Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2025 i PC Gamer

Thanks to spending many a night in my youth enjoying classic turn-based combat RPGs, such as those in the Final Fantasy, Suikoden, and Persona series, I now have a soft spot in my heart for these synonymously Japanese fantasy adventures. Clearly, so too does Sandfall Interactive, an exciting new French studio that next year is set to bring gamers Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a stunning new dark fantasy RPG adventure that not only builds on the established JRPG core in novel ways, but feels excitingly fresh and unique. We’ve got the scoop on page 36! ROBERT JONES Twitter @rnicholasj This month Spent an afternoon painting with The Paintress, which he told her was very palette-able. After making one too many painting puns, though, The Paintress erased him from existence. Fair.…

HIGHS Pricey titles To appease a Steam user Webfishing added a 'Straight' title -but it costs 9.999 fish bucks. Another surprise It only took eight years and an orchestral jazz cover but Persona 5s Last Surprise finally won a Grammy. Finish the fight A group of Halo modders has delivered a playable version of the legendary Halo 2 Earth City dema. Nuked A hacker used a Call of Duty anti-cheat exploit to ban thousands of innocent players. Off to oblivion Bethesda is closing its Elder Scrolls card game Bad signs Sony isn't giving up on PSN sign-ins for its PC games - the company president says it's necessary so people can safely play them. LOWS…

Unfortunately, social media has meant that old-school retro-gaming console chains in Japan such as Super Potato and Mandarake have now become well-known in the west, largely to their detriment. However, the Japanese PC gaming scene and its shops have managed to avoid this, remaining pretty obscure, and that’s what I want to talk about here. The Japanese PC business is not handled by small independent stores, as can be found in the west, but by large chains such as SofMap, Tsukumo, Pasokon Kobo, and Janpara. But between these chains there are differences in offering, some dealing only in new systems, while others lean into used systems, components or, yes, gaming PCs. And one of the most notable in terms of having a PC gaming focus is Dospara, which started in…

By the time you read this, the last game from the father of all the JRPGs, Hironobu Sakaguchi (the man behind the whole Final Fantasy Saga), will be out and playable on PC via Steam. Originally funded by Apple in 2018 and released four years later on Mac in two parts, Fantasian Neo Dimension on PC comes with a series of improvements and optimisations, including 4K graphics and an English language dub, as well as three difficulty levels (the Mac release only had one, and it was hard). The game’s score is composed by the iconic Nobou Uematsu and, in terms of quality, is once again at the highest level. The entire soundtrack is available on Spotify for free, too.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE December 5, 2024 DEVELOPER Nightdive, Computer Artworks PUBLISHER Nightdive Studios LINK nightdivestudios.com I had no idea what to expect from The Thing Remastered. I’ve always been a fan of the film, but I was far too young to play the original game back in 2002, so I was excited to get a chance to see what all the fuss was about for myself. Dropping into Outpost 31 in Antarctica, my rag-tag group and I had the simple goal of evacuating survivors and eliminating enemies. This seemed simple enough, but as I said before, I’ve seen the movie, so I knew what was going to be waiting for me around the next corner (hint: there are shape-shifting killer alien life forms around). But before heading into the research…

To borrow a phrase from the legendary fictitious king Théoden of Rohan, “How did it come to this?” Dragon Age: The Veilguard is now out and, as our review details, it has had much of its original Dragon Age identity exorcised. A slick, visually impressive action RPG it is, and one that younger gamers with no experience of what came before, but with a deep love of Marvel superhero movies, will no doubt enjoy. There’s gaming to be had here, yes. But this shallow, Marvel-i-fied Veilguard is 100 per cent not what I, and I’m sure plenty of other Dragon Age fans, wanted from this game. The current BioWare has created here a good game objectively, but has also cast aside so much of what made Dragon Age special. And…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A beloved, long-running giant robot combat simulator EXPECT TO PAY £42 DEVELOPER Piranha Games Inc PUBLISHER Piranha Games Inc REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 9 5900, 32GB RAM, AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK mw5clans.com MechWarrior is back and going harder than ever with a completely standalone game confusingly titled MechWarrior 5: Clans, some five years after MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. It’s the classic campaign of mech-tweaking and smashing enemies, but Clans is a bold game that improves on the classic sim-lite action of MechWarrior by adding a more modern, story-driven framing. You can bring up to four friends along on the linear campaign as you seek to conquer human civilisation – the massive and numerous neo-feudal Inner Sphere states – as the militaristic…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? This year’s Call of Duty, set in the 1990s EXPECT TO PAY £70 DEVELOPER Treyarch, Raven Software PUBLISHER Activision Blizzard REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 7 5700G, 32GB RAM, AMD Radeon RX 6600 MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK callofduty.com At some point when I wasn’t watching, Call of Duty’s campaign became a bad stealth game. Gone are the perspectives of the faceless soldiers, replaced with characters who look and feel like they came from a Netflix Original movie. When Black Ops 6’s campaign occasionally channels the bombastic scope of its predecessors, it rocks, but all too often it’s bogged down in tedious espionage. I’m usually the CoD fan who actually cares a lot about the campaign, but it’s those shortcomings pushing me towards this year’s stellar multiplayer…

