Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i PC Gamer

3 months ARMORED CORE VI: FIRES OF RUBICON RELEASE August 24, 2023 | DEVELOPER FromSoftware Inc After an 11-year gap the Armored Core series returns, promising even more massive stompy mechs, dazzling new graphics and an epic story set in a dying star system. STARFIELD RELEASE September 6, 2023 | DEVELOPER Bethesda Game Studios We now have a confirmed release date for Starfield, with the open world ‘Skyrim in space’ RPG dropping in early September. Start planning your character now. MORTAL KOMBAT 1 RELEASE September 19, 2023 | DEVELOPER Netherealm Studios The reborn Mortal Kombat universe created by the Fire God Liu Kang promises plenty of opportunities to gruesomely finish your foes. 6 months ASSASSIN’S CREED: MIRAGE RELEASE October 1, 2023 | DEVELOPER Ubisoft Montreal The series returns to its…

“SELL YOUR GRANDMOTHER, REMORTGAGE THE CAT, DO WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO DO. JUST DON’T MISS OUT.” SO READS THE FINAL LINE OF PC GAMER’S REVIEW OF HALF-LIFE 2. ALMOST TWO DECADES SINCE ITS RELEASE, THE GENIUS OF VALVE’S SEQUEL HAS BEEN EXHAUSTIVELY DISCUSSED. BUT THE EXPLOSIVE IMPACT OF ITS DESIGN IS PRESERVED IN THE BREATHLESS WORDS OF ITS REVIEWS. JIM ROSSIGNOL GAVE IT A SCORE OF 96 IN PC GAMER, CALLING IT “A NEAR PERFECT SEQUEL”. THE LONG-DEFUNCT PCZONE WENT ONE POINT HIGHER, AND SAID “GAMES MAY NEVER BE THIS GOOD AGAIN”. IGN MATCHED ZONE’S SCORE ON A DECIMAL SCALE, AWARDING IT 9.7. EUROGAMER BROUGHT OUT THE PERFECT 10. MOST REMARKABLY OF ALL, SO DID EDGE, MAKING HALF-LIFE 2 ONLY THE FIFTH GAME TO RECEIVE THE AWARD, ONE OF JUST…

When the Layers of Fear remake was first announced, I didn’t understand the need for it. The original game still looks great and it’s still as scary as ever – so why bother? Especially when developer Bloober Team is already hard at work on Silent Hill 2. After playing through it, though, I get it. I understand why the developers felt they had to remake this, and why they felt it was important to do it now more than ever. Layers of Fear 2023 is, confusingly, both a remake of the original 2016 release of Layers of Fear and the 2019 release of Layers of Fear 2 – with both titles being completely remade in Unreal Engine 5 and smushed together into one cohesive package. The original game was greatly…

The Pulse of Evil is a game about stuff. Glorious weapons and ammo, which you have to cram into your inventory, by dragging and rotating them inside your allotted squares. If I can rotate this shotgun just a little bit, I might rescue a square or two for this crossbow bolt. Ah, and I can fit more pistol ammo if I store them all horizontally. You’ve probably enjoyed doing that in games like Resi 4 before, but probably not while the game carries on. The Pulse of Evil has you managing your inventory while in the middle of battle. You can only carry one thing in your hands in this gloomy top-down survival horror, and to swap your weapon or refill your ammo you have to temporarily drop your weapon…

It’s 2015. The Crystal Dynamics team is having its weekly ‘how can we make Lara Croft suffer?’ meeting. “We already put her upside-down in a dirty bag and impaled her. What else is there?”, asks one developer. “I know!”, shouts another, excitedly. “Let’s make the weather really shitty!” Cheers all round. Everything I just wrote is completely made up. But it does sometimes feel, over the course of three titles, like the First Lady of Action Games has been shot, stabbed, bound, burnt and drowned. But the big difference in the second game is that Lara is at least a willing participant in the adventure. Whereas in the 2013 reboot she ended up washed ashore on Peril Island, here she’s following in her father’s footsteps by hunting for the Divine…

So the legend goes, we have bad software to thank for the RGB revolution. When Corsair brought the first mechanical keyboard with individual RGB-backlit keys to market in 2014, its intention was to empower us with the ability to customise our layout in a manner that made sense for our games. I remember keyboards prior to this that differed in backlighting between WASD keys and the rest of the board, so that you could orient yourself for shooters at a moment’s glance. PERSONALLY, I ALWAYS FELT A BIT INFANTILISED BY ALL THE TWINKLY LIGHTS By making the whole keyboard customisable, the idea was that we could backlight certain keys in a more specific manner, colour-coding our MMO macros, RTS shortcuts and MOBA layouts. The thing is, it was actually quite…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW B aldur’s Gate offers plenty of questing and adventuring, all set against an epic, battle-for-godly-power main story but, being honest, as I tour around the Western Heartlands with my bunch of merry men (and women), I think I’d just prefer to settle down here by this stream and have a picnic as, my god, how idyllic is the Sword Coast? Honestly, think of the most beautiful patch of countryside/coast you’ve ever been to. OK, got it in your mind? Well, the Sword Coast wizzes all over that, with lush verdant forests and woods, azure seas, meandering rivers, green pastures and rolling hills, rugged cliffs, and picture-postcard towns and villages in abundance. Simply put, it’s the perfect location for a cheeky…

