Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2022 i PC Gamer

There are some fictional locations that are just endlessly evocative. The shadowy streets of Gotham City, the rolling hills of the Shire… and, of course, the shifting sands of Arrakis, setting of Dune. Its fierce space politics, giant worms ,and psychic drugs make it one of the most memorable places in all of sci-fi – and, incidentally, the perfect battleground for a strategy videogame. We first found that out 30 years ago with Dune II, and now Dune: Spice Wars is here to prove it once again. ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Zipped himself up in a sleeping bag and declared himself God Emperor.…

HIGHS Take-yo time Ghostwire: Tokyo’s director is interested in making a sequel. MM-No Final Fantasy XIV producer Yoshida recently asked that players in a new PvP mode stop saying “Nice job!” to opponents. Lego May Cry Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga arrived with an unexpected quality: air-chains and infinite combos. LOWS That sucks Bethesda has also delayed Arkane’s vampire co-op shooter Redfall to the first half of 2023. You bet Streamer Félix Lengyel aka xQc, admitted spaffing about $2 million on gambling in April. Deus Next? Square Enix has sold Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, and three game studios for $300 million. A bargain?…

It’s not often that a multiplayer shooter decides to reinvent itself six years into its life. In the age of service games that never stop updating, Blizzard is taking a chance by revamping large parts of its competitive FPS and slapping a ‘2’ on the end of it. Overwatch 2 is not a sequel in the way we understand them. What I’ve seen of the multiplayer PvP beta so far feels more like an expansion. Overwatch 2 will have more heroes, more maps and an intriguing PvE story mode, but Blizzard is also taking this opportunity to completely upend the meta it’s spent six years building with one simple rule change – Overwatch 2 is no longer a 6v6 game. One tank slot is gone and it’s now 5v5. Hearing…

Time travel is tricky. It’s never as easy as popping back, saying hi to Napoleon Bonaparte, and going home, is it? Sticky situations are inevitable, and that’s as true as ever in upcoming point-and-click adventure Old Skies, which sees you working as a temporal agent looking after rich patrons as they mess with crucial timelines. “I did a game jam about three years ago, when I was having a lot of trouble coming up with our next game idea,” says Wadjet Eye Game’s Dave Gilbert. The studio’s most recently released project, Unavowed, was a real stand out of the point-and-click genre, telling a story of demonic possession and urban fantasy on the streets of New York. But that makes it something of a tough act to follow. “I entered a…

NEED TO KNOW EXPET TO PAY £16 DEVELOPER Laki Studios PUBLISHER Goblinz Publishing LINK goblinzstudio.com In the words of competitive baking show judges everywhere: if you’re going to go for something simple, you have to execute it perfectly. With its small levels, tight scope, and visual polish, Oakenis – or is on its way to be – that idealised Victoria sponge of tactical roguelikes. Oaken is a simple game. You play your units out over a hexagonal grid, with each taking one action and moving one tile per turn. They can attack – and counterattack – any unit in their handily highlighted frontal arc, and placing units, casting spells, and using skills all burns a turn-limited resource. That’s it: that’s the game. OK, there’s a little more to it than…

DEEP DESERT This stretch of sand will quickly sap the supplies, and then health, of any lesser warriors attempting to cross it on foot. SANDSTORMS Massive storm clouds roam the map, destroying ornithopters and armies outside protective villages. FREMEN SIETCHES Independent Fremen communes will send raiding parties at you unless you form an alliance by trading water. SANDWORMS Leave troops outside a village too long, especially in combat, and a worm will arrive to swallow your entire army.…

I’ve never given much thought to the ‘skip dialogue’ button in a videogame, but after playing The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe I can’t stop thinking about it. The button is just one of several new features explored in the “expanded reimagining” of 2013’s The Stanley Parable, which once again turns the act of playing a game into a hilarious, surprising and thoughtful examination of games and game development, players and player choice, and yes, even simple buttons. I did, eventually, get my Reassurance Bucket back But what even is Ultra Deluxe? It’s not just a remaster, though the original game has been faithfully rebuilt in Unity. You can play through it once again as office worker Stanley, who realises he’s the only one in the building and sets out to…

