Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2022 i PC Gamer

Sometimes, the best thing ever is taking a trip to somewhere absolutely horrible. In games, at least. Whether it’s a barren wasteland, scorched post-apocalypse, or literal Hell, we love a grim digital world. And the irradiated wilderness that is the Zone is one of our all-time favourites. So it’s a thrill that not only is the STALKERseries finally out of limbo and making its way back to our screens, but its new entry is a true open world – bigger, bleaker, and more dangerous than ever before. Read on, and discover a place where even the deer can kill you… ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Stared deep into the Orb. The Orb is light! The Orb is life! All hail the Orb!…

HIGHS Kasparov plays Hearthstone  PCG spoke to former world chess champ Garry Kasparov, “Yes, I do play Hearthstone. I’m diamond five!” Surprise Halo Microsoft announced an early launch for Halo Infinite multiplayer. So long Bowser Nintendo sued a 52 year-old Canadian man who was selling emulators. His name? Gary Bowser… LOWS NFT rush EA, Epic, and Ubisoft are among the big-hitters declaring their interest in NFTs. Squid name Streamer SquidGame got a lot of grief over their name, picked in 2010. Premium Access Many ‘premium’ games are now launching with early access weeks: but only if you’ve bought a deluxe or ultimate edition. This sucks.…

When a post praising the thousands upon thousands of game walkthrough maps created by a GameFAQs poster named StarFighters76 circulated on Twitter, the astounded responses weren’t only from people seeing them for the first time. Tons of replies were from players who’d used his maps before, but had no idea just how many he’d created. “These maps have gotten me out of SO MANY jams bro,” says one. “Shout if you’ve been using these maps for the FF Pixel Remasters,” says another. The collection of over 3,500 maps that StarFighters76 has created is impressive, but the number of players he’s helped through more than 300 games may be even more so. For nearly 20 years, StarFighters76 has been posting maps to GameFAQs, one of the few surviving institutions from the…

No one seems to tackle anyone when you’re watching When Ardiles returned to manage Spurs, he played to their strengths, putting all five world-class strikers in from the start. It was breath-taking… and a disaster. I find that devil-may-care, joie-de-vivre irresistible, and that’s why I suck at football manager sims. I’m a fan, and the intricacies of the game are often too arcane. Just play better, I scream, occasionally out loud. So, the Football Manager series scares me. There are menus and charts and significant obfuscation of its systems. It’s big and clever, for the statistician and connoisseur whose dish is data. Sports Interactive’s commitment to quality is a feast for those with the acumen to get to the bottom of the bowl. Yet the tutorial system that made last…

Hot on the heels of Inscryption (see p90), Voice of Cards is another card game where all is not as it seems. But where Daniel Mullins’ feverish cabin battler deals you a hand of jokers and, for me, proved more than the sum of its parts, Square Enix has barely shuffled the deck. This is despite featuring creative input from Yoko Taro, he of Nier and papier-mâché head fame. Come to this expecting his galaxy (moon?) brained genre subversion and the biggest twist is how ploddingly basic it all is. There’s little variety or poetry in these building blocks In truth it’s less a card game than a game built from cards. It’s a cardboard kingdom dealt by a disembodied game master who narrates the campaign. Characters, items, and buildings…

With Age of Empires II still held up as a paragon of strategy games, you can see why new series developer Relic has decided to model Age of Empires IV on the second entry. The latest iteration strips away the complexities of AoE III, while adding welcome touches of its own. Chief among these are asymmetrical factions, which will elicit screams of bloody imbalance but count as the game’s greatest success. It’s Relic’s bravest evolution of that precious AoEformula On the other hand, reverence to the past can be restricting, and I can’t help but feel that Age of Empires IV could have been something more. While I respect Relic’s decision to play things fairly safe, that should result in making what’s already there really shine; polish those mosque minarets…

