Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2021 i PC Gamer

In 2015, Games Workshop killed the Warhammer Fantasy setting, literally blowing up its world in one final campaign. So how, in 2021, does it still feel so alive? A huge part of that is the efforts of Creative Assembly, who decided GW’s apocalypse was no reason not to use the setting for one of the most exciting strategy series ever made. Now their grand trilogy comes to its final entry, and it feels bigger, more confident and more creative than ever. So, of course, we’re all over it – and we’ve got the feature to prove it. ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Forged his white hot, overflowing rage into one historically bad tweet, then deleted it.…

HIGHS Phone phreaks The Epic vs Apple trial began with botched audio access, with kids able to enter and scream at the court. Appropriate? No. Funny? Yes. GPU hope Ethereum cryptocurrency will soon be based on storage instead of GPUs. Double bongcloud World chess champion Magnus Carlsen took part in an opening dubbed ‘the double bongcloud’. LOWS Calm down Paradox Interactive says the toxicity on its forums recently is driving its developers away. Chill out people. Burning bridges Blizzard continues to anger players with fees, the latest a $35 charge for WoW Classic players to ‘clone’ their avatars. The company then relented. Not-so elite Elite: Dangerous’ Odyssey expansion was a little bit of a fiasco, to the extent Frontier’s CEO apologised.…

Ask a Warhammer 40,000 fan which books to read, and they’ll recommend Dan Abnett’s. His stories of morally compromised Inquisitor detectives and soldiers bonding behind the razorwire are a great entry point, starring relatively ordinary characters rather than armoured giants. He’s a perfect choice to join Fatshark as co-writer on Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, a co-op game that casts players as regular grunts investigating cult-related goings-on. “I love the universe as a whole, obviously,” Abnett says. “I’ve spent a lot of time there, so I love all the stuff to do with it. Obviously there are iconic elements like Space Marines that represent 40K in a nutshell, but I’ve always gravitated towards human characters because they seem to me to give the best place for a reader, or a player in…

The postal service was much simpler back in the 1980s. No PS5s being snatched from porches, no looming threat of Amazon delivery drones, and no aggressive push for a speedier service. Gamious’ indie driving sim Laketakes us back to that time. It’s set in the Pacific Northwest, where you deliver mail, talk to the locals, and, well, not much else. Lake is chill, has lovely visuals, and basically is right up my street. You play as Meredith Weiss, a corporate computer whiz who has taken a break from her city job to spend two weeks as a postal worker in her hometown of Providence Oaks, Oregon. I say town, but that’s a stretch. Providence Oaks has a tiny population, barely 100 people, many of whom have grown up and never…

On her first trip away from home, in a Burbank, California, mall filled with CRT monitors and Quakefans, Lorie Kmiec Harper’s mouse broke. It was 1997, and Harper, a 23-year-old assistant warehouse manager from Ontario, was playing as a finalist in the first-ever All Female QuakeTournament under the handle Temperance. “I got kicked out first, you know that, right?” Harper says. “I was number one in Canada, or I was that year,” she reminisces. “But I was eighth in the world.” In another scenario, Harper’s busted mouse might not have been a big deal. “I don’t know how attached you are to your mouse, but for gaming purposes, it was really bad timing,” she says. She’d spent the previous month training for the finals, playing with people all over the…

So Biomutant is a boring game that survives on some modicum of charm. This is an RPG in which you can leap from your grotesque horse, summon a ball of mucus around yourself to roll up your enemies with, ‘detonate’ the mucus to send them flying, and finish with a slow-motion Max Payne-esque volley of electric bullets from a gun with a trumpet horn for a muzzle. It should be brilliant, gonzo fun. It’s tragic, then, that hollow progression and an incessant narrator suck out so much of the joy. It depicts a vibrant world teeming with life after we’re gone Biomutantfeels like it’s going to be much more, but in practice it’s an endless stream of new ideas that go nowhere and beautiful, toxic landscapes with little to offer…

An outlaw biker drifting through a Pacific Northwestern post-apocalypse is a killer premise, and Days Gone occasionally lives up to it. When you’re alone on the broken road, riding your scrappy motorcycle between missions, it’s easy to get swept up in the desolate romanticism of it all. It’s just you, your bike, and an unforgiving land. No job, no bills – just two wheels, a thirsty gas tank, and all the time in the (end of the) world. You play as Deacon St John, a young Oregon biker who wears a backwards baseball cap at all times. Two years after a mysterious outbreak has turned half the population of America into zombie-like cannibals called Freakers, Deacon embarks on a quest to find his missing wife, Sarah. Your bike is your…

