Home//PC Gamer/January 2021/In This Issue
PC Gamer|January 2021“GRIMDARKNESS, OVER-THE-TOP VIOLENCE, AND HUMOUR”You can barely swing a Catachan death-feline these days without hitting a Warhammer game – and the sad truth is, a lot of them aren’t great. But that only makes it more special when a developer really getsGames Workshop’s worlds. And is there any developer that gets it more than Fatshark? With the Vermintideseries it found the perfect balance of grimdarkness, over-the-top violence, and most importantly absurdity and humour. I couldn’t be more excited that they’re back to take a crack at 40,000 – and to mix up their co-op formula with even bigger, spikier weapons of war… ROBIN VALENTINE Specialist in Heresy Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Fell in with a bad horde.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021HACK THE PLANETMicrosoft Flight Simulator’s version of Earth is a marvel. Satellite data from Bing Maps (hey, someone’s got to use it) interpreted by Microsoft’s Azure AI platform creates an approximation of our planet, all 200 million square miles of it. The result is a feat of engineering to rival the real-life aircraft you fly over it – an evolutionary leap from Google Earth, exactly the world tourism simulator we all need right now. Except when it’s not. Drop beneath the clouds, and you may notice the generic office buildings that replaced iconic landmarks such as the Washington Monument and Buckingham Palace. Or the Brazilian airfield swallowed by a mile-deep chasm. Or the 2,000-foot monolith piercing the skies of Melbourne, apparently the result of a typo in OpenStreetMap, a source that Bing…4 min
PC Gamer|January 2021DOOM SCROLLROMERO HAD QUIT OVER FRUSTRATION WITH CARMACK’S BELIEF THAT TECH SHOULD COME FIRST In the early days, id Software was all about ego. It wasn’t unique in that regard: like practically all of its contemporaries, id was founded by kids of the late ’70s and early ’80s, for whom game development had started as a bedroom hobby. Without university courses or internships, theirs had been a self-directed education – driven by the thrill of getting light to move across a screen. Knowledge was shared, through computer clubs and magazines, but games of the time were not made through teamwork – instead they were the godlike act of an individual typing the most efficient, creative and accurate code into an Apple II keyboard. Thanks to the accessibility and simplicity of the…5 min
PC Gamer|January 2021GOODBYE VOLCANO HIGHYou’d be forgiven for thinking that, of the many things a game about dinosaurs that go to high school is likely to be, ‘relatable’ isn’t one of them. Yet you would be wrong. Despite the dinos, this is set to be a game that tells a deep, surprisingly human story. Goodbye Volcano High is a narrative adventure game. The player drops in when graduation is on the horizon and the protagonist, Fang, needs to make a decision about where they want their life to go. “What this game is really about,” says Saleem Dabbous, studio director and Goodbye Volcano High co-director, “is asking yourselves, if you knew everything was going to come to an end, what would you do with that time? What are the choices that you would make?…3 min
PC Gamer|January 2021SECOND EXTINCTIONThe Ankylosaurus roamed the plains of what is now North America in the late Cretaceous period. It weighed as much as a pair of rhinos, and put their thick skin and horns to shame with an armoured shell and bony club at the end of its tail that could sweep predators’ legs from under them. Seventy million years later, it was discovered by a Victorian palaeontologist named after – of all people – PT Barnum, the circus barker from that Hugh Jackman musical. And a century after that, I’ve just managed to get one tipped onto its back, and am hastily emptying my minigun’s entire belt feed into the glowing weak spot on its exposed belly. (Oddly enough, this tactic is kind of historically accurate, minigun aside – flipping an…3 min
PC Gamer|January 2021TOOLS OF THE TRADEBOLTGUN The standard Space Marine weapon, the boltgun is a devastating bit of a kit – a mobile cannon that can blow enemies to smithereens. Smaller versions are carried by the Astra Militarum. LASGUN The main weapon of the Imperial army, the lasgun shoots out a focused energy beam that can sear off limbs and even puncture power armour. It’s not the beast the bolter is, but it’s still a good, solid weapon. CHAINSWORD The classic melee weapon of the Imperium across the galaxy. Its sharp, grinding teeth make quick work of thick armour and alien flesh. It’s usually accompanied by a gun, so you can shoot and shred. POWER HAMMER This bad boy is as good at cracking armour as it is rocks thanks to the disruption field that…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021HALF-LIFE: ALYXChris Livingston: Whatever tech wizardry Valve did under the hood, it allowed me to play Half-Life: Alyx for sessions lasting for hours at a time without headaches. That’s something I’ve never managed to do in VR before, as typically after a half-hour of wearing a headset I’m ready for a break. Alyx is also, by far, the best looking VR game I’ve ever played, with so many stop-and-stare moments I lost track. But Alyx’s true success is in somehow finding the waning interest I had in the Half-Life saga after all these years and setting it ablaze again. The first half of the game dragged more than a little, confining me to slimy sewers and throwing headcrabs at my face, but the second half became a thrilling adventure as the…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021DOOM ETERNALJames Davenport: I could fill a bathtub with the palm sweat Doom Eternal milked from me this year. It is easily the most intense shooter of 2020, and not just because it throws dozens of demons at you at once. Arenas are filled with hazards and demon compositions designed to test FPS habits, old and new. The most hated enemy of 2020 might be the Marauder, who inverts your embedded Doom habits with melee duels. The expansion continues the trend: the Spirit possesses and buffs fellow demons, while the giant tentacle pancakes whole arenas while the ants (you and co) below duke it out. Pointing and clicking alone won’t cut the cake. Eternal demands sharp situational awareness at 1,000 mph. All the while you’re treading water, topping up resources with…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021ASSASSIN’S CREED VALHALLASteven Messner: Valhallawas a bit of a surprise to me, honestly. I expected it to be pretty good, but I had no idea that Ubisoft’s next Assassin’s Creedwas going to be such a memorable adventure. What matters here are the little details – the numerous ways Ubisoft listened to feedback from Odysseyto make Valhalla a much more inviting RPG. Level-gating is gone, the open-world doesn’t feel like a checklist of boring activities, and the combat has been refined to include more depth. It’s also the first time an Assassin’s Creedstory really gripped me from beginning to end. Odyssey’s storytelling was often clunky and a little obtuse, but Valhalladoes a fantastic job of exploring Eivor’s relationship with her adoptive brother Sigurd while questioning the traditions of Norse culture with a surprising…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021PHASMOPHOBIARich Stanton: The first thing my team of crack spook-hunters look at in a Phasmophobiamission is whether the ghost responds to everyone, or only people who are alone. When it’s the latter, the mood darkens. Communication is at the heart of this experience, and even the most hardened don’t enjoy being alone with a ghost. The array of equipment forces the team to work in tandem, necessitating constant chatting, while the ghost ‘listens’ to what’s being said. Rule one: never admit you’re scared. The most common sentences in the game begin with “I think I saw…” as one player