Home//PC Gamer/September 2019/In This Issue
PC Gamer|September 2019“DOOM PROVED TO BE A CONFIDENT, CLEVER STATEMENT”In an era where singleplayer shooters have fallen out of fashion, id Software’s return to Doomproved to be a confident, clever statement about what an FPS can be. The 2016 release was arguably the best shooter of the decade, using forward momentum to replicate the frenetic pace of the ’90s classics. By all accounts Doom Eternallooks to focus in on everything that made its predecessor great. Head to p42 to read Andy’s bloody report. In a classic case of counter-programming, this issue we also celebrate The Sims, a series that’s excelled at letting every kind of player tell the stories that interest them. Enjoy the issue! PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in Coverlines Twitter @Octaeder This month Made the terrible decision to put the words “Granny Theft Auto” on the cover of…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019ODYSSEY SPACEBUILD-AN-ASTRONAUT 1 ”To simulate actress Kezia Burrows in zero G using mo-cap we used a system where we’d capture her limbs separately and then blend them together. Chris Wilson, lead animator, would also do swimming motions lying down on a stool.” HOME OFFICE 2 “On the original ISS, laptops are just stuck to every surface at every angle. Most of these laptops run on DOS and they run one specific programme only, so you don’t lose lots of crucial data in case of a malfunction.” FOUND FOOTAGE 3 “Cameras on the station are all of the same quality because we wanted tech to feel unreliable as a whole, to give you a sense of unease. The interference and glitches make it feel like they might fail at any minute.” LITTLE…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019EVIL GENIUS 2: WORLD DOMINATIONOne of the more unusual games at E3 was this sequel to a lair-building simulator from a defunct developer. Evil Genius 2 slots into the landscape of Cities: Skylines and Two Point Hospital, with a cartoony art style that swerves clear of looking like a mobile game. Your aim is to build an evil lair, and eventually, a doomsday device to go with it. You build a base, train up henchmen, defend your lair from spies and aim to conquer the world. Rebellion’s goal is to make a game that has the original’s feeling – it retains many of the characters, and a similar tone – but make it appealing to new players. “It was about revisiting every element of the game and deciding, does this still hold up?” says…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019SNIPER ELITE VRAt E3, you end up playing builds of games that are coming to PC, but not necessarily demoed on them. For Sniper Elite VR, I was playing on a PlayStation 4 with that console’s gun controller – and that’s how I ended up poking myself in the face while I was trying to aim my gun at some Nazis. I guess that means I was getting a bit too into it. This demo is nice and simple. It’s basically a shooting gallery from a rooftop, though you can freely move around to get better angles on your targets, and it’s a good representation of how aiming and shooting works in VR. There are essentially two stages to aiming in Sniper Elite VR: you need to hold the rifle to your…2 min
PC Gamer|September 2019EMPIRE OF SINEmpire of Sin was perhaps the most pleasant surprise of my E3 this year. Announced as part of the Nintendo Direct stream, I had assumed it would be a casual, console-friendly strategy that would offer little to PC enthusiasts. Having now seen it in action, I can confidently say I was wrong. It’s the 1920s, prohibition is in effect, and wannabe kingpins are jostling for a slice of Chicago’s booming bootlegging scene. In Empire of Sin you pick one of 14 such bosses, most of whom are based on classic American gangsters such as Al Capone, Dean O’Banion and Stephanie St Clair. Each boss will offer their own traits, including combat abilities, and empire and diplomatic bonuses. In a hands-off demo, designer Ian O’Neill picks Al Capone, and immediately proceeds…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019BLOODY HELLI’M IN SPACE, ABOVE MARS, SO CLOSE THAT THE HULKING RED PLANET FILLS THE ENTIRE SCREEN. A MASSIVE CHUNK HAS BEEN TORN OUT OF IT AND I’M HOPPING BETWEEN SHARDS OF ROCKY DEBRIS THAT HAVE BROKEN LOOSE, SLAUGHTERING DEMONS WITH A SUPER SHOTGUN. DOOM ETERNAL, A SEQUEL TO 2016’S STELLAR REBOOT, IS A GAME OF IMPOSSIBLE SCALE AND DRAMA. SO MUCH SO THAT THE PREVIOUS GAME SEEMS ALMOST BORING IN COMPARISON. “From the beginning our goal was making you fight in unbelievable locations, surprising you every step of the way,” says id Software’s Marty Stratton, producer of Doom Eternal. “From the very start to the final boss, players will be seeing things they’d never expect from a Doomgame.” “It’s all about engagement,” says creative director Hugo Martin, a word the…9 min
PC Gamer|September 2019EXTENDED FAMILYThere are two types of Sims players: the ones who create maniacal fantasies, in which hapless, interchangeable Sims are mere pawns in their sad*stic games involving swimming pools and deleted ladders, and those who painstakingly recreate people and situations from real life and then run bizarre social experiments with them. As a teen playing The Sims 2, I was the latter. I’d discovered The Sims on a friend’s mum’s PC a few years previously, whilst staying up late into the night on a sleepover, prodding little computer people who couldn’t ever seem to figure out how to use a dishwasher without help. But those early Sims were pixelly automatons. The Sims 2 had the character creator of my dreams. Instead of prefab faces with Lego haircuts, it had nose-length sliders…4 min
PC Gamer|September 2019REMAKING CANON“If you don’t like it, why don’t you make something else that you do like?” is one of those questions that many inside fandom spaces have heard, especially when directed towards minorities, and will continue to hear probably until the end of time. It’s a crappy retort that, at its heart, pushes aside real, troubling issues in favour of the artist’s vision. My favourite character in The Walking Dead, Andrea, met a grisly end in the third season finale. So, like any other reasonable person, I decided I was going to change the ending completely. Not by petitioning a complete rewrite of the season, I’ll leave that to Game of Thrones fans, but by making a new one by myself in The Sims 2. As I found out, I wasn’t…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019Phil SpencerOn Monday, the day after the Xbox E3 briefing where Game Pass for PC was revealed in full, I had the chance to sit down with Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Gaming Phil Spencer. We talked about the company’s approach to selling PC games, its relationship with Steam, and many other things. It’s a long read, but hopefully it’ll give you a comprehensive overview of where Microsoft sees itself within PC gaming as it stands. You’re very candid about your history with PC. You think I should hide it? You think you guys won’t find it? [laughing] I feel like you’re paying close attention to how you’re perceived. How much do you pay attention to the granular feedback of Microsoft’s recent past on PC? Being honest with you, I’m probably…12 min
PC Gamer|September 2019OUR 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|September 2019WINNING FORMULAIt seems obvious now in retrospect. The best way for an annualised, licensed motorsport game to stay fresh every summer when the latest iteration trots out onto the Steam Store is, clearly, to chuck in an entirely different racing series as well. With the inclusion of the 2018 F2 championship, F1 2019feels for the first time in the series like a wider world of motorsport, offering that irresistible rags-to-riches journey in career mode and a handling model all of its own to master. It makes a lot of sense. Codemasters has had the handling down for years now, twitchy and frightening, and giving just the right amount of rumble in your hands as you wrestle your car implausibly fast over an impeccably rendered apex. It needed to add something more…4 min
PC Gamer|September 2019CASTLE MANIAFive years ago Koji Igarashi, director and writer on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, left Konami to make another Castlevania-style game. Five years is a long time, and the Metroidvania genre has grown substantially in that period, but sometimes you don’t want a variation on a familiar theme. You want the same game in a new package. Rejoice, because with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, that’s exactly what you’re getting. Miriam is a science experiment in the shape of a dolled-up anime girl. Together with her friend, a man named Gebel, she was part of an experiment that transplanted the essence of demons into her body. This demonic power comes in the form of shards, thus she’s called a Shardbinder. The more shards you absorb the more you let go…4 min
