Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i PC Gamer

This issue, we’re looking back at some of the most iconic games PC gaming has seen – games that shaped the history of the medium. But I didn’t want it to be purely historical, because ultimately PC gaming is as much about us players as the games themselves. Personal computers give us personal experiences. So this feature reflects us as a team, dwelling not just on the games, but on our relationship with them – the ways they’ve shaped us as PC gamers. I hope you’re inspired to think on those that have shaped you, too, and, in the warm glow of nostalgia, can forgive us for our more out-there picks… ROBIN VALENTINE Specialist in Defining PC Gamer magazine every month Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Was reminded of what he…

HIGHS Steam In December Steam registered its highest-ever number of concurrent players: 24,776,635 PC gamers. Pacifist panda WoWplayer DoubleAgent reached the new level cap of 60 purely by picking millions of flowers. New Elder Scrolls ? Bethesda tweeted an image of a map along with the date, 4E 182, which is before the events of Skyrim. LOWS Cyberdunk CD Projket’s woes continue with a class-action lawsuit launched by investors, and Poland’s consumer protection agency is investigating. Pogchamp After the man whose face was the popular Pogchamp emote called for “civil unrest” during the Capitol riot, Twitch removed the emote. DMRZone Call of Duty: Warzone players are angry about DMR weapon domination and infinite stim glitches.…

Time travel, international espionage, explosions – not exactly what you expect from a game about the sinking of the Titanic. But Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, a ’90s FMV adventure made by a little studio in Knoxville, Tennessee, isn’t your typical Titanic story. It’s definitely bolder (and maybe even more ambitious?) than more famous Titanic stories, tying the events on the ship into other historical moments from the 21st century. Released in 1996, Titanic: Adventure Out of Time was a moderate success, but it wasn’t enough to save developer CyberFlix’s failing publisher GTE Entertainment. Then James Cameron came along. Luckily CyberFlix was able to keep the rights to the game and re-release it in the wake of the blockbuster film, in perhaps the most fortuitously timed game release in history.…

Horror reimaginings of Arthurian legend seem to be surprisingly popular at the moment. Between this Early Access roguelike and last issue’s cover star King Arthur: Knight’s Tale, you might start to think that something about recent events has gotten developers thinking about how British legends getting corrupted into monstrous forms. Ahem. Tainted Grail: Conquest has an odd legacy. It’s based on a board game, though it’s not a direct adaptation, merely borrowing the setting and a few gameplay concepts. It started life as an Early Access-friendly mode within in-development single-player RPG Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon for testing that game’s features, before growing in scope enough to be split off into its own standalone game. And if any of that confused you, you’ll definitely struggle to understand the set-up for…

TRAIN STATION Freeman arrives in City 17 by train, meeting oppressed citizens and enslaved Vortigaunts, all watched over by the ever-present digitised mug of Wallace Breen, the human face of the Combine invasion force. CITY SQUARE Emerging from the train station, Freeman gets his first glimpse of the Citadel, the sinister headquarters of the Combine. The city’s distinctive Eastern European architecture is especially prominent here too. CITADEL Freeman eventually makes his way into the Citadel, confronting Breen and his alien lackeys. Inside we see the Combine forces being created, including a production line of War of the Worlds-inspired Striders. SECRET LAB One of the few safe places in City 17. Here Freeman is reunited with Isaac Kleiner, a colleague from Black Mesa. And if you pay attention you’ll learn a…

SO MUCH OF WHAT I’VE COME TO LOVE ABOUT PC GAMING IS PRESENT IN EVE ONLINE I’ll never forget my first real fight against another player in EVE Online– it had taken me, a fresh-faced noobie at the time, almost a month to scrounge up the ISK to buy a beloved Catalyst destroyer, and now I was about to lose it fighting a player in a vastly more deadly assault frigate. As my shields evaporated in a single volley, I began shaking so severely from the adrenaline rush that I couldn’t accurately use my mouse anymore. Dying in EVE Online is intense. Unlike most other MMOs, where you can simply respawn with all your stuff and carry on with your quest, a destroyed ship is gone forever. That loss stings…

