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PC Gamer USA - Issue 353, 2022 Flipbook PDF

PC Gamer USA - Issue 353, 2022

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TIDE A NOIACIRERMON N HT

HARDWARE BUYER’S GUIDE INSIDE!

CALL OF DUTY VS BATTLEFIELD REVIEWS

GAME OF THE YEAR

WHICH IS 2021’S TOP SHOOTER?

2021

WORLD EXCLUSIVE ACCESS

S

U

WARFRAME SECRETS

EXPLORING THE NEW WAR UPDATE

2

T

BEST AIR COOLERS HARDWARE

ISSUE 353

KEEP YOUR BUILD ICE COLD ON A BUDGET

Discuss all things PC gaming with fellow readers at our oﬃcial forums forums.pcgamer.com

WELCOME

“BIGGER, BLEAKER, AND MORE DANGEROUS THAN EVER BEFORE”

ROBIN VALENTINE

Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Stared deep into the Orb. The Orb is light! The Orb is life! All hail the Orb!

Sometimes, the best thing ever is taking a trip to somewhere horrible. In games, at least. Whether it’s a barren wasteland, scorched postapocalypse, or literal Hell, we love a grim digital world. The irradiated wilderness that is the Zone is one of our favorites. So it’s a thrill that not only is STALKER making its way back to our screens, its new entry is a true open world—bigger, bleaker, and more dangerous than ever before. Read on, and discover a place where even the deer can kill you… TALK TO PC GAMER

ROBIN VALENTINE PRINT EDITOR

[email protected]

Have your say! Email us at letters@ pcgamer.com

The PC Gamer team TYLER COLP

Twitter @tylercolp This month Can a team really include two Tylers? Thanks to our latestaddition, we’re about to find out. Exciting.

FRASER BROWN

Twitter @FraserIBrown This month Foughtthrough agonising tooth pain to bring you yet another historical strategy game article.

CHRIS LIVINGSTON

Twitter @screencuisine This month Had a blast writing our STALKER 2 feature. He was practically glowing.

NAT CLAY TON

Twitter @its_natclayton This month Visited a real-life Witcher bar, and drankenough ‘potions’ to suffer some serious debuffs.

PC Gamer (ISSN 1470169) is published 13 times a year, monthly plus a Holiday issue following the December issue,by Future US, Inc., 11 W 42nd St, 15th Flr, New York, NY 10036 USA. Website: www.futureus. com. Periodicals postage paid in New York, NY, and at additional mailing oﬃces. Newsstand distribution is handled by Curtis Circulation Company. Basic subscription rates: one year (13 issues) US: $24; Canada: US$47; Foreign: US$47. Canadian and foreign orders must be prepaid. Canadian price includes postage and GST (GST #R128220688). PMA #40612608. Subscriptions do not include newsstand specials. POSTMASTER: Send changes of address to PC Gamer, PO Box 2024, Langhorne, PA 19047, USA. Future US, Inc. also publishes Mac|Life and Maximum PC. Entire contents copyright 2018, Future US, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited. Future US, Inc. is not aﬃliated with the companies or productscovered in PCGamer. Reproduction on the Internetof the articles and picturesin this magazine is illegal withouttheprior written consent of PCGamer .Products namedin the pages of PC Gamer are trademarks of their respective companies. PRODUCED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

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FUTURE US,INC. 11 Hanover Square, 14th Floor, New York, NY 10005, USA www.futureus.com SUBSCRIBER CUSTOMER SERVICE PC Gamer Customer Care, Future Publishing,PO Box 5852, Harlan, IA 51593-1352 Website: myfavoritemagazines.com Tel: 844-779-2822 Email: [email protected] BACK ISSUES Website: myfavoritemagazines.com Tel: +44 344 848 2852 ISSN 1470169 We are committed to only using magazine paper which is derived from responsibly managed, certified forestry and chlorine-free manufacture. The paper in this magazine was sourced and produced from sustainable managed forests, conforming to strict environmental and socioeconomic standards. The manufacturing paper mill holds full FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certification and accreditation All contents © 2018 Future Publishing Limited or published under licence. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be used, stored, transmitted or reproduced in any way without the prior written permission of the publisher. Future Publishing Limited (company number 2008885) is registered in England and Wales. Registered office: Quay House,The Ambury,Bath BA1 1UA. All information contained in this publication is for information only and is,asfar as we are aware, correct at the time of going to press. Future cannot accept any responsibility for errors or inaccuracies in such information. You are advised to contact manufacturers and retailers directly with regard to the price of products/services referred to in this publication. Apps and websites mentioned in this publication are not under our control. We are not responsible for their contents or any other changes or updates to them. This magazine is fully independent and not affiliated in anyway with the companies mentioned herein. If you submit material to us, you warrant that you own the material and/or have the necessary rights/permissions to supply the material and you automatically grant Future and its licensees a licence to publish your submission in whole or in part in any/all issues and/or editions of publications, in any format published worldwide and on associated websites, social media channels and associated products. Any material you submit is sent at your own risk and, although every care is taken, neither Future nor its employees, agents, subcontractors or licensees shall be liable for loss or damage. Weassume all unsolicited material is for publication unless otherwisestated,andreserve the rightto edit,amend, adapt all submissions.

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Chief executive Zillah Byng-Thorne Non-executive chairman Richard Huntingford Chief financial officer Penny Ladkin-Brand Tel +44 (0)1225 442 244

Contents #353

FEBRUARY 2022

30

SUBSCRIBE TO Check out our digital bundle! SEE p36

Monitor

08THETOPSTORY

Investigating Rockstar’senormous remaster flub.

10 SPECIALREPORT

In conversation with one of gaming’s greatest cartographers.

12 POSITIVE  INFLUENCE

How limitations, notopportunities, led to the creation of an iconic platformer.

14 DNATRACING

The rocky journey of Turtle Rock,the original developerof Left 4 Dead.

Previews

18 Warframe: The New War 22 Weird West 24 Men of War II EARLYACCESS 26 Sacred Fire 28 The Monster Within

Features

30 STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl 39 The PC Gamer Game of the Year Awards 2021

22 6

18 30 WARFRAME: STALKER 2 THE NEW WAR

39 GAME OF THE YEAR 2021

We delve intothe heart of the Zone to discover thegrand ambitions of The cyber-ninja RPG will soon be this long-awaited sequel—and Join us as we celebrate a year of receiving a huge slice of cinematic everything fromkiller deer to fantastic PCgames, and hand out storytelling—we’ve got all the info. flaming whirlwinds. our coveted awards.

18

39

Reviews

GAME OF THE YEAR 2021

50

50 Call of Duty:Vanguard 54 Riders Republic 56 Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One 58 Battlefield 2042 62 Gloomhaven 64 Ageof Empires IV 68 Circuit Superstars 70 Guardians of the Galaxy 74 ForzaHorizon 5 76 Inscryption THEY’REBACK 78 Resident Evil 79 Layers of Fear 79 Maniac Mansion 79 Rusty Lake Hotel 79 Pacify

ExtraLife

80NOWPLAYING Robin getsgrumpyat a raccoon. 84UPDATE The latest additions to Apex Legends. 86MODSPOTLIGHT A whole new Half-Life story. 90HOWTO Survivethe hordes in Back 4 Blood. 92DIARY Pacifism bedamned. 96WHYILOVE The joyof destroy…ing. 98REINSTALL The FPSleftin Half-Life’s dust. 102MUSTPLAY

92 104

Tyler shareshis cheap-as-chips picks.

50 92 104 CALL OF DUTY: HITMAN DIARY CPU AIR VANGUARD

The seriesreturnsto World War II—but is that particular well starting to run a little dry?

We head back into 2016’s Hitman to conduct an experiment—is it possible to kill everyone in every level? And canyou do it without having anexistential crisis?

COOLERS

Hardware

104GROUPTEST 108BUYER’SGUIDE

58

Youdon’t need liquid cooling to keep your PC frostyduring marathon sessions. 7

NEWS | OPIN

MONITOR NEWS | OPINIO

EVELOPMENT

GRAND THEFT LOTTO

R

GTA: THE TRILOGY had one of the greatest launch disasters of recent times

ockstar launched Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy on November 11, 2020, just over 20 years after the launch of GTA III: One of the most important games in history. There were high expectations. But what no one expected was a catastrophe. The GTA Trilogy launched and, a few hours later, the Rockstar Games Launcher went down and the games were pulled from sale. The launcher came back a day later but the Trilogy remained unavailable to play or purchase for three days. Rockstar said the Trilogy was, “Unavailable to 8

play or purchase as we remove ﬁles unintentionally included in these versions.” This was one problem. The launch Trilogy included a bunch of unlicensed music tracks and in-code developer comments. Even more unbelievably, some modders found the code for the infamous Hot Coffee minigame in San Andreas.

DATAMINERS FOUND THE TRILOGY SHIPPED WITH SONGS THAT HAVEBEEN ‘REMOVED’

PC Gamer asked Vadim M, a GTA modder, what exactly was left in the Trilogy’s ﬁles. “The developers left in the ﬁles uncompiled mission/script sources. This is an internal ﬁle where they coded scripts in the ‘native language’ and made notes.”

OUT OF TUNE

Such things aren’t intended for the public, but aren’t a huge deal. However some dataminers found the Trilogy shipped with songs that have been ‘removed’ because the licences have expired. I asked Ash R, another modder, whether the songs were playable. “Yes these are playable after being extracted,” writes Ash R. “For

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT BATTLEFARM 2042

XP TRAP

MASSIVE SURPRISE

Battlefield Portal’s ‘make-your-own’ tools were quickly abused to create XP farms. But thanks to server quirks, many players found themselves on the unarmed bot team. NC

MASS EFFECT TO RETURN

On November 7, BioWare dropped a teaser promising, “Mass Effect will return.” Andromeda bombed, but the Legendary Edition was a hit, and fans are eager for more. AC

GPU HEIST

THIEVES HIJACK TRUCK

A truck was stolen in California, containing a shipment of cards, including Nvidia RTX 3090s. It certainly shows the absurd rarity of high-end hardware at the moment. JR

Highs & Lows HIGHS

Kasparov plays Hearthstone PCG spoke to former world chess

champ Garry Kasparov, “Yes, I do play Hearthstone. I’m diamond five!”

Surprise Halo

Microsoftannounced an early launch for Halo Infinite multiplayer.

So long Bowser

Nintendo sued a 52 year-old Canadian man who was selling emulators. His name? Gary Bowser…

TOP: “This s***

doesn’t work the way they wrote it below so we’ll just show the text and place the blip at the beginning of the mission,” reads one of the developer comments left in the game’s code. ABOVE: This is one hell of an echo of the San Andreas Hot Coffee farrago, a removed sex minigame that modders eventually accessed, resulting in a controversy that ran for years, and ultimately resulted in an investigation into Rockstar by the Federal Trade Commission.

San Andreas every song is there: Ozzy, James Brown, Rage Against The Machine, 2Pac.” This could be a headache for Rockstar. “In short yes I think they could get in trouble even if access were limited,” business lawyer Richard Hoeg says. “They (presumably) don’t have the right to distribute those songs. Now, the fact that you’d have to do some signiﬁcant things to get them to operate might be [at] least a partial defence to a full legal claim, but what we are really talking about here is content holders getting upset before anyone goes to court […] I think the publisher has every reason to be concerned.” This is all highly embarrassing for Rockstar, a publisher that until now had a well-earned reputation for polish and high production values. This is also just one side of GTA Trilogy’s launch woes: The quality of the ports is extremely poor, with bizarre implementations of features like rain, terribly re-done textures, and various glitches. For Rockstar to have sent out its ﬂagship titles, the games that made it what it is, in such a sorry state suggests a severe lack of oversight on this project. Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy may be back on-sale, but it’ll be some time before it can be considered worthy of the games it was supposed to ‘remaster’. Rich Stanton

Premium Access

Many ‘premium’ games are now launching with early access weeks: But only if you’ve bought a deluxe or ultimate edition. This sucks.

Squid name

Streamer SquidGame got a lot of grief over their name, picked in 2010.

NFT rush

EA, Epic, and Ubisoft are among the big-hitters declaring their interest in NFTs.

LOWS

9

Special Rep rt

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT

PC

S

W

MAP QUEST

The diehard GAMEFAQS user who’s drawn over 3,500 maps

hen a post praising the thousands upon thousands of game walkthrough maps created by a GameFAQs poster named StarFighters76 circulated on Twitter, the astounded responses weren’t only from people seeing them for the ﬁrst time. Tons of replies were from players who’d used his maps before, but had no idea just how many he’d created. “These maps have gotten me out of SO MANY jams bro,” says one. “Shout if you’ve been using these maps for the FF Pixel Remasters,” says another. The collection of over 3,500 maps that StarFighters76 has created is impressive, but the number of players he’s helped through more than 300 games may be even more so. For nearly 20 years, StarFighters76 has been posting maps to GameFAQs, one of the few surviving institutions from the ’90s era of videogame websites. Although his maps have changed some over the years, it’s no surprise that people recognized them. Since the early 2000s, StarFighters76 has created maps with bright, basic 10

color palettes, and thin black lines that make no secret of their Microsoft Paint origins. They look simplistic at ﬁrst—and some of his early maps were certainly more pared-down versions of what he now produces—but even his early work contains numbered legends, helpful arrows, and other instructions that elevate his maps from artistic recreations to actual visual walkthroughs with puzzle solutions and directed paths. They stand out on GameFAQs, which most of us associate with guides submitted as plain text ﬁles. “I actually use the old school MSPaint, like from the early 2000s,” StarFighters76 says. Aside from being an antique, old-school Paint really isn’t a forgiving program. He could keep his visual style while using a program that adds ﬂexibility with layers and more powerful tools. “I should, honestly,” he says when I ask if he’s ever considered changing. “But MSPaint has been with me since day one, and hasn’t let me down yet, so I don’t want to turn my back on it.” Like his choice of software, StarFighters76 says that his process has largely remained unchanged all these years too. He starts out by drawing a game map out on paper

FAQs facts

GameFAQs originated as the Video Game FAQ Archive created by Jeff ‘CJayC’ Veasey in 1995, accepting requests and volunteer submissions for game guides and answers. By the time StarFighters76 startedposting maps, it was already the go-to for thousands of players. Today, it hosts a database of guides and answers for over 200,000games.

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT FAR LEFT:

StarFighter76’s maps of Link’s Awakening are as artistic as they are instructive. ABOVE LEFT: Even with a boxy layout and basic colors, you might recognize this Raccoon City map. LEFT: For an even greater challenge, StarFighters76 took on the fully 3D world of Super Mario 64.

MAP EXPANSION How StarFighters76’s maps have evolved over 20 years 2004

The map of the Raccoon City Streets in Resident Evil 2 uses annotations and some basic colors as direction.

2007

The Cave of Bahamut in Final Fantasy IV includes pseudo 3D and some complementary colors for clarity.

2013

By 2013, this map of Chrono Trigger’s Ocean Palace uses more complex shapes, pseudo 3D, and pattern effects.

2020

Another Link’s Awakening map from 2020, the Eagle’s Tower, shows an eye for detail and consistency.

while he plays, taking notes that he’ll need for later. Eventually he switches over to recreating those sketches in Paint, going back and forth between drawing and playing. “The game itself has to catch my attention in some way for me to work on it,” he says. “Whether it’s the game itself, or the particular layout of the game, there has got to be that special something that pulls me in.” In Resident Evil, navigation is actually part of the game’s puzzle. For the early Zelda games, it’s a joy just to see entire game areas contiguously laid out in a way that only a good map can make immediately comprehensible. “It’s much more fun to map things out while exploring something new, because I am always curious about what’s around the corner to discover,” he says, though he’s also worked on mapping out some old favorites. “It gives me a chance to relive the fun I had with them, as well as appreciate those games for what they are.”

“I’ve been into mapping since I was a teenager,” StarFighters76 says, explaining how he would explore nearby neighborhoods as a kid and has since recreated his own map of his city multiple times. “Because I have taught myself how to navigate throughout my city, friends have literally called me their ‘human GPS.’” That sense of dedication is the connecting factor in how StarFighters76 talks about every part of his lengthy history drawing maps. There’s something to envy in that ongoing commitment. I’ve always wanted to be someone who could say I’d been posting on the same message boards for a decade. Over where the grass appears greener, StarFighter76 says it isn’t just sunshine all the time. “After I reached 3,000 maps back in 2019, I wasn’t sure what I was gonna do,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, the art of game mapping is fun by itself. But doing it for 20 years can get to me at times because I feel like I’ve done all I could do, even though there is tons more I could be doing.” STAR CONTRIBUTOR The wave of gratitude for Starﬁghter76’s maps spurred StarFighters76 has been posting his maps on GameFAQs by that tweet changed things for him. Players who for nearly 20 years, giving his work nearly the same remembered his maps showed up in droves to comment longevity as the site itself. “GameFAQs was the ﬁrst gaming site I went to when looking for help,” he says. “It’s their thanks. The amount of attention it gathered caught him by surprise. “I needed that,” he says. “Being on Twitter kinda become my internet home.” StarFighters76 originally created written walkthroughs has helped give me that boost in motivation just a bit.” With 3,519 maps currently to his name on GameFAQs, too. Some of his old guides still contain hallmarks of the StarFighters76 has spent two decades dedicated to his early 2000s era: Large text art introductions and maps recreated in text form. Despite those early walkthroughs style. Here’s hoping that a quick injection of internet and his continued practice of creating maps that contain appreciation carries him through to 4,000 and beyond. text notes, the act of mapping is what he truly enjoys. Lauren Morton

“IT’S MUCH MORE FUN TO MAP THINGS OUT WHILE EXPLORING SOMETHING NEW”

11

Positive Influence

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT

I N S P I R AT IONS AND CONNECTIONS IN GAMES

I

TRY, TRY AGAIN

How N: THE WAY OF THE NINJA became the PC’s best platformer—then got better

f limitations breed creativity, then today’s developers have it harder than ever. With free access to the world’s top game engines—not to mention the knowledge bank of an entire industry available through Twitter, YouTube, and Discord—there’s little holding them back. When two Toronto students named Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns set out to make a platformer back in 2001, however, they had nothing but limitations. “We both had old computers that couldn’t run AAA games,” Burns remembers. “But they could run freeware games no problem.” For a couple of years he played Soldat—a twist on Worms built around jet boots. “If you jump and then thrust, you can ﬂy upwards,” Burns says. “Because your jump momentum is added to the thrust momentum.” It turned out to be simple to copy. Then, one day, a Bungie dev in a Usenet group called Game Dev Algorithms shared how object collision worked in Halo. “The thing is,” Burns says, “there wasn’t a lot of good information out on the internet back then.” And so N: The Way of the Ninja was born—a platformer about building momentum, and avoiding collisions. Metanet didn’t have Unreal Engine 4 or instant publishing through Steam—instead it had Adobe Flash, which could be used to make 2D games. “When we were using it, it only had vector rendering, which looked

KING BROWSER

These web platformers were no Flash in the pan

MEAT BOY

There are dozens of Flash projects in Ed McMillen’s back catalogue, many of them disgustingly gory, but only this one spawned the defining precision platformer of the ’00s.

12

VVVVVV

From previous column guest Terry Cavanagh, this gravity-flipping adventure paints with simple colors— both in its garish maps and emotive characters—to quite extraordinary effect.

CELESTE

Now known as Celeste Classic, this journey up a mountain with a girl who can only jump and dash became the basis for a superb meditation on anxiety. Sounds unlikely, I know.

beautiful, but was really, really slow,” Burns says. “The speed was proportional to the number of pixels that changed every frame, so we knew from the beginning—no scrolling. And everything should be as small as possible, so that the number of pixels changing is low.” Inspired by the Japanese freeware game Puchiwara no Bouken, the pair made the player’s ninja a tiny stick ﬁgure, who navigated rooms made up of gray passageways. The maps involved mine-strewn chicanes and homing rocket death strips, but never took up more than a screen. “Parkour was starting to be a thing,” Burns says. “Once we had that additive momentum vertically, wall jumping became very acrobatic, because you could gain speed.” Sheppard and Burns questioned the wisdom of inherited platforming traits like Game Over screens. “There was deﬁnitely a sense that certain concepts in game design were stuck in the past or just sucked,” Burns says. “A lot of times we were pushing back,” Sheppard adds. “Why do they have to always be this way?” Though N was tough, it wasn’t punishing—once you died, the screen simply reset. Hit points and extra lives were just two things Metanet didn’t need to work out how to program. “The minimalism was deﬁnitely an explicit thing we wanted to do, but it was because we knew we were just two people and we were learning,” Burns says. “So we simpliﬁed and got rid of all the window dressing.” When N was released, the browser version ran badly—not that players cared. You didn’t turn your nose up at a free game. Not when it let you soar like Sonic starring in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

THE N’D

Since then, Metanet has only published new iterations of N. “We’ve made a bunch of other stuff,” Burns says. “It’s just, nothing is good enough. We don’t really want to release a game unless we have as much fun playing it as we have playing N, which is a pretty high bar for us to meet.” Even N+ and N++ aren’t sequels as such. Burns describes them as further excavations—attempts to pull a perfect statue from the marble of that original idea. “We were deﬁnitely aware that there was this latent potential that we had accidentally hit upon with N,” he says. “It wasn’t until we were making N++ that we realized that playing the game is about this perfectionism, and that’s us. It’s like a fractal.” Jeremy Peel

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT

“THE MINIMALISM WAS DEFINITELY AN EXPLICIT THING WE WANTED TO DO”

ABOVE: Metanet was

inspired by print graphic designers like Büro Destruct. LEFT: There’s a lot of this in a typical N++ play session.

13

DNA acing G

ONE TEAM HAS RETAINED NOT ONLY ITS DISTINCT IDENTITY BUT A DEGREE OF WIDER RECOGNITION 14

AGES EXPLORED

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT

BACK FROM THE DEAD

O

How TURTLE ROCK STUDIOS righted itself after rolling on its back

ne commonly accepted piece of games industry wisdom is that ideas are cheap; everybody has them. It’s the execution that’s difﬁcult and expensive. But it’s evidently not a philosophy shared by Valve, which has long bought its best ideas. Counter-Strike, Portal, Team Fortress, Dota—all were ﬁrst dreamed up outside Valve by modders or students. Again and again, the studio has acted as a kind of incubator— hiring on creators and giving them resources and expertise, so that they can take those magic ideas to their big-budget conclusion. Often, in time, those creators fade into the grey anonymity of Valve—contributing to the studio’s brain trust in ways both crucial and imperceptible to the general public. But one team has retained not only its distinct identity but a degree of wider recognition: Turtle Rock, the outﬁt behind Left 4 Dead. Perhaps that’s because Turtle Rock built the vast majority of its most famous game as an independent. Valve had reason to trust the studio—as a contractor, Turtle Rock had effectively become the custodian of Counter-Strike—and so largely left its team alone during Left 4 Dead’s development, providing funding and the services of acclaimed Portal writer Chet Faliszek. Valve’s greatest contribution to Left 4 Dead was actually the organic and full-throated enthusiasm of its staff, who quickly adopted the game for their play sessions outside work. They demonstrated the argument—so obvious to us now—that the FPS genre was missing a trick with casual co-op. Turtle Rock was reacting against Counter-Strike’s baked-in competition; put simply, the team was sick of ﬁghting each other.

COUNTER, TERROR BELOW: Boom boom

boom boom, please give me some room.

What began as a goofy CS mod named Terror—in which bloodily-textured bots armed with knives ran eerily at a squad of four friends—became the follow-up to Half-Life 2. Valve acquired its developer brieﬂy before launch, which meant Turtle Rock’s name wasn’t on the box. But not long afterwards, the studio spun out on its own again. As Valve South, the team had missed its independence, and struggled to communicate with its

colleagues 800 miles away in Seattle. In the end, it was Gabe Newell who suggested a return to the way things had been—signing back Turtle Rock’s name and logo. Valve would handle Left 4 Dead 2 internally, while Turtle Rock worked on its DLC (as well as more Counter-Strike, the studio’s spiritual default). As you know, Left 4 Dead changed the industry. Alongside 28 Days Later, it rehabilitated cheesy old zombies in pop culture, rendering them terrifying once again with a simple speed buff. What’s more, Turtle Rock’s easygoing, chat-friendly approach to PvE—in which it paid to put the team before yourself—paved the way for COD: Zombies, Payday, and Vermintide. Yet it was the game’s lesser-played Versus mode that mapped a path to the studio’s future. There, four players took on the roles of the Special Infected, mastering bizarre abilities with the goal of halting and separating a team of survivors as they pushed through a campaign map. Where competitive shooters had traditionally balanced two teams with identical toolsets, Left 4 Dead embraced asymmetry, asking zombie players to become walking bombs and sentient lassos.

STAGE TWO

Evolve took that imbalance to its logical endpoint, tipping the seesaw as far as it would go. Turtle Rock’s sophomore effort cast a single player as a monster, and four others as the hunters tasked with trapping and killing the beast. One side was playing a co-op shooter in the mould of Predator; the other a strange stealth game about troughing on an alien ecosystem until you were so engorged as to be unstoppable. “This ain’t about just running around and shooting bad guys like you’re some kind of goddamned Navy Seal or

4+1=0

The great asymmetrical multiplayer struggle FABLE LEGENDS

Lionhead’s last big project installed one player as the Dungeon Master, working against four heroes as they embarked on high fantasy quests. But it died with the developer.

SHADOW REALMS

Built by the Bioware studio behind Star Wars: The Old Republic. The Shadowlord would have controlled creatures and set traps—if it hadn’t been scrapped.

DEAD BY DAYLIGHT

The exception to the curse: a playable slasher flick in which one player becomes the killer. So successful that it’s hosted monsters from Halloween and Stranger Things.

15

DNA Tracing

SLOW AND STEADY Turtle Rock’s long road

COUNTER-STRIKE

to indie success

Turtle Rock’s Chris Ashton made textures for de dust, don’t you know.

HALF-LIFE 2

Seminal first-person shooter.

COUNTER-STRIKE: CONDITION ZERO

Turtle Rock helped finish this one.

PORTAL

DemonstratedChet Faliszek’sway with words.

COUNTER-STRIKE: SOURCE

The predecessor to Global Offensive.

LEFT 4 DEAD

You can still find a match at any time of day on Steam.

EVOLVE

An admirable but overambitious failure.

LEFT 4 DEAD 2

A quick sequel from Valve’s internal team.

BACK 4 BLOOD

Turtle Rock reclaims its bloody crown. 16

KEY Turtle Rock Studios Valve

NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT

whatever,” drawled your guide in Evolve’s tutorial. “You are hunting a monster on an alien planet, and that ain’t like anything else. You already know how to use a gun and run around and how to face which direction and all that bullsh*t—you’re not an idiot. We’re gonna teach you monster hunting. It may seem… it’s a lot to deal with, but after only like three or ﬁve matches, you’ll get it.” It’s hard to know whether Turtle Rock’s high opinion of players—both their intelligence, and their appetite for novelty—would have been rewarded in the long-term. Evolve was already hamstrung at release by a punitive pricing policy, introduced by 2K, who had picked up the game after original publisher THQ went bankrupt. “If your customer needs to ﬁnd four friends to enjoy your game, maybe don’t charge $60 for it,” says Turtle Rock lead writer Matt Colville in a Reddit postmortem three years ago. “Because getting your friends to spend a total of $240 on a game is a hard f****** sell. We were already thinking about this. We knew this, and THQ knew preserves Left 4 Dead’s core in amber—or, if you prefer, it. Alas, THQ went tits up.” secures it in a safe room. The modern touches intended to give the game longevity, like the deck of unlockable TURN LEFT cards that offer percentage tweaks to health or reload Evolve ultimately went tits up too, shutting down after a time, are merely layered on top—there to be engaged brief free-to-play redesign. Besides with if you want to, or not. Turtle the price, Colville partly attributes Rock knows better than to mess with that outcome to sheer design the rock, paper, scissors simplicity of challenge. “It wasn’t just its premise. A hulking boss is still best asymmetrical,” he says. “The two dealt with using napalm; a horde sides were playing fundamentally lured away with a pipe bomb. different games. That was a problem It’s not exactly evolution. In fact, we never solved. It meant all new if Turtle Rock were a monster from content was a colossal pain to its most famous failure, you could say it had reverted to Stage 1, rather implement, forget balance.” than grown into its most powerful, Given the cost of all that ambition, ﬁnal form. But let’s allow the studio this one, fond it should be no surprise that Turtle Rock has since throwback. Doesn’t Turtle Rock deserve to rest on its retreated to more familiar ground. This year it put out laurels when, for so many years, those laurels were Back 4 Blood—the Left 4 Dead 3 that Valve, with its democratized development process, seems unable to mistakenly handed to Valve instead? rally its workforce around. Back 4 Blood’s genius is that it Jeremy Peel

ABOVE: Trapping a sentient, player-driven beast in Evolve was an undeniable thrill.

“THE TWO SIDES WERE PLAYING FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT GAMES”

Shooting zombies through the bars of the saferoom door is a hobby in itself.