STEALTH: 4 COINS Hood picks up some good stealth game tricks that make for some fun moments. THE SHERIFF: 5 COINS Sure, it’s not very ‘Hoody’ to give to the rich, but medieval Mr X deserves it. MELEE COMBAT: 1 COIN A single coin only on account of how pitiful it looks among the game’s better ideas. EXTRACTION: 2 COINS It’s suspenseful, it’s exciting, but it’s also too long and scruffy. Two coins so it can clean itself up.…

Let me begin by saying that I had to work really hard to resist the urge to fill the page with nothing more than pirate-speak and various remarks about my timbers being shivered. This is a problem I have with most reviews, but especially so with a pirate simulator that makes being horrible on the high seas really fun. If all you want is something that lets you wander around being pirate-y, this will serve you very well indeed. Controls are nice and simple. Speed is dictated by how many of your three sails you have unfurled, which means taking a few down for tight turns, which can come in handy during combat. Speaking of which, to begin with, you’ll rely on your cannons. Shooting to the left or right…

I love the individuality of Purcitop Garden, even if I question its underlying foundations. It’s a game about solving mazes, which takes place in the biggest garden this side of Babylon – so vast it’s split up into several procedurally generated levels. You’re there to meet your uncle – the inventor Professor Eustace – but first you have to fathom your way around his sprawling garden. From a top-down perspective, you’ll trudge through a series of mazes hitting dead ends and doubling back on yourself, before finally acquiring the key to each exit and moving on. This simple act of orienteering is soon expanded with NPCs, acquirable tools including hedge trimmers, and occasional minigames in a variety of genres. There’s bags of content here, and it’s all whimsical, giving off…

Every workplace has a Chris. He’s short, furious, and less capable than his ‘flashy’ associates. It’s only a matter of time before Chris a) finds love and becomes whole or b) joins the Flat Earth Movement and starts screaming at people outside Primark. And it’s a testament to the construction of Thomas Was Alone that I can create a backstory for Chris, a literal cube. It would be tragic – like a lonely butcher’s son drawing eyes on a ham – if it wasn’t so telling. I also feel Danny Wallace’s chipper, internal monologues should be an option in every game – let him narrate Agony and I’ll die happy. It’s all slightly smug and arch, but it deserves to be, because it’s brilliant. 81…

A power supply is maybe not going to be the first product you pick for your new gaming PC build project, but it could be one of the most important. It’s the heart of your PC – it feeds every component you have in your machine, and if your PSU goes down, it can take everything else with it From the CPU up to your precious graphics card, everything in your PC benefits from a decent PSU. The good units last for several system builds, even. So, if you make a good investment, you won’t have to spend extra money the next time you perform an upgrade. The way new processors and graphics cards are chewing through more power with each generation, that’s a legitimate concern. This means that you…

CPUs Intel has been struggling to get a working 10nm process after its dependence on 14nm. Alder Lake could be here this year, but shortages may affect shipments. GPUs Not just for gaming. GPUs are the backbone of the supercomputer and data centre worlds, and their needs may be greater than your desire for ray tracing. SOCs Apple stated that the shortage is hampering its production of Macs and iPads and could cost it up to $4bn in sales, and it’s the world’s fourth largest seller of laptops. MICROCONTROLLERS Simple boards like this Raspberry Pi Pico are everywhere. They don’t have to use the latest tech, but they’re stamped out of silicon wafers like everything else.…

There’s something oddly comforting about an underworld, exploring caves and tombs that people are not supposed to be in, seeing things we’re not meant to see – like a big floating eye-bat that spits streams of corrosive acid. I’ve been playing Noita, which is a roguelike about ruining things. The anonymous wizard you control is descending deeper into a mysterious cave, while trying to avoid – or gleefully trigger – the many environmental hazards sitting temptingly in their way. These include, but are not limited to, big pits of lava, puddles of acid, explosive barrels, and mounds of gunpowder. I should be giving them the widest berth, as I would do in real life, but in NoitaI am my opposite: I’m not afraid to make decisions, even in the knowledge…

1 MOVE CABINETS Shelving near doors marked in yellow can be moved to block doorways. While the invaders are halted in their tracks, thin out the pack by lining up some quick headshots. 2 AIM SMARTLY While successful shots to the brain are effective against any werewolf, aim for the arm to make them drop their weapon, or the kneecaps to slow them down. 3 GEAR UP Lycans aren’t that quick, so don’t panic, and take the time to search for loot. For example, don’t miss the shotgun in the first major fight.…