Modern MotoGP is in a golden era. 2021 saw eight different winners across 18 races, and so far this season we’ve had three different riders on the top step in four races, including two taking their maiden victories. It’s unpredictable, packed with talent and spectacle, and guaranteed entertainment every race. Naturally, then, the focus of Milestone’s licensed bike sim MotoGP 22 is the 2009 season. An all-new mode, titled Nine: Season 2009, takes you back to a bygone era when Rossi, Lorenzo, Stoner, and Pedrosa jostled their 1,000cc machines around each other for the wins, by way of a documentary-style video series directed and narrated by filmmaker Mark Neale, and a series of challenges intertwined between them. Milestone has addressed the braking difficulty this year The challenges are straightforward, the…

Of all the tools in the puzzle-solver’s arsenal, the most essential is the undo button. You’ll be making a lot of mistakes, particularly in a Sokoban-style block-pushing game. Thankfully, time-reversal is a thing of beauty in Give up the Ghost, ultimately speeding up as you keep the Z button held down. I found myself more ready to experiment, knowing how easily, how majestically my many blunders would be unravelled. Ghostdoesn’t boast about its intricate puzzle boxes, but they’re some of the most original I’ve come across. There are often a lot of tools in play, but they’re introduced at a manageable rate, and come together in a careful way, with every icon being legible and easily distinguishable in the game’s low-res environments. You can access all 50 puzzles from the…

At first, the analogue tech of Alien Isolation doesn’t make sense. Some tedious part of my dad-brain can’t ignore the fact we have iPads now. But there’s a logic to it. Perhaps taking stuff to space you can fix with a wrench is the most sensible option. Computers, speaking from expierience, can be murdering, capricious bastards after all. It all knits together into one of the weirdest games I’ve enjoyed There are two vivid examples of this in Alien Isolation. The Working Joes are the most frustrating part of this otherwise impeccable game. Being hunted by a perfect killing machine is exhilarating; being bludgeoned by Milky Michael Myers less so. The second example is more esoteric. For some reason, I’m having repeated tech issues, from doors refusing to open to…

Forget the lost, heretical technology of the past. There is one source of guidance now. One truth. And to live outside that truth is to risk ruin, ridicule and destruction. I am, of course, talking about trying to play Dawn of War with the original disks rather than just buying it again on Steam, complete with all 76 expansion packs that have been released since. It’s the smart choice, partly because the box copy is probably lost in my parents’ loft, and partly because I’m not certain my PC even has a disk drive. The Dark Age of Physical Media may have passed, but Dawn of War still bangs. No mercy for those snivelling xenos.…

Marketing around games has changed considerably over the last two decades. There are far fewer young women in lingerie trying to make a network adapter look sexy, for example, or gamers whose entire heads are exploding due to the intensity of the latest title. But in the realm of PC hardware, at least one maxim has remained more or less unwavering: buy this thing, and you’ll magically see your own prowess as a gamer transform. IN THIS CASE, OLDER, LOWER SPEC HARDWARE OFFERS THE ADVANTAGE There’s more sophistication to the message now. Esports team-endorsed products. MMO mice. MLG gamepads. Still, it boils down to the same idea PC hardware was sold on in the Razer Boomslang days: that there’s some kind of linear relationship between money spent and k:d. And…

