Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 i PC Gamer

ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Got his neck permanently stuck at an angle. A small price to pay for a great looking cover. I love when we get to do the Top 100. For all the drama it can cause (please be nice on social media, you lot), at its heart it’s just a big, earnest celebration of the games we love the most. Getting to write 100 effusive entries is a treat – and hopefully you’ll enjoy reading it just as much. And with it back to being its own supplement, we’ve got loads of space for great articles and features too – including a dive into the brilliantly ambitious Dying Light 2: Stay Human, a game whose mix of zombie open world action and RPG-like reactivity is…

HIGHS Gabe Gear A pleasant surprise about the Steam Deck was the reasonable cost of £349/$399 for the basic model. Doggone Snoop Dogg’s Twitch stream was muted for days without him realising. Fighting Fantasy Final Fantasy XIV is on a tear, with Square-Enix even briefly running out of digital copies. LOWS Crypt-no Reports from China indicate crypto-miners are beginning to try and sell used cards in bulk. Bad code Microsoft employee Volodymyr Kvashuk exchanged Xbox gift codes for $10 million in Bitcoin over 2017-2019: he’s just been jailed for nine years and fined $8.3 million. Last-gen FIFA FIFA 2022’s PC version lacks the ‘Hypermotion’ animation system.…

Boomerang X is an arena shooter that shouldn’t work on a gamepad. You’re able to toss a mystical bladed boomerang like its an extension of your body, dragging its wide arc through multiple enemies, recalling it whenever you like, and even magnetising yourself to its current location. This is a game where you can’t stop moving, where success is found dancing through the air, whipping the camera around to poke at half a dozen goo monsters from across the map in a single leap. Mouse-aim is almost required. Even with decades of experience with my trusty mouse and keyboard, I found it pretty demanding. So in an effort to bring Boomerang X to as many people as possible, the team at Dang! turned to an emerging, experimental gamepad control scheme…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Autumn DEVELOPER WolfEye Studio PUBLISHER Devolver Digital LINK weirdwest.com What convinced me Weird West is a true immersive sim had nothing to do with the carefully prepared talking points from a recent 30-minute hands-off demo. It was a small dust devil, a random weather event, whipping through the scene. While former Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio explains the finesse of the physics system, showing off by tossing a bottle and shooting it out of the air, a better, if less elegant example comes along. The dust devil skirts around the edge of our bird’s-eye view of a destitute barn and gunslinger protagonist, first picking up some wooden debris, then passing over a campfire. It then transforms into a raging cyclone of flame and despair, a swirling monstrosity…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Slow Bros PUBLISHER In-house LINK slow-bros.com/harold-halibut If you were to fling the last humans to a distant planet and raise them on a spaceship for 250 years, you’d end up with some weirdos. Harold Halibut is about just such a group, and turns out that humanity’s last hopes are indeed a quirky bunch. Mr Halibut himself is one such resident of this city. He’s the ship’s handyman and lab assistant to lead scientist, Jeanne Mareaux, who is trying to find a way to get humanity’s metropolis unstuck and back into space. Turns out after leaving Earth the space vessel’s residents hoped they would find another planet, but accidentally crash-landed, leaving everyone trapped underneath the waves of an alien world. Not that they seem to…

A iden Caldwell, enigmatic hero of Dying Light 2: Stay Human, is a member of the Pilgrims – a loose gathering of post-apocalyptic drifters wandering the ruins of the old world. He arrives in the City, the nameless metropolis where the game is set, looking for his sister, Mia. “Aiden is plagued by vague, disconnected memories of her,” says lead game designer Tymon Smektala. “When he learns the people responsible for what happened to her have been found there, he embarks on a mission to learn the truth.” This open-world zombie game is going a step beyond the original, backing its free-running, undead swarms, and brutal melee combat up with an interactive, branching story you can have a real impact on. The City isn’t just home to countless numbers of…

