributes. DAMAGE CONTROL After you take damage, part of your health is highlighted in yellow. You can earn some of this health back by doing damage to enemies as quickly as possible. GOOD TIMING Early stages have doors that lock after a certain amount of time. These are a great source of cells – prioritise them when you’re working on an important upgrade.…

ELEMENTALS One character you meet meddles with powerful magic and is cursed to become an endlessly burning fire spirit. JINN They don’t grant wishes, but do live in bottles. Jinn of note include the leader of the Unavowed and your companion, Mandana. MER-MEN Your second case with the Unavowed involves this massive, fishy military general from another plane of reality. GHOSTS You encounter ghosts regularly on your travels through New York City, but only one companion can actually talk to them.…

1 Professionalism, represented by the star icon, is a measure of a cop’s experience. 2 High negotiation lets this cop defuse a situation without getting anyone hurt. 3 High intelligence means this cop is especially good at investigations. 4 The beer icons show this cop is drunk. In my experience this means he’ll crash his squad car a lot. 5 Equipment like batons and pepper spray give a cop extra options when responding to crimes. 6 This officer is wearing his hat. This means he respects me. No really, that’s actually a thing.…

KIRYU BRAWLER Your usual punches, kicks and throws, with the twist that you get more moves when you’re a bit drunk. RUSH Fast punches and snappy dodging make this is a useful style for taking on strong, lumbering enemies. BEAST Attack like you’re holding a grudge, walk like you’ve got constipation. Beast mode is a heavy hitting style. MAJIMA THUG It’s a lot like Kiryu’s Brawler style, but with some added eye poking. Majima fights dirty when given the chance. BREAKER Inspired by breakdancing. Spin and flip into long combos, but remember to strike a pose. SLUGGER You know what? Screw fancy brawling. Why not just beat the shit out of someone with a baseball bat?…

I think it was level two where I swore at the screen and quit to the desktop in this (otherwise lovely) puzzle game, and that usually doesn’t happen until, at least, the fifth or sixth stage. It was only by reading about the game online that I would later learn what I had missed: a tiny, yet vital, platform almost completely obscured from sight. A Wish’s central system sees you raising and lowering the game’s many platforms, in order to create pathways leading from each stage’s entrance to the exit. Unfortunately, A Wish throws you straight in at the deep end, requiring what seem like advanced tactics nearly immediately. To circle back to that missing platform, it’s never inferred that the game is going to hide such things from you.…

Dexterity Ball 3D’s levels are time trial obstacle courses where you fling a space ball around a winding track trying to reach a series of markers. This is somewhat a matter of rolling and jumping, and otherwise about activating the right power-ups – a magnet to make you stick to surfaces, for example. Acceleration is unpredictable and slippery, an issue compounded by all of the game’s other mechanics and by a frequently panicked camera. It’s like being strapped to a ball bearing inside one of those plastic mazes you might get from a big Christmas cracker. There’s something to be said for that if you’re into masochistic platformers, but you’d be forgiven for wanting a smoother ride.…

For years 144Hz monitors have ruled the roost, but recently we’ve seen a new generation of 240Hz monitors hit the market. Are they the next must-have for competitive gamers? I gathered up five of the most popular options to find out. Q&A What about framerate caps? Limiting the appeal of these displays is that some games are capped at framerates lower than 240Hz. For instance Titanfall 2 is limited to 144fps while Star Wars Battlefront 2 is limited to 200fps. Do these monitors include Freesync or G-Sync? AMD and Nvidia’s adaptive sync technologies work at up to 240Hz, and indeed all the monitors here feature one of these. Dictionary TN – The displays use TN-type panels. These have the worst viewing angles and colour accuracy but the fastest response of…

MOTHERBOARD B360M-DS3H Gigabyte £70 It lacks overclocking options, but the new B360 chipset is far cheaper than the Z370 and is perfect for this budget build. PROCESSOR Core i3-8100 Intel £105 A great processor for out-of-the-box gaming performance. Opt for the AMD Ryzen 1300X if you’d like to overclock. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce GTX 1060 3GB Inno3D £184 The rumours were true and graphics card prices are starting to fall. Our pick for this build is bit cheaper than last time. COOLER Hyper 212 Evo CoolerMaster £25 We’ve dropped the controller from this build and added in a better CPU cooler, for a quieter, cooler system. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 8GB (2x4GB) @2400MHz Corsair £89 DDR4 prices are still high, however this Corsair pair is a good value option. POWER SUPPLY 500BQ…

DIG OUT YOUR OLD GAMES 1 If you bought your old games online there’s a high chance they have already been patched and updated to work on modern systems, but the collection of CDs at the back of the wardrobe? Those will take some more work. REGISTER THEM ONLINE 2 Most people don’t know this, but you can sometimes register your older games on services like Steam, Origin and Battle.net. If the code is recognised you’ll be rewarded with a fully patched digital version, letting you skip the next step. DOWNLOAD THE LATEST PATCHES 3 If that doesn’t work, you’ll need to find and install the most recent official patches manually. This can be tricky if the official site has shut down. Check the fansites, they’ll likely have put up…

One of the many highlights of the Yakuza series is its minigames. In Yakuza 0 alone, you can go bowling, sing karaoke, play OutRun , and even run a cabaret club. While many of these are entertaining, most are throwaway distractions – cute slice-of-life moments designed to reinforce the idea that Kazuma Kiryu is a human being with interests and hobbies outside of beating people up. Not mahjong, though. Mahjong is a deep pit from which there is no escape; a terrifyingly complicated and intricate pastime designed to fool you into thinking you could possibly become good at it. It is a deceptive creature that delights in toying with your hopes and dreams. I love it, and I’ve played…

When it first launched, Fortnite Battle Royale was an empty, cartoonish PUBG impression. Being free didn’t hurt, but there wasn’t much incentive to make the leap from one to the other. But a string of updates and the discovery of an exploit would quickly change Fortnite’s direction and how it was perceived. On October 26, 2017, Epic released update 1.8, a bundle of small fixes, changes, and additions wrapped in a thematic Halloween package. A key component of the update was the addition of pumpkin rocket launchers, an innocuous reskin of the existing launcher. No one is sure who discovered the exploit, but perhaps because the pumpkin rockets were so much bigger than the usual RPGs, players experimented with leaping onto them as they passed by. Stupidly, it worked, leading…

PERFORMANCE FORTNITE is still in beta, so performance can fluctuate as Epic makes adjustments. Our analysis suggests the minimum specs of an Intel HD 4000 and Core i3 2.4 Ghz might be a tad too low for acceptable frame rates, while epic quality tends to crush all but the best systems. There’s some fine tuning to be done. Still, Fortnite will run just fine on most systems as long as you keep its graphics settings within modest ranges. UPDATES FORTNITE has settled into a pattern of fortnightly updates bringing new weapons, items, skins, and tweaks. The map has also undergone several changes, with the addition of several zones on its western half and a desert biome in the southeast.…

It’s a tough question. PUBG has map variety, while Fortnite’ssingle map can get quite boring after a while. On the flip side, Fortnite’s weapons and tools are inventive and wacky, whereas PUBG’s arsenal is about nuance not excitement. If you fancy a more arcadey shooter with a challenging but satisfying base-buildingcomponent, Fortnite isthe obvious choice. If you tend toward shooters that are slow and tense, or militarysims, PUBG istheway togo. The reality is that either game is worth your time and both can be enjoyed alongside the other. If you’re still on the fence, start with Fortnite. Being free-to-play means you can try it out with no risk and get a feel for whether the battle royale genre is your cup of tea. It can be a tad overwhelming when…