half-catches something and the team rushes over. When the lights are on and you’re setting up, it’s all bonhomie and wisecracks about the wallpaper. Then stuff starts to happen, the chat…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021HOW WE REVIEWWe review each game on its own merits, and try to match it to a reviewer who’s a passionate expert in the field. The main aim of reviews is to help you make buying decisions. To this end, we’re selective about what we review, and try to focus on the notable, interesting, exciting or surprising. DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT DLC might be new missions for a game, or it might be a single new item. If we think you want to know about it, we’ll review it. EARLY ACCESS Any released alpha, beta, or otherwise unfinished game that you can currently pay for. For these games, we won’t assign a score, but we will tell you whether they’re worth your time. THEY’RE BACK Whenever there’s a bargain or re-release of a significant…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021This month’s hairy, axe-wielding reviewers…STEVEN MESSNER Specialist in Viking stealth. Currently playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla This month ‘Assassinated’ half of England with an axe. ANDY KELLY Specialist in Whatever the hell is going on in Yakuza. Currently playing Yakuza: Like a Dragon This month Put a chicken in charge of a shop. That’s one way to make a buck. LUKE KEMP Specialist in Hawking his wares. Currently playing The Falconeer, The Pathless This month Diligently covered all this month’s bird-based indies. TYLER WILDE Specialist in Eating things he finds on the floor. Currently playing Bugsnax This month Got to critique someone else’s bad puns for once. CHRIS LIVINGSTON Specialist in Making friends. Currently playing Watch Dogs Legion This month Built a deadly team of living statues and terminally ill writers. TOM SYKES Specialist in…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021FREAK SHOWPSEUDOTRASH This oddball disguises himself as a bin bag and ambushes you as you walk by. DINE-AND-DASHER Big lads who are the scourge of Yokohama’s streets. WELTRAISER A body piercing fanatic who has modified himself so much that he no longer feels pain. IMP PATIENT A patient who has escaped from his ward. Sneezes on you and gives you a debilitating cold. TURNCOAT TITILLATOR Creeps who inflict negative status effects by dancing suggestively. FASHION POLICE A fashionista who attacks anyone he sees who has zero fashion sense.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021ANOTHER BUG-HUNTThe bugsnax that affected me most is the weenyworm. A weenyworm is a hot dog (with bun) that squiggles around in a circle saying “weenyworm” in a sing-songy voice I’d describe as ‘nasal’ if that didn’t imply a nose, which weenyworms don’t have. “Weeny… weenyworm,” it says again and again as it circles, waiting for me to capture it and feed it to a grumpus – a furry person, more or less, whose body parts turn into the bugsnax they eat. As you may have guessed, the bugsnax are literally bug-like snacks Bizarrely, grumpuses love turning into bugsnax. And they aren’t Justin Roiland-style shrieking monsters. They’re regular people, albeit bean-like and snaggletoothed. They’re cute, actually, and when they aren’t becoming snack foods, they even edge past wackiness and sentimentality and…4 min
PC Gamer|January 2021SCOOBY GANGCerebral horror is fine, but I like my scares to come from monster chases and stuff jumping out of the shadows. Idiots in peril, abandoned towns, maybe some ghosts – that’s where I get my thrills. Little Hope, the second game in the Dark Pictures Anthology, has all of that, along with multiplayer modes that help it simultaneously capture the experience of watching and being inside a goofy horror flick with your pals. Nobody really gets along that well in Little Hope Like its predecessor, Man of Medan, it’s through the co-op modes that the game reveals all of its mysteries. In singleplayer, you’ll control different members of the stranded quintet, trapped in the town of Little Hope by fog and plagued by visions of 17th century witch trials. The…4 min
PC Gamer|January 2021DRONE ZONECTOS DRONE Pros: Like smartphones, they’re everywhere and easy to find. Cons: Can only distract enemies, can’t attack them. PARCEL DRONE Pros: Can drop little boxes on people. Sometimes they explode! Cons: Someone is impatiently waiting for that package. NEWS DRONE Pros: Can take pictures and daze crowds with a camera flash. Cons: Like the news industry itself, it’s pretty fragile. RIOT DRONE Pros: Has a shotgun and can fire gas canisters. Cons: It’s usually firing them at you. Best to hack it as soon as possible. CT DRONE Pros: Has a heavy machine-gun and lots of missiles. Cons: Built by the lowest bidder: constantly overheats.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021FEEL LUCKY, CYBERPUNK?The fundamental concept is easy to understand, and mildly terrifying. Each enemy dies in one hit, and so do you. You’ll sometimes die (many) more times in one level here than in an entire game elsewhere. It’s hard – brutally, unforgivingly so – but fair in a way that some obnoxiously difficult games don’t even try to be. I’ve brought a knife to a gun fight, and I love it. If you’re moving, you’re running. To stay still is ordinarily to invite death; most enemies have guns, they’re all excellent shots, and you only have a sword. There’s no time for quiet contemplation while you’re in the air or running along walls either. Miss a jump or react too slowly to fling yourself at the next wall, and you’ll fall…3 min
PC Gamer|January 2021COLLISION COURSEI feel that Spårvagnis a game that knows it’s frustrating. Why else would this game of metropolitan tram traffic control feature such a soothing ambient soundtrack? Without it, I might have thrown a trammy tantrum and thrown in the towel before finishing it, but that minimalist soundtrack – and its beautifully alive top-down city – combined to offset the frustration, just long enough for me to complete its handful of stages. In each cityscape, you have to manage a couple of tram lines long enough for all the waiting passengers to be collected. The trams move automatically, but you can pause them momentarily by clicking on them – and if you don’t, a collision will occur sooner or later. However, leave them paused toolong and they might be bashed from…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021BUG SMACKSThe theme this month was meant to be festive. And with that in mind, Hollow Knight is a stretch but it’s a winter-adjacent excuse to play one of the best Metroidvania games ever made. Another is that it’s simply brilliant. There’s a crispness to it all that satisfies like stepping on a semi-frozen puddle – a clear, sharp sense of purpose that’s unusually compelling, even if it can be a harsh experience at times. The setting of Hallownest is uniquely appealing despite having the same wistful sense of decay that British seaside resorts have in October. It’s a place long past its prime, full of echoes of former glory. But it doesn’t have the same oppressive gloom as its thematic gaming counterparts, such as the likes of Lordran. Despite it…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021THE LONG DARKI’m not saying that my current playthrough of The Long Dark is going badly. Just that I might struggle to survive if I don’t manage to kill this rabbit by chucking stones at its adorable head. And I just ran out of stones. It’s one of those games that remind you just how dead you’d be if you had to spend even one night outside in mild temperatures, let alone an endless winter in the wake of a geothermal disaster. It’s a brutal, unusually brilliant survival game, but it’s utterly terrible for your self esteem.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021MIND READINGA lot of sci-fi ideas seem to have their roots in the ’70s. We don’t know whether it’s the availability of mind-bending drugs at the time, or the free love, or the fashions, but something seems to have sparked off a load of ideas that still seem modern today. One of those ideas is the brain/computer interface (BCI), which you kind of expect Elon Musk to talk about in the same way he might discuss hollowing out a volcano, but sit up and take notice when Valve starts talking about it too. Research into them began in the ’70s, and earlier this year the UK Government received a report into them from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, in which it was stated that entertainment companies are developing non-invasive…5 min