In the time it takes to read this sentence, 17.3 game developers will have tried and failed to do what Circuit Superstars does: a mix of arcade and sim racing that feels enriched, not compromised, by both. Admittedly that was quite a long sentence. Still, the point stands. This may look like an unassuming title, and certainly it launched to little fanfare from publisher Square Enix, but it deserves the attention of any motorhead. The game itself is pretty laissez-faire about online racing conduct If you’re a veteran of many a cross-legged Micro Machines campaign from the 16-bit days or, to be honest, if you’ve simply seen a screenshot and clocked the isometric camera, you’ve got a handle on how it feels to drive. What isn’t evident until your first…

After being airdropped from a cargo plane in an AMG One, I arrive at the festival site to a fanfare. The organisers are delighted – their ‘superstar’ is finally here – and to celebrate they offer me a choice of starting car. I leave the site and head to my first race in a Corvette Stingray Coupe. This isn’t how racing games are supposed to start. I should be battling for wins in some hatchback. Instead, I’m being handed a 500 horsepower supercar. Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t need to do what other racing games would do. It just needs to be a Forza Horizon game. It’s a series with no serious rival, and as such it feels unchallenged. It’s not being forced to reinvent the wheel, and so it’s content…

Tim Sheinman makes beautiful detective games embedded in fictional music scenes. Think Her Story, as filtered through the NME. After Family and Rivals comes the darker Echo Beach, set in a future where music is banned, and where rogue musicians are hunted down by undercover agents. You play as one of these agents, and your job is to infiltrate an online community, reading messages and listening to music for clues to their identities. Every time you work out a name, you feed the information back to your superiors, who will arrest the musician and give you new targets, the following day. I love how Sheinman has reworked the themes of the previous games, which celebrated community and discovery in the world of music. Here you’re tearing a community apart, through…

I’ve often wondered how I’d die in a horror movie. I assumed something heroic, like having my knees eaten while I lift starving orphans onto a rescue helicopter. Layers of Fear has been kind enough to confirm the grim truth. Apparently I get locked in a basement and starve to death after effing about with a ouija board I should obviously have left alone. It’s not even that I was stupid enough to play with such an obviously-cursed item – more that I broke the sacrosanct gaming rule of following the light and going where the game wanted me to. It’s not the ideal finale for my first go, but it does highlight one of the game’s most interesting and unforgiving features: if things go wrong, that’s it. Game over.…

Time is tight – we’ve only got one ‘rotation’ (however long that is) to explore this graveyard of derelict spaceships. Rocket points out the best way forward, and warns against a dead end path. Of course, ignoring all dramatic tension and logic, I go down the dead end first, seeking collectibles. But then, a surprise – Rocket actually calls me out, directly reacting to my time-wasting with a bitter wisecrack. Ha ha, ho ho, see how my gaming habits have been delightfully skewered. Guardians of the Galaxy has been widely praised for this reactivity, with loads of dialogue triggered by the player’s actions – but my experience has been that it’s almost all been along these lines. I go off to explore, and some grumpy aliens call me a jackass…

Last season notwithstanding, Apex Legendshas had one hell of a year. So, to celebrate, Respawn has sent our gang of delightful murderbuds off on an unseasonably sunny holiday to close out the year. Welcome to Storm Point, Apex Legends’ largest map to date. With a landmass roughly 15% larger than World’s Edge, Storm Point is truly massive. But it’s also both denser and taller than any Apexarena yet, laid out as a sprawling jungle wrapped around a mountain that extends higher than any previous map, dusty peaks descending into thick foliage before levelling out into white sandy beaches. It’s gorgeous, but it’s also a jarring shift from the tight, clustered maps we’ve seen so far. Without obvious hotspots like Kings Canyon’s Skulltown (RIP), or World’s Edge’s Fragment, matches are scattered,…

On November 19, 1998, Sierra released Half-Life. In the time it took to install 300MB of exquisitely poised shooter off its CD-ROM, everything from the genre prior became part of a bygone era. And perhaps the unluckiest of the lot was Ritual’s SiN, which released just ten days before it. Here was a game that, like Half-Life, wanted to bring a bit more storytelling back to the genre after a long period of dominance from dialogue-averse id Software and similarly laconic newcomers Epic Games. It had a spectacularly named hero in John Blade, and in its antagonist Elexis Sinclaire a typically salacious depiction of a woman – though to give Ritual some credit, both black player-characters and female CEOs were wildly progressive ideas for the era. It had voice actors.…