Norcodemanded to be played. A surreal, anti-capitalist point-and-click with striking, grungy art and writing that’s evocative, angry, and exhausted – how could I decline? I was confident it would be my jam, with comparisons to Disco Elysium and Kentucky Route Zero, as well as glowing reviews, sealing the deal. And it absolutely did prove to be my jam, at least initially. It’s bleak and beautiful, with a strangeness that gives it the air of another reality. But it’s grounded in the problems and frustrations of the real world, where corporations pillage and pollute as a matter of course, leaving behind a string of ruined towns and people. As a piece of fiction it’s great: clever, pissed off, and deeply weird. But as an adventure game, or any game, it’s not…

It’s been a while since I’ve stuck my nose into anything related to Game of Thrones. I think I just lost interest, which is what happens when you spend years invested in a bunch of books and then more years invested in a TV show, and then you get an abrupt and disappointing end to it all. But just because something ends badly doesn’t mean you can’t – eventually, after a long enough grace period – dive back in and enjoy all the stuff you liked before it came grinding to an unsatisfying halt. And so when I saw a full conversion mod for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord called Realm of Thrones, which turns the world of Calradia into Westeros and Essos and populates it with characters and locations…

BRICK BREAKER TEARDOWN teardowngame.com One of the few indie games that I can’t stop coming back to. Now that its campaign is complete and its modding scene is thriving, it has become one of the most inventive and fun quasi-puzzle games around. You’ll be hooked the first time you sledgehammer a wall. SPIRIT BOMB MIDNIGHT GHOST HUNT midnightghosthunt.com This is what happens when the prop hunt genre reaches its natural conclusion: a 4v4 asymmetrical showdown between kitted-out ghostbusters and ghosts with a ton of tricks up their sleeves. Ghosts can also fight back with the props, and that’s just cool. MUD LOVE SNOWRUNNER bit.ly/3MfadE6 This is the other game that creeps back into my life every few months. Its goals rarely diverge from ‘deliver materials to a place’, but the…

NEW HEROES Overatch 2’s PvP beta only features one new hero at the moment (Sojourn), but more are planned for the final release. A CAMPAIGN The part of Overatch 2 that returning players will actually have to pay for is the new PvE campaign. 5V5 Overatch 2 moves away from the 6v6 format in favour of 5v5, dropping one Tank role from each team. PUSH MODE Push is a new mode that will replace the old 2CP objective maps. It’s a bit like two concurrently moving payloads.…

1 month DIABLO IMMORTAL RELEASEJune 2 | DEVELOPERBlizzard No, this isn’t Diablo IV – this is the mobile game that was announced a couple of BlizzCons ago, and weirdly is getting a PC version day-and-date. THE QUARRY RELEASEJune 10 | DEVELOPERSupermassive Games A spiritual successor to Until Dawn that sticks close to the same horror tropes, with a new gang of horny teens being terrorised by mysterious killers in the woods. STARSHIP TROOPERS – TERRAN COMMAND RELEASEJune 16 | DEVELOPERThe Aristocrats Is an RTS game a suitable vehicle for the original film’s brand of biting satire? We’re not sure – but it looks like either way it’ll be fun to blast hordes of bugs to bits. 3 months TWO POINT CAMPUS RELEASEAugust 9 | DEVELOPERTwo Point Studios Another Bullfrog-aping, light-hearted…

I thought he who controlled the spice controlled the universe, but it turns out he who controls the spice mostly just pays hellish taxes. Here I am on Arrakis, spreading Fremen warriors to more and more territories so I can collect enough spice to rule the desert planet. And yet I have to pay most of my haul to the Spacing Guild as a bribe? And they want more every month? Forget this competition between the Atreides, Harkonnen, Fremen, and Smugglers factions: I hope 4X strategy game Dune: Spice Wars eventually includes a win condition that lets me tell the Spacing Guild to piss off. They’d probably nuke me from orbit, but I worked hard for that spice, braving sandworms and massive storms and treacherous spies. If I’m gonna go…

