Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i PC Gamer

Before entering game development, John Dennis was “an art teacher who really didn’t enjoy teaching!” as he puts it. A friend who was working at Team 17 encouraged him to apply for a game designer job there, which, after some hesitation, he did. “I was the first game designer they’d had.” Though at the beginning he wasn’t sure precisely what a game designer did, he was clearly a quick learner. He stayed at Team 17 for 15 years, and had advanced to the level of head of design, leading a team of 14, by the time he left. After a few years at Activision, he moved on to working with New Star Games and Five Aces, where he’s been for the past ten years. The game he worked on for…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE March 22 DEVELOPER Edgeflow Studio PUBLISHER Hooded Horse LINK breachwaygame.com T he thing about roguelike card battlers is you wait around forever… no, that’s not it. The thing about roguelike card-battlers is that they are legion, just keep coming, and absolutely will not stop. Breachway takes the genre, which is often rooted in fantasy, into space for a science-fiction twist on the Slay the Spire formula. Sent out in a small ship to investigate some wreckage, armed with a laser cutter and a shield, you try to sneak through patrols by turning off your reactor and going dark. Of course this doesn’t work, so the power gets turned back on and you start slashing your beam at any pirates foolish enough to approach. In the wrecked…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2024 DEVELOPER Forgotten Empires PUBLISHER Xbox Game Studios LINK tinyurl.com/ynz2zv36 T he upcoming Age of Mythology: Retold has just shown off its signature mythological monsters in detail, including the terrible Medusas, the flying Pegasus scout, and the titan Cerberus, and I’ve got to say the monsters are dang good looking. These visually punchy new models are part of the overall effort to make Age of Mythology: Retold a real upgrade from the original 2002 game, including changes to the models as you upgrade through the ages – though they come complete with a stack of classic sounds and twists on the old animations. The Medusa death sound is just as I remember it. That’s just what Age of Mythology: Retold producer Earnest Yuen had to say…

I t’s been a wonderful decade of adventuring for our Warriors of Light, but Final Fantasy XIV isn’t done with us just yet. While Endwalker wrapped up the Hydaelyn-Zodiark storyline, Square Enix has flung the door wide open on a whole new adventure in upcoming expansion Dawntrail. It’s an exciting new arc that’s awaiting us, one which director and producer Naoki Yoshida described as “the very best summer vacation” during last year’s Las Vegas Fan Festival. I’m sure it’ll be a much-needed pivot from the world-ending doom and gloom the Warrior of Light has dealt with for the last few years, and I’m dying to know more about just what Dawntrail will bring. Thankfully, I was able to have a chat with Yoshi-P – the nickname Yoshida is more widely…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Three legendary action-adventure games given a loving makeover EXPECT TO PAY £25 DEVELOPER Aspyr, Crystal Dynamics PUBLISHER Aspyr REVIEWED ON Intel Core i9-13900HX, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 MULTIPLAYER No LINK t.ly/2ID3W Lara Croft may need no introduction, but her first three artefact-swiping, wildlife-bothering, lever-pulling adventures were in real danger of becoming exactly the sort of forgotten relics she hunts for. Tomb Raider I-III Remastered hauls this trio of excellent action-adventure-puzzle hybrids and their original expansions – foundational examples of a style of game we’re still enjoying today – back into action. This is the definitive version of these games, feeling both 25+ years old and also brand new at the same time. It never did anything other than work exactly as intended…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A roguelike deckbuilder where you cheat outrageously at poker EXPECT TO PAY £12.80 DEVELOPER LocalThunk PUBLISHER PlayStack REVIEWED ON Asus ROG Ally MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK playbalatro.com Imagine the rush of winning at a high-stakes poker table. Now imagine you’re winning because you’re cheating so blatantly that you might as well be drawing your own numbers on the cards. You put down a 2, then another 2, then three more 2s, to make everyone’s favourite poker hand, 5 of a kind. This is a constant joy in Balatro, a roguelike deckbuilder that successfully scratches an itch to cheat in a casino that I never even knew I had. You get three opportunities to discard up to five cards and redraw You start off with a…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A remake of the classic 2006 turn-based RPG EXPECT TO PAY £60 DEVELOPER Atlus PUBLISHER Sega REVIEWED ON Intel Core i9-10920X, 128GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 MULTIPLAYER No LINK persona.atlus.com/p3r Persona 3 Reload isn’t just a re-release or hi-res tune-up of the 2006 turn-based classic Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3. It’s a true remake, with nearly every aspect of the game other than the story changing in subtle or major ways. What feels like thousands of voiceover lines, impressive new persona animations, sharp graphic design and some nifty quality of life features give Persona 3’s solid story a high 2024 shine. Sixteen years ago, Persona 3 was a landmark release for RPGs. The way it combined a sim-style RPG about high school life…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Locomalito LINK bit.ly/ToxicTomb No one puts as much effort into a game’s presentation as Locomalito, developer of sidescrolling shmup Super Hydorah, and other games with a distinctly arcade sensibility. These are new games that look like retro re-releases, complete with hi-res screen borders, CRT filters and even box art to print out at home. That’s not to say the attention to detail is lacking in-game, as these feel like games that could have been unearthed from a ’90s time capsule. Toxic Tomb resembles a Master System game, with its looping, one-room stages and simple premise. You play as a demon trying to save a power plant, by killing the ghouls that have set up shop in its reactors – er, forget what…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £10 DEVELOPER The Behemoth PUBLISHER The Behemoth Last this month is Castle Crashers, a game that sounds like a mediaeval reality TV pitch, looks like a banned cartoon Network show, and plays like a night terror after watching Krull too many times. Which, as it happens, was the inspiration for this month’s They’re Back. You could take away all the game’s flourishes and it would still basically be brilliant: a fast, chaotic, multiplayer action game that feels lovely to play. Enemies are numerous and varied. Weapons have a satisfying ‘thwomp’. But everything here is layered with the kind of mad creativity that’s almost humiliating for other games. That cool idea you had for an industrialised medieval stronghold? That’s a throwaway design in level 19.…