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PREVIEW

Warframe: The New War NEED TO KNOW RELEASE December

DEVELOPER Digital Extremes

PUBLISHER In-house

LINK warframe.com

WARFRAME: THE NEW WAR

quite happy, but that’s a different flavor from what The New War is. It’s full-on, cinematic, about your relationship to the main characters in the game.”It’s the kind of content Digital Extremes gets excited to share. “For us, because this is the most personal content we make, we consider it our banner types of content. We put so much into it. It’s really a singleplayer campaign, right? You can see how devs react when players reach a certain point in God of War or those very narrative [focused] experiences. This is that, for us.” t feels like only yesterday Warframe was It’s also the biggest campaign they’ve just that odd little free to play game with done todate. “It’sdefinitelylonger than the space ninjas. Now it’s a sprawling any quest we’ve ever done.” But players sci-ﬁ epic that contains everything from should brace themselves. “The New War open world mech battles to ship-to-ship space will take several hours—prepare combat. Warframe’s next update, The New War, accordingly, because your normal Warframe activities will not be available.” isn’t simply a burst of more content, intended to The New War also has a grander scope pad out a service game treadmill with new chores to grind. It’s a huge story campaign: The latest than ever before. As new big bads the chapter in a lavish saga about the solar system Sentients arrive in the solar system, protecting Tenno and the return of an old enemy. players will be stepping outside their One that’s been a long time coming. Tenno shoes and taking control of characters in the factions that have “The New War has been the grand vision previously served as your foe. for years,” Rebecca Ford, live operations MAGNUM CORPUS and community director, tells me. A Warframe stalwart, Rebecca has Seeing the universe through the eyes NEW been with Digital Extremes for nine INFO of what has been, for the player, years, helping to build and steer its cannon fodder should give it a new story alongside managing its sense of scale. With properties like community. She’s even the voice of Dune ascendant, Warframe feels poised Lotus, the player’s guide and mentor. “I to capitalize on an audience eager for don’t think there’s been a time since it dense, political world building andstrange was announced in 2018 that someone science fiction concepts. However, even wasn’t thinking about how to start though this is a dark, dramatic beat in the making it awesome, start testing it, start story, Warframe isn’t afraid to have fun. building assets, the concepts, everything The cloned foot soldier in the Grineer has been part of that.” army you control is bossed around by a comically over the top drill sergeant type PRIME TIME officer, while the weak, robot commanding For anyone who’s been playing Warframe, lad in the hyper capitalist Corpus faction is they’ll be no stranger to its flair for story following the instructions of a flippant, self driven content, but The New War moves centeredcorporateoverlord, whose the focus back to the center. “Last year we disregard is too much to be anything other dropped that open world, Heart of than laughable. It’s this degree of Deimos, it had a story quest, it moved the personality that helps Warframe stay story along… story-seeking players were away from becoming some self serious sci-fi game, too obsessed with its own lore. Even as The New War escalates things, it makes plenty of time for the sillier, characterful elements that have made the game such a delight. Though don’t expect to spend all of The New War in these shoes. “You will

The latest update is an epic years in the making

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POISED TO CAPITALIZE ON AN AUDIENCE EAGER FOR DENSE, POLITICAL WORLD BUILDING

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PREVIEW

Warframe: The New War certainly be needing a Warframe of choice and your operator as the main playable quest content. The system’s at war and what we aim to do with act one of The New War, which is what we showed at Tenno Con, just shows the system’s perspective on the war, and then it will immediately become a personal story.” For those invested in its twists and turns (the quests preceding The New War left players with a lot of personal stakes) this new campaign is set to be an emotional chapter. “I think the story is going to leave people emotional… I didn’t finish the script without crying.It’s a very personal work for us.”

during lockdown because people are depressed, but it’s not a mutually exclusive concept.You need to be aware of how the player base are invested in the world you’ve built, and for us that’s come with its challenges because we’ve had a couple of misfires over the course of the pandemic wherein we released a pretty buggy update, or maybe we nerfed something, but we’ve just taken an approach where we’re trying to overcommunicate the truth with all our decisions to alleviate any misunderstandings.”

ALL LIFT TOGETHER

The New War represents more than a new NEWBIES WAR story. It’s the fruit of a tough couple of This sounds all good for those already years. “We’ve only really gotten together enthralled but what about those who’ve once this year andthat was for Tenno-con, never even tried Warframe? Well, it might for the developer stream crew all included. just be the best time there’s been yet to So when it comes to work, that was it, and jump aboard, as Digital Extremes has we’re now all remote again. I wish we were released a new onboarding update. “The together because I think it would change goal of that is to make people’s journey the… sense that we’re actually doing this, from the starting the game to getting to this is the year, this is the time. But we’re The New War way less grindy.” Though it’s making it work remote. There are more no simple thing to rebalance the game’s challenges remote, that is baseline truth, early portion, some aspects weren’t so but we’re doing what we can to get around difficult to implement. “Luckily there’s a those challenges.” couple of really easy ways to do it by just For Rebecca The New War is more reducing the resources required… it’s than just the next update. “This quest is very much a de-grind.” like… the Half Life 3 of Warframe, you All of which is a testament to Digital know? Because we’ve been talking about Extremes care for its community, a it for so long and it’s finally here. I’m so responsibility it takes great care with, but proud we got to this point despite all the one that isn’t always easy, especially hardships… I hope people think it’s during a globalpandemic where your worth the wait. More than anything I game suddenly becomes a lifeline for hope people realize the next year of Warframe is all about what happens portions of your audience. “It’s been surreal. I myself have picked a game and after The New War.” made it my digital therapist for coping So what is coming in Warframe’s with lockdown. I know Warframe has future?What ofthe elusive DuviriParadox, become that for a lot of people. Which teased back in 2019? “It was the weirdest comes with its own series of issues to thing we’ve ever shown. Fans should wait engage around, because no one’s really to hear from us on when to set their happy, right now, andwe’re just trying to expectations accordingly. The truth is, do our best to not add to the now we’re about to release The New War, unhappiness.” So what’s the best our next update will be that. There are approach? “We’re just trying to exercise some interesting things going on, I’m not caution with everything we do to not make going to say it’s directly connected people’s days worse by doing something because The New War is its own thing, but in Warframe that is a net negative. one or two players already saw some Sometimes that’s a nerf, right?I’m not connections in the trailer at Tennocon. saying the design philosophy is not to nerf There was a very interesting horse in one of our Tennocon videos… This world is always connected.” Youcan findthose connections yourself, and maybe you’ll even get a few tears in your eyes, when The New War releases later this month. Samantha Greer

IT MIGHT JUST BE THE BEST TIME THERE’S BEEN YET TO JUMP ABOARD WARFRAME 20

You’ll get to command your little robot army as one of the Corpus.

PREVIEW

ABOVE: You’ll also

take control of Teshin, who’s still more mystery than man. LEFT: Warframe has never been bigger or grander.

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PREVIEW

ABOVE: You’ll choose

between five characters whose stories intertwine. RIGHT: Enemies carry a range of loot that’ll help you on your mission. FAR RIGHT: You can find and hire crewmates to help you in battles.

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PREVIEW

Weird West NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Jan 11, 2022

DEVELOPER WolfEye Studios

PUBLISHER Devolver Digital

LINK weirdwest.com

WEIRD WEST

travels back in time and plucks from classic RPGs like Fallout. Like Deathloop, Weird West is about finding your own way through environmentsdesigned first and foremost to obey physical laws: Bullets ignite barrels, heavy rain puts out fires, and the elements at your disposal are often at the enemies’ as well. Like Deathloop’s island, the setting is a playground for the absurd, a smear of the American West with devils in the seams. Beyond that, the two games diverge significantly. ne grisly stop on a trek through the ﬁrst As I led my veteran bounty hunter of ﬁve chapters in Weird West will through Weird West’s tangled world via a remind you of what was so scarce in its bird’s-eye perspective, I spent a lot of time most recent contemporary, Deathloop. speaking with the people, something that Both are immersive sims with vastly different happens rarely in Deathloop. It’s also the goals. Deathloop was about harnessing an unwieldy first game I’ve played set in this time system, but Weird West is about living in it. period that features a number of Black and Asian characters, although it’s unclear Early in Weird West, I came across a coven to me at this point if Weird West plans to ritual. The witches asked me to leave them grapple with America’s westward alone, but before I could walk away, their expansion from those perspectives or the ritual succeeded. A horde of undead and native perspective, which are often erased their ghastly leader poured out of the in western fiction, or if the supernatural summoning circle. The sisters were armed will take center stage. for it. They took care of the abominations The firstcharacter, a bounty hunter in like it was a Monday. I just watched. search ofher husband, isequipped This event, like some others I PLAYED with a series oflethal and silent skills experienced in a preview version of IT but is very weak. Enemies carrying Weird West’s first act, unfolded shotguns wiped meout in a few hits. I without any input from me. This was forced to take cover,roll and year’s big immersive sim, Deathloop, also carefully aim, but every bullet felt like a dice features inhabitants who go about their roll. Stealth is anoption too, but the density days without you, but little consequence of enemypatrols made it hard for me to happens withoutyour intervention. You stay undetected. And when the caves rarely get to stand back and watch coughed upmonsters, thesturdy crates I everything play out. was hiding behind couldn’t save me. That’s why Weird West works, at least IMMERSIVE GRIM in the early hours I previewed. Despite Raphaël Colantonio, Weird West’s creative having considerable influenceover the director, previously led Arkane’s admirable scenarios you can find yourself in, the effort to keep the immersive sim genre world is against you. To make it through, alive with Dishonored and Prey. In 2017, you’ll need a bit of luck. While not as clever Colantonio left the studio he founded, and as Deathloop’s time loop premise, it in 2019 he formed a new studio called means there’s almost no repetition WolfEye. Arkane went on to release robbing it of spontaneity. Deathloop, a modernized take on the Weird West reassured me that the genre, whereas WolfEye’s Weird West immersive sim is still playful, still sharp, and open for interpretation by developers who want to push it further. If what I played is close to what the final game will be in early 2022, I’ll be thrilled to step into its clockwork world and make some spectacular mistakes. Tyler Colp

An immersive sim that blends chaotic combat and horror

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I WAS FORCED TO TAKE COVER, ROLL AND AIM, BUT EVERY BULLET FELT LIKE A DICE ROLL

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PREVIEW

Men of War II NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2022

DEVELOPER Best Way

PUBLISHER 1C Entertainment

MEN OF WAR II The return of the men who love war, and their tanks

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ideogames are pretty invested in continuing and replaying World War II. There was a period where it seemed like people were getting a bit tired of the old confrontation between Allies and Axis, but it was short lived. Hot on the heels of Company of Heroes’ reappearance and Call of Duty heading back to its favorite war, we’ve also got returning RTS Men of War II. It’s a good time to be a lover of old tanks.

LINK 1cpublishing.eu

gunners can be killed—there are plenty of ways to slow down an enemy’s advance, leaving them vulnerable. With the series’ Direct Control feature, you get to effectively sit inside the tank, controlling it like you might a first-person shooter. All vehicles and troops can be commanded this way, though some will be third-person. Some tanks can be camouflaged, too, and in one clip I saw a Tiger disguised as a bush devastating a convoy before it could even figure out where the attack was coming from. Of course, allof Men of War II’s units require anon-the-ball commander to take advantage of their tricks. It looks like there will be a fair amount of micromanagement as you select different types of ammunition to deal with different kinds of enemies, and you’ll need to make sure they’re fully stocked back in your territory.

LINE OF FIRE

These tanks were very much the stars of Speaking of territory, Men of War 2 has a the first hands-off demo and presentation dynamic frontline thatdivides maps into from publisher 1C Entertainment and Men enemy and ally areas, limiting what you of War’s original developer, Best Way, can do. Troops can only appear a certain once again at the helm. In the clips of distance from the front line; engineers campaign missions and PvP have to be in your own territory to confrontations,I almostfelt bad for FIRST erect defenses; vehicles have to the wee digital soldiers getting mown LOOK retreat into your territory to resupply; down by these indomitable vehicles. and enemy territory will be hidden by a fog of war, unlike your own. HEAVY METAL Alongside the twin campaigns are Men of War II’s tanks seem unstoppable, co-op and PvP modes. In co-op, you can with the heavier ones able to do a huge play specific missions or entire campaigns amount of damage even on their in a five-person team, while the PvP mode lonesome. Theyaren’t really unstoppable, will be a 5v5 affair with players picking a of course. Some well-positioned anti-tank preset battalion from a list of 45—15 each guns, or sneaky infantry keeping out of for the Allied, Axis, and Soviet forces. Each sight, can take these monsters out. battalion has a specific playstyle, with Whether you’recommanding or fighting units that represent the different phases them, you’ll want to pay attention to things of battle. In the case of tanks, that means like armor thickness and the piercing you’ll have light tanks to start with, and power of shells. Thankfully, all this stuff is then you’ll want to bring in things like the displayed clearly, helping you get a read on King Tiger when you reach the endgame. the damage you’re doing and taking. If you need a break from World War II, Modular damage means there’s more then modders might have your back. With than just two states. Vehicles can be full mod support and a toolset provided by immobilized, turrets can be taken out, Best Way, modders will be able to make sci-fi scenarios, or ones that go further back in history. Amid Men of War: Assault Squad 2’s mods, for instance, are Fallout and Warhammer adaptations, so we should be able to expect the same kind of thing after Men of War 2 arrives in 2022. Fraser Brown

IN ONE CLIP I SAW A TIGER DISGUISED AS A BUSH DEVASTATING A CONVOY 24

Just taking a break to admire the planes.

The close-up detail is incredibly impressive.

PREVIEW

FAR LEFT: Some pals

hunting nature’s most elusive beast: Tanks. LEFT: Pretty sure that convoy won’t be around for much longer.

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EARLY ACCESS PREVIEW Sacred Fire NEED TO KNOW EXPET TO PAY $17

DEVELOPER Poetic

SACRED FIRE

PUBLISHER Iceberg Interactive

LINK sacredfiregame.com

suppose the RNG could get annoying if that weren’t the case.

HEAD GAMES

Each event is treated like a battle, whether it’s a literal fight against a group of Romans, or a heated exchange with the village healer. You respond by picking your actions and words carefully, but also by taking a moment to assess the situation, reflecting on your history with and thoughts on the people around you. It’s a fairly in-depth system, too in-depth hat’s Geralt’s mindset when he’s cutting sometimes, turning what could be simple a group of bandits down to size? What conversations into drawn-out does Shepard really think about the psychological evaluations. Normandy crew? These are not I shaped my first character into an questions I’ve thought to ponder, but Sacred Fire idealistic and community-focused villager, makes them its raison d’être, opening the hero’s and my second into a loner still haunted skull to have a good look inside their brain. by her traumatic youth. The protagonist’s background is fixed, but you can change Set vaguely in ancient Scotland, the plot how they feel about it, reducing trauma (asit is now) sees you trying to warn your points as they deal with it, or inflicting guilt village about a Roman incursion. You then points on the brother who you feel didn’t make for the hills, either for a rescue have your back. While the story is linear, mission, or while blowing it off. It took me and seems to reach the same conclusions about two hours to reach the end of act 1 regardless of what you do, it will divert on my first playthrough (there are three slightly depending on your choices—for acts planned for the finished game), example, whether you take the time by which point I’d been presented PLAYED to search for a missing girl. with roughly twenty gazillion choices. IT On my second playthrough, I The village bully tries to rob you. decided not to save Raven, which What do you do? If it comes to simply skipped a huge chunk of act 1. violence, how do you handle it—step by She appeared briefly by my side in a later step. There are a ton of micro decisions to scene—as if I had saved her—so there’s resolve during each event: a mixture of work to do pruning the story branches. dialogue, introspection, action sequences, I need to mention the artwork, as it’s and combat. fascinatingly strange, comprised of static Essentially, Sacred Fire is a visual 3D models sat atop environmental novel, but where your every choice is backgrounds. There’s a great level of accompanied by a bevy of stats, which are detail to the faces, but no expression, even pleasingly illustrated onscreen with swish during fight scenes.It’s as if a bunch of typographical effects. Youneed to mannequins have been dressed up to manage your anger and fear, which can perform a play. Knock a character down in both reduce the percentage chance of combat, and their static artwork will many choices. But you can increase the merely be tilted sideways.It’s one of the odds by spending MP (Motivation Points). funniest things I’ve seen in a game in ages. Failed decisions can usually be Ultimately, the character models reattempted a couple of times, weren’t too distractingand undermining undermining them somewhat, but I when I got stuck into the in-depth character development, which is the best part of the Early Access build as it stands. The story isn’t anything to shout about yet, but I enjoyed the nuts and bolts of the statistical decision-making. Hopefully, my choices will pay off in the rest of the story. Tom Sykes

Your worst enemy is your own mind in this psychological RPG

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THE PLOT SEES YOU TRYING TO WARN YOUR VILLAGE ABOUT A ROMAN INCURSION

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Etain’s mysterious backstory is left tantalizingly unfinished.

EARLY ACCESS PREVIEW

ABOVE: The faces

can be impressive, but the children look quite odd. LEFT: Characters gain renown points as they perform impressive deeds.

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EARLY ACCESS PREVIEW

ABOVE: Optional

‘afflictions’ help or hinder, with a health cost. RIGHT: Each monster plays very differently.

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EARLY ACCESS PREVIEW

The Monster Within

NEED TO KNOW EXPET TO PAY $15

DEVELOPER GMO Free Games

PUBLISHER In-house

THE MONSTER WITHIN Meet your new beast friends

LINK bit.ly/3ksD3pi

ones with themes and abilities that often lean into the details of your current monster. The mad scientist, for example, can create potions used for an instant resource, attack, or defense boost, while the blob can build up a growth stat that can, with certain cards, be translated into damage or healing.

FANGS VERY MUCH

The fact that you’re not only playing as a monster, but also against (an AI) one, is where much of the strategy comes here’s no shortage of card battlers on from. Reduce an opponent’s health to Steam, but none of the others are quite zero, forcing them to embrace their true like this. For example, get a load of that form, and the fight continues against gorgeous, Lichtenstein-style retro art this new, more powerful version of spread across the page. Isn’t it fantastic? themselves with a new health bar. Gameplay needs to work hard to keep up; and, Though it’s worth pointing out that when you reach zero health, you just hit game somehow, it just about does. over (an odd decision, but one that The basic concept would, interestingly, prevents the game from being too easy). be a good fit for several genres. Each Several losses in, I eventually learned character is a monster disguised as a to think ahead when buying cards in the human. The more damage they take, the early stages of a round. The wraith for more their true monster form is instance sometimes employs an ability revealed. The more monstrous they making it immune to all but Day cards, become, the greater the difference in so I stock up on as many of those as I the abilities available to them. can while they’re still available. The How this translates to play isn’t PLAYED vampire can become incredibly explained fully in-game (for now at IT difficult to take down if you don’t do least), but it’s easy enough to fill in it quickly, thanks to her regular use the gaps. At the beginning of each of healing and debuffs, so I try to round, you have a few cards that deal a plan accordingly. little damage, and the rest are played to The Early Access status is mostly earn resources, which you must ‘spend’ visible in terms of the amount of on new cards before the end of your content. There are already hundreds of turn. Resources don’t carry over to the cards, which makes each round next turn, but a card isn’t lost when you pleasantly unpredictable, and there are play it. All of your cards are cycled temporary mutators and card buffs to through your discard and draw piles be had. Each run consists of just three until the end of the round… with one rounds though, and can usually be important twist. beaten in half an hour or less. Six of the As you take damage and start to look ten monsters are currently available, the more icky, the types of card that you vampire your starting character and the hold and have available to buy change. other five waiting to be unlocked. Initially, the resource and card type is One issue is that some major current Day. As you take a virtual beating, the and planned content is locked behind a Day cards begin to be swapped out for requirement to finish a run on one of the Night and Monster cards. These are the highest difficulties. This carries a danger of casual players losing interest sooner rather than later. That would be a real shame, as this is a unique and enormously fun game—one I’ll keep playing—that deserves as large a community as possible. Luke Kemp

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B… but I want to go full monster!

THE MORE DAMAGE THEY TAKE, THE MORE THEIR TRUE MONSTER FORM IS REVEALED

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COVER FEATURE

STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl

New mutants, a new faction, and new ways to die in STALKER 2: HEART OF CHERNOBYL. By Chris Livingston

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COVER FEATURE

STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl

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he Zone of the STALKER series is ﬁlled with radiation and dread in equal measures. Home to mutant horrors, hostile factions, and otherworldly anomalies, the Zone only promises one thing: a quick and brutal death. The original STALKER games were bleak, terrifying, unforgiving survival sandboxes. The Zone is the most miserable place in videogame history. We can’t wait to go back. We have, however, waited for quite a while. It’s been over a decade since the release of the last STALKER game by GSC Gameworld, Call of Pripyat, and STALKER 2 (oddly enough, it’s the fourth game in the series) was originally planned for 2012. It was cancelled that same year, only to reappear in development again in 2018, this time in the Unreal Engine. Aiming for a release in April of 2022, we’re ﬁnally getting tantalizingly close to another visit to the Zone. And the wait may have been worth it, as it sounds like something closer to the vision GSC Gameworld had for its ﬁrst STALKER game, Shadow of Chernobyl, way back in 2007. “The STALKER series always aimed to be set in a seamless open world, but only now is it possible to implement it as planned,” says game director Evgeniy Grygorovych. “STALKER 2 features a vast world to explore with different biomes,

numerous locations, labs, and undergrounds to explore. It’s 64 square kilometers, and it’s all yours. You can go anywhere.”

DEATH AND REBIRTH

Time hasn’t just passed for us while we waited for the next STALKER game. Time has passed in the Zone, too. Years have gone by since the events of STALKER: Call of Pripyat, and that passage of time is evident in the look of STALKER 2. “In terms of art direction and general feel, that means more modern vibes have been added to the atmosphere of decay and devastation,” says Grygorovych. “At the same time, locations and environments have become even more obsolete and abandoned, as a signiﬁcant time has passed in this frozen world. This is why the contrast between technology and abandonment feels even stronger.” That’s also why you might be skulking cautiously through the world, and suddenly stumble upon a ﬁeld covered in bright red poppy plants, which provides a shocking burst of color in the normally gray and gloomy Zone. Green grass, leafy trees, and ruined buildings covered in moss show nature ﬂourishing in some areas, despite all the deadly radiation and decay. At the same time, other locations have plunged further into ruin. As seen in the trailer, a guard tower from the second game in the trilogy, STALKER: Clear Sky, can be visited in STALKER 2, but the tower is now barely standing, leaning crookedly and held up by

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COVERFEATURE

STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl

cables as if it’s about to crumble into a pile of twisted and rusty metal. But ﬂourishing ﬂora and decaying buildings aren’t the only thing that’s changed over the years. The Zone is home to new inhabitants, both human and otherwise.

But this is the world of STALKER we’re talking about. Mutant deer in STALKER 2 are nothing to sneeze at. In fact, it sounds like you might want to avoid them altogether. First, the deer look absolutely badass, with glowing eyes set below a massive cluster of jagged antlers. If you were thinking of walking away from your OH, DEER You can expect to meet many of the hunting excursion with a cosy warm Zone’s familiar residents in deer fur pelt, you can probably forget STALKER 2. As we saw in the E3 it: Most of the deer’s fur has fallen trailer, the fast-moving, nearly silent, out, leaving only a few tufts growing often invisible Bloodsuckers are back between hard armored plating of (unfortunately, because they’re scary what might be mutated bone that’s protruding through the animal’s hide. as hell) and you can expect to run This deer looks mean and not even into the hooded, dwarf-like Burers again, too, still ready to yank weapons remotely tasty, and its armored frame out of your hands and unleash deadly means a simple shot isn’t going to take it down—you’ll need to ﬁnd a shockwaves with their telekinetic weak spot somewhere on its body if powers. But STALKER 2 will also feature new mutants and monsters, you want to kill it. And it’s not just going to be standing there gently and even something that initially sounds harmless may wind up being nibbling grass while you shoot: The a very grave threat. deer can attack with its sharp Typically in open world survival hooves—both back and front—and games, deer are a combination of a that chaotic crown of jagged horns. bit of pleasant scenery (aw, a deer!) But that’s only part of the and a resource (yum, a deer!). In problem. STALKER 2’s deer hasn’t just mutated physically, but mentally. most games, these gentle creatures Yes, this is a psychic deer, and not are to be admired at a distance or only can it launch physical and hunted for meat, leather, and other psy-attacks at you, it can summon crafting resources. Even in a radioactive wasteland, you wouldn’t other medium-sized mutants nearby for help, meaning targeting a single expect a deer, even an irradiated, deer can lead to a swarm of other mutated deer, to be anything more nasty creatures. Don’t worry, it gets than a harmless feast.

Irradiated dogs hunt in packs, so make sure you’re locked and loaded. RIGHT:

even worse. The single deer you were foolhardy enough to shoot at now appears to be many deer, because this irradiated deer can create illusory copies of itself. Now not only are you ﬁghting a potential mob of helper mutants, you’re also trying to ﬁgure out which of the several deer you’re looking at is the real one and which are simply illusions. Like I said, you might want to avoid the deer of STALKER 2 altogether.

ANOMALOUS MATERIALS

Parts of the Zone almost seem idyllic now that nature is reclaiming them.

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Of course, the whole reason you’re going into the Zone and braving encounters with psychic armored deer in the ﬁrst place is to hunt for artefacts. Artifacts are rare, valuable, and often dangerous items that have gained unusual properties due to the anomalies of the Zone. If you’ve been in the Zone before, you’re no stranger to anomalies, but familiarity might not help as much as you think. “Anomalies work in much the same way as before, but have become more dangerous and more varied,” says Grygorovych.

COVER FEATURE

ITS ARMORED FRAME MEANS A SIMPLE SHOT ISN’T GOING TO TAKE IT DOWN

Anomalies are extremely dangerous, often fatal phenomena that occur in the Zone. And a lot of times they occur before you’re even aware you’ve stepped into one. They come in many different forms: Sometimes they’re explosive, ﬁery events that will ﬂash-fry you where you stand, or gravitational vortexes that will pick you up and spin you around as if you’ve been caught in a tornado. There can be singular anomalies, they can be clustered together in anomaly ﬁelds, and there are new ‘arch anomalies’, such as the Fire Whirlwind, which represent an even deadlier type of threat. Special detectors can help you spot the anomalies and point you to the precious artifacts within them, but they’re no guarantee you’ll escape in one piece or with the item you were searching for. And some tricks for dealing with anomalies from the previous STALKER games might not be viable strategies, such as one we probably all did at one time or another—suddenly realizing an anomaly is about to go critical

and just running like hell. Dashing through an anomaly ﬁeld might save your life, but it’s not going to be a long-term solution. Even if you survive, your equipment may be heavily damaged or even destroyed. As Grygorovych bluntly puts it, “Your armor will turn to dust” after a few sprints through an anomaly ﬁeld. With good quality equipment so hard to come by in the game, it’ll cost you dearly if you try to take a shortcut through an anomaly ﬁeld too many times. As for the arch anomalies like the Fire Whirlwind, GSC isn’t telling us much about them yet, other than that simply making your way through them using detectors won’t be enough to come away with your prize. “The temperature is too high and the artifact from the center cannot be retrieved,” says Grygorovych of the Fire Whirlwind. “We don’t want to spoil the solution, but there is a way to fetch the artifact.” I’m guessing it involves something more durable than some sort of fancy oven mitt.

PICKING SIDES

STALKER’s factions have different goals and ideologies. Who will you side with?

FREEDOM

Members of Freedom think the Zone’s secrets should be shared with the world, not kept by the state.

MONOLITH

The religious cult of Monolith are back, determined to kill anyone trying to reach the center of the Zone.

WARD

Led by Colonel Korshunov, this new faction acts like the policemen of the Zone. Bandits hate them. Will you?

33

COVER FEATURE

DUTY SEES THE ZONE AS A HAZARD TO HUMANITY AND FIGHTS TO ERADICATE IT

IT’S THE FUZZ!

Along with new mutants, a powerful and feared new faction has risen in the years you’ve been away from the Zone. This new faction was hinted at in the E3 trailer, as eagle-eyed viewers spotted grafﬁti on a wall written in Ukrainian, which included the word ‘guard’. This new faction is called the Ward. Put it this way: If the Zone is the Wild West and bandits are outlaws and bank robbers, the Ward are the lawmen. They may not have tin stars pinned to their chests, but they’re deﬁnitely seen as police by the rest of the Zone. The leader of the Ward is Colonel Alexander Korshunov, an accomplished and experienced soldier who personally recruited the faction’s members from groups of highly trained mercenaries, and turned them into a proper army. A disciplined leader, he doesn’t tolerate disloyalty from his soldiers, and crossing him is a bad idea. The Ward sounds a bit similar to Duty, another paramilitary faction 34

ABOVE: Even in the

deadly Zone there are a few safe places to visit.

from earlier STALKER games, but Duty sees the Zone as a hazard to humanity and ﬁghts to eradicate it. The Ward, on the other hand, wants to control the dangers of the Zone so they may serve humankind through the scientiﬁc knowledge gained from them. As a result, the Ward’s goal is to protect the important discoveries taking place at the Scientiﬁc Institute for Research of the

Chernobyl Anomalous Area. They don’t look kindly on bandits, and the feeling is mutual. Choosing to side with Colonel Korshunov and the Ward, or the leader and members of any of STALKER 2’s factions, will be an important and difﬁcult choice for players, according to Grygorovych. “Several characters of conﬂicting ideologies can be found even within

CLUB DREAD

Love STALKER’s bleak and hopeless atmosphere? Sure, we all do! Here are other games that capture a similar feeling METRO 2033

It’s linear, not open world, but Metro 2033 captures the same dread and horror as the STALKER series.

SURVARIUM

Deadly anomalies and FPS combat in a postapocalyptic landscape. Like STALKER, but multiplayer only.

ESCAPE FROM TARKOV

Brutal combat and survival elements fill this shooter as players try to escape with valuable loot.

CHERNOBYLITE

Hell, it’s a non-linear survival shooter that takes place in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and features Stalkers.

COVER FEATURE

STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl

the same faction,” he says. “Even within the [GSC Gameworld], I see people argue about the choices [their coworkers] have made.”