Today’s PC gamers are constantly feeding YouTube and Twitch with game footage, but back in 1995, capturing our screens was hardly thought of. Though even then there existed seeds of 2000s machinima. One such seed was 3D Movie Maker, a program that empowered kids to spend afternoons animating car crashes and alien abductions. It’s one of Microsoft’s best bits of ’90s software, recognising the potential for real-time 3D rendering as a creative tool. It’s also bizarre. There was an idea back in the ’90s that modern software should map its functions onto the most obvious metaphors possible. In Microsoft Bob, for instance, programs were organised into the rooms of a house.PC Gamer’s ’90s demo discs similarly featured adventure game-style interfaces. These virtual spaces couldn’t have boring old tutorials – Turing…

It’s easy to forget about where we came from in PC gaming, especially when we’re arguing over gigabytes of memory and teraflops of performance. But there’s actually a lot that we can glean from the annals of GPU history – the colossal leaps in power that GPUs have taken in under 25 years goes some way to explaining why today’s top graphics card costs $1,499. You have to walk before you can run, and there were many attempts to nail an image resolution of just 800x600 before anyone could dream up the pixel count required for the latest games at 4K. Yet you’d also be surprised by just how many features so prevalent in modern GPUs were first introduced back at the dawn of the industry. But let’s start right…

If the fragmentation of your PC games libraries makes your gamer sensibilities short-circuit, then GOG Galaxy’s launcher could be the answer. The DRM-free store’s gaming platform can be used as a pretty frontend for gathering your Steam, Epic, Origin, Uplay and even PlayStation and Xbox games into one easily navigated library. 1 libraries Some games aren’t supported by GOG Galaxy, but you can get open-source plugins to integrate those too. 2 connected Once you’ve your account, GOG Galaxy quickly scans your library and adds all the appropriate box art. 3 games You can from filter across your all your libraries by genre, platform, and any custom tags you’ve added. It helps you find stuff later. 4 activity This area among shows your friends across all your linked platforms, including time…

And so, here we are, we’ve finally come to the end of IO Interactive’s so-called World of Assassination trilogy, which began with the Danish developer’s first Hitman reboot back in 2016. These are some of the best systems-driven stealth games on PC, and Hitman 3 tops the series off with a superb collection of levels – some of which are among the best in the entire series. This is a spiritual and mechanical continuation of the previous two games, but IO still has a few surprises up its sleeve. And one level in particular might just be the studio’s masterpiece. The beauty of Hitman is studying these big, intricate levels I’m in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Berlin. Spindly lasers and strobing spotlights sweep across a shadowy dancefloor,…

I have built a lot of cities in games over the years, and I’ve given my citizens plenty of reasons to flee them. In Cities: Skylines, I flooded their homes in liquid poo. In Surviving Mars, I left them to suffocate. In Anno 1800 – and this is the one that’s actually left me most ashamed – I failed to provide them with enough sausages. Airborne Kingdom, however, is the first city builder where I’ve lost people because the city was leaning too much. Physics ends up being an excellent replacement for terrain Before this became a review, my plan was to play an hour of Airborne Kingdomto get some gifs, but instead it ended up stealing most of a day, with me finally leaving my floating metropolis at around…

There’s a weird reputation to games made in RPGmaker. The game engine’s is known for spawning basic clunky demakes of classic RPGs, but also cult horror hits like Yume Nikki and Lisa. The RPGmaker scene has dwindled over the years, making Omori feel like the ghost of a bygone era. But even though seeing the game’s blocky visuals is like a blast from the past, this psychological RPG has all the makings of being a modern cult classic. Omorifollows the childhood antics of a group of kids during the summer break. The game is split into two realms: the dream world, where the group is searching for their missing friend, and the real world, where their regular lives play out. Led by a stone-faced boy called Omori, the group has…

You’d hardly know that Loco Motive was created in just a fortnight for the AdventureX game jam, as it tells a measured, comedic murder mystery, brought to life with colourful characters, witty dialogue and puzzles that hit the sweet spot when it comes to difficulty. More of a parody than it is a faithful murder mystery True to the title, the game takes place on a luxury steam train owned by the wealthy Lady Unterwald, who has come aboard to make a speech to her assembled family and employees. Naturally, she pegs it before said speech has even begun, and it’s left to her personal lawyer Arthur Ackerman to solve her grisly murder, by retrieving the will he so carelessly loses at the start of the game. As Arthur, you’ll…