We did a lot of things differently during lockdown. Our bins went out more than we did. Socialising meant pub quizzes on Zoom. Going for a 35-minute walk was an act of reckless abandon worthy of police intervention, flour was harder to come by than depleted uranium, and we all got very into our home working setups. Did you experiment with a standing desk in 2020? No, come on. There’s no shame in it. It was a different time. And anyway, I did. Terrified by the thought that my already sedentary lifestyle would be disrupted by a government-mandated period of remaining indoors and gleaning my only exercise by banging a pan outside my front door every Thursday night, I panic-bought (among other crippling and regrettable expenses including a vast double…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW ROBERT JONES THIS MONTHFailed a Dishonored 2 pacifist run with gusto. ALSO PLAYEDHotline Miami, Pacific Drive I feel the rage rise within my body, my sensations heightened, my palms sweaty. These mangy curs are not going to take me down and, even if they do, I’m taking them into the darkness of the Void with me. I unleash a bolt from my crossbow into the belly of a guard trying to kill me, one who is milliseconds away from pulling the trigger of his pistol. The fleshy thud forces him to bend double, wincing in agony, but it’s not that which kills him, it’s my razor-sharp Folding Blade which, as I force the crumpling guard to his knees by crushing…

1 month EUROPA RELEASE April 16, 2024 | DEVELOPER Novadust Entertainment A Studio Ghibli-inspired adventure-puzzler, PC gamers play as android Zee as he solves the mysteries of a fallen utopia. Looks promising. TALES OF KENZERA: ZAU RELEASE April 23, 2024 | DEVELOPER Surgent Studios A Bantu-inspired Metroidvania in which you must try to reclaim the spirit of your father in the beautiful but treacherous land of Kenzera. HOMEWORLD 3 RELEASE May 13, 2024 | DEVELOPER Blackbird Interactive Another delay has seen the much-anticipated third game in the beloved sci-fi RTS to fall back to a mid-May release date. Keep the faith. 3 months SENUA’S SAGA: HELLBLADE II RELEASE May 21, 2024 | DEVELOPER Ninja Theory The long-awaited sequel to the award-winning original Hellblade, Senna’s Saga sees Senua return in a…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2024 DEVELOPER Redemption Road Games PUBLISHER tinyBuild LINK tinybuild.com T he first 22 seconds of a game trailer can tell you a lot. They set the scene, perhaps flash some publisher or engine logos, and establish the setting of the game in an easily digestible way. In Kingmakers’ trailer, we see armoured warriors clash on the field of battle. Aha, you think. I know what this game is all about. With Manor Lords also donning its armour and hefting its sword in this issue, it might be forgivable to think that PC Gamer has been taken over by fans of medieval warfare. And while that might actually be true, following the siege of PC Gamer Towers in 2020 that saw nasty trebuchet injuries all round, it’s…

Y ou might well ask why Elden Ring needs an expansion. FromSoftware’s brilliant fantasy RPG is already colossal in its scope and depth – several orders of magnitude larger than any game that preceded it. Yet any longtime fan of FromSoft’s work would have a quick and definitive answer – expansions are where the studio typically does its best work. From Dark Souls’ Artorias of the Abyss to Bloodborne’s The Old Hunters, FromSoft’s expansions see its games at their most vivid, intense and strange. More than simple continuations of the base, FromSoft’s expansions are often surrealist side adventures that fold back into the main narrative in surprising, yet essential ways. IT WILL TRANSPORT PLAYERS TO AN ENTIRELY NEW YET FAMILIAR LAND Much like the base game, Shadow of the Erdtree…