PC Gamer|January 2021ADVANCED BUILDMOTHERBOARD MPG Z490 Gaming Carbon WiFi MSI £260 A heady mix of enthusiast motherboard functionality and build quality that stops short of god-tier motherboard pricing. PROCESSOR Core i9 10900K Intel £529 If you want the fastest gaming CPU, look no further than Intel’s flagship Core i9. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition Nvidia £649 The RTX 3080 is the flagship graphics card of an entire new GPU generation. COOLER Kraken X63 NZXT £123 One of the most stunning AIO coolers rebuilt with an updated pump and, of course, RGB lighting for more pizzazz. MEMORY Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB) @ 3,200 Corsair £176 If you truly want to show off, even your system memory should be aglow in RGB. POWER SUPPLY SuperNOVA 1000 G5 Gold EVGA £200 This…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021“It feels like a wacky spin on the usual format rather than a fresh new entity”Hearthstone’s new Duels mode feels a bit like playing the results of a teleporter accident. Blizzard has spliced something I love with something I very much do not. The result feels like an amped up version of the already fairly deranged main game. The unevenness comes as no surprise given that, as I write this, Duels is in Early Access. Borrowing from Arena, your aim is to build a deck capable or racking up 12 wins against human opponents – but lose three times and you’re out. Where the Dungeon Run element comes in is that you add to the deck after each game, picking bundles of cards from themed ‘buckets’ which will nudge your playstyle in a particular direction. So far, so Hearthstone. The real spice comes from the…3 min
PC Gamer|January 2021FALLOUT: NEW VEGASEver since Microsoft announced its Bethesda acquisition, Fallout: New Vegas has been on my mind. With Obsidian and Bethesda now sharing the Microsoft umbrella, speculation about a sequel or remaster to the western apocalypse are both rampant. I highly doubt we’ll see either of those two things happen. Not soon, in any case. Although an official remaster would be nice, Fallout: New Vegas has recently passed its tenth anniversary, meaning it has a decade of mods accumulated for making your own remastered version. Ten years of mods is quite a pile to sift through though. Some have been abandoned and others are redundant. Some are shiny and new but less developed than other old faithful options. In honour of its big birthday, I’m setting out to find the most faithful…7 min
PC Gamer|January 2021TRYING TO BE JUST AND PIOUS IN CRUSADER KINGS III PART IIQuick recap: I’m trying to ignore the urges this game inspires in me and everybody else, and be lovely, kind and noble at every possible opportunity; unless I catch anybody being in any way immoral, then they shall feel my pious wrath. After losing every square inch of the kingdom of England with a speed that I almost feel I should be proud of, I moved on to Jarl Isleifur of medieval Iceland. My jolly nature has won me a friend named Yosi… and bandits running rampant throughout my realm thanks to my lack of ruthlessness. After going on a pilgrimage hoping for a bit of deus ex machina, I am now returned, holier than a wagon full of Swiss cheese but in debt thanks to the costs of my…9 min
PC Gamer|January 2021RECURSIONSJanuary 2001 RuneScape launches. December 2003 The RuneScape 2 beta begins. March 2004 RuneScape 2 becomes RuneScape. The old version becomes RuneScape Classic. February 2013 Old School RuneScape launches, bringing back a version of the game from 2007. April 2013 The RuneScape 3 beta goes live. July 2013 RuneScape 3 becomes RuneScape. April 2016 A new game client is released. August 2018 RuneScape Classic closes. Jagex delays the shutdown to let one player finish the Legends’ Quest. October 2020 RuneScape releases on Steam. Early 2021 The Steam release window for Old School RuneScape.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 20212020 VS 40KA global pandemic forces us all to stay inside and listen to burbling politicians. A galactic pandemic forces us to join the armies of Nurgle and listen to burbling daemons. Fascism and authoritarian thought rises inexorably across the globe. Fascism rose 25,000 years ago, but at least it has cool spaceships. You can rebel against the status quo by retweeting an article you didn’t read. You can rebel against the status quo by summoning dark forces you cannot comprehend. Become numbed to fear through overexposure to a 24 hours news cycle. Become numbed to fear because you’ve been turned into a genetically-enhanced super soldier. You have to wear a mask over your face just to go to the shops. You have to wear a rebreather over your face just to…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021The PC Gamer teamRICH STANTON Specialist in Extremely outdated headshots Twitter Er, nope This month Became our new News Editor and official Kojima Enthusiast. FRASER BROWN Specialist in Painting Necrons Twitter @FraserIBrown This month Got promoted to be our Online Editor. To be honest he has always been extremely online. RACHEL WATTS Specialist in Playing by the book Twitter @rachel_wattts This month Added a touch of lightness to our grimdark issue over in previews. Absolutely unacceptable. JAMES DAVENPORT Specialist in Comments sections Twitter @my_beards This month Successfully argued for a GOTY decision that is almost certainly going to make you angry.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021The SpyThe Spy has finally accepted that the internet is here to stay. Originally, The Spy assumed it was a pointless novelty, in part – The Spy has since learned – due to a coordinated and malicious rickrolling campaign. “All links lead to Astley,” The Spy thought. “This will never catch on.” And yet it appears The Spy was wrong; such was the people’s need for an on-demand source of Never Gonna Give You Up. And also it turns out that other websites did actually exist. The Spy isn’t clear on the details. After briefly catching up on the last decade of online trends, The Spy took the obvious next step of figuring out how to utilise this tool for The Spy’s own personal gain at the expense of others. Unfortunately…3 min