TED LITCHFIELD THIS MONTH Shot Midwestern-accented Russians with tranquillisers. ALSO PLAYED Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, Mouthwashing I don’t even know how long it’s been since I played Metal Gear Solid 3. It’s a game I’ve perennially wanted to revisit, but I’ve found myself stymied by platform exclusivity: I like playing games on my PC, or a handheld. I could never bother to shift my butt from my desktop to my couch for the PS3 version, but I did try my hand at this game’s 3DS port like some kind of sick freak – impressive, but not how The Game Was Meant To Be Played™. A year after its initial release, the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection is finally in a fit enough state that I didn’t feel…

Before you even set foot into the arena of a fighting game, you’re dealing with the hardest part of the entire game – picking a main. Sure, you could look up a tier list and pick whoever is the best, like a coward, usually resulting in you picking someone nimble, like Street Fighter’s Cammy or Ken. For me, I take the strategy that every character in a prison movie talks about; you go into the field and you pick the biggest guy out there to latch onto. The big boys of fighting games like Zangief, Potemkin and Hugo may never make it to the top tier often, but they have the most essential thing I need from a fighting game character, a big old grapple. While these characters may not…

MORGAN PARK You won’t catch me diving into the latest strategy games or JRPGs, but I love a good FPS and have been indulging a stealth game kick recently. HELLDIVERS 2 arrowheadgamestudios.com Helldivers 2 continues to dominate my gaming time with friends, and it’s not just because we’re used to it after 100+ hours. It’s one of the best shooters I’ve ever played and Arrowhead’s tireless updates keep things fresh without focusing on cosmetics. A triumph! TEARDOWN teardowngame.com There is no better videogame to take out life’s frustrations within. I’ve been playing Teardown off and on for years, marvelling at the game’s ingenious physics engines, puzzles and expansive mod support with every return trip. I particularly love its recent expansion Folkrace. ABIOTIC FACTOR abioticfactor.com You and up to eight friends…

JAKE TUCKER Twitter @_JakeTucker This month Pondered the query that has stumped humans for centuries: are octopuses scarier than robots? IAN EVENDEN Twitter @ievenden This month While founding his own Type II civ in Beyond Astra he solved the three-body problem. What you do is… ELIE GOULD Twitter @elie_gould This month Marched around PCG Towers demanding to know if we were The Thing. Understandable. MOLLIE TAYLOR Twitter @mollietayy This month Realised she didn’t need to sleep, ever, so farmed beetroot at 1am. Oh, and in Mirthwood she……

The Spy is used to being in hot, sweaty places. That mysterious stranger you thought you saw the outline of in the Longleat Center Parcs’ steam room, only to then conclude that no, you were actually steaming alone? That was The Spy. The sudden gust of fresh air that drifts into and then out of the scarily pungent Edge magazine rumpus room? The Spy. Sorry guys, you just lost another scoop. This is why The Spy was perfectly at home infiltrating this year’s QuakeCon, which ended up being a hot mess of seemingly how not to please a fanbase. The cause? A behind-closed-doors Doom: The Dark Ages presentation was shown to a select few QuakeCon attendees and then, plus ça change, it proceeded to messily leak out in snippets via…

After the big success of spooky horror game Platform 8, Kotake Create (a talented studio from Kyoto) has finally revealed some details of their new upcoming title: Strange Shadow. Developed with Unreal 5, the game starts with your spaceship crashing on an unknown planet, where you’ll then proceed to be hunted by gigantic monsters of various kinds. For those who are familiar with Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan manga, there are quite a few similarities, as in this run-and-hide thrill game you’ll have to find a way to not only save your life, but also discover a way to escape from the whole planet! Coming 2025.…