Sometimes a game will reveal the most unexpected facets of a player’s character. Two of these become apparent to me playing 80 Days. Firstly: being forced to prepare for a long trip in no time at all is like ‘Anxiety Dream: The Game’. Secondly: I’d be quite happy playing a valet simulator that rewarded me for impeccably packed luggage. Extra points for socks stored in shoes or expansive use of tissue paper. We don’t even need to travel anywhere. It’s a vivid game, that feels thick with alternative choices Inkle’s 80 Dayshas some of that, in that I’m forced to select chattels and fit them into our limited luggage space. And like everything else in the game, it’s a trade off. You can buy more suitcases, of course, but then…

This one makes the cut because time travel is still a form of travel. It’s a bright, bold, chunky 3D platformer that’s overstuffed with Nintendo-like ideas – a Kickstarter game that crams in every single influence imaginable. Sometimes it feels like a jumble – the opening levels of Mafia Town are the platformer equivalent of a batteries and USB stick drawer. But there’s so much love for an evaporating genre here it’s difficult not to be moved by the pull of the developer’s enthusiasm. It’s never as polished as the titles that inspired it – I feel like I’m floating through the world, rather than inhabiting it – but A Hat In Time is too pleased with its existence for me to care.…

I am World War II’s biggest jackass. For one thing, I’m terrible about firearm safety – the main problem being that if I have a firearm, I always want to be firing it, sometimes into people’s arms. Other times I hold my sidearm next to a person’s head while they’re talking and empty the magazine into the wall behind them, because I find it funny. Or I shoot at my own feet. Or I pull the pin from a grenade and toss it straight up. Anything to pass the time while Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond’s NPCs talk and talk. IT’S POSSIBLE TO PICK UP AND THROW JUST ABOUT ANY OBJECT IN THIS VR SHOOTER For the most part, Above and Beyond enables my bad behaviour. It’s possible to…

Have you ever played a game that felt like it was made just for you? I don’t mean one that you enjoyed a lot, or that zoned in on a specific interest of yours. I mean a game that seems to have been designed only after the developers conducted a disturbingly invasive investigation of your life. I ask because, yes, that’s how this feels to me. Here’s the thing: I try very hard to enjoy videogames, but videogames fight me on this with surprising regularity. My main obstacle is time, of which I have very little. With a full-time job, a family and then a part-time job playing and writing about games, the moments I have that are truly my own can be in short supply. I’m drawn to series…

DEFIANCE You don’t tend to see the words ‘multimedia’ and ‘enduring’ in the same sentence often, do you? This ambitious attempt at a story told across both a TV show and an MMO didn’t defy the trend, managing only to be forgettable in two mediums simultaneously. PARAGON There was a time when this shiny action-MOBA seemed like it would be Epic’s next big hit. Instead, it was so badly eclipsed by a rushed-out battle royale mode for the then-nascent Fortnite that it winked out of existence before it even made it out of open beta. PROJECT COPERNICUS Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was meant to be a prelude to this MMO. Despite never making it to launch, it managed to drive not just the studio but the entire state of Rhode…

JOHN SMETHELLS Smethells is the first character you meet aboard the Titanic and acts as a guide if you get stuck. PENNY PRINGLE Your fellow agent aboard the Titanic, Pringle gives your mission briefing and guides you where you need to go. THIRD OFFICER MORROW Morrow is an officer aboard the Titanic. Though vigilant, he can be reasoned with, using the right approach. BEATRIX CONKLING Beatrix is a passenger aboard the Titanic. When you find her she’s being bribed by her former house servant.…

The premise of Ruinarchis simple: you are a powerful extradimensional evil that must dominate and destroy, by whatever means you choose, a fantasy world. It’s set up like a god game, but you’re the devil instead: whispering lies into peoples’ ears, starting cults, and raising up monsters. Ruinarchplays out in a setting like a colony builder – except you’re the bad guys. The invading armies from Dwarf Fortress. Randy Random fromRimWorld. The villagers start off unaware of you, going about their lives, marrying, farming, hunting, building their towns. There are something like 10 to 30 of them in most games.Ruinarch is a sandbox where your task is to subvert or kill every one of them. You have a lot of tools to do it. The biggest are summoning demons to…

