TOP NEW GPUs TESTED INSIDE

STR ATEGY

AGAINST
THE STORM

THE DARK FANTASY
CITY-BUILDER REVIEWED
ACTION

PACIFIC
DRIVE

SURVIVE HORRORS
ON FOUR WHEELS

NEXT-GEN

GTA VI
HOW THE STUNNING
NEW OPEN-WORLD
COULD RUN ON
YOUR PC

WOR LD EXCLUSIV E ACCESS

THE GREATEST MOBA OF ALL TIME
GETS AN EPIC NEW UPDATE

ESCAPE FROM TARKOV | COCOON | HOUSE FLIPPER 2

WELCOME

#393 MARCH 2024
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12,708
JanuaryDecember 2018

“LEAGUE OF LEGENDS IS
ONE OF PC GAMING’S
MOST PLAYED GAMES”
League of Legends, now
celebrating its 15th year,
remains to this day one of PC
gaming’s most played games.
This is a MOBA that had more
than 150 million players
enjoying it last year at its
peak, and which boasts over
160 champions to play as. As
you might expect, LoL also
has one of the most vibrant
communities in PC gaming.
ROBERT JONES
Twitter
@rnicholasj
This month
Went out drinking with
Gragas. Was found by Vi
the next day in a ditch
singing, “See the little
goblin, see his little feet.
And his little nosey-wose,
isn’t the goblin sweet?”

Despite this immense success, though, LoL’s
maker Riot Games is just getting started, and
with its latest content update is shaking things
up like never before. Turn to page 36 for the
exclusive inside scoop. Enjoy the issue.

SUBSCRIBE TO

ROBERT JONES
PRINT EDITOR
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The PC Gamer team

LAUREN MORTON

SEAN MARTIN

JACOB RIDLEY

JOSHUA WOLENS

Twitter
@ComradeCupcake_

Twitter
@RemainsToBeSean

Twitter
@RidleyJG

Twitter
@joshuawolens

This month
Became queen of the cosy
games genre. There was
a totally chill parade and
laid-back acoustic guitar.

This month
Wrestled Fortnite’s Peely
for bragging rights over
who was most dench. It
ended in a split decision.

This month
Tested so many GPUs
that he started seeing
the world as 3DMark
benchmark scores.

This month
Infiltrated the Big Shell
offshore facility with
Hideo Kojima. Raiden’s
skin-tight suit itched.

Future plc is a public company quoted
Chief executive Jon Steinberg
on the London Stock Exchange
Non-executive chairman Richard Huntingford
(symbol: FUTR)
Chief financial and strategy officer Penny Ladkin-Brand

PC Gamer (ISSN 1351-3540, USPS 24170), March issue 393, is published monthly with an extra issue in April by Future Publishing, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA. UK

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36

Monitor

08 THE TOP STORY
How ‘vibes-based forecasting’ from
retailers almost killed the CRPG

10 THE SPY
New gaming rumours investigated

12 SPECIAL REPORT
The ‘cosmetic uglification’ problem

14 SECRET LEVEL
The art of making a videogame demo

16 INCOMING
The hottest games to get excited for

Previews

18 United 1944
22 Solium Infernum
24 Pacific Drive
28 Railroads & Catacombs
30 Escape from Tarkov:
Arena

Features

36 League of Legends
46 Grand Theft Auto
56 Total War: Warhammer III

24

36

46

Matt Killeen literally drives to
survive in the hotly anticipated new
first-person driving survival game.
Supernatural dangers, scavenger
hunts and burning rubber await.

Mike Stubbs speaks to Riot Games
about the long-running MOBA’s
enduring legacy and new update.

Rick Lane digs deep into the bloody
and bombastic history of the gamechanging open-world crime series.

PACIFIC DRIVE
56

LEAGUE OF
LEGENDS

THE HISTORY OF
GTA ON PC

24

46

Reviews

64

64 Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
68 Gangs of Sherwood
70 Warhammer 40,000:
Rogue Trader
74 Cocoon
76 House Flipper 2
78 Disney Dreamlight Valley
80 Against the Storm
82 A Highland Song
84 Last Train Home
FREE GAMES
88 The Roottrees are Dead
89 Tommy Gun Witches
89 The Two Rivers Hypothesis
THEY’RE BACK
90 Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
91 Tropico 5
91 Wilmot’s Warehouse

Hardware
94 GROUP TEST
100 TECH REPORT
102 TECH TALES
104 BUYER’S GUIDE

Extra Life
108 NOW PLAYING

Lego Fortnite, SIGIL II, WoW Classic
Season of Discovery, Ghostrunner 2

124

112 UPDATE
How modders are fixing Metal Gear
Solid Master Collection Vol. 1

114 MOD SPOTLIGHT
Mod’s that make Lethal Company’s
horror even more horrifying

116 HOW TO
How to survive in Lego Fortnite

94

64

FRONTIERS
OF PANDORA
Noah Smith adventures with the
Na’vi in the visually impressive
new Avatar game. Is it a winner?

94

MAINSTREAM
GPUS TESTED
The PCG hardware labs review six
new mainstream graphics cards
to see which is the smart buy.

118 DIARY

124

SHADOW
OF MORDOR
Lauren Morton reinstalls Middleearth: Shadow of Mordor 10 years
later. Has it aged like Galadriel?

Wise-cracking 24th-century jerk-of-alltrades Jett Johnson blasts off in Starfield.