SURVIVAL KIT

As always, survival is a challenge, and that’s not just due to monsters, mutants, and roaming bandits. While most of STALKER 2’s survival systems will sound familiar, such as using bandages to stop bleeding, meds to recover lost health, and different types of protective clothing or armor to avoid lethal doses of radiation, there are a few new survival elements sprinkled in that will make keeping yourself alive even more difﬁcult, even when you’re not being shot at, blown up, or stalked by psychic deer. As always, you’ll need to keep yourself well-fed, but going without eating for too long will do more than simply lower your hit points. There will be secondary effects of hunger, which include more difﬁculty aiming your weapons, and a loss of stamina. Your stomach may even

begin to audibly rumble if you’ve skipped too many meals. With a full belly, on the other hand, you’ll be able to move faster and cover long distances more quickly. And sleep will play a big role in maintaining your health and effectiveness in the Zone. If a STALKER goes more than a full day without sleep, they’ll begin to feel the effects of that fatigue, and the longer they continue pushing themselves without rest the more severe those effects will become. The STALKER’s vision will be affected, they’ll lose stamina, and they may even begin experiencing auditory hallucinations. There are already plenty of creepy, disturbing and horrifying sounds in the Zone: You deﬁnitely don’t want to be adding to them by not getting enough sack time. There are, naturally, short-term solutions for dealing with the negative effects of hunger or lack of sleep. “Any debuff can be overcome with an item for a short time period,” says Grygorovych. “For example, the negative effects from the [sleepdeprived] condition can be temporarily removed by having an energy drink. But if you do not satisfy the needs of your character, the sum of all those needs signiﬁcantly complicates the gameplay.” You can put off things like rest and meals for a while, in other

words—and seeing as how the Zone isn’t a great place to take a nap, you’ll probably have to. But it’ll all catch up with you eventually.

FRIENDZONED

Grygorovych expects players to be able to spend 100 hours to see everything STALKER 2 has to offer, which includes an intricate plot and non-linear storyline. And with different choices to make, such as which faction to side with, he says it’s “impossible” to see everything in a single playthrough. “We have 30 narrative designers working speciﬁcally on plot and quests,”says Grygorovych . “Creating a nonlinear story is the most difﬁcult challenge in games, and we consider the plot to be one of the main features of the game. We are really proud of how it’s shaping up.” There will also be multiplayer elements like PvP, deathmatch, and team deathmatch added after launch. If you were hoping to take on the Zone with a friend at your side, however, that’s not in the cards. When it comes to STALKER 2, co-op is a non-starter. “It is impossible to add a co-op mode without ruining the experience of overcoming the difﬁculties on your own,” Grygorovych says. When it comes to surviving the Zone, you’ll have to do it solo, STALKER.

The underground of Agroprom is the last place you want to run into someone. Or something.

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BEST ACTION p45

BEST OPEN WORLD p43 BEST MULTIPLAYER p41 BEST ONGOING p40

BEST CHARACTERS p44 BEST RPG p42

BEST CO-OP p41

BEST HORROR p47

BEST STRATEGY p45 BEST STEALTH p46

BEST NARRATIVE p48 BEST DESIGN p48

GAME OF THE YEAR

GAME OF THE YEAR p49

2021

Celebrating the absolute best of the last 12 months of PC gaming 39

GAME OF THE YEAR 2021

Robin Valentine DORFROMANTIK

This year I was really looking for videogames to be my calm, chill escape from an increasingly weird and stressful reality. So you can understand why I fell so in love with this gentle puzzle game about building idyllic little countryside towns, one tile at a time. I’m terrible at actually scoring points, but I’m always completing the true objective: Creating a placeI’d love to go on holiday.

BEST ONGOING 2021

APEX LEGENDS Nat Clayton, features producer: Apex

Legends has always been good. But for those ﬁrst few years it felt like Respawn was still ﬁguring out how to run an ongoing battle royale. But in 2021 the studio nailed it. Season 9 is the clear standout, bringing us not only a strong new character in Valkyrie, but a new Arenas game mode—a distinctly Respawn take on CounterStrike that lets you immediately get into a fair ﬁght. Arenas proved that Apex has legs beyond battle royale, cementing the game as not just a good BR, but one of the best team shooters around. But it also feels like Apex is just so much more conﬁdent this year, both as a game and as a world. Respawn’s storytelling has gone into overdrive, bringing in community artists, and animators to help ﬂesh out the world, while leaning fully into voice lines and BR downtime to bring the game’s cast to life. Apex is a soap opera now, and every new season escalates the drama between our sci-ﬁ buds. The game’s latest season, Escape, has only reinvigorated my excitement for the game after a somewhat lacklustre tenth season. Like Olympus, Storm Point is a gorgeous reimagining of what an

Apex map can look like, and Ash is a strong initiator who managed to be more than mere Titanfall 2 nostalgia. But at the end of the day, Apex is still the best and only shooter for punting yourself down a hill at 400mph as a ﬂoating Scottish lass. What more could you ever ask for? Phil Savage, UK editor-in-chief: There’s a lot of personality in Apex’s maps, and—as each gets tweaked and upgraded over its seasons and through Town Takeover events—plenty of history too. King’s Canyon has covered its vast empty spaces with new attractions, and World’s Edge is breaking apart at the seams. Despite this, each new map manages to bring its own personality. The most recent, Storm Point, feels like a strong reaction to earlier maps, with more clearly deﬁned routes that funnel players into conﬂict in interesting ways. The strength of Apex’s third year is that there’s always something new to learn. But the enduring appeal of Apex as a whole is that it’s built on such an enjoyable foundation. Try sliding into a teamﬁght, SMGs blazing, and tell me any other battle royale is worth your time.

EACH NEW MAP MANAGES TO BRING ITS OWN PERSONALITY

Wesley Fenlon CRUELTY SQUAD

Surely the result of a food poisoning fever dream, Cruelty Squad also gleefully aims to depict what rancid sushi does to your body as a first-person shooter. Playing Cruelty Squad is bathing in wall-to-wall puke textures and embracing the filthiness of a hypercapitalist existence where you sell body parts on the stock exchange and use your own intestines as a grappling hook. The open-ended missions are a genuine treat to puzzle out.

40

GAME OF THE YEAR 2021

BEST MULTIPLAYER 2021

CHIVALRY 2 Morgan Park: In a

BEST CO-OP 2021

BACK 4 BLOOD back into the campaign on a higher difﬁculty, having a it released, we were marksman for the nastier concerned that adding infected hordes is not only aim-down-sights to the Left 4 smart, but necessary. I think Dead formula would slow it that speaks to Back 4 Blood’s down too much. But Back 4 strengths over Left 4 Dead: The Blood’s guns are silky in your game pushes you to try new hands, containing nuance that things, and it’s not only replayable because shooting exceeds their appearance. zombies is fun. There’s always As an FPS fan I love the attention to detail: The hip ﬁre a new deck to test out, a gun animation changes when you you’ve not given a proper try yet, or a nasty combo of drop to a crouch, Corruption Cards that puts a communicating clearly that you’re more accurate than twist on a mission you’ve done standing, but less accurate than before. It’s Left 4 Dead, but if you were in ironsights. Range more, and often better. matters. You can kit out a horde killer by grabbing attachments Jacob Ridley, senior hardware and card bonuses that increase editor: I’ve never had as much bullet penetration. fun benchmarking a game as I The high volume of enemies did in Back 4 Blood, and that and the fact that so many guns was in the company of the are one-hit kills against basic game’s confused bots. Seriously, undead feels great. Lately, I’m I ran the same level maybe 30 lugging around the .50 caliber times, and I genuinely enjoyed sniper riﬂe as an anti-‘big guy’ every run. If you have a cheery gun, with the silenced Magnum bunch of zombie-annihilating as a sidearm. hobbyists to play with, there’s a lot of replayability in this game. Morgan Park, staff writer: Were The cards system makes each I still on my ﬁrst playthrough of level feel a little different to the last, and with buffs, for both Back 4 Blood, I would’ve thought Evan silly for carrying player and zombie, you’ll ﬁnd the big sniper riﬂe that shoots you end up with a different slow. But now that I’m jumping playstyle nearly every run. Evan Lahti, global editor-in-chief: Before

world of multiplayer games that are either ultra competitive or gloriﬁed checklists, Chivalry 2 is a rare game that just wants you to hop into a match and go efﬁn wild. Objectives are little more than set dressing for the game’s impressively massive 64-player battles. You can push the battering ram toward the castle with your team, but no one will begrudge you for ignoring it and going on kicking spree instead. One time I decided I’m allergic to swords, and was only allowed to kill people with dismembered arms and heads (it went surprisingly well). Evan Lahti: If you’ve ever practiced a martial art, you know how crucial it is to manage and manipulate distance to beat an opponent. Chivalry 2 manages to contain this aspect of authenticity without going all-in on fussy medieval realism. It feels unbelievably good to survive a 3v1 by dodging at the right time, or forcing enemies to wallop one another with unexpected footwork.

This is a rare competitive multiplayer game that understands the value of being messy. Sometimes a catapult shot drops out of the sky and insta-kills me and ﬁve of my teammates. Over-enthusiastic teammates will hit you in the back of the head with their falchion. Archers are an absolute nuisance, cowardly arrow-lobbers who can kill with impunity. But Chivalry 2 embraces these warped aspects as charming texture. There’s a dedicated button for letting everyone around you know that you want to ‘Kill the archers’. I press it often. Tyler Wilde, executive editor: I love how Chivalry 2 balances negativity with positivity. When you die, you can tap a key to commend the knight who decapitated you, if they deserve it. A couple of times I looked for that key in Battleﬁeld 2042 and was disappointed not to ﬁnd it. And like Evan says, the combat is subtler than it can look. You’ve got to use footwork to ﬁnd openings, and ﬁnd a rhythm without being predictable. It’s a bit like boxing. But with swords.

41

GAME OF THE YEAR 2021

BEST RPG 2021

WILDERMYTH Robin Valentine, print editor: I don’t think

any videogame has ever more successfully evoked the feel of a tabletop RPG. A few hours in Wildermyth is like a supercut of a fantastic year-long Dungeons & Dragons campaign. With the procedural systems as your dungeon master, you follow the lives and adventures of entire parties of heroes, each organically growing and developing in all sorts of unexpected directions. And they really are unexpected—while it’s perfectly possible for a warrior to just ﬁnd a magic sword and kill a dragon with it, it’s equally likely they’ll be cursed to slowly transform into living crystal, or make a pact with an ancient tree, or upset a witch who turns their head into a raven’s. They even age, and fall in love, and have children; eventually they’ll retire, if they survive the adventurer’s life. They’re never really gone, though—your favorites become legacy heroes who can return rejuvenated in subsequent campaigns, like pulling out your favorite old character sheet for yet another dungeon run. Combine all that with really interesting, tactical combat and a great meta layer that sees you adventuring across the land while trying to keep it free of invasion and corruption, and you’ve got a recipe for some of the most memorable non-linear stories I’ve ever 42

experienced. This is the emotional investment of XCOM times 100, and it’s great seeing a videogame draw on the actual feel of tabletop RPGs, instead of just their mechanics or settings. Just make sure you crank up the difﬁculty—your heroes’ journeys and the tactical challenges of combat are both more compelling when death lurks near. Campaigns become tales of desperate resistance in the face of overwhelming odds, and that’s just tasty drama.

resemble smug protagonists of early 2000s webcomics. They shouldn’t be ﬁghting mythic beasts, they should be arguing about Xbox games on a couch. But I kept playing and I’m glad I did. In a great campaign called ‘Eluna and the Moth’, I brought back old characters alongside fresh ones, and though reset to ﬁrst level they progressed in other ways. One’s ﬂame-arm spread to cover other limbs, another went from having wings to just being a crow. Their relationships deepened as well, developing romances and rivalries that Jody Macgregor, AU/weekend played into how they fought editor: I wasn’t sure about Wildermyth at ﬁrst. I liked the together. As Robin says, it’s like a tabletop campaign that runs magic and the papercraft monsters hopping around like for ages, players coming and invisible hands are picking them going, all the stories getting tangled up together. up, though the adventurers

CAMPAIGNS BECOME TALES OF DESPERATE RESISTANCE

BEST OPEN WORLD 2021

FORZA HORIZON 5 Phil Savage, UK editor-in-chief: Once again, Playground Games has stitched together a massive patchwork representation of a place, and ﬁlled it full of theme park delights. There’s the Baja Desert, where you can smash into cacti to build up a massive skill combo. There’s La Gran Caldera, an active volcano with twisting dirt roads and a mountainside that’s just begging to be used for offroad stunts. There’s jungle and farmland and a big airstrip for drag races. In short, Forza Horizon 5’s Mexico makes for a varied car playground. In terms of construction, it’s much the same as Australia and the UK before it: Different biomes that prioritize fun over realism, and that are ﬁlled with enough races, challenges and collectibles to keep you exploring for hundreds of hours. Yes, we could have given Forza Horizon 5 a ‘Best Racing’ award and been done with it, but to do so would have been to miss the point. The racing is a part of the Forza Horizon series, sure, but more than that it’s an enthusiastic celebration of videogame driving. Cars are

handed out like RPG loot, and they’re used for more than just its vast series of checkpoint races. There are ‘PR stunts’ that each celebrate a different discipline, from drifting to doing inadvisably massive jumps. There are sidestories that set you speciﬁc goals as you’re transformed into, for instance, the stunt driver of some ridiculous action blockbuster. There’s even a surprisingly decent battle royale mode. In most games, a giant open world full of icons would exhaust me. But in Forza Horizon 5, each is a guarantee of something fun to do in a car. If you love racing games, this series remains the pinnacle of the form. Jacob Ridley: Ahead of Forza Horizon 5’s release, I was still playing Forza Horizon 4. I never really put it down. So the fact that Forza Horizon 5 feels very much a shinier version of that same game, well, that’s all I could’ve asked for. There’s a ton of beauty in the Mexican map and a whole lot to do. Though, saying that, I found I spent my ﬁrst few hours on a joy ride for no other reason than the thrill of the drive and the beauty of the landscape.

Lauren Aitken

ASSASSIN’S CREED VALHALLA: WRATH OF THE DRUIDS

I haven’t had a lot of time to play games in 2021, so it’s unsurprising that my GOTY is actually someDLC. Wrath of the Druids took Eivor off to Ireland, and it was a lovely departure from fighting around England. I enjoyed following Ciara around and listening to her sing between fighting the creepy and mysterious druids and exploring parts of Ireland I’m familiar with.

THIS SERIES REMAINS THE PINNACLE OF THE FORM

Natalie Clayton UNBEATABLE: WHITE LABEL

Unbeatable is without question the coolest game I played this year, and it’s not even done yet. Despite being a Kickstarter demo with a handful of songs, White Label is a banging rhythm game in its own right, serving up anime-tinted pop rock beats and VHS visuals, and has even dropped a few extra tracks over the year. Mark my words—when Unbeatable hits for real, I won’t be talking about anything else.

43

GAME OF THE YEAR 2021

Evan Lahti LEMNIS GATE

In a gaming year defined by time gimmicks, Lemnis Gate managed to quietly turn the FPS into something much more like 3D chess. You and your opponent deploy characters one by one, playing out their actions in a 25-second span. Your fourth move might be a landmine that alters the history of the match, erasing the moment that your opponent captured an objective. A smart game worth celebrating.

BEST CHARACTERS 2021

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Fraser Brown, online editor: My love for Guardians of the Galaxy makes me feel very basic—a big Marvel action game with quips, how novel!—but I can’t help myself. It’s an incredibly entertaining jaunt through colorful alien planets, cop-infested spaceships, and a city chilling out inside the skull of cosmic god, elevated beyond a popcorn-munching diversion by the Guardians themselves. Star-Lord is a man-child leading a bickering team of semi-reformed criminals who don’t respect him. He’s the only member of the Guardians you’ll directly control, and starting out you’re a bit of a punching bag. But over the course of the 15-hour adventure, the team becomes a support system, helping each other work through trauma in genuinely heartwarming and heartbreaking moments. And when things threaten to get sickeningly sentimental, there’s guaranteed to be a joke or a ﬁght right around the corner to give you time to dry those tears. It’s very 2021—a comedy action game that’s secretly a big therapy session. These different sides never trip over each other, either—it’s all holistic. When you’re exploring a planet or

ﬁghting some space cops, the Guardians are always chatting away, forging bonds, working through shit or ﬁring out meme-worthy running gags. The heroes-in-training and their punchy dialogue might be the high point, but it also makes everything else so much better. I’ve been a fan of this lot since they ﬁrst teamed up in 2008, but this might be the best they’ve ever been. Morgan Park: Guardians is basically Uncharted with better characters. All of the enjoyable hours spent shooting, climbing, and walking are really just sponges for hours of engrossing, funny chatter between teammates. I love that even during a ﬁght or treacherous climb, the game makes you an active participant in every conversation with binary dialogue choices. Not every choice has an impact on the mission, but you often set the group’s mood with your input. Before long, keeping everyone’s spirits high became as important as shooting straight. As someone who’s never cared for the world or characters of Deus Ex, I’m thoroughly impressed that Eidos has whipped up a better version of the Guardians than the MCU could ever dream of.

AN UNCHARTED GAME WITH BETTER CHARACTERS

Fraser Brown THE ASCENT

I’m a simple man who loves bright lights, big guns, and stupid clothes, and The Ascent gives me all three by the truckload. This cyberpunk action-RPG is a stunning, explosive romp through a dazzling but simultaneously filthy megacity. An early weapon lets you spew a barrage of rockets like a machine gun, and that really sets the tone for the whole thing. When it comes out, the party begins.

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GAME OF THE YEAR 2021

BEST ACTION 2021

DEATHLOOP Phil Savage: Finally, an

BEST STRATEGY 2021

OLD WORLD Fraser Brown: I’ve dreamed of splicing all my favorite games with Crusader Kings at some point or another, but few more so than Civilization. Firaxis’ series has spawned some genuine masterpieces, but it’s also starting to feel a bit familiar and unadventurous, especially compared to Paradox’s wildly ambitious and proudly weird grand strategy RPG. Could the best parts of both coexist in a single game? Old World proved they could, while also being a fantastic historical 4X in its own right. Old World is a game of building empires and expanding cities, but with heaps of human drama and complications, and both aspects interact with each other in interesting ways. When you found a city, for instance, you have to make a single family its ruler. Each comes with unique mechanical bonuses, but there’s also your relationship with the families to consider, and the people who belong to them. Maybe you’ll give it to the family of your favorite general and best mate, or use it as an olive branch to mend things with a family you’ve annoyed.

All the intrigue and strategy exist in harmony, even if things aren’t looking so great at court. It’s so much more than Civ with Crusader Kings’ humanity, though. Mohawk Games and designer Soren Johnson have also reconsidered a big list of 4X systems, as well as ﬁnding ways to make the genre more manageable without sacriﬁcing complexity—sometimes they add even more interesting opportunities. The Orders system is fantastic for this very reason. It ostensibly limits how much you can do in a single turn, teaching you to prioritize, but that limitation can be neutralized by making certain decisions that will shape your civilization and ruler. Simpler but just as welcome, you can undo any action you take, or an entire turn. It’s great for ﬁxing silly mistakes, but it’s also a boon for experimentation and learning the ropes. All this, combined with its more focused timeframe—the name’s a giveaway—and fairly brisk campaign make it easy to get stuck into, but it’s still dense and sometimes opaque. I thought it was great at launch, but I can appreciate it even more now.

Arkane game that dares you to let your hair down. Where Dishonored wagged its ﬁnger at high-chaos murder and mayhem, Deathloop positively revels in it. Sure, your overall objective is to break the very timeloop that lets you ﬁght and kill without consequence, but along the way it’s constantly asking: Do you really want this to end? Are you not having fun? I am having fun. It’s easy to miss how good Arkane’s combat usually is, because there’s a sense that being quiet and nonlethal is the right way to play. In Deathloop, the lack of a quickload key means that, if you’re spotted, you’re unable to correct your mistake. And eventually you start to ask if being noticed is even a mistake at all. You’ve got an arsenal of cool guns, and a selection of powers that make you really good at taking out your targets. Is it really so bad to use them? It’s all underpinned by the invasion system, where other players can join your game in an attempt to hunt you down. These cat-and-mouse battles let you use the full breadth of

Deathloop’s many systems, in encounters that are as hilarious as they are tense. There’s little more satisfying than turning an invader’s impatience against them as you slowly manipulate the environment to your advantage. And, as an invader, it feels great to weaponize the added tension of your sudden appearance—goading your quarry into making a mistake that costs them their life. Deathloop has as much in common with Arkane’s entertainingly messy Dark Messiah: Might & Magic as it does with the seminal Dishonored series, and it’s all the better for it. Jody Macgregor: Deathloop does feel like Arkane’s response to people who felt pressured to sneak through Dishonored. That’s how I’d have played whether it felt right or not, so Deathloop—with its guilt-free murderthons and, instead of quicksaves, a modern take on ye olde three lives—shouldn’t be for me. And yet I kicked people off cliffs, ran across rooftops, set off dominos to drop a landmine on someone’s head, and loved it all.

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GAME OF THE YEAR 2021

BEST STEALTH 2021

HITMAN 3 Fraser Brown: For the site, I wrote a far-too-revealing feature about really wanting a game where Agent 47 chases me. Then I tried to get Andy Kelly to ask Agent 47 voice actor David Bateson to record himself saying, “I’m coming to get you, Fraser”. He chickened out, and now he is dead (to me). You could say I really got into Hitman 3. It’s weird to think of it as a stealth game. In one of the most out-there missions, I spent my ﬁrst attempt in-character as a detective in an Agatha Christie knock-off, right up until the point where I killed my target. There are more traditionally sneaky routes through every map, of course, but Hitman’s all about that social stealth, and 3 has some of the strongest examples out of the whole trilogy. Agent 47 gets plenty of chances to show off his acting chops, even though they still just amount to putting on a disguise and acting and sounding just like his regular spooky self. The murder mystery in Dartmoor and the elaborate Chongqing mission are where we get to see IO at its most experimental, but for the purists there’s Berlin and the sandbox of a nightclub. You’ve got targets you know nothing about and no plan so, at least for that ﬁrst playthrough, it’s all about reacting and going with your instincts. It would have probably made for a better climax than the actual ﬁnal mission, the game’s only dud. 46

Phil Savage: Berlin really is emblematic of what makes Hitman 3 so good. Hitman 2’s levels were bigger, but the sequel has a playful conﬁdence to it—exploring the edges of what makes a great stealth sandbox to great effect. Here, in this underground club, you’re tasked with taking out the ICA agents that are there to hunt you. Rather than a single target with a handful of big, obvious routes leading to their demise, you’re instead left to work out a series of more small-scale assassinations. Arguably this is Hitman at its purest: Just ingenuity and opportunism at your disposal. As Fraser mentioned, Hitman’s stock-in-trade is social stealth—playing dress-up to hide

in plain sight and walk among your victims. But it’s also worth celebrating the continued quality of IO’s level design. Your ﬁrst playthroughs will likely be deﬁned by the showcase solutions—Dartmoor’s detective being the most obvious example. But each level is also designed to support its many optional challenges, the pinnacle of which is silently completing a mission without ever donning a disguise. Attempt this, and you’ll discover new options—clever ways a level is made to reveal possibilities that you missed on your ﬁrst visit. This design is what makes Hitman 3 not just a great stealth game, but a near endlessly replayable one too—that scales to support whatever challenge you want

IT’S ALSO WORTH CELEBRATING THE QUALITY OF IO’S LEVEL DESIGN

BEST HORROR 2021

RESIDENT EVIL VILLAGE Jacob Ridley: Resident Evil Village is a

much more fast-paced game than you might expect off the back of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. For that, it’s the Resident Evil game I’d recommend to those who haven’t tried a Resi game before, as in between all the body horror there’s a whole lot of running and gunning. It also blends so many excellent horror game staples into a single, ﬂuent game. Each primary ‘area’ of the map feels like a discrete experience, some more action focused and others more downright haunting. And each one home to a well-written, and well-acted, paranormal mob boss ﬁgure. Resident Evil Village feels like a horror game built to cater to most horror fans, and while usually that might appear overreaching, Capcom manages to thread the needle exceptionally well. Harry Shepherd, guides editor: I skipped Resident Evil 7, but totally not because I was too scared. And I can prove it: I played Resident Evil Village. But it means my last experience of the series was the terminally bloated action movie, Resident Evil 6, and Ethan’s terrifying jaunt through Castle

Dimitrescu could hardly be more different. In the best way possible. It also reasserted to me how useful it is to have fully-functioning hands. Anyway, where Resident Evil 6 was overlong, over the top, and needed the reset of 7 to get back to what the series is best at: Scares. Village takes that a step further: It’s tighter, more focused, and, most importantly, blood-curdling. As Jacob says, each area feels distinct. They’re a series of neat, horrifying episodes that feel fresh enough that, while Lady D is sent packing quicker than you might expect, you don’t really mind. Village boasts plenty of fearsome moments, even when you’re armed to the teeth. In what feels like no time at all after admiring the reveal of the Gothic castle, you’re surrounded by werewolves, left scrapping for survival with a mixture of bullets, red barrels, and dumb luck. I was at my most afraid in these moments. That said, for all the gratifying guns, the section in which they’re all taken away will always live longest in the memory. The tall vampire that stole the show ahead of release may cast a long shadow, but hidden behind her was one of the scariest horror sequences I’ve ever played.

Tyler Colp

NIER REPLICANT

I played Nier Replicant because I didn’t like Nier: Automata. The latter game felt overwrought for a familiar story about robots with feelings. This year, I discovered that Nier Replicant was always the better game, blending a tragic, and sometimes comedic story with a beloved main cast. It’s a game that digs into people and their desires instead of simply suggesting it. It’s devastatingly honest, and I needed that this year.

IT’S TIGHTER, MORE FOCUSED, AND BLOODCURDLING

Lauren Morton TOEM

Toem may be as prescriptive in its quest checklist as any adventure game, but it lets you get silly and personalize the details. Solving problems for the residents of its cute, colorless world always requires pulling out your instant camera, but there’s a playfulness in deciding how to set up each requested shot after you puzzle out what’s being asked for. Do you take a selfie with a dog? Whip out your foam finger?

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GAME OF THE YEAR 2021

BEST DESIGN 2021

LOOP HERO Evan Lahti: This mighty little RPG got 50 hours out of me over the course of reviewing it. It’s remarkably distilled. If Diablo is a ten-gallon tank of pleasant ARPG liquid, Loop Hero is a thimble of hyperconcentrated essence. The loop: Build the level. Fight enemies (automatically). Equip loot they drop. Repeat. How does combat feel this engaging when you have essentially zero control over it? The retro sound design has a lot to do with it, steeping the whole game in a Halloween-y vibe and making weapon impacts, harpy claws, and shattered shields feel sharp. Like the sprawling deckbuilder genre that Slay the Spire spawned, I hope we’ll see more of this sort of thing across different themes. I can easily imagine a multiplayer version of this where you’re building a board for an opponent, not unlike Legion TD 2. Graeme Meredith, video producer: You see a lot of

games on the indie side of things trying to replicate or re-establish retrovisuals. More often than not, it’s just a

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practical means to an end, but the best ones really exemplify that the early years of gaming only really scratched the surface of the potential in pixel art graphics. Not only does Loop Hero provide a lavish visual experience with that aesthetic, it’s one of the very best ‘non-speciﬁc CRT era’ style games I’ve seen, and it’s a key part of why it’s so addictive. The vibrating scan lines, grimy sprite work and rattly sound effects suck you in and keep you looping your way round these maps of your own design for hours. That, and the rumor mill it creates for itself—something typical in pre-internet gaming, but rarely seen these days. Get talking with a friend or two, sharing in the experience, and each of you might have noticed or discovered something different or unusual while running the loop. It ﬁlls you with an eagerness to share information. So it’s not just the gameplay or the visuals that transﬁxes you, it’s the time and place Loop Hero creates around you that makes it such a stand out this year.

BEST NARRATIVE 2021

SABLE Nat Clayton: The hero

of this desert adventure doesn’t save the world. There’s no existential threat, no looming war or ancient MacGufﬁn to recover. In fact, Sable doesn’t really have much of a plot at all—and yet, within an hour of ﬁring up the game, a passing conversation brought me to the brink of tears. Sable is a coming-of-age story. A rite of passage that sees you leaving your family behind to explore the world and ﬁgure out who, exactly, you want to be. Every quest, every conversation, every mask and piece of clothing is there in service of ﬁnding an identity for the titular glider. Throughout the game you’ll be choosing conversation options and outﬁtting your bike not because you need to optimize stats or grind reputations, but because it’s what feels right for your Sable at that moment. Every mask you acquire is quite literally another face to try on. There is simply such an earnest warmth to Sable’s writing. Almost every conversation you have is ﬂeeting and incidental, but penned with such absolute

earnestness that it’s hard not to well up. You’ll meet an old guard who’s chosen to embark on her own journey of discovery late in life, and even the most sour-faced shopkeep meets you with the understanding that your gliding is an important moment. It resonates hard with my own brief experience of travelling after high school, experimenting with identity as I ﬂoated haphazardly between volunteer gigs across Europe. Most telling of all is that Sable is happy to let you wrap things up on your own terms, whenever you feel ready. This isn’t a game that wants you to rinse it of content—rather, you’re free to return to your clan whenever your Sable feels she’s found the mask that’s right for her. It’s a game about the joy of self-discovery, encouraging you to reﬂect during those long desert rides, best summed up in a tearjerking line from one of your clanmates at the very beginning of your journey. “Try to have fun. There’s a lot to be said about ritual and independence and all of that out there, but the world’s an easier place if you put joy ﬁrst.”