PC Gamer|September 2019A-PEELINGThe gamers running at me have swords, because all gamers own swords, I guess. They also have Monty Python Dark Soulscosplay armour but it can’t save them from the shotgun blasts that reduce them to lumps at my feet. I’m out of ammo before I’m out of gamers, the last one charging with sword held high. But any object you kick is a one-shot kill in this game, and dead gamer lumps are kickable objects. He’s full of potassium and advice on how to kill people There are more impressive gun-fu stunts in My Friend Pedro than breaking somebody’s neck by kicking their dead friend’s torso at them, but this moment of improvisation is typical of what happens between gif-able highlights. Once or twice per level I’ll do something absurd…4 min
PC Gamer|September 2019BOXING CLEVERGiven its basic presentation, it’s clear the majority of development time on game jam puzzler Cirkoban³ was spent designing its nuts and bolts – the fairly intricate, tactile systems that make this puzzle game feel like a real puzzle box. At its core this resembles Sokoban. You’ll manoeuvre blue blocks around, using them to push green ones attached to rigid power lines. Connect these lines from one end of a battery to another and you’ll proceed to the next stage, of which there are, lamentably, only eight. Where Cirkoban³differs from the majority of Sokoban-likes is its incorporation of the third dimension. Rather than a single, flat game board, there can be up to six in play here, as you hop from side to side of a 3D cube. Every side…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019TOFF LOVEThe character select screen is enough to let me know I’ll love this game. The choices in Sir, You are Being Hunted resemble the finale in a middling episode of Poirot. My options include a gamekeeper, a cook, a military officer, and a dipsomaniac. I’m tempted to pick the officer because they come equipped with a revolver and commemorative royalist crockery, but that seems a bit OP. I go for the default option of aristocrat instead. The goal is to collect mysterious fragments scattered across a procedurally-generated archipelago and bring them back to the equally-mysterious henge (is there another kind?). It’s rather nice to begin with, the birds are tweeting as I stamp through a copse in search of blackberries and I can practically feel the dew on my tweeds.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019OPUS MAGNUMOpus Magnum, also known as ‘that game you always see on Twitter that makes no sense until you play it’, is an alchemical puzzle game included here because of the vaguely mechanical looking arms. It’s the sort of game that makes me feel clever and stupid in equal measure. Solving a conundrum is brilliant right up until the point I see how smarter, more efficient minds have circumvented the same problem. But that sense of being able to muddle through is still incredibly satisfying.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019VALVE INDEXThere’s no denying that the Valve Index is a great VR headset. At present, it’s the best VR headset on the market, with best-in-class display resolution and refresh rate. But it’s also the most expensive – and at times more frustrating – than other headsets (namely the Oculus Rift S) that offer a similar experience. Let’s start with what the Index does well. The Index display boasts a 1440x1600 per-eye resolution and refresh rate of 120 Hz, which together offer the best visual experience I’ve had in VR to date. (For comparison the Rift S offers 1280x1440 resolution per eye at 80 Hz.) The ‘screen-door’ effect that plagued first-generation VR headsets is practically nonexistent. There’s also a dial and slider for lens adjustment, helping you get the placement just right…4 min
PC Gamer|September 2019ADVANCED BUILDMOTHERBOARD Strix X470-F Gaming Asus £185 Get the most from the new AMD Ryzen 2700X with this matching X470 motherboard that’s packed with features. PROCESSOR Ryzen 7 2700X AMD £269 Easy to overclock and with huge performance out of the box, AMD’s new flagship CPU is the one to go for. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 2080Ti Black Edition EVGA £1,018 EVGA’s custom design is considerably cheaper than Nvidia’s reference card, and with great cooling. COOLER Kraken X62 NZXT £130 The Kraken is the culmination of three of our favourite things: an infinity mirror, a 280mm radiator and slick braided cooling. MEMORY Ripjaws V 32GB @3200 G.Skill £172 G.Skill is always a safe bet for lightning fast RAM, and if you can do without the RGB frills this 2x16GB set will…2 min
PC Gamer|September 2019“Even the licence plates on my truck are accurate to the region”When I finished HBO’s brilliant Chernobyl miniseries, I found myself missing its muted, desaturated Soviet misery. So I thought about what games I could play to fill the gap. One of the STALKERgames, maybe? They certainly have the aesthetic, and are literally set in and around Chernobyl. But, honestly, they’re too exciting. DayZis set in a fictional Eastern Bloc country, Chernarus, that is steeped in a similar atmosphere. But I gave up on that game long ago. I wanted something more realistic, more subdued. Something that captured the compellingly bleak, dreary mood of the series. And then I remembered that I hadn’t played Euro Truck Simulator 2’s new Beyond the Baltic Sea expansion yet, which adds Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, southern Finland, and parts of western Russia to the already massive…2 min
PC Gamer|September 2019SIGILHas John Romero forgotten how to put lights into Doom levels? Nobody’s going to hold it against him if he has – it’s been 25 years since Doom 2, after all. Perhaps he could make an anonymous account on the Doomworld forums if he’s embarrassed. It’s just that I’ve spent a sunny afternoon squinting around in the dark of Sigil, Romero’s new fifth episode for Ultimate Doom, feeling out pathways over lava I can’t see. It feels a little perverse that the only episode Doom’s designer has made in the full-fledged internet age is one where visual information is so hard to come by, and confusion the defining theme. But there’s a lot about Sigil that’s wilfully backward. Andy dug into Total Chaos in issue 332, a Doom 2 mod…7 min
PC Gamer|September 2019DISARMS RACE1 GO LOW Enemies aim at chest height, so you want to get beneath that and close the distance with a forward roll. 2 BRING THE FIGHT You’re still at risk of a point-blank shooting. Wind your opponent by thwacking them in the groin. 3 THE EXCHANGE Wait until the cop attempts a pistol whip, then grab the gun when it flashes red. It’s yours now. 4 IT’S A KNOCKOUT Let your enemy’s momentum carry him to the ground. Continue on your day better equipped than before.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019LISTENING TO CONVERSATIONS IN EXPLORATION GAMESThere’s something eerie about how walking simulators drop you into an otherwise entirely empty landscape, particularly when they aren’t built to look empty. Often it seems as if everyone has simply stepped away and just never returned, making it all the more impactful when you do come across a sign of life – usually in the form of a snippet of conversation. I love it. I have a lot of love for stories that you uncover by being a bystander to conversations that don’t concern you at all. Getting a glimpse of how characters talk to each other – or even themselves – makes them feel that much more human. Games focused on exploration and discovery are the best for this, because it’s rare that the conversations you hear or…4 min