122 WHY I LOVE
Project Wingman’s 11th mission, Cold
War, a do or die dogfight doozie.

124 REINSTALL
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

128 MUST PLAY
Chants of Sennaar, Jusant, Planet of
Lana, Palia, Disney Dreamlight Valley,
Sky: Children of the Light, Fabledom

7

BAD ROLL
RPG devs blame the temporary death of CRPGs on ‘vibes-based forecasting’ from retailers

V

eteran developers
from RPG specialists
like Obsidian and
BioWare had an
interesting Twitter
exchange recently, and collectively
reckon that the temporary death
of the CRPG in the early 2000s
was down to retailer meddling. A
conversation between Nathaniel
Chapman (a designer at
Timberline with former credits at
Blizzard and Obsidian) and Josh
Sawyer (studio design director at
Obsidian) discussed the role that
retail giants formerly played in the
life and death of game genres: and
not with approval.
8

“I completely forgot how big a deal it
was for Best Buy/Walmart/etc buyers
to see your game, which determined
your shelf space and thus your sales,”
said Chapman, in response to which
Sawyer noted Walmart had been
“prudish” about content in the past
(while hypocritically clearing the
shelves for GTA).

ACCORDING TO
SAWYER, IT WAS A
SNAKE-EATING-ITSOWN-TAIL SITUATION

Sawyer then offered some
specifics. “BioWare made Baldur’s
Gate, which sold well, and BG II
sold very well. Black Isle made
Icewind Dale, which also sold well,
but after BioWare announced
Neverwinter Nights, retailers decided
that 2D iso[metric] games were
dead. Temple of Elemental Evil was
the last for a long time.”
According to Sawyer, it was a
snake-eating-its-own-tail situation, “I
can’t stress enough how often I’d
hear a retail rep declare a genre/
style/look was dead with zero
supporting data. Truly vibes-based
forecasting, which resulted in
self-fulfilling prophecies.”

N E WS

AFEELA NERVOUS!

POTTER CASH

|

OPI N ION

|

DE V E L OPM EN T

FULL OF HOLES

EV IS A (DUAL) SHOCK

MAGIC NUMBERS

DON’T FEAR THE REAPERS

Sony Honda Mobility
president and COO Izumi
Kawanishi livened up CES by
driving a car onstage with a
Sony DualSense controller. The new
Afeela concept has all the features you’d
expect, but the ads on the front bumper
and the smoke-and-mirrors of gamepad
control were a bit of a moment. AA

It didn’t trouble many GOTY
lists, and the launch saw its
share of controversy, but
Warner Bros Games
announced that Hogwarts Legacy
sold over 22 million copies. WB exec
David Haddad claims it was “the
best-selling game of the year
in the entire industry”. RS

Worried about the AI
apocalypse? Don’t be. Dell
founder Michael Dell reckons
we’ve nothing to fear from AI
gaining sentience because humanity’s
good at fixing problems like “the ozone
and all” before they happen. Climate
change wants a word, Michael, but I
guess that’s a weight off my mind. JW

Highs & Lows

HIGHS
Mod life

Check out Daggerfall Unity, a rebuild
of Bethesda’s 1996 RPG.

Pre-Portal

Portal: Revolution is a free fan-made
and Valve-approved seven-hour
prequel to the Portal games.

Heroes of the mod

Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm
has now become a fully
featured StarCraft 2 mod.

BAD TARGET?
It’s easy to dunk on
Pagiarulo’s assertions
about story, but worth
bearing in mind that
Bethesda’s games
do tend to have
straightforward
main quests, with
all the really good
stuff squirrelled-away
in sidequests.

The idea that isometric RPGs aren’t popular is hogwash,
considering how obscenely well Baldur’s Gate III has
been doing for Larian Studios. But David Gaider, of
Summerfall Games, says the issue can’t be put entirely on
one group. “It wasn’t just retailers,” Gaider wrote. “There’s
an ‘industry wisdom’ which creeps into dev teams where
some things are simply declared dead or too oldfashioned, and there’s no opposing this certainty up until
someone else comes along and proves it’s 100% untrue.”
Gaider reminds me of an infamous talk by Emil
Pagliarulo (lead writer and designer on Starfield) who
spoke at a STORY conference about Fallout 4 and
Skyrim. This is an old talk, but Pagliarulo makes the
assumption that gamers will “tear out the pages” of a
game’s story and “make paper airplanes” with it, arguing
developers ought to “keep it simple, stupid” – limiting a
narrative to one or two core central themes.
Big-box retailers are no longer the make-or-break
genre setters they once were, thanks to the advent of
online stores, but the frustration from developers (and
players) lingers on. Because whether it’s vibes-based
forecasting or vibes-based dev wisdom, games that play
it 100% safe are rarely memorable.
Harvey Randall

Minecraft Leg-Ends
Moang and Blackbird are
wrapping up development
on Minecraft Legends.

Starry eyed

Star Citizen’s Legatus bundle offered
everything in the game for…
$48,000 to you, good citizen.

Post-Portal

N64 whiz James Lambert got two
thirds of the way through the
demake Portal 64 before the
cease-and-desist landed.

LOWS

9

The Spy
B U T W H O WAT C H E S T H E S P Y ?

n the grim darkness of
the far future, there is
only war. Well, war and
PC Gamer magazine.
Well, war, PC Gamer
magazine and the
Warhammer 40,000:
Space Marine 2 game
from Saber Interactive.
The Spy knows this as The Spy
recently took a jaunt to the 42nd
millennium in PC Gamer’s own
DeLorean time machine, and while
working with the magazine’s
far future editorial team of AIs,
overseen of course by the immortal
Emperor of Mankind himself, The
Spy read an entry in the ancient
history of PC gaming archives that
chronicled how Space Marine 2
actually ended up launching on
September 9, 2024, almost a year
after its original winter 2023 release
date. Unfortunately, PC Gamer’s
review of Space Marine 2 had been
lost during the Horus Heresy.
After playing a couple of rounds of
Unreal Tournament 2004 with the
Emperor, The Spy returned to the
present day to find out exactly how
on-track the studio is in delivering a
great gaming experience on Space
Marine 2’s destined release date.