When Lionhead crumbled, Flaming Fowl Studios was the first studio to emerge from the rubble, farting loudly to let the crowd of onlookers know that the spirit of Fable still lived. Its immediate priority was to release Fable Fortune, a CCG that had been in the works at Castle Molyneux. With that project finished off – both in the sense that it came out and has already shut down – the team has moved onto another beloved licence: Gloomhaven, the cooperative board game. Faithful to the point of piety, Flaming Fowl’s adaptation is a turn-based tactics adventure about clearing dungeons room by room. If it’s underground, you’re there, picking up loose change in the dark. It does feel a little like a waste of ex-Lionhead talent: the studio’s stated goal…

THE DINGY BASEMENT IT OFFICE LIT UP WITH WHOOPING AND BACK CLAPS LIKE A DAMN MEAD HALL Left 4 Dead represented a turning point in how I socialise through games. In 2008, LAN parties were still around and I had a good group I’d play games with at my old IT gig at the University of Montana. We’d take over the office after-hours and run through a list of custom Warcraft III games (a lot of the original DotA before I realised what a mistake I was making), some Quake and Unreal, Counter-Strike and the like. The common thread: all competitive. Worse, so was everyone in the room. Things got heated, and after a lifetime of football and wrestling coaches teaching me how to boil blood, I shut down the…

IT AMBITIOUSLY TRIED TO CAPTURE EVERYTHING THAT WOULD GO INTO A CLASSIC ARTHURIAN QUEST Conquests of Camelot introduced me to the merciless difficulty of old Sierra point-and-click adventures just a few minutes in. As King Arthur, I filled my purse with coin in preparation for a long journey to find the Holy Grail, picked up a magical lodestone from Merlin to guide me, and gave Guinevere a kiss before heading out the gates of Camelot – or trying to. The castle gate fell onto my head as I rode under it, crushing me to death. “It is terribly unwise to start a sacred mission without the blessings of the gods,” Conquests of Camelot admonished. Later I’d be gored by a wild boar, skewered on the lance of the Black Knight,…

PHANTOM BRIGADE Already playable in Early Access, this turn-based strategy game pits towering mechs against each in crunching battles across adorable little forest towns. The twist is that you can see four seconds into the future, allowing you to outmaneuver your enemies. DARKEST DUNGEON II The relentlessly difficult but sadistically rewarding roguelike returns as an Epic exclusive some time in 2021. The biggest news we know so far is that it will be 3D, while retaining the original’s brutal turn-based combat and hellish gothic world. CHIVALRY 2 With Mordhau and Mount & Blade II, there are a lot of very good ways to dally in medieval combat on PC. Chivalry is one of the classics though, and the sequel looks pleasingly brutal as you kick, dismember and slash your way…

COAL Sorry, you can’t be entirely green in Airborne Kingdom. You need to keep burning coal to stay in the sky, but limited storage space means you’ll always be looking for deposits. LIFT Massive wings, fans, and balloons will keep you soaring, but as your city gets heavier you’ll need to keep adding more, which means burning through more workers and coal. PROPULSION Propellers, tails and other devices will help you keep up the speed and hopefully stop you from being stranded without resources, but you’ll need to keep an eye on drag.…

Giant robots. Stick those two words together, in that exact order, and something deep in the human brain lights up and makes swooshing noises. Make them fight one another (what else are they good for, after all?), and you might even get an involuntary squeak of delight. This game is about nothing butenormous mechs punching, kicking, and shooting one another; but something’s not quite right. And I’m not talking about the wrestler fish with nipples the size of transit vans. Each mech is limited to four to six special moves and an ultimate To understand what Override 2 is, you first need to understand what it isn’t. It’s a beat-’em-up and, sure, that immediately tells you a lot about the experience. Given the clear influence certain Japanese movies and TV…

The developer of Huldufólk has pulled out all the stops when it comes to the game’s presentation. This is a PS1-styled horror game that features choreographed 3D cutscenes, a well-produced soundtrack, and a blocky, warped world dripping with rural atmosphere. All very impressive circa 1995, and really rather impressive again in 2020, when such nostalgia is usually inconsistent, or puddle-deep. You play as an archaeologist dispatched to the Faroe Islands to survey a building site. The owner of the farmhouse you’re staying at quickly fills you in on a local legend: of the huldufólk, or hidden folk, who are said to dwell on the islands, and who, he warns, are best left alone. Huldufólk are real (well, you know what I mean) creatures of Faroese and Icelandic folklore: elf-like and…