Grand Master Kai looms over my crew via hologram like a Greek cybergod. It’s our bimonthly report and he’s not happy. Our Inquisitor’s desire to procure knowledge about the Nurgle plague has accelerated its spread, and he wants to know who’s responsible. Do I cover up for Inquisitor Vakir and piss off Brother Ectar, or do I throw Vakir under the bus? Whatever I do, someone will be unhappy, and that will have knock-on effects. The greatest threat is the Bloom, the Nurgle-driven disease I go for the third option: tell the Grand Master that the mission is going exactly as planned. He buys it, and seeing as we’re doing sowell in our campaign (which we’re really not) he diverts our requisitions and armoury access to some other chapter that…

It would be so, so easy to write off Teardown as just a tech demo. A simple framework of maps, tools, and missions built to show off developer Dennis Gustaffson’s incredible voxel destruction technology. But over its 18-month stretch in Early Access, Teardown has proven itself not only a stunning display of technical prowess, but also a bloody good little heist-’em-up, and the most creative sandbox platform since Garry’s Mod. Teardownis, first and foremost, all about that destruction. It’s a game of wooden shacks, concrete walls, metal catwalks, and plaster corridors – all of which respond appropriately to being wailed on with a sledgehammer. Despite its blocky appearance, Teardown’s worlds break in wonderfully convincing ways. Metal pipes bend when supports are removed, while plaster walls chip away to expose sturdier…

There’s no canon version of the Arthurian legend, and as such it’s fertile ground for reinterpretation. From Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur to T H White’s The Once and Future King, or from Frank Miller’s Cursed to John Boorman’s gorgeous but somewhat flawed Excalibur, everyone has their own notion of what it is and what it represents. In my case, it was a lifelong thing for Cherie Lunghi. King Arthur: Knight’s Tale sidesteps much of this by picking up where NeocoreGame’s 2009 dark fantasy King Arthur – The Role-playing Wargame left off, and where most retellings stop. Arthur and Mordred have killed each other at the Battle of Camlann, and the Lady of the Lake has taken Arthur’s body to Avalon. Each party of knights needs to be balanced and…

Taking inspiration from an unusual source, Ravenous Devils is a cooking strategy game with a twist – the meat you use comes from the people you kill. However, it’s so keen for you to get the joke that there’s a reference to a barber in the opening. So just in case it wasn’t clear, this is Sweeney Todd: The Game. Sadly, the promise this concept inspires is fleeting, as you discover that running a capitalist cannibal empire is surprisingly dreary. Setting up shop in an appropriately squalid building, the murderous couple at the centre of this is Percival and Hildred. Percival, a tailor instead of a barber, spends his day selling clothes and murdering his clients. Hildred runs the pub underneath, using the bodies Percival sends her way as the…

In peculiar RTS Orbles, you’re not trying to beat another faction operating with the same tools as you. No, your enemy is a horde of giants, advancing upon you from every direction. As the giants constrict the map, they will also demolish any of your structures standing in their way. Given the circumstances, you might expect your citizens to display a bit of haste, but they’re content to work agonisingly slowly, ferrying food and metal and fighting the giants with not a care in the world. Still, it gives you time to think about Orbles’ single, extremely challenging scenario. On a fixed map, you have to build up your little town so that you have enough workers to gather food and metal, and warriors to thin the encroaching hoard. All…

It’s such a great pitch, isn’t it? Braces! Aliens! Smoking! All the threat and precision of XCOM, but with the immediacy of a third-person shooter. You can tell from the construction of this intro that it doesn’t deliver. The Bureau is a deeply strange game: a cut-and-shut of different ideas that never really coheres. It’s a cover shooter with some inconsequential conversational elements; like someone made a Mass Effect game after hearing it described by six different stupid aliens. The result is akin to wearing a fedora in 2022: it feels like a great, stylish choice people will admire. But, actually, you look like a right twat.…