Last Stop is a game about extraordinary things happening to ordinary people. Set on the streets of London, it follows four very different characters – John, Jack, Donna, and Meena – whose unremarkable lives are suddenly touched by the supernatural. It’s an offbeat mix of the mundane and the fantastic, where one minute you’re making a cup of tea, and the next you’re tumbling through a portal into another dimension. It’s also one of the most authentic depictions of Britain I’ve seen in a videogame – a realistic, setting that makes those moments when things turn magical seem extra uncanny. It has a knack for telling small, human stories that feel genuine Last Stop is a linear narrative game. You tell the characters what to say in conversations, occasionally move…

Six years on from its very successful Kickstarter campaign, Crowfall has landed. The throne-war MMO was touted as many things during that time, including a claim by its designer that by launch it would be the “most strategic virtual universe (IMO surpassing Eve Online)”. So let’s just reset expectations by saying that Crowfallmost definitely isn’t that. What it is is a guild-based PvP game with a heavy focus on economy. You’ll be creating multiple characters sharing your account name, then levelling them quickly so that they can become cogs in a machine, helping your guild gain ground in the perpetual throne war. These flat-textured character models lack facial flair It all starts, as so many MMOS do, with character creation. Here you have your classic elven variations, mythological minotaurs and…

Just occasionally, as a new wave of orcs washes in to crash against your fortifications, you’ll catch a moan from a greenskin on the breeze, “Feels like we’re never gonna get there.” If your enemy is on the verge of a galaxy brain realisation about their doomed role in tower defence, however, they never get to complete the thought: they’re invariably dashed against the rocks, tarred and burned, or electrified so that their skeleton flashes through their skin. On the whole, combat is best described as mash and peas Orcs Must Die! 3 isn’t a thoughtful fantasy game, in that sense: it makes little effort to contextualise its maligned title characters, to ponder where they come from or why they do what they do. Yet it is a thinking person’s…

I’ve always been a distant admirer of the Monster Hunter series, with its lush worlds and vicious beasties, but no matter how many times I’ve tried – be it the early PSP forays or the more recent Monster Hunter World – it’s never clicked for me. As much as I want to love the series, I’ve been unable to get past the five-hour mark. There are so many systems to learn and aspects to juggle that it can be overwhelming. Monster Hunter Stories 2 has been my way in. Raid their dens for eggs, then raise their offspring to do your bidding A spin-off of the main series, Storiesfocuses on, er, story, and uses a turn-based battle system and monster-catching mechanics in place of the usual hunting action. While it’s…

They don’t make platformers like they used to – and that’s mostly for the best. I have a hard time going back to games on the Mega Drive, and having to contend with an ancient lives system and no damned saves. But there’s not a lot of humour, or playfulness, now that everything’s an emotive Metroidvania. Sometimes you want a nostalgic shot of light-hearted platforming. Oh, hey Janosik. Didn’t see you there. To be fair, that may be because you’re a highwayman – a real 17th century robber, and Slovakia’s version of Robin Hood. I wasn’t aware of Janosik, and this is an affectionate game about him, even if Wikipedia has little to say about his career as a platformer. I suppose you are robbing the rich, as you leap…

Otus, the hero from Owlboy, is terrible at everything. His fellow villagers seem to hate him. Everything he does seems to go wrong. He’s even mute, the poor lad. And that’s probably why guiding him to some degree of success is so pleasing. However bad he is at the start, I take comfort in knowing I can’t make it worse. That said, even the earliest attempts to fix things go wrong. The first beat of the story sees Otus and his soldier friend Geddy chasing a ‘troublemaker’, only to miss the entire fleet of pirates that descends on the village. The lovely animation just makes things worse: Otus’ simple sprite is still capable of expressing fear and doubt, and I just want to pat him on the feathered shoulder and…

It’s not often you’ll hear a PC gamer admit that the combo of keyboard and mouse is ill-suited for gaming. It does happen, though, and there are oodles of adventure games, sports games, and brawlers that play better on a controller. So, you’ll want one of the best controllers close at hand for when you run into one. There are many schools of thought on what makes one controller better than another, though, and the biggest divide undoubtedly comes down to thumbsticks: do you go for two parallel sticks, as is customary for Sony, or instead offer an asymmetrical approach? The latter championed by Microsoft, yet also an approach used by a good few more. Even if you firmly believe one layout is best, you’ll want to consider other potential…