GAME OF THE YEAR 2021

GAME OF THE YEAR 2021

VALHEIM Lauren Morton, associate editor: The week Valheim launched, I scoffed, “Do we really need another Early Access crafting survival game?” Whether or not we needed one, the appetite I and all of my friends developed for scarﬁng down over 100 hours within a month suggested we very much wanted one. On paper, Valheim is like any other crafting survival game. You begin by picking up rocks and sticks, slapping together a crude stone axe, and chopping down every tree in sight. In practice, it’s full of twists. The building system with supports and structural integrity challenged me to ﬁnally think about base building as a technical puzzle instead of just an aesthetic one. The food system that required me to think about boosting my health and stamina convinced me that I should spare a thought for cooking after I couldn’t be bothered in any other game. Small touches like needing to touch a resource before discovering what I could craft with it were an extra delight. Ultimately, the fact that my friends wanted to spend countless nights planning some grand expedition across a sea we’d yet to cross or into the swamps was what I loved about Valheim. Millions of people spending two months absorbed in an Early Access game made by a tiny studio is the kind of magic I adore about PC gaming. Christopher Livingston, features producer: It says something about the size and scope of Valheim

that I played for 20 hours before I realized that I’m on an island, not a continent. I’m on a tiny tutorial island, and there’s a huge world out there full of other stuff I haven’t even seen yet. The day I left my island, bringing everything I could carry onto my little wooden raft and setting off across a vast ocean, headed for the unknown, was a thrilling adventure. And now every trip I make into the unknown in Valheim feels like a bold adventure with that same awe and wonder I felt on my ﬁrst shaky voyage. Jacob Ridley: Like Lauren, I was done with survival games when Valheim rolled around. Well, I thought I was. Tune in a month or so later, and I’ve played over 100 hours of Valheim and counting. There was just

something so accessible about the feel of its world, and the fact there’s always something to keep you occupied, whether building or exploring. I spent tens of hours building a manor house on top of a precariously placed rock, in one of the most inhospitable biomes in Valheim— racing to have the highest tower against a friend who set up on the next rock over. I sailed across the ocean to ﬁnd the best sources of ore to smelt to build up towns and villages spanning islands. I set up trade routes with friends in other areas of the world, and created bridges and canals, partially changing the face of the landscape. Truly the most fun I’ve had in a game all year, and it offered a great opportunity to share that enjoyment with my friends as we explored together.

THE KIND OF MAGIC I ADORE ABOUT PC GAMING

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REVIEW

Call of Duty: Vanguard

DUTY STALLS

Despite some impressive moments, CALL OF DUTY: VANGUARD struggles to stand out

O

By Rick Lane

Stalingrad Summer, which gives you nce again, Call of Duty spins its wheel of war, and for the sixth time in the series’ history, the needle has landed on NEED TO KNOW a taste of life in WWII’s lynchpin city prior to the Nazi assault, before all ‘World War the Second’. Call of Duty has always been WHAT IS IT? hell breaks loose in the campaign’s most comfortable booting Hitler right in the Activision’s annual Panzerschrecks, nestled cosily in the history of the cash-cow, this time standout action sequence. Not all the missions are so well victors, safe in the knowledge that the baddies really were bad. But it’s with a World War II theme. thought out. The later missions set in also the most difﬁcult setting from which to build something new. north Africa are spectacular, and lent There are only so many World War II battles, after all, and Call of Duty EXPECT TO PAY a sense of fun by your team of cocky has covered them exhaustively over the years. $60 Australian saboteurs. But ultimately DEVELOPER It’s a problem that Vanguard fails to administration building. While our Sledgehammer Games it’s a derivative drive through the desert. The biggest letdown is the heroes sit around sucking their teeth, resolve, which is a shame, because PUBLISHER Battle of Midway, where breaththe campaign hops between there are hints of more interesting Activision taking scenes of aerial combat are ideas amid the game’s familiar sights ﬂashbacks that individually focus on REVIEWED ON by Call of Duty’s refusal and sounds. But in the end Vanguard each member of the team’s AMD Ryzen 5 3600, undermined experiences during the war. submits to expectation. There are Nvidia GeForce RTX to cede control of the ﬂightstick, In other words, what initially certain things a Call of Duty game 2080 Super, 32 GB RAM constantly pushing you toward the next objective rather than giving you seems like a different must be, and MULTIPLAYER a chance to enjoy the ﬁghting. take on the Second Sledgehammer ticks Yes World War turns out to those boxes in Sledgehammer LINK just another playable dependable but TEAM PLAYERS tries to put behighlight callofduty.com reel of the unadventurous fashion. twists The campaign’s broader issue, on the conﬂict. Admittedly, The campaign is though, is it offers little opportunity more familiar Sledgehammer tries to most indicative of the to experience your spec-ops team as gulf between put twists on the more a team. It’s a shame because, for once, encounters familiar encounters. Vanguard’s ideas and the characters are a likeable bunch. The obligatory D-Day execution. The story The writing may be heavily splashed mission involves parachuting into revolves around a group of special with patriotic pathos, and the fact the forces agents plucked from different treacherous Normandy woodland game uses quotes from its own before assaulting a clifftop bunker theatres of the war, who are characters for the death-screens is from behind to facilitate the D-Day dispatched on a secret mission to painfully pretentious. But the general Berlin in the ﬁnal days of the Reich. landings, while the Paciﬁc themed rapport of the squad is engaging, The action commences with a raid on Numa Numa Trail sees you join while characters like Lucas the a German train while ﬁres from the forces with an all-black American Australian saboteur, and Polina the Russian advance rage in the distance. unit, dodging Japanese deathtraps Russian sniper, are given enough This rolls seamlessly into an assault and snipers in preparation for a depth to make you care about them. spectacular assault on an airﬁeld. The on a submarine dock, where the Sadly, there are only two missions highlight of the campaign is group learns about a secret Nazi in which the squad actually work operation known as Project Phoenix. together. The rest of the time, they’re incarcerated in a prison cell, while Dominic Monaghan’s creepy Nazi OPSY DAISY administrator tries his best to conceal It’s an interesting setup for a WWII Vanguard’s almost complete lack of shooter. The prospect of following My rating of the CoD WWII campaigns plot. The cutscenes are long and this group of renegades through meandering, and it all leads up to an infernal Berlin is tantalizing, and I Call of Duty underwhelming ﬁnal mission. was keen to see what tale Call of Duty: United Offensive As the campaign struggles to make Sledgehammer would spin in this Call of Duty 2 the best of its ideas, multiplayer is relatively unexplored area of the war. more progressive, bringing a couple But this isn’t what happens. Call of Duty 3 (not on PC) of broad changes and more bespoke Immediately after the raid, your Call of Duty: World at War new features that make a small but group of agents are captured by the Call of Duty: WWII noticeable difference from previous Nazis, and spend most of the years. Foremost among the new remaining campaign imprisoned Call of Duty: Vanguard additions are more destructable beneath some gloomy Nazi

WAR NEVER CHANGES

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REVIEW

Call of Duty: Vanguard

LEFT: A sprinkling of

destruction tech means some walls and doors deteriorate as the match progresses. BELOW LEFT: The Vanguard squad are a surprisingly likeable bunch, but you don’t spend much time with them together.

Killstreaks are as spectacular and unbalanced as ever.

CoD’s awkward relationship with vehicles continues in the Battle of Midway Mission.

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REVIEW

Call of Duty: Vanguard Vanguard’s flamethrowers are terrifyingly effective.

RIGHT: An exploding zombie. What will they think of next? FAR RIGHT:

Gunsmith’s back, and even more weirdly positioned than it was in Black Ops: Cold War.

Even the portals in Vanguard are evil.

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REVIEW

Call of Duty: Vanguard maps. While we’re not talking nothing as interesting as Call of Duty: Battleﬁeld levels of destruction, WWII’s War mode, for example, certain walls and windows can be while the whole gunsmithing shattered to alter the ﬂow of maps, element of the game feels entirely and environments are subject to a out-of-place with World War II more cosmetic ‘dirtying’ over time. It era-weaponry. Indeed, one thing I gives the maps a satisfying sense of would like from Vanguard is a ‘no progression, and it’s fun to see the attachments’ mode, where you play mess left behind by a half-dozen only with the default weapons— bombing-run killstreaks. scopes and stocks be damned. Less notable but I suppose I’m now arguably more obliged to talk about Modes-wise, Zombies. Cards on the signiﬁcant is the I’ve never really introduction of Combat Vanguard table, Pacing, which cared for CoD’s hinges heavily essentially lets you mode, and around classic Zombies select the rough Vanguard’s version player-count for each little to convince scenarios does mode. There are three me that I’m missing pacing levels: Tactical, out. Der Anfang Assault, and Blitz. Tactical keeps the centers around a hub in Stalingrad, player count low, resulting in an from which you can access portals almost Counter-Strike feel. Blitz, that transport you to different places meanwhile, can have anywhere like Paris or the Paciﬁc, where you between 16 and 48 players, which must complete one of three objective means intense action and killstreaks types. One sees you collecting runes by the bucketload. Personally, I liked to disable a series of magic obelisks, another involves protecting a ﬂoating letting the game cycle through the orb as it travels around the map, and different tiers. It made for a good showcase of how varied Vanguard’s the third is a ‘kill zombies until the multiplayer can be. timer runs out’ affair. Modes-wise, Vanguard hinges Completing these missions earns heavily around classic scenarios like you Cursed Hearts. These are spent Team Deathmatch and Domination, at an altar on various powers that can while there’s a new version of combine with your weapons and Modern Warfare’s Gunﬁght mode abilities in, well, I was going to say called Champion Kill. This sees ‘interesting ways’ but frankly that’s players square off in teams of two or pushing it. For example, I combined three in small-scale rounds. You all the combat shotgun with an ability start off with the same loadout, but that reloads your gun for you on a cash you earn by winning lets you critical hit. The result of this was I upgrade your weapons and equipment, meaning ﬁghts gradually diversify as they progress. For me, though, the highlight of Vanguard’s multiplayer is Patrol. This is a capture and hold-scenario similar Sledgehammer’s decade with Call of Duty to Domination, but there is only one control point that moves randomly around the map. This makes it far more dynamic than traditional Domination, as the team in control CALL OF DUTY: CALL OF CALL OF DUTY: must constantly adjust its defence to ADVANCED DUTY: MODERN VANGUARD counter new sightlines or angles of WARFARE WARFARE 2019 2021 attack. It’s a fun, frenetic mode that Assisting 2014 Infinity Ward balances teamwork with your ability to react, although it’s best played on Tactical or Assault Pacing. Blitz turns Patrol into a chaotic pile-on.

hardly had to reload again, letting me mow zombies down easily. More powerful versions of these abilities become available to buy as the zombie horde grows, so the combat scales in intensity as you progress. But with only three mission types and three zombie types, the hamsterwheel grind quickly emerges.

All considered, I like Vanguard’s multiplayer, but there’s nothing here that makes it a must-buy. Like the campaign, it seems to struggle with the World War II setting. There’s

Multiplayer is as good as ever, but the campaign and Zombies mode fail to capitalize on what could be interesting ideas.

HAMMERING IT HOME

SMITHING THE POINT

CALL OF DUTY 3 2011

Co-developed with Infinity Ward

CALL OF DUTY: WWII 2017

CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS COLD WAR 2020

Assisting Treyarch

STORMY WEATHER

There is one last issue relating to this year’s Call of Duty that must be addressed. Sledgehammer’s game releases off the back of truly horriﬁc allegations of discrimination and sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard has led to the state of California suing the company. It’s the most egregious example yet of the game industry’s endemic mistreatment of women. Sledgehammer, for its part, addressed the allegations against its parent company in the run-up to release, and there are ongoing efforts by the ABK Workers’ Alliance to improve the culture of the company. It’s difﬁcult to address this topic in a sufﬁciently nuanced fashion within the scope of a review. The PC Gamer site has covered the story extensively as it has unfolded and will continue to do so. Nonetheless, during the process of review the allegations were never far from my mind, and although I wouldn’t want to punish the work of Sledgehammer for actions taken by people elsewhere in Activision Blizzard, I also ﬁnd it hard not to be frustrated at the prospect of who might proﬁt from the positive things I’ve said about Vanguard, and how that feeds, however slightly or indirectly, into facilitating a culture of harassment and abuse. I hope there is no need to make such clariﬁcations in the future, because there are glimpses of ingenuity within Vanguard, and perhaps Sledgehammer can take those ideas and run further on its next outing with the series. This time around though, my feelings are largely indifferent. The singleplayer has a couple of great missions, and the multiplayer has a couple of good modes. But on the whole, Vanguard is a war we’ve seen before.

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VERDICT

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REVIEW

Riders Republic

ABOVE: One of us

should go home and change or it’ll be embarrassing. RIGHT: “Am I doing it right?”—Phil’s last words on the slopes. BELOW: Suddenly, riding without a helmet feels like a poor choice.

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REVIEW

Riders Republic

“

I

PARTY LINES

RIDERS REPUBLIC falls just short of shred heaven By Phil Iwaniuk

t might not sound like it, but trust me—it’s hip…” One of the many disembodied voices guiding me through this bold new society of NEED TO KNOW extreme sports types in the mountains is telling me I can win a IS IT? pizza delivery bike in the next event. She’s also, knowingly or not, An WHAT extreme sports critiquing herself. Everybody here talks like they’re hooked up to open-world—think a Red Bull IV drip and graduated English class taught by Life is Strange’s Steep 2 with bikes Chloe. It’s a bit much. EXPECT TO PAY $60 A bit much can also be a good thing, sponsors who offer daily challenges DEVELOPER which, when completed, shower you understand. Ubisoft Annecy’s Ubisoft spiritual sequel to Steep is a decidedly even more stuff all over the ﬂoor. PUBLISHER It’s easy to just let yourself get maximalist game, albeit an untamed In-house caught in the jetstream of this and jabbering one. Joining the REVIEWED ON frenzied progression snowsports and RTX 1080 TI, and whizz along in it, i7 9700K, wingsuits from its 16GB RAM Keep nodding enjoying Riders ancestor are biking MULTIPLAYER on its own disciplines and along with the Republic Yes terms. Do a race, listen powered vehicles, all X-Games bros to someone describe ready to be swapped LINK and winning how rad that thing you game/riders-republic ubisoft.com/en-gb/ between in real-time did was, watch a brief with a button press and stars cutscene of a thumbstick ﬂick. snowboard being A patchwork quilt of real-world national parks forms the unlocked, do another race. That’s my advice. Don’t think too sumptuous world map, red rock much, just keep nodding along with giving way to budding tundra succumbing to powdery white peaks. the X-Games bros and winning stars. Because like many a 20th century Event markers pop up like energy drink-branded pestilence, waiting for communist republic, this one is built the park ranger protagonist to clean on pretty shaky ground. It starts with the physical models them all up using their aptitude for shredding, catching sick bumps, and underpinning the many disciplines on offer. It’s clear from the ﬁrst other such hijinks. over-caffeinated whooping noise that Marquee events, unlocked by Ubisoft Annecy is going for simplicity, reaching milestones in a given but in whittling each handling model discipline, are particular highlights down to such basic terms, it’s taking and throw in wildly different away much of what ought to be geographical propositions. And tucked away behind the events are super-technical pro line runs that require Super Meat Boy-like feats of daring and dexterity. Once in a while, a different disembodied voice ushers us to mass Three natural havens to explore in Zen Mode events, where up to 64 players embark on absurd jaunts by bike, skis, snowboards, and rocket wingsuits. There’s a lot more to digest in this melange of Forza Horizon, The Crew ZION GRAND TETON YOSEMITE 2, and Destiny than Steep offered. WHITE THRONE GRAND TETON HALF DOME With each completed event, Riders Look how utterly MOUNTAINS MOUNTAIN Millions of years, laid flipping high we are! You’ll fall for days off Republic showers new stuff Shred away the bare as rock. Shred this. Best have some everywhere. Gear, character levels, but show reverence. vertigo blues. shreddie brek first. events, bucks to spend on outﬁts,

A QUIET PLACE

interesting about sending a MTB down a mountain. It was hours before I accepted that there really is no wheelie function, or an endo.

REPUBLIC INQUIRY

Stunt controls fare much better under long-term exploration, particularly with manual landing selected. No, it’s the races where you have time to want more, even as the excitable voices distract you from it. Ubisoft Annecy’s either lampooning the cringey exuberance of extreme sports culture, or emulating it sincerely. Both music and dialogue miss the mark, wherever the intended mark is, and very often Riders Republic sounds like game developers approximating cool, in the same way those medieval artists who’d never seen lions had a stab at them on a coat of arms. Between us though, I’d take a soundtrack comprised entirely of tiresome Coolio covers in exchange for some mechanical tweaks like a no-contact online race option, rider weight controls that allow ﬁne control and wheelies, and a button actually rewinds the AI too, not just me. There are tonal irritations. There’s a drunken imprecision to control at times. But I’m not ready to pack up, shave off my soul patch, and join the ranks of the normies. If Riders Republic isn’t delivering on its premise, why do I care so much about winning mass events? And why do I get excited about a new pair of skis with a higher number? It might not be the best extreme sports game, but it’s compelling. A jamboree of adrenaline and player progression with some suspect tunes. To put it another way: It might not sound like it, but trust me—it’s hip. Extreme sports are made accessible in Riders Republic to the point of basic. It’s got a tin ear, but a big heart.

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VERDICT

55

REVIEW

Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One

The number one hobby in Cordona is murder. RIGHT: Another classic Sherlock Holmes disguise. BELOW RIGHT: It’s adorable when Sherlock tries to act tough.

A dynamic duo where nobody has to be Robin.

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Old Sherlock plays the violin, but Hot Sherlock plays the salacious trumpet.

REVIEW

Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One

SUPER SLEUTH

SHERLOCK HOLMES: CHAPTER ONE is an ambitious sandbox with a younger detective

F

By Fraser Brown

rogware’s latest Sherlock game feels like the ultimate NEED TO KNOW expression of the developer’s ambition for its venerable sleuthing series—but also its strangest entry yet. It is nearly IS IT? everything you could want from a game about the consulting An openWHAT world detective detective, but also a few things that you could do without. It mystery with a young veers between greatness and absurdity, but if you’ve got an itch to solve Sherlock some Victorian mysteries, there isn’t a better salve. EXPECT TO PAY $45 Don’t let the title fool you—this is not and not in full control of his abilities. DEVELOPER the ﬁrst in a series of episodic games, He’s Batman with fewer muscles. Frogwares And like the Dark Knight, he’s but rather an origin story with a PUBLISHER now joined the ranks of open world younger, hotter, weirder Sherlock. In-house protagonists. Cordona is very far Instead of being stuck in gloomy REVIEWED ON from Arkham’s London, Sherlock’s GTX 1080 Ti, Intel Gotham, however. taken a trip to the i7-8086K, 16GB RAM Some great Instead, it’s evocative sunny Mediterranean MULTIPLAYER LA Noire and Maﬁa, island of Cordona, self-contained ofwhere No the cities are where he lived as a mysteries elaborate stages. For child, to visit his LINK that are fun the most part, the sherlockholmes.one mother’s grave. island just lets you get Unshackled from so to solve on with the good stuff: many of the Solving cases. conventions of a Outside of the main story’s ﬁve Holmes mystery, Chapter One takes mysteries, there are more than 30 bold, surprising, and silly turns. side cases, ranging from simple things Sherlock’s constant companion, like ‘which drunk idiot stabbed that Jon, is a sort of proto-Watson, and really exempliﬁes how Chapter One adapts Doyle’s ancient character. Like Watson, Jon is a sounding board and conﬁdant for Sherlock. But unlike the good doctor, he’s a bit of a rogue, with How the consulting detective solves crimes a playful, cheeky streak, and a more fraternal relationship with Sherlock. He’s also entirely imaginary. Jon’s also another mystery to solve. He’s been with Sherlock since childhood, a period of his life that’s REENACTMENTS mostly a blank. Lost memories can be CASEBOOK contains all the clues, You’ll need to explore crime conjured up, however, ﬁlling the gaps This testimony, and observations scenes for clues, after which you in Sherlock’s past with sketches you’ve gathered, and helpfully construct a mental recreation of superimposed onto the present. And directs you towards the next step the events. Watch out for in the investigation. multiple red herrings though. while you’re unraveling this story, at the heart of which lies the mystery of his mother’s death, you’re always a detective. The tools you use to solve crimes are the same ones you use to illuminate the past. It dawned on me, somewhere MIND PAL ACE ACCUSATIONS between having visions, bantering you’ll try to find When you’ve settled on a with my sidekick, and putting crooks Here connections between clues so deduction, you can accuse one of you can form deductions, of your suspects. This is where you behind bars, that Chapter One is a which you’ll once again be given get to bask in glory or find out superhero origin story speciﬁcally; multiple interpretations. you got it terribly, terribly wrong. one where he’s still unsure of himself

TRICKS OF THE TRADE

other drunk idiot?’ to chasing down an elephant who may have killed an important lead. The best cases, of course, are the bamboozlers that send you all over the city to research legal documents, interview suspects, solve riddles, and do a spot of chemical analysis, but there are some great self-contained mysteries that are just as fun to solve.

VIOLENT TENDENCIES

Nearly everything in the open world ﬁts, but there’s a glaring exception: Fights. Inexplicably, you can burst into bandit lairs and kill (or subdue) everyone with your gun and environmental hazards. These are all repetitive, wave-based ﬁghts that lack any of the qualities that make decent action sequences, and they simply don’t ﬁt in at all. The lairs are optional, but ﬁghts crop up in cases from time to time, ruining the pace. Thankfully, Sherlock still favors words over ﬁghts, running rings around everyone with his uncanny observations and revelations. His patter beneﬁts from the strongest writing in the series, and he’s even allowed to be occasionally funny. There are some stumbles, though, like the poor handling of a character’s trans identity, or the solution to ﬁnding a hiding African refugee being ‘ask any random Black person’. For a game with so much smarts, it can be very dumb. Chapter One is imperfect and sometimes awkward, but I still found myself dangling on its hook, hungry for more crimes, which it’s more than happy to offer. For all its welcome oddities, it still manages to stay focused on the important stuff. You’re here to sleuth, and that’s exactly what you’ll get to do for 40 hours. Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is full of riveting mysteries, but stuck with some truly awful and jarring combat.

80

VERDICT

57

REVIEW

Battleﬁeld 2042

I

BIGGER FIELD

BATTLEFIELD 2042 refocuses the series on its founding principle: Being huge By Tyler Wilde

wasn’t sure whether or not Battleﬁeld 2042’s randomly-appearing tornadoes could pick up vehicles until my squad’s ATV was inhaled NEED TO KNOW by one. As we tumbled skyward, I had to make a choice: Ride it out WHAT IS IT? in the gunner’s seat or eject? I bailed. Our driver remained at the A large-scale wheel, trusting that ‘all-terrain’ included the sky. Two seconds later multiplayer shooter the vehicle fell into a ﬁeld like a bomb, and incinerated him. focused on vehicle combat and point capture Even after two decades of sanding improvement to the Battleﬁeld and streamlining, Battleﬁeld can still experience, but if it’s wrong to make EXPECT TO PAY $60 surprise. The modern FPS scene is a game bigger and more technically now stacked with big maps and complicated without designing for all DEVELOPER whimsical vehicle physics, but the possible consequences, then I DICE Battleﬁeld remains distinct from the don’t want to be right. PUBLISHER milsims and battle The commitment to EA royale games that have scale does come with REVIEWED ON What was a regressions, such as encircled it. With Intel Core i5-9600K, Battleﬁeld 2042, DICE 64-player game cruder, less16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 2070 Super stands its ground as the for 20 years is destructible buildings, and large tracts of mud, king of military MULTIPLAYER now a 128- grass, and sand shenanigans more Yes convincingly than it did player game between landmarks. LINK with Battleﬁeld V, The new vehicle call-in bit.ly/2ZjwUEC ditching the system makes it hard to singleplayer campaign to focus on the become truly stranded—on a two pillars of the series: Objectivecooldown, you can ask what I based multiplayer and scale. presume is an orbital parking garage to drop a vehicle for you—but sometimes I like going for a walk, ROOM TO STRETCH anyway. Squad and vehicle spawning What was a 64-player game for 20 years is now a 128-player game, with took a lot of the cardio out of the proportionally bigger maps, putting Battleﬁeld series, and the downtime gives me a chance to take in the scale Battleﬁeld back in the category of of the battle around me and feel some games that push technical of the awe I felt when I ﬁrst played boundaries. The increased acreage Battleﬁeld 1942. isn’t an across-the-board

ZONES VS BAYOUS VS EASTERN EUROPE

How Hazard Zone’s premise compares to other modes HAZARD ZONE

Collect cookbook-sized data drives from US and Russian spy satellites as they fall out of low orbit. Verdict: 3/10 “The Cold War if everyone were stupider”

58

HUNT: SHOWDOWN

Track supernatural monsters across big, creepy bayous, and banish them back to Hell… if you’re lucky. Verdict: 9/10 “There’s a character named John Hunter”

ESCAPE FROM TARKOV

Private military companies and gangs of scavengers clash in a blockaded Eastern European city. Verdict: 7/10 “I’ve been reading the wiki for three hours”

There is some trend-chasing in Battleﬁeld 2042, but it’s handled better than it was last time, when the Firestorm battle royale mode was airdropped into Battleﬁeld V after launch. From the start, Battleﬁeld 2042 includes Hazard Zone, a more coherent mode for four-player squads. It’s similar to Hunt: Showdown in that multiple teams enter a map, compete to grab a thematic MacGufﬁn, and then try to get out alive, but the stakes are lower and there’s 100% less bayou. It’s plain by comparison, but once the tornado squad and I got the hang of seeking out respawn and vehicle call-ins and keeping each other alive with our specialist abilities—another of Battleﬁeld 2042’s modernizations— we started to get into fun protracted battles with other squads, reviving and re-reviving each other as they did the same.

BACK TO BASICS

To the left of Hazard Zone on the main menu, All-Out Warfare encompasses Battleﬁeld’s standard big-team warfare: The classic Conquest point capture mode and Breakthrough, the simple but fun attack-and-defend mode. And on the right side of the menu is Portal, a tool for creating and hosting custom game modes. It’s no replacement for modding and custom dedicated servers, but those ships have sailed for big multiplayer games. Even Left 4 Dead successor Back 4 Blood is without mod support. As a compromise, Portal is a powerful middle ground that can even be used to whip up co-op experiences with friends and play Battleﬁeld 1942 Conquest on Battle of the Bulge. I hope every big live service shooter steals it and uses it. There’s a lot to experience in Battleﬁeld 2042, but it feels like Swedish minimalism has won a victory here. Outside of the granular accessibility and graphics settings (it runs decently for a Battleﬁeld game

REVIEW

Battleﬁeld 2042 The bigger maps mean more room to maneuver.

My Portal mode makes you a human missile.

LEFT: Hazard Zone’s crashed satellites have a light Fallout vibe. BELOW: This is just a corner of the map.

59

REVIEW

Battleﬁeld 2042 Just a regular day in the life of a No-Pat.

RIGHT: The old Battlefield Bad Company 2 maps now feel tiny by comparison. FAR RIGHT: I got a tank stuck in Portal’s version of Battle of the Bulge.

I missed waiting around for jets to spawn in Battlefield 3.

60

REVIEW

Battleﬁeld 2042 on my RTX 2070 Super), the menus Sundance’s wingsuit is a blast. They can leap out of helicopters or off of feel sparse. There are fewer unlockable guns than usual, simpler skyscrapers, and maneuver in the air like a manta ray. It’s not as satisfying progression systems, and no battle as skiing in the Tribes games, which pass. The only extra EA is selling is essentially using a bug to accelerate right now is a year-long pass that promises four new specialists who’ll forever, but if you master the physics bring exclusive gadgets and perks to of it, you can keep them airborne for a long time. Mackay’s grappling hook the battle. The menu and microtransaction hygiene is largely a is useful in fewer situations, but likewise increases the good thing, although fun of moving there are some I can easily intrinsic around skilfully. I once annoying and a smoke disappointing spend an entire chucked grenade over a omissions at launch. match duking it crate, zipped There’s no stats page, out in a single shipping onto the top of it, and for instance, and you then leapt into my can’t tell if a teammate sector smoke plume to is coming to revive you emerge like a stage when you’re down. magician, surprising a squad that could’ve sworn I’d been much further GET TO THE POINTS away just a few seconds ago. One thing hasn’t changed: In Conquest, two 64-player teams compete to capture and hold control BLASTS FROM THE PAST points the same way they have for 20 Some of my complaints about years, by standing near a ﬂag until it Battleﬁeld 2042 can be addressed in changes color. However, points can Portal. It’s a Battleﬁeld potpourri that now appear in clusters of two or features ofﬁcial recreations of three, forming sectors that give some Battleﬁeld 1942 Conquest, Battleﬁeld: structure to the giant maps. I can Bad Company 2 Rush, and Battleﬁeld easily spend an entire match duking 3 Conquest, with two remade maps it out in a single sector. Entirely per game and most of their guns, separate war stories were playing out vehicles, and gadgets, as well as over at the rocket launch pad while I free-for-all and team deathmatch was repeatedly dying on a grassy hill, modes, plus servers running custom, for all I knew. It’s easy to lose track of player-made modes that mix and the larger battle as I focus on one or match maps, weaponry, and rules. two points, but that sense of being a You can turn off squad and vehicle small variable in a big, complex ﬁght is part of what makes it enchanting. Battleﬁeld 2042 is best played in a four-person squad in a Discord voice channel (there’s no built-in VOIP at How to play Battlefield like a series veteran launch), which I wouldn’t have said about Battleﬁeld V. We always 16% 5% 14% seemed to end up doing different SHOOT AT YELL AT PILOTS LIE ON HILLS things in that game, but 2042’s new What were they thinking when Have a lie down NOTHING they didn’t dodge all those with a big rifle, a You got into the specialist gadgets encourage lock-on missiles? 10x scope, and seat of a teamwork by making us more useful gunner no shame. vehicle, so you to each other. So far, I like to bless may as well use the gun. my crew with intel from a spotting drone and transparent fortiﬁcations to hide behind. The decoupling of class from loadout also makes it easier to coordinate, because no one has to give up their favorite gun to heal, or spot, or carry rockets. The ammo capacity tuning feels just right, too, such that putting an ammo 64% PINE FOR crate in one of my loadouts is useful 1% OLD DAYS CAPTURE A enough to not feel like a downgrade If only that one POINT next to toys like rocket launchers feature from Game’s almost Battlefield 2142 were and AA missiles. over, better be in this game. Then it’d There are great characters and seen near a flag! be good! gadgets for solo players, too.