PC Gamer|January 2021WEIRD WORLDTHE MELBOURNE ANOMALY The one that started it all – a 212-storey omen that, when the Combine come for Earth, Australia will be first. THE BENEVENTO TWIN But it’s not alone. Rising out of the Italian countryside, this tower is too eldritch for its peaceful surroundings. THE JAPANESE DEATH SPIKES Located in the Saga prefecture, these spines appear to be… oh God… organic in nature? Horrifying. THE LAGOA NOVA PIT You can take off from the airstrip at the bottom of this chasm, but be warned: physics get a little weird down there.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021ENGINE DRIVERSQUAKE Planned as a Thor simulator, but wound up as an FPS. QUAKE II PC Gamer called it “sensational and subtle”. QUAKE III ARENA No single-player, unless you count the bots. QUAKE LIVE The last word in hyperspeed deathmatch. QUAKE CHAMPIONS Tim Willits’ loving tribute to mid-air murder. WOLFENSTEIN 3D First-person shooting with no ceiling. Literally. DOOM Still eminently playable for its pace and whooshing projectiles. DOOM II More of a level pack than a sequel; dizzyingly creative nonetheless. DOOM 3 The scariest and slowest of id’s catalogue. DOOM 4 A cancelled, story-driven reboot sometimes dubbed ‘Call of Doom’. DOOM (2016) FoldedQuake-style arenas into single-player, with terrific results. DOOM ETERNAL Bolder, tougher, and more tactical. DOOM ETERNAL: THE ANCIENT GODS - PART ONE The fastest game of chess ever. DARKNESS…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021KING OF SEASPirate. Game. Not that kind. If you’re anything like me, those two words are enough to generate excitement (the concept) and despair (recent examples) in equal measure. By concentrating on sailing, and ensuring that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, King of Seas seems to be setting course for success. Considering the fact that your character is something of a reluctant pirate – you play as the son or daughter of the king of the seas, framed for his murder – you don’t wait long to start causing chaos, graduating from delivery person to merchant murderer with amusing speed. My first truly piratey objective is to sink three merchant ships. The preview build is limited to 45 minutes of play, and each time I run through, I never seem to…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021LIGHT IT UPAfter more than five years surrounded by Vermintide’s skittering, shrieking Skaven, Fatshark has jumped into the grimdark future of Warhammer 40,000. Darktidepits another four brave souls against unrelenting waves of monstrous enemies in a city being corrupted by the power of Chaos. It’s a meat grinder, but you get to be the teeth, chewing through hordes, leaving nothing but dismembered body parts in your bloody wake. And this time, there are chainswords. “AS WE’VE SEEN IN VERMINTIDE, PLAYERS REALLY ENJOY TWEAKING THEIR LOADOUTS” There was a teaser trailer in July, but since then Fatshark hasn’t given much away about its next co-op outing. Chatting to the team, it’s clear they’re being careful about what exactly they reveal at what is still a fairly early stage. They want to keep some…12 min
PC Gamer|January 2021MEET THE NEIGHBOURSPOXWALKERS Poxwalkers are the cannon fodder of Nurgle’s cursed armies – shambling, plague-ridden husks that serve as the living weapons of the traitor guard. They attack with teeth and claws and whatever simple weapons they can find, and they keep mutating even following death. Like regular zombies, poxwalkers gather in hordes and can quickly swarm you. TRAITOR GUARD The traitor guard are former members of the Astra Militarum who have pledged themselves to Chaos. This regiment is the Moebian Sixth, deployed to help out the Moebian government, but are now attempting to seize power. These treacherous guardsmen fight with anything from simple melee weapons and chain axes to lasguns and combat shotguns.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATORJames Davenport: It’s easy to say Microsoft Flight Simulator’s greatest trick is that it’s just Bing maps in an aeroplane costume, but it’s the flight simulation wrapper that grounds a free web application in reality like no other game. Flying over your hometown hits differently from typing its name into a search bar. I can’t speak to the depth of the flying simulation. It’s not why I keep revisiting Microsoft Flight Simulator. Like so many of us, I’m stuck at home waiting out a pandemic. But in MFS I’ve charted a course from a remote Siberian airport to the Tunguska meteor crater; I’ve skimmed the top of the Tetons; I flew to the northern tip of Iceland, turned on active pause, and stared out at the edge of everything. MFS’…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021SPELUNKY 2Evan Lahti: Olde Spelunky, our 2013 GOTY, was a clever proc-gen platformer that along with other roguelikes helped usher in the era of ‘Difficulty is Good’. But seven years later, the indie hit’s legacy might be the daring, creative player feats it inspired: the eggplant run (escorting a useless eggplant all the way through to the end of the game), the no-gold run, a speed run of Hell itself. What’s special about Spelunky 2, then, is how much the game’s lead designer Derek Yu drew on the legendary achievements of the Spelunky community as inspiration for this sequel. The eggplant, for example, is no longer just an item: it’s a path to reach a sprawling, secret level that contains the sacred lore of the eggplant god. NPCs are no longer…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021CRUSADER KINGS IIIFraser Brown: Crusader Kings III is this year’s best strategy game, but it’s also one of the greatest RPGs and sandboxy sims around as well. On the surface, it’s not much of a departure from its predecessor, but this is a game with astounding ambition that couldn’t have happened without eight years of Crusader Kings II. It refines and reconfigures so much that, while at a glance it’s familiar, it’s far from a repeat. It’s been made knowing that the audience for this sort of thing is surprisingly large and broad, something Paradox probably wasn’t that sure of last time, and that means it’s also the studio’s most accessible grand strategy behemoth. It remains endlessly complex, but the abundance of nested tooltips and all the different ways it guides you,…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021PARADISE KILLERAndy Kelly: Paradise Killercame out of nowhere and singlehandedly reinvented the detective genre. The first project from indie studio Kaizen Gameworks, this is a detective game that lets you actually detect. You’re presented with a crime, a densely detailed island full of clues and suspects, and you can go to court and present your case whenever you like. This freeform structure is bold, but it pays off. A single, well-hidden clue can transform the version of events you’ve built up in your head, and it’s possible to pin the crime on the wrong person if you missed a clue. The game won’t even tell you if you got it wrong; you just have to live with it, like a real detective would. As well as being a great detective game,…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021OUR SCORING SYSTEM EXPLAINED00%-09% Broken or offensively bad; absolutely no value. Example Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude 10%-19% We might be able to find one nice thing to say about it, but still not worth anyone’s time or money. Example Gettysburg: Armored Warfare 20%-29% Completely falls short of its goals. Very few redeeming qualities. ExamplesFamily Guy: Back to the Multiverse 30%-39% An entirely clumsy or derivative effort. There’s little reason to play this game over a similar, better one. ExamplesTrials of the Blood Dragon 40%-49% Flawed and disappointing. ExamplesAliens: Colonial Marines 50%-59% Mediocre. Other games probably do it better, or its unique qualities aren’t executed well. ExamplesPrimordia, Homefront: The Revolution 60%-69% There’s something to like here, but it can only be recommended with major caveats. ExamplesNo Man’s Sky, Ghost Recon: Wildlands 70%-79%…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021VIKING INVASIONMy favourite Assassin’s Creed is now Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which is saying something considering it’s a series that spans 23 games. It builds on the already excellent RPG foundations laid by Origins and Odyssey, but with meaningful improvements that iron out many of the frustrations I had with both games. Case in point: not once during the 60-hour story was I told to stop and level up a bunch before I could take on the next quest. That also means Ubisoft isn’t selling optional experience boosts, either. Thank God. As the settlement expands, it draws new characters What really stands out to me, though, is how much better Valhallais at telling an engaging story that twists and turns according to my decisions. Valhalladoes a great job of introducing characters, concepts,…8 min