This is one of those games that’s lovely to play but difficult to write about without sounding like the sort of person who uses words like ‘lilting’ in conversation. Very little happens, but in a way that makes you nicely introspective – like being stranded at an unknown train station on a crisp, cold day. There are few distractions here other than the gorgeous, shimmering skylines. And the game’s unwavering goal of moving towards a distant mountain is refreshing – even more so in this world of crafting and sidequests and squad goals. You jump around. Manipulate magical rags. Learn about a lost world. And while it does build to a lofty emotional climax, it’s a pleasant game to play rather than an overwhelming one. You don’t need to put…

It’s impossible to describe Forza Horizon 4 as boring, since it’s an exhilarating sandbox racer. But for a UK resident, I can’t help but love how comfortingly familiar the setting is. Yes, it’s nice to drive around places I’ll never visit in real life, but there’s also an analgesic relief to seeing familiar environments in a game – like picking your favourite thing off a menu, rather than worrying about trying something new. Forza’s peerless racing is the lamb bhuna in this analogy, the setting a peshwari naan. Delicious.…

PCs are ten, maybe even fifteen, years behind where they should be. That sounds a lot, but actually makes a lot of sense if you remember what PCs were like in 2005 (spoiler: the same as they are now). Bell’s Law, a companion to Moore’s Law, states that every decade, a new and lower-priced computer class forms that leads to the establishment of a new industry. This hasn’t happened. The desktop PC wasn’t out-competed by the laptop, and the laptop wasn’t bullied out of its evolutionary niche by phones and tablets. We’ve got all three, at the same time, and the one you want always costs £1,000. This month’s Tech Report was meant to be about the future of chip cooling, and it kind of still is, but it also…

I thought I was done with Star Wars. I think the last time I really cared about the franchise was when I was still young enough to find Jar Jar Binks funny. But the unbelievably slick The Mandalorian TV show has hooked me back in, and now I’m so far down the rabbit hole I’ve been catching up on the last five years of games. Star Wars: Squadrons is definitely the best of EA’s efforts so far – a brilliantly atmospheric dogfighting sim – but the game that’s surprised me most is Star Wars: Battlefront II. I only really knew it before by its dreadful reputation, its launch such a microtransaction-addled mess that it changed the industry’s approach to lootboxes and even kicked off new government regulation. It was a…

NEED TO KNOW DIFFICULTY Easy TIME 20 hours VITAL LINKS  Best lifepath: bit.ly/3m8CK10 Braindance tips: bit.ly/2JSELB6 Hacking guide: bit.ly/3a4IFSa 1 ALL-SEEING EYE The first cybernetic implant you get is in the main story, and useful for stealth. With Kiroshi Optics, zoom to scope out your environment with RMB, then use your scroll wheel to get an even better look at enemies, cameras, and turrets. 2 CYBER JUNK V has a carry limit, so you’ll need to store or sell your gear to stop yourself from getting over-encumbered. If you’re a hoarder who can’t part with anything, look out for drop points. They’re marked as cardboard boxes on your map. 3 NIGHT NIGHT Iconic weapons are unique damage-dealers with boosted stats and perks – pick one up free early on. The…

A wizard lives here, supposedly. Either he’s out to lunch, or someone at id Software in 1996 came up with the name for Quake’s E2M5, ‘The Wizard’s Manse’, and decided it was too cool – sorry, too metal – to change, even when the wizard himself never makes an appearance. Forgivable, considering it’s one of the most tightly crafted levels in a game full of them. I’ve been on a classic first-person shooter tear recently, playing a mix of old-old and designed-to-feel-old shooters like Amid Evil, Dusk, Duke Nukem 3D and Quake. With so many games today designed to keep you playing for a hundred hours, it’s refreshing to pick up a shooter that lets you ice skate uphill at Olympic speeds and tear through a dozen levels in an…

A big trend at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show was the number of companies investing big in personal masks and other sorts of PPE for daily use. The fact Razer ranked high among them with Project Hazel is genuinely no surprise, either: the company has been heavily involved in mask production during the pandemic. YOU CAN LOOK ‘SICK’ WHILE HOPEFULLY NOT SPREADING SICKNESS Project Hazel marks a new level of ambition and is Razer’s attempt to make the “world’s smartest mask”, a step up from your typical cloth and paper masks, by introducing a reusable design loaded with features and tech for everyday use. Hazel is a surgical N95 respirator with active ventilation and auto-sterilisation, though those features aren’t new for highly-rated masks. What Razer says sets Hazel apart is…