After five years, we’re nearing the end of our journey through the battlefields of Total War: Warhammer. With the third and final game, we can at last play as and against the daemonic hordes of the Chaos gods, and for this conclusion Creative Assembly still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. In my first foray into the latest game, I found myself facing an endless horde of these monstrosities, slicing my way through them in a completely new kind of Total War brawl. Survival battles are an evolution of the quest battles introduced in the previous Warhammer games, where you face a bespoke challenge on an extra fancy map. As the name suggests, you’ll need to deal with relentless waves of enemies as you try to reach your goal…

Efforts to build a sense of unease begin immediately in this dark point-and-click adventure. Your nameless character, who is wearing an untied straitjacket, finds himself in a surreal landscape. Standing at the top of a narrow path surrounded by an abyss, the only way forward is down this path to a huge, talking clown head. After telling you a dark joke, it lets you enter through its mouth, and the game proper in this twisted carnival world begins. Publisher Wadjet Eye has a reputation for great modern point-and-clicks, both developing its own titles and helping others’ projects to launch. Strangelandfeels at home in that stable, but it struggles to live up to the company’s better efforts. Walks a darker path than you might typically expect from the genre Upon entering the…

1 ROOMS Rooms and corridors can be dragged, dropped and rotated into place once your happy with them. 2 OBJECTS Things like furniture and ‘doorway blockers’ can stop parties from wandering into whitespace. 3 MONSTERS No dungeon is complete with monsters! Choose from four classes ranging from small to gargantuan. 4 TRAPS Available traps include hidden spikes, poison clouds, and the ominous sounding Death Glyph. 5 CAMPFIRE Lets the party have a nice long rest before the climactic boss fight. Reminds me of Dark Souls quite a bit. 6 LOOT No point in exploring a dungeon if there’s no reward. Two chests of goodies for our brave heroes.…

There are two camps of thought when it comes to the original Mass Effect. One admires its RPG sensibility, the bloated inventory and stats that affect how wobbly the rifle is, while also appreciating that it was slightly closer to classic sci-fi than the sequels – more Starship Troopers the novel than Starship Troopers the movie. Camp two sees ME1 as a bit clumsy, both the controls and elements that don’t fit the kind of story it’s telling. I’m in camp two. ME1is best when you’re stepping off your ship with a gun and a conveniently invisible tool for translating alien languages. Though you pick your face, class, and background, you’re always official space badass Commander Shepard, every planet an episode of your own TV show. Because I’m in camp…

Mechs in games are usually huge killing machines that can punch through buildings. Pure metal, fuel, and servos, ready to unleash destruction and chaos on anyone that gets caught in the crossfire. But the mechs in the adventure game Stoneflyare not like that. Sure, you’re still controlling an intimidating machine, but these miniature mechs are light on their robotic feet, hopping and gliding with ease. I love the idea of a mech that is not simply a war machine Stoneflyputs a magnifying glass over a forest’s undergrowth, letting you take a peek at an entire bug ecosystem, all from the safety of the world’s smallest mech. You play as a young engineer and inventor named Annika who’s on a mission to find her father’s stolen rig. On her escapades she…

The world of Oceanwork is an incredibly bleak one. As the perpetrator of an unspecified crime, you’re rocketed onto a watery planet to rinse it of its natural resources. When you’ve mined enough metals – and then banked them in exchange for cash – you can buy your freedom for the very reasonable price of 30 million credits. Oh, it’s a joke number at first, as you dive into the ocean again and again, chipping bits of copper in exchange for chump change. But as you exchange that change for upgrades – a bigger air supply here, a sharper pickaxe there – you can delve deeper into the ocean, where the rarer, more valuable minerals lie. By the time you’re fully upgraded you feel empowered If all that sounds eerily…

We’ve all experienced that feeling in a new relationship where, for a while, everything is perfect. They’re handsome. Smart. Surprising. They like all the same things you do and help you see the world differently. Then, just when you begin to think they might be ‘the one’, you wake up one night to find them listening to Mumford and Sons while gnawing human hands, and the magic evaporates. It’s an environment where up and down lose all meaning This is similar to what happened to me in Observation. The game’s unique, granular take on speculative fiction feels refined and thoughtful – the sci-fi equivalent of charity shopping your IKEA furniture and replacing it with stuff from Swoon. But things unravel about an hour in. I’m solving a puzzle that involves…