Down 1. A group of stars making a recognisable pattern5. The leader of Constellation (two words)6. The name of Starfield’s protagonist8. Name of Starfield’s director (two words) Across 2. Name of Starfield’s largest faction (two words)3. A weak force common to planets4. The area of space Starfield is predominantly set in (three words)7. The developer of Starfield9. Name of Constellation’s expeditionary robot ...UNTIL SEPT 14 ANSWERSAcross :2. United Colonies, 3. Gravity, 4. The Settled Systems, 7. Bethesda, 9. VascoDown: 1. Constellation, 5. Sarah Morgan, 6. Spacefarer, 8. Todd Howard…

100 FOOTBALL MANAGER 2023 RELEASED Nov 8, 2022 | TOP 100 SCORE 203.18 | PROMOTED BY Dave James Quality 6.30 Importance 7.65 Hotness 8.10 Playability 6.30 Dave James: It’s very easy to dismiss the Football Manager games as just spreadsheets for footy nerds, but it remains one of the most influential PC games in the platform’s history. Not because it’s launched a thousand clones – indeed there is literally no genuine competition – but because it’s had a direct influence on the sporting industry it is simulating. There’s no other game that’s had such a lasting real-world impact as Football Manager. Plus, it’s addictive. 99 DIABLO IV RELEASED June 5, 2023 | TOP 100 SCORE 207.43 Tim Clark: That Diablo 4 placed so low despite being one of…

The Video Game History Foundation, a “non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and teaching the history of videogames”, has published a study that it says shows most older games are now beyond the reach of players, unless they’re willing to in most cases pirate them. “87% of classic videogames released in the United States are critically endangered. Just 13% of videogame history is being represented in the current marketplace. In fact, no period of videogame history defined in this study even cracked 20% representation.” The methodology used a randomised sample of 1,500 games released before 2010, “Roughly the year when digital game distribution started to take off.” They also collected targeted data on different consoles, so in total over 4,000 games were included in the study. Whether a re-released game…

Special Report PCG INVESTIGATES NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT After budgeting out the next tier of upgrades for my PC, the total cost of my new components had me endlessly second-guessing every pound spent. So I went in the opposite direction. I bought a CRT, instead. Why? Let me explain. If you’ve done a cursory search on what modern gaming on a CRT looks like in the 2020s, you might have come across a deep dive by Digital Foundry. It’s a great video, and outlines some of the technical benefits of a CRT display – vibrant, vivid colours that truly pop, with deep blacks and blinding whites that LCDs can only dream of. A responsiveness and motion clarity still unmatched today by most hi-refresh flatscreens. That Digital Foundry video…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE August 24, 2023 DEVELOPER The Game Kitchen PUBLISHER Team 17 LINK shorturl.at/ektu0 B lasphemous 2 is a Metroidvania with a very distinctive Spanish Catholic apocalypse thang going on. You play The Penitent One, who needs to do penance for something, and you do that in this game by gutting a series of nightmarish adversaries who are joining you in this distinctive hellscape but are not too pleased to see you. There’s plenty of Metroidvanias on the market today, but where Blasphemous 2 piques the interest is in its strong visual and tonal feel, as well as its tight, addictive play mechanics. In terms of gameplay you you’ve got a main attack, dodge, jump and block mechanics, as well as the ability to equip and make use of special…

I went into The Last Worker expecting a deeply political game. Best case: something really pressing for the current moment. Worst case: a preachy polemic about this ‘late capitalism’ thing people are always patting themselves on the back for having noticed. I instead found a forbidden, third thing: a breezy caper with a broad anti-corporate theme, anchored by puzzle-solving gameplay centred around a six degrees of freedom hovercraft. The Last Worker is a fun, short, narrative puzzle game, something I’m always glad to play, but not an exemplar of the genre. You assume the role of Kurt, a 25-year veteran of the Amazon-alike Jüngle corporation who, through bureaucratic oversight, has outlasted wave after wave of automation-driven layoffs to be the literal last human worker sorting packages in a Manhattan-sized fulfilment…