KEY LIME HERESY

Do you know what they don’t have in the 42nd
millennium? Famous Florida foodstuff Key lime pie. And,
let me tell you, The Spy did not take that news well.
There’s just something about the tart (but not too tart)
lime-flavoured filling, crunchy but light graham cracker
base, and soft and fluffy egg white meringue topping that
makes Key lime pie the ultimate mid-morning or
mid-afternoon indulgence. No Key
lime pie? Heresy! Needless to say The
Spy brought this to the Emperor’s
attention before leaving the grim,
pie-less darkness of the far future. But
it did mean that the first thing The
Spy did when infiltrating Saber’s HQ
was sneak into the canteen and,
disguised as Tim Willits, proceeded to
scarf three slices back-to-back.
Glutton? Not at all. Crafty spying legend with ideal
vantage point to eavesdrop on Saber’s devs? Absolutely!
Mid-scarf, The Spy overheard that Saber’s devs have been
granted the extra time from publisher Focus Interactive to
“properly polish the game and to ensure the best possible
experience”, as well as release “a game that is of the highest
quality and that exceeds the expectations of the countless

fans of the franchise”. After hacking Saber’s central
mainframe database, The Spy also went on to confirm that
Space Marine 2 has been pre-ordered by over one million
gamers to date, and also ate another slice of Key lime pie
while watching the game’s yet-to-be-revealed new trailer.
There are, however, many questions that remain
unanswered about Space Marine 2 right now, and
unfortunately none of them are Key lime pie-based. PC
Gamer’s preview of Space Marine 2 last
year left big reservations about the
game’s core gameplay experience, with
us coming away cold from the combat
specifically, which didn’t feel
responsive and left the writer feeling
like he was playing as a half-sedate
gorilla. PC Gamer’s previewer found
the audio for weapons flat and linear
and series of horde battles dull. Hardly
the bombastic cinematic WH40K experience that many PC
gamers are hoping for then. The Spy was going to try to go
hands-on with a new build of Space Marine 2, but with
The Spy’s Tim Willits mask starting to get very messy, and
Saber Interactive’s canteen running out of Key lime pie,
exfiltration proceeded. Spy out.
The Spy

SPACE MARINE 2 HAS
BEEN PRE-ORDERED
BY OVER ONE MILLION
GAMERS TO DATE

THE SPY

The Spy is on first
name terms with the
Emperor of Mankind.
He’s called Jeff.

10

Special
Report
P C G I N V E S T I G AT E S

THE UGLY EPIDEMIC
Stuffed full of brands and tie-in skins, shooters are getting harder to look at

T

here’s an epidemic of ugliness in
multiplayer shooters, and its cause goes
by many names. Skin. Bundle. Drop.
Outfit. Coating. Or the most generic:
cosmetic. Unassuming at first and quiet
by nature, Cosmetic Uglification is a viral affliction
infecting the best shooters of our time. When left
unchecked, all semblance of aesthetic cohesion is
sacrificed at the altar of individual expression,
exclusivity and FOMO. Every shooter I love is
becoming visual ooze before my very eyes.
Signs of cosmetic uglification are everywhere: in spec
ops soldiers trading tactical vests for diamond-laced
streetwear, elite operators wearing Lara Croft cosplay,
commandos going loud in pyjamas. As seasons rage on,
live service games garner years of stylistic baggage unique
to our post-Fortnite world. It’s become normal to watch
shooters that once flaunted a style of their own be
infiltrated by garish outfits and pop culture guest stars.
Throw in enough Mortys and Santa outfits and even the
strongest art direction becomes mush. The very items that
can drive us to play longer can also erode their appeal.
I recently had a moment of clarity in Call of Duty while
being brutally executed by Diablo IV’s Lilith holding an
AK-47: cosmetic uglification never happens all at once,

12

but the cycle always begins at launch, and it can take over
before you realise it’s there.

THE PATTERN

There’s no better time to enjoy a shooter’s style than when
it first comes out and a full party of operators actually look
like characters in the same world. We really don’t give
default outfits enough credit. Yes, they’re basic, but they’re
often among the most detailed, iconic and well-crafted
forms our heroes can take. That’s no surprise since it’s
how the characters were originally conceived – outfits
that prevailed through months or years of concepting and
discussion. They’re way more special than their ‘common’
rarity tag implies, but it’s hard to resist switching things
up when a battle pass comes along or new store items
drop that promise you can look different to everyone else.
In the early days of a shooter, player fashion is in line
with the game’s style even if you splash some cash.
Immediately available cosmetics are often charms, gun
skins, or simple colour variations on default outfits. But
give developers enough time, and the silly skins start to
arrive. It’s becoming normal for me to return to a shooter
after a year and smack face-first into sensory whiplash as
a once visually coherent game has become a clown show.
The trend is most noticeable in Call of Duty, where
operator bundles sporting glowing jackets, pumpkin heads

Blemish
The proliferation of
cosmetics can have
a real impact on
gameplay, too. On
several occasions,
Call of Duty
developers have
had to modify
cosmetics after
releasing them
because they
blended in too
well with the
environment. One
all-black outfit
was such great
camouflage that it
was a legitimate
pay-to-win
accessory. In
response, Modern
Warfare 3 is
experimenting with
enemy outlines.

N E WS

|

OPI N ION

|

DE V E L OPM EN T

FAR LEFT: Tackiness

aside, I can’t deny
that this is an
impressive rendering
of Nicki Minaj.

LEFT: There’s a part
of me that loves
the absurdity of
literal Satan with
a machine gun.