We have previously suggested that a robot-controlled future in which humans are hunted for sport is a likely one, but we’ve had a bit of trouble with our blood pressure lately, and have decided techno-utopianism is just as reasonable, in the style of Iain M Banks’ Culture novels. The crucial difference here is that, while the murderous AI of the Terminator is a human invention, the benevolent Minds that oversee the Culture are AIs built by AIs, and it seems to work out better that way. There’s a step in microchip design known as floorplanning, in which the building blocks of a chip are marked out before they go anywhere near a silicon wafer. You put some processing cores here, a touch of cache RAM there, top it all off…

ROBIN VALENTINE THIS MONTH Watched an unhealthy amount of Marvel movies. ALSO PLAYED Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Legends of Runeterra Superheroes are a particularly difficult thing to get right in a videogame. They shouldn’t be, in theory – power fantasy is gaming’s bread and butter, and loads of game protagonists have supernatural abilities anyway. But in practice it requires a delicate balance. Marvel’s Avengers perfectly illustrates the potential pitfalls, sadly by falling afoul of most of them. The game begins with an attack on the Golden Gate Bridge – the Avengers swoop in to try and stop it. I first get to charge into battle as the mighty Thor, whirling Mjolnir. The thing is, the enemies aren’t aliens or super-soldiers or robots, they’re just… guys. Dudes in body armour with guns.…

Phasmophobia’s mix of rag-doll comedy and moments that make my blood run cold is the reason why it’s been my multiplayer group’s go-to game for the past year. That balance has been great for someone like me who’s easily spooked, but Kinetic Games has been slowly fixing the game’s jank and turning it into pure horror. It’s not quite there yet, but Phasmophobiaisn’t the loveable glitchy jumble it once was. Its horror streak has gotten much more sinister, and as brilliant as it is, I’m not sure how many more updates I can take. Phasmophobia’s ghost list has now risen from twelve to fourteen with the introduction of the Yokai and Hantu – it looks like Kinetic has been delving into some Japanese and Indonesian folklore. The Hantu is a…

KORTHIA CALLING 1 Korthia is a brand new sub-zone you can visit in the Maw and it’s worth making sure you have access to it. It unlocks after a short intro questline, and is home to a full quest hub with various new factions and activities for you to discover. BRAVE THE MAW 2 Now you’ll have the ability to ride ground mounts around the Maw, making daily and weekly quests here much less of a chore to complete. In fact, the zone becomes almost enjoyable – especially for slower classes – as it’s much easier to get around. DAILY LIFE 3 There are some new daily quests to pick up and complete in Korthia, as well as one weekly mission. These can grant you new gear, faction reputation, even…

DEAD SPACE 3 My new preferred way to play. Analogue directional control plus fine-tuned aim just feel perfect. ENTER THE GUNGEON I prefer the stick for arcade shooters. Having a centrepoint for resistance and reference makes aim easier. CITIES SKYLINES A keyboard is still ideal for all the shortcuts it allows, but Flick Stick is an excellent way to play from the couch. FORTNITE Flicking the controller to summon a box around myself? Much more natural than analogue guesswork.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Kitfox Games PUBLISHER In-house LINK boyfrienddungeon.com Dating sims are weird. I’ve courted pigeons, wholesome fathers, monster prom hopefuls, ’90s velociraptors, sacrificial goats, Colonel Sanders, and now, thanks to Kitfox Games, I can date hot people that can transform into deadly weapons. What a world we live in. Boyfriend Dungeon combines dating sim mechanics with hack-n-slash dungeon crawling, the idea being you meet human hotties and then use their transformational powers to fight monsters. The game’s title focuses on boyfriends, but you can also date women and non-binary folk if you prefer. You also pick your own pronouns, making for a super-inclusive take on the genre, which is what we like to see. The only thing that stays the same across all games is your…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE September 28, 2021 DEVELOPER We Create Stuff PUBLISHER Modus Games LINK modusgames.com Lately, something has been stirring in the murky periphery of the horror genre. Recent games like Amnesia: Rebirth, The Medium, and Chernobylite use horror framing and ambience to serve the story rather than just startle the player – they’re haunting rather than horrifying, unsettling rather than jumpy. In Sound Mind looks set to join this club. Here you play a psychiatrist figuring out why various patients of his ended up killing themselves following their treatment. But this isn’t just a case of looking through old session notes and drug prescriptions. When you listen to a patient interview tape, your office shakes, and you exit the door into a nightmarish recreation of the area where…