PC Gamer|September 2019“SIMPLY THE BEST PC GAMES YOU CAN PLAY TODAY”Every year, the global PC Gamer team gets together to craft the PC Gamer Top 100. The format is simple: we take last year’s list, suggest a bunch of additions, tweaks and removals, and then embark on a series of hours-long discussions going step-by-step through every entry. The result is this book: a rundown of what we think are simply the best PC games you can play today. That caveat is important – these aren’t the most important, most fondly remembered or most influential games. Every entry is something we recommend that PC gamers play in 2019. As always, to celebrate the variety of the platform, we (mostly) only allow one entry per series. Enjoy the list! PHIL SAVAGE Specialist in Snubbing your favourites Twitter @Octaeder This month Persuaded our…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201995 RISING STORM 2: VIETNAMRELEASED 2017|LAST POSITION New Evan: An asymmetrical, 64-player historical FPS where it actually means something to be on the Red Team. It might cost 200 US Marines to claw your way up the steep, scorched earth of Hill 937, where the North Vietnamese have vision, bunkers, RPGs, traps, and can dig their own spawn points. Fighting through ‘unfair’ circ*mstances like this with your own faction-specific weapons (helicopters, napalm, the M16) provides a small insight into the brutality of the Vietnam War.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201991 HEARTHSTONERELEASED 2014|LAST POSITION 39 Tim: It’s easy to see Hearthstone as embattled on multiple fronts these days, what with the current fad for Auto Chess draining the game of streamers and the rise (at last) of a serious competitor now that Magic: The Gathering has a digital version that doesn’t look like Excel. But for all those travails, it’s also easy to forget how much Blizzard’s colourful card battler gets right. And recently, with more active card balancing and the first range of buffs we’ve seen since the beta, the game has felt more vibrant than it has for a long time. This year’s Rise of Shadows expansion was followed by the best single-player mode Team 5 has created yet in The Dalaran Heist, which provided a welcome outlet for…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201985 VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE – BLOODLINESRELEASED 2004|LAST POSITION New Jody: Bloodlines is one of few games that actually makes you feel cool. Being a vampire in a Los Angeles where it’s always dark and it’s always goth night at the clubs is great. You get to hang out with sexy people and murder anyone in your way. Occasionally you get trapped in a nightmare hotel, but that’s a small price for being a secret ruler of LA. Then you accidentally murder someone, or bump into a friend from your old life. Suddenly it’s not so cool being a monster. Bloodlinesturns out to be a powerful horror game where you’re trapped on the other side of the fence. Phil: Bloodlinesmissed the Top 100 last year, but it’s back where it belongs – in part because the…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201982 ELITE DANGEROUSRELEASED 2015|LAST POSITION 94 Andy: Whether it’s a nimble fighter or a chunky freighter, the ships in Elite Dangerous are all a delight to fly, and you can really feel the weight and power of the things when you slam the throttle. They’re the real stars of the game, but there’s a massive, beautiful open galaxy to explore here too. With so many ways to play and make money, the game’s vast scale replica of the Milky Way can be quite daunting at first. But when you find your niche – for me it was trading commodities between systems for massive profits – you’ll lose weeks to it. It’s great with a gamepad, but playing with a flight stick and throttle takes it to the next level. Steven: I’ve never…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201976 OVERCOOKEDRELEASED 2016|LAST POSITION 42 Jody: Cooking is stressful. There are sharp objects, things burn if you don’t take them off the heat right now, and that order of soup was supposed to go out ages ago. Overcooked puts you in a kitchen with your loved ones, who all have their own ideas about how long to let dirty dishes pile up. Arguments are inevitable. In the chaos of Overcooked, everyone is an idiot sandwich. Phil: A great test of any relationship. SurviveOvercooked’s chaotic co-op and you can survive just about anything.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201973 FACTORIORELEASED 2016|LAST POSITION New Chris: There’s a certain exhaustion that can set in when playing resource management games – there are only so many trees you can chop or so much coal you can chisel before it becomes a joyless chore. But in Factorio you build little factories to do all that busywork for you and it’s a genuine rush to turn a barren landscape into a massive assembly line of busy little conveyor belts, robotic arms, and research labs. All the harvesting, transporting, and crafting you’ve been doing by hand can be turned over to machines, and the machines themselves can be built by machines that have been built by other machines. Once you’ve gotten a taste for the automation possibilities in Factorio, you’ll never want to lift a…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019The PC Gamer teamANDY KELLY Specialist in Demon guts Twitter @ultrabrilliant This month Had a very good time doing unspeakable things to demons and then speaking about them. MALINDY HETFELD Specialist in No deadlines Twitter @yourkyotowife This month Enjoyed the best half of the deputy editor role – the half without the magazine deadline in it. JEREMY PEEL Specialist in Deadlines Twitter @jeremy_peel This month Suffered the worst half of the deputy editor role – the half with the magazine deadline in it. SAMUEL ROBERTS Specialist in Old anime Twitter @SamuelWRoberts This month Exorcised his E3 demons by writing a whole lot of previews and watching Neon Genesis Evangelion.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019The SpyAs truth becomes increasingly improbable, The Spy has difficulty distinguishing between well-founded rumour and the fanciful thoughts that naturally occur in the mind just two days before a magazine deadline. Elden Ring, for instance, might be a name generated by a neural network trained come to up with Tolkien titles forever. Or equally, it could be the next FromSoftware game. Its world will be vast and navigated by horse, but The Spy has read enough reports to expect Shadow of the Colossus rather than The Witcher 3. Uncharacteristically, it appears George RR Martin has finished providing its “overarching mythos”. But The Spy swears that, with a listening device held flat against the monitor, you can still hear him playing for time in the E3 trailer, “The Elden Ring, shattered by…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019WATCH DOGS LEGIONLet me tell you about Abe Welch. He’s a hired goon who is now in a hospital. I put him there, after performing a melee takedown on him in Camden Market during a mission in Watch Dogs Legion. It was at this point I decided to save him to my collection of tracked people in the game. A menu screen tells me he hates Dedsec, no surprise after I knocked him out. But, having hacked into the hospital, I can now prioritise his care, which will begin to change his mind. From there I can help him with the other troubles in his life, like his sister who’s being harassed. Eventually I will have the chance to win Abe to my cause. If all goes well, he’ll have gone from…7 min
PC Gamer|September 2019STAR WARS JEDI: FALLEN ORDERI came into my hands-on time with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order at E3 expecting more or less George Lucas’ Uncharted – a gorgeous-but-conventional linear Star Wars action game. But what I played had a few unexpected shades of Metroid’s backtracking and FromSoftware’s secret areas. To be clear Jedi: Fallen Order is not an open-world game. You’ve got your own ship, the Mantis, and any time that it’s accessible to you, you can walk inside, visit a holotable to bring up a galactic map, and jump to one of the other planets you’ve visited. But (despite the presence of a crew you can engage with using simple either/or dialogue) you are not going to be zipping between these worlds as in Mass Effect, running side-quest errands. Instead, travelling between the…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019ZOMBIE ARMY 4: DEAD WARHitler is making his play to return from hell in Zombie Army 4: Dead War, which is where players left him at the end of Zombie Army Trilogy. At E3 2019, this latest Sniper Elite standalone spin-off offered a fun demo of zombie shooting – another moreish four-player co-op shooter to join the growing ranks that have emerged since Left 4 Dead 2. My PC demo was actually in singleplayer, and I played as Sniper Elite protagonist Karl, who’s among several other returning characters in this entry. That means I carry a sniper rifle and shotgun, but on top of that I have an electric fist melee attack for knocking zombies back. There’s an ’80s genre movie influence hanging over the game, which is most noticeable in the moody John…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019SHENMUE IIIThe E3 hands-on demo for Shenmue III is timed to 15 minutes, and I’m sat playing with creator Yu Suzuki. Ryo Hazuki, the returning protagonist, is going around a village asking people the same thing again and again. Every time he asks and with the countdown in mind, I want to skip the dialogue, but it seems rude to do that in front of the developer, so I don’t. And so, Ryo asks NPCs the same ridiculous thing over and over again. Most of the answers are wasting my time, and the English voice-acting that delivers them is odd in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. This is definitely a Shenmuegame. Shenmue III feels like a Dreamcast game, only released 20 years later, which I think you…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019HISTORY OF VIOLENCEDOOM 1993 The original Doom is the gory journey through Hell that set the standard for first-person shooters on PC. DOOM II 1994 Interconnected levels