Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2021 i PC Gamer

There’s something wonderful to me about an idea as ridiculous as ‘what if orcs played American football?’ enduring for 35 years and counting. Not just enduring, in fact – thriving, with a new edition on the tabletop and a new videogame adaptation heading to our PCs this year. Of course, you need more than a sublimely silly premise to make a good strategy game, which is why we’ve gone behind the scenes of Blood Bowl 3 to properly test its turn-based chops, grill the developers, and even chat to the guys at Games Workshop about their endearingly bizarre creation.…

HIGHS Accept Cookies Final Fantasy XIV director Naoki Yoshida showed off his lalafell black mage in a seven-hour Twitch stream while baking coffee cookies. Total domination The Total War series has sold over 36 million copies. Prepare for Titanfall Respawn has announced it will be bringingTitanfallcontent intoApex Legends, beginning with season 9. LOWS Sub standard Blizzard’s changed how it sells WoW game time, so players can no longer just pay for 30 days up-front: it has to be a minimum of 60. Among duds The long-awaited Airship map arrived for Among Us and… it’s not great. The huge space makes it trivial for imposters to win. Cyberfunk Cyberpunk 2077’s latest patch fixes 484 issues – and it’s still buggy.…

Metallica never scored a Legend of Zelda game, but it sounded like it when Twitch replaced Metallica’s BlizzCon 2021 concert with cheery midi music. The biggest streaming platform in the world had to censor its own broadcast or risk upsetting an already aggravated music industry. In 2020 the music industry attacked Twitch in a letter claiming it “continues to turn a blind eye to the same users violating the law while pocketing the proceeds of massive unlicensed uses of recorded music”. After largely ignoring Twitch for years, the music industry started sending thousands of DMCA takedowns for copyright violations. So Twitch reacted – dramatically. In October, it forced streamers to delete thousands of old VODs, with no good tools to determine which files were problematic. The music industry is upset…

EA SPOUSE “My happy, supportive smile is running out.” The 2004 open letter from the anonymous partner of a game dev triggered multiple lawsuits against EA. ROCKSTAR SAN DIEGO The Red Dead Redemption studio was the subject of a similar letter six years later, which detailed mismanagement and overwork. BIOWARE’S ANTHEM A Kotaku report said many staff had taken doctor-mandated stress leave after working on the doomed jetpack shooter.…

When I think of People Can Fly, I think of Bulletstorm, an absurdist FPS remembered a decade later for its outrageous weapons, like the crazy-ass drill gun that could be steered in mid-air and penetrate multiple enemies. By the end of that game, launching bodies 20 feet in the air and energy-whipping them into an explosive barrel was one of the most mundane ways to solve a problem. It’s almost hard to believe that Outridersshipped with the same studio logo on the box, because it looks like the bland shooter that Bulletstorm’s meathead characters would make fun of. It’s a surprisingly shallow looter shooter that tries very hard to look like Destiny and play like Gears of War. But honestly, I’d rather replay any of the games I’ve already mentioned…

One of the peculiarities of Sega’s PC port release schedule – releasing the series (almost) chronologically, rather than in the order they were made – is it lessens the original impact that Yakuza 6 once had. It’s no longer a showcase for the new Dragon engine, because Yakuza Kiwami 2 exists. And it’s not as experimental or new as Yakuza: Like a Dragon, whose reworked combat and fresh protagonist make it a great jumping on point for newcomers. Instead, this is Kazama Kiryu’s final game as protagonist – the end of a story that has played out over hundreds of hours across six previous games. Which is to say, if you’re new to the series – or have only dipped your toe into a handful of them over the years…

Might and Delight is a studio known for making survival games that capture the awe and ferocity of the wilderness. Or, if you’re like me, you might know it as the studio who made that badger sim that made you cry. Well, it seems like it’s still on a mission to make me bawl my eyes out over adorable creatures with the third instalment in the Shelterseries, which this time features an elephant herd. In Shelter 3, you play as a mother elephant who is leading her herd to a place that will reunite the group with their ancestors. Its world mixes elements of both previous games: the linear story of Shelter 1 and the more open-world structure of Shelter 2. To survive, you need to keep your herd fed…