OLD-SCHOOL TACTICS

spawning, for example, or design an asymmetrical mode in which a team of Battleﬁeld 2042 soldiers ﬁght Battleﬁeld 1942 soldiers, or one team is full of aggressive, knife-wielding bots that swarm toward the human players like zombies. I’m frustrated by Portal restrictions that feel unnecessary, or like they exist to stop me from making a mode that’s broken or unfun (I’ll decide what the boundaries of FPS design are, thank you very much). For example, the visual logic editor, which opens many more possibilities than the built-in toggles and sliders, can only be used to modify free-for-all and team deathmatch modes, which don’t contain any vehicles. You can’t set up a mode that spawns ten players into jets for a free-for-all dogﬁght. With the logic editor, I did manage to create crude hit boxes so that players can kill each other by colliding in the air, and then set it up so that they teleport back into the sky if they get too low. If they opt to use a sniper riﬂe from rooftops instead of being human missiles, they get on-screen messages declaring that they’ve violated the way of Bushido. So, Portal is powerful. I hope DICE loosens up some of the restrictions. If I can make a mode that crashes my PC, I’ll consider that a feature, not a bug. Taken together, All-Out Warfare, Hazard Zone, and Portal are a substantial videogame warfare toybox, enough to get me to reluctantly accept a newfangled scoreboard that focuses on squads more than individuals. The specialist abilities and Portal custom modes introduce new ways to play Battleﬁeld, while some of the old ways don’t feel the same, for better and worse. It’s a modern Battleﬁeld I want to get my Forza Horizon and Rainbow Six Siege-playing friends into. That might not happen until EA makes Battleﬁeld 2042 available on Xbox Game Pass, if it ever does, but that’s ﬁne. I’m happy to spend months trying to break the game with Portal’s logic editor so that I have a library of nearly unplayable mutant FPS modes ready to go. Battlefield 2042 makes gusty changes to a series that needed them, and Portal fills it with possibilities for creativity.

80

VERDICT

61

REVIEW

Gloomhaven

SWORD AND BOARD

GLOOMHAVEN brilliantly translates the beloved board game to your PC screen

D

By Jon Bolding

ungeon-crawling, campaign-adventuring Gloomhaven is NEED TO KNOW surely the most widely-praised hobby board game of the past decade. The digital edition replicates the sprawling WHAT IS IT? Gloomhaven campaign in its entirety, adds an entirely new A turn-based second mode of play called Guildmaster, and networks dungeon crawler based them both with online multiplayer: An adaptation of the tabletop on a wildly successful board game experience that leaves nothing behind. Nonetheless, occasional poor performance, the lack of key features like undo, and a healthy sprinkling EXPECT TO PAY of bugs hold Gloomhaven back. $35 DEVELOPER Gloomhaven is at its heart a dungeon turns: a rush forward to roast some Flaming Fowl crawler, where framing stories read enemies, or a stunning shot to a PUBLISHER by a narrator sit alongside missions tough enemy and a defensive buff to that take adventurers through a series nearby allies. As you use cards they’re Asmodee Digital REVIEWED ON discarded or burned. of rooms and monsters AMD FX-8350, Nvidia Burned cards leave to accomplish fairly GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, A single play, while most simple objectives. 32GB RAM Everything in between misplayed turn discarded cards MULTIPLAYER quests is a choose-your- can set you on eventually return to Yes your hand. Run out of own-adventure, where LINK the path cards or health and decisions are made and bit.ly/3r1aPGo be taken out of give static bonuses or to doom you’ll the ﬁght for the rest of penalties to either the the mission. campaign as a whole or the next adventure. Both modes can be played by yourself controlling one GLOOM RAIDERS to four adventurers, or with up to These fairly simple rules make ﬁghts three others controlling one each. into a slew of tough tactical choices Dungeons are card-driven tactical and tight time limits in any given battles, some of the best you can ﬁnd, ﬁght. Missions are hard, and even the that use a ﬂexible system where you base easy difﬁculty can and will beat choose two cards each turn, then tactics veterans into a pulp. A single execute the action from the top of misplayed turn can set you on the one card and the bottom of the other. path to doom in some scenarios, as a Monsters play out simply, no tight timeline combines with a complex AI here, but each round is planned in advance: You don’t know what the monsters are going to do until you’ve locked in your options. Each card also has a numerical value, its initiative, which is when you act in The world of tabletop Gloomhaven the round. Weirdly, the AI often takes quite a while to determine its action after you move—odd, given that it’s entirely deterministic behavior. So for a given round, your Tinkerer might pick their Stun Shot JAWS OF THE LION FROSTHAVEN for initiative 20, which is a long-range GLOOMHAVEN The original smash A standalone game A hotly-anticipated stun attack on top and a four space hit board game. designed as a more sequel that’s still in move on the bottom, and their Kickstarted in 2015, accessible path into the works following it was an enormous another Kickstarter Gloomhaven. It’s Flamethrower, an area of effect burn success and enjoyed smaller and cheaper campaign. It moves weapon on top and a shield aura on almost universal with an easier ramp the action to an icy the bottom. That combo of two cards critical acclaim. wasteland. into the rules. can come out to two very different

INSIDE THE BOX

62

limited number of cards to burn before you’re out of the ﬁght entirely. It’s some of the best tactical play in gaming, and some of the most delightfully difﬁcult choices you’ll ever make in a dungeon crawler. Bafﬂingly, Gloomhaven doesn’t have an undo button. What would be simple ﬁxes in the tabletop game (a wrong move, a declared ability, using an item) are impossible to take back. Misunderstanding the rules can be extremely frustrating, and with no comprehensive rule book in the menus, I had to consult the tabletop rule book at times. Nonetheless, the campaign is a blast with friends, and far faster than a boxed game. Four hours at the table will get you a single dungeon, with its encounters before and after, played. Four hours in the digital campaign will let quick players plough through as many as three dungeons. If you feast on this kind of tactical play like I do, then Gloomhaven’s ruggedly narrated adventures are exactly what you want from the genre. They’re the simplest framework to play out a series of dungeon brawls, just engaging enough a framework to keep you wanting more night after night. You chart a fantasy epic, improving and building up the town of Gloomhaven as your adventurers level up, retire, and get replaced by fresh young blood. The new Guildmaster mode is just icing on the cake, as is the built-in level designer and modding support. The campaign is great co-operatively, while Guildmaster provides an experience made with solo play in mind. It’s the thing all good tabletop adaptations should have: a reason why I’d play this rather than sit around a table. One of the best dungeon crawlers ever made is now on your PC and is brilliant, especially if you don’t own a big table.

87

VERDICT

REVIEW

Gloomhaven

ABOVE: Every battle is

its own tactical puzzle to figure out. FAR LEFT: It’s a faithful adaptation, but with some clever additions and changes.

Expect to spend a lot of time in underground rooms.

63

REVIEW

Age of Empires IV

ACT YOUR AGE

The unique civilizations are the stars, showing that less is more in AGE OF EMPIRES IV

W

By Robert Zak

ith Age of Empires II still held up as a paragon of strategy games, you can see why new series developer NEED TO KNOW Relic has decided to model Age of Empires IV on the WHAT IS IT? second entry. The latest iteration strips away the new entry in the complexities of AoE III, while adding welcome touches Aiconic historical of its own. Chief among these are asymmetrical factions, which will elicit real-time strategy series screams of bloody imbalance, but count as the game’s greatest success. EXPECT TO PAY On the other hand, reverence to the across three distinct eras each. $60 Interposed throughout each past can be restricting, and I can’t DEVELOPER help but feel that Age of Empires IV campaign are crisp documentary-like Relic Entertainment videos showing footage of signiﬁcant could have been something more. PUBLISHER castles, towns, landscapes, and While I respect Relic’s decision to Xbox Game Studios battleﬁelds as they are play things fairly safe, REVIEWED ON today, superimposing that should result in Ryzen 7 5800H, Nvidia It’s Relic’s hundreds of wireframe GeForce making what’s already 3070 (mobile), over them. there really shine; 16GB RAM bravest soldiers The documentary polish those mosque MULTIPLAYER evolution of permeates into minarets and Yes that precious style the campaigns Moscavian onion LINK themselves, with most domes, pump up those AoE formula ageofempires.com of the stories told population limits, let through a narrator bodies ﬂy with rather than in-game characters. It abandon upon impact from keeps you at a distance from Genghis, cannonballs and elephant heads. Ivan the Terrible, and other movers, Instead, there’s a staid shakers of medieval history, which is utilitarianism throughout much of Age of Empires IV—everything in it disappointing given Relic’s history of great RTS storytelling. works much as it ever did, but Regardless, the campaign throws without the ﬂair that could have up plenty of great set-pieces; there’s made it a grand celebration of that the Battle of Xiangyang to establish timeless AoE formula. Kublai Khan as Emperor of China, The campaigns follow the Normans, Mongols, Rus, and English Dmitry Donskoy’s power-shifting

THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN

The DLC packs people want most, according to a fan poll MESOAMERICA

It’s got to be the Aztecs. Before the Spanish came and cocked everything up, there was a rich history of conquest and politics between the Aztec city-states, leading to the Aztec Triple Alliance.

64

SOUTH EUROPE

A vast region with plenty of intriguing powers like Castillan, Venice and Genoa, though Byzantium is probably a favorite, with its influence and gloriously turbulent history during the medieval era.

NORTH EUROPE

Everyone loves the Vikings, but the Viking era ended by the period covered in AoE IV, and the 12th-14th centuries were a time of Christianization, unity, and relative peace in the land.

EASTERN EUROPE

Given that the Rus already feature, the next logical jump would be Poland, which began life as an nation in the tenth century. Sadly, this era predates the famous cavalry.

defeat of the Mongols at Kulikovo, and over in the west the Battle of Bremule to establish England as a regional power. These missions aren’t easy either—on standard difﬁculty I found I had to quickly wrap my ﬁngers around the new keyboard shortcuts to keep up. But these sleek campaigns are just a foreword to the stories you’ll be crafting on the Skirmish maps with the eight eclectic civs on offer. It’s not a huge number, but the visual and strategic variety between these factions is one of the most signiﬁcant evolutions in the series. The Mongols are the biggest wildcard, capable of packing entire towns up into carts and relocating to anywhere on the map. For a simpler player like me, the Delhi Sultanate, with its war elephants and research system based around scholars, was a hoot, while the Rus accrue gold through hunting cabins and bounties. Your path through the ages is further reﬁned each time you advance an age, when you get to pick one of two civ-speciﬁc landmarks that will advance your empire in different directions.

WISE UP

A couple of the civs even have their own twists on age advancement. The Abbasids add wings onto their House of Wisdom instead of erecting new landmarks, while the Chinese can build two landmarks per age and found dynasties which grant bonuses. You can even ‘build tall’, with the Holy Roman Empire gaining bonuses based on buildings you place near their central structures. While the core mechanics and loops will be familiar, the carefully designed civs and age-advancement choices offer an intricate new web of strategies and approaches to each match. It’s Relic’s bravest evolution of that precious AoE formula, and it really diversiﬁes the game. Upon starting a new game, returning players will immediately

REVIEW

Age of Empires IV

Campaign video footage superimposes wireframe soldiers onto modern scenery. LEFT: Good luck

replicating some of the large-scale campaign battles in Skirmish mode. FAR LEFT: A Holy Roman battalion made up of Men-at-Arms and Landsknecht made quick work of the Chinese.

Piling in on the French city of Bayeux as Henry I in the Norman campaign.

65

REVIEW

Age of Empires IV

ABOVE: The plain

terrain leaves a bit to be desired graphically. RIGHT: Buildings could be better textured, but are completely distinct between factions. FAR RIGHT: The crisp campaign videos do a good job of getting you up close to history. BELOW: The ability to position units on walls offers some sneaky forward-settling opportunities.

66

REVIEW

Age of Empires IV ‘cavalry collisions done good’. Units in vague proximity to war elephants seem to drop dead (elephlatulence?), and there’s no dynamism when castle walls fall out from under units or bombards blow troops away. Similarly, leaving population caps at the traditional 200 means that battles never really reach the grand scale the trailers tease you with (unless orchestrated by the campaign). But perhaps what I think of as anachronism others will think of as purism; a game zealously keeping to an excellent formula, right down to its strangely civil combat, and non-existent horse-turning animations that look a bit like a carousel pony rotating on its axis. The fact remains that the strong AoE loop, ever so slightly reﬁned, is as compelling as ever, spruced up by a colorful roster of truly distinct civs. Age of Empires IV has strong foundations to really grow into something, but it comes at a time when Age of Empires II: Deﬁnitive Edition is adding long-desired co-op campaigns and an ever-expanding library of historical battles. Age of Empires IV is missing both those things, and looks a little content-thin for a $60 game (conversely, it’s an absolutely glorious Day One release on Xbox Game Pass).

mixes in beautifully from the menu settle into the rhythm of resourcemusic and evolves throughout the gathering, villager spamming, ages. They’re little things that scouting, and forward-settling. increase the grandness of your Victory conditions have been smoothed out to keep matches pacey, journey through the ages, ironically in a game that actually seems to be a with military conquest now only requiring you to destroy an enemy’s little bit faster than its predecessors. And yet, for every thoughtful landmarks, the number of which tweak and feature, there’s an equal increases with each age. For a and opposite misstep holding Age of religious victory, you can no longer Empires IV back from take relics back to the because god safety of your base, but Battles never greatness, forbid it outshines the instead have to hold second entry. onto all the Sacred really reach the immortal Sites on a map for ten grand scale the Building and ground are on the minutes. Given their trailers tease textures washed-out side (and central locations on I won’t accept maps, this should you with nope, explanations that this is encourage more feisty just part of the game’s strategies than the more ‘painterly’ art style). Having relic-hoarding of AoEs past. But gone back to Age of Empires III: defensive-minded turtles needn’t worry: The Wonder victory—where Deﬁnitive Edition for comparison, I found that not only are textures you build a late-game wonder and cleaner there, but the game is more hold it for ten minutes—still exists. Sieges feel much better thanks to secure about showing them off by the ability of infantry units to create letting you zoom in further. Speaking of zoom, the battering rams and siege towers. It does wonders for the pacing that you combination of high camera angle no longer have to guide your siege and limited zoom-out makes for quite equipment across an entire map. a narrow ﬁeld of view. I’d love to have seen some kind of free camera Positioning soldiers on walls defensively, on the other hand, offers functionality that lets you admire your town planning and get into the increased sightlines, and I shamelessly exploited this against the nitty-gritty of battles, or at least the AI by building stone walls right up in option for an isometric perspective. And battles still feel too polite, as their business, picking off key units and cavalry charge each other economic buildings with wallonly to stop just short of collision and mounted archers. Finally, the ability to quickly rotate start jabbing at each other with their and position unit groups on an axis is pokey-sticks—it’s kind of alarming that I can refer back to Battle for great for battle micromanagement, letting you set up defensive positions Middle-Earth as an example of or proper army formations more elegantly than before. These aren’t huge changes, but they all help the combat feel that bit cleaner.

GROW UP

Despite a single 30-minute game of Age of Empires ostensibly spanning decades of technological progress, the series has never really evoked the sense of time passing; for all I knew from playing the original AoE, Rome really was built in a day. Age of Empires IV addresses that dissonance with a few discerning touches. When you plonk down buildings, for instance, you see sped-up wireframe outlines of builders popping up at different points around the construction site—like old stop-motion footage of a skyscraper being erected. Each civ has its own soundtrack too, which

THE HOTTEST KEYS

ONE FOOT IN THE PAST

These five shortcuts will serve you well

SELECT IDLE VILLAGERS

SELECT IDLE MILITARY

CYCLE TOWN CENTERS (H)

GROUP UNITS

FAST-BUILD

Jumping straight to town centers lets you easily navigate to nearby buildings.

(Ctrl+V) Never let your villagers rest with this handy shortcut.

(Ctrl+1-9) Select a group of units by dragging your mouse or double-clicking.

(Ctrl+C) Military units get scattered, so gather them up.

(Q-R, A-F, Z-V) To activate these, you’ll need to press two hotkeys in a row (tricky, we know).

Relic told us two months ago that they weren’t looking to steal AoE II’s player base or place at the top of the series hierarchy, but rather give players an interesting new alternative. In this sense I guess they’ve succeeded, but it feels like with a bit more attention to detail (rather than, say, hours of globetrotting documentary footage), they could have heralded a new AoE era rather than invoking a past one. But in a series where a single game can take years, even decades, to evolve into its ﬁnal form, the only thing really standing in the way of Age of Empires IV’s growth is the ongoing success of its predecessors. It offers enough new ideas amidst the sturdy old foundations to rank among them, though it’s not yet ready to rule. A worthy new entry in the series that’s equal parts progressive and dated. It could’ve been far better if it was bolder.

77

VERDICT

67

REVIEW

Circuit Superstars

I

THE BENDS

Bad news, sim racing rigs—CIRCUIT SUPERSTARS has arrived By Phil Iwaniuk

n the time it takes to read this sentence, 17.3 game developers NEED TO KNOW will have tried and failed to do what Circuit Superstars does: a mix of arcade and sim racing that feels enriched, not WHAT IS IT? compromised, by both. Admittedly, that was quite a long An isometric racer with sentence. Still, the point stands. This may look like an genuine sim chops unassuming title, and certainly it launched to little fanfare from EXPECT TO PAY publisher Square Enix, but it deserves the attention of any motorhead. $20 DEVELOPER circuits—with 18 total layout If you’re a veteran of many a Original Fire Games variations—lies a long-term cross-legged Micro Machines campaign from the 16-bit days or, to challenge. Mastering the lines well PUBLISHER Square Enix Collective enough to perform respectably be honest, if you’ve simply seen a screenshot and clocked the isometric online, and ﬁne-tuning that muscle REVIEWED ON i7 9700K, RTX 1080 TI, memory in search of camera, you’ve got a 16GB RAM time trial leaderboard handle on how it feels The game itself perfection. to drive. What isn’t MULTIPLAYER Yes evident until your ﬁrst is pretty PARTY FOUL race is the sheer LINK laissez-faire amount of subtlety being an indie bit.ly/305NLv3 about online This baked into those studio’s debut, you can adorable little vehicles. racing conduct forgive its pretty light Going fast here is about online proposition. picking out and Still, it’s a shame that committing to perfect racing lines, even with an online lobby feature keeping all inputs smooth, and that lets you buddy up as a party of holding onto momentum like it’s a four, you still have to race in public ﬁstful of James May’s Marks & lobbies with up to eight strangers, Spencer Autograph blazer after he and can’t create your own event types wanders a bit too close during a from scratch. The community’s Grand Tour ﬁlming. Each day I’ve gone back to it, I’ve found some new way to unlock more speed. A micro-revelation that makes me want to go through every racing Circuit Superstars’ finest mini motors series—12, since you ask—all over again. It is, I’m really surprised to discover, my favorite racing game for years. Tracks rubber up as the laps go by, revealing thick, tar-like stripes of freshly laid tyre where extra grip and lap time can be found. Conversely, in PANTHER PICCINO A GT car that seems to be Say hello to my little friend. It’s events with tyre deg enabled, you’ll smiling effusively. named Piccino. lose pace alarmingly quickly unless you focus your driving style on modulated throttling and minimal steering under throttle or braking. Another part of your brain is still keeping an eye on fuel. In a game that looks like this, remember. Original Fire ﬁnds a style of track STORM OSPREY design that works really well with For expert handlers of tiny Driven by only the most daring both its camera perspective and cars only. borrowers of the ’60s. vehicle physics, and in its 12

HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIAS

68

voiced its desire for more lobby controls since Early Access in March, so far to no avail. That’s not to say those strangers themselves are a bad lot, you understand. Partly motivated by the unforgiving collision physics and perhaps partly by the air of joviality inherent to a game about tiny vehicles racing through Aardman Animation sets, they’re usually sporting—and about three seconds a lap quicker than you. It’s just that full 12-person servers are prone to lag, which in the worst cases render the race pretty undriveable. The game itself is pretty laissezfaire about online racing conduct. Brief time penalties are incurred when you cut corners, and you can see exactly how much cutting constitutes a penalty by observing the marker poles beyond the apexes. No penalties are handed out for contact, other than the time both parties lose for playing silly buggers and inevitably heading off track. It might not always feel fair, but which online racer does? It is, at least, clear and consistent in its race marshalling. Oddly enough, there’s no mid-series save function in ofﬂine races, so later series which feature ﬁve, ten+ lap races must be taken on in one session. It’s not like asking someone to drive a season of F1 2021 in one sitting, but it’s an inconvenience all the same. But despite those issues, if you ask me a real and formidable talent has emerged in Original Fire Games. Somehow, using some cute little cars, a camera perspective from the arcades of yesteryear, and surprising sim touches, it makes all-out racing sims feel a bit like doing a yearly tax return by comparison. Please make more games, Original Fire. Show the rest of the genre how sim meets arcade is done.

85

VERDICT

REVIEW

Circuit Superstars

ABOVE: I… may have

missed my pit box just by a hair. LEFT: The more you drive, the more customization options unlock. BOTTOM: Listen, third out of four is actually very respectable.

These wholesome podium scenes reward a series victory.

69

REVIEW

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy

MOONAGE DAYDREAM

MARVEL’S GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY is charming, heartwarming, and beset by issues

I

By Luke Winkie

did not expect to root for Guardians of the Galaxy this much. The NEED TO KNOW game was weighed down by so many stagnant vibes during its pre-release cycle. The shadow of Marvel’s Avengers, Square Enix’s WHAT IS IT? 2020 attempt to transmute the total media superiority of the MCU A singleplayer space into a living co-op videogame, loomed particularly large. That adventure full of game’s cast of Hollywood facsimiles left customers ice cold, and while the moral choices core narrative was solid, nobody enjoyed the meaningless currency grind. EXPECT TO PAY $60 Guardians is full of sequences that Guardians comes from the same DEVELOPER publisher, and appears to be made of capture the odder, funnier, lighter Eidos Montreal the same stock, except that this time, side of Marvel’s cosmic expanse. I ran PUBLISHER it’s a singleplayer only campaign, and into a Soviet test-ﬂight golden Square Enix retriever blessed with celestial the player is restricted to the least REVIEWED ON hyper-intelligence, and interesting member of Windows 10, GeForce in a moment of the troupe, Star-Lord. GTX 1070, Intel Core It’s full of weakness, he admitted i7-9700 There is a pervasive CPU, 16GB RAM focus-tested coldness sequences that to me how much he MULTIPLAYER missed his former puny that corrodes so many No capture the dog-intellect, those products that bear the LINK Marvel name in 2021, funnier, lighter endless afternoons bit.ly/30Ml7yJ and I wasn’t optimistic side of Marvel chasing tennis balls in the front lawn. There’s that Eidos Montreal a fourth-wall-breaking would be capable of left-hook, taken right out of the overcoming the taint. Arkham playbook, tied to an amazing That is until I solved a puzzle involving a psychedelic space llama twist that caught me hilariously who I needed to coax into chewing off-guard. Hell, deep into the game’s up some wires on the ship. The beast ﬁnal acts, I watched as the was either enchanted or repelled by permanently chaffed Rocket Raccoon each crewmember’s singing voice— faced his one lingering trauma thanks to the encouragement and support of he’d come closer to Star-Lord’s his teammates. The scene worked as melody, run away from Rocket Raccoon’s, and so on—so we all took a better emotional payoff than anything I’ve seen the character do turns belting out Bobby McFerrin’s on ﬁlm. Guardians of the Galaxy has Don’t Worry Be Happy until our mercurial llama was ﬁnally in place. its heart in the right place… if only

TOP OF THE POPS

The objective, scientific ranking of the Guardians of the Galaxy 1

DRAX

Sure, he doesn’t get jokes, and he’s animated only by grief, but he’ll never let you down.

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2

GROOT

It’s a giant tree with restorative powers and super-strength. Great in a scrap, if bad at conversation.

3

GAMORA

A powerful ally, but perhaps a little quick to threaten our lives over every single perceived slight.

4

ROCKET RACCOON

Look man, I get that you’ve had a hard life, but do you always need to be a dick?

5

STAR-LORD

This game would be ten percent better if Star-Lord was eaten by the Dune worm in the first act.

the game itself weren’t constantly sabotaging those efforts with exhausting technical jank.

DRAX, MURDERER

Like Avengers before it, Guardians of the Galaxy is steeped deep in the character-action tradition. You wrest control of Star-Lord, as I mentioned earlier, and unload an endless stream of photon beams at the toothy beasties, corrupt interplanetary cops, and deranged cult leaders that stand in your way. A bar on the left side of the screen ﬁlls up as the player deals damage, punctuated with Marvel-ﬁed versions of those vintage Devil May Cry descriptors—“Marvelous!” “Uncanny!” The remaining Guardians come into play with your unlockable special power rolodex. I could ask Groot to bind my enemies to the ﬂoor with his roots, or summon up Drax for an earthshattering ground pound. But outside of those instances, your fellow superheroes are relegated to the nameless faces that tend to populate Call of Duty levels, offering the faint image of warﬁghting solidarity, without actually doing anything all that productive. It gets the job done. The combat isn’t where Guardians of the Galaxy shines, but it is both ﬂashy enough and simple enough to sustain some of the more active portions of the plot. Strangely, I found that the villainﬁghting got more engaging the closer I came to the game’s conclusion. In the beginning, armed with only a pair of pea-shooters and a handful of basic attacks, Guardians is a shooting gallery with no pulse. But when you’re popping off multiple cooldowns at once and enjoying a fully optimized arsenal, the design gets close to that overwhelming, splash-panel, polychromatic eye candy that is so often prioritized in the ﬁlms. Laser beams, bombs, swords, and Drax ﬂying in off the top rope like a punishing Marvel vs Capcom assist.

REVIEW

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Communing with Worldmind.

Beasties afoot.

FAR LEFT: Some

familiar faces pop up along the way. LEFT: Rocket might be a malcontent, but he’s our malcontent.

Particle effects abound!

71

REVIEW

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy

ABOVE: Star-Lord

springs into action.

RIGHT: Some of the

visuals are genuinely stunning.

There’s plenty of environmental objects to blow up.

72

REVIEW

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy dramatic arc rather than meeting a certain threshold of resources. You will spend precisely zero minutes staring at talent trees or defensive integers a la Kratos from God of War. When I saw that the characters all had their own suite of grayed-out costumes, I thought for sure they were going to be cinched by some CULT HIT The story here is centered around the sort of depressing meta-grind and an in-game real money usual universeNope, you just threatening Marvel At one point I store. ﬁnd those stashed away gamut. There’s some sort of hyper-religious ran into three in the remote corners the geography as a stellar church different ofreward for taking the corrupting the minds of crashes within time to explore. It the Andromeda Galaxy. to mind the Our motley crew is a single hour brings storytelling here to stop it, even as conventions of the the odds continue to Uncharted and God of War series. pile up against us. The Guardians Eidos doesn’t punch at quite that might be a roving batch of greedy malcontents, but at least they’ve got a weight, but it does enough here to be mentioned alongside their inﬂuences. heart of gold. The broad-strokes didn’t interest me much, but Guardians does a good job integrating SPACE BUGS the uber-high stakes into the That brings me to the core, cloistered anxieties of the heroes debilitating issue with Guardians. themselves. One of the cult’s ﬁrst This game is frequently, ﬂagrantly victims? A girl who may or may not broken. At one point I ran into three be Star-Lord’s illegitimate child. How different crashes within a single hour could a bunch of daffy venerated of play. One was a bizarre soft-lock, nerds ever seduce a chiseled the other two were straight-up meathead like Drax? Maybe by hardcore freezes that required an introducing the memories of his dead alt-F4 to escape. The ﬁrst boss I wife and daughter. All of this is fought stopped moving a few times; it buttressed by Guardians’ moral was stuck in stasis as I blasted away choice infrastructure, which is clearly at its tentacles, scoring oodles of ripped directly from the Telltale cheap damage. The game routinely convention. Along the way, Star-Lord believed Star-Lord had fallen down a has a hand in shaping the team’s phantom pit, and it dutifully plans and posture, which have a light impact on the narrative. In the interstitial periods between missions, you can chop it up with the team on the ship, akin to those elliptical The anatomy of a Guardians soundtrack therapy sessions hosted by Commander Shepard on the 15% 41% Normandy. The writers here are Terrible ’80s adult Synthpop nostalgia. clearly bound by Marvel orthodoxy, contemporary. (See: A Flock of but it was still cool to see some of (See: Rick Seagulls—I Ran Astley—Never (So Far Away) their own ﬂourishes. (Gamora, for Gonna Give instance, is a huge action ﬁgure You Up) collector in this timeline.) I should reiterate again that Guardians of the Galaxy is very much singleplayer and plot-focused. You move from chapter to chapter, disembarking on all sorts of famous 10% 34% Marvel locales, ﬁghting through Original Ironic beautiful corridors that are recordings pump-up jams occasionally broken up by some designed to mine that do actually heavy-duty cutscenes. That makes the exact same ’80s kinda hit in the middle wistfulness evoked by the rest of (See: Europe—The the game a bit of a dinosaur, in a good ofFinala firefight. the tracklist. (See: Star-Lord— Countdown) way. A number of the attack unlocks Space Riders (With No Names)) are tied to certain wrinkles in the

One of the best features is the Huddle Up ability. Every once in a while, you can call the team together, offer words of encouragement, and re-enter the fray with a damage buff cued to an ’80s classic pulled from the game’s trove of licensed material.