and a greater variety of enemies elevated Doom to new heights in this legendary sequel. FINAL DOOM 1996 A compilation of two Doom II mods, TNT: Evilution and ThePlutonia Experiment. More of a spin-off than a sequel. DOOM 3 2004 A reboot with an increased focus on horror and storytelling, which remains the most divisive entry in the series. DOOM 2016 Another reboot, and arguably a more successful one. This brought Doom back to its violent, fast-paced roots. DOOM ETERNAL 2019 Very much the Doom II to the original Doom, Eternal takes the 2016 reboot and revs it up like…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019OOH BE GAHThe last time you stubbed your toe, hopped on one foot, and cursed in a series of wordless noises – “mmmmnaaargh ow umph!” – you were speaking Simlish. The exact collection of strangled vowels that echoed down your hallway probably haven’t yet been heard in a Simsgame, but their emotional delivery is the core tenant of speaking The Sims’ iconic language fluently. Here, anguish communicated more than “I banged my foot” ever could. Feeling is more important than phonology in Simlish. Emotion is the answer to a problem that had developers scratching their heads in 1996. Sims needed to communicate realistically – it’s a life simulator after all – but using English would become repetitive and literally put words into the mouths of characters whose story belonged to the player.…4 min
PC Gamer|September 2019LAUNDRY LOVESIMS 3 SIMS WILL JUMP AT THE CHANCE TO DO LAUNDRY. THE WEIRDOS One of the most charming aspects about The Sims is that it sometimes falls just short of reality. Take having kids in the first game. Instead of showing the mother’s pregnancy, a cloud of daisies will flutter around in the air and ‘give birth’ to a baby in a bassinet. But The Sims is much more accurate to real life now in many ways other than having children. You can go to college, run your own restaurant, and do laundry – which is equally the worst and best thing to happen to The Sims. The ability to wash and dry your Sims’ clothing first appeared with The Sims 3’s Ambitions expansion pack. It included a few different…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019Forest for the treesIf a Steam game releases off the store’s homepage and nobody is around to review it, is it still a 29%? Regular readers may notice that the majority of our review scores land in the top half of our 0-96% spectrum. There’s a good reason for this, but it’s not the one you’ll have seen posited via various forums or Reddit threads. Simply put, there are a lot of PC games and we only have a finite amount of reviewers, time and pages. And so we pick what we think you’ll be interested in. But even if we like to focus on the good stuff, the scoring brackets found to the left of my tiny avatar are still in play. All of which is to say that when Malindy gives…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019BETTER OFF REDA grandiose rendering of World War II’s Eastern Front, Steel Division 2 details Operation Bagration, the Red Army’s back-breaking push against the Nazi war machine. It’s an ambitious real-time strategy game, and though it ultimately fails to live up to a lot of that ambition – especially with its singleplayer campaign – the vastness of its battles captures the scale of total war with lavish detail. Operation Bagration was the June to August 1944 offensive that threw a huge number of the Soviet army’s best troops against the German army in occupied Belarus and Poland. At the same time as the Normandy invasion thousands of kilometres away, the Soviet army surrounded and crushed Germany’s Army Group Centre, signalling the end for Germany in the east. It’s warfare at a scale…8 min
PC Gamer|September 2019LOUD AND PROUDCNH2N+2ENERGY – TIGER Pretty sure there’s a magic eye hidden on this one, but it hurts too much to look at. DISTORT – INTERFERENCE There’s a reason this kind of camo doesn’t appear in nature – animals have better taste. OVOLO – FLUID DYNAMICS “Can you make it any greener? What if you painted a greener green on top of the green?” VENUS – STRIPE WIPE The driveable manifestation of a printer jam, yours to own and compete in.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019RISING DAMPIn a gloomy, perpetually rain-soaked American city where smoke-spewing factories loom over rows of dreary suburban homes, a serial murderer is on the loose. The killer’s calling card is an origami animal, and four very different people find themselves swept up in his wave of terror: journalist Madison Paige, FBI agent Norman Jayden, private detective Scott Shelby, and architect Ethan Mars, whose son has been kidnapped by this so-called Origami Killer. It’s actually possible for every main character to die in Heavy Rain What exactly is Heavy Rain? Well, it’s an adventure game of sorts, with a heavy focus on Shenmue-style QTEs. That means a lot of button-tapping and stick-waggling, whether it’s one character shaking a carton of orange juice before taking a swig or another swinging a fist in…4 min
PC Gamer|September 2019THE THICK OF ITAmid Evil’s worst weapon is a staff that shoots blue homing blobs – pathetic water balloons that splash against low-poly demons, many of whom look like what you’d get if you coated a bunch of triangles with super glue and threw them in a dryer. I don’t like it or the moments when I resort to it, but I can also use the entire Earth as a grenade, which more than evens things out. Amid Evil is good. The Star of Torment fires clumps of homing crystals It’s a throwback FPS like Dusk, but rather than the hitscan headshots, Amid Evil recalls Heretic and Hexen’smagical weapons. The staff sucks, but there’s also a magic sword, a grenade launcher that shrinks and fires planets (like the Earth), a spike-firing morningstar, a…4 min
PC Gamer|September 2019NEXT OF KINOur fates, as we can all agree, are written on our palms, dictated by life lines and other creases that are definitely meaningful. Dear Substance of Kin imagines a world where our destinies are etched onto our backs, in invisible lines that only a wandering mystic can see. By getting a load of blood and scribbling out these destiny lines, a coppersmith may rewrite a person’s fate. You are a coppersmith, and it’s not the best life to be honest. You seem to traipse from one destitute hamlet to another, offering your services to an assortment of miserable peasants. First you visit a hovel, then you engage its owners in conversation, seeking out the element of reality they would like to change. It might be a desire for food, or…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019ICONOCLASTSRemaining with the same loose theme of ‘things that have bolts’, next we have Iconoclasts. It’s a slightly wordy name for what might be one of the prettiest pixelated games I’ve ever seen. It’s milkshake for the eyes. Even death is cute: colourful little skulls float away whenever I shoot the wildlife. It’s the sort of game that I think all games used to look like growing up. And systemically, it’s a dream – gentle Metroidvania progression that doesn’t feel too back-and-forthy, alongside some elegantly timed puzzles that make me feel delightfully effective. Even the threatening theological police state storyline can’t dent my childlike enjoyment of this.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019GRAPHICS CARDSFinding the best graphics card for you depends on how you plan to use it. Chances are that since you’re reading this guide in PC Gamer, you’re in the market for the best graphics card for gaming, and these are hands down the best parts for our favourite hobby. The best gaming PCs will almost always prioritize the GPU over the best CPU for gaming because gaming workloads prioritize the kind of single threaded processing at which graphics cards excel, but if you run a lot of applications simultaneously or your workload (rendering, encoding, etc) leans on multithreaded processing, you may want to consider budgeting a little more for your CPU. Of course, you can automatically pad out your budget by getting your graphics card on sale, so keep your…7 min