PC Gamer|January 2021STUCK IN THE MUDWho and what is Dirt 5 for? I don’t know the answer, and I’m not sure Codemasters does either. After all, this is a series that made a name by injecting a bit of extreme sports culture into the Colin McRae Rally series, which was itself beginning to feel a bit warmed-up by 2007. Colin McRae: Dirt was fresh and fun, chucking its pace-notes out of the passenger window and doing a doughnut just because it felt like it. The problem, is that recently Dirt Rally and its sequel came along. Lovely, strait-laced Dirt Rally. It was so brilliant it reminded us how much we missed pace-notes, and realistic offroad handling, and drizzly Welsh lanes. Just like that, we like the old style of rally game again. The one Dirtwas…3 min
PC Gamer|January 2021GROANSANDOPEDE They can chain into a multi-segment sub sandopede. SPRINKLEPEDE Now you’re just sticking ‘pede’ on words. COCOMITE Sounds kind of like ‘coconut’, but it’s a mite. Sure. HUNNABEE A honey bee is already a thing, so is this wordplay? BUFFALOCUST A buffalo wing locust that dives into hot sauce. TACOROACH Only works if you pronounce ‘co*ckroach’ funny.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021LONDON BRAWLINGA couple of hours into Watch Dogs Legion I look at my small team of DedSec agents and think to myself: these people actually suck. The concept seems sound – rather than playing a traditional protagonist, you recruit a team of heroes from randomly generated, ordinary citizens of London. The problem with ordinary people, though, is that they’re ordinary. I have a filmmaker on my team. An ambulance driver. A legal assistant. A lady whose only skill is that she owns a car. It’s not exactly a dream team, and initially I’m so uninterested in my collection of ‘heroes’ that when one of them (the car owning lady) is kidnapped by an enemy I don’t even bother rescuing her. Go ahead and keep her, I shrug. I can steal a…8 min
PC Gamer|January 2021PICK AND MIXI’m grooving nicely to my current Fusermix. I’ve got Carly Rae Jepsen’s upbeat drums from Call Me Maybe blended with the deep synths of LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem and the cool guitar riffs from Don’t Let me Down by The Chainsmokers. It’s going pretty well, and the crowd is diggin’ it, but I’ve got one space left for vocals. I have one song in mind, but I’m hesitating. Do I dare use the vocals from Smash Mouth’s All-Star? The mischievous streak in me needs to know what it would sound like, and before I think of the devastating consequences of a hundred people shouting “Hey now!”, I’ve already clicked on it. The disc drops, and to my astonishment, it’s not terrible! Fuser encourages you to create music with more depth…4 min
PC Gamer|January 2021GHOST TOWNI love the laid-back vibes of hidden-object games. I like the feeling of easing into a scene and taking my sweet time searching for a long list of items. I Am Dead is a hidden-object game that keeps the puzzle elements of the genre, but is about finding out what small curiosities mean to people as much as spotting objects. It’s a game about death, but also how we remember people after they are gone through the things they leave behind. That’s a pretty ominous introduction to I Am Dead, but it’s more upbeat than it sounds. Sure, there is talk of ghosts, the afterlife and morality, but it handles these topics with heart and a sprinkle of silliness. It’s nowhere near as dark as the name implies. Morris can…4 min
PC Gamer|January 2021PANE SAILINGThis asks you to imagine the world on the otherside of that pane of glass. What’s going on in the lives of your neighbours? By clicking on four apartment windows, in any order you desire, you’ll witness glimpses of their lives, as they struggle with relationships and work-life balance. There’s the middle-aged couple who snap at each other over a seemingly inconsequential matter, a man and a woman coping with breakups, and the lead of an indie studio wrestling with coding errors and a fast approaching deadline. You’ll drop in on each twice before witnessing the resolution, which takes the form of direct interviews with the cast and seemingly a few of the (real) developers of Beyond Your Window. It’s an unusual ending, and I enjoyed how it leant against…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021FAHRENHEITThere are loads of things that stick in the memory after your first time playing David Cage’s Fahrenheit. QTE boinking. The heartfelt probably-necrophilia. Floating kung-fu fights against psyche-insects. And that means it’s easy to forget how good the setting and opening are. There’s a palpable sense of panic to the opening crime scene that I don’t think I’ve seen recreated as effectively in any other game. And while the story stays small, before the SWAT teams and spirit mediums arrive, it’s surprisingly effective – more so thanks to some restrained characterisation and seasoned voice acting. It’s also maybe the most January game that’s ever been made.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021PCIe 4.0 SSDsOne of the easiest ways of giving your system a performance boost is to upgrade your storage. This is particularly true if you’re still rocking a spinning hard drive or two, although SATA SSDs will also see a notable speed boost when you upgrade to the latest drives. Right now, the best storage around uses the PCIe 4.0 interface to produce blistering read and write speeds. At the moment only AMD’s Zen 2 and Zen 3 platforms natively support PCIe 4.0 drives, although Intel’s next generation of CPUs (codenamed Rocket Lake) will also jump aboard this particular super speedy wagon. So even if you don’t have a supporting platform right now, you will do when you next upgrade, which is why we think that moving over to a PCIe 4.0…7 min
PC Gamer|January 2021BUDGET BUILDMOTHERBOARD B450-A Pro Max MSI £95 A healthy dose of ports and PCIe SSD support has this B450 at the heart of our budget build. PROCESSOR Ryzen 3 3300X AMD £115 AMD has packed its Zen 2 architecture into a speedy four-core package, and that’s great for gaming. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce GTX 1650 Super Gigabyte £165 The GTX 1650 Super is much more than a rebrand of the GTX 1650, securing it the budget crown. COOLER Wraith Stealth AMDFree with the CPU Gone are the days when a stock cooler was little more than a bonus paperweight. AMD’s Wraith Stealth delivers. MEMORY Vengeance 8GB DDR4 (2x4GB) Corsair £40 The new norm for gaming is 16GB, but dual-channel 8GB memory is enough to get by for most. POWER SUPPLY CX Series…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021“If you love exploring vibrant worlds, this is the game for you”If you told me that one of my favourite games in 2020 would be a free-to-play RPG with ‘gacha’ microtransactions, I’d never have believed you. Yet here I am, approaching what is close to my 60th hour in Genshin Impact. It’s a brilliant game – so long as you aren’t overly offended by some sketchy in-game purchases. It’s easy to forgive that stuff, though, because Genshin Impact is genuinely a joy to play. It ditches the modern trend of big open worlds littered with icons and instead takes a more intuitive approach, forcing you to use your faculties to find hidden treasures, collectibles and loot that’ll power up your party of four characters. I’m constantly skeptical of the environment around me – suspiciously unlit torches might be a little puzzle…3 min