It’s easy to root for Abe. The Mudokons have been enslaved for centuries by the Glukkons. Mudokons are worked to the bone, drugged and punished for any insubordination. It is up to one Mudokon to spark an insurrection and free his people from their chains. This is the plot of the 1998 Playstation cult classic Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus, and many of the same core story beats are preserved in this 2021 ‘reimagining’, Oddworld: Soulstorm. Maybe Soulstorm is an ideal tribute to the PlayStation era Veterans of Exoddus will recognise Soulstorm’s basic rhythms from the jump. This remains a 2D stealth puzzle game, in the traditions of Gunpoint or Mark of the Ninja, or the many other games that took initial influence from Oddworldall those years ago. Abe is a wimp;…

TAWNA Not the same Tawna from previous games, but a more kickass version from another dimension. Her hookshot can smash crates and enemies from a distance DINGODILE Half-dingo, half-crocodile, all-vacuum lover. His big back-mounted tube can suck up crates, including TNT, which can then be shot as a projectile. NEO CORTEX This villainous doctor is responsible for Crash’s mutations. Armed with a laser, he transforms foes into platforms of a solid or bouncy variety, and can do a floaty headbutt.…

In endless runner Miska’s Cave, you can also endlessly run on the ceiling, by bounding gracefully from the bottom to the top of screen. The game’s rabbity little hero is more acrobatic than Mario, even before you unlock the double and triple jump, which let you switch direction while the bunny is in mid-air. This athleticism gives Miska’s a different flavour from other endless runners, which tend to focus on pits and obstacles to trip you up. Miska’s is all about leaping, and all about its enemies, which come in waves and fly menacingly towards you. A quick slice is all it takes to knock them back and eventually kill them, but getting the timing right is another matter. Miska’s Cave is quick: runs can be over in a matter…

It’s hard to think of many things as intuitive as Inside. It’s one of those games you understand in the first five seconds precisely because it tells you bollock-all. Run, jump, move things, don’t get bludgeoned by baddies. There’s rarely ever any confusion. The pacing of Insidemakes it a hard game to stop playing. The puzzles roll elegantly into each other in a way that’s incredibly morish – there’s some simple part of my brain that just loves being rewarded with progress, like a rat in a patronising maze. My desire to progress is compounded by the endless suffering of my nameless protagonist, too. Some games spend hours setting me up with a compelling reason to keep playing, and don’t always succeed. Inside, however, manages to captivate me with a…

Yes, it sounds like the sort of thing you’d secretly rename your little brother’s diary as a prank. And yes, it’s as relentlessly foul and lavatorial as The Binding of Isaac, but despite some thoughtful match-four puzzle mechanics and unique cardboard-cutout presentation, Bum-Bo doesn’t inspire the same devotion as Edward McMullin’s more well-known trip around the u-bend. Whereas Isaac encourages me to dive back in after every failure, I’m less inclined to do so after 20 minutes spent lining up faeces.…

There’s some benchmarking software you may have heard of called 3DMark. It’s on Steam. Recently, it updated its benchmarks to include the 3DMark Mesh Shader Feature Test, which requires a GPU that’s compatible with DirectX 12 Ultimate. The test runs twice, once with mesh shaders disabled, then again with them switched on. In 4K, using an RTX 3080 card, we got a framerate of around 50 fps for the first run, then something closer to 500 fps for the second, with no perceivable difference in what was displayed on the screen. How the heck did that happen? ‘Shaders’ is a term that’s been thrown around in videogames for a while now, and while it seems straightforward it’s not exactly obvious. Shaders are programs that run on programmable GPUs (that’s most…

RPGs trend towards bloat. People want bigger worlds, more stuff, greater choice. But as in any genre, the things that are missing can end up defining the experience far more than what’s there. After adoring the first game, I’ve finally recently dived into Legend of Grimrock 2, and it’s reminded me of one of my favourite absences in gaming: neither game has any merchants. In fact, they have no commerce at all. You can’t trade or barter. There isn’t even any money. Any gold or jewels you do find are just dead weight – if you can drag them to the end of the game, you’ll earn an achievement, but really they serve no function. That’s got to be almost unique among RPGs – I struggle to think of another…

1 WINGMEN Squadrons’ status. White = fine. Red = damaged. Hollow = dead. 2 MONITORING Displays the health of the key ships that are taking part in the battle. 3 WEAPONS Shows the available and selected weapons at your disposal. 4 GSE The power level of systems. G = guns. S = shields. E = engine. 5 SHIELDS Shows the shield status of both your ship (left) and target ship (right). 6 MINIMAP A snapshot of the battle showing enemies and friendly ships.…