As ever, it’s the game with the least-obvious link that requires me to straight-up say what this month’s theme is (it’s AI, folks). It says a lot about Invisible Inc that even the AI, Incognita, looks like a Louis Vuitton model, albeit one made out of conductive tracks. It’s one of those turn-based stealth games that makes you feel cooler than disco tzatziki right up until the point your plans turn to sewage and your agents get brutalised. There’s a brilliant sense of time slipping away with every mission, and the setting and prevalence of cheekbones will make you feel handsome and capable by proxy, even if every stumbling failure is nothing but your own fault. You sexy idiot. 74…

Cast your mind back to a time when Facebook was in its infancy. An inconspicuous social media site where unsolicited posts from racist uncles, data mining advertising, and deceitful catfish personas were non-existent. It was a more innocent time where we were all still figuring out how to communicate digitally. It’s a piece of internet culture that’s particularly hard to articulate, but the visual novel Emily is Away <3 manages to capture the habits and language of a bygone era. The first two games in the trilogy took place in AIM chat windows, and this third in the trio takes place in 2008 over Facebook. Oops, I mean ‘Facenook’. Playing as a high schooler in their senior year, you and your friends are trying to figure out life’s next steps…

The original Total War: Rome was a huge part of my life in the mid-2000s. Not only did it get me through a lengthy stay in hospital, but it was also the game of choice of my neurodivergent daughter as she grew up. She played it, modded it, broke it, and bent it to her will. Her armies were suddenly vast and improbable, her coffers splitting with Denarii and her enemies cowering at the mention of her name. I always thought it was cheating, but she said she was channelling Julius Caesar. Living in a world where social norms and the ignorance of others made her life needlessly difficult, Rome, as well as its modding community, gave her control, power, and a place. It was also our thing. Amongst all…

It’s not unheard of, but still pretty rare, that a massive and popular mod for a game simply disappears. But it happened with Wyrmstooth, an expansion-sized mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It arrived in 2012, but was abruptly removed from modding sites by its creator in 2016. For years, players could really only acquire it by sharing the files with each other. There were a few rumours, but no one was exactly sure why the mod vanished. In February of 2021, Wyrmstooth’s creator, Jonx0r, officially re-uploaded the mod. Since I missed my chance to play it before it disappeared, I decided not to make the same mistake twice. I’m not just happy it reappeared, I’m happy I played it. In Wyrmstooth, dragons aren’t just an occasional terror filling…

AMID EVIL newblood.games/amidevil A Heretic throwback (think Doom but with magic) set in an ultra-cool astral fantasyscape, now with Nvidia ray tracing support. (Check the Steam settings for a beta branch if the RTX update hasn’t released yet.) Looks great either way, and you can use the planet Earth as a grenade. SERIOUS SAM 4 croteam.com The sort of shooter people say “well, I mean, it’s not great“ about while recommending it. Get this bad boy on sale and dual-wield big dumb shotguns (don’t think too hard about the reloading process), pilot a big mech, and run over hordes of big aliens with a big combine. MASS EFFECT LEGENDARY EDITION bit.ly/3eOv4R0 There’s been some debate on the PC Gamer team over whether the Mass Effect remaster looks good or misses…

OHSHITTOR GOD OF DEADLINES Eats slow writers alive Always arrives quicker than you expect him to Rises to his full power at 1am E’HMBRRRGOH GOD OF GAME ANNOUNCEMENTS Loves cryptic CG trailers Inspires insane frenzies in his followers Perpetually leaking DISCOURSUS GOD OF HOT TAKES Spreads corruption across social media Hates everything you like A man surrounded by swords is his herald THE SCOREFIEND GOD OF REVIEWS Absolutely never correct Hates numbers higher than 95 A solid 7/10 god…

Dream is a hugely popular YouTuber and Minecraft speedrunner who has nearly 23 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.5 million followers on Twitter. His runs break records and make the Minecraftworld speedrun leaderboard, to the astonishment of many viewers. But suspicions arose about their legitimacy and, in particular, there were accusations about tampering to get better luck. OTHER RUNS THEN CAME INTO QUESTION BECAUSE OF THE HIGH DROP RATES The controversy began in October 2020 when a speedrunner reported seeing higher RNG drops for key items in a run submitted by Dream earlier that month, which placed fifth on the world leaderboards. Various other runs then came into question because of the high drop rates of two key items – ender pearls and blaze rods – both of which are…