LAUREN MORTON Specialist in Tragic backstories Currently playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard This month Flirted with everyone on her team. Oh, and in The Veilguard she… RICK LANE Specialist in Chatting-up mascots Currently playing Planet Coaster 2 This month Spent far too long riding the ghost train with Planet Coaster 2’s shark mascot Bodhi. MATT ELLIOTT Specialist in Train martinis Currently playing Over The Alps This month Was found rat-arsed in Innsbruck clutching his new novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Gamer. JON BOLDING Specialist in Space fascism Currently playing MechWarrior 5: Clans This month Created PC Gamer’s own MechWarrior clan. It’s name? Clan McMuffin Eater. TED LITCHFIELD Specialist in Eating haggis Currently playing Judero This month Went to a chip shop in the Scottish Borders for a fight. Needless to say,…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Theme park building sim with extensive customisation options and new water park features EXPECT TO PAY £40 DEVELOPER Frontier Developments PUBLISHER Frontier Developments REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super MULTIPLAYER No, but you can share parks with other players via Franchise mode LINK planetcoaster.com Back in the early 2000s when I last visited Disney World, my favourite parks out of the whole archipelago of attractions were the water parks. The squealing chaos of the Typhoon Lagoon’s tsunami-generating wave pool. The terrifying, trunks-eroding descent of Blizzard Beach’s Summit Plummet. Blissfully bobbing along the lazy rivers. Oh, the lazy rivers! Forget Space Mountain or the Tower of Terror, give me a big rubber ring and let me bake my…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Kultisti LINK bit.ly/RaideGame I’ve played a lot of puzzle games, and usually the thing that most excites me is the New Idea: how it stands apart from the crowd of Sokoban clones and Portal-likes happily populating the internet. But that feels like the wrong tack with Raide, a game of intimate, tactile puzzling and unravelling secrets. If there is a big idea – some mechanic that sets it apart from the other train-based puzzle games (and there are quite a few) – I haven’t found it. The rules of the game are simple: you’re laying track segments between distant points, to connect houses together. In each level, you’re given a pile of track bits, and you must use every piece in the…

NEED TO KNOW DIFFICULTY Easy TIME 10 hours VITAL LINKS Unlock mercenaries: pcgamer.com/games/rpg/diablo-4-mercenaries-best-merc/ Boss loot tables: pcgamer.com/diablo-4-boss-loot-tables-uniques/ 1 MERC-ED One of the biggest additions are the new mercenaries. You recruit these four fighters via quests once you unlock The Den. One merc functions as a companion, while another can act as a reinforcement, hopping in to help when you activate a chosen skill. 2 RUNE AWAY Runewords are another new feature you unlock through the campaign. They seem complex at first, but essentially you have a Ritual Rune that produces Offering, and an Invocation Rune that spends the Offering to activate a skill or buff. 3 DOWN UNDER Another new activity called The Undercity unlocks once you venture to Kurast in Nahantu. This time-trial dungeon is a decent way of acquiring Runes, and…

Bandai Namco created a special box set for the 40th anniversary of Tower of Druaga, which was made by legendary Japanese game dev, Masanobu Endō, who the likes of Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto have paid tribute to as a major inspiration. The limited-edition box includes four books totalling over 1,200 pages, which include Tower of Druaga’s game proposal document, as well as a smorgasbord of illustrations, developer commentary and interviews, an original soundtrack CD and a reprinted instruction card for the game. The box costs 25,000 yen ($160/ £130), and will be available only through the Bandai Namco Japanese site.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Embark Studios PUBLISHER Embark Studios LINK arcraiders.com What scares me? In real life, the answer to this is heights and octopuses, but when it comes to videogames there’s nothing quite as scary as a robot: inhuman metal enemies that can soak up an unknown amount of punishment and just keep on coming. It’s robots that are the scariest thing you’ll face in Arc Raiders, a PvPvE extraction shooter set in a post apocalyptic future where a robotic menace has driven mankind deep underground, only emerging to try and get supplies from the ruined world above. It’s the latest game from The Finals developer Embark Studios, and it feels like it could be a perfect entry in the extraction genre if you’ve not played one…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Out now DEVELOPER Emberheart Games PUBLISHER Apogee Entertainment LINK shorturl.at/BM4ws With its glorious ’90s-style graphics, rapid boomer shooter action, and delightfully on-point publisher of Apogee Entertainment, Wizordum recaptures the flavour of classic fantasy FPS games like Heretic and Hexen with aplomb. And that recapturing also includes the frustration of not knowing where that one sodding switch is that opens the one sodding door you need to go through in order to progress the game. Unlike the ’90s, though, the internet (and specifically YouTube) exists, so getting help is a lot easier than ringing the Wizordum tips hotline (£1.99 a minute). That’s good, as when you’re not getting stuck finding the silver key to open the silver door, or that elusive switch that actually looks like a…