I would describe my colouring style in Chicory as a chaotic, turbulent scrawl. I have zero time for staying within the lines, switching up colours as fast as I can on the fly. Chicory may be a game about colouring in, but its willingness to let players draw freestyle is what really makes it shine. It’s a whimsical adventure game where you play as an adorable beagle named after your favourite food – which for me was pancakes – who possesses a magical paintbrush that lets you colour in the environment around them. As cool as having a giant magical paintbrush is, you’re only borrowing it, and the brush’s true master is the titular Chicory, who is currently missing. Not only that, but Chicory seems to have taken all the…

MARS HORIZON Basically your own NASA control room. Auroch’s management sim is friendlier than Kerbal but deeper than space itself. MINIT In this Zelda-like adventure, your lives last only 60 seconds. It’s a typically intense and giddy concept from Vlambeer’s Jan Willem Nijman. THE LONG DARK “Your endless struggle to keep the Grim Reaper at arm’s length is enormously rewarding,” said PC Gamer’s Andy Kelly of Hinterland’s chilly survival game. JOHN WICK HEX Put together with the input of Hollywood fight choreographers, this is turn-based tactics at its most stylish.…

Realmforge Studios’ Spacebase Startopia is a homage to one of my favourite management games. More than an homage, really, as it lifts pretty much everything from the original Startopia, even the name – it’s more like an unofficial remake. After two decades of waiting, I should be happy to return to my donut-shaped space station, but instead I’m conflicted. Hewing so closely to the original also emphasises the ways in which it misses the mark, and some of the new additions leave a lot to be desired. The deck system was one of Startopia’s defining features We got off on the wrong foot, Spacebase Startopia and I, when it introduced me to my relentlessly irritating virtual assistant. Clippy ain’t got nothing on VAL, an AI buddy who keeps track of…

If you’re unfamiliar with the D&D-adjacent Record of Lodoss War novels, RPG, and anime from the ’90s, Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth will be mostly incomprehensible. The story has characters such as Parm, Pirotess, and Ashram, and working out their relationships is like starting Wandavision at episode nine without having seen a Marvel movie. Later, Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth mirrors Wandavision’s exploration of grief, and that at least should make sense to anyone. Non-fans don’t need to worry too much about following the story. The Metroidvania genre traditionally values exploring 2D dungeons over cohesive narrative, and Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth is no exception. It checks all the familiar Metroidvania boxes, though its shortness and lack of difficulty left me wanting. A few late-game beasts are impressively powerful Deedlit is a high…

1 With 40,000 muscles, an elephant’s trunk is strong enough to break a tree branch, yet delicate enough to pick a flower. 2 Studies have shown that elephants are genuinely compassionate and altruistic towards other animals and humans. 3 They have super tough tusks that they use to dig into the ground, peel bark off trees, and fend off any predators. 4 These giants take regular mud baths to protect their skin from the sun, and to cool themselves down.…

For years, Rome: Total War was my favourite game in the series. It struck the perfect balance between being a game and being an exercise in history. Total War: Rome Remastered brings back what I’d call the first great Total War game for the modern era, updating much of its outdated UI and scaling it up to 4K and widescreen displays. It’ll be a trip down memory lane for those who loved the original and a more palatable experience for modern Total War lovers. Graphics look as good as nostalgia says they looked 17 years ago As a remaster, a lot of attention is going to be given to how it looks and sounds, but what you really get out of this remaster is how it plays. The old Rome:…

Did you know that robots have paparazzi? Every time C-3PO stumbles out of a nightclub, there’s a tin-man scumbag waiting with a telephoto lens. Johnny 5 is enjoying a holiday in Spain, when a pap trundles up the beach and takes a photo of his saggy robo-bod. In Roborazzi, you area robot paparazzi, and it’s actually a pretty stressful job. For one thing, you can’t stop. In every nightclub-set level, you’re given a list of targets to take photos of (funkily dressed partygoers, or sometimes parts of the scenery). However, as your character won’t stop moving – as you shunt them around the gaff with WASD – it can be tricky to locate your mark, and to keep them in shot while you work your camera magic. Take a pic…

The plan this month was to pick dark games to go with the theme of under-places. But as far as dungeons go, this one is deliciously bright. It’s part gameshow, part RPG, part RNG, part CCG, which is enough acronyms that I’d hit my word count if I spelled them all out. And while that disparate mix should stitch together into some flesh-pit abomination, Dicey Dungeons is just lovely. It’s crisp and intuitive, and, if anything, mixing all those elements together makes challenging things more palatable. Think of it like hiding grandpa’s medicine inside a key lime pie. The constant weirdness and delirious selection of enemies is like you’ve eaten the drugged pudding yourself.…