PC Gamer|September 2019BUDGET BUILDMOTHERBOARD B360M-DS3H Gigabyte £60 It lacks overclocking options, but the new B360 chipset is far cheaper than the Z370 and is perfect for this budget build. PROCESSOR Core i3-8100 Intel £120 A great processor for out-of-the-box gaming performance. Opt for the AMD Ryzen 1300X if you’d like to overclock. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 2060 Ventus 6G OC MSI £320 MSI’s budget take on the RTX 2060 is lightning fast for the money, offering out-of-the-box overclocked values. COOLER Hyper 212 Evo CoolerMaster £26 Even a budget build can benefit from a good CPU cooler, letting you enjoy a quieter, cooler system. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 8GB (2x4GB) @2400MHz Corsair £48 DDR4 prices are still high, however this Corsair pair is a good value option. POWER SUPPLY CX-M Series CX550M Corsair £58 A…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019“Well, I’ve just finished my first date and what can I say? Love is blind”This, my first encounter with Quantum Break, had the odd anticipation of a first date. I’ve annoyed my friends with it for ages – what if I don’t like it? With heightening anxiety, I realised that their opinions were just making it worse. They have different impressions. The only way to find out was to actually commit and see for myself. So I invite it over and spend the length of a rom-com montage getting ready while watching the progress bar of a seemingly endless download. Then it’s time. Sometimes starting a new game can be oddly nerve wracking. Wanting to give a game the attention it deserves – to truly dive headfirst into an experience without getting distracted – can be tricky when there’s so much stuff vying for…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019“If the game wants me to fall asleep at the wheel, I’m not going to fight it”The sun sinks behind the high rises of Foshan, sending long shadows in block formation across the highway. A lovely lavender light bathes the dash of my ancient Shanghai SH760. After about a minute, the light starts blinking. And then the engine cuts out. What I’d taken as part of the ambience might, in retrospect, have been a mechanical warning. It’s 32 kilometres to the nearest garage. And many more to the farm in Shenzen, my destination. Luckily, a cursory examination of the car reveals I’ve run out of fuel. I switch to the outside view, pull open the cap, and pour a can of petrol into the engine. Not all of it – just enough to get me to the garage, where I can fill up. Road disasters like…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019EYES LEVELTRIP ENSLAVED: ODYSSEY TO THE WEST Ninja Theory lead the way in performance capture. Lindsey Shaw lent pathos to a character who makes a slave of the player. ALYX VANCE HALF-LIFE 2 This is the first twinkle of humanity you see in City 17, where the faces of local law enforcement don’t say ‘happy to help’ so much as ‘weaponised squid’. WHEATLEY PORTAL 2 With Portal 2 Valve set themselves a challenge – a companion whose only means of expression were Stephen Merchant’s voice and two metal eyelids. CLIPPY MICROSOFT OFFICE Clippy was the word processing assistant we never asked for – imbued with strange humanity by two blinking, smug spheres.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019POLICE QUESTThere are actually two versions of the original Police Quest, whose full, unwieldy title is Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel. There’s the 1987 original, which has basic 16-colour graphics and uses the classic Sierra text parser. And then there’s a VGA remake, released in 1992, which features a point-and-click interface, slightly reworked puzzles, and vastly improved visuals and sound. The first release has its charms, and is undoubtedly a classic of the genre. But for this retrospective I decided to revisit the 1992 version because, honestly, it’s more fun to play – especially by modern standards. Police Quest was a collaboration between developer Sierra On-Line and retired police officer Jim Walls. When it was first released, most videogames were either fantasy or science fiction. But this was…8 min
PC Gamer|September 2019SILENCE IS OLDENBREAKING THE FOURTH WALL The character addresses the player and thus reveals themselves as a figure doing your bidding. MAKING CHOICES Select dialogue choices and pick the reaction you feel fits best, ensuring you identify more strongly with your character. QUEST DIALOGUE You approach a character and they reveal their problem and ask you to fix it. A conversation meant to send you on your way. TALK TO YOURSELF Characters like Lara Croft vocalise their plans and feelings to keep you on track and react to what’s happening.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019100 GRIM FANDANGO REMASTEREDRELEASED 1998|LAST POSITION 78 Tom: It’s vague to suggest an adventure game has ‘heart’, but it evokes the warmth and humanity of Grim Fandango’s cast, who in story terms actually happen to be cold and dead. It’s a story of love, friendship, and death-after-death in an afterlife inspired by the Day of the Dead. The puzzles are often nonsense but it’s bursting with jokes and even features a few touching moments. Glottis the big orange demon is the friend we all deserve and Hector LeMans is a terrifying villain.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201997 PSYCHONAUTSRELEASED 2005|LAST POSITION New James: Double Fine’s bizarre platformer is still a gleefully grim adventure through the strange corners of the human brain. Psychonauts is a game about nostalgia. It takes place in a summer camp and each level therein takes place in the distorted memories of the people there, little tours of their own hazy recollections; some traumatic, some tragic, others joyful, all lost to time. Thanks to the fusion of the formerly massive genres of 3D character-based platformers and adventure games, Psychonauts’ nostalgic qualities take on more power. Deal with the tricky camera and pointless combat for a playful, funny and earnest coming-of-age story.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201994 STAR WARS: KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC IIRELEASED 2005|LAST POSITION New Fraser: The weird, slightly stoned, tragically unfinished sequel to Knights of the Old Republic is Star Wars at its boldest. It is Planescape: Torment to KotOR’s Baldur’s Gate, equally at home with pondering the nature of the Force as it is shooting lightning at Mandelorians. It takes a bit of effort getting it working well – you’ll want the unofficial patch at the very least, but some of the cosmetic mods are worth a look, as well – but the reward is one of the best Star Wars stories ever written, and a cracking RPG to boot. Word of warning: if you do decide to go down the Dark Side and take all of your crew with you, be prepared for some guilt pangs. It’s brutal.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201990 THE NORWOOD SUITERELEASED 2017|LAST POSITION 72 Phil: A first-person exploration adventure about falling down the rabbit hole of a remote jazz hotel. You explore the converted mansion of celebrated musical icon Peter Norwood, solving problems for a quirky cast of characters. Whether you’re uncovering a finger-destroying musical score or just making a sandwich for a corporate stooge, everything you do is accompanied by a distinctive soundtrack and a witty visual flair. It’s a delightfully surreal space, full of mystery and surprise.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201984 SHADOW TACTICS: BLADES OF THE SHOGUNRELEASED 2016|LAST POSITION New Jody: Top-down stealth set in feudal Japan. Shadow Tactics is a game of ninja stars and distracting tanuki, where you stab a guard and drag him back into a bush before a cherry blossom hits the ground. You have mastered the art of invisibility, and nobody needs to know it took four quickloads to get right. Phil: A worthy successor to tactical stealth classics like Commandosand Desperados. So much so that its creators are now working on DesperadosIII.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201981 UNDERTALERELEASED 2015|LAST POSITION 28 Tyler: I always second guess myself on this one. If Undertale was really so good, why don’t I think about it anymore? But I always conclude that yes, it was very good. It’s the best game that breaks the fourth wall of RPGs, commenting on authorship and fandom in a way nothing else I’ve played has even approached. It’s easy to forget how much I loved it because it’s been meme’d to death, but if you haven’t played Undertale, you should. Just don’t read anything about it.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201975 LIFE IS STRANGERELEASED 2015|LAST POSITION 13 Joanna: In this adventure game you play as a teenage girl named Max, who must navigate an increasingly complex web of angst while making decisions that may or may not end in the entire destruction of her hometown. You also have developed the power to rewind time, which doesn’t always save you from the consequences of your decisions. This gut-wrenching, coming-of-age tale left me sobbing for my best friend by the end – and made me fall in love with branching narratives.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201972 DEUS EXRELEASED 2000|LAST POSITION 53 Andy: I replay cyberpunk RPG Deus Ex every couple of years, and I’m always heartened to discover that it still holds up. I mean, visually it’s hideous. But those big, detailed, complex levels, and the sheer amount of ways to navigate them, make this a game that is somehow immune to the passage of time. Every time I play it I find new ways to complete objectives, and there’s something compelling about its bleak pre-apocalyptic world where every wild conspiracy theory is true.