FREE GAMES REVIEWS COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A 3D platformer that takes you back to Celeste’s snowy mountain EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Maddy Makes Games PUBLISHER Maddy Makes Games REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYER No LINK bit.ly/Celeste64 What a joy it is to be back in Celeste’s world, with its distinctive colour palette and chiptunes to warm your bones on its snow-covered mountain. Celeste 64 isn’t a sequel, but a small game made in celebration of its sixth anniversary. Collect strawberries in an intricate platforming level, while suffering a heroic number of deaths. Same as it ever was, but with one key difference: it’s now in 3D. It’s an alarming shift from the…

THEY’RE BACK OLD GAMES REVISITED NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An MMO, but offline and the rest of your party are actually worth conversing with EXPECT TO PAY £35 DEVELOPER Bioware PUBLISHER Electronic Arts REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER Online co-op LINK store.steampowered.com/app/1222690/Dragon_Age_ Inquisition Diving back into the lore-heavy opening of Dragon Age: Inquisition should be overwhelming. In the first few minutes, the game makes reference to mages, Templars, the Chantry, the Divine Justinia and more. It’s easy to share the bewildered confusion of your character. And perhaps, more than this, it makes me realise that I was always fuzzy on the specifics of BioWare’s grand, high fantasy world. In this respect, the nine-year gap since release doesn’t really…

Three new graphics cards in the same month – what a super way to kick off spring. These three new ‘Super’ graphics cards are a chance for the green team to tinker with core counts, buses and budgets to appeal to our PC gaming sensibilities, and I’m pleased to say this lot are a lot more appealing than the last. Each Super graphics card carries more cores than the non-Super variant of the same name, and that’s about the extent of the improvements for the RTX 4070 Super. However, the RTX 4070 Ti Super comes with an entirely different GPU to the RTX 4070 Ti. 1 RTX 4080 NVIDIA £1,139 Much maligned The RTX 4080 was launched in November, 2022 and for most of the time since I, and many…

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 £112This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400F Intel £199Intel’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 £290One of the cheaper…

MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Jan 18, 2024 PUBLISHER Pocketpair DEVELOPER Pocketpair LINK pocketpair.jp/palworld J ust in case you stepped away from your computer, and Twitch, and TikTok, and the entire internet for the past couple of months, here’s a news flash: Palworld is a bonafide hit. The Early Access co-op survival game that combines Pokémon-ish creature-collecting with lots of guns and base-building is massive. Within a few days of its Early Access launch it drew millions of players and became the number one game on Steam. People just want to catch ’em all: Pals, that is. And as with any big game, along with the players come a ton of modders. Whether you’re playing solo or with friends on a server, you might…

REINSTALL OLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES NEED TO KNOW RELEASE August 23, 2016 PUBLISHER Square Enix DEVELOPER Eidos Montreal LINK eidosmontreal.com I never played Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at launch. I’d just gotten a PC that could handle this 2016 GPU punisher (I’ll always love you, GTX 1080) when it first came out, but something stayed my hand. Some combination of Square Enix’s bombastic marketing, Eidos Montreal’s ham-fisted use of robot arms as an allegory for racism, and the creeping sense of doom at seeing a largely divergent, self-contained story presented as a ‘prequel’ start to butt against its fictional timeline constraints totally gave me the ick. In the years since, it’s become apparent that Eidos Montreal’s planned trilogy will likely never be concluded – we’re entering full reboot…

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT Helldivers 2’s galactic war is much more than a mission selector. In a short time, players have become invested in the status of their favourite planets and reacted to gains and losses in a sector’s liberation. The simulated conflict has become an unexpected focal point of the Helldivers 2 experience. Unexpected to players, that is. To developer Arrowhead Game Studios, the war is a product of planning and storytelling by a specific behind-the-scenes individual pulling the strings: what Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt described to PC Gamer as Helldivers 2’s ‘dungeon master’. “We have an actual person with the job title of game master,” Pilestedt told PC Gamer in an exclusive interview. His name is Joel, and he takes his job very seriously. “We have a…

As a poker fan I’m always on the lookout for a new poker game. I’m especially keen to find games that use poker in interesting new ways, like RPG We Slay Monsters or roguelike Poker Quest, both of which use poker hands as their combat system. So, when poker-inspired roguelike deckbuilder Balatro came along I was eager to talk to its developer – not just about the game, but also what I assumed would be our shared love of poker. “It’s funny, I don’t play poker at all,” says LocalThunk, solo developer of Balatro. That is pretty funny, actually, because Balatro has, well, quite a lot of poker in it. You begin with a standard deck of 52 playing cards, you make poker hands like straights, flushes and full houses…