Though we’ve come quite a long way since hefty rubber balls traversed freebie magazine mousepads, even the most popular gaming mice still have a bit of heft to them. Hence why the term ‘lightweight’ has become the major buzzword for manufacturers looking to flog the latest line of top-tier gaming mice in the past couple of years. Nowadays there are heaps of lightweight gaming mice available, ready to usurp your desktop from the classics. When it comes to shedding a few grams each company has taken a slightly different route, resulting in multiple ultra-lightweight gaming mice best suited to all manner of player and grip style. Whether you’re looking for cut-outs that increase airflow and lighten the payload, or a wireless option that opts for style over fluid useability, there’s…

1 BOTTLENECKS Nvidia’s Asteroids demo shows the benefits of mesh shading moving bottlenecks from the CPU to the GPU. 2 ASTEROIDS There are 350,000 asteroids here, each 10 million triangles. But with mesh shading, only 50 million are drawn. 3 DISTANCE The asteroids are separated into six LOD categories, depending on how close they are to the player. 4 TRIANGLES Here, the asteroids are coloured depending on their level of detail, with closer rocks using more triangles.…

Retro indie games are too common these days, but it’s rare to find one that so bravely – and resolutely – clings to the past. Sure, throwbacks like Hyper Light Drifter or Celeste evoke games of bygone eras, but they mix that together with a ton of very modern design and graphical features. But Loop Hero doesn’t just echo games of yore, it feels like a long-lost relic. To put it bluntly: this shit is old school. The idea is brilliant in its simplicity: you play an adventurer who survived an apocalyptic event in which an evil lich erased the world. To restore everything, you walk along a barren loop of road fighting monsters. Sometimes these monsters drop cards, which you can then place either on the road, beside it,…

NEED TO KNOW DIFFICULTY Easy TIME One hour VITAL LINKS  Loop hero classes: bit.ly/3r9ZUXf Card combo list: bit.ly/3f55zvq All bosses guide: bit.ly/31vRoHw ESCAPE ARTIST 1 Assess your situation each time you start a new loop. You’ll only limp back to camp with 30% of your hard-earned resources if you die, so there’s no shame in backing out if things are getting tough. The Lich can wait. BASE CAMP 2 Any feelings of shame from ducking out early will fade when you have more resources to spend back at camp. Prioritise buildings like the Herbalist’s Hut to give you potions and the Field Kitchen to boost your campfire’s healing powers. BAR HUMBUG 3 Keep your eye on the progress bar in the top-left of your screen with a skull next to…

CRUSADER KINGS LACROSSE In this rather complicated sports sim, it’s considered a good match if you can make it to half-time without either team captain being assassinated or marrying a sibling. XCOM BASKETBALL The fog of war keeps each match surprising, though things do have a tendency to grind to a halt as both sides take turns whiffing shots at the basket. BIOSHOCK CRICKET The possibility of an errant ball putting a crack in the glass wall separating the arena from the crushing weight of the ocean adds a wonderful tension to each match. SKYRIM TENNIS Mostly it just plays like normal tennis, with a similar amount of shouting, but if a ball goes out of bounds it can take upwards of 200 hours to retrieve it. PORTAL FOOTBALL Each…

The major digital storefronts have faced reckonings in recent years, and haven’t always come out of them smelling like roses. This is partly because they have kicked certain decisions into the long grass, but are now being forced to come down one way or another. The other side, sadly, comes down to political pressure to de-list games that certain regimes, in this case the Chinese communist party, don’t like. Recent months have seen some of these issues come to a head when Valve, notoriously reluctant to intervene in the content available on Steam, refused to sell a game called Super Seducer 3. SS3 is a full-motion video offering that uses multiple-choice dialogue for the player to go through dates with women. “STEAM DOES NOT SHIP SEXUALLY EXPLICIT IMAGES OF REAL…

MORE THAN ANY OTHER GAME IN DÉSILETS’ CATALOGUE, IT SHOWS THE PAST TO BE AS ALIEN AS FANTASY History loomed over the young Patrice Désilets. Aged three or four, he would meet his mother as she came off the boat from the French fort where she worked on the Richelieu River. The Quebec waterway had been a crucial path for French and English armies during the era of European colonisation, and the scene of several bitter battles. But for Désilets, three centuries on, these ruins represented a kind of reverse science fiction. “The past is like a fantasy land,” he enthuses these days. “It’s so different. Where we are now, it’s as if it’s on a different planet. The 20th century just changed us, totally. But this is where I’m…