HIT FACTORY

teleported me back to some sort of crucible of danger completely haphazardly. I needed to reload checkpoints in order to get certain progression choke-points to trigger. It’s bad, and Square Enix knows it. When I ﬁrst downloaded my review code for Guardians, it came in at an insane 150GB size. A few days later, the company issued a new version that reduced the ﬁle size and promised greater stability. The crashes I described earlier all occurred after that patch. Another patch came after and more will come, but the odds that every physics anomaly and crash will be swept up within days of launch are slim. This makes Guardians of the Galaxy a difﬁcult game to recommend right now. Something clearly went awry during development, because it’s weird for a singleplayer, linear game to have so many bizarre performance issues. This is something we expect in the high entropy of Tamriel, not the series of combat arenas and connective tissue that makes up Guardians. The closest analog I can think of is Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order; another Disney property that shipped with a well-hewn narrative, some neat combat tricks, and a boatload of sundering technical hangups. Unfortunately, I don’t think Guardians of the Galaxy is quite good enough to offset those problems the way Respawn did. But then I think back to a sequence early on, where Star-Lord runs into an old drinking buddy named Lipless at a slimy dive bar in Knowhere. The two of you fumble through a turgid hair-metal anthem that, apparently, the hero was too blacked-out to remember writing. The player chooses each line in the song, and Star-Lord does his best to half-mumble the lyrics to stay on Lipless’ good side. Guardians of the Galaxy wants to be a technicolor, starfaring adventure worthy of the multimedia powerhouse that shares its namesake. It accomplishes that with its story, its voice cast, and its wonderfully cheeky ’80s pastiche. If only the technical side could better keep up with those ambitions. When you’re not forced to reload your checkpoint after a game-breaking bug, Guardians is a surprisingly good time.

70

VERDICT

73

REVIEW

Forza Horizon 5

A

CRUISE CONTROL FORZA HORIZON 5 is more of the same, and that’s OK By Phil Savage

fter being airdropped from a cargo plane in an AMG One, I NEED TO KNOW arrive at the festival site to a fanfare. The organizers are delighted—their ‘superstar’ is ﬁnally here—and to celebrate WHAT IS IT? they offer me a choice of starting car. I leave the site and A ridiculous car head to my ﬁrst race in a Corvette Stingray Coupe. This isn’t playground how racing games are supposed to start. I should be battling for wins in masquerading as an open world racing game some hatchback. Instead, I’m being handed a 500 horsepower supercar. EXPECT TO PAY comfort zone, and making you think $60, free on Game Pass Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t need to do what other racing games would do. It about how to overcome the DEVELOPER restrictions it presents—giving you just needs to be a Forza Horizon Playground Games reasons to think about your garage game. It’s a series with no serious PUBLISHER and what ﬁts your next goal. rival, and as such it feels Xbox Game Studios unchallenged. It’s not REVIEWED ON being forced to MEXICAN WAVE RTX 3080Ti, 32GB RAM, Inevitably reinvent the wheel, and You’ll notice at this Ryzen 7 3700X so it’s content to just point that I’ve not as I play, I MULTIPLAYER hone and reﬁne—to be about anything Yes have a big, talked the best Forza Horizon new to Forza Horizon dumb grin on 5. There’s a reason for bit.ly/3FxV0uI LINK it can be. If you have played Yes, there’s a new my face that. any previous Forza event type—an Horizon games, you ‘expedition’—used to already know what this means. A unlock the outposts that contain map ﬁlled with more icons than a different racing disciplines. You go to Ubisoft open world, each denoting a a new area, complete some objectives race event, a PR stunt, a rumor about and your map ﬁlls up with new road, some vintage car, or a series of street, dirt, or cross country races. challenges organized into a handful Even so, calling this a new feature of stories. As you win races and may be overstating the point. With so complete events, you’re bombarded many event types already, any slight with rewards. You earn accolades— variation struggles to stand out. mini achievements that act as Forza Horizon 5’s career progression system—some of which reward new cars and new phrases to spam in chat. You earn wheelspins that can Forza Horizon 5’s multiplayer explained drop cars, cash, and clothes. The rewards come so thick and OPEN RACING HORIZON TOUR fast, that collecting new cars is more Weirdness rating: Weirdness rating: about broadening your options than Low Still low straight progression. You’ll likely get It’s a race, just with Team up to take on an S2 class car—among the fastest—in real people. Pretty simple, really, an AI team in a series of races. but there’s plenty of variety The better each racer on your your ﬁrst hours. But, thanks to the between the different cars, team places, the more points restrictions present in the seasonal classes and terrain types. you earn. playlist, you’re encouraged to chase different makes and models. PLAYGROUND ELIMINATOR The seasonal playlist is the heart Weirdness rating: GAMES of Forza Horizon 5’s live service. Each Off the charts Weirdness rating: week takes place in a new season and Slightly higher It’s battle royale, but offers a variety of events and with cars. It’s got loot drops that FPS standards like capture the give you better cars, a slowly flag and king of the hill, but with challenges, usually with restrictions cars. In my experience, these are closing ring and eliminations. to class, type, and difﬁculty. As such, Extremely bizarre. it succeeds by forcing you out of your often wildly unbalanced.

AFTERPARTY

74

Really, then, the major new feature of Forza Horizon 5 is, simply, its setting. Mexico is more varied and vibrant than Forza Horizon 4’s UK—with rainforests, towns, deserts, and many, many cacti to bash into. The weather is more interesting too. Throughout, the game’s characters reference Mexican culture and history, although it’s all ﬁltered through the series’ relentless positivity. It’s hard to think of its world as a real place, not because it’s a pick-and-mix truncation of real locations, but because it exists in a universe where bad things don’t happen. Everyone is loving life all of the time—the festival is a constant party, where destruction means skill chains and harsh vibes don’t exist. This is Forza Horizon’s whole deal, though, and while I might roll my eyes at the dialogue, I can’t pretend I don’t get swept up in the atmosphere. Inevitably as I play, I have a big, dumb grin on my face. It’s just that kind of game. Similarly, I can’t really criticize it for not innovating the series—making big, sweeping changes for the sake of it feeling more different. It’s easy to forget given how effortless everything feels, but the sheer detail of its environments and the level of craft evident in each of its over 500 cars is astounding. This is what happens when a series gets to exist without any serious competition. It gets to focus on and perfect the things it’s most interested in. While I’d love to know what Forza Horizon would look like if it had any serious rivals forcing it towards greater innovation, I’ll happily make do with playing the most polished and conﬁdent Forza Horizon game made to date. The series gets a new, lush setting, but otherwise is content to simply fine-tune an already winning formula.

90

VERDICT

REVIEW

Forza Horizon 5

Driving down a big volcano is as much fun as it looks. ABOVE: Live out your

fantasy of crashing some of the world’s most expensive cars. LEFT: Forza Horizon 5 has no chill. BELOW: Street races are dangerous. Everyone here should go to jail.

The setting sure does look the part.

75

REVIEW

Inscryption

T

DIE CARD

INSCRYPTION is a disconcerting, multi-layered card game By Jody Macgregor

his is a card game with a villain. This shadowy ﬁgure, all staring eyes and long ﬁngers, waits at the table for our game NEED TO KNOW to start. I’m trapped in a cabin and have to play, under pain of WHAT IS IT? death, though I can get up and stretch my legs. There are Part deckbuilder, part shelves of trinkets on the walls: a skull, a safe, a clock. They puzzle room, part present puzzles to solve as part of the larger puzzle: How do I get out? nightmare EXPECT TO PAY in teeth, which fall into a pair of The game at the table is a $20 scales. I need to get ahead by ﬁve deckbuilder, less Slay the Spire and DEVELOPER more like the singleplayer mode of a teeth to tip the scales and win each Daniel Mullins Games CCG—a Hearthstone solo adventure round. There’s an item on the table PUBLISHER with a wilderness Americana theme, that promises to help me tip the Devolver Digital all rattlesnakes and yeehaw. I collect scales. It’s a pair of pliers. REVIEWED ON My opponent isn’t a simulation of a deck of animal friends, bullfrogs, Windows 10, Intel Core and wolf cubs with familiar stats and another player, and doesn’t play by i7, 16GB RAM, Nvidia the same rules. He’s thematic abilities. The GTX 1060 more a Dungeon skunk smells so bad MULTIPLAYER The mechanics Master, or the Dealer enemies have their No Hand of Fate, power reduced, the of this card from LINK narrating encounters beaver builds defensive game are and putting on masks inscryption-game.com dams, and so on. wilfully to portray NPCs as I The mechanics of cross a map. “Thar’s this card game are off-kilter gold in them cards!” he wilfully off-kilter and hollers as the grotesque. Most cards prospector, whose pickaxe have a blood cost, which has to be transforms cards into rocks. Then he paid by sacriﬁcing other cards. takes off the mask and sets up minis (Which is why I’ve got a separate around a campﬁre to play out a scene deck of squirrels—free cards worth one blood each.) Rather than being with suspicious, starving travelers who offer to warm one of my beasts measured in hit points, damage against my opponent and I is counted by their ﬁre. He may be a murderous What I really need is Flames of Wrath, or my Broadsword.

ABOVE: Ask not for whom the clock cuckoos.

76

kidnapper, but he puts in so much effort I kind of respect him. I spent hours in The Elder Scrolls: Legends playing singleplayer battles with fun twists: a siege dropped a stone wall across the middle of the table, a storm-tossed pirate ship slid cards back and forth. The twists in Inscryption are just as novel. Every wolf card gains the ability to ﬂy; a hook drags my cards across the board and turns them against me. There’s another twist, however. Inscryption is the work of Daniel Mullins Games, who made Pony Island (in which the Devil forces you to play a buggy auto-runner), and The Hex (in which videogame characters re-live ﬂashbacks to different genres they’ve been in). Like those games, Inscryption changes as you play, revealing so many layers that if it was a cake, Paul Hollywood would shake someone’s hand. To discuss those layers, I’ll need to spoil them even more than I have just by acknowledging they exist. Spoiler-averse? Skip to the verdict.

TRAP CARD

The second act of Inscryption is a 2D pixel-art RPG in the style of the

REVIEW

ABOVE: It’s like

climbing the Spire, but folksy. FAR RIGHT: The stoat card talks back.

Game Boy Pokémon Trading Card Game. It trades horror for whimsy, and calling it ‘a bit different’ would be an understatement. What was a one-card-at-a-time deckbuilder becomes a CCG where I have to construct a viable deck of 20+ cards from a collection, then tweak it as I earn booster packs. Though there’s an automate option, it doesn’t create viably competitive decks, and I found manual deck construction a bit of a chore. Opponents with gimmick decks that require speciﬁc builds to defeat make it even worse. Get through this, and there’s a third and ﬁnal act, which returns to something more like the format of the ﬁrst act only with a sci-ﬁ theme, but Inscryption lost me before that. To be totally honest, I was getting a bit tired of the ﬁrst act’s structure before it was over with thanks to run-based repetition and multi-stage boss battles. But for those opening hours, Inscryption was delightfully creepy and full of new surprises. I just preferred being trapped in a spooky cabin to being trapped in a succession of less interesting videogames. Inscryption plays well but unfortunately it just doesn’t know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em. Shame.

69

VERDICT

CARDS WITHOUT HUMANITY More card games you can play alone

SENTINELS OF DANGEROUS THE MULTIVERSE HIGH SCHOOL Superhero brawls GIRLS IN where every card is a TROUBLE comic book panel. Adapted from a tabletop game.

Lead your own girl gang in a 1920s boarding school.

HAND OF FATE

A Fighting Fantasy book with paragraphs of text replaced by cards, and combat right out of Arkham Asylum.

FAERIE SOLITAIRE

Fantasy solitaire with so many whimsical additions that it practically becomes a PopCap game.

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THEY’RE BACK

OLD GAMES REVISITED by Matthew Elliott

Barry Burton: Not so much a man as an upholstered anvil.

H

PHARMA POLICE Enjoying the company of idiots in RESIDENT EVIL

owever bad I am at writing, I rest easy knowing I’m better NEED TO KNOW at my job than the S.T.A.R.S. bravo team. For me to approach their level of ineptitude, this entire column WHAT IS IT? would have to include my bank details, passwords, industry A haunted house full of crushes, and darkest secrets. The screenshots would be stupid, sexy accidental selﬁes, and the score would be a macaroni picture of a balloon. supermodels EXPECT TO PAY I love the ﬁxed camera angles, It’s the ideal way to set the stage for $20 which let me stand in corridors and the alpha team, who, reassuringly, DEVELOPER make shapes while the moonlight can’t be any more useless than Capcom human hostess trolleys who wobbled hits Jill’s haunted porcelain doll face. PUBLISHER into Spencer mansion before them. I love how every enemy feels like a In-house One can only assume that Delta team waste of bullets. I even love that the REVIEWED ON controls make no sense, even in their suffocated while donning their Intel Core i7-7700 CUP rejigged, modern S.T.A.R.S. uniforms. By 3.60GHz, 16 GB RAM, incarnation. This is the @NVIDIA comparison, Chris and GeForce GTX Jill look magniﬁcently Then, we have remake, and it still feels 1070, Windows 10 laughably dated and capable, even though the puzzles, MULTIPLAYER cumbersome. But Jill is a lockpicker which ﬁll my somehow, it just adds No without a lockpick and heart with the to the terror. If I had LINK Chris can only carry six bit.ly/3HHvYLF purest joy any control over my things. I’m carrying six movements, I could things right now, and just avoid the all I have to do is sit zombies. Instead, Resident Evil is here and reach my word count. the survival horror equivalent of Also, anyone who doesn’t secretly driving an ice cream truck immediately recognize Wesker as pure bastard evil shouldn’t be trusted through a Walmart. to be around cutlery, let alone ﬁrearms. They are all, without S.T.A.R.S. IN THEIR EYES exception, idiots. But I love them, and Then, we have the puzzles, which ﬁll I love this game. my heart with the purest joy because 78

they’re so staggeringly, laughably, inexcusably impractical. Remember that people work in Spencer mansion. It’s basically a functioning laboratory. Compare that to, say, a modern ofﬁce, where the most minor inconveniences are enough to discourage us. Can you imagine being bothered to change a toner cartridge if you had to collect all seven secret moths ﬁrst? Resident Evil might be the easiest game to lampoon, then, but it’s partly a defense mechanism on my part. Combining scary monsters with resource management anxiety is the smartest, most relatable way to scare the solids out of me, similar to if someone made a horror game about avoiding smalltalk with your racist old neighbors. We can sit here and smirk at Resi’s idiosyncrasies, but I’ll still be shitting it when my canteen runs out of oil and the Crimson Heads start re-rising. Nobody should ever make another game that plays like this, and that’s exactly why it’s still wonderful.

85

VERDICT

THEY’RE BACK

ART ATTACK

BELOW: ‘Portrait of a Young Games Journalist’.

I NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY $20

DEVELOPER Bloober Team

PUBLISHER Aspyr

LAYERS OF FEAR is spooky, but in a loud way

’ve often wondered how I’d die in a horror movie. I assumed something heroic, like having my knees eaten while I lift starving orphans onto a rescue helicopter. Layers of Fear has been kind enough to conﬁrm the grim truth. Apparently I get locked in a basement and starve to death after messing about with a ouija board I should obviously have left alone. It’s not even that I was stupid enough to play with such an obviously-cursed item—more that I broke the sacrosanct gaming rule of following the light and going where the game wanted me to. It’s not the ideal ﬁnale for my ﬁrst go, but it does highlight one of the game’s most interesting and unforgiving features: If things go wrong, that’s it. Game over. A second attempt is more fruitful, quite literally. I stumble into a

kitchen that features a painting which spews forth endless apples, and I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be terrifying or delicious. This is perhaps the biggest issue with Layers of Fear: One scare isn’t enough. There have to be 20, daisy-chained together like monstrous bunting. The game has a tendency to bury you in cascading dolls and warping corridors. It all comes quite early for me, too. Before I really have time to understand what ‘normal’ looks like, the doors are switching around and the paintings are ﬂying off the walls. It’s effective, but some restraint would help the big scares stand out. I still love the ambient storytelling, artistic suffering, and the scrawled notes hinting at past horrors, but I also feel that Bloober Team don’t quite trust me enough to decide when I need to be scared.

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Even the furnaces in Pacify look terrified.

MANIAC MANSION

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eviewing something as inﬂuential as Maniac Mansion feels slightly absurd, like I’m giving you a critical appraisal of bees. But it’s worth knowing that Maniac Mansion is still worth playing. And it does loads of stuff that still feels surprising. As a point-and-click game, I’m expecting to meander around without any sense of urgency, but I immediately saunter into the wrong room, and get locked in a dungeon. Better still, I’m able to escape when one of my buddies gets captured and we ﬁnd a button hidden behind a fake brick. The interface feels cumbersome now, but there is something immersive about having so many ways to screw up a puzzle.

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RUSTY LAKE HOTEL

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t’s quite hard to ﬁnd games about big old buildings that a) aren’t scary, and b) I haven’t re-reviewed before. That’s why Rusty Lake Hotel is nestling here like roasted venison upon a bed of mushrooms and rosemary. Which, with the necessary context, is still a rather frightening thought. It’s Fawlty Towers meets Hannibal: a game about preparing dinner for (and with) your guests. The route to murdering and cooking them is often crooked—it involves solving a series of puzzles while they wait for death—but the weirdness of it all helps excuse some ludicrous solutions. Unless Tabasco sauce does in fact come from the nose of deer skulls, in which case I stand corrected.

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PACIFY

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opping off this month’s theme is Pacify, a game that proves that investigating spooky places with friends does nothing to lessen the unpleasantness. Although, to be honest, the most frightening thing about Pacify for me was the nausea I got from playing for too long— vengeful wraiths have nothing on a stomach that feels like it’s been in a tumble drier. Sickness aside, this is a simple, moreish investigative horror game, and possibly the ﬁrst that’ll make you glad to lay eyes on horrible dolls.

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EXTRA LIFE CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING

“I’ve done all of my racing so far using Microsoft’s Xcloud streaming on PC” Getting lost in the Xcloud in FORZA HORIZON 5

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ike millions of other Game Pass members eager for something pretty to play, I’ve been sinking my teeth into Forza Horizon 5. It’s only my second Forza game since I played Horizon 4 earlier this year, and I’ve already had a blast on the new map. It’s bright, cosy, and extremely fast. While Horizon 5 overall feels extremely familiar to the last game, I ﬁgured this would be a great opportunity to shake things up a bit: Instead of downloading all 100GB of Horizon 5 to my poor, chronically packed SSD, I decided to look to the cloud. That’s right, I’ve done all of my Mexico racing so far using Microsoft’s Xcloud streaming on PC, and I’m a little amazed at how well it works. Just click the Cloud Gaming button on the Windows 10 Xbox app 80

MORGAN PARK

THIS MONTH Drove some very fast cars among the clouds. ALSO PLAYED Hunt: Showdown

(you’ll need Game Pass Ultimate, by the by), pick a game from the huge library, and wham-bam-presto: Forza Horizon 5 comes alive. But not the PC version of Horizon, it seems. It looks like all Xcloud games are actually streaming you the Xbox Series X version of whatever game you’re playing. It’s a little weird to see the Xbox version’s limited video options on the main menu, but I guess it makes sense for how simple the process of cloud gaming is supposed to be. Plus, running a virtual Xbox means that you’ve also

ABOVE: When the

light’s just right, Forza 5’s gorgeous landscapes come through well.

got access to tons of backwards compatible Xbox 360 and original Xbox games as well.

CLOUD CHASING

Anyways: Back to Forza. It plays way better than I’d hoped over the cloud. The delay is undeniably there, but after switching to the Performance preset in Horizon and clocking up the framerate to 60fps, I honestly stopped noticing the lag. I’ve even been able to beat my friend Ian in a few races, who loves driving games so much he plays on a racing wheel with pedals and a shifter. There’s something funny about winning

THE EXCEPTIONAL FRAMERATE SMOOTHS OUT THE STREAM’S ROUGH EDGES

NOW PLAYING

THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW OK, so the game is actually pretty well-written on the whole. But the stripey boy’s words… they hurt.

All this beautiful desert is taking up none of my hard drive, but a lot of bandwidth.

“Some grumpy aliens call me a jackass” Dead ends in MARVEL’SGUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

against his top-of-the-line rig and specialized hardware while I’m basically playing a YouTube video. But video is deﬁnitely one area where Ian will always have me beat. Forza Horizon 5 can look beautiful over Xcloud, but the comparison between my streamed image and his proper download is night and day. Colors are washed out by the time the image beams through space back to me, and it’s not abnormal to see fuzzy pixels and artifacting. Xcloud’s artifacting is most noticeable on objects and edges in darker areas. Mexico’s jungles started to look a bit muddy for me with overcast skies, so I’ve been naturally sticking to the brighter desert roads. That said, I’d still say Forza on the cloud looks ‘good’. The cars are gorgeous and the exceptional framerate smooths out the stream’s rough edges. I’ve snapped a few screenshots of the game and, at least if I squint my eyes and don’t blow it up too large, I can barely tell it’s captured from a video stream. Visual nitpicks be damned, Forza on Xcloud has gone beyond my needs by not making me sacriﬁce another slice of my hard drive to play a new game. And if I ever want the full experience, the option is there.

Maybe I’m the grumpiest alien of all, but this kind of gag does bother me. The reason I wander off exploring every nook and cranny instead of role-playing my character is because thousands of games have trained me to. Including this one. There are collectibles at the end of those dead ends—upgrades, costumes, and even entire, easily ime is tight—we’ve only got one ‘rotation’ missable story sequences—and, (however long that is) because of the game’s linear nature, if you don’t ﬁnd them right away, you to explore this graveyard of derelict can never go back for them. spaceships. Rocket points out the DEAD WRONG best way forward, and warns against a dead end path. Of course, So what do you want me to do, game? If I go with the ﬂow then I miss out, ignoring all dramatic tension and logic, I go down the dead end ﬁrst, but if I poke around then I get jeered at, often even interrupting more seeking collectibles. But then, a surprise—Rocket actually calls me interesting dialogue. Believe me, out, directly reacting to my developers, I don’t want to ruin the time-wasting with a bitter pacing of every story-driven game for wisecrack. Ha ha, ho ho, see how myself—it’s not particularly fun, my gaming habits have been constantly trying to ﬁgure out what delightfully skewered. the wrong way to go is all the time. This is what you’ve trained me to do. Guardians of the Galaxy has been Instead of having your cake and widely praised for this reactivity, with eating it too, why not actually get rid loads of dialogue triggered by the of this now tired trope? Ditch the player’s actions—but my experience dead ends, stop making fun stuff only has been that it’s almost all been obtainable by un-fun behavior, and along these lines. I go off to explore, I’ll cheerfully follow the path you and some grumpy aliens call me a want me to follow. With a bit less jackass for doing so. grief from a talking rodent, please.

ROBIN VALENTINE

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THIS MONTH Got my jetboots upgraded to max, at least. ALSO PLAYED The Ascent, Genesis Noir

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NOW PLAYING

THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW

“Legends of Runeterra feels like it’s in the midst of its own golden age” LEGENDS OF RUNETERRA is stillthe best digital card game ever made

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ith the new Arcane animated TV series out on Netﬂix, and big events launched all across Riot’s different games, November might as well have been called Lolvember. But aside from sinking a few hours into League of Legends: Wild Rift, the one Riot game I’ve been obsessed with lately is Legends of Runeterra, its unparalleled card battler that’s secretly the best game in the whole League of Legends universe It’s not just that Legends of Runeterra is ﬁlled with innovative ideas and fun new mechanics, but that it slots into my life in a way no other free-to-play game really has. Unlike Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering, Legends of Runeterra is generous enough with its currency that even casual players can eventually collect every card available. That also means that even when I take long breaks, I don’t feel left behind by the release of new expansions. Just start slinging cards and, soon enough, I’m able to afford whatever ﬂashy new deck I’m ogling. Legends of Runeterra is also such a lovely game because it’s always

STEVEN MESSNER

THIS MONTH Got wrapped up in the League of Legends universe. ALSO PLAYED League of Legends, Final Fantasy XIV

changing. Entire new sets drop every few months, but I also appreciate how much Riot has invested in ﬂeshing out the singleplayer aspects too. Last year, its Lab of Legends mode introduced a roguelike deckbuilding component to the game, opening up an entire avenue of play that doesn’t require squaring off against other players. And, recently, that mode was transformed into Path of Champions, which expands the roguelike elements while also introducing a lot more storytelling in the form of little cutscenes that sometimes play between battles.

I APPRECIATE HOW MUCH RIOT HAS INVESTED IN FLESHING OUT THE SINGLEPLAYER Building a powerful deck can be a rush when luck is on your side.

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WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS

Unlike Lab of Legends, which was a static gauntlet of boss ﬁghts, Path of Champions gives you a map with a web of encounters you can choose between—similar to Slay the Spire. It also adds a whack of new progression systems, like being able to level up speciﬁc champs to unlock permanent bonuses for future runs. I’m not sure if Path of Champions is my favorite iteration on this roguelike deckbuilding idea that Riot has been experimenting with for the past year, but it is exciting to see how much Runeterra is willing to reinvent itself every few months. And it still retains that distinct joy of slowly assembling a deck ﬁlled with wild synergies that, if you’re lucky, turn you into an unstoppable force. Coupled with how generously it doles out new cards to you and how diverse the competitive meta is at the current moment, Legends of Runeterra feels like it’s quietly in the midst of its own golden age. In fact, I much prefer this more relaxed pacing, and the ways it’s become such an articulate exploration of League of Legend’s iconic champions—but in card form. LEFT: Each node on the path has new events, battles, or shops. BELOW: Some Path of Champion’s missions have fun narrative moments.

EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY Who knew a game about moving house could be relaxing?

“One of the ﬁnest examples in recent memory of showing instead of telling” UNPACKINGis hiding one of this year’s best stories

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hy am I struggling to keep my eyes dry over a missing mug? After several levels of Unpacking, I had become accustomed to seeing this tiny, pixelated little item hop from house to house. First, it was a reliable holder of coffee, and then of toothbrushes, when a chip became visible. But in one move, it vanishes. Thanks to this puzzler’s subtle storytelling, I care more about this little cup’s disappearance than I do about most of the characters I’ve played this year. Unpacking is an apt title on multiple levels. While the game is primarily focused on you rummaging through cardboard boxes and ﬁnding homes for the various items, trinkets, and accoutrement the main character has, it also describes the way you piece together the story as you play through, each ﬁnished level becoming a photo in an album. While the calming, Tetris-esque loop of making order out of chaos appears to be the main attraction, it

BEN TYRER

THIS MONTH Put away virtual clothes instead of real ones. ALSO PLAYED Forza Horizon 5, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy

becomes clear that the game’s real aim is to let us see a life unfurl in front of our eyes, the main character’s story told through the items she takes with her, how they change, and how they ﬁt (or don’t) into the environments she lives in. The game’s ﬁrst major storytelling accomplishment is that those items give us a sense of who she is without any dialogue. For instance, we see how a pig plushie has a gouge in one level and is patched up the next. An easy-to-miss moment, but one that

THE MAIN CHARACTER’S STORY TOLD THROUGH THE ITEMS SHE TAKES WITH HER

shows the endearing qualities of the character I’m playing as. The places are just as important as the items in this regard. While the ﬁrst childhood bedroom you unpack brims with possibility in the opening level, it’s borderline unrecognizable when you return halfway through.

SHOW TIME

The experience is one of the ﬁnest examples in recent memory of showing instead of telling. With no dialogue, it allows you to lose yourself within the story, giving you enough time to create connections with the items you store away and experience the central character’s life through your own eyes, rather than being spoon fed what is happening. Maybe that’s why that mug has me blubbing. Watching it travel between rooms and shared houses over the years reminded me of the items that I’ve carted across the country. To see it vanish is the game’s reminder that moving through life’s different phases means the things we love get left behind. But that doesn’t mean the memories disappear. 83

UPDATE

APEX LEGENDS

WHAT’S NEW IN THE BIGGEST GAMES

Twitch streamers and Wraith mains. Ash’s abilities are powerful enough in their own right—her tactical is a snare that prevents enemies from leaving a small radius, while her ultimate tears a rift in space-time, leaving a one-way portal to bring her and her team straight into the ﬁght. But her real trick lies with her passive, which ﬂags death boxes on the map as soon as any player on the map beefs it. This lets her know where the ﬁghts are happening, pulling her squad into the action with terrifying efﬁciency. By throwing a data-knife into a death box, she can even ping the poor sod’s killers. In a game deﬁned by third-partying ﬁghts, Ash is brutal, and has already

Storm the beaches witha backstabbing blender. By Nat Clayton

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ast season notwithstanding, Apex Legends has had one hell of a year. So, to celebrate, Respawn has sent our gang of delightful murderbuds off on an unseasonably sunny holiday to close out the year. Welcome to Storm Point, Apex Legends’ largest map to date. With a landmass roughly 15% larger than World’s Edge, Storm Point is truly massive. But it’s also both denser and taller than any Apex arena yet, laid out as a sprawling jungle wrapped around a mountain that extends higher than any previous map, dusty peaks descending into thick foliage before leveling out into white sandy beaches. It’s gorgeous, but it’s also a jarring shift from the tight, clustered maps we’ve seen so far. Without obvious hotspots like Kings Canyon’s Skulltown (RIP), or World’s Edge’s Fragment, matches are scattered, and it can take some time before you ﬁnd a scrap. It’s the closest Apex has ever come to feeling like a more traditional battle royale like PUBG or Fortnite, trading constant ﬁreﬁghts for the lingering tension of stalking through the wilds for ﬁve, ten, even ﬁfteen minutes before ﬁring a shot. I’m not entirely sure it’s a trade-off that works. Apex is traditionally a game that wants you to ﬁght early and often, and already you can see players choosing to land in

NEED TO KNOW

RELEASE Out now PUBLISHER Electronic Arts

DEVELOPER Respawn Entertainment LINK bit.ly/3Cp4bvG

more central locations like Barometer or Cascade Falls to force an early combat. Clustering in one spot just makes the rest of the map feel even emptier. It’s a shame, because Storm Point has some of the strongest locations of any map—densely layered, tactical arenas with a strong focus on verticality. To help you get around the island quicker, Storm Point features the nippy wee Trident hovercars from Olympus. But it also trades the traditional redeploy balloons for Halo-style gravity cannons which punt you in a single direction at ludicrous speeds. You’ll need them, too, lest you risk being bogged down ﬁghting the island’s ecosystem, with Prowler dens and spider nests ready to ensnare passing squads. These beasties can be shockingly vicious, but reward hunters with extra loot, evo shield charges, and crafting materials for clearing them out.