PC Gamer|January 2021“Alt-tabbing out between runs to take notes, I find my fingers are rattling”This is the kind of game you don’t describe so much as circle around, making occasional stabs with the ol’ metaphor-knife in the hope of hitting something solid. I could tell you that it’s a retro-shooter-adjacent roguelike, where you sprint around randomly-generated hallways blasting baddies and desperately seeking the exit… but that wouldn’t capture the way it feels to play. And it certainly doesn’t explain why, when alt-tabbing out between runs to take notes, I so often find my fingers are rattling against the keyboard. It’s easy to reach for the substances, comparatively speaking. Not least because of the way Post Void looks: all woozy edges and bright colours and men in suits who have something wrong with their faces. But, the best parallel I can draw from personal experience…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCEVORTEX Nexus Mod Manager has been replaced with Vortex. It does a lot to hold your hand and warn you of conflicts between mods that you may have overlooked. MOD ORGANIZER 2 MO2 is a no-frills approach and doesn’t have as difficult a learning curve that it’s sometimes alleged to. It also gives more precise control over mod load order. FALLOUT MOD MANAGER FOMM is getting long in the tooth. You’ll see its name mentioned in install instructions for older mods but you’re better off choosing between MO2 or Vortex in 2021.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021PRESSING X TO COMFORT MY UNBORN CHILD IN AMNESIA: REBIRTHAmnesia: Rebirth casts you as Tasi Trianon, a young explorer with a rough case of amnesia. Big surprise. Besides bobbing and weaving around cosmic horrors, getting your memories back is the top goal here. Early on, you’ll recall the tragic fate of some loved ones and chip away at the extra tragic local colonial history. But soon enough Tasi will gather enough memory scraps to piece together a particularly big one: she’s four months pregnant. Tasi’s pregnancy isn’t marginalised, stowed away for certain cutscenes and story beats. As the player you will need to literally babysit, pressing a button to make Tasi hold her belly to feel and listen for her unborn child. I’m not very far into Rebirth, but the simple existence of a ‘Press X to check fetus’…4 min
PC Gamer|January 2021MUST PLAYDEEP ROCK GALACTIC deeprockgalactic.com I think this is one of the most engrossing and layered co-op games to come out in years – basically Left 4 Dead meets No Man’s Sky. The procedurally generated levels are a constant test of your ability to adapt and improvise, and they never seem to stop finding ways to surprise me. HADES supergiantgames.com/games/hades For years I’d been evangelising the Early Access version of this to not much success, so it was surreal seeing it blow up so much once it hit 1.0. I’m just glad it finally got its proper time in the spotlight. A Roguelike this clever, beautiful, and compelling sets a new high bar for the entire genre. TABLETOP SIMULATOR tabletopsimulator.com I’ve relatively recently gotten into board games in a big way,…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021COPYCAT?A woman named Stephanie has alleged that a new League of Legends character with a similar appearance and name, Seraphine, is based on her. At the crux of this allegation is her brief relationship with a Riot employee in 2019, who she believes borrowed details from her likeness and life for the popstar from fictional girl group K/DA. Riot denies the allegation, “Seraphine was independently created by Riot Games and was not based on any individual. Additionally, the former employee [Stephanie] is referring to left Riot more than a year ago and was in a department and role that has no input whatsoever into the creative design process.” “IT’S BEEN KIND OF HORRID TO HAVE A LEAGUE CHAMPION WHO LOOKS LIKE YOU” We omit Stephanie’s full name at her and…3 min
PC Gamer|January 2021This month in… 20101 EVE Online was over seven years old at the time of this cover feature, but PC gaming has always been a space where games could thrive long after they were unleashed on the world. And thrive EVE did, generating countless fascinating stories about intrigue, betrayal and full-scale space war. Even now, 17 years after its release, it’s an essential story generator. ISSUE 222, January 2011 ON THE COVER EVE Online IN THE CINEMA TRON: Legacy 2 The first Black Ops game was “let down by bad scripting, glitchy multiplayer and dull firefights,” claimed our review. Hopefully Cold War fares better… 3 Minecraft was our 2010 Game of the Year, which seems obvious in hindsight, but it’s worth remembering that it was still in Alpha at the time. Despite that,…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021FAR OUT“THE PLAYER’S NARRATIVE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE GAME’S NARRATIVE” It’s hard to imagine a more prestigious PC gaming university than Maxis in 2008. When an industry fresher named Alex Hutchinson joined the Spore team, he was introduced to Civilization IV designer Soren Johnson, SpyParty creator Chris Hecker, and producer extraordinaire Lucy Bradshaw – who Fortune would later name one of the ten most powerful women in gaming. Presiding over it all was SimCity genius and walking TED talk Will Wright. “It was a very big learning curve, working with some of the smartest people I’ve even seen,” Hutchinson recalls. “There were all these luminaries from the business, which for a 20-something Australian was pretty exciting.” As it turned out, though, Maxis was a better environment for learning than it…4 min
PC Gamer|January 2021BOOK OF TRAVELSI love playing the role of the wanderer in games, but it’s pretty difficult to explore virtual worlds without some bloodthirsty monster trying to kill me. It is too much to ask to quietly traverse The Witcher 3’s Novigrad, collecting herbs and picking plants, without a ferocious wolf trying to gnaw my arm off? I’m down for fisticuffs more often than not, but there are moments when I just want to explore and take it all in. Thankfully, Might and Delight has come to my rescue with Book of Travels, an upcoming RPG that embraces this wanderer philosophy. Self-described as a “collaborative and friendly roleplaying experience”, there are no linear quests or nagging plotlines. Players are free to explore the handcrafted world of Braided Shore at their own pace. Might…7 min
PC Gamer|January 2021EVERSPACE 2When you start up a free-roaming space shooter, the last thing you expect is to be flying down a tight and twisting tunnel, in search of something called the ‘core’. There are anemone-like creatures all over the walls, and they fall easily to your ship’s lasers. You don’t even know who you are at this point, referred to as just ‘the wingman’ on comms, but once you’ve defended the core, and the miners trying to exploit it, from a giant drill that lets in angry drones, you’ll be slightly closer to finding out. This is the closed beta of Everspace 2, the final stage before its Early Access release in January. The game is running from the gravity well of Cyberpunk 2077, rescheduling from a December release that saw CD…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021HIVE TOURS1 HABZONES The hive’s billions live in the habzones, where you might even find some survivors holding out against the tide of Nurgle’s abominations. 2 WALKWAYS If you want an idea of the scale of the hive, why not visit one of our gothic, picturesque bridges and walkways. Don’t look down. 3 MARKET Come to the underground water market to admire the uplifting graffiti and cheery atmosphere. It’s probably even nicer now that Nurgle’s moved in. 4 SERVICE TUNNELS Why not explore the guts of the hive? Though the weather isn’t great – we’ll warn you, an umbrella doesn’t protect you from acid rain. 5 PRISON Don’t forget to be on your best behaviour. The Imperium isn’t delicate when it comes to upholding the law. Hence all the blood stains.