Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i PC Gamer

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEOut now (Early Access) DEVELOPERGator Shins PUBLISHERHellforge Studios LINK shorturl.at/3louq C oven opens with you, a young woman living in the 1600s, being burned at the stake as a supposed witch. As the flames lick higher, your screams of agony ring out over the assembled crowd and through the trees of the surrounding forest. Blackness engulfs you, and your end arrives. And then, for some reason beyond your ken, you’re crawling your way out of your hastily dug grave, scrabbling against mud and stone, worms and detritus. You have been reanimated, resurrected, something, and now you’re breaking through the ground and up into the dark night’s damp air. You have been reborn, part dead, part not, and there’s only one thing left do, the thing that needs…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASENov 12 (Early Access) DEVELOPERTriassic Games PUBLISHERMicroprose Software LINK microprose.com A Microprose game about Cold War naval battles? For gamers of a certain vintage, those words will come with expectations of a large cardboard box and a particularly thick manual, accompanied by at least four floppy disks. Sadly, in the age of Steam, we can no longer enjoy such luxuries. For the ships in Sea Power, however, it’s very much the age of diesel. The team at Triassic Games includes the lead designer of Cold Waters, the 2017 submarine sim developed and published by Killerfish Games, so there’s an experienced hand on the tiller. What we get here are some of the most exciting naval jet aircraft recreated in the Unity engine, as well as lumbering, missile-studded…

W hen Ubisoft published Far Cry on March 23, 2004, it was a watershed moment in gaming. Casting players as an ex-soldier battling mercenaries across a tropical archipelago, Far Cry dragged first-person shooters out of tight linear corridors into va`st, open-ended levels. A glimpse of gaming’s future, Far Cry was a hit, selling 2.5 million copies and spawning one of the most successful shooter series’ of the last 20 years. Inside Crytek, the neophyte German studio that had developed Far Cry, the general feeling was euphoric. “The ego was boosted across the board,” says Cevat Yerli, Crytek’s founder and former CEO, and Far Cry’s director. “Everybody was like, ‘We can build Far Cry 2 in a year!’” Ubisoft was likewise keen for Crytek to capitalise upon its success, and follow-up…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A big wide systemic FPS sandbox set in the Chornobyl exclusion zone EXPECT TO PAY£50 DEVELOPERGSC Game World PUBLISHERGSC Game World REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 MULTIPLAYERYes (but not at launch) LINK stalker2.com I admit it: I was scared. The gleaming trailers, the Microsoft showcases, the Unreal Engine 5 – STALKER 2’s marketing didn’t look like any STALKER I’ve known and loved. Had GSC Game World traded in all the series’ beloved jank in pursuit of streamlined console success? Had it made Metro by another name? Well, never trust a trailer. It might be shinier and it might have gamepad support, but STALKER 2 is still STALKER down to its bones, that unique and unreplicable mixture of FPS, survival…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?Eyeball-searing cyberpunk pinball bliss EXPECT TO PAY£12.80 DEVELOPERWIZNWAR, FLARB LLC PUBLISHERFLARB LLC REVIEWED ONIntelCore i9-13900HX, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK xenotilt.com I thought I could handle this. I knew I was in for another round of traditional pinball skill mixed with shmup-like sprays of bullets, just like the developer’s previous “occult pinball action” hit, Demon’s Tilt. But no, I was initially as overwhelmed by Xenotilt: Hostile Pinball Action’s riot of colour, fireworks, and pixelled retro cyberpunk style as anyone. There are energy scythes, cyber-scorpion women and dragon-adjudicated billiards here. Pinball for people who love laser-firing mecha-dinos Xenotilt has just one table, but it’s so big it’s essentially three different pinball machines stacked on top of each other, each zone feeling like a…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A turn-based, top-down adventure that feels like a gentler Ultima EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERAquatic Ranger Studio PUBLISHERAquatic Ranger Studio REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK bit.ly/TravellersHymn In the wake of Moonring and Skald: Against the Black Priory, here’s another vaguely Ultima-esque top-down RPG with a beautiful tileset and some modern bells and whistles. Where you could lose yourself in Moonring’s systems and lore, Traveller’s Hymn is a smaller, more streamlined affair. It’s a comfortable stomp round an autumnal forest where you’re unlikely to trip over a hidden branch or lose your way among the trees for too long. In fact, Traveller’s Hymn’s colour palette might be my favourite thing about it, as you explore forests and ruins lavishly draped…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?Like going to The Evil Dead’s house for dinner and dessert EXPECT TO PAY£16 DEVELOPERCapcom PUBLISHERCapcom REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-7700, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK store.steampowered.com/app/418370/Resident_Evil_7_ Biohazard Relatable horror is a powerful, underused thing. I recall an audience of men groaning in sympathy as Cillian Murphy shaved off his beard with a blunt Bic razor in 28 Days Later. In many ways, it’s more effective than arms being yanked from sockets or kneecaps exploding. Resident Evil 7 presents the most visceral, relatable horror of all: going to somebody else’s house. The first hour of Resi 7 does a magnificent job of toying with these latent fears. It’s like visiting a long-lost, aggressively-fragranced aunt in her house full of priceless ceramic Pekingese dogs,…