“I SAW COMPUTER GAMES AS A WAY OF LIBERATING PLAYERS FROM THE TEDIUM” Thank you to the 1980s schoolkids who wouldn’t let Julian Gollop join in. They were playing Warlock, a wizard-battling board game from a new publisher named Games Workshop, and Gollop was forced to watch from the sidelines. He consoled himself by picking holes in the game’s design. Warlock had cards, which represented player’s spells. But its board was wholly cosmetic – once the wizard tokens were placed in their floating arena, they didn’t move again. “What’s the point?” thought Gollop. “This board is useless.” And so he built Warlock for himself – unlicensed but better. In Gollop’s game, when a wizard summoned a creature, its card was placed on the board and moved around like a counter.…

VALVE UNDERSTANDS THE POWER OF HOLDING BACK, THAT LESS IS MORE, WHICH IS SOMETHING THAT ELUDES MANY DEVELOPERS EVEN NOW The magic of Half-Life 2 lies in how it tells its story. In most games developed in the early 2000s you’re forced to endure endless exposition about the world and the state it’s in – usually in the form of cutscenes. In Half-Life 2, a few scraps of old newspaper stuck to a notice board achieve the same goal; and in a much more evocative way. In the secret laboratory of eccentric scientist Isaac Kleiner, this entirely missable detail refers to a “seven hour war”, Earth surrendering to the invading Combine, and villain Wallace Breen being declared administrator of Earth. It’s everything you need to know in one unassuming texture…

I don’t think city-building games, despite the perspective of looking down on all the tiny people and making decisions that can bring them happiness or ruin their lives, really make me feel like a god. I usually feel more like a Peeping Tom mixed with an exasperated parent. I delight in just spying on my citizens to see what they’re up to, and getting annoyed when they need something from me. “Fine, I’ll build you a hospital! Now stop bloody complaining all of the time so I can get back to  blissfully squinting at all the little cars driving around.” SimCity 2000 was a revelation to me. I’d played the original SimCity, but SimCity 2000 swapped from the top-down view and 2D graphics to an isometric perspective, which made my…

WHEN YOU’RE PLAYING CIV VI, YOU’RE ALSO PLAYING EVERY CIV THAT CAME BEFORE IT I have no idea where we’d be without Sid Meier’s Civilization. Its influence has been an overwhelming constant for decades, defining generations of strategy games and developers. If Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley hadn’t decided to let Napoleon, Montezuma. and Alexander the Great duke it out, swallowing up the world and dropping nukes on each other, a huge chunk of gaming history would never have happened. Turn-based strategy existed long before Civ, but it’s Civ’s brand of turn-based strategy that became the model that most of the genre ended up following. It’s not just 4X games that owe almost everything to Civ. You can’t help but stumble across its DNA everywhere, whether you’re playing Crusader Kings,…

The Epic Games Store celebrated its second anniversary recently. You can be forgiven for not setting a calendar reminder. The store’s impact on the PC gaming landscape has been fascinating, but controversial – a suspiciously philanthropic entity that’s provided gamers with dozens of wonderful freebies, fledgling developers with financial security and a foot-up in a tough industry, and Steam with some proper competition. It’s also pissed a lot of people off. From fairly trifling complaints about having to use a separate launcher other than the de facto PC darling Steam, to the slightly less trifling issues around aggressive platform exclusivity and its poor infrastructure when compared to Steam. All of this can make for a confused tangle of feelings about the Epic Games Store, and even two years on the…

DESERT It might look like an arid wasteland at first glance, but the desert is actually the most generous of all the biomes, with abundant resources all grouped together. You’ll start here, and you should stick around. HIGHLANDS The misty, craggy north will see you travelling further to find resources, and you’ll always be struggling for food. Make sure to pack a picnic – and maybe build some farms – before you head up there. SHALLOWS You’ll not need to worry about water in the shallows. Sure, most of it’s full of salt, but there are loads of freshwater pools waiting to be drained. Unfortunately, there’s hardly any coal, which is a problem.…