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021FINAL FANTASY XIVSteven Messner: Final Fantasy XIV is the most consistently excellent MMO I’ve ever played. I started back in 2013, with the relaunch, and have consistently played for seven years. What keeps me coming back isn’t just the memorable boss fights and beautiful locations, though. It’s that Final Fantasy XIV tells an emotionally gripping story that just keeps raising the stakes. Case in point: its latest expansion, Shadowbringers, takes players on an interdimensional journey to a parallel universe while somehow also keeping a tight focus on the characters that I’ve come to love over these past seven years. FINAL FANTASY XIV TELLS AN EMOTIONALLY GRIPPING STORY What makes this the best ongoing game in 2020 is down to how scientific Square Enix is with updates. While other MMOs have big ups…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021HADESRachel Watts: As someone who has zero patience for dying in games, Hadeshas made me a roguelike convert. It’s a dungeon crawler that gives the gods of ancient Greece action and attitude, all encased in Supergiant’s signature artstyle. But the most impressive feat that Hadeshas, that defeats one of the genre’s biggest hangups, is it makes failure fun. Combat feels punchy and intense, and there are plenty of godly boons to be bestowed that make every run a new endeavour. Testing out each newly discovered weapon or ability never feels like a waste of time, each one feels like it’s been carefully thought out by Supergiant. Progression and persistence just melt away as each run gets easier and dying never feels frustrating when I get to catch up with the…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021VALORANTEvan Lahti: Despite decades of developers borrowing and improving on each others’ ideas, it’s surprising that we still often get hung up on ‘copycat’ games. And there’s no series more sacred, more untouchable than Counter-Strikeon PC, an FPS whose weapons and maps mostly resemble what we played 20 years ago. With Valorant, we learned that not only can Counter-Strikebe copied, but that it’s durable enough as an idea to be mutated and mixed without diluting the essence of what makes a high-lethality, angles-driven team FPS so fun. At first Valorantwas a glossy invitation to dust off those mothballed Counter-Strike skills; its weaponset is practically untouched from CS:GO’s. But it quickly became its own thing, a remix of CS’ format with walls of vision-denying smoke, healing, revives, scout drones, a turret…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021MONSTER TRAINWes Fenlon: It’s impossible to play Monster Train without Ozzy Osbourne singing Crazy Train in your head. And honestly, that’s exactly how it should be, because it isa crazy train. My favourite thing about this deckbuilder is its wild makeup of factions, which I can mash together into unlikely allies. The Awoken, for example, are burly plant boys that I use as front line defenders to soak up damage for units I place behind them. But depending on the faction I pair them with, that strategy totally changes. A KIND OF CHAOS THAT NEVER STOPS ESCALATING With the Stygian Guard I sometimes like to go all-in on spell weakness, using puny magicians to stack a multiplicative debuff on enemies and then one-shotting them. But the Stygians also have a whole…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021DEATH STRANDINGJames Davenport: Death Stranding is a hypnotic exercise in dramatic serenity. For 90 percent of my 100-plus hours wandering the gorgeous, rocky terrain, I was completely alone. It was just me and Norman Reedus’ gentle breath. It’s nothing special for an open-world game to punt you out into a huge space on your lonesome, but Death Stranding understands how isolation feels, that jerky oscillation between peace and terror. You’re alone in your job, delivering gear (and oxytocin) to subterranean settlements, and you’re alone out there in good ol’ indifferent, unforgiving nature. Death Stranding is about carrying on anyway and trying not to panic when things get worse. Because they will. I’ve tumbled down cliffs and slid down a river or 12, but scrambling to adjust and salvage my shipment is…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021Chaos reignsWe’ve entered a strange season of reviews. A time of sudden, pandemic-induced delays, and games taking their last chance to be out before Christmas 2020. A time of next-gen console launch games sheepishly showing up on PC too (and looking all the better for it). A time of hopeful indie games growing increasingly bizarre as they fight to stand out from the crowd – or just go viral on Twitter. A time of Harmonix relaunching the music game, again (or perhaps just a Mouth Sounds simulator). A time of April Fools jokes becoming full-fledged Yakuzasequels. And, most of all, a time of games scrambling to stay out of the way of Cyberpunk 2077as its release date drifts month by month, while Ubisoft releases the year’s three biggest open world games…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021DRAGON QUESTPlaying a Yakuza game without series stalwart Kazuma Kiryu in the leading role takes some getting used to. But luckily for Yakuza: Like a Dragon, it’s easy to warm to new hero Ichiban Kasuga. He has all the strength and determination of his predecessor, but with a goofy sense of humour and an endearing enthusiasm for everything he does – whether that’s taking on the Korean mafia or employing a chicken to run a sweet shop. Ichiban starts out as a low-level yakuza in Kamurocho, the Tokyo red light district that serves as the main setting for most of the Yakuzagames. But after a series of unfortunate events, he ends up homeless in Yokohama. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is about Ichi getting his life back together, reckoning with his past,…4 min
PC Gamer|January 2021PRETTY FALCON GOODDespite all the dialogue and narration, I walked away from this game with the most important question of all unanswered; are they tiny people, or huge birds? I like riding on the back of a falcon as much as the next person, but give me a sense of perspective! This didn’t bother me during play, as I was too busy gawping at the graphics and shooting down enemies; but it sat at the back of my mind throughout the adventure. The Falconeer takes place in a unique world that sits somewhere outside our own, a world that slowly drew me in as I progressed through the story. A huge expanse of water littered with islands controlled by warring factions, the tale that this place tells is interesting enough to prevent…4 min
PC Gamer|January 2021ROAD NOT TAKENWhen your enemy is called The Godslayer, you might hope to have more to hand than a bow and arrow and an eagle. In fact, this is a game notable in part for what it doesn’t have. It’s an open-world game with no minimap, no fast travel, no player deaths, no enemies (apart from bosses), no NPCs and no vehicles. Yet what it doeshave has been so expertly crafted, that the end result is something truly remarkable. This isn’t easily comparable to anything else, something that becomes apparent within seconds of taking your first dash across a field. Your sprint is powered by your spirit meter, which is depleted rapidly but can be constantly topped up by shooting the many floating talismans scattered throughout the entire game. Travelling on foot…4 min
PC Gamer|January 2021SKILL SHAREMARTIN CHAI Occupation: None Claim to fame: Has disease named after him Weird Skill: Flatulence. Uncontrollable. It alerts enemies. AMY YI Occupation: Living statue Fun fact: Spends 20 percent of her income on paint Weird Skill: Can hide from pursuers by holding still. BOB O’KEEFE Occupation: Novelist Weird Skill: Will gamble away DedSec’s money. Weirder Skill: Spontaneous death. BRITTANY BHATTACHARYA Occupation: Busker Hobbies: Car Theft Weird Skill: Can still beatbox while wearing mascot costume. MANAL AWAD Age: 76 Occupation: Adult film star Age: Again, she’s 76 Weird Skill: She’s so famous that she’ll be recognised in public.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021VICIOUS CYCLEIf the Doom Slayer is a race car, as id Software has described him, then The Ancient Gods – Part One is a series of victory laps around three new courses. It picks up right at the finish line of Doom Eternal, and the experience is akin to waking up at the wheel of a Ferrari screaming down the track at 200mph. While it’s possible to play without having completed its parent game, you’d be foolish to try. The truth is that The Ancient Gods regularly frightened me You inherit the Slayer plus all the extras, souped up with weapon mods and ability runes picked up during Eternal’s original campaign. And despite having completed it, I spent the first 20 minutes embarrassing myself, thumping at a reload key that doesn’t…3 min