FREE GAMES REVIEWS COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH by The conceit of CHAINGED is a bold one, and it makes this PlayStation-style horror anthology stand out from the thriving PS1-aesthetic scene. It starts with Catherine and her daughter Lucy, the latter whisked away by the Antichrist during the apocalypse. After appealing to Chronos, the god of time, Catherine is given two choices where to look, and each takes the form of a new game made by a different developer. From those two branches multiple timelines diverge, as you play through each game and come to a binary choice. Do you fight the Antichrist or Chronos? Do you save Lucy or the world? As you pick one or the other, you’ll be taken to the gorgeous timeline menu, where…

THEY’RE BACK OLD GAMES REVISITED It’s dangerous going into Heavy Rain with anything less than absolute sincerity. An odd thing to say, perhaps, about a game about a child-murdering serial killer. But it’s also a game that lets you fail QTEs without consequence, slip over on weaponised fruits, and chop your finger off with Fisher Price safety scissors. In the wrong (mangled) hands this becomes a deeply comic game. It doesn’t help that, for a game set in the US, so many of the cast have bizarre accents, making the clumsy dialogue even trickier to navigate. But that’s not the only problem. In the moments when some restraint would help elevate the story, there’s a sense that not only is this a game written by someone with no…

W ired gaming mice haven’t gone anywhere despite plenty of competition from their wire-free counterparts. By keeping a cable around it’s possible to shave the maximum amount of weight from a mouse for rapid reactions and fast flick shots. There’s also the added benefit of never having your mouse die partway through a match of Valorant. If an ultra lightweight gaming mouse sounds like something you’d be interested in, for this issue of PC Gamer I’ve put some of today’s hottest contenders against one another to see how they fare. There are some of our favourites in the mix, including the DeathAdder from Razer and Logitech’s excellent G502, but also some cheaper options like Corsair’s Sabre Pro. In this pile of tethered rodents there’s sure to be a good…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick these parts if you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price. Mid-range build You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through. Advanced build You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart. BUDGET BUILD Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank MOTHERBOARD B660M Pro RS ASRock £115 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400F Intel £210 Intel’s added four more cores to its entry-level Core i5 and it’s become even more fantastic value. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 4060 Nvidia £315 The…

S omething doesn’t feel right about my dumb ass meeting Chun-Li. Backing up: I’ve started making crude versions of myself whenever I’m confronted with a character creator. I didn’t used to do that. I used to make characters who looked cool, or at least had more hair. Maybe I’ve gotten more comfortable with my body, or just creatively lazy. Street Fighter 6’s story mode, where you wander around a city challenging pedestrians to fights, includes a senselessly granular character creator. Positioning the moles that sit on either side of my torso felt like some kind of pre-screening task I’d do at a dermatologist’s office. You can separately adjust the size of every muscle group, creating entirely new ways to be ripped or buff or not. I’ve never seen such anatomically…

MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED We’re edging closer to the original Half-Life turning 25 years old (it’ll happen in November of this year) which means it’s the perfect time to revisit Valve’s classic first-person shooter. But here’s a thought – why not revisit it in a whole new way and experience it from a completely different angle? And I mean that literally, by turning Half-Life from a first-person shooter into a top-down twin-stick shooter. Luckily for you, someone is already working on making it a reality. Codename: Loop (originally called Half-Life: Loop) is a roguelike remix of Gordon Freeman’s original adventure through the Black Mesa Complex, created by developer Daniel Almenara, aka PinkyDev. The good news continues: unlike most mods, you don’t even need to own the original Half-Life…

Noah Lone (AKA somehumbleonion) studied computer science at college… and hated it. Until his final semester that is, when the class was allowed to make anything for a web programming project. So he decided to try to make a game. “It just like, completely changed my life,” he says. This first game was a simple pixel art platformer, but it sparked an instant passion for game development that only grew more powerful as time went on. After graduating college, he turned down a full-time job at his employer (where he provided IT support for a software company), choosing instead to keep part-time hours so he could keep working on game development. Six months after that, he quit the job entirely. “It was a big, risky decision,” he admits. “And there’s…

When I care about a game’s characters I stop walking if they launch into conversations, because I’m afraid I’ll cross some invisible line that triggers more plot-critical dialogue to override it. What if I never hear the end of that Garrus story? Though I liked the talkative teenagers stranded on a spooky island in the original Oxenfree back in 2016, I never stopped walking to listen to them chat. Partly that was because they’d return to important topics with seamless “like I was saying” asides. Mostly it was because they said so much about so little I never felt at risk of losing out on anything I was going to care about. Protagonist Riley has longer to consider her options Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals is about adults, and that changes…