“When designing the Howler, we tried to emphasise its main function in the world, which is screaming,” says Katarzyna Bech, lead character concept artist. “It has a painful growth, a mutation, on the chest and lungs, as well as on the larynx, which suggests where this incredible and terrifying sound comes from. It can even paralyse the player for a moment. The Howler is also aided in its screams by a wide-open, four-part maw. This creature is not physically strong, so its body shows it through its emaciation, protruding bones, hanging pale skin, and mutated atrophic hand.”…

You may not be able to see them, but there are secret PC gamers hidden deep within the bowels of the major console companies. Back in 2013, Brian Hicks was a project manager at Microsoft Studios – a professional Xbox evangelist. But behind the scenes, he was working to build relations between his bosses and the makers of a quintessential PC game he had fallen in love with: DayZ. “You know, I’m doing this so much,” Hicks wrote in one email to DayZ creator Dean Hall, “you should just hire me.” Asked to fly out to Prague for a two-week working interview, Hicks was shocked to discover that the DayZteam, as development on the standalone game began, was roughly five people. “It was a very, very barebones team,” he says.…

The story of my first campaign in Old World, where I led my Greek civilisation to global domination, is equally the story of Rome, my nemesis. When I first encountered the Romans, they were friendly, offering us goodies and hospitality, but it was a poisoned chalice – quite literally. A sickness spread, and Roman gifts were the source. I demanded justice and compensation; Rome only wanted war. It would take nearly 200 years until I got my revenge. Old World feels like a meaningful evolution, and a welcome one It was not a single continuous war, but rather an eternal grudge. The first conflict ended without much resolution, with the distance between our empires and the massive mountain chain that separated us creating some logistical difficulties. There were still battles,…

Along with thousands of other galactic migrants, your character in The Ascent pays a small fortune for a ticket to the planet Veles, looking for a better life. The moment you step off the ship, however, the price of the ticket becomes a debt so astronomical that you’ll die before you can pay it off. Even so, the company that owns the city you now call home, the Ascent Group, wants its pound of flesh. You are now an indent – slang for an indentured servant – working dirty, dangerous jobs to pay it off. The Ascent’s setting, a mix of neon-flecked ’80s cyberpunk and grimy science fiction, is magnificent. The story takes place in an Arcology – a self-contained city squeezed into an immense skyscraper. One of the most…

The butterfly effect – the theory that changing something in the past, however small, could have a huge impact on the present – is a central tenet of any number of time travel stories. Cris Tales is no exception. Simultaneously showing you the past, present, and possible future of its fantasy world, it seems to invite you to make those changes. But beyond a few oft-repeated ideas, it lacks the courage to see that broader concept through. Walk by a child and your future perspective will show them all grown up After being lured to the altar of the local cathedral by a talking frog, orphan Crisbell discovers that she is a Time Mage, an order of magic users whose abilities allow them to perceive and alter the flow of…

You know, little inhabitants of Vedelem’s 13th century keep: it might have been wiser to build a farm in the years of peace beforethe Mongolians invaded. Now, as your advisor – really, as the god figure trying to keep you alive – I have only desperate minutes in which to plonk down some essential infrastructure. That includes sawmills and quarries, houses and military camps, and each requires mounds of slowly accruing resources. Naturally each building can be upgraded, as can your keep and soldiers Vedelemis a strategy game where you’re trying to defend a fragile central keep, primarily by building walls and training squads of eager little soldiers. When the enemy arrives – they appear in waves over the course of each game session – you drag-select and inflict your…

Scenes of Britishness are a largely untapped gaming resource. Aside from the leafy, Radio 4 apocalypse of Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, few games accurately capture the damp-bunting disappointment of the British experience. And until someone makes a savage economy management sim set during a Women’s Institute charity bake sale, we’ll have to make do with Untitled Goose Game: the world’s first mild inconvenience-’em-up. There’s a simple, silly immediacy to it that’s refreshing There’s something nice about playing a game where my goal isn’t to break necks or save worlds or amass boundless wealth. As a horrible goose I’m more concerned with stealing hats and trapping people in garages. It’s worrying how happy I am to go along with this seemingly meaningless list of things to do. Firstly, because it…