I WAS FORCED TO TAKE COVER, ROLL AND AIM, BUT EVERY BULLET FELT LIKE A DICE ROLL One grisly stop on a trek through the first of five chapters in Weird West will remind you of what was so scarce in its most recent contemporary, Deathloop. Both are immersive sims with vastly different goals. Deathloop was about harnessing an unwieldy system, but Weird West is about livingin it. Early in Weird West, I came across a coven ritual. The witches asked me to leave them alone, but before I could walk away, their ritual succeeded. A horde of undead and their ghastly leader poured out of the summoning circle. The sisters were armed for it. They took care of the abominations like it was a Monday. I just watched This…

There’s no shortage of card battlers on Steam, but none of the others are quite like this. For example, get a load of that gorgeous, Lichtenstein-style retro art spread across the page. Isn’t it fantastic? Gameplay needs to work hard to keep up; and, somehow, it just about does. The basic concept would, interestingly, be a good fit for several genres. Each character is a monster disguised as a human. The more damage they take, the more their true monster form is revealed. The more monstrous they become, the greater the difference in the abilities available to them. How this translates to play isn’t explained fully in-game (for now at least), but it’s easy enough to fill in the gaps. At the beginning of each round, you have a few…

APEX LEGENDS Nat Clayton, features producer: Apex Legendshas always been good. But for those first few years it felt like Respawn was still figuring out how to run an ongoing battle royale. But in 2021 the studio nailed it. Season 9 is the clear standout, bringing us not only a strong new character in Valkyrie, but a new Arenas game mode – a distinctly Respawn take on Counter-Strikethat lets you immediately get into a fair fight. Arenas proved that Apexhas legs beyond battle royale, cementing the game as not just a good BR, but one of the best team shooters around. EACH NEW MAP MANAGES TO BRING ITS OWN PERSONALITY But it also feels like Apexis just so much more confident this year, both as a game and as a…

Sledgehammer tries to put twists on the more familiar encounters Once again, Call of Duty spins its wheel of war, and for the sixth time in the series’ history, the needle has landed on ‘World War the Second’. Call of Duty has always been most comfortable booting Hitler right in the Panzerschrecks, nestled cosily in the history of the victors, safe in the knowledge that the baddies really were bad. But it’s also the most difficult setting from which to build something new. There are only so many World War II battles, after all, and Call of Duty has covered them exhaustively over the years. It’s a problem that Vanguard fails to resolve, which is a shame because there are hints of more interesting ideas amid the game’s familiar sights…

Frogware’s latest Sherlock game feels like the ultimate expression of the developer’s ambition for its venerable sleuthing series – but also its strangest entry yet. It is nearly everything you could want from a game about the consulting detective, but also a few things that you could do without. It veers between greatness and absurdity, but if you’ve got an itch to solve some Victorian mysteries, there isn’t a better salve. Some great self-contained mysteries that are fun to solve Don’t let the title fool you – this is not the first in a series of episodic games, but rather an origin story with a younger, hotter, weirder Sherlock. Instead of being stuck in gloomy London, Sherlock’s taken a trip to the sunny Mediterranean island of Cordona, where he lived…

16% SHOOT AT NOTHING You got into the gunner seat of a vehicle, so you may as well use the gun. 5% YELL AT PILOTS What were they thinking when they didn’t dodge all those lock-on missiles? 14% LIE ON HILLS Have a lie down with a big rifle, a 10x scope, and no shame. 64% PINE FOR OLD DAYS If only that one feature from Battlefield 2142 were in this game. Then it’d be good! 1% CAPTURE A POINT Game’s almost over, better be seen near a flag!…