BEST ONGOING GAME 2024 STARDEW VALLEY Kara Phillips: At this point, Stardew Valley feels like the gift that keeps on giving. When you first play it feels like you’ve got a whole world at your fingertips – everything feels so new and exciting. But the best part of Stardew is no matter how long you’ve been playing, this feeling doesn’t go away. Even when you’ve decided to speedrun to Ginger Island, restore the community centre in your first year, and fill the library with everything you find. With a lot of farming simulators, it’s pretty easy to get bored of completing the same tasks every single day – cultivating your crops and tending to your animals – but so much time has been put into making Pelican Town lively enough…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An action-RPG in which your choices affect the plot EXPECT TO PAY £50 DEVELOPER BioWare PUBLISHER Electronic Arts REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-8086k, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 MULTIPLAYER No LINK ea.com/games/dragon-age/dragon-age-theveilguard Dragon Age games have long faced the same problem as Dragon Age protagonists: the utter impossibility of pleasing everyone simultaneously. Arriving a decade after Inquisition, with hopes and expectations as granular as demands for cameos from minor characters and RPG features from 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is trying to please a lot of people. Major battles have thrilling sequences of their own as I explore Like a protagonist playing ‘yes man’ to every faction, Veilguard has ended up likable, but too broad in its appeal to love…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Co-operative multiplayer shooter based on Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film EXPECT TO PAY £40 DEVELOPER Offworld PUBLISHER Offworld REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 32 GB RAM, Nvidia Geforce 2080 Super MULTIPLAYER Cooperative PvE LINK starshiptroopersextermination.com If you’re thinking about comparing Starship Troopers: Extermination to Helldivers 2, stop right there. Sure, they’re both co-operative multiplayer shooters that involve blasting thousands of alien bugs, each inspired by Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 satirical sci-fi flick. But apart from that, they’re totally different games. Helldivers 2 is a surgically precise slapstick comedy. Extermination is a much broader, weirder, rougher affair. Often, the results of this are fair to middling, while parts of Extermination are outright terrible. Yet when all of its ideas come together, its action is every bit…

1ROG Strix X870-I Gaming WiFi Asus £420 Herein lies the bulk of the cost for this build, alongside the graphics card. A quality Mini-ITX motherboard requires squeezing a lot of circuitry into a small space and the cost of doing so is reflected in the eye-watering price tag here. It’s a beauty, though. Asus has nailed the design for this motherboard with a stunning hammered-metal finish. The Strix-emblazoned plate hides two NVMe slots and sits above a single PCIe 5.0 slot. There are just two DIMM slots for RAM, though there’s space for an less traditional add-in card close by for extra SATA. 2 CASE Terra Fractal £180 This lil’ Terra is a dream to use. The side panels swing aside to unveil a dual chamber with room for ample…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE February 8, 2024 PUBLISHER Sony Interactive DEVELOPER Arrowhead Game Studios LINK playstation.com When I last wrote an update log for Helldivers 2, it was a little more speculative doom and gloom – I wondered out loud (in print) if the studio would be able to keep pace with the hungry, galaxy-eating demands of its Warbonds system. Developer Arrowhead Studios has elected to replace the much-maligned season pass system of other live service games with a batch of new weapons every few months, access to which can be earned by plugging in enough game hours – none of this is time-gated, either. The issue is the studio had some trouble balancing the damn things. Helldivers 2 treated its weapon balance as if it were a PvP game,…

Mikey T has been declared a rogue agent. He’s being hunted by his own government. He can trust no one. That’s a pretty shocking development, because Mikey is a 19-year-old intern at Alpha Protocol, and therefore not actually an agent at all. A week ago, he was trusted with nothing more complicated than keeping the Alpha Protocol printer topped up with toner. In the time since then, he’s travelled to Saudi Arabia, arrested an international arms dealer, been betrayed by a mole within the agency, and cleaned up most of the printer ink he spilt. Now, Mikey’s hunkering down in a safe house in Moscow. Mina Tang is the only member of the Alpha Protocol team who isn’t out for his blood, and thankfully she has continued to supply us…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE October 23, 2013 PUBLISHER Grinding Gear Games DEVELOPER Grinding Gear Games LINK pathofexile.com I thought I was prepared for Path of Exile after spending the last year knee-deep in Diablo IV, but it turns out I’m still not strong enough. No matter how many times I’ve tried to get into it I can never seem to spend more than a handful of hours lost in its maze of mechanics. That’s not to say it’s a bad game by any means; I just don’t think Path of Exile is for me. This attempt was the most successful and I’ll admit that it made me appreciate the kind of action RPG Grinding Gear Games is going for with Path of Exile. Compared to Diablo, Path of Exile is extremely…