This is the most relaxing and stressful game I’ve ever played. On the one hand, I can set the camera mode to orbit and sit and watch baby hippos for hours on end. And I can zoom so close to lion paw puds that I can practically reach out and touch them without the danger of being mauled. On the other hand: there’s disease everywhere, I’m not making enough money, and all my animals keep having too much sex. More than this, the degree of freedom is so high it’s almost paralysing. Even with the excellent and detailed tutorial system, there’s a nagging sense that I shouldn’t be left in charge of the welfare of all of these delicate animals. Just ask my chronically depressed bears and bulimic antelopes.…

ELBO This chair was generatively designed using Autodesk’s Project Dreamcatcher. It has an organic look to it. ARUP These components by Arup are designed to carry the same loads and forces, and can be 3D printed. ART This ‘dog’ was created by a GAN – a Generative Adversarial Network. See more at aiartmedia.com. WRITE The GPT-3 language generator produced an article published on the Guardian website in September 2020.…

1 FLASHING TORCHES This is the first signifier that the hunt has begun – duck behind some furniture or skedaddle to a closet or locker. 2 DOORS If you hear doors opening on their own, that means the ghost is checking near your hiding spot, maybe even in the room you’re in. 3 FOOTSTEPS The ghosts in Phasmophobia are a stompy bunch. Just make sure to stay as quiet as you can when you hear them pass by your hiding spot. 4 GHOST GASP If you hear a ghostly exhale, one of your mates has definitely died, but that means you have survived the hunt. Congratulations!…

1 NUMBER CRUNCHING You need anywhere between 10 – 30 players for normal and heroic raids as the bosses will scale to your group size. The harder mythic difficulty requires a group of 20. 2 GRAND STRATEGY Bosses vary in difficulty so it pays to know the mechanics you need to deal with ahead of time. Assigning players tasks, such as interrupting spells, can help you taste victory. 3 BUFF UP Ensure your entire group is using flasks, enchants, weapon oils, and food whenever possible. The individual buffs may seem small, but it all adds to your chances of success.…

There are a few guiding principles that we stick to when we put together this Top 100 list. For example, we’re always clear that this isn’t a ranking of the greatest PC games of all time, but rather the best ones to play right now. It’s a reflection of all the brilliant experiences the industry has to offer in 2021. Yes, that includes some retro classics that hold up nicely, but it also means celebrating the impact of bold new releases. But the most important principle is that it should reflect us as a team, and who we are as PC gamers. With lots of new additions to our crew since last year, that means some big, exciting changes to our list. Read on and enjoy! ROBIN VALENTINE Specialist in…

The Challenger 2 is a British tank that’s been in service since 1994, and has seen service in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Iraq. It’s also found in War Thunder, Gaijin Entertainment’s free online game. There’s a commitment to accuracy in War Thunder: realistic vehicle and weapon physics, which players partake in spirited discussions about in the forums. The Challenger 2’s debut, for instance, sparked a thread 319 pages long (and growing). IT’S UNKNOWN WHETHER THE PLAYER IS ACTUALLY A TANK COMMANDER Things got out of hand in early July, however, when one player demonstrated slightly too much commitment to realism. The player, who claims to be a Challenger 2 commander and formerly of the British Army’s Armoured Trials and Development Unit, complained the in-game model is inaccurate and more…