I did not expect to root for Guardians of the Galaxy this much. The game was weighed down by so many stagnant vibes during its pre-release cycle. The shadow of Marvel’s Avengers, Square Enix’s 2020 attempt to transmute the total media superiority of the MCU into a living co-op videogame, loomed particularly large. That game’s cast of Hollywood facsimiles left customers ice cold, and while the core narrative was solid, nobody enjoyed the meaningless currency grind. It’s full of sequences that capture the funnier, lighter side of Marvel Guardianscomes from the same publisher and appears to be made of the same stock, except that this time, it’s a singleplayer only campaign and the player is restricted to the least interesting member of the troupe, Star-Lord. There is a pervasive focus-tested…

JRPGs have a lot in common with road trips, even if you’re usually travelling on the back of a chocobo or flying galleon. It’s a journey with pals, bonding and bickering on back-roads. Get in the Car, Loser! has that – but it also has a sweet convertible. It’s literally a road trip, where you hop from gas station to gas station on a straight stretch of road, while beating up demons. The title is taken from the opening scene, where shy protagonist Sam is picked up by a friend and her boyfriend, before being dragged into an adventure to save the world. You see, Grace has stolen the Sword of Fate, and plans to use it to destroy the evil Machine God, whose followers are a bunch of creeps.…

However bad I am at writing, I rest easy knowing I’m better at my job than the S.T.A.R.S. bravo team. For me to approach their level of ineptitude this entire column would have to include my bank details, passwords, industry crushes and darkest secrets. The screenshots would be accidental selfies and the score would be a macaroni picture of a balloon. Then, we have the puzzles, which fill my heart with the purest joy It’s the ideal way to set the stage for the alpha team, who, reassuringly, can’t be any more useless than fuck-knuckled human hostess trolleys who wobbled into Spencer mansion before them. One can only assume that Delta team suffocated while donning their S.T.A.R.S. uniforms. By comparison, Chris and Jill look magnificently capable, even though Jill is…

It’s quite hard to find games about big old buildings that a) aren’t scary and b) I haven’t re-reviewed before. That’s why Rusty Lake Hotel is nestling here like roasted venison upon a bed of mushrooms and rosemary. Which, with the necessary context, is still a rather frightening thought. It’s Fawlty Towers meets Hannibal: a game about preparing dinner for (and with) your guests. The route to murdering and cooking them is often crooked – it involves solving a series of puzzles while they wait for death – but the weirdness of it all helps excuse some ludicrous solutions. Unless Tabasco sauce does in fact come from the nose of deer skulls, in which case I stand corrected.…

With the new Arcane animated TV series out on Netflix and big events launched all across Riot’s different games, November might as well have been called Lolvember. But aside from sinking a few hours into League of Legends: Wild Rift, the one Riot game I’ve been obsessed with lately is Legends of Runeterra, its unparalleled card battler that’s secretly the best game in the whole League of Legends universe It’s not just that Legends of Runeterra is filled with innovative ideas and fun new mechanics, but that it slots into my life in a way no other free-to-play game really has. Unlike Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering, Legends of Runeterra is generous enough with its currency that even casual players can eventually collect every card available. That also means that…

WORST NIGHTMARE 1 especially Back 4 Blood not is on not the an two easy higher game, difficulty levels. To compete with the many zombies (sorry, ‘Ridden’) and special enemy types in your way, you’re going to need a balanced deck and team. So let us show you how. SHORT SUPPLY 2 several When you basic start cards you . ’ll You be given can get more, and expand your choice of buffs and improvements, by progressing Supply Lines in the Fort Hope hub. For that you’ll need Supply Points, which you get by completing campaign missions. TOP OF THE PILE 3 run Drawn in Back cards 4 persist Blood, and for an the entire first card in your deck activates automatically. That means you should make this your most…

Rockstar launched Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy on November 11, 2020, just over 20 years after the launch of GTA III: one of the most important games in history. There were high expectations. But what no one expected was a catastrophe. The GTA Trilogy launched and, a few hours later, the Rockstar Games Launcher went down and the games were pulled from sale. The launcher came back a day later but the Trilogy remained unavailable to play or purchase for three days. Rockstar said the Trilogy was, “Unavailable to play or purchase as we remove files unintentionally included in these versions.” This was one problem. The launch Trilogy included a bunch of unlicensed music tracks and in-code developer comments. Even more unbelievably, some modders found the code for the infamous…