FA S T FA S H I O N

The worst kinds of cosmetics we all have to deal with nowadays

THE TRYHARD CALL OF DUTY
Every shooter has a fancy mask guy
who’s trying way too hard to look
cool. Just take it off, eejit.

THE SOMEHOW $40 VALOR ANT

Looks cool. You want it, but immediately
lose your appetite once realising it costs
more than a dinner for two.

and exploding kill effects live alongside $20 packs that let
you become actual celebrities like 21 Savage and Nicki
Minaj. In December 2022, the final prize on the Modern
Warfare 2 season 1 battle pass was a guy with a helmet. In
season 6, battle pass skins include a Groot-like tree
monster that’s so hard to see that Activision removed it
from the game, and comic book character Spawn. The
same thing happened throughout 2020 in Warzone as the
original tacticool operators were outshined by the arrival
of Rambo, John McClane and Godzilla.
When I returned to MW2, I
couldn’t find anyone using the base
operators I enjoyed at launch. It was
a sea of Groots, flaming skull heads,
weirdo clowns and a robot woman
exclusive to the Blackcell battle pass.
Everybody looked cool, but nobody
looked like they belonged.

T H E M E TA H U N T: S H O W D O W N

The callsign of a sweatlord. Fashion
doesn’t matter here, as long as it grants
a slim profile or camouflage.

THE BUNDLE HALO INFINITE

You want a cool gun skin, but you’re not
getting it unless you buy ten other things
you don’t like.

would become in 2023: squads of elite operators wearing
creepy muppet heads, full-body Pickle Rick Sanchez suits
and Master Chief armour.
With Activision’s decision to carry over
microtransactions to Modern Warfare 3 and Ubisoft’s full
embracing of crossover skins, Call of Duty and Siege have
crossed a point of no return in cosmetic uglification: the
Fortnite event horizon.
Post-FEH, there’s simply too much crap in everyone’s
digital closet for the game to ever be beautiful again. Not
every player buys every kitschy skin,
but given enough time, enough players
will earn or buy skins at some point
that aesthetic repugnancy is
unavoidable. I’m part of the problem:
half of my Siege roster is equipped
with battle pass filler I never intended
to get, yet inexplicably decided to put
on in a moment of “why not”.
It’s probably too late for Call of
Duty and Siege, but I have hope for the shooters that have
managed to dip their toes into unfamiliar territory while
respecting their original style. Overwatch 2’s partnered
skins with One Punch Man and K-pop group Le Sserfim
look fantastic up close without clashing in a crowd.
The common denominator, and possibly a key factor
in beating cosmetic uglification, is that Blizzard and
Respawn’s artists design original outfits true to the
crossover brand and the game’s core art style. It’s possible
for cosmetics to be fun and complimentary without losing
sight of the game we loved at launch, but there’s only one
vaccine for this disease: hard work, with a bit of restraint.
Morgan Park

THERE’S SIMPLY
TOO MUCH CRAP
IN EVERYONE’S
DIGITAL CLOSET

TACKY ROYALE

Sometimes cosmetic uglification is a slow process. Service
games that released in a pre-Fortnite world are taking a
longer road. I played Rainbow Six Siege almost daily for
years and failed to notice the signs.
Longtime players will pinpoint different moments
when things started to change, but for me, it was Mozzie’s
Pizza Party skin in 2020. It retextured the defender’s tan
camo with a smattering of pepperonis and swapped his
dirt bike helmet with a comically large, googly-eyed pizza
monstrosity. It radiated Fortnite, and was among the first
patently absurd cosmetics that’d gradually become the
norm in Siege. At the time I thought it was a bit of
harmless fun. If only 2020 Morgan knew what Siege

13

Secret
Level
THE UNSUNG HEROES OF DEVELOPMENT

DEMONSTRATION MAN
TOBIAS GRAFF, CEO and co-founder of Mooneye Studios, on making a game demo

W

hile studying
computer
science with an
emphasis on
game
development, Tobias Graff worked
part-time for some of Germany’s
biggest mobile gaming companies.
Soon after that, he founded
Mooneye with some friends from
university, entering the industry
full time; and later, the company
branched out into publishing games
from other developers.
In 2016, Mooneye launched a
Kickstarter for its first game, Lost
Ember. It was successful, and so other
people came to Graff and the team
for advice on building a successful
campaign. They were happy to help,
but there was only so much they could
do. “We were basically working
nonstop on the game; we couldn’t
really afford to take time off to help
other developers,” says Graff. After
Lost Ember’s release, which was also
a success, Mooneye immediately
started putting money into “a
publishing pot” until it reached an
amount that allowed it to look into
game publishing.
Long before that however, it had
its own debut game to complete and
promote. This involved building a
demo. The demo was however only
released to streamers and YouTubers.
“We wanted to minimise the bug
reports and support requests and all
that, because that’s not really what we
were looking for back then,” Graff
explains. “We [only] decided to have a
demo at all because we were four
students with no gaming credit, and
we had to convince people, ‘These
people can actually make games!’”

14

Building a demo presented
significant challenges. For one thing,
many aspects of a game are subject to
change early in development. For
another, many games can’t simply take
the first 20 minutes or so and put it
out into the world as a demo, because
– as with Lost Ember – the start of the
game is an intentionally slow build up
to something. For this reason, the Lost
Ember demo was an amalgamation of
sections from the start and middle of
the game; a bespoke experience.
“Doing that meant working for a
couple of months on things we already
knew we would throw away and
wouldn’t really need for the final
game, because we had to change
everything again to stretch it out”.

TRY ME, I DARE YOU
Demos past and present well worth your time

PT

Difficult to play today, the
PS4-exclusive demo remains
unique and terrifying.

DELTARUNE

Stretches the definition of ‘demo’,
but currently free, with future
instalments to be paid releases.