TO THIS DAY, HICKS CAN’T FACE PLAYING PUBG OR ANY OF ITS BATTLE ROYALE PEERS There was no PUBGwhen Brian Hicks and Jordan Tayer conceived the Survivor GameZ, a last-player-standing tournament for DayZ. But in 2012, The Hunger Games was an international movie phenomenon, and Tayer couldn’t stop talking about its potential. “He just kept pushing that point,” Hicks recalls. “The more he talked about it, the more I realised he’d push to make it happen, whether or not anyone had the ability to technically implement it. He put me in a position where if I didn’t jump in, learn how the hell Arma 2 worked, and figure it out, we were going to land flat on our face and everyone at work was going to see it.” At the…

Deathloopis the next big game from Arkane, the studio behind Dishonored and Prey. It has a lot in common with those games, and the immersive sim genre in general. You’re presented with a varied toolset and a dense, multi-layered world, and encouraged to experiment with reactive, open-ended systems to achieve your goals. But Deathloop’s premise sets it apart: you play as an assassin stuck in a time loop who must figure out a way to kill eight targets in one cycle. This is the only way hero Colt can free himself. Think Groundhog Day, but directed by Luc Besson and set in the 1960s. Deathloop takes place entirely on Blackreef, a mysterious island where time endlessly repeats. Taking advantage of this temporal anomaly, a group of self-proclaimed Visionaries are using…

Unexplored 2 comes so close to nailing the sense of adventure I got the first time I read The Lord of the Rings. It’s technically a roguelike, but instead of being trapped in a dungeon that reassembles itself into new configurations each time I die, I’m set loose into an expansive and enchanting fantasy world that is constantly in a state of flux. To survive, I have to forage, fight, and talk my way through a gauntlet of different challenges. While it doesn’t replicate the fun social dynamics of playing Dungeons & Dragons with a group of pals, it often feels like I’m playing a tabletop campaign uniquely crafted just for me. That Unexplored 2 channels The Lord of the Rings is definitely not an accident. I play as a…

With Warhammer games having the hit ratio of a blunderbuss shooting a target at 50 feet, I should really be immune to the IP’s allure by now. But something about its tone and lore just gets me, so when I was asked to review the turn-based tactics game Age of Sigmar: Storm Ground – the first Warhammer game on PC set in the newish titular setting – I felt that familiar frisson stirring. But like so much Warhammer spawn, Storm Guard’s lore and fine writing flatter a flawed game that clumsily combines tactical turn-based combat with an odd roguelike metagame. You start each battle with a single hero unit. As you amass ‘Power’ over the turns you can call in subsequent units using cards that you earn over a campaign…

Whatever else Solastamay be, you can’t fault its authenticity. Armour classes, spells, wincing at a bad dice-roll, it all brings back fond memories of BioWare’s early games. The Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition rules form the backbone of this RPG, filled with giant dungeons and tactical combat. It’s a decent first effort from the small French studio, albeit one that suffers from clumsy, derivative storytelling. Combat is where you’ll spend most of your time in Solasta That story sees you control four adventurers recruited as Deputies of the Council, an organisation representing various factions across the realm of Solasta. Initially dispatched to investigate a beleaguered border fort on the frontier of the Badlands (think Mordor, but in the west rather the east), you eventually stumble upon an ancient artefact known…

So Subnautica: Below Zero is almost as good as Subnautica. This may sound like damning with faint praise, but since Subnautica is, to my mind, the best survival game ever made, I’d argue the praise is pretty darned clear. Although less consistently brilliant, Below Zero shares the wild imagination, adventurous spirit, and richly tactile systems of its modern classic of a predecessor. 4546B’s icecap introduces a suite of new biomes to explore Below Zero returns players to the marine planet 4546B, this time donning the flippers of a new protagonist named Robin Ayou. Robin is searching for her sister Sam, who according to Sam’s employer Alterra, was accidentally killed while on a research expedition to the planet’s arctic region. But Sam’s previously recorded messages to Robin tell a different story.…

Introducing the latest contender looking to grab some of that PvPvE plunder, currently hoarded by games like Hunt: Showdown and Escape from Tarkov. It does bring some of its own ideas to the growing genre, including a third-person perspective, a focus on stealth and stealing, and an indestructible sheriff who stomps angrily around maps like an ironclad Mr X, grumbling about the vault key that one of the players has nicked off him. The premise is that two teams of four players are attempting to grab a treasure chest from a heavily fortified keep. The teams start at opposite sides of a sizable map, working their way into the keep by stealthily taking out guards, opening up shortcuts and eventually stealing that vault key off the sheriff. Once a team…