“THE MINIMALISM WAS DEFINITELY AN EXPLICIT THING WE WANTED TO DO” If limitations breed creativity, then today’s developers have it harder than ever. With free access to the world’s top game engines – not to mention the knowledge bank of an entire industry available through Twitter, YouTube, and Discord – there’s little holding them back. When two Toronto students named Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns set out to make a platformer back in 2001, however, they had nothing but limitations. “We both had old computers that couldn’t run AAA games,” Burns remembers. “But they could run freeware games no problem.” For a couple of years he played Soldat – a twist on Worms built around jet boots. “If you jump and then thrust, you can fly upwards,” Burns says. “Because…

The Zone of the STALKERseries is filled with radiation and dread in equal measures. Home to mutant horrors, hostile factions, and otherworldly anomalies, the Zone only promises one thing: a quick and brutal death. The original STALKERgames were bleak, terrifying, unforgiving survival sandboxes. The Zone is the most miserable place in videogame history. We can’t wait to go back. We have, however, waited for quite a while. It’s been over a decade since the release of the last STALKER game by GSC Gameworld, Call of Pripyat, and STALKER 2 (oddly enough, it’s the fourth game in the series) was originally planned for 2012. It was cancelled that same year, only to reappear in development again in 2018, this time in the Unreal Engine. Aiming for a release in April of…

Keep nodding along with the X-Games bros and winning stars “It might not sound like it, but trust me – it’s hip…” One of the many disembodied voices guiding me through this bold new society of extreme sports types in the mountains is telling me I can win a pizza delivery bike in the next event. She’s also, knowingly or not, critiquing herself. Everybody here talks like they’re hooked up to a Red Bull IV drip and graduated English class taught by Life is Strange’s Chloe. It’s a bit much. A bit much can also be a good thing, you understand. Ubisoft Annecy’s spiritual sequel to Steepis a decidedly maximalist game, albeit an untamed and jabbering one. Joining the snowsports and wingsuits from its ancestor are biking disciplines and powered…

Iwasn’t sure whether or not Battlefield 2042’s randomly-appearing tornadoes could pick up vehicles until my squad’s ATV was inhaled by one. As we tumbled skyward, I had to make a choice: ride it out in the gunner’s seat or eject? I bailed. Our driver remained at the wheel, trusting that ‘all-terrain’ included the sky. Two seconds later the vehicle fell into a field like a bomb and incinerated him. What was a 64-player game for 20 years is now a 128-player game Even after two decades of sanding and streamlining, Battlefieldcan still surprise. The modern FPS scene is now stacked with big maps and whimsical vehicle physics, but Battlefieldremains distinct from the milsims and battle royale games that have encircled it. With Battlefield 2042, DICE stands its ground as the…

Dungeon-crawling, campaign-adventuring Gloomhaven is surely the most widely-praised hobby board game of the past decade. The digital edition replicates the sprawling Gloomhaven campaign in its entirety, adds an entirely new second mode of play called Guildmaster, and networks them both with online multiplayer: an adaptation of the tabletop experience that leaves nothing behind. Nonetheless, occasional poor performance, the lack of key features like undo, and a healthy sprinkling of bugs hold Gloomhavenback. A single misplayed turn can set you on the path to doom Gloomhavenis at its heart a dungeon crawler, where framing stories read by a narrator sit alongside missions that take adventurers through a series of rooms and monsters to accomplish fairly simple objectives. Everything in between quests is a choose-your-own-adventure, where decisions are made and give static…

You’ve probably heard of SWERY. Or if you haven’t, you know his magnum opus, Deadly Premonition, of which The Good Life is a kindred spirit. Both involve a murder in a small town, but while the former leans into detective work and survival horror, The Good Life is a life sim… sorta. It also feels like an RPG, but with (almost) no combat and an abundance of menial quests, which have you trudging the mysterious town of Rainy Woods. I learned to just roll with it and embrace the (mostly funny) nonsense During every full moon, its residents transform into cats and dogs – a power you soon snaffle for yourself. But while they remain moon-bound, you can change forms whenever you like, leaping over walls and onto rooftops as…