I’M NOT ENTIRELY SURE IT’S A TRADE OFF THAT WORKS established herself as a top-tier pick. Following a good Ash around the map can be a terrifying thrill, as you track down and pick off weakened squads with ruthless precision. But it’s so, so easy for a bad Ash to lead you to your doom, and her lone-wolf kit often makes playing with one feel like you’re playing constant catch-up. Really, my favorite thing about Ash is the absolute venom she brings out in my main space mum, Horizon. There’s a sour history between these two, one that’s been spun out through cinematic trailers and now plays out through Apex’s phenomenal voice interactions. Believe me when I say I’ll never tire of hearing Dr Somers revive this cold, calculating murderbot while spitting out lines like “back on yer hooves, ya heartless toaster”.

ASH, CATCH ’EM!

Who better to guide you through the jungle than an expert tracker, then? Season 11 brings back Titanfall 2 baddie Ash as a new Legend, and as a deadly hunter-killer, she’s already proving herself a favorite among

ASHES TO ASH Our newest Simulacrum has this whole ‘death and resurrection’ thing down to a tee

1

Dr Ashleigh Reid, scientist and dear friend, punts Dr Mary ‘Horizon’ Somers into a black hole. This will have consequences in 87 years’ time.

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2

Reid then dies, stabbed in the back while attempting to murder the rest of Somers’ colleagues to steal their unobtanium crystals.

3

Reid’s mind is salvaged and turned into a Simulacrum, a cyborg built from the fleshy brain of a human being, and shortens her name to ‘Ash’.

4

Ash then dies, crushed into a pulp by Titanfall 2’s best metal boy BT-7274, as kind of a footnote during that game’s stellar singleplayer campaign.

5

The shattered pieces of Ash’s skull are retrieved in Apex Legends’ Season 5 quest. A few months later, she gets a cushy job running the game’s Arenas mode.

6

Horizon, having not quite gotten over the whole black hole situation, accidentally wakes up Ash’s latent memories and triggers her entry into the game.

EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY

ABOVE: Storm Point’s

gravity cannons will give you a good kick up the rear end. ABOVE LEFT: On a map this large, Valkyrie’s jetpack is essential. BELOW: The new CAR SMG can take two types of ammo, making it a powerful early pick.

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MOD SPOTLIGHT

MAJOR MODS, ANALYZED Otis is the new Barney.

You get a peek into what happens in Black Mesa.

TOP: The Xen invasion doesn’t just happen at

Black Mesa.

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EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY

HALF-LIFE: DELTA

Exploring unforeseen consequences. By Chris Livingstone

G

MAD SCIENCE

Games where science screwed everything up

DOOM

SOMA

DEAD RISING

RESIDENT EVIL

Sure, let’s try to harvest power from Hell. What could go wrong? Besides absolutely everything?

Scientists created mutant wasps which turned people into zombies. Yes, really.

Scientists created an AI to oversee the last of humanity, but it started animating corpses.

Umbrella Corporation went from creating cosmetics to developing bio weapons. Then, zombies.

ordon Freeman and Nick Farell have a lot in common. Both work in the ﬁeld of secret government science: Freeman is a theoretical physicist at Black Mesa, and Farell is a generator technician at Delta Base. Both of their companies are working on teleportation technology in huge, sprawling underground labs in New Mexico. Both are men of few words (no words, to be precise) and despite their nerdy leanings, are just as capable with rocket launchers and shotguns as they are with scientiﬁc equipment. And both are about to have an extremely bad day. Half-Life: Delta is a full conversion mod for the original Half-Life, and it takes place at the exact same time. Farrell has come to Delta Base to do his job as a generator technician, while over in Black Mesa Freeman is also arriving for his morning duties of riding a tram for a half-hour and then pushing a cart full of alien science into an anti-mass spectrometer. We all know how that goes. In fact, in Half-Life: Delta, we actually get to see the scene of Freeman pushing the Xen crystal on his little cart, and then skeedaddling when everything suddenly goes boom. The resonance cascade, in which monsters from Xen pour into our world through dimensional rifts, isn’t localized in Black Mesa. In Delta Base, familiar Half-Life creatures like headcrabs and vortigaunts begin popping in. And Farell, like Freeman, doesn’t have anything resembling a weapon. As Delta Base begins getting torn to shreds, all you can do is watch. At ﬁrst…

COMMON GROUND

Thankfully, Delta Base has its own version of Barney Calhoun. I quickly

NEED TO KNOW

RELEASE November 19, 1998 PUBLISHER Sierra Studios

DEVELOPER Valve LINK half-life.com/en/halflife

meet Otis, a security guard, who speaks Russian. In fact, everyone in Delta Base speaks Russian (at the moment, anyway, there are plans for English voices to be added). Luckily, there are subtitles, and there’s not all that much information that needs to be explained out loud. Monsters are trying to kill us, so let’s kill them

MONSTERS ARE TRYING TO KILL US, SO LET’S KILL THEM INSTEAD instead. I follow Otis, who is kind enough to shoot a bunch of zombies, until I ﬁnd a crowbar. Don’t worry, it’s a completely different crowbar than the one Gordon Freeman is currently picking up for the ﬁrst time over in Black Mesa. Farrell’s crowbar is yellow, not orange. With a melee weapon in hand, I do something terrible if not completely unexpected. I promptly beat Otis to death. I know! I know. It sounds like an awful thing to do, but there are a lot of monsters around, and I really need a gun of my own. Killing Barneys for their ammo is a common occurrence in Half-Life (I bet Freeman is doing it right now) but as Otis drops dead, my screen goes black. Otis, unlike the many Barneys of Half-Life, is a mission critical character. I ﬁnd out why when I reload and he unlocks a few doors for me using the retinal 87

MOD SPOTLIGHT

MAJOR MODS, ANALYZED

As I make my way through zombie-ﬁlled labs, more familiar Half-Life monsters begin showing up. Those annoying sonic dogs (houndeyes), those squid-faced things (bullsquids), those tentacle monsters (just called tentacles, apparently) and of course plenty of environmental hazards like malfunctioning electrical equipment and explosive barrels I never seem to notice until I’m discharging a shotgun a wee bit too close to them. Eventually, I run into Otis again, who proves even more useful, opening up an armory, collecting explosive charges, and using them to blast open a sealed door. And then he escorts me to a tram. Unlike Freeman, who used his tram to get to work, I’ll be using mine to get the hell out of here. And I’ve got a bunch of guns, so I can even shoot at monsters on my tram ride. Otis, sadly, won’t be coming with. He waves goodbye, and the last I see of him he’s shooting the hell out of a pack of zombies in a security room. The tram, naturally, doesn’t deliver me to safety, but it does give RUN AND GUN I’m not usually a fan of shooters that me some brief hope as I leave the don’t give you a ton of spare ammo. underground complex and actually see the cloudy sky above. It’s always Rationing bullets in a ﬁrst-person such a relief to make it to the surface shooter usually seems like a waste. I’ve got guns, let me shoot ’em! But it in a Half-Life game or mod, even if works well in Half-Life: Delta. Rather hope for escape is short lived. Before much longer I’m killing a tentacle than rushing through the base pouring ammo into everything that moves, I take my time, slowly creeping through the darkened corridors and blood-splattered ofﬁces. New guns are parcelled out pretty rarely. Get used to that pistol, it’ll be a while before a shotgun appears, and even longer before a We’re still machine gun does. waiting to BARNEY Moving slowly doesn’t just save CALHOUN learn what ammo, it helps me ﬁgure out the He was in Half-Life 1 happened to layout of the base and how I can get & 2, Blue Shift, and Half-Life 2: Episode these beloved from area to area. At ﬁrst I feel like 1. He wasn’t seen or I’m getting lost and backtracking a Half-Life even mentioned in lot, but I eventually get a feel for Episode 2. characters things. The path forward is not quite as signposted as Valve’s Half-Life, but more often than not I have a good idea of where I’ll need to go to escape the current peril and ﬁnd the upcoming peril. And it’s a bit of a throwback, but there are color-coded ODESSA RUSSELL keys needed to unlock doors from The guy was CUBBAGE time to time, Doom-style. It’s been a indispensable in Cubbage was in long while since games in general Half-Life: Alyx, which Half-Life 2 and is takes place before gave up on those, but I enjoyed mentioned in Half-Life 2—in which Episodes. But after hunting them down in Delta Base. he’s never seen or teaching you to use Maybe more games should bring mentioned. an RPG, he’s gone. them back these days.

with toxic waste so I can once again descend underground to reach another subterranean complex.

scanners. Thanks, Otis. Sorry about the attempted murder! Delta Base isn’t all that different than Black Mesa, really. It’s a massive network of corridors, ofﬁces, labs, and facilities, with a great many air ducts that can be slithered through when need be. It’s ﬁlled with scientists and ofﬁce workers and guards, though many are dead at this point, lying in puddles of blood, crumpled in stairwells, or crushed by heavy security doors they weren’t quite fast enough to escape through. Many of your co-workers die right in front of you in traditional Half-Life fashion, slapped to death by zombies as you watch through plate glass, or plunging to an explosive death after stepping onto a malfunction elevator. The ones who survive are helpful. Several open locked doors for me, and I’ll occasionally come across a technician who has concealed himself in a safe space and can inject me with a dose of healing meds. But mostly, everyone is dead, and it’s up to me to escape the facility.

SUBSURFACE TENSION

Half-Life: Delta follows a lot of the same structure as Half-Life. As you might have guessed, at some point the overworked military arrives and heavily armed soldiers attempt to keep a lid on the resonance cascade by slaughtering everything that moves, human and otherwise. Luckily, I love ﬁghting the military in Half-Life. Finally, ammo is plentiful, weapons abound, and I’m not counting my grenades, I’m just chucking them. And I’ll say this for the army: They can’t teleport in behind you like those sneaky Xen

THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF CUSTOM MODELS IN THE MOD

M.I.A.

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ADRIAN SHEPARD

G-Man stuffed him in an interdimensional closet at the end of Half-Life: Opposing Force. He deserves to be let out.

GORDON FREEMAN

We get a glimpse of him in Half-Life: Alyx, but he’s been in limbo since 2007. Will we ever swing his crowbar again?

creatures do. Plus, you get to see a bunch of army guys get killed by monsters, just like your co-workers were. At the end of the day, Farell is capable enough to become a one-man army and defeat the actual army. And yes, Farell does make his own trip to Xen, just like Freeman. But even if the story beats are the same, Half-Life: Delta doesn’t really feel like Half-Life. Black Mesa and Delta Base may mostly be constructed from the same parts and pieces, but they do wind up feeling like very different places. There are hundreds of custom models in the mod, lots of new textures, and many custom sound effects. The soundtrack and look of Delta Base feel refreshingly different, and provide a new atmosphere that really doesn’t feel like you’re retreading through Half-Life again, even if so much of it is familiar. In every respect, Half-Life: Delta is a full conversion of Half-Life. It’s also huge. There are over 30 maps in the mod, and they’re big ones. If you’re looking for a shooter that complements the original Half-Life, and even takes place side-by-side on the timeline, you should deﬁnitely check out Half-Life: Delta. If you do, say hi to Otis for me. And remember: Don’t kill him. You need him more than you know.

EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY

ABOVE: Teleportation

must be easy. Every monster can do it! LEFT: Yes, fellow technician, please jab me with that syringe.

Xen looks pretty cool this time around.

Oh, hi. Were you looking for me?

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HOW TO

GET MORE FROM YOUR GAMES

BACK 4 BLOOD BUILD A DECK IN

Play your cards right to beat back the ravenous horde. By Harry Shepherd

NEED TO KNOW DIFFICULTY Easy TIME Ten hours VITAL LINKS Tips guide: bit.ly/3kaNldA Top builds: bit.ly/3ka0R11 Character list: bit.ly/3CPtjg1

WORST NIGHTMARE

Back 4 Blood is not an easy game, 1 especially not on the two higher difficulty levels. To compete with the many zombies (sorry, ‘Ridden’) and special enemy types in your way,you’re going to need a balanced deck and team. So let us show you how.

SHORT SUPPLY

you start, you’ll be given 2 When several basic cards. You can get more, and expand your choice of buffs and improvements,by progressing Supply Lines in the Fort Hope hub. For that you’ll need Supply Points, which you get by completing campaign missions.

TOP OF THE PILE

Drawn cards persist foran entire run in Back 4 Blood, and the first card in your deck activates automatically. That means you should make this your most powerful card so you can make the most of its top-tier bonuses, and stick your weakest cards at the bottom.

3

TEAM SPIRIT

As with any multiplayer game, Back 4 Blood is easier, and much more fun, with friends. Bots and randoms can be unreliable,so plan over Discord, and pick characters whose unique perks complement each other and your playstyles.

5

SPICE OF LIFE

can have 15 cards max in your 4 You deck, so there are a colossal number ofcombinations. Createvarious custom collections in Fort Hope, and name them around their intended specialization, such as melee or healer, to make your life easierin future.

SURPRISE MECHANICS

The optimized card collection of a co-ordinated squad will be handy at the end of a chapter when the game sticks you with a Corruption card, making things harder. But you get to choose a new card too—choose very wisely.

6

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BETTER TOGETHER

Think strategically about howcards can interact with each other. For instance, combining amelee damage buff with Holly’s damage resistance makesfor a good close-quarters combination. Then add Battle Lust, which restores health with each melee kill.

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EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY

SEEN AND NOT HORDE Watch for these traps that alert nearby Ridden

1

2

FOR THE BIRDS

Birds are the most common trap in Back 4 Blood, so watch out. Tiptoe around them, and don’t shoot near or move close to them, for the love of god.

WARNING SIGNS

While you should always keep moving, don’t rush through doors without checking them for warning signs on their fronts. These are alarmed, but are sometimes unavoidable. Proceed with caution.

3

TRAFFIC JAM

Alarmed cars sadly, are much harder to avoid.You can certainly keep your eyes peeled for their blinking lights, but just a single bullet to the chassis can send zombies flooding in.

SPRING CLEANING

most powerful bonuses you’ll 8 The enjoy are character specific, so take the timeto get to know each available Cleaner and build decks around your favorites. Note: Some characters are locked until you finish the first chapter of act 1 in co-op.

GIVE AND TAKE

close attention to card 9 Pay descriptions as you add them to your deck and apply them. While some may have very appealing bonuses, they may also inflict debuffs and modifiers that complicate things. If it harms your role in the team, put it in the bin.

FREE TRIAL

your run ends, the cards you 10 Ifchose during that session reset. While frustrating, it still gives you the chance to experiment with all sorts of deck combinations. Don’t agonize over every last card: Get in the game, and see what works.

PACKING HEAT

LOCK AND LOAD

While it pays to specialize, one thing always worth buffing is reload speed (unless you’re running a melee build). The advantages areobvious: You’re at your most vulnerable when you’re not firing, so any card that minimizesthat is worthincluding.

11

Equally you should always pay special attention to cards that bestow an inventoryboost. In most cases you’ll only be able to carry one type of each bit of gear, so adding extra inventory slots can be invaluable.

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DIARY

PERSONAL ADVENTURES IN GAMES

KILLING EVERYONE IN

HITMAN Stealth bedamned.

By Matt Killeen

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I

THE RULES

1. All targets must be eliminated and tasks completed. 2. All police, military, security, employees, and contractors must die, plus guests. Everyone, basically. 3. All in the Requiem Suit… because style matters.

Suit and Chrome by ICA. RS-15, model’s own.

’m a Hitman purist. The ideal playthrough involves a few people getting food poisoning and passing out, before there’s a terrible accident where someone nasty dies in an ironic way. Less a murder-simulator, than a death-bymisadventure-simulator. I think it’s why the two movie adaptations leave me cold. If I was directing, it’d be all choking on vol-au-vents and you wouldn’t see Agent 47 at all. But when my daughter plays, she embraces the ﬁlm aesthetic. She goes in shooting… become death, destroyer of worlds. While the body count is impressive, it’s not what you’d call efﬁcient. There’s a real ammo issue, and often the target ﬂees once the big guns come out. However, while I usually restart after the automatic weapons kick-in, I wondered if it was possible to hit all the targets and then, wipe everyone out. Hitman is a passable shooter and with paciﬁst playthroughs all the rage, I’m pulling a 180. Everyone is going to die. All people. I also wondered about the notion of innocence. If you’re a soldier of a corrupt regime, you’re fair game, especially if you get in the way. Maybe security guards are too, on that basis. But if you’re a guest at the party of someone who can at best be described as evil? By your friends may you be known, I suppose. What if you’re just setting up the sound-system? This makes precise rules woolly or unfair, and I’m leaning on the latter. Rule One tends to preclude going in all guns blazing. Rule Two is where it promises to get complicated. I’m also cheating slightly and doing the ﬁrst season of Hitman, as this has the locations I know best. I’m going to abuse the automatic weapons I’ve earned and never used in a normal playthrough. Rule Three is about looking like an angel… an angel of death. Paris’s The Showstopper is the Hitman level I know best of all, having played it endlessly, waiting for the next episode to unlock. It’s a beautiful, immersive simulation, that is a honeycomb of stacked puzzles. The armed intervention, which I’m calling The IAGO Farrago, threatens to fracture this delicate balance, and as such it’s a proof of concept.

There are plenty of horrible people upstairs at IAGO’s auction of state secrets, while Dalia Margolis and Viktor Novikov’s actions cost innocent lives. Screw them, they’re all going down with the goons. Then there are the employees, but they should probably know better, and ﬁnally, there are the guests. I’m making the call that they’re all awful people, which they seem to be if you listen in on their conversations for any time at all.

“J’FAIS DES TROUS…”

Full-frontal assaults in all those crowded, open halls proves suicidal, so I’m driven to experiment, with healthy

FULL-FRONTAL ASSAULTS IN ALL THOSE CROWDED, OPEN HALLS PROVES SUICIDAL doses of sneaking and drainpipes as usual, but leaving a trail of dead, which is new to me. I ﬁnd myself trying to hide bodies out of habit and being rumbled, when the best bet is just headshot everyone who might see the body. Whittling down the armed guards by constant ﬂanking through different rooms, picking up new weapons as you go, is the strategy that works best. Every time they send someone to ﬁll body bags, I just make more work for them. Eventually it’s just me and my quarry. So, I turn to the auction guests. I work through them, pleased by the dropped IAGO invites that tell me I’ve nailed another monster. It was here that things take a turn that I wasn’t expecting. It’s one thing being Leon the Professional and cutting a swathe through goons and monsters like a slow-moving ghost, leaving the fallen behind you like an arrow for the foolish to follow. It turns out, it’s quite another gunning down a stream of pleading, crying waiters and models. I begin to ﬁnd it difﬁcult, even upsetting. I try hardening my heart. “You’re all terrible people, neck deep in corruption and exploitation, with horrible dress sense,” I cry. But a little voice inside me wails back, “Should not these wayward souls be given a shot at redemption? Are they not people too? If you prick them, do they not bleed?” Well, yes, but that blood is just lines of code, just as they are. They aren’t real. This is a video game. But my buzz has been totally harshed. Thanks, conscience. It takes another hour to complete the wholesale and complete slaughter of every single NPC, and ﬁnd Victor in the safe room where I started. I wanted it to feel like a triumph, and it was deﬁnitely a thing, but I just feel drained. This means that by the time I reached the sunlit Amalﬁ Coast for The Mansion Fumigation, I’m already conﬂicted. I declare everyone in the mansion and lab as the enemy, deciding to deal with the rest of the town later. I spurn the tempting thought of doing the whole 93

DIARY

PERSONAL ADVENTURES IN GAMES

BODYCOUNTDOWN

Who’s Top of the Popped Off? Down at #5, it’s Sapienza with ‘Just the Mansion’

Hakkaido are in at #4 with ‘Everyone in a Small Map’

Holding at #3 is ‘No Civilians’ By Marrakesh

thing as the Plague Doctor and start with the lab. I’ve a bioweapon and its creators to destroy, otherwise I can’t go home. I complete the original mission in under ten minutes. I’ve nailed the combat now, and just walk round and round the mansion killing as I go, silently, like the Grim Reaper in a white suit. It’s exhilarating, but amongst all the macho nonsense and comments about my clothes that the guards bellow in inappropriate accents, I hear, “Ours is not to reason why!” Do the goons need to work themselves up? Are they assuming death and having second thoughts? Surely, some reluctance must be creeping in now there’s a pile of bodies in the hall so tall that they have to walk round it? I am overthinking this.

QUALITY OF MERCY

And again, it’s the unarmed employees that make me feel queasy. So much so, that as I emerge into the sunlight and walk towards the gates to continue the reign of terror, I pause at the brink. Behind me is a charnel house. Blood is trickling past me towards the town square, where people are resting, drinking coffee, and sunning themselves. It’s beautiful. Believable. And I can’t do it. There’s no rationale I can apply to the process that makes sense in-game. The massacre thus far is a message for bad people. The spree killing of a whole town would obscure it. Meanwhile, back in the real-world, I don’t want to do it. I drop the riﬂe, holster my ICA chrome and step into the square. There I ﬁnd Rocco’s sister, the mansion employee, still calling up to wake her shiftless brother. He can’t be bothered to go to his job in the kitchens—and I’m

New at #2, it’s Bangkok with ‘Don’t Be Our Guest’

At #1, it’s Paris with ‘Every Living Soul Extinguished’

supposed to steal his chef’s whites—but she wants him to make something of his life. She’s missed everything. I let her go, the one and only survivor of the vengeance that Ether had brought upon her place of work. On the one hand, A Guilded Cage (or in this form The Legation Negation) seems to offer some clearer moral choices. The corrupt army, the scheming general, and white-collar master-thief Strandberg are all malevolent, and the Swedes are harboring a criminal on a technicality. So, I clear out the consulate and the old school, but the population have seen me kill a lot of soldiers, and they’re anxious to let everyone know. As I move through the market that becomes irritating, and I turn an assault riﬂe on the crowd. What follows is truly distressing. It’s a well-rendered window onto hell. Too real. I quit out, load an autosave, carry out the plan, and leave. I wonder at myself, playing a game and simply refusing to do what I’d said I would do, again. I tell myself the next level will be different. Club 27 in Bangkok offers me some respite. Yes, the murdering rockstar, his bottom-feeding lawyer, and their friends are fair game, but how to approach a hotel full of other guests and staff? Not being as familiar with the destination as the other levels, I walk around to reacquaint myself. As I doI listen to the guests talk… and realize they are all terrible, terrible people. They are dismissive or patronizing about the country, affecting boredom with it, and rude about the staff. They are bored, rich and entitled idiots. So, all the guests die. Round and round I circle the hotel and its corridors and gardens, wiping out the security. The staff get to go home. The Guest Eradication. I am ﬁne with all that, apparently.

JAPANESE HOSPITALITY

I’m not ruining their tranquillity.

94

By the time I reach the Japanese hospital of dubious morals for the super-rich, I am tired and grumpy. And armed. I don’t care who the targets are, but it’s something about involuntary organ donation. I have zero sympathy for the medical staff, guards, or guests, merely wincing a bit with the cleaners and sushi chefs. I call it The Sod Everyone, or Min’na mechakucha. Am I just desensitized by playing an interactive version of Alan Clarke’s Elephant non-stop for days on end? Or is that process making me more discerning somehow? It’s easy to see Bangkok’s waiters as real people, just getting by, whereas the hospital

EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY A good night’s work.

targets. He isn’t even doing it for the money. He’s doing it because it’s all he’s ever known. It’s what he was created to do. And he’s YOU. You are doing it. There’s a level on which the game is saying, it isn’t OK to like any of this. You are indulging yourself, immersed in self-righteousness. The degree to which you are enjoying it is a little window into the darkest parts of yourself. You are the Shadow Client. Most is remote, and its very existence is obnoxious. Why therapists will tell you that this is a healthy thing, it’s would you work there? And oh my god, what kind of judgemental psychopath called owning your own shadow. But therapy is hard and have I become, slowly by degrees? This is where Hitman upsetting, and sometimes you don’t know what to do is, in fact, a litmus test for your humanity, a moral trafﬁc with what you’ve found out. In my case, it’s that this game isn’t meant to be played like this. Attempting to kill light, like Tom Waits in The Fisher King. There is a moral dimension baked into the game, but everyone has left me wanting to kill no one, in a game all it isn’t just in the irredeemable targets or the penalties about killing people. Maybe that’s the point? Anyway, that’s Hitman ruined. Thanks a lot, conscience. for non-target kills. There’s another level that the laissez-faire attitude to other people’s lives comes to highlight. You can target the super-rich as fundamentally unethical, with immoral goals, but the organization you work for is also corrupt, just another resource for the obscenely wealthy to wield power. Your handler is just yet another sociopath, working through her own grandiose and skewed notions of morality. The Moroccan coup isn’t being prevented because that’s a good thing, it’s just about a defence contract held by a western Almost exactly corporation. 47 can talk about a “just when this stopped hit”, but he’s kidding himself. He’s a being fun. monster too, as ghastly as those

THEY ARE BORED, RICH, AND ENTITLED IDIOTS. SO, ALL THE GUESTS DIE

95

WHY I LOVE

WHAT MAKES GAMES SPECIAL

TEARING THINGS DOWN IN

TEARDOWN Smash and grab. By Nat Clayton

RIGHT: That’s one

way to get to the snack aisle.

96

R

EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY

emember the ﬁrst time you brought a house down in Red Faction: Guerrilla? It felt like the start of something new. The beginning of an era of games that would be more tangible, more physical, and more breakable than ever before. Of course, that didn’t happen. Games largely focused on making static scenes look even shinier with sharper textures and ray-traced lighting. But thanks to a small Swedish developer, we have a window into that delightfully destructive alternate world—and believe me when I say Teardown’s window shatters very nicely indeed. At its core, Teardown is a game of heists. Each new mission gives you a series of computers and safes to steal, or cars to plunge into the ocean, challenging you to use a limited toolset to carve out a path towards the perfect crime. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun challenge—but it’s not why I’ve opened up Teardown almost every day for the past year. I’m playing Teardown every day because smashing things up never gets old. Teardown might be a voxel game, but Tuxedo Labs has taken great care to build its sandbox levels with true-to-life materials. Smashing a wall with a sledgehammer will crumble plaster while leaving tougher brickwork exposed. It is the closest (and safest) means games have come to grabbing a hammer and going to town on a run-down construction site. But that faithfulness to life isn’t just met by the materials. See, Teardown may be the best (and only) argument I’ve

NEED TO KNOW

RELEASE Oct 29, 2020 PUBLISHER In-house

DEVELOPER Tuxedo Labs LINK teardowngame.com

adding new maps to tear apart, letting you cut about a riverside village and urban shopping mall with abandon. But over the past year, mod Analysing a symphony of destruction support has completely transformed The shape of these holes and Once inside, it looks like the Teardown from a fun curiosity into a signs of blast marks suggest suspects used bombs were used to force entry sledgehammers to break into worthy successor to the king of into the building. the office. physics sandboxes, Garry’s Mod. Teardown’s basic destruction can be enhanced. Feel like ﬁres are going 2 4 out too soon? Download a mod to keep the ﬂames burning as long as possible. And while Teardown doesn’t track structural integrity (buildings will remain ‘ﬂoating’ if even one 1 voxel is connected to the ground), there are mods to fake this by having explosions cause chain reactions of 3 shockwave damage. This is best seen on miniature city maps, where one At some point it appears a fire … hold on, did someone toss tower collapse can bring an entire swept through the house, an entire boat at this burning the lower levels. building? I give up. neighborhood to rubble. In recent months, we’ve also seen mods that add new and bizarre seen for ray tracing. With every last modes of play to Teardown. My voxel at risk of being tossed around favorite is Basilisco, a terrifying killer the map, baked lighting wouldn’t cut robot snake that ﬂoats through the it—and while Teardown’s own ray skies with a piercing red spotlight. tracing solution isn’t as taxing or Evading this beast on a rain-soaked accurate as RTX, it perfectly paints night map turns Teardown into your rubble with accurate lighting. something akin to a survival horror There’s a phenomenal feeling that game. You’ll hear a shriek, and turn comes with seeing the light bounce to ﬁnd what was once an apartment block is now a pile of bricks. Tuxedo Labs has even been ‘Part 2’ of Teardown lately— TEARDOWN MAY USE VOXELS, teasing adding more physics toys like ropes BUT IT USES THEM TO CREATE and thrusters, along with some truly horriﬁc AI robots to stalk you SOMETHING GORGEOUS through a map. I’m not just excited about how these will offer more through the hole you just shotgunned opportunities to break apart the base out of a shack roof. Tear the roof off game—I’m thrilled to see what the a house in a storm, and the furniture community will do to build on and will get soaked, reﬂections dappled expand these tools. against their now-slick surfaces. Dropping into the Steam Teardown may use voxels, but it uses Workshop to see what’s new in them to create something gorgeous. Teardown has become a fun routine. It feels like popping down the shops, only instead of planning a new recipe KNOCK ’EM DOWN That, alone, would be enough to keep for dinner, I’m outlining what I want to smash up this week. Either way, me sticking around. Tuxedo Labs something’s getting ruined. itself has done a good enough job

CARNAGE REPORT

1

2

3

4

RIGHT: The eastbound

train has been diverted, somewhat.