Sporefeels like Pixar’s take on the xenomorph origin story in Prometheus. It’s more revealing than I’d like. When faced with the question of carnivore or herbivore, I choose a life of meat. Soon, I’m chasing weaker creatures around the primordial soup, snapping their soft extremities with my disgusting beak. It’s like watching a petri dish in fast-forward, and there’s something rather satisfying about levelling up so I can eat bigger animals. So satisfying, in fact, that I might not to grow legs at all.…

VR first gained momentum at the same time that 3DTV lost it. When Palmer Luckey launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new headset unit in 2012, panel manufacturers were still half-heartedly extolling the idea of families sitting around the telly in wildly expensive glasses, watching something between a discernible movie and a magic eye. Few of us were listening though. If we were never fully committed to that future before, the idea of fully immersing ourselves in a virtual environment thanks to this Luckey chap’s new doohickey only accelerated 3DTV’s demise. The campaign raised over $2.5 million from 10,000 backers by the time Mr Zuckerberg came knocking. At the time of Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition of Oculus in 2014, the mainstream press started taking notice. Arguably the most influential figure…

Guilds in MMOs are a wonderful thing. They bring players together under a common cause to tackle deadly dungeons, navigate new challenges, and build friendships. But like all online communities, they don’t always last. When a game has been out for over a decade, it’s natural that some people will move on to other games or get too busy with life, leaving formerly tight-knit groups to fizzle out. It’s no one’s fault – that’s just how it goes. It’s also why I decided to risk all of my in-game wealth in one huge server move gamble. The latest patch for FFXIV(6.1) saw the opening of a new housing area, and with it hundreds of new plots for home enthusiasts to scramble after. It also introduced a new lottery system to…

As a recovering completionist, any open-world game I try in 2022 poses an inherent dilemma: how much of this world do I experience? Historically I’ve given into the guilty pleasures of Ubisoft-style games, merrily chasing question mark-laden maps and filling progress bars to 100%. Recently, I’m taking a more direct approach. Rather than attempting everything, I’m being more selective. With Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West out this year, too, there’s only so much time. Elden Ring presents challenges to both halves of my virtual tourist, it turns out. As you’d expect from a FromSoftware open-world game, trite modern conventions like question marks are absent. You do have a mount and fast-travel points to help you get around the Lands Between, but with the fact that hidden map fragments…

HORSEPLAY 1 The Lands Between is filled with horse-riding foes, but did you know you can parry them off their mounts for a ground stab? You can even do this to the Night’s Cavalry bosses, though they will try to re-summon their spectral steeds if you don’t keep them occupied. MARGIT GUD 2 Looking to make Margit a little easier? Visit the annoying Patches in Murkwater Cave and purchase his shackle. This item lets you restrain Margit multiple times throughout the fight, and you can even use it on Morgott later. Two for one can’t hurt. POISON OVERLOAD 3 You’ve most likely encountered Land Squirts in Elden Ring’s watery areas, bloated sacs that spew poison into the air. It may seem counter-intuitive, but if you poison them in return, they’ll instantly die in…

It’s official: Starfield is not launching November 11 2022 as originally planned. It’s instead now aiming at “the first half of 2023”, according to an official Twitter update. Bethesda repeatedly claimed that the game wouldn’t be delayed, but the marketing has told a different story. With a focus on developer waffle over substantive reveals, the official videos have been light on concrete info. With only brief in-game clips shown, it’s been hard to believe that the game was only months way. Director Todd Howard has dubbed it “Skyrimin space”, but he’s keen to emphasise that it aims to do more with character customisation than Skyrimdid: “Some things we didn’t do [in older games]: the backgrounds, the traits, defining your character, all of those stats... a lot of the things that…