THE STANLE Y PAR ABLE
DEMONSTR ATION

As hilarious and unpredictable
as the main game.

THE PLANET CRAFTER:
PROLOGUE

This is in effect an early yet very
lengthy version of the full game.

SAMPLE MINDS

Lost Ember is a slow and thoughtful
game telling an emotional story,
something that’s very difficult to
convey in a brief demo. Mooneye’s
new game currently in development
follows a similar path, and so a demo
is hoped for but not guaranteed.
The plan was to release Lost
Ember in 2018, but for various
reasons this was delayed to 2019. With
approximately three years between
the demo and the final game, some
things inevitably changed. Graff gives
a few examples.
“The colour of the main character,
the wolf, changed. One of the main
reasons was giving a better contrast
with the environment; the initial one
blended into a lot of things. In the
demo, the main featured animal was
a parrot, and a huge open area you
could play around in; but for the final
game, we wanted to save the parrot as
a highlight for later.”
Haven Park from 2021 was
Mooneye’s first experience publishing
a game and the debut of Fabien Weibel
as a developer. They worked together
on the demo. Again, it was a bespoke
experience, but this time one that was
released to the public… for just a few
weeks at a time, on a few different
occasions. But why?
“We wanted to have these kind of
focus groups,” Graff explains. “We
only published a new demo when
we changed a big feature, or had
something new in the game that we
wanted feedback on”.
A demo can be an effective piece of
interactive or passive PR, a beta test, a
self-contained experience all its own,
or all three. One thing it can never be,
it seems, is simple to make.
Luke Kemp

N E WS

|

OPI N ION

|

DE V E L OPM EN T

LOST EMBER IS A SLOW AND
THOUGHTFUL GAME TELLING
AN EMOTIONAL STORY

FAR LEFT: Haven Park
lets you chat with
adorable widdle
campers and fulfil
their requests.
LEFT: Upcoming

indie Farewell North
will be published by
Mooneye… and has a
demo available now.

15

THE
BIGGEST
GAMES ON
T H E WAY

16

1 month

3 months

PACIFIC DRIVE

STAR WARS OUTLAWS

RELEASE Q1, 2024 | DEVELOPER Ironwood Studios

RELEASE 2024 | DEVELOPER Massive Entertainment

Drive to survive in this run-based driving adventure.
Scavenge resources from the anomaly-filled Olympic
Exclusion Zone, upgrade your car and complete missions.

What’s looking like the biggest Star Wars game of 2024,
Outlaws sees you play as rogue scoundrel Kay Vess in an
open-world adventure set in the Outer Rim.

NIGHTINGALE

STALKER 2: HEART OF CHORNOBYL

RELEASE February 22, 2024 | DEVELOPER Inflexion Games

RELEASE 2024 | DEVELOPER GSC Game World

Explore, craft, fight and survive in dangerous Fae Realms
either on your own or with friends. You play as a
Realmwalker in this visually punchy fantasy world.

The long-delayed STALKER 2 slipped into 2024, meaning a
longer wait to return to the Zone. We were impressed with
it at Gamescom, though, so keep the faith.

HOMEWORLD 3

FROSTPUNK 2

RELEASE March, 2024 | DEVELOPER Blackbird Interactive

RELEASE 2024 | DEVELOPER 11 bit studios

The new game in the classic sci-fi series promises to deliver
a stunning space-based RTS that makes the most of
three-dimensional movement. Incoming in March.

We were intrigued by the sequel to the hit society survival
game, Frostpunk, when we saw it last year. Grim, difficult
decisions and deep strategy await the player.

N E WS

|

OPI N ION

|

6 months

12 months+

VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE - BLOODLINES 2

SENUA’S SAGA: HELLBLADE II

RELEASE Autumn 2024 | DEVELOPER Paradox Interactive

RELEASE Unknown | DEVELOPER Ninja Theory

Bloodlines 2 now rises courtesy of Everybody’s Gone to the
Rature dev The Chinese Room. Set in Seattle, you fight as
an elder vampire in a huge underworld war.

The long-awaited sequel to the award-winning Hellblade,
Senua’s Saga sees Senua return in a brutal journey of
survival through the myth and torment of Viking Iceland.

DE V E L OPM EN T

STA R FIELD

WARPING IN

WARHAMMER 40,000: SPACE MARINE 2

ARK 2

RELEASE September 9, 2024 | DEVELOPER Saber Interactive

RELEASE Unknown | DEVELOPER Studio Wildcard

After a huge delay out of 2023 into the back-end of 2024,
our hopes remain high that Titus’ return against relentless
Tyranid hordes will be a triumphant one.

The Ark series returns with Vin Diesel-voiced hero Santiago
attempting to protect his daughter, Meeka, while surviving
in a world dominated by dinosaurs.

MECHWARRIOR 5: CLANS

BLADE

RELEASE 2024 | DEVELOPER Piranha Games Inc

RELEASE Unknown | DEVELOPER Arkane Lyon

Fight for freedom in 100 tons of death-dealing fury. Pilot a
huge stompy mech, customise it as you see fit, and enjoy
new narrative-rich missions.

From the talented devs who brought PC gamers both Prey
and the Dishonored series, Marvel’s daywalker is set for a
mature, singleplayer, third-person adventure game.

Good news for those
still playing Starfield,
or indeed for those
who have already
comprehensively
explored everything
the Settled Systems
has to offer, as
Bethesda has
confirmed that
“all-new gameplay
options” and “new
survival mechanics”
are incoming in 2024.
Beginning in February,
Starfield will receive
updates “roughly
every six weeks”
with those updates
including new features
we’ve been teased
with like “all new ways
of travelling” official
mod support, city
maps and more.