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201970 EVE ONLINERELEASED 2003|LAST POSITION 50 Steven: EVE Online is a space-faring MMO with an uncanny ability for creating some wild and incredible stories, and it’s the only game on this list that might be more enjoyable to read about than to play. EVE Online players just keep finding new ways to screw one another over in the most wonderful ways. The last few years have seen long-standing empires implode, betrayals, and even a recent alien invasion that temporarily crippled all of its biggest player alliances.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201968 SEA OF THIEVESRELEASED 2018|LAST POSITION New Samuel: It’s been fantastic seeing Sea of Thieves transform from something with potential into a game I want to play every week. I hope it keeps growing. Tyler: Some of the puzzles and boss fights are terribly designed, and I would never describe the non-ship combat as good, but we always have fun messing around within Sea of Thieves’ loose structure. A great moment the other night: two fellow pirates held book pages in my face so I could use the symbol keys on them to decode a different page without flipping back and forth. Just after I finished translating the last line, thinking I’d have to start all over because I’d already forgotten the first line, a notification popped up. “Found it,” said Andy Chalk.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019ALIENS VS EVE ONLINEAttacking out of nowhere, a non-player faction called the Drifters has invaded New Eden, the galaxy where EVE Online takes place. The Borg-like aliens laid siege to starbases and destroyed more than 5,000 player ships, amounting to hundreds of billions of ISK, EVE’s in-game currency. The major player-led alliances scrambled to respond, but not before a huge amount of damage was done – and now they’re pissed. IT WAS AN ATTEMPT TO SHAKE NEW EDEN UP IN AN EXCITING WAY What was intended as an attempt to inject some life into EVE’s universe served mainly as an annoyance for the large groups of players who call New Eden home. “The lack of forewarning that normally precludes an event like this took a lot of the playerbase by surprise,” TEST Alliance…2 min
PC Gamer|September 2019DYING LIGHT 2I am an indecisive gamer. Give me a choice between two different rewards and I will tab out to research which one is better. Give me an option between two quest resolutions and I’ll scour forums to figure out how each will affect the game. “Do you want to murder this person for no reason or reward?” Er, not really, but let me just check a wiki real quick. Based on this fact, Dying Light 2 is either the worst game I could play or the perfect form of immersion therapy. Let’s start at the end of the hands-off E3 demo I saw, because it features exactly the sort of big, impactful choice guaranteed to afflict me with gaming paralysis. The mission of the demo was to restore drinking water…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019MARVEL’S AVENGERSThere was an air of disappointment around the look of Square Enix’s Avengers game when it was announced. The slightly muted colour palette of Marvel’s Avengers approximates the look of the Marvel films rather than the comics, but without the actors playing those roles, it ends up looking like an uncanny, slightly drab cover version. Seeing more of the game in action behind closed doors at E3 – about 20 minutes of an early mission – couldn’t overcome that initial reaction to capture my imagination. But the long-term ambition at play here is very exciting, and this is only a tiny introduction to what Crystal Dynamics and company have planned. This hands-off demo takes place during A-Day in San Francisco, a celebration of all things Avengers. As the reveal footage…7 min
PC Gamer|September 2019DESPERADOS IIIIt can be nerve wracking playing a hands-on E3 demo in full view of one its designers – particularly one for a PC game that delights in its difficulty. You’ve got a short amount of time to figure out the controls, intuit the most effective route forward and exude an air of basic competence. Luckily, for Desperados III, I already had some experience. Not from my distant recollections of playing Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive some 18 years ago, but rather developer Mimimi’s previous game, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. Desperados III may be a prequel to the classic stealth series, but it feels like the follow-up to the studio’s lauded Edo period sneak-’em-up (itself inspired by both Desperados and the earlier Commandos games. Snake, meet tail). In the…2 min
PC Gamer|September 2019YOOKA-LAYLEE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE LAIRYooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair is a Donkey Kong Country game. It’s inarguable. The lizard is wearing the great ape’s skin. It’s a side-scroller, you roll across the ground to defeat enemies and pick up momentum, collectibles are squirrelled away in every level, and there are far too many bees. But I’m not mad, because Donkey Kong Country is a very particular and pleasant kind of platformer. After a short hands-on session at E3, I can verify that Yooka controls like a large ape, with weightier movements that reward chaining leaps and rolls together. Expect to find level design gimmicks that layer complexity as you move through a given branch of stages. There aren’t many direct homages like it on PC, and this isn’t just pale imitation. Playtonic Games is…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019ART ATTACKConcept art for Eternal’s version of the Arachnotron, a returning enemy from Doom II. You can shoot its head-gun off. Described by id as the ‘arch-nemesis’ of the Doom Slayer, this multi-weapon beast is named the Doomhunter. Concept art of another returning enemy, the brilliantly named Pain Elemental. Like a meaner, smellier Cacodemon. An evocative painting of a classicDoomenvironment, which depicts a soul processing plant in Hell. A test model of the Ballista, a devastating new weapon that launches fast-moving projectiles. Similar to Quake’s railgun.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019TAKE PRIDEWhen I first played The Simsas a little girl, I found it odd that I could have relationships with men and women. It would be many years before I realised that this isn’t just normal – it’s also my normal. THE IMPACT THE SIMS HAD ON ME THROUGH ITS DEPICTION OF QUEERNESS Now that I’m older and have come into my own as a bisexual woman, I’ve realised the profound impact The Simshad on me through its depiction of queerness as natural in the face of a society that once largely found it radical. For the last two decades, The Sims has spearheaded queer representation in gaming. The freedom it’s long offered in letting players romance, woohoo, and marry whomever they wish regardless of gender – to be who they…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019LICENCE TO BILLI’ve watched enough episodes of Eastenders to know how I should want life among my Sims families to go down. Sarah ought to be boffing Kenneth from across the street behind her husband Jim-Bob’s back. Their grade-school daughter Katie should be bullying every nerd in the playground, while her teenage brother Miles acts as a secret criminal mastermind plotting the downfall of poor, hapless Kenneth’s unsuspecting family. Every dinner-table conversation should be fraught with tension and the possibility that, at any moment, a plate of food could end up flying at the wall. It’s up to me to bring these webs of intrigue to life. But, let’s be honest, that’s not how I really play The Sims. You don’t even need to scratch the surface of the franchise to realise…4 min
PC Gamer|September 2019HOW 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|September 2019MASKIROVKA!RECON UNITS See the little binoculars on the scout men? The binoculars are for seeing things. AT GUNS Place these in forests, or behind houses, so that they can spring forward and attack. ASSAULT INFANTRY Put them in the middle of a row of houses so enemies get a nasty surprise. ARTILLERY Don’t only bombard where you’re attacking – use it to keep sections of the enemy line pinned. SLEIGHT OF FORCE Keep troops out of sight behind terrain until you’re ready to attack.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019DROWN AND OUTPlagued by nightmarish visions of a drowned city and a colossal tentacled beast, private detective Charles Reed travels to the town of Oakmont to find answers. Storms have been battering this once thriving fishing community, cutting it off from the mainland, flooding parts of it, and leaving the rest sodden and dilapidated. And to make matters worse, the locals are deeply suspicious of outsiders. But with the source of these harrowing visions lurking somewhere in the city, Reed has no choice but to get his feet wet. The Sinking City’s dreary setting is also hard to love The Sinking City is a third-person detective adventure set in a fictional version of 1920s New England, inspired by the works of influential (and, yes, controversial) horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Divers uncover an…4 min