SZROT IS A DRIVING GAME ABOUT STEERING JALOPIES AROUND POST-SOVIET CITIES For Hjalte Tagmose and Gustaw Mackay, the frustration started with mislabelled food in The Witcher. “The pierogi is called a dumpling,” says Tagmose. “It’s like calling sushi a rice sandwich,” adds Mackay. Now, these two Polonophiles are determined to counter the Americanisation of games by creating, in their words “the least American game possible”. The result is Szrot. “It’s a Polish word,” says Mackay. “You have to know how to do the rolling, trilling R. It can mean junkyard, or it can also just refer to an old, beat-up car.” That’s fitting, since Szrot is a driving game about steering jalopies around post-Soviet cities. One in which even the countdown to a race is written in Croatian and translated…

First things first: no, you can’t go storming off to race control to argue your case in F1 Manager 2022. This isn’t quite the sport as it is, but the sport as it might be – races and championships in Frontier’s debut licensed title are decided strategically, not politically. So how does that play out? Newer fans might be wondering what a team principal even does, if not berating Michael Masi in very public, televised radio communications or insulting their contemporaries at other teams. The answer, as F1 Manager 2022 comprehensively demonstrates, is: a lot. You’re in charge of both the car’s development, and the team’s. You’re assigning people to work on a new front wing, but also managing the facilities that those front wing designers work within. If you…

Chuhai Labs co-founder Giles Goddard thinks minimum settings are going out of fashion. A veteran of Nintendo in Japan who has worked on everything from Amiga and N64 to Wii and Oculus Quest, he’s noticed a change over the years with regard to developing for different PC specifications. “It used to be that the developers would aim for the lowest spec, and they’d make it look great on that, regardless of anything,” he says. “And then, if you had a faster PC or graphics board, you could put more bells and whistles on top for post-processing effects or whatever, but only to make what was already there nicer-looking. “I think nowadays, because everybody’s got a [powerful computer] the bar is so high that all the AAA makers are basically just…

Back in 2013, the original Rogue Legacy won the hearts of many a roguelite fan, with a twist on the genre that saw failure go hand-in-hand with progress. And nearly a decade on, Cellar Door Games faces not only the weight of expectation that comes with creating a sequel, but competition from an army of titles inspired by its formula. Far from buckling under the pressure, the dev has crafted a follow-up that revitalises the series with fresh ideas. Once again, you step into the shoes of a randomised hero tasked with navigating the levels of a procedurally generated castle. Said castle is a gruelling gauntlet teeming with tough enemies to defeat, tricky obstacles to overcome, and valuable gold to steal. If, or more likely, when your hero reaches the…

This latest sequel in the long-running strategy series bills itself as the most accessible entry yet. This is true, in the same way that the tail is the most accessible part of a tiger. Stardock’s long running 4X series officially has a tutorial now, in the form of a little robot helper accursedly nicknamed ‘Space Clippy’. But Space Clippy doesn’t help much when a game explains everything as if it’s arrived from another dimension. GalCiv IV introduces a new victory condition called Prestige Take modules as an example. What are modules, you ask? Well, so did I. At first I thought modules were optional extras you could select to tailor your starbases (which act as both resource harvesters and deployable control points, with modules helping improve those functions in various…

1 GRINDER This ominous contraption gobbles up bodies and spits out mince. Hildred keeps mentioning how little she actually cleans it, which is surely going to impact her establishment’s hygiene rating. 2 OVEN Where meat and flour are transformed into the best pies (that are made from humans) you can buy. While that kitchen might look unwelcoming, what with all the viscera, at least the ovens work well. 3 BODIES Surely every London kitchen has a hole for where the bodies can pile high? While it might not look like the most sanitary option, rest assured that with business booming, they don’t stay there for too long.…

You name an animal, and someone has turned them into a platforming mascot, usually with a catchphrase and a pair of cartoony eyes. So I admire the unassuming nature of the protagonist in Pebble. You are literally a pebble, with only a pair of boots to add an element of anthropomorphism. Everything about Pebbleis minimalist, and that’s refreshing in a genre stuffed with collectibles and radical marsupials. Here’s a small, sunny world for you to explore, while enjoying a relaxing soundtrack. Pebbledoes have one idea – any more would be overkill. The little pebble can acquire green gemstones, attaching them to its body for later use. You’ll come across inactive platforms that will accept the gemstones as currency, allowing you to unfurl bridges or shift floating platforms so you can…