17

18

PREVIEW
United 1944

NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE
Out Now (Early Access)

DEVELOPER
Novarama

PUBLISHER
Novarama

LINK
united1944.com

bases at fixed control points), so the early
game is a dash for wood and intel
documents, plus gunpowder and metal
for weaponry. Escape From Tarkov this
ain’t – this is fast and aggressive resource
gathering, hoovering up piles of
highlighted, glowing assets to fuel your
team’s expansion. Each part of the map
has different resource nodes, giving some
weight to where you expand towards, but
it’s never too hard to find what’s needed.
It’s a handsome-looking game too. Not
technically amazing, but the maps are
nited 1944 was bleeding out before my
detailed, the accelerated day/night cycle
eyes. The first day I played this WWIIgives them interestingly varied lighting,
themed squad shooter, there were barely and the weapons and reload animations
enough players to fill a single server.
aren’t shabby either. Character models
Each day, the number has dwindled. The life
are a bit bland, however, with limited
draining out of a young, promising game, barely
cosmetic customisation options, but more
days into Early Access.
unlocked through extensive play, but very
few players had anything but the starting
As it stands, United 1944 is two
items, in the matches I was able to play.
surprisingly different games sharing a set
As the match plays out, the teams level
of mechanics. One, a 16v16 team shooter
up, giving each player the option to define
that draws equal inspiration from Day Of
their class and role from a tech tree of
Defeat, Battlefield, Fortnite and survival
perks and crafting options, creating
sandboxes. The other, a low-stakes take
interesting strategic choices. Building
on the extraction shooter formula that
skills and more inventory space will help
doesn’t feel nearly as well thought
you upgrade your bases with metal
out as its big-team counterpart.
walls, which shrug off most
PL AYED
Between them, a game with a lot of
bullet-based weaponry. Or you can
IT
potential, at least when there’s
focus on demolitions, crafting
enough players to fill a match.
Molotovs and grenades to break
In the primary team-play mode,
wooden and metal fortifications
Domination, Axis and Allied teams fight to
specifically. With good voice comms,
oust each other from a ruined battlefield.
there’s real room for team and squad-wide
Both teams start with almost nothing, just
strategies to form, and while I’ve yet to see
a crafting hammer and a knife each, and a
this working fully in action, I witnessed
single shared spawn point. Each player
glimpses of it in the few decentlygets to pick a couple of crafting recipes
populated matches I was able to find.
to start with, including their choice of a
makeshift pistol, rifle or shotgun. They’re
FUN GUN RUN
rubbish, but better than your knife.
But the strategy is just the connective
tissue, and this is a team shooter. United
SCRAPHEAD CHALLENGE
1944’s gunplay is light and not at all
With shooting discouraged, both teams
realistic, but the familiar WWII weapons
scramble for position. The ruins are
look and sound satisfying. Thompson
jam-packed with respawning resources
SMGs rattle messily, and the Garand rifle
(used to craft equipment and build
makes that oh-so-satisfying ping when
structures) and intel (used to create new
you’re out of bullets. Weapons have wide
accuracy cones unless you aim down the
sights, and it takes a few solid hits with
most guns to knock someone down, plus
some extra bullets to finish them. Fortnite
is probably the best point of reference
here, minus any kind of shield mechanic.
Respawning is quick, putting players back

UNITED 1944

WWII squad shooter risks
being another unknown soldier

U

WITH SHOOTING
DISCOURAGED, BOTH TEAMS
SCRAMBLE FOR POSITION

19

PREVIEW
United 1944

at their base with their weapon and ammo
intact, but any carried resources are left
with their body, spoils for the victor.
This leads to knockabout, high-attrition
fights once the teams start pushing at
each other’s bases. The defending side
have the advantage, being able to respawn
at the central desk of their base, while the
attackers aim to destroy that structure
and capture the control point, denying
their opponents ground and pushing
closer to knocking out their core control
point on the far side of the map. Matches
continue until one team loses all their
territory or is determined by score at the
end of 45 minutes, whichever comes first.
Despite there being no specific
commander role, the base-building and
resource gathering gives United 1944 the
feel of an Company of Heroes-like RTS
played in first-person, with players
scattering out in search of specific
resources while the team-level thinking is
focused on whether to expand, push
against enemy defences or fortify what
you’ve already got. There’s definitely a
good foundation here, but more than
anything it needs players. I’ve yet to see a
full 32-player match, and with numbers
shrinking each day, I don’t think I will.

ESCAPE FROM TEDIUM

The other half of the game, and the far
weaker component, is Survivor mode. A
take on the popular extraction shooter
format, but with some fundamental
design flaws that sucked the life out of the
experience for me. This mode thrusts up
to 24 players (in non-matchmade teams
of up to three) into one of the regular
Domination maps with the goal of working
your way through the entire tech tree,
crafting an extraction beacon (available
only at level ten) and leaving the battlefield
with whatever blueprints you managed to
keep on your person when you extracted.
The reward for successful extraction is
being able to use just one of those
blueprints in your next Survivor match to
give yourself a slight tech boost. The
penalty for failure is, bizarrely, nothing.
While extraction shooters tend to be
games of high stakes cat-and-mouse
antics, picking off other players and
scavenging their gear, death in this mode