The last year has been one of change for AMD and Intel, with both rolling out new ranges of desktop CPUs. The former launched the Ryzen 9000-series in August, using its Zen 5 architecture, which is an overhaul of Zen 4 for more speed. Intel released the Core Ultra 200S lineup in October, based on Arrow Lake, its first multi- tile chip for desktop PCs. The old Core names are now gone, along with Hyper-Threading and support for DDR4. In their place is a big reduction in power. Let’s go! 1 Ryzen 5 9600X AMD £270 Little Zen It’s the cheapest of all the new processors from AMD and Intel, but don’t let the price deceive you. The Ryzen 5 9600X might just be all the gaming CPU you need.…

ROBERT JONES THIS MONTHBattled STALKER 2’s deadliest anomaly, the uberjank. ALSO PLAYEDRedneck Rampage, South Park: The Fractured But Whole C reeping through woods, AK47 rifle locked and loaded, I find the small bunker. Inside a hole in the floor leads down to an underground room filled with sewage, detritus and the body of a fallen stalker. There’s a stash down there, too, and I need to loot it. I drop into the hole, my boots landing into radioactive waste. After looting what I can from the stash and the fallen stalker, I then ponder the key question that I probably should have asked myself before dropping into the hole – how do I get back out? There’s no ladder or way back up, so I have to venture through the…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE2005 PUBLISHERActivision DEVELOPERInfinity Ward LINK callofduty.com I t’s 2005 and I’m strapped into the back of a truck, driving once more into a North African town in the level The End of the Beginning in the demo for Call of Duty 2. Ahead, El Daba is masked by desert haze and a grave instrumental underscores the nervous energy of boys from the 7th Armoured Division. Suddenly fighter planes are swooping above, the tank ahead explodes along with the Tommies who were riding it, and your driver swerves to avoid the wreckage as it chugs smoke over the landscape. This is the kind of non-interactive, bombastic spectacle which would define the series – not always to its credit. But here, as I replayed the demo yet again, I…

1 month ASSETTO CORSA EVO RELEASE January 16, 2025 | DEVELOPER KUNOS Simulazioni A driving simulator geared towards hyper realism, EVO promises plenty of top marques and racing thrills, with different classes spanning across the history of motoring. MARVEL’S SPIDER-MAN 2 RELEASE January 30, 2025 | DEVELOPER Insomniac Games The visually impressive action-adventure game starring the famous web-throwing wonder finally hits PC. Here’s hoping we get the quality port this game deserves. SNIPER ELITE: RESISTANCE RELEASE January 30, 2025 | DEVELOPER Rebellion The violent sniper simulator returns, promising new stealth and tactical third-person combat mechanics, as well as a fresh campaign set within the heart of WWII-era France. 2 months SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION VII RELEASE February 11, 2025 | DEVELOPER Firaxis Games The latest instalment in the long-running 4X strategy…