It’s raining dinosaurs. It’s literally raining dinosaurs. I’ve absorbed a lot of gaming elevator pitches in my time, and Exoprimal’s preposterous conceit is about as strong as they get – at least on a primal level. You look at a purple miasma forming in the sky, you watch a tide of velociraptors pour forth from it, and you say to yourself: I am absolutely going to be shooting at that. I got a bit more conflicted after scratching that itch. Capcom’s five-person PvPvE hero shooter is enjoyable. It has some fantastic ideas. And almost all of them carry frustrating limitations around their neck. In short, Exoprimal’s launch state feels more like an Early Access phase than a finished game. Before any extinct hides can be perforated, there’s a surprising amount…

It’s not often I would say a game needs to be seen to be believed. Viewfinder is as much a digital magic show as it is a first-person puzzle game, composed of astonishing visual and space-bending tricks you’ve never seen in a videogame before. The game’s central gimmick is its magic camera. Take a photo of something, grab the resulting Polaroid after it satisfyingly whirrs out of the side, and then hold it up and place it in the world wherever you want. Everything in the 2D photograph instantly becomes part of the 3D environment, drawn directly from the perspective you were looking at it from. It’s mind-bending. At its simplest, that could mean taking a photo of a tower, turning it on its side, and placing it so it…

What are tetrominos made of? It’s not a question I’ve asked before, but after Sandtrix it’s on my mind. Can they melt? Are they hollow? How heavy are they? In Sandtrix, the shapes are made of sand, dissolving into particles when they hit the ground. It makes for the weirdest, most inventive Tetris yet. That one key difference aside, the rules of Tetris remain the same. Blocks fall and you have to put them into lines, to make them disappear. Here those lines aren’t neat rectangles, but hills of coloured sand – connect a colour from one edge to the other, and every touching grain of the same hue will disappear. The physics make this a special game, as the sand will tumble down those little hills, adding another time…

THEY’RE BACK Perhaps games only need to do one thing really well. Bionic Commando has swinging. Gears of War has active reloading. Sniper Elite has the joy of perfectly judging the wind so you can shoot a Nazi through his balls. There are even famous testicles to shoot, none more obvious or satisfying than those belonging to Hitler. Although I should use the singular, because the developers, to their eternal credit, take the saucy, secondary school approach to the Fuhrer’s anatomy and commit to his monorchism; a fact that forced me to Google ‘did Hitler only have one nut’ before writing this. The whole experience, then, is the sort of functional, unpretentious fayre we’ve come to expect from British developer Rebellion, a sort of chipper, productive Dad’s Army of making…

TECH REPORT Back in June, the Bank of England raised its interest rates to a nice round five percent. It’s a single number that tells a much wider story about the impact of Covid and Brexit on our economy. Often what we read in the news feels worrying in some abstract form – it’s simply a loop that we can’t close, some unwelcome chaos that’s sufficiently distant from our observable world that it’s gone again by the time we put our phone away. But this isn’t that. Our country’s economic health affects just about everything in our observable world: the price of boiling the kettle while we check the news on our phone. The monthly tariff of the phone contract. The price of the tea bags. And – thank you…

CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING I’m a card game dilettante, meandering from table to table whenever I get bored. I’ve bounced between Hearthstone, Gwent, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Horus Heresy: Legions and so many others. The worst thing they can do is offer a daily login reward. I’ll dutifully collect the freebie every 24 hours until the game becomes a chore I uninstall out of spite. Magic: The Gathering Arena doesn’t have a daily login reward, because it doesn’t need to. It’s Magic: The bloody Gathering. It makes money hand over fist whether we play it or not. Some of the cards are more valuable than gems. People should wear them as jewellery, propose marriage with a foil copy of Sol Ring. That means there’s a refreshing lack of neediness in…

I ’m an Aliens fan. A xenomorph disciple. A “ran a laser-tag centre as a Colonial Marines training camp” kind of devotee. For this former singer in an Aliens-themed cover band, Alien and Aliens aren’t just movies. Alien: Isolation is not just a game. They are a belief system. I’ve watched, read and played everything related to this franchise, and that has been, for the most part, a miserable experience. For such as I, the endless re-treads that we are subjected to are exquisitely painful. But I can’t look away. So, here we are again. Aliens: Dark Descent is a perfectly workable isometric squad-shooter, with problematic resolution settings. What it isn’t, is scary. Or particularly suspenseful. Or very well written. It might be unfair to pick on this game out…

REINSTALL OLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES As a strongly self-selecting PC gamer, there have been times in my life I’ve tried to convince myself I didn’t like something because it wasn’t ‘hardcore’ or PC enough. For almost a year in high school, I pretended to not like BioWare games – to no one else in particular, just in my own mind palace – because I watched a loud man on YouTube say they were quite bad indeed. So too, more recently, with the Deus Ex series. I played the hell out of Human Revolution, Eidos Montreal’s 2011 prequel/reboot, in high school. I must have rolled credits on it at least twice before ever making it past the halfway point in the OG classic, and yet for a long time…