PC Gamer|January 2021NOW YOU SEE ITStuff. It’s great, isn’t it? Except when it’s not: when you attach personal baggage to it, and you have so much that you can barely move in your own house. Emptyis a game about stuff, more specifically getting rid of it, as you Marie Kondo your way around a sequence of rooms, ridding the colourful 3D spaces of all their clutter. Once it’s gone, and each room is basically just the walls, floor and ceiling, you move on. There are other domestic spaces, and later on more abstract scenes, that demand your attention. It felt a bit unsatisfying to find that, oh, I had completed the game But Emptyis a puzzle game. Rather than dragging the unwanted items into a skip, you have to vanish them instead, by lining each…3 min
PC Gamer|January 2021CHRISTMAS KNIGHTThere’s a sense of trepidation firing up Arkham Origins for the first time. It has a reputation. This is the estranged, drunk uncle of the series – one who starts celebrating Christmas in September and might not actually be a blood relative. His timing is terrible. He’s slightly unreliable. But he’s not the urine-soaked catastrophe you expect and, in fact, some people like him more than the other uncle with the flashy car. The title refers to the origin of the broader Arkham mythology That’s a potentially-too-personal way of saying Originsisn’t as bad as you probably think, even if it never lives up to the promise of an enriching prequel. In practice, the showcase of Bats as a rawer, more savage version of his later Rocksteady incarnations feels hollow. The…3 min
PC Gamer|January 2021FROSTPUNKPlaying Frostpunksometimes is like reading a historical account of some fatuous, ineffectual king who failed upward into a position of power. “Idealistic but impractical, he invested heavily in schools. But the children stopped being able to write when their fingers fell off due to frostbite.” Compared to the constant, escalating crises of Frostpunk, every other city management game feels like Farmville. And as well as being a brilliant exercise in humility, it’s also a useful way of learning to say no to people. Or ‘yes’, if the question is ‘should we keep working even if it kills us’. It sounds grim, but Frostpunkis so good that you’ll suffer this and more just for a scintilla of success.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021TOMORROW’S PERFORMANCEPCIe 4.0 SSDs are the fastest drives you can buy at ‘reasonable’ prices right now, offering higher sequential performance and improved random read and writes over everything we’ve seen before. While the performance can be incredible in benchmarks, when copying files and loading games it’s fair to say that they aren’t fully utilised just yet. A shift to make the most out of these next-gen SSDs that could potentially banish loading times as we know it, and make for more seamless transitions between areas. What form this will actually take, and how it’ll fit into a landscape that still has gamers running hard drives is tricky to fathom, but we wouldn’t be surprised if future titles demand a certain level of SSD performance in their system requirements.…1 min
PC Gamer|January 2021MID-RANGE BUILDMOTHERBOARD B450 Tomahawk Max MSI £120 A reliable platform for your build, the Tomahawk Max also comes in black to complement any style. PROCESSOR Ryzen 5 3600X AMD £198 This CPU is one of the greats, and uses the Zen 2 architecture to dominate in gaming and productivity. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 2060 KO GAMING EVGA £320 The RTX 2060 is a taste of the good life, where frame rates are high and real-time ray tracing is possible. COOLER Wraith Spire AMDFree 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. MEMORY Ballistix 16GB DDR4 (2x8GB) Crucial £75 With plenty of capacity at 16GB, this unembellished memory has everything you need for gaming and more.…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021“I don’t want to live on Robot World”Hello Games’ epic always looks so amazingly magical from afar. I see my friends’ screenshots of glorious alien vistas, and I want to find some of my own. I see the latest updates, introducing all sorts of new wonders to discover, and I long to see it all for myself. But every time I try, the game seems ever more unwelcome to me. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten out of what amounts to the extended tutorial. It seems to get longer and more convoluted with each update – and, somehow, the exciting new features always ruin my fun, rather than enhancing it. The last time I tried was shortly after the full multiplayer update was introduced, and while I was grinding through the opening stages, trying to scrape together…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021RAINBOW SIX SIEGEIf you haven’t checked in with Rainbow Six Siege in a while, you might have missed that its technology has become pretty wild. In 2020, Rainbow Six’s operational budget includes laser cameras, moving holograms, smart glasses and now laser gates. That’s right, Operation Neon Dawn adds Aruni to the roster – a Thai detective who deploys laser gates and pulverises walls with her Big Boss-like prosthetic limbs. She is radiating coolness from every direction. It seems like Ubisoft had a lot of fun with her design, and I love any chance to naturally incorporate aspects of an operator’s identity with their functionality. This is no repeat of Oryx, whose wall-smashing ability is satisfying yet mostly useless in practice. Aruni’s Surya laser gates are complex, potentially meta-shifting defensive tools. GATED COMMUNITY…4 min
PC Gamer|January 2021Explore Teyvat in GENSHIN IMPACTNEED TO KNOW DIFFICULTY Easy TIME 30Hours VITAL LINKS Anemoculus map: bit.ly/3mtTWhT Tier list: bit.ly/2TtfVcv Best builds: bit.ly/2TwvDUc STAY FOCUSED 1 While you’ll be tempted to discover every inch of miHoYo’s Breath of the Wild-style world, mix your exploration with questing. That’ll ensure you don’t miss out on crucial tools like the wind glider to help you find more secrets and resources. TAKE IT SLOW 2 There is an option to activate Teleport Waypoints to fast travel between, but I recommend against it. Only do so if you’re absolutely certain you’ve covered the area you’re skipping: useful materials, hidden chests and collectibles are everywhere. CHATTERBOX 3 Talk to as many NPCs as possible. Rather than spouting useless dialogue, many peripheral characters are worth speaking to. Some may secretly have quests…2 min
PC Gamer|January 2021RUNESCAPEIn 2001 RuneScape launched as a browser game and never stopped moving forward, depositing old versions along the way for players who wanted to stay in the past: RuneScape Classic, which no longer exists, and then Old School RuneScapein 2013. For everyone else, the modern version is just called RuneScape, and was recently added to Steam. I’ve always had the sense that RuneScapeis a bit esoteric (I’m sure I tried it back when it launched, when I was into MUDs and other relics of online gaming), but I didn’t realise just how weird the free-to-play MMO is until I gave it a try. Nearly two decades after it first released, visiting RuneScapeis like entering a PC gaming pocket dimension that split off from our own years ago, perhaps accessed by…8 min