PC Gamer|September 2019QUAD DAMAGEETHAN MARS Architect whose family is destroyed when his son is killed in an accident. Then his other son is kidnapped by the Origami Killer. MADISON PAIGE A journalist suffering from insomnia and nightmares. An encounter with Ethan leads her to investigate the Origami Killer. NORMAN JAYDEN A talented, and secretly drug-addicted FBI agent who has been sent to assist the police in the hunt for the Origami Killer. SCOTT SHELBY A private detective who is also hunting for clues about the Origami Killer. He has a partner of sorts in Lauren Winter.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019BE KIND, REWINDYou’re sat at your computer, trying to write. Perhaps you have an essay to submit, or an important email to send. Whatever it is, you probably shouldn’t give in to distraction and respond to the instant message that’s just popped up on your screen. That’s the premise of Missed Messages – a gorgeous and affecting visual novel where you, of course, immediately reply to a photo sent by someone known as ‘goth gf’. You won’t be able to relieve May’s depression permanently I mean, what else are you going to do? Finish your essay? You have plenty of choices to make in this brief yet replayable interactive story. However, curiosity’s lure will surely make that first one for you – getting to know the mysterious stranger who is suddenly chatting…2 min
PC Gamer|September 2019SEVER ISSUESIt’s Wednesday, it’s raining, and you’ve just begun your guided tour of the Cumberland Pencil Museum. There are still 405 pencils left to view and you don’t even like stationery. Then a cyborg ninja cartwheels through the gift shop, slices up all the pencils in a swirl of katana strikes, and you escape together on a motorbike to a more interesting museum. That’s how exciting it is to play Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance for the first time. I’m not exaggerating. For the rest of this review, I’m going to ask you to pretend it’s written in capital letters with all the punctuation removed. I’m fighting a Metal Gear RAY within the first five minutes. Although ‘fighting’ isn’t the right word. I’m knocking the sh*t out of it, hacking at its…3 min
PC Gamer|September 2019BINARY DOMAINBinary Domain is the sort of game that inspires 7/10 list features (that’s list features about average games, not average list features). The characters, apart from the chipper French robot, are uniformly bland. It’s so much fun shooting robots with machine guns that it just doesn’t matter. It’s a masterclass in how an obviously flawed game can capture your heart. Like a dog with a fat ear, those minor imperfections just give it more character. If you’ve ever wondered how a game can score 75 per cent and still be incredible, simply play Binary Domain. And if you’ve already played it and understand why it’s so wonderful, go ahead and add 10 points to that score.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019SHOULD YOU UPGRADE?If you’re doubtful that your current PC is fast enough to warrant purchasing a better graphics card, I have some data for you. Even with the fastest graphics card around, running at a resolution that puts more of the burden on your CPU (1080p ultra), there’s often only a minor improvement in gaming performance. Yes, truly old CPUs are going to struggle, but going from a Core i7-4770K to a Core i7-8700K only improves gaming performance by 20 per cent on average, at 1080p ultra. What happens if you use a graphics card that’s 20-30 per cent slower than an RTX 2080? Your CPU becomes even less of a factor. If you have at least 8GB of system memory and a Core i7-4770K or better CPU, you should be fine…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019MID-RANGE BUILDMOTHERBOARD Prime Z370 A II Aus £153 Great shielding, full of features, and featuring that – ahem – all important RGB lighting, this is a fine Asus board. PROCESSOR Core i5-8600K Intel £231 Six cores, six threads, good out-of-the-box clock speeds – and it’s overclockable. No performance bottlenecks with this installed. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 2060 Twin Fan Zotac £320 Serious power from the ‘just about affordable’ end of Nvidia’s new GPU fleet, and it’s ray tracing-ready too. COOLER Hydro Series H55 Quiet Edition Corsair £55 Tidy and quiet, the H55 will unlock our CPU’s overclocking potential and look good through your case window while it does so. MEMORY Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) @2666 Corsair £69 16GB is the minimum amount of RAM we’d recommend for a system of this…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019“I’m still using the default loadout”I load up TF2not with any serious intention of playing it. I’m here simply because I’m trying to figure out Steam’s bizarre Grand Prix sale event. Apparently if I play some casual matches I can earn points that do… something? I don’t know. On the menu screen I notice a new button for something called the ConTracker. It seems to be a bounty system offering rewards for completing basic missions – kill, capture, defend, etc. It’s all locked behind the Jungle Inferno Contracts Pass. On a whim, I buy it. I’ve been here less than five minutes and I’m already £1.89 down. I queue up for a casual Payload game and load into Badwater Basin. It’s on the loading screen that the nostalgia hits. The long bar denoting the many…2 min
PC Gamer|September 2019OVERCOOKED 2Zombies are not known as fussy eaters. Yet this one – a sentient slice at the vanguard of the unbread horde – is demanding better service. It ordered a burger with only beef, lettuce, and cheese, but the one I’m holding also comes with tomato. That simply won’t do. So it’s back to the grills, while the malt monstrosity bangs its head against the door of my kitchen, threatening to bring the whole operation down. Horde mode is the clear highlight of Overcooked 2’s Night of the Hangry Horde DLC – a spin on tower defence in which you spend as much time repairing barricades as chopping ingredients in an attempt to keep your clientele at bay. But it’s merely the latest course in a tasting menu of inspired additions…4 min
PC Gamer|September 2019PICKING EVERY FIGHT IN MIRROR’S EDGE PART IIIAuthoritarian regimes often pick train stations as the place to present an idealised face to the world – a sort of dictator’s Instagram account. A station in a capital city is a point of entrance, a shiny front door to a society. It’s a confined space where message can be easily controlled. No expense was spared on Moscow’s famous metro system, with enough marble and chandeliers to suggest an underground ballroom. At the height of the Soviet Union, photographs of Stalin were hung from its walls. The street facade of the central station in Pyongyang, meanwhile, has the appearance of a shrine – thanks to the portraits of the two Kim Jongs at the foot of its clocktower. On their flanks, a long colonnade props up a row of letters,…9 min
PC Gamer|September 2019PACKING HEATSERVICE REVOLVER A standard issue .357 Magnum with a wooden grip. If you pull the trigger you’d best prepare for a mountain of paperwork. NIGHTSTICK If a suspect becomes aggressive your nightstick will come in handy, but misuse it and you may lose your badge. TICKET BOOK You play as a traffic cop in PQ, which means writing a lot of tickets, whether it’s for speeding or illegal parking. RADIO EXTENDER A cop’s best friend, used to call for backup or report a crime. This thing could save your life, so always keep it close.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 2019MUST PLAYDRIVE TO ISTANBUL JALOPY shop.excalibur-games.com/products/jalopy A road trip in a knackered Trabant during the fall of East Germany, Jalopy is Euro Truck Simulator reimagined as an art game. You wind up loving the car, which needs regular attention just to keep going. The mundane moments are oddly memorable – washing the wheels, or checking into your bare motel room. STOP THE GREENSKINS ORCS MUST DIE! 2 robotentertainment.com/games There’s a rhythm to Orcs Must Die! – the way its thoughtful trap placement phase flips to hectic siege defence and back again, like the repeating structure of a James Brown song. Every round has a compositional feel, as you build up the perfect killboxes. It’s that creativity which makes it an all-timer. FIGHT FOR EVIL TYRANNY www.paradoxplaza.com/tyranny/TYTY01 GSKMASTER.html Obsidian’s strangest RPG positions…2 min