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REINSTALL

OLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES

SIN

Remembering the last shooter of the pre-Half-Life world. By Phil Iwaniuk

O

n November 19, 1998, Sierra released Half-Life. In the time it took to install 300MB of exquisitely poised shooter off its CD-ROM, everything from the genre prior became part of a bygone era. And perhaps the unluckiest of the lot was Ritual’s SiN, which released just ten days before it. Here was a game that, like Half-Life, wanted to bring a bit more storytelling back to the genre after a long period of dominance from dialogue-averse id Software and similarly laconic newcomers Epic Games. It had a spectacularly named hero in John Blade, and in its antagonist Elexis Sinclaire a typically salacious depiction of a woman—though to give Ritual some credit, both black player-characters 98

and female CEOs were wildly progressive ideas for the era. It had voice actors. It was set in a recognizable near-future. There wasn’t an inverted cross, alien landscape, or power-up in sight. If John Romero wasn’t already turning in the grave, he was slowly digging for himself at Ion Storm, the posters on SiN’s walls hilariously stating ‘Lex to make Romero her bitch’ on them would have sealed it. Though it was destined to be forgotten in Gordon Freeman’s wake, the story goes like this: Billionaire biotech company owner and apparent PVC fetishist Elexis Sinclaire is making dangerous drugs that mutate humans into giant veiny hitboxes down in the Sintek labs. Freeport City PD’s ﬁnest and most implausibly musclebound colonel John R Blade gets wind of the scheme when his Hardcorps team is

TOP: Don’t do drugs,

kids—or else.

called into a bank robbery led by a mob boss, who abruptly erupts into something beastly and inhuman mid-chase. Blade, with hacker sidekick JC in his earpiece and splicing into various mainframes from back at headquarters, must track down the supply of the street drug U-4 causing the mutations and take down Sintek. Not one for the Booker shortlist, but SiN’s great appeal was, and remains, the sheer exuberance with which it goes about telling that tale. It’s a game full of moments that clearly, transparently began with someone at Ritual saying, “It’d be cool if…” Design document be damned. Market research can do one. What can this new toy of 3D interactive space do? It can drop you from a helicopter into a bank heist in progress. It can turn a construction site shootout into a platforming puzzle, and then throw a driveable digger in there purely to allow the player to bash a

NEED TO KNOW

RELEASE 1998 PUBLISHER Activision

DEVELOPER Ritual Entertainment LINK bit.ly/3krVRVs

EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY And you thought it all started with Deus Ex, eh?

Thus begins another chapter of ’90s forced stealth.

hole in the wall in real-time, then get out, and never operate another vehicle again. What was a bombastic corridor shooter in a subway station ﬁve minutes ago becomes a stealth game that asks you to sneak around the Sintek labs with nothing but judicious use of the crouch button to mask your presence.

CREEPING DEATH

That stealth section, just ﬁve missions into the story, proved an impasse for me at the time of SiN’s release. It’s tricky to shufﬂe around the many nigh-identical rooms of the laboratory and tick off the mission objectives without a single NPC, guard or camera spotting me now. To

THERE WASN’T AN INVERTED CROSS, ALIEN LANDSCAPE OR POWER-UP IN SIGHT

YEAR OF THE GUN A timeline of shooters from 1998

UNREAL MAY 22

Wake up on a wrecked prison space ship, meet Skarj, shoot Skarj, look incredulously at nice water. Pretty shallow, but Unreal made a leap forwards visually from incumbent FPS king Quake II.

TOM CLANCY’S RAINBOW SIX AUGUST 21

Guns, yes, but also: Tactics. A revolutionary idea only diminished by the clumsy planning stage which worked a bit like giving RTS-style orders then executing them.

SHOGO M.A.D. SEPTEMBER 30

Mechs, yes, but also: Guns. Will the revolutionary shooter ideas never cease this year? Monolith’s take on the FPS stood apart from the Quake clones. Also about 20 feet taller.

SIN NOVEMBER 9

As Quake and Unreal dialled back exposition and dialogue, SiN wanted to take FPS gaming in a more cinematic direction. Characters, plot, set-pieces… it was a grand plan.

HALF-LIFE NOVEMBER 19

It upstaged SiN. It made Unreal feel like a tech demo. Tom Clancy’s waypoints and Shogo’s mechs were laid to waste. So were the next 300 shooters. Gordon changed it all, forever.

13-year-old hands in ’98, it was unassailable. It would be months before I’d get to see its later levels. Months spent in the uncaring vision cones of Sintech’s spider robots and wall-mounted miniguns. The indignity of Mr Blade himself sliced and diced by high-calibre rounds. Modern sentiment towards such a hurdle at the hands of clumsy stealth mechanics would be damning, but you didn’t excommunicate a game for trying something in the beige age. Besides, I’d previously spent several days stuck on a construction site puzzle that required you to look up and shoot a girder out of the sky in order to rupture a water pipe at your feet, allowing Blade to swim out of the hole he was in. And another few days ﬁguring out a platforming run behind some loose bricks and ascending the ﬂoors of a derelict building in the precious few seconds before a bomb went off. What was another few weeks reloading the same quicksave? 99

REINSTALL

OLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES Nah, don’t mourn them. They knew who they were working for.

Where are your quips now we’re in the same room, huh JC?

SINCLAIR SPECTRUM

After clearing the stealth mission though, SiN’s digressions from the corridor shooting vogue of the time are fewer. Levels within Sinclair’s wicked facility can come and go with little imprint on the memory. There’s a sense that after the freewheeling nature of its opening levels, any further conversations that began, “It’d be cool if…” ended with, “Yeah, but we ship in two months.” Laboratories give way to warehouses and sewage works that might be visiting from any number of other shooters from that period, before SiN seems to remember itself again and start ﬂinging absurdly and hilariously disparate locations at you. Oil rigs. Jungle. The ocean ﬂoor. All perfectly reasonable places for a policeman to visit in pursuit of an evil biotech boss. While the cohesion of its levels ebbs and ﬂows in the moment, Ritual’s commitment to interactive toys is a constant. Computer consoles are a particular highlight, offering the odd moment of proto-immersive sim problemsolving. Then and now, the kick of disabling a whole area’s cameras or turrets from within a security room hits beautifully. You might even pad 100

Blade’s bank balance out by transferring funds from any number of Freeport City Bank’s customers, including one Billge Yeates and Elexis Sinclaire herself. Evidently nobody told her about company accounts. Twenty-three years later

BRINGING LEXY BACK

What Ms Sinclaire did next

WAGES OF SIN 1999

An expansion pack that pits John Blade against a crime boss who wants to take over Freeport.

SIN: EPISODES 2006

An episodic sequel with only one episode, titled ‘Emergence’. Poor sales did for the rest.

SIN: THE MOVIE 2000

Despite carrying the name, the animated movie adaptation plays pretty fast and loose with canon.

SIN RELOADED 2022?

A Night Dive remake running on the studio’s Kex Engine, coming out soon.

it’s still unclear what the advantage is of doing this, or why Ritual saw ﬁt to include it in the game. Like so many of SiN’s extraneous touches, I’m glad they did. Most lavish of all is the training facility, a lovingly constructed tutorial area that many players would wilfully breeze past on the way to a new game, or fail to spot on the main menu screen. Anyone who does would miss out on the skeet shooting and sniping ranges, the shooting galleries where cardboard terrorists and civilians pop up, and the inconspicuous buttons on the wall that deploy bleachers from the wall, as if all of John’s buddies are about to down tools and watch his mastery. Before you even get on the helicopter to that bank, you’re sold on the future-cop fantasy.

BLADE RUNNER

Before you install the game, in fact. SiN’s manual sets the scene before disc ever meets disc tray, detailing Blade’s troubled dreams and disturbed visions in diary form. A life on the beat, it appears, has taken its toll on the man’s psyche, and the appearance of a new street drug that makes monsters of people has done nothing to take the load off.

EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY Just another day for this guy down the mutant warehouse.

He’s quite a talented sketch artist too, is John. The nightmare visions he puts into form, all bulging eyes and blood vessels, are expertly drawn, if partially obscured by the manual’s faux coffee rings. Quite why Elexis Sinclaire wants to make monsters of people, all bulging eyes and blood vessels, is a question SiN barely scratches. She’s evil. She’s super-rich. Her eyebrows arch at an especially cruel angle. That’s all the insight as we get into the chief antagonist, which is as much of a shame as the asphyxiating latex she’s almost always wearing. As if a buttoned up blouse and pantsuit would have been the difference between playing it and leaving it on the shelf. Blade and JC fare much better under deeper character scrutiny. In keeping the cocksure young hacker away from the action and thus safe to chip in frequent jibes at his enormous boss, SiN ﬁnds a way to bring in some buddy cop comedy and make it the game’s own. Having JC there to observe the extraordinary events you’re shooting through and then banter with you elevates the story beyond its prosaic plotting. Without a spiky haired white hat watching, Blade would get

SIN FINDS A WAY TO BRING IN BUDDY COP COMEDY AND MAKE IT THE GAME’S OWN away with donning a lab tech’s yellow overalls to disguise himself without ridicule. And that would be inﬁnitely duller. As a helpful objective reminder and mechanic explainer, he’s there to address the player as much as the protagonist, but in the end it’s JC’s warm and insouciant bro-ing out with Blade that stands as one of the game’s more enduring components.

AGE OF INNOCENCE

It’s natural to feel nostalgic for this halcyon period of PC gaming, particularly since it’s been so adept at archiving and updating itself over the years—Night Dive just released a Gold version to Steam featuring the Wages of SiN expansion, and plans a full remaster soon. But the exact nature of what was so good about those days anyway can be hard to pinpoint. Enter a wobbly Quake II engine shooter, all ideas and precious little polish, that serves a handy reminder

that a crucial player in the PC gaming golden age was naivety. Ideas, set-pieces, and mechanics thrown in with reckless vigor and scant regard for timelines. Modern game dev is smart and efﬁcient. SiN had fully animated bleachers in the skeet shooting range of its optional police training level. Not that we lavished praise on this game and its ilk for their generosity at the time, you understand. This extravagance is something you can only get a sense of by playing a game now. No, at the time everybody was much too annoyed by the absurdly long load times—and subsequently bewitched by Half-Life—to appreciate SiN for what it was. The last luddite shooter before the industrial age, happy just to give you a handgun bigger than your entire forearm, a screen full of identical goons, and a driveable JCB you operate for ﬁve seconds then park up forever. Night Dive’s typically sterling work means it’s perfectly preserved for modern systems and, ﬁnally, easy to run on widescreen monitors. But Ritual’s plaudits are long overdue for crafting a shooter whose charms and replayability far exceed our estimations in 1998. 101

EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL I MUST PLAY TYLER WILDE

I recently bought a TV so that I can stop watching movies at my desk with the ShadowPlay overlay visible. It was expensive, so here are some not so expensive games.

DON’T STOP

LIVE FOR FUN

NEVER GET BORED

QUAKE (ENHANCED)

CALL OF JUAREZ: GUNSLINGER

COOKIE CLICKER

A remaster of the inspiration for all the filthy-looking, hard-angle-having shooters people over 35 keep making for each other. Make sure to rebind the mouse and keyboard controls tosome ridiculous pre-WASDconfigurationfor the old school experience.

No mucking about aroundhere: Just lots of dudes popping up from behind Old West things – bars, wagons, you know – and getting shot by you. $15 and 4.65GB gets you five or so hours of what we correctly considered high quality fun in 2013. Regularly on sale for even less.

The infamous web game about clicking on a cookie to make more cookies is now on Steam for $5. If you’re unsure why you’d want to click on a cookieto make more cookies, then try the free web version first. You may spend several hours not finding the answer.

bethesda.net/game/quake

BEG TO DIFFER

PLEASE, DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING bit.ly/3jFOj1a

Before the great Loop Hero, developer Four Quarters made this $5 game in which you aren’t meant to touch anything. But if you do press the big red button on the control panel you’re meant to leave alone, something might happen. And isn’t

MUST PLAY

A PERSONAL LIST OF THE BEST GAMES YOU CAN PLAY RIGHT NOW by Tyler Wilde

orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker

BREAK THE MOLD

BACK 4 BLOOD back4blood.com

The unofficial Left 4 Dead 3 is $60, which does feel a bit outdated for a four-player co-op game, even though it’s worth it. But B4B is also on Xbox Game Pass for PC, so you and your friends can go get chomped by a horde of zombos for $10 a month

GO PLAY

GET THE SHOW ON

GET PAID

LORDS OF THE FALLEN

FUSER

PUNCH CLUB

Instead of staring at the Elden Ring subreddit waiting for new details, play a game that probably isn’t as good as Elden Ring will be, but will sate your thirst for dodging giant swords anyway. LotF has gotten a few patches since my 58% review, and regularly goes on sale for $5.

$60 felt too pricey for this nifty Harmonix DJing sim, regardless of how much I enjoyed defacing recent hits by ruthlessly dropping the vocal track from Smash Mouth’s All Star into the middle of them. A year later, Fuser is down to a much more agreeable $20. Go ruin some songs.

I’ve recently gotten to know some amateur boxers, and it turns out that Punch Club presents a pretty accurate picture of a boxer’s life: Work, train, eat, sleep, fight. Granted, none of the boxers I’ve met have fought any crocodiles yet, but I’m sure that’ll happen any day now.

bit.ly/2Zjg8oF

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bit.ly/3bbmhWE

fuser.com

lazybeargames.com/game/punch-club

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of the best air coolers on the market.

the killer gamingrig of your dreams.

GROUP TEST Stay frosty with our pick

BUYER’S GUIDE Let us help you build

103

GROUP TEST

CPU AIR COOLERS

Keep your chip cool and quiet with one of PC Gamer’s recommended air coolers.

By Chris Szewczyk

T

hese days all-in-one liquid coolers seem to get all the attention. I get it, they look awesome and really add some personality to your rig. But let’s say you don’t have the budget for a liquid cooling solution but still need to cool your CPU. Here’s where the best CPU air coolers come in. Even the most expensive air cooler is nowhere near the cost of an

AIO liquid cooler, and they offer simplicity and reliability. Following the bigger is better mantra is a good start towards ﬁnding your ideal air cooler, but you need to make sure it ﬁts in your case. Noctua’s NH-D15 is a mighty beast, to say the least. There’s also some leeway on style here. While maybe not as ﬂashy as some liquid coolers, some air coolers do come with RGB lighting to add some pizzazz to your rig.

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HARDWARE

Group Test 2

AS500 Plus

Pure Rock 2

DEEPCOOL $45

BE QUIET! $39

A fantastic all-round cooler

An aﬀordable and eﬀective cooler that’s very quiet

The Deepcool AS500 received worthy attention when it was released, but the AS500 Plus with its additional fan elevates it to the point where it can compete with any single tower cooler on the market. At the same time, it undercuts competitors in price. Even if you spent double the money on a premium single tower cooler, your cooling performance won’t be a lot better. Its cooling ability belies its compact dimensions.Only more expensivedual tower coolers beat it, but not by a lot. Its dual fan design no doubt helps, though it’s

1

also quiet. Cooling and low noise levels are welcome, then add to that great build quality and subtle ARGB goodlooks andthere’s nothing to complain about. It even comes with its own ARGB controller, and there’s a white version too if you like. The Deepcool AS500 Plus punches above its weight. Short of stressing it with an overclocked high-end processor, the AS500 Plus ticks all the boxes. VERDICT Great value Low noiselevels Efficient cooling

SPECS SOCKET SUPPORT: INTEL 1200, 1150, 1151, 1155, 2011, 2066, AMD AM4, AM3, AM2, FM2 & FM1 COMPATIBLE / FANS: 2X 140 MM PWM / FAN SPEEDS: 500-1200 RPM / DIMENSIONS (L X W X H): 140 MM X 102 MM X 164 MM / NOISE LEVEL: MAX 31.5 DB(A)

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If the brand name didn’t already give it away, the Be Quiet Pure Rock 2 really is quiet! It’s a single tower cooler equipped with the company’shighly regarded Pure Wings 2 PWM fan which carries a low 26.8 dB(A) noise rating. That means it’s very quiet indeed. It feels really solid too, an indicator of good build quality, even at its low price.We wouldn’t describe the Pure Rock 2 as the most beautiful cooler on the market. But if you do have a windowed case, you could consider the smarter black version for a more polished look instead. The Pure

Rock 2 is primarily designed to cool, unseen and unheard. Though perhaps its 150W TDP is a touch optimistic, and at least an Intel Core i5 11600K or AMD Ryzen 7 5800X won’t present a problem for the Pure Rock 2. For anything other than high-end CPUs the Pure Rock 2 will keep your chip cool and quiet. If you’re not interested in bling and want something that’s a step up from bundled coolers, this is great. VERDICT Very quiet operation Great price Good build quality

SPECS SOCKET SUPPORT: INTEL LGA 1150, 1151, 1155, 1200, 2011, 2011-3, 2066, AMD AM3 & AM4 COMPATIBLE / FANS: 1X PURE WINGS 2 120MM / FAN SPEEDS: UP TO 1500 RPM / DIMENSIONS (L X W X H): 87 MM X 121 MM X 155 MM / NOISE LEVEL: MAX 26.8 DB(A)

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GROUP TEST

EXCELLENT FANS THAT ARE A WELCOME BLACK COLOR

NH-D15 Chromax Black

3

NH-P1

NOCTUA $110

NOCTUA $110

Air cooling at its best

Quiet computing enthusiasts, look here

The Noctua NH-D15 Chromax Black is considered by many to be the best air cooler on the market. We really love it too. It performs brilliantly, it’s got excellent fans that are a welcome black color, and its build quality is fantastic. Really only 360mm AIO coolers outperform it. If you want an air cooler that can handle any consumer CPU on the market, you might find one to match the Noctua flagship, butyou won’t find any that truly beat it. Under normal operation the NH-D15 can be considered silent, but when pushed hard it becomes louder

3

than you might expect. Though we don’t mind having some optional cooling headroom when needed. Its expense, and sheer size, are the only things that count against it in my eyes. Notably, though, Noctua has a tradition of support for new sockets, and LGA 1700 support will either be included in the box or available to you as a free kit, depending on when that NH-D15 was made. VERDICT Excellent fans Optional cooling headroom Can handle any consumer CPU

SPECS SOCKET SUPPORT: INTEL LGA 1150, 1151, 1155, 1156, 1200, 2011, 2011-3, 2066, AMD AM4, AM3, AM2, FM2 & FM1 COMPATIBLE / FANS: 2X NF-A15 HS-PWM / FAN SPEEDS: 300-1500 RPM / DIMENSIONS (L X W X H): 161 MM X 150 MM X 165 MM / NOISE LEVEL: MAX 24.6 DB(A)

106

Noctua’s NH-P1 passive cooler is very much a niche product, and one that fans of quiet computing have been looking forward to for some time. It’s expensive, bulky, and generally limited to CPUs in the 65W range. Sounds like a dud? Hell no. Its appeal may be limited, but if you’re a user who values silence above anything else, then the NH-P1 will be exactly what you’re looking for. The NH-P1 is a great match for something like an AMD 5700G. That way you could omit a discrete GPU and play esport titles in silence. The NH-P1 will keep this class of CPU

4

boosting to its max, but only if you have at least some airflow. The chances are you have a rear case fan that’s not far away from it anyway. If you want, you can still opt to attach a fan, too. The NH-P1 is built for a specific purpose. If you sleep near your PC or run a lounge room media center, the NH-P1 will go a long way to ensuring that your PC is truly silent. Clearly it’s not meant for everyone though. VERDICT Silent! Every aspect of it is premium You can add fans if you want

SPECS SOCKET SUPPORT: INTEL LGA 1150, 1151, 1155, 1156, 1200, 2011, 2011-3, 2066, AMD AM4, AM3, AM2, FM2 & FM1 COMPATIBLE / FANS: N/A / FAN SPEEDS: N/A / DIMENSIONS (L X W X H): 152MM X 154 MM X 158 MM / NOISE LEVEL:0 DB(A)

HARDWARE

Group Test

WHAT CPU SOCKETS DO AIR COOLERS WORK WITH?

4 5

6

C7

Not all coolers support all CPU sockets. Cooling for AMD Threadripper CPUs can be tricky, for example, as the sheer size of these chips mean you’ll want proper coveragefor optimum cooling. Similarly, Intel 12th Gen LGA 1700 compatibility is now a topic of discussion, so pay close attention to the list of supported sockets if you’re investing in one of those. Stock from earlier in 2021 will definitely lack support, but you may be able to find a compatibilitykit. When it comes to AMD Ryzen desktop CPU support, things get a little easier. Aside from the aforementioned Threadripper chips, all other Ryzen CPUs use the same AM4 socket. That means that any CPU cooler that lists AM4 support is good right the way up to the current Ryzen 5000-series CPUs.

Dark Rock TF 2

CRYORIG $30

BE QUIET! $86

A great choice for a truly tiny system

Cooling for your whole system

The Cryorig C7 has been on the market for some time, but it’s been updated to support newer sockets. It’s perfect for a truly compact small form factor system thanks to its 47mm height and adherence to ‘keep-out’ zones, where it will not interfere in any way with other system components. The C7 destroys the stock Intel cooler. It’s rated for up to 100W but is better suited to 65W class CPUs. This leaves it a bit of headroom for Turbo bursts. If you’re overclocking, or using a high core-count processor, you

Keeping your CPU cool is vital, but so is overall system cooling. A cooler like the Be Quiet Dark Rock TF 2 blows air downwards, which helps to keep hot running M.2 drives, and your vital motherboard VRM, running cool. This is something that can often be overlooked in AIO cooled systems that lack good airflow over the motherboard, particularly if you have a GPU heating up everything around it. The Dark Rock TF2 performs much like other single tower air coolers, and though it’s on the pricey side, it’s not unreasonably sogiven the

5

can give it a pass, but that’s to be expected. With the right CPU it will stay surprisingly quiet for its compact size. Its top flow design will help to cool the VRM and M.2 SSD, too, something that can be neglected in compact systems. The Cryorig C7 is a niche cooler, but for the tiniest builds, the C7 does an admirable job. If you want a little bit of extra TDP headroom, there are copper and graphene coated versions, too. VERDICT Truly tiny size Cools well considering its size Quiet lowload operation

SPECS SOCKET SUPPORT: INTEL 1200, 1150, 1151, 1155, 1156, AMD AM4, AM3, AM2, FM2 & FM1 COMPATIBLE / FANS: 1X 92MM QUAD AIR INLET / FAN SPEEDS: 600-2500 RPM / DIMENSIONS (L X W X H): 97 MM X 97 MM X 47 MM / NOISE LEVEL: MAX 30 DB(A)

6

inclusion of two high-quality fans. Its ability to mount a fan above or below the heatsink (orboth) adds a lot of installation flexibility. You can use it in all kinds of systems from powerful gaming PCs through to compact SFF systems. In the Be Quiet tradition, the Dark Rock TF 2 is very quiet, particularly under low loads and with a rating of up to 230W, it can handle all modern CPUs, though overclocking will be beyond it. VERDICT Downward blowing for more cooling Quiet operation Good build quality

SPECS SOCKET SUPPORT: INTEL LGA 1150, 1151, 1155, 1200, 2011, 2011-3, 2066, AMD AM3 & AM4 COMPATIBLE / FANS: 1X SILENT WINGS 3 135MM, 1X SILENT WINGS 135 MM / FAN SPEEDS: UP TO 1400 RPM / DIMENSIONS (L X W X H): 163 MM X 140 MM X 134 M / NOISE LEVEL: MAX 27.1 DB(A)

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YOUR NEXT P C

BUYER’S GUIDE Build the best PC for your budget

ADVANCED MID-RANGE BUDGET

Budget build

PC gaming is for everyone. Pick the parts you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price. 108

KEY 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.

HARDWARE

Buyer’s Guide

ROSSECORP DRAC SCIHPARG

Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank

D R AO B R E H T O M

BUDGET BUILD

A320M-A Pro

MSI $69 Everything you need and nothing else. This MSI motherboard is simple, but it works. And that’s all we can ask for at this price.

Ryzen 5 3400G

AMD $150 Capable budget CPU and GPU in one tiny package, and it also comes with its very own CPU cooler.

None

This build is tailored to today’s GPU shortage. But don’t fret, once cards are back in stock, you could slot one in to this PC for an upgrade.

RELOOC

Wraith Spire

AMD Free with CPU The Wraith Stealth is a great cooler made even better by the fact it comes free with our choice of chip. Budget heaven.

YROMEM

Vegeance LPX 8GB (2x 4GB) DDR4-3000

Corsair $65 For gaming we only really need 8GB of RAM, and this stuff is quick to boot.

YLPPUS REWOP

MWE White 400W

Cooler Master $48 Small by today’s standards, this PSU from a trusty manufacturer offers plenty of juice for this buildm and a little more.

DSS

MX500 500GB

Crucial $54 One of the best value SATA SSDs you can buy, and plenty fast enough for a snappy OS. DDH

WD Blue 1TB 7200rpm

ESAC

Neos

YA L P S I D DRAOBYEK ESUOM

TOTAL $697

Western Digital $43 You don’t necessarily need a HDD in 2020, but if you’re a virtual hoarder, this’ll give you loads of useful extra space. BitFenix $65 You’ll want to minimize how often you rebuild your PC, so make sure to give it a good home. This case’ll do nicely.

GW2280

BenQ $113 A 1080p60 VA monitor will see you through in style and, once you upgrade, will make a superb second monitor.

G213

Logitech $60 It may be a membrane switch board, but it’s stylish, and well-built. Sometimes that’s worth more than cheap clicky switches.

G102

Logitech $30 A classic shape delivered in a sleek shell, this mouse fits all hand sizes and grips. A solid option for the money. 109

HARDWARE

Buyer’s Guide

ROSSECORP DRAC SCIHPARG

Our recommended build for playing the latest games

D R AO B R E H T O M

MID-RANGE BUILD

RELOOC YROMEM YLPPUS REWOP

Ryzen 5 3600X

AMD $210 This CPU is one of the greats, and uses the Zen 2 architecture to dominate in gaming and productivity.

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Ed. Nvidia $399 The RTX 3060 Ti is a little overkill, but we’re willing to make sacrifices elsewhere to make it work.

Wraith Spire

AMD Free with the CPU We love a freebie, especially one as capable as the cooler included with the 3600X. This’ll keep your machine running smoothly.

Ballistix 16GB DDR4 (2x8GB)

Crucial $80 With plenty of capacity at 16GB, this unembellished memory has everything you need for gaming and more.

CX650M

Corsair $108 The heart of your gaming PC is your PSU, and this 650W Corsair promises to keep your rig ticking nicely.

S70 1TB

DDH

WD Blue 1TB 7200rpm

ESAC

Eclipse P400S TG

YA L P S I D DRAOBYEK ESUOM

110

MSI $115 A reliable platform for your build, the Tomahawk Max also comes in black to complement any style.

DSS

TOTAL $1,497

B450 Tomahawk Max

Addlink $44 Building on a budget doesn’t mean sacrificing speed—the Addlink S70 proves you can indeed have both. Western Digital $43 Just like in the budget build, this HDD isn’t strictly necessary, but for a pretty low price it’s nice to have plenty of extra space. Phanteks $90 An ATX case is all you need for this build. We like this one because it’s simple, functional, and really nice to look at.

AOC G2590FX

AOC $236 Everything a PC gamer could want: 144Hz refresh rate, 1ms response time, and it’s AMD FreeSync and Nvidia G-Sync compatible.

Alloy FPS

HyperX$97 As the name suggests, this keyboard is built like an absolute tank, with a steel frame and Cherry MX switches.

Model O-

Glorious $75 Lightweight and responsive, the Model Ohas made a name for itself among streamers and pros thanks to its clever design.

HARDWARE

Buyer’s Guide

ROSSECORP DRAC SCIHPARG

Go above and beyond with a PC powerful enough to end worlds

D R AO B R E H T O M

ADVANCED BUILD

RELOOC YROMEM YLPPUS REWOP

MSI $280 The MSI Gaming Pro Carbon isn’t the most lavish X570 going, but it’s pretty darn close without the ludicrous price tag.

Ryzen 9 5900X

AMD $549 AMD’s latest Zen 3 architecture cruises through the newest games, and hands you plenty of cores for CPU-intensive workloads.

GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Ed Nvidia $1,199 The RTX 3080 Ti is the latest flagship graphics card from Nvidia, but savvy builders may prefer the RTX 3080.

Kraken X63

NZXT $150 One of the most stunning AIO coolers rebuilt with an updated pump and, of course, RGB lighting for more pizzazz.

Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB) @ 3,600 Corsair $170 If you truly want to show off, even your system memory should be aglow in RGB.

SuperNOVA 1000 G5 Gold

EVGA $214 This caliber of gaming PC draws a lot of power. Thankfully, this PSU can handle it with high efficiency

DSS

WD Black SN850 1TB

DDH

860 QVO 2TB

ESAC

600C

YA L P S I D DRAOBYEK ESUOM

TOTAL $4,215

MPG X570 Gaming Pro Carbon WiFi

Western Digital $229 Western Digital is delivering PCIe 4.0 speeds with the SN850, making the most of that AMD Ryzen platform. Samsung $243 Built on QLC flash memory, it’s not the quickest storage around, but it’s a speedy alternative to a HDD. Corsair $149 If you’re going big on parts, you should grab a case that has plenty of room for upgrades down the line. This one will do just fine.

Nitro XV273K

Acer $650 This one’s an easy choice—4K and 144Hz for under $1,000 is an offer we can’t refuse, and neither should you.

G915 Lightspeed

Logitech $245 Low-profile mechanical switches are just the icing on the cake that is the superb, wireless Logitech G915.

G502 Lightspeed

Logitech $137 With a lengthy battery life and a phenomenal sensor to keep you gaming at your best, the G502 is undoubtedly one of the finest. 111

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