RELEASEFeb 14, 2025 DEVELOPERAspyr, Crystal Dynamics PUBLISHERAspyr LINK s.team/a/2525380 Following the modest success of the first remastered Tomb Raider trilogy, it was as inevitable as the turning of a hidden ancient mechanism that the next three games in the series would meet the same fate. Thing is, games IV, V and VI – known here as the Darkness Trilogy – are a bit of a mixed bag. Best of all is IV – 1999’s The Last Revelation – in which Lara accidentally wakes up an ancient Egyptian god and goes on pyramid-based adventures to stop him ending the world. Game V is Chronicles, a series of flashbacks over Lara’s life framed by her own funeral, and introduces stealth to the series as she slinks around New York. But she’s not…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASENov 18 (Early Access) DEVELOPERGemelli Games PUBLISHERGemelli Games LINK s.team/a/2148970 “ F inal Fantasy Tactics meets League of Legends” reads the press release announcing turn-based tactics game Skygard Arena, a bold claim invoking two titans of their respective genres. Its blend of solo campaigning and PvP arena battles backs the boast, though its turn-based combat definitely favours one side of the comparison. With ‘Arena’ in the game’s title, the singleplayer portions of the game may come as a surprise. They’re story-based, and see a party of three heroes, each with two personas and primary, secondary and ultimate abilities, moving through maps that have a hint of a fantasy XCOM 2 about them, with their high and low barriers, water features, mysterious glowing things and red and green…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A remaster of 2011’s Sonic Generations with a new campaign starring Shadow the Hedgehog EXPECT TO PAY£45 DEVELOPERSonic Team PUBLISHERSega REVIEWED ONIntel Core i5-10600K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti MULTIPLAYERNo LINK sonicxshadow generations.com Sega continues its remaster treatment of the blue blur’s varied catalogue, now turning its attention to one of the most popular in Sonic Generations. Originally released back in 2011, the platformer sees classic 2D Sonic team up with modern 3D Sonic in a time-travelling adventure. This time an all-new campaign starring Shadow the Hedgehog has been bundled to entice returning fans and undoubtedly promote excitement for the character’s big-screen debut. Running parallel with Sonic Generations, Shadow Generations is a similar time-twisting tale that sees the Ultimate Lifeform confront an old…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERGuillem Espias LINK bit.ly/CampsiteGame Warm-hearted adventure game The Campsite has some of the best pixel art I’ve seen in, well, any game. The characters are expressively animated and the backgrounds are sumptuously drawn. You can understand why there are only a few of them, but a satisfying adventure nevertheless unfolds in this small, detailed space. The adventure takes the form of a treasure hunt, where three kids liberate a classic car and head off into the jungle in search of the booty, and there are some lovely, not too tricky puzzles as you work your way to the conclusion. Many of them revolve around that car, as you manipulate its outside and interior to build your camp and ultimately access the dig site, and…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£11.40 DEVELOPERCloak & Dagger Games PUBLISHERWadjet Eye Games It’s always lovely when a game set in England shows us somewhere other than London. It might be four times smaller than California, but Old Blighty has a tremendous degree of variety: accents change every five miles and the landscapes can switch as quickly as the word for ‘bread roll’. The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow probably takes place in bun territory – further north would be barmcakes; further west, breadcakes – in a village called Bewley, which is pronounced as written but feels like it should be spelled Beaughlieugh. What starts as an antiquarian mystery quickly becomes personal for Thomasina Bateman, and Samantha Béart’s performance brings believable warmth and drive to the story. Even when surrounded by…

Short answer: it was supposed to be Cyberpunk, wasn’t it? The last vestige of that great ‘I’m going to buy a new graphics card for this!’ tradition lay in CD Projekt’s hands, along with the collective expectations of several million unreasonably excited RPG fans, and it fumbled it. It’s a wonderful experience now, of course, but at the time V’s arrival felt like a slow-mo slap in the cheek with an unnecessarily reflective glove. But asking that question – the last game that felt like one of those moments where we all went out and upgraded our PCs to meet its specs and experience it at its best – reveals something deeper about how our culture’s changed. Or been changed. Because it’s not generally about the games any more, is…

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 RSASRock £112 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400FIntel £170 With ten cores, six of them the Performance kind, this Raptor Lake Core i5 is fantastic value and a great all-rounder. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX 7600AMD £249…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEJune 23rd, 2023 PUBLISHERValve DEVELOPERDE Development Team LINK shorturl.at/roXHs S lightly bookish aesthetics aside, Gordon Freeman is a pretty cool guy. Theoretical physicist turned action hero at the drop of an HEV suit’s (clearly optional) hat. Unforeseen circumstances and the occasional military ambush aside, he’s a smooth operator. The guy you’re playing as in Swelter… isn’t, as his graceless dismount from a moving train in the mod’s intro highlights, sending him tumbling head-first into a lamppost. Welcome to City 545, located somewhere in central Asia, formerly Kazakhstan. You’ve got a job to do, and you’re clearly not the best man they could have sent. Available on Steam to anyone who already owns Half-Life 2 and its expansions, Swelter is a self-contained fangame that kinda stretches the definition…