The expectation with FMV games is that they’re always cheap and often rubbish. It’s not that the actors are bad – more that there’s nobody in production used to directing. The X-Files Game could have been an amazing disaster, then, especially considering how inelegantly some of the episodes have aged. But it’s something of an anomaly. It cost $6 million and was filmed over four years, with scenes shot around the schedule of the series. It’s quite telling that the central plot point is that Mulder and Scully have gone missing, but they do turn up eventually. But what could have been a gnawing disappointment turns into a positive: as FBI agent Craig Willmore, I have to team up with assistant director Skinner. I was braced for Mitch Pileggi to…

If you’re on the hunt for the best DDR5 RAM to pair with your shiny new Intel 12th gen system, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve tested many DDR5 memory kits over the last few months ourselves and we’ve picked out the top kits, at different price points, to suit systems at different performance levels. Back when DDR5 made its debut, it was expensive and very difficult – if not impossible – to find in many markets. That’s all changed now, and while DDR5 remains expensive compared to DDR4, it’s nice to see a PC component trending downwards in price, instead of up. In general, spending big money on RAM isn’t recommended unless you have a high-spec rig to use it with. As prices fall though, you may find…

HTC VIVE PRO 2 £720 Massive FOV, massive resolution, 120Hz refresh rate. It runs a bit hot during longer sessions, though. HP REVERB G2 £550 The huge 4320x2160 resolution rivals the Vive, but HP’s offering doesn’t quite have the FOV. OCULUS QUEST 2 £300 Popular on the grounds of its affordability and convenience, it’s also one of the quickest to set up. VALVE INDEX £920 The big boy. It’s the priciest, but it does feel the most premium of the lot of them to make up for it.…

Developer Traveller’s Tales has achieved something really special with Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. Making all nine mainline films playable in one game was hugely ambitious, and the result is a lovely tribute to an iconic series. But that structure does end up shining a light on the fact that, taken as a totality, Star Wars is mostly… well, not very good. Out of nine movies, any sensible person can agree that at least five of them are rubbish, perhaps up to seven (depending on your tolerance for Rian Johnson, Daisy Ridley, and teddy bears somehow overthrowing fascist empires). From that angle, you’d think the full series might actually not be a good basis for a game. But the alchemy of Lego is the vital element here – by…

1 BLOODHOUND’S STEP To dodge Malenia’s waterfowl dance, the Bloodhound’s Step skill is vital, letting you jump through it as she comes at you. It’s a reward for beating the Night’s Cavalry boss in Dragonbarrow. 2 KNOCK HER DOWN Malenia is susceptible to stunlock, but can also be knocked to the ground with sorceries, charged attacks and skills from weapons like the Giant Crusher, the Prelate’s Inferno Crozier, or Radahn’s Starscourge Greatswords. 3 ICE AND BLOOD Even though Melania heals when she hits you, Bleed and Frost help chop down her health. Use status spells like Swarm of Flies in her second phase, when she’s recovering from Scarlet Bloom.…

There is no high quite like the emasculated agony of graphics envy. It was 2007, I was 16 years old, and still fully bound to the limitations of the Xbox 360 and PS3 in the bedroom. The hand-me-down laptop whirring on the desk could barely handle Battlefield 1942, much less the relentless tempo of speedy processors dutifully obsoleting the seventh generation of home consoles. Still, I voraciously tore through the games press, reading up on the mouthwatering vistas that were enthusiastically unavailable on a Dualshock, essentially as a way to torture myself. The primary object of my obsession? Supreme Commander. Gas Powered Games’ watershed RTS arrived with exactly one selling point; this thing was a beast, and you should be jealous if you couldn’t run it. And so, I binged…