“WE WEREN’T SEEING THE ENTIRE PICTURE OF WHAT WAS GOING ON” Back in the ’90s, everybody told Bioware that the western RPG was dead. “That’s the best news you can hear,” cofounder Trent Oster laughs. “That means that there is absolutely nobody looking at your market space, and you can roll in and do fun things.” It also meant, however, that the studio was short on good examples to follow. Bioware’s model for a great D&D game, Pool of Radiance, had come out in the late ’80s and looked like Teletext. By 1995, the studio was instead playing Warcraft, the pioneering real-time strategy game. That’s why, when you click on a Baldur’s Gateparty member, you often hear a funny, fourth-wall breaking quip in the style of early Blizzard – a…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Early 2022 DEVELOPER Black Salt Games PUBLISHER In-house LINK blacksaltgames.com When the sun is high and the fish are biting, Dredgecould almost pass as any other fishing game. With seagulls wheeling overhead and your simple vessel bobbing back and forth between picturesque island communities, there’s something very relaxing about life on the high seas. But when the sun sets, whatever wholesome vibes Dredge might have given off are immediately replaced by something much more sinister. As the fog rolls in, the picture-perfect bays and harbours become treacherous mazes filled with jagged rocks. The toll of being alone on the open water starts to weigh on your mind, and the mackerel and cod beneath the waves seem to be replaced with something much more dangerous. Whatever’s out…

NEED TO KNOW EXPET TO PAY £10.30 DEVELOPER Balcony Softworks PUBLISHER Those Awesome Guys LINK deepestchamber.com If you never ‘got gud’ at Dark Souls, and you’ve been wondering what all the fuss was about, you can get the gist, sort of, with this very Souls-inspired roguelike deckbuilder, out now in early access. Deepest Chamber is set in an own-brand version of Lordran, home to beaky plague doctors, hatchet-wielding midwives, and other undead weirdos. The game takes place in a fantasy city, which is simultaneously stuck under a magical energy dome, and beset by a familiar undead curse. As a result, the surviving residents have retreated to the sewers. Playing as a band of adventurers you’ll descend into the bowels of the city, fighting turn-based battles across a handful of floors.…

Chernobyliteis a curious mash-up of ideas orbiting around a pretty stiff first-person shooter framework. But it feels more inviting thanks to its evocative setting and cast of grizzled scavengers. Despite some shortcomings, it succeeds as a game about choice, where you’re constantly faced with quandaries that may meaningfully affect the hero Igor’s journey as he chases spectral visions of his wife around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Killing a sketchy character early on might lead to an awkward impasse with his wife later, split-second decisions about whether or not to save stalkers from patrolling army guards will dictate how many allies and enemies you have in the Zone, and at every key point you’ll have companions radioing in to persuade you to do stuff. Combat gets a bit tangled between shooter,…

When Capcom announced that The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles would be coming to Steam on day one of its overseas release, the eruption of joy PC players felt was like hearing the words ‘not guilty’ after a long, fierce trial. The original trilogy released in the 2000s only made their way to Steam in 2019, so we’re used to waiting a bit longer. Not this time, though. The international versions of The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures and The Great Ace Attorney Adventures 2: Resolve are available right out the gate, neatly bundled together in this double feature. There’s no connection to the previous games whatsoever The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles keeps up much of the melodrama and flair from previous games in the series. If you want backstabbing, tragedy, and…

I’m no good at the tricks, but I love the sensation of skating games, feeling the concrete and metal under wheel as I perform the two moves I can remember, again and again. One of the best series for the sensation – and for the atmosphere, for that matter – was the impossibly cool Jet Set Radio, which had you roller-skating round a hip, cel-shaded city. Downhill Jam comes remarkably close to it, offering a downhill course in a similarly funky city. There are little alternate routes, collectible cash, and at the end a score so you can see how badly you did. At the risk of burying the lede: in Downhill Jam you’re a cat on a hoverboard. You can customise the cat, giving it a hat and different…

You know when spring arrives, and you see the mummy ducks with their trails of fluffy yellow ducklings, and the only thought that springs to mind is, ‘half of you are going to die’? That’s how it feels playing Shelter. There’s an overwhelming sense of looming disaster, and no matter how many radishes I pick or groundhogs I butcher, I know it won’t be enough to keep all five of my precious badger children alive. I’m so committed to failure, in fact, that I almost leave one of my offspring behind because I assume they’re already dead, as a means of the game warning me how grim things are going to get. In fact, I’ve never been more glad not to be a badger, and that’s saying something.…

We’ll top off this month of me shitting on games people pretend to love by finishing with Goat Simulator– a title that defines our knees-up, clown shoes, rumpitty pumpitty, oopsy-daisy Mr Grimble lackwit obsession with games being ‘hilarious’. It doesn’t work, never did, and the positive Steam reviews suggest nobody cares. It’s the same weak joke your dad tells wrong every Christmas – the game equivalent of an airbag that doesn’t stop you from being maimed but does feature a picture of a kitten wearing a pineapple hat.…