Talking to friends and colleagues about a new Call of Duty is never the same as our banter about other games. As an annual series defined by incremental changes to a formula, nitpicking is ingrained in the discourse. That’s certainly the case for Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War, a good game that falls short of its predecessor. Instead of being undermined by unforgivable sins, it’s an accumulation of smaller flaws, like how guns feel or maps flow. Despite welcome adjustments to Create-a-Class and a fun (if brief ) campaign, Call of Duty has been a lot better before. In fact, a better Call of Duty game released last year – the free-to-play battle royale madness of Call of Duty: Warzone. One of Cold War’s biggest problems is…

We’ve all fantasised about getting away from it all, haven’t we? Dropping out of the daily grind, the forced small talk and the pressures of civilised living; simply escaping with our favourite person and carving out our own space in the universe. The difference with Yu and Kay is that they’ve actually gone and done it – although the reality they’re facing is less ‘remote luxury villa in the Maldives’ and more ‘broken spaceship on a smashed-up planet’. Havenis an RPG/visual novel that charges you with exploring Source – as the couple have named their new home world – hunting for components to fix up their battered ship and uncovering its sinister mysteries. The planet is made up of separate chunks of landscape that you need to recce, interconnected by…

This bizarre adventure game plays out like a half-remembered episode of He-Man, if it had been recreated by the folks behind Rick and Morty. You’re the heroic Prince Xandar – a gullible beefcake – but also his crotchety wizard pal Maldrek, on whom he rides through space on a sort of intergalactic piggyback. It’s a very 1980s sci-fi story: luridly colourful, visually arresting, and deeply, deeply silly. After crashlanding on a planet, you have to get to the bottom of some disappearances, using the magical powers at Xandar and Maldrek’s disposal. The verbs, and indeed the items of the usual adventure game have been replaced here by ‘spells’, which are really make-believe actions by the deluded protagonists – for instance, Xandar’s levitation spell involves him hopping into the air, while…

I appreciate how much trust Mini Metrohas in me. It’s supremely confident in my ability to translate its clean, satisfying world of shapes and lines into something approaching a functional transit system. I’m delighted to report that trust was entirely misplaced. My first run ends swiftly with a crush of angry passengers spilling off the platform. And the fact I’m this embarrassed to have made the triangles angry is a measure of how compelling Mini Metrois in spite of its limited toolset. And similar to how the game makes me feel I’ve lied on my TFL job application, don’t believe anyone who tells you this is ‘relaxing’. For me, it’s a failure simulator dressed up as a Tube map.…

After nearly a year of being stuck in the flat, starved of human contact, I’ve really flung myself into the role of Night City’s most popular and sociable street samurai. Cyberpunk 2077 has not grabbed me like The Witcher 3, but after taking a long weekend to dig into it, I’ve found myself enamoured with its cast of crooks. Now I’m eager to finish slapping words onto this page so that I can get back to the dystopian megalopolis. I’ve got dates lined up, jobs on the go and so many more bars to get drunk in. While Cyberpunk 2077 often feels cynical and vapidly edgy, most of its recurring characters are sincere, nuanced people, juxtaposed to the loud, obnoxious world they live in. Even Jackie, who is exactly as…

Booting up Cursed Halo feels, for a few moments, like any other Halo playthrough. The introductory cutscene rolls, Cortana makes some cheeky comments, the whole thing feels tense and grand. You’ve seen this before. Then the cutscene jumps to the preparations on board the Pillar of Autumn, and set against Sgt Johnson’s tough-guy speech to the space marines you see a Warthog that looks… wrong. It’s small. Like, way too small, like the Marines (still normal size) are about to be driving around in go-carts. Well, you think. That’s odd. But everything else seems pretty normal. You start up the campaign, settle into the Master Chief’s several-hundred-kilo boots, and go visit Captain Keyes. He hands you a pistol and you rush to battle. Only once the fighting starts, you start…

1 Spacing is important when planting out your seedlings, try and aim for two footsteps between each shoot. 2 Don’t worry about over-watering as rice shoots are a thirsty bunch. Be generous with your water. 3 Make sure you add fertiliser to your soil every day to keep it full of delicious nutrients for your crops. 4 Keep track of the weather. If it’s been raining, drain the excess water, and if it’s been sunny, open the floodgates.…