Rumours about Half-Life 2: Episode 3 have circulated for years, but a new documentary released for Half-Life 2’s 20th Anniversary has possibly revealed more than we’ve ever seen before, showing glimpses of the game and getting a few of its developers to explain why it was never finished. The gist is that Valve didn’t know how to push the game design forward enough to make it feel worthwhile. A new ice gun was apparently not up to the studio’s standards of innovation, nor were the blob enemies that used Portal tech. In the doc, Half-Life 2 level designer David Riller says that they were experiencing “element fatigue” and needed to “go bigger or do something else”. A NEW ICE GUN WAS APPARENTLY NOT UP TO THE STUDIO’S STANDARDS “I think…

Sometimes the art-making process is a sacred thing. Other times it’s fart trumpets and poop jokes. Nobody knew this better than Renaissance artists, who are best known for the stunning paintings of 14th to 16th century Italy like The Birth of Venus. Then there’s Hieronymous Bosch, the 15th century Dutch painter whose most famous work is a triptych of Eden, Earth, and Hell called The Garden of Earthly Delights. His overwhelmingly detailed panoramas tell a hundred stories in one. While their overall subject matter is serious, those little stories create a collage of Earthly life that’s both comedic and surreal. It makes sense then that Bosch’s painting Death of the Reprobate is the inspiration for (and namesake of ) Joe Richardson’s follow-up to 2020’s The Procession to Calvary. To play…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEJanuary 30, 2025 DEVELOPERRebellion PUBLISHERRebellion LINK rebellion.com A naïve part of me expected Sniper Elite Resistance to deviate from the Sniper Elite formula, if only a touch. I thought maybe we’d be shooting something other than Nazis, perhaps during a point in history that’s not World War II. No: Sniper Elite Resistance is still about shooting Nazis during WWII. Not only that, but like Sniper Elite 5, Sniper Elite Resistance is set in France. I guess it has to be Nazis every time. No other baddies are as unambiguously villainous in the history of sniper rifles, except for zombies, and Rebellion has a whole other series for that (the Zombie Army series, where the zombies are, I shit you not, Nazis too). When the violence is as…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEFebruary 18, 2025 DEVELOPERObsidian Entertainment PUBLISHERXbox Game Studios LINK avowed.obsidian.net I walked through the front doors of Obsidian Entertainment with a singleminded mission: find a gun in fantasy RPG Avowed as quickly as possible. So much of Avowed – which Obsidian has taken pains to point out is not a sweeping open world game like Skyrim – looks deeply traditional. Cosy. Unsurprising. But then there are the guns. Where else might it diverge from the stock fantasy playbook? “The things that set Avowed, and really all the [Pillars of Eternity] games we’ve made in the world of Eora apart, are that blend of a very grounded political story and a very philosophical and metaphysical story,” says director Carrie Patel. “You almost always have a player character with…

RELEASENov 15 (Early Access) DEVELOPERRanela Games PUBLISHERRanela Games LINK s.team/a/1723780 Sitting in a sauna and beating yourself with a bundle of twigs is a bit of a first for videogames, but what is a creative medium without the ability to surprise? Finnish Cottage Simulator offers all the bucolic joys of off-grid nordic property ownership, with hunting, fishing, grilling, chopping logs, illegal alcohol distillation and all the other things they get up to in what claims to be the world’s happiest country.…