PC Gamer|September 201998 MAX PAYNE 2: THE FALL OF MAX PAYNERELEASED 2003|LAST POSITION New Samuel: Remedy’s slow-motion shooter is more challenging and interesting than pretty much every cover shooter I’ve played, turning each room into a puzzle that has to be solved (by diving through the air and firing guns wildly). Bullet time became passé a bit too quickly, as slow-mo crept into more and more games to no real benefit, but Remedy’s Max Payne games always did it incredibly well. Tom: I wish Max Payne was a genre. I would spend hours in beautiful sequels wearing increasingly detailed leather jackets and shooting goons in slow motion. I’ll never forgive Max Payne 2 for making Max’s face normal, but improved level design and more physics-driven destruction make it the better shooter. Tyler: I don’t have any proof of this, but…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201996 OXENFREERELEASED 2016|LAST POSITION 76 Jody: This horror game about teenagers on a spooky island does have eerie moments – if you’ve ever read about numbers stations you’ll understand the kind of creepiness it’s evoking with its story of radio ghosts. The best thing about it, though, isn’t the scares. It’s the way Oxenfree’s teens talk over each other realistically. You never know when choosing one of the word balloons to respond to their believably teenage banter might break the flow of conversation. Like every teenager, every time you open your mouth you might be jamming your foot in it. It’s hard to talk about Oxenfree’s horror side without spoiling it, but its conversational side – well-written, funny, and with a rhythm that puts most RPGs to shame – makes it…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201993 MORDHAURELEASED 2019|LAST POSITION New Evan: Messy, unfair, and brutal, just as medieval warfare was meant to be. I love the way that Mordhau makes kill-stealing a certifiable skill – I take pride in being that guy who can whirl his zweihänder into a steel party-in-progress and decapitate someone who’s already engaged (without gutting my teammates, usually). Likewise, it’s the heroic fantasy of winning outnumbered fights, of dancing around four dudes who are poking at you with spears and still being the last one standing. Also: the heroic fantasy of clubbing a Templar with a frying pan. It’s a shame it’s being undermined by an unusually toxic community and the absence of a modern player reporting system. Triternion’s response to this unchecked tire fire is pretty 13th century.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201989 GALACTIC CIVILIZATION IIRELEASED 2011|LAST POSITION 69 Tom: With each expansion Stellaris creeps up on GalCiv 2. And yet this classic 4X game remains one of the smartest empire-builders you can play on PC. The factions are imaginative and the AI is slightly terrifying. If you’ve read Tom Francis’ Galactic Civilization 2 diaries you’ll know it’s a great story generator too. Oddly my favourite part might be the ship builder, which lets me customise the way my forces look on the map. You can build some very odd and broken stuff.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201983 HOMEWORLD REMASTERED COLLECTIONRELEASED 2015|LAST POSITION 56 Tom: Make war with sad spaceships in one of the most beautiful RTS games ever made. The lasers, drive trails and spaceship designs are timeless, so the Remaster only had to touch up some textures. It’s one of the few games to try real-time strategy in true 3D. It can melt your brain at times but the action is always spectacular. Great use of Adagio for Strings too. Andy: People often say No Man’s Sky looks like the cover of a ‘70s sci-fi paperback come to life, but I think Homeworld does it better. The brightly-coloured ships are pure Chris Foss, and watching thousands of them duking it out against vivid nebulas is absolutely thrilling to behold. The campaign is also one of the best in…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201980 THIEF II: THE METAL AGERELEASED 2000|LAST POSITION New Phil: Incredibly influential, many of the games elsewhere on this list (not least Dishonored 2) owe a debt to the first two entries in Looking Glass’s first-person burgle-’em-up series. But Thief II isn’t just included here as a historical curiosity. The fact is it’s still one of the best stealth games you can play in 2019. Its levels are immaculately designed, its tools make for excitingly tense encounters, and its community is still active and still building new mods and missions.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201974 WARHAMMER: VERMINTIDE IIRELEASED 2018|LAST POSITION 77 Samuel: Playing through this co-op shooter’s campaign with the UK team was one of the most fun experiences I’ve had with games in the last year. It’s got a good, broad range of difficulties, the characters are so much fun, and the levels are so pretty. This sells me on the excitement of the Warhammer fantasy universe better than anything else has. Tom: It’s hard to make first-person melee combat feel good but Vermintide II nails it. Even the magic flaming staffs feel powerful and hefty, and trying not to blow up as the Bright Wizard is a fun minigame in itself. I still prefer killing Skaven to the tougher Chaos enemies, but the levels are larger, prettier and more ambitious than the original game. Wes:…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201971 INVISIBLE, INC.RELEASED 2015|LAST POSITION 43 Fraser: There are a lot of good stealth games that fall apart the moment you get spotted. The game devolves into a less tense, less thrilling action game, maybe. Or you’ve failed instantly and that’s the level over. Not here. Invisible, Inc. is a turn-based tactics game that’s pure stealth, but it’s equally brilliant when you screw up and get caught. Maybe your agent has an ability that can save them. You might simply be able to escape, ensuring your agents make it to the next mission. But if you’ve got an agent down, stunned and in another room, do you rescue them first? There are a bounty of options, and they’re almost always followed by persistent, dramatic consequences that change the complexion of a campaign…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201969 OVERWATCHRELEASED 2016|LAST POSITION 14 Bo: While its popularity has waned some in the face of battle royales like Fortnite and Apex Legends, Overwatch remains one of the most accessible multiplayer hero shooters you can play. Its enormous cast of 30 characters (and still counting) cater to just about any playstyle that takes your fancy. From fast-twitch damage dealers like Tracer and Widowmaker to less aim-intensive heroes like Reinhardt and Brigitte (and everything in between), there’s something here for everyone.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201967 DON’T STARVE TOGETHERRELEASED 2016|LAST POSITION New Tim: I type this with a stuffed Beefalo plushy on my desk, despite being a man in his forties, which should give you some indication of the hold Klei’s Burton-esque survival game holds on my imagination. Much as I enjoyed building my own isolated megabase ringed by meat effigies (one of a few items which can cheat death in this roguelike), the appeal of encountering strangers or working with a friend to stay alive in this gothy land is undeniable. Klei’s attention to the game also remains admirable, adding new characters Wortox and Wormwood this year, plus rebalancing old favourites and providing ongoing support for modders. Thanks to its gorgeous art and carefully considered mechanics, Don’t Starve in its various versions is the kind of game…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201965 HER STORYRELEASED 2015|LAST POSITION 23 Samuel: Her Story’s unusual style of play – you’re piecing together bits of video by searching for words from the audio in a police database – makes it very easy to recommend to people who have never played games before. This is the game that gets the closest to making you feel like an actual detective: following your own intuition and coming to conclusions yourself, rather than trying to figure out exactly what the game’s designer wants you to do next.…1 min
PC Gamer|September 201964 FINAL FANTASY XII: THE ZODIAC AGERELEASED 2018|LAST POSITION 58 Samuel: Not my personal favourite Final Fantasy, but the one I think will resonate the most with PC players due to its flexibility in classes and programmable party members. Plus it still looks amazing. Tom: The story’s all over the place but FF12 has some good characters (basically any that aren’t Vaan) and the squad development system is awesome. The Zodiac Age update adds a fast-forward command that makes the grind more manageable. Without it I wonder if the game would make this list. If you like toying with character builds then this is a must-play. The Gambit AI system is genius too. Wes: The flavourful writing and voice acting puts almost every other game in the series to shame. But what I really love is…1 min