The Steam Deck isn’t going to be another Steam Machine. Well, OK it literallyis. As a full gaming PC that runs purely on SteamOS, and aims to wrestle gamers away from Windows, it feels like a new generation of that failed idea. But where the Steam Machines were ultimately evidence of Valve’s initial naivety around PC hardware, the Steam Deck is something far more assured, far more believable, and far more timely. The most basic, and obvious comparison when you first clap eyes on the Deck is the Nintendo Switch. After all, it’s another handheld gaming machine with an attractive price point. While the Steam Deck is most certainly that, it’s also something else entirely. This is handheld PC gaming with the same benefits and pain points we all recognise…

TYLER WILDE THIS MONTH Wandered into a game that was supposed to be empty. ALSO PLAYED Rainbow Six Siege, Wildermyth Playing Tribes: Ascend, an abandoned multiplayer-only FPS, feels like being somewhere you’re not supposed to be. Did someone forget to turn the game off? Or did I stumble into a pocket dimension? Is a capture-the-flag-loving wizard going to be very angry when he finds me here? The uncanniness of playing Tribes: Ascendtoday is funny given that it would feel completely normal to launch Quakeand jump into a server (or the original Tribes, for that matter). The difference is that Tribes: Ascendreleased in 2012, which is just recent enough to make it an oddity. These days, online games that aren’t hits get demolished and paved over before they even finish ‘beta…

In the tension between childhood in the WWII-mad ’70s and having German relatives, I developed a life-long horrified fascination with the whole thing. Not for me are the superficial delights of Battlefield-style shooters though. I need huge, sweeping simulations of the Eastern front, dripping in appropriate misery. My brain hums with counter-possibilities. What if the 2nd & 3rd Panzers had continued onto Moscow in August? And I want receipts. So, I see a game like Steel Division II and I wantit. I want to be good at it, I want to have time for it. It’s the kind of game that I acquire during a Steam sale, carefully hoovering up all the DLC… then never, ever play. Because I hate base-building, I hate resource management, and fear the menus. Give…

Valheimis an easy game to fall in love with. The exploration, the crafting, the base-building – all of it had me hurrying through real-life tasks so I could get back to the Viking afterlife as quickly as possible. I honestly didn’t think I could have been any more excited about it – and then I found out that not only are there wolves in the game, but you can tame them too. To say I got a little carried away may be a bit of an understatement. Two wolves became three, became ten, then suddenly it seemed like my entire base – and the surrounding countryside – was inundated with the goodest of boys (and, apparently, girls). And they aren’t limited to my base either. I’ll often be sailing down…

DOTA 2 I’m afraid none of us play it. And if you don’t all stop being so horrible, we never will. Besides, if we’re all being honest with ourselves, League of Legends is just better, isn’t it? PLAYER UNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS It feels thematically appropriate to only let one battle royale game fight its way onto our Top 100 list, and PUBG needs to start hosting pop concerts if it’s going to beat Fortnite there. TEAM FORTRESS 2 In spot 100 last year, Valve’s enduring shooter clung on for dear life this time round, but couldn’t stand in the face of a barrage of new entries. Goodnight, old friend. DEAD BY DAYLIGHT We would get into this surprisingly successful multiplayer horror game, but frankly we can’t afford the DLC on our…

100 WARFRAME RELEASED 2013|LAST POSITION 68 Steven: Warframe has had some ups and downs over the last year, but it’s still an innovative, strange, and absorbing MMO shooter unlike anything else on the PC. No other game comes close to doing what Warframe does – especially now that it has ship-to-ship space combat and a Shadow of Mordor-style Nemesis System. The amount of stuff to do in Warframe is mind-boggling. And with a major story expansion coming later this year, there’s never been a better time to start playing. 99 HEARTHSTONE RELEASED 2014 |LAST POSITION No change Tim: Hearthstone retains its place thanks to Battlegrounds mode, which has surely overtaken Standard as the main reason to play. Blizzard is pumping resources into BGs, and (inevitably) rolling out paid…