I’m Niccolò Machiavelli, emperor of the Han Dynasty, and Harriet Tubman’s archers are menacing the farmers on my southern border. What a pickle. I ought to stand up for myself, but can I really denounce the hero of the Underground Railroad? It doesn’t feel right, so instead I spend Civilization VII’s new Influence currency to steal a piece of technology from the famous abolitionist. Is that problematic? Stealing the idea for bronze working from Harriet Tubman? More to the point: has Civilization jumped the shark? The turn-based grand strategy games have always been abstractions, allowing players to, say, found the United States in 10,000 BC as immortal autocrat George Washington, but this meeting of ancient China, Renaissance political philosophy, and the American Civil War was still a little jarring. There…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?Bloodsoaked action game in which you quantum leap into different bodies to fight monsters EXPECT TO PAY£48 DEVELOPERBokeh Game Studio Inc PUBLISHERBokeh Game Studio Inc REVIEWED ONIntel Core i5 12500H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK store.steampowered. com/app/2631250/ Slitterhead/ From the creator of Silent Hill and Forbidden Siren comes a game that spits in the eye of survival horror. Slitterhead is a bloody ridiculous action slaughterhouse. You play a mysterious floating entity with no memories (of course) who can possess almost any NPC in the game. You spend your initial moments bouncing between bodies until someone down a dark alley greets you with their head exploding, revealing your first Slitterhead. Luckily, you can fight back with any NPC you possess, and you’re encouraged…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?Photorealistic third-person ant-on-ant violence RTS EXPECT TO PAY£35 DEVELOPERTower Fire PUBLISHERMicroids REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 9 5900, 32GB RAM, AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT MULTIPLAYEROnline 1v1 and free-for-all PvP LINK microids.com/empire-of-the-ants Zooming in on tiny things and imagining what life is like for them: it never gets old. Like platformer Unravel and Obsidian survival game Grounded, new RTS Empire of the Ants plops us into the world of macro photography. It does a great job of showing us the world from an ant’s perspective, where pebbles are boulders and a beetle is an elephant, but you’ve really got to love that feeling for it to work, because as an RTS campaign, it’s not great. In Empire of the Ants you’re 103,683rd, a warrior-caste red wood ant…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£16 DEVELOPERHidden Fields PUBLISHERAnnapurna Interactive It’s nice to see a hand-drawn game I can relate to. That’s not to suggest, on any level, that I’m capable of recreating the art in Mundaun. More that the game’s mix of scratchy, sepia-toned pencil etchings feels more relatable to me than the sleek lines of a Hollow Knight or Cuphead. It also helps with the cloying sense of alpine dread. From the opening moments, the look and feel of Mudaun recalls those bleak, upsetting European animations that traumatised you as a child, causing you to Google them years later as a means of catharsis. This bold design choice encapsulates everything good and bad about the game: at its best, it’s unique, unsettling, and effective; at its worst, it…

It’s an odd rite of passage, when you think about it. You might have 10,000 hours in Dwarf Fortress. You might have a favourite DPI. You might even be able to name every 90% PCG review back to the ’90s, including the mad ones like Braveheart. But on some level, you only reach a certain level of enthusiast cred once you’ve wilfully dismantled the box that makes your games happen, and then had a guess at how to put it all back together again, but this time with a new thing inside it. LIKE ICARUS, YOUR CHIP FLEW TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN An endeavour that’s equally fraught with peril and rich with payoff, and which there’s no adequate preparation for, no matter how many hours of Linus you watch…

KARA PHILLIPS THIS MONTHStill galloping around trying to find my place in New Austin. ALSO PLAYED The Outlast Trials I was one of those people who played Red Dead Redemption 2 before the first. In hindsight, it feels wrong, but now I’ve got to experience the chronological order of my favourite western adventure, I’m glad I waited. Going from playing as heartwarming Arthur Morgan alongside the Van der Linde Gang to playing as the solo, rather gritty John Marston driven by nothing but anger was certainly a change of pace. But going into the game fuelled by my already existing knowledge of the characters I was inevitably going to hunt down to kill only made the game more enthralling to play for the first time. It feels like a tale…

DANIELLA LUCAS THIS MONTHHad nightmarish flashbacks to Watership Down. ALSO PLAYEDDragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, Stardew Valley T he first major patch since Dawntrail’s launch started setting the tone for what’s to come for the next two years with some tantalising story revelations and a fight with an incredibly angry bunny, but it was the nods to games of the past that caught my attention. Alongside patch 7.1’s additional story, new dungeon and extreme fight came the start of a new 24-man raid series based on the first Final Fantasy MMO – FFXI. It’s the one Final Fantasy game I’ve never tried – having good internet access or access to something that could run it never seemed to line up for me at a point where I had the time…