I mean it as a compliment when I say Age of Empires 4 looks like Age of Empires 2. It’s 20 years newer and 3D instead of 2D, but the blue splotches on buildings and the peasants working the fields catapult me back to my obsession with building armies of Teutonic knights who lumbered across the battlefield like better-dressed Terminators. “We knew we wanted to make a modern version of Age, but we also wanted to make a game that felt like Age of Empires and would be immediately relatable to the core community,” game director Quinn Duffy said at a roundtable, where the AOE 4 team talked about the game in-depth for the first time. I only got a relatively brief look of Age of Empires 4 in motion,…

The wonderfully named Glee-Cheese Studio has its sights set high here. It’s a rhythm game, sure – tap buttons in time to the music, occasionally hold one down, you know how it goes – but one with a narrative focus. You see, correctly synching button taps with the music sparks a brief flashback. Music sparks memories as the main character of A Musical Story, Gabriel, tries to remember how he ended up in a hospital bed. The soundtrack is fantastic, a diverse and 1970s-appropriate collection of lo-fi beats and casual, psychedelic riffs that let notes ring. If nothing else, your ears are in for a real treat, man. CORRECTLY SYNCHING BUTTON TAPS WITH THE MUSIC SPARKS A BRIEF FLASHBACK NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2021 DEVELOPER Glee-Cheese Studio PUBLISHER Digerati LINK…

Wearing its inspirations with confidence, Fights in Tight Spaces riffs on classic movie hallway fight scenes, capturing much of the scrapping and dirty tactics that make those close-quarters brawls so electric. But despite the clean choreography, it’s the less apparent influences that force a stumble. Immaculately-dressed and with a snappy retort always on hand, Agent 11 would be a serviceable stand-in for James Bond or John Wick. But rather than give you the whole movie, Fights in Tight Spaces wants to focus on the real action – the scenes where the hero is hopelessly outnumbered with nowhere to run. In attempts to break up crime rings run by Scandinavian bikers, well-dressed Mafiosi, or German ninjas, you’re placed into subway cars, prison cells, and dive bar bathrooms, and tasked with fighting…

The games industry never stood a chance. Raphael van Lierop, narrative director of Far Cry 3, believes the medium inherited crunch from its parent industries – the expectation of overwork baked into software and filmmaking long before a programmer first managed to steer a pixel across a screen. By the time van Lierop joined a game studio in the early 2000s, burnout was considered best practice. HINTERLAND IS PART OF A NEW WAVE OF STUDIOS DEDICATED TO ENDING CRUNCH “We didn’t at all associate these things with poor management or poor planning practices,” van Lierop says. “We believed crunch was a necessary prerequisite to creating something exceptional.” It was only after a dozen years of 70 to 80 hour weeks, as van Lierop found himself putting his kids to bed…

SUB DECK This is where ships dock and visitors arrive – so it’s also where you’ll find essential rooms and facilities, like visitor quarters, the medical centre, security, and industrial buildings. FUN DECK Visitors can feed their insatiable desire for booze, dancing, and gambling here, forgetting all their troubles. Unless they have a gambling addiction. BIO DECK The bio deck is a huge garden that can be terraformed to produce resources, which can then be crafted into blueprints. It’s also where visitors can do a spot of meditating.…

The Big Bang is wild when you think about it. All that we have come to understand – space, time, our universe, and life as we know it – are all part of a long chain started from one precise moment. Thinking too much about it is enough to send anyone spinning into an existential crisis, but Genesis Noir takes these grand themes in its stride, creating a cosmic adventure mixed with a detective story that goes down like a smooth glass of whiskey. In Genesis Noir, the Big Bang isn’t only the single biggest event in recorded human history, but a gunshot blast frozen in time, its bullet speeding toward your lover. To stop this event from meeting its inevitable end, you need to explore different pockets of time…

Everyone’s favourite jorts-champion has only recently become a PC gaming convert, but he’s hit the ground running and is looking better than ever. This is a gorgeous cartoon platformer that plays like something out of the genre’s golden age, but with welcome quality of life improvements. I’ll admit that most of my deaths felt like my own fault Time and space have been shattered, meaning that Crash and Coco need to run through quirky takes on real-life historical settings, from pirate ships to jazzy New Orleans swamps. Most of the time you’re running away from the camera, on pretty linear paths – though as you’d expect it changes to a side-on camera at times, and running towards the screen for the odd chase sequence. New default options give you an…