SURVIVOR MODE WORKS AS
A QUICK DEATHMATCH
ALTERNATIVE TO DOMINATION
20

has the same penalty as Domination.
While you may drop any resources you’ve
collected, you keep your gun and ammo.
Base building is also enabled here,
allowing you to create a stronghold and
spawn point, allowing for easier hoarding.
With no match time limit, the end
result is a bizarrely purgatorial experience.
With no time limit, everyone on the map is
just trying to leave, and to do so without
quitting out and forfeiting any rewards.
The fastest way to progress is either to kill
other players a whole bunch, or harvest
intel from locked safes around the map. To
hit level ten can sometimes take over an
hour of experience grinding if you’re
running solo, often killing the same players
over and over in a cycle of retaliation.
It’s a pity because the central combat
of the game feels nice, but Survivor mode
feels like an attempt to reshape the basic
Domination format into something
resembling the hot new multiplayer trend
to chase, and that hasn’t worked out here.
There’s no NPCs to fight, and with the only
persistent loot being single-use perks for
the next match, no long-term reason to
play beyond unlocking cosmetics.
When there’s enough players to
properly function, Survivor mode works
as a quick deathmatch alternative to
Domination, albeit with a chance of
spawning into a server where everyone
already has MG42s researched and
you’ve only got a rusty bolt-action that
holds two bullets. In short, it’s a mode in
need of a serious rework. Or dropping
entirely in favour of concentrating players
into Domination.

SERVER DESOLATION

And yet all of this praise and criticism feels
hollow, even to me, because I’ve only been
able to find a single match of the game’s
primary mode in the past two days, and it
was far from a full server. At most hours
there’s too few players to even begin a
round, let alone putz around with just five
players per team. The extraction shooter
mode is similarly desolate, although with
just a couple players online, you can at
least experience the game’s gunplay,
albeit in an awkward, increasingly spiteful
cycle of respawns and griefing. Neither is
enough to make a game, though, and
with no bots or NPCs, it’s impossible to
recommend it unless things change.
I’m hoping that Novorama can turn
things around and bring in more players.
But if not, then let this be the game’s
memorial: it was sometimes pretty neat.
Dominic Tarason

Sniping is risky business.
Even SMG counter-fire is
surprisingly accurate.

PREVIEW
United 1944

ABOVE: United 1944’s

battlefields are often
pretty, detailed and
multi-layered.

LEFT: A player drives

me out of house and
home, setting fire to
my command desk.

21

PREVIEW
Solium Infernum

ABOVE: The Blood of

Astaroth legion sets
out from my
stronghold.

RIGHT: Diplomacy

can turn into a
slanging match.

22

PREVIEW
Solium Infernum

NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE
Feb 14, 2024

DEVELOPER
League of Geeks

PUBLISHER
League of Geeks

SOLIUM INFERNUM
Satanic strategy with demonic
divisions on hellish hexes
ell may be other people, but getting
those presumably extremely
unmotivated and uncooperative other
people to form into a mighty legion and
fight for you must be a difficult undertaking. You
can make diabolical threats, of course, but they’re
already damned and tricky to persuade. Who’d
want to rule Hell?

H

Rituals can affect
whole buildings on
the map.

LINK
soliuminfernum.com

minimum bid, so it’s possible for an
opponent to outbid you without you
knowing anything until it’s announced who
gets the huge bloodthirsty berserker in
their army. Clearly no one else is bidding,
as I win this one with the lowest amount of
outlay – the money coming from tribute
swept up by my marching forces – and
welcome Bune (six eyes, horns, two
tongues and an unreasonable number of
teeth) to my legion.
Bune likes to lead from the front, so I
wheel my army and lay siege to the Vats
of Torment, which seems important as
another duke of hell is already firing
arrows at it. Each player gets two order
slots per turn, and combat plays out in
three phases – ranged, melee and infernal
– the last of which sees crackling red
energies exchanged between the
combatants. As the Vats’ defenders have
already been weakened, I’m able to claim
it fairly easily, and the enemy demon
Murmur’s legion leaves feeling very silly.

Astaroth would. In Solium Infernum
(that’s ‘only hell’ for the non-Latin
speakers out there) Satan has
disappeared, and the remaining top order HELL TO PAY
of demons are left to fight it out for the
While all this is going on, an advisor by the
throne. Hell is, conveniently, divided up
name of Belial is urging me to attack a
into hexes, which turns the infernal
tree. The Tree of Woe is weak, he tells
regions into the perfect place for a
me, and easily conquered, and with a
PL AYED
spot of turn-based strategy, with the I T
Praetor I could beat it in a single turn.
legions of the damned and their
Another piece of advice, coming from
champions zooming about one hex
somewhere else, informs me that
at a time, carving up territory and taking
Belial is a pathological liar. Well what did I
out their frustrations on the local
expect from Hell – reliable narrators?
landmarks, which have suitably hellish
The other players in this demo version
names such as the Unholy Fountain and
of the game are AI, but in the final release
the Great Wheel of Pain.
there will be the opportunity to have real
As Astaroth, one of four greater
humans take their place. A rotating
demons vying for the top spot from their
‘regency’ system sees each player
own fortress on the map, I start with a
crowned regent for a turn, seeing their
legion with an encouraging name: the
orders actioned first and getting to play an
Blood of Astaroth. After a few moves to
Event card that can change the course of
carve out some territory – opposing
battles. The player with the most prestige,
forces can’t enter your hexes without the
won by conquering and destroying, is the
correct diplomatic status, politeness
winner at the end.
being so important in Hell – I am able to
The plains and swamps of Hell are a
upgrade my legion by bidding on the
sparse place to battle, but there’s enough
services of a Praetor, or champion, at the
space to guide your armies and always
bazaar. This is a blind auction with a
something new to conquer, if you’ve got
the right diplomatic status to reach it.
The game’s slow-burn plotting and
strategising is a good match for its
setting, and there are enough background
systems whirring away to promise depth
beyond the clash of armies.
Ian Evenden