The Florist is a game about being in a trendy apartment: a haven of tranquillity in a busy city. There’s no TV to distract you, although you can play classical music, and bury your nose in a selection of stories from long-dead authors. If you want, you can try to keep your grandma’s houseplants alive, a task she is certain even you will be able to manage on your own. To that end, she sends you a parcel containing fertiliser and a jug – essential items as you point and click around the tiny apartment setting. Its main features are the tap (for filling the jug), the computer (for doing research), and the demanding, diva plants your gran insists on sharing a flat with. Each has different needs, of course.…

Reviewing something as influential as Maniac Mansion feels slightly absurd, like I’m giving you a critical appraisal of bees. But it’s worth knowing that Maniac Mansion is still worth playing. And it does loads of stuff that still feels surprising. As a point-and-click game I’m expecting to meander around without any sense of urgency, but I immediately saunter into the wrong room and get locked in a dungeon. Better still, I’m able to escape when one of my buddies gets captured and we find a button hidden behind a fake brick. The interface feels cumbersome now, but there is something immersive about having so many ways to bollocks up a puzzle.…

Topping off this month’s theme is Pacify, a game that proves that investigating spooky places with friends does nothing to lessen the unpleasantness. Although, to be honest, the most frightening thing about Pacifyfor me was the nausea I got from playing for too long – vengeful wraiths have nothing on a stomach that feels like it’s been in a tumble drier. Sickness aside, this is a simple, moreish investigative horror game and possibly the first that’ll make you glad to lay eyes on horrible dolls.…

Like millions of other Game Pass members eager for something pretty to play, I’ve been sinking my teeth into Forza Horizon 5. It’s only my second Forza game since I played Horizon 4 earlier this year, and I’ve already had a blast on the new map. It’s bright, cosy, and extremely fast. While Horizon 5 overall feels extremely familiar to the last game, I figured this would be a great opportunity to shake things up a bit: Instead of downloading all 100GB of Horizon 5 to my poor, chronically packed SSD, I decided to look to the cloud. That’s right, I’ve done all of my Mexico racing so far using Microsoft’s Xcloud streaming on PC, and I’m a little amazed at how well it works. Just click the Cloud Gaming…

Why am I struggling to keep my eyes dry over a missing mug? After several levels of Unpacking, I had become accustomed to seeing this tiny, pixelated little item hop from house to house. First, it was a reliable holder of coffee and then of toothbrushes, when a chip became visible. But in one move, it vanishes. Thanks to this puzzler’s subtle storytelling, I care more about this little cup’s disappearance than I do about most of the characters I’ve played this year. Unpackingis an apt title on multiple levels. While the game is primarily focused on you rummaging through cardboard boxes and finding homes for the various items, trinkets, and accoutrement the main character has, it also describes the way you piece together the story as you play through,…

Gordon Freeman and Nick Farell have a lot in common. Both work in the field of secret government science: Freeman is a theoretical physicist at Black Mesa, and Farell is a generator technician at Delta Base. Both of their companies are working on teleportation technology in huge, sprawling underground labs in New Mexico. Both are men of few words (no words, to be precise) and despite their nerdy leanings are just as capable with rocket launchers and shotguns as they are with scientific equipment. And both are about to have an extremely bad day. Half-Life: Delta is a full conversion mod for the original Half-Life, and it takes place at the exact same time. Farrell has come to Delta Base to do his job as a generator technician, while over…

1 FOR THE BIRDS Birds are the most common trap in Back 4 Blood, so watch out. Tiptoe around them and don’t shoot near or move close to them, for the love of god. 2 WARNING SIGNS While you should always keep moving, don’t rush through doors without checking them for warning signs on their fronts. These are alarmed, but are sometimes unavoidable. Proceed with caution. 3 TRAFFIC JAM Alarmed cars sadly, are much harder to avoid. You can certainly keep your eyes peeled for their blinking lights, but just a single bullet to the chassis can send zombies flooding in.…