You build your own dungeon in the hectic Super Raft Boat, which takes place on the open sea – a terrible place. You extend, and repair, a raft by plonking down endless bits of driftwood, while soggy terrors including sharks, fish and ghosts advance relentlessly towards you. A hodgepodge island that’s constantly growing and shrinking Your main method of defence is, naturally, a gun, which you fire in a typical twin-stick manner. Shoot the gulls and leaping fish before they can take a bite from you. But kill the sharks and the giantsharks before they can chomp on your raft, tearing chunks of the floor out of your floating dungeon. The shooting is fine: very screenshakey, if a little lacking in aural oomph. But the flooded-world setting is a veritable…

Sometimes it’s nice to go back to places that hold a special place in your heart, isn’t it? Quaint French seaside towns you holidayed in as a child. The village in which you grew up. The toilet labyrinth where you spent countless hours fighting diseased rats, cursed lizards, and wobbling stacks of slime, only to discover the next area was even worse and all suffering is relative. Thank you for these special memories, Dark Souls. I’m actually too good at Dark Souls to fight the Taurus Demon I had planned to see how far I could get without dying, in an act of Souls-defying mastery. I’ve been here before, Miyazaki, and I know all your horrid tricks. I’m even arrogant enough to take on the Black Knights, parrying and riposting…

Not every danger is clearly labelled. There’s no combat in The Cave, and very little in the way of peril – you can’t die, and doomed interactions with monsters always result in a quick restart. But the biggest antagonist here is a rope. You will grow to hate the rope. The rope is your enemy. Not because it’s dangerous, but because it’s so slow you could grow a lustrous beard in the time it takes to climb one. And in a game that requires lots of backtracking, that can quickly suck your will to live. It’s one of a few unimaginative stumbles in The Cave, a game that otherwise functions as a pleasant, mildly-amusing puzzle platformer that never goes as deep as you hope.…

For the last year or so, I’ve only associated Sekirowith frustration and anxiety. I wrote about beating the final boss using a slow-motion mod when Sekiro released, which led to dozens of death threats in the inbox and mentions, and to a meme big enough to make the news all over the internet, from Vice to the BBC. The voice actor for Liquid Snake, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the XCOM commander all chimed in with takes on the thing. “You not only cheated yourself…” It was funny in retrospect, but not while in the eye of the hurricane. I didn’t touch Sekiroafter that. Until now, at least. I’ve been inside for a year. The Snyder Cut exists. Actual Elden Ring footage leaked. Anything is possible, so I might as well…

I’m sorry about my first playthrough of Disco Elysium. So sorry, in fact, that the game branded me ‘Sorry Cop’ – the human equivalent of a Hallmark sympathy card. I spent the first hours of the game trying to make up for all the awful things my character probably did, without really knowing what they were, in a haze of post-booze self-loathing that felt entirely too much like innumerable Sunday mornings. But this time it’s going to be different. I’m going to live life (or play Disco Elysium) without boundaries. I’ll pick the most confident option even if it leads to results that nobody desires. Nothing says ‘assertiveness’ like choosing things based on how much other people don’t want me to have them. The first example of this manifests as…

The Las Vegas strip, chunkily but recognisably rendered in PS1 polygons, screams by at a rate of about two lampposts per second. I’d check the speedometer for a more conventional reading, but I daren’t look down for even a moment. As I weave between the street furniture into oncoming traffic, two squad cars mimic every jerk of my steering wheel. They’re so close behind that, occasionally, the nose of a pursuit vehicle bumps into the rear end of my 1971 Dodge Challenger, nudging the speed still higher. This is fender bender figure skating, and it only ends one way: with a car-totalling crash. The question is whose. Eventually, my slaloming across the central reservation succeeds in sending one panda into a neatly manicured tree outside a casino, and the second…

Released in 1999, Freespace 2 is generally regarded as one of the best space sims ever made. But it’s worth bearing in mind that, for a long time, Freespace 2 didn’t have much competition. In the 2000s, space sims almost disappeared completely, with only a handful of notable titles like Freelancer, X3, and EVE Online appearing through that decade. Freespace 2 was the last of the great ’90s space sims, and there appeared to be little new coming out that could challenge it. Since 2010, however, the situation has changed. Space sims have seen a welcome resurgence, with major projects like Elite Dangerous, No Man’s Sky, and Star Wars: Squadrons careening out of hyperspace alongside a swarm of indie titles like Evochron Mercenary, Everspace, and House of the Dying Sun.…