Mass Effect Legendary Edition includes remastered versions of Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3, plus most of the DLC. It’s sold as a package, and you can’t buy the remasters individually. Despite that, we decided that reviewing just the first game, which got the biggest overhaul, would be more useful than reviewing all three at once. This review should give you a good idea of whether you want to replay the classic series in remastered form or not.…

The Structure is a dystopian megacity ruled by a government that values order and efficiency above all. And if someone shows any signs of what it considers to be mentally divergent behaviour, it sends in a Mind Scanner (that’s you) to probe around in their brain with a series of disturbing, invasive machines and ‘cure’ them, turning them into its idea of a model citizen. The problem is, these machines also completely drain the subject of their personality. And what The Structure considers ‘mentally divergent’ might just be an eccentricity, or a slightly offbeat view of the world. It wants a population of dead-eyed drones who will blindly obey its commands and never question its leadership – and you’re going to help it. But it’s not like you have a…

In this affecting adventure game, you play as a woman returning to her home town in Sweden, a year after the death of her childhood friend. The place hasn’t changed, and it’s with bitterness rather than nostalgia that she wanders the streets, chatting to the locals as she tries to understand what happened. It’s impressive, the way that How We Know We’re Alive shifts over the course of its short runtime. The mystery is dangled in your face before being deconstructed at the close of the game. While it has the atmosphere of a Twin Peaks-style mystery – as you explore a quiet, rural town impacted by a shocking event – it’s a subtler story than I was expecting, offering no neat resolution to your friend’s sudden death. The ending…

It seems like faint praise to celebrate System Shock 2 – an epoch-defining game of enduring influence – because the signage is good. But by God, this is a game that knows how to direct me. I’m assailed by fat, welcoming arrows that disintegrate any doubt about where I am or where I’m going, and it’s one of many elements that mean System Shock 2 remains wickedly immediate 22 years after release. There’s a crisp, functional simplicity to everything that’s like going back to a Windows 98 PC with only four things on the desktop. Even navigating the simple drag-and-drop menus is weirdly charming. Other touches give it the feel of an Ultima-style RPG with sci-trappings – things like being able to write on the map in case the tiny…

I’ve devised my own test for AIs in games. Are you an AI in a game? If you answered ‘yes’: get away from me before I unplug you. Because although TOM from The Turing Test feels warm and benevolent, there’s enough underlying threat in the game to make anyone suspicious. The neat puzzles and soft robot guidance hide a deft, twisting story, perfect for anyone who wants Portal with fewer lemonade jokes and more introspective examination of the nature of machine intelligence. 80…

Tried buying a GPU lately? Chances are that you’ve been disappointed, faced either with dwindling stock levels or enormous prices on that well-known online auction site. And it’s not just PC gamers who are feeling the pinch – stocks of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles are at rock bottom, and even car makers and tumble dryer manufacturers are having trouble getting hold of the right amount of silicon to create their products. There are a few hypotheses about why this has happened, from large ships stuck in small canals, to Brexit making it generally harder (and more expensive) for the UK to import electronics, to Chinese chip manufacturers increasing their stockpiles of in-demand chips, decreasing their availability on the open market. Then there’s the small matter of COVID-19.…

Have you noticed how weirdAssassin’s Creed has gotten? I feel like I’m the only one who has. The strangeness has been creeping in since the move to the ancient world with Origins, but in Valhallait feels like it’s found its surreal voice. I’m not talking weird in the way they used to be, with overblown sci-fi plots where you’d end up fistfighting the Pope over alien technology, or discover the office IT guy was a reincarnated pirate. The series has frequently been ridiculous, but only in the way videogames tend to be. It wasn’t properly weird. Eivor, the hero of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, is a blunt and serious Viking, accustomed to raiding, pillaging, and stabbing blokes with swords. But she’s also a strangely mystical figure, who always seems to have…

Some of my favourite games feel like a second job. Ferrying cargo between systems in Elite Dangerous, doing shifts on the forklift in Shenmue, driving a truck around Europe in Euro Truck Simulator 2. So I always knew Shipbreaker would appeal to me. It’s a game about a regular working stiff on a mission to clear a mountain of debt by scrapping disused spaceships. It might all be taking place in a rich, vividly realised sci-fi setting, but you’re still clocking in for the nine to five and breaking your back for The Man. I love this about it. Science fiction games rarely focus on what it’s like just existingin these settings, and it’s refreshing to spend time in a universe like this without being a hotshot fighter pilot, a…

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