Land of open glory FromSoftware applies its world design to a realm of vast scale Exploration has always been a part of FromSoftware’s games, but Elden Ring puts pushing toward the horizon at the front and centre of its design. Like most of the studio’s games, Elden Ring’s key areas are guarded by brutally tough bosses. But Elden Ring doesn’t expect you to beat them through pure skill or grinding attrition. Instead, the emphasis is on tracking down the tools that will help you overcome the challenge and gradually accrue power. To this end, FromSoft builds a world that seeps adventure from every crag and crevice. Crucially though, The Lands Between aren’t simply large and beautiful. Since the days of Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware has exhibited a knack for infusing the…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A singleplayer first-person driving survival game with maybe the best car ever EXPECT TO PAY £25 DEVELOPER Ironwood Studios PUBLISHER Kepler Interactive REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-9700K, , 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti MULTIPLAYER No LINK pacificdrivegame.com W ith sincere apologies to the Magnum Opus from Mad Max, the Saud Kruger Orca passenger liner from Elite Dangerous and Arthur Morgan’s horse, I have a new favourite ride: the station wagon in Pacific Drive. It’s amazing. Nearly all of the survival systems are focused on your car It didn’t look like much at first: just a typical late ’80s family wagon with wood panelling and a hatchback trunk. But over the course of the last 35 hours I’ve turned it into an armour-plated,…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The sequel to 2015’s Helldivers, an online squad shooter inspired by Starship Troopers EXPECT TO PAY £35 DEVELOPER Arrowhead Game Studios PUBLISHER Sony Interactive Entertainment REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK arrowheadgamestudios.com Picture the scene: four soldiers make a desperate scramble for their dropship on an alien planet, pursued by enormous, dagger-clawed bugs. Machine-gun fire rattles, green goo erupts, the landing pad teems with beasts as the quartet piles through the boarding hatch and their ride blasts off at the last available second. It could be a Hollywood action sequence, but in Helldivers 2 it’s merely the end of another mission. Indeed, it’s amazing just how often a Helldivers 2 sortie climaxes in screaming, skin-of-the-teeth heroics.…

THEY’RE BACKOLD GAMES REVISITED NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £18 DEVELOPER Rogue Factor PUBLISHER Nacon The Warhammer Fantasy world is a wretched place to live. Beastmen in the forests. Trolls in the rivers. Giant rats beneath you. And, if Mordheim is anything to go by, flaming comets in the skies above. Worse still, if you survive the impact event, roaming mercenaries or deranged cultists will probably finish you off. That’s the setup for this PC adaptation of Games Workshop’s cult tabletop game. In some ways, Mordheim is the raucous city break of the Warhammer world. But instead of cologne-drenched white orcs on a stag weekend in Budapest, this features devout Sigmarite warrior priestesses and skittering bands of skaven on the hunt for precious wyrdstone. You start off with a…

TECH REPORT It’s been around for long enough now that we take it for granted. A new game comes out, dripping in graphics, and occasionally when we run it at 4K it dips to an unplayable 58fps. So we go into the video options, turn the ‘DLSS’ option on, and get back on with walking through neon-lit streets in our game du jour. But DLSS is worth paying closer attention to. This tech is indistinguishable from magic. It’s upscaling our games in real time, at the point that the frame is being rendered by the GPU. It’s able not just to take a 1080p image and produce a very convincing 4K version that doesn’t eat up resources, but also to interpolate between rendered frames for a smoother visual experience and…

CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING FRASER BROWN THIS MONTHDying from the comfort of my bed. ALSO PLAYEDMarvel’s Spider-Man 2, dotAge S ince it launched on PC back in early 2021, I have made a few valiant attempts to get stuck into Nioh 2, each of them ending in the same way: exasperation and failure. And here I am trying very hard to git gud. Endurance rather than skill is what gets me through soulslikes. My reflexes are sluggish at best, and anyone who’s ever fought me in Mortal Kombat knows that I quickly forget about the existence of a block button. That’s why I usually go for a build that can take a beating, or in the case of Elden Ring, a magic build that can demolish foes with meteors. But…

IAN EVENDEN THIS MONTHWrecked a perfectly good game by tinkering. ALSO PLAYEDPikuniku, Baldur’s Gate III While avoiding doing any actual work one day, I stumbled upon something magnificently fiddly and nerdy that can work to improve the way older games look – as long as you have the right hardware. Nvidia has released a beta version of its RTX Remix tech, which uses the RT and Tensor cores in your GeForce RTX graphics cards (sorry, everyone else) to intercept the graphics pipeline of compatible games, upscale the textures and inject ray-traced lighting. At least, that’s the idea. You can find a list of working titles in places like Reddit and ModDB, and I was looking through it when one name caught my eye: Splinter Cell. Oh hell yeah. This game,…