COMBAT PLAYS OUT IN
THREE PHASES – RANGED,
MELEE AND INFERNAL

23

PREVIEW
Pacific Drive

NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE
February 22, 2024

DEVELOPER
Ironwood Studios

PUBLISHER
Kepler Interactive

PACIFIC DRIVE

LINK
pacificdrivegame.com

WOULD YOU KINDLY

There’s nothing truly original going on
here, and you could name dozens of
games with similar themes, characters
and mechanics. But the whole package
is delivered with sufficient enthusiasm
to make it seem fresh, albeit a moody,
earthy, rain-soaked fresh. Tara Langella
happily chews the scenery as Ophelia
‘Oppy’ Turner, ostensibly the scientist
behind the pandemonium, but now a
voice on the radio guiding you round her
abandoned garage. She bickers over the
n the mid-20th century it seemed that
air with Francis and Tobias, the requisite
new science, from DDT to nuclear
conspiracy theorists, who are there to
power, would save us all. By the time
muddy whatever waters you’re being
the ’70s rolled round, the legacy of
served. Is she GLaDOS, Atlas or Delilah?
ignorance, corporate greed and government
Only time will tell.
arrogance was clear. So it was, in one beautiful
The other voices you hear on the FM
corner of the Pacific Northwest.
radio along with some very beardy tunes
are entertaining enough – “I have your
Amongst the redwoods and fir trees,
lamas” being a highlight – but I was a
research into a potentially limitless
little perplexed as to who was talking.
energy source – LIM – unleashed a series Were they inside the wall too? Or is the
of increasingly deadly anomalies. In the
weird leaking out into the lands beyond?
end the government evacuated the
Again, I suspect all will become clear,
population, walled off the whole
and I’m here for it.
peninsula and left it to descend into
The risk/reward game loop, once
eldritch chaos. This is the setting for
you’re settled into it, is a good one.
Pacific Drive, a debut first-person
To get out of the zone, you have to
PL AYED
driving-survival-adventure game by
head out and find resources, and
IT
Seattle-based Ironwood Studios, a
try not to consume more than you
proudly anti-crunch group with an
reap. You are safe in your car for the
eclectic track record in the industry.
most part, but can’t stay there if you’re
A humble delivery driver, you get
going to progress. You can run towards
sucked into the exclusion zone by an
that shack, but you’re prey to radiation
escaping red goo vortex, and find
and passing anomalies. Drive off-road to
yourself sealed inside the Olympic
it and your car suffers. Do you wait for
Peninsula’s 400ft barrier with no way
that floaty machine to pass by or drive
out. But help is at hand. There’s an old
round it with spinning wheels and skid
radiation-proof station wagon, a safe
into a log? Can you leave the car there or
garage for crafting, upgrades and repairs, will the blue-arcing fungi catch it up?
and some helpful, albeit caustic, voices
Does that cabin even have anything
to guide you through the zone. Gather
useful? You know the drill. But one way
resources to fix your car, survive the next
or another, you’ll need to find stable
outing and find a way home. It also
anchors – glowing gold balls – to fuel
seems that the old station wagon that
your car’s ARC Device, a cross between
you are driving is a Remnant, an object
a GPS and portal-maker, and call up a
of some power. Are you the chosen
way out of the area.
thingamabob, or what?

Take a road trip
through mankind’s folly

I

NORTHWEST PASSAGE

THE RISK/REWARD GAME
LOOP, ONCE YOU’RE SETTLED
INTO IT, IS A GOOD ONE
24

Then, once you use the ARC Device to
open a Gateway, the zone will become
unstable and contract around you.
Sometimes the storm comes, ready or
not, leaving you with a shopping list of
anchors to gather before you can

A stable anchor
harvested, just
in time.

PREVIEW
Pacific Drive

ABOVE: I’m not saying

they move, but these
dummies weren’t
there a minute ago.

LEFT: Devs who

worked on
Bioshock, unite!

25

PREVIEW
Pacific Drive

RIGHT: Not rubbish.
Just a bit characterful.
BELOW: Awkwardly

placed ARC machine,
in need of charging.

26

PREVIEW
Pacific Drive
It’s very pretty
when the
sun shines.

escape, leading to some thrilling chases
through a universe coming apart at the
seams in stunning fashion.
However, the position of the ARC
Device on the passenger seat is very
awkward in 16:9. While realistic in some
sense – it’s a big piece of kit and where
else would it go? – trying to drive a flimsy
car and check the map, while things stalk
you all about, is very disorienting. Maybe
that’s a feature, not a bug, but I found it all
challenging enough already.
In the first instance, I was
disappointed that there was mandatory
fast travel in a game about driving,
especially when the promised road trip
boasted such atmospheric surroundings.
The game is not truly open-world but a
series of semi-stable zones that you’re
zapped into, and it seems churlish to
criticise a game for what it isn’t. However,
what it often is, is confusing.

DAZED AND CONFUSED

Dying, or rather being snatched from
death at the last second and returned to
your garage, feels unreasonably punitive,
as you lose most of your scavenged parts.
This feels unfair, as your death probably
came following the instructions of the
off-stage voices, with no way to know if
the anomalies in your way are deadly or
benign until you’ve driven into them. This
often leaves you less able to conquer the
mission you just failed, exacerbated by
other poorly explained features. I turned
on a LIM-powered vacuum that I assumed
was a storage device, and hoovered up all
my items, only for them to vanish from
the bag when I returned. My manual save
had updated with the latest checkpoint
so there was no going back unless I
wanted to start again.
Meanwhile, the crafting is not the
most intuitive. Making a bulb, or indeed a
‘light fixing kit’, won’t repair a headlight
with a broken bulb and if you’re running
short of resources, crafting the wrong
item can prove fatal. As I played on, I
found many answers to my troubles, but
a touch more hand-holding, or a little less
snark in the logbook, wouldn’t go amiss
in the early stages.
I’m usually impatient with games that
don’t explain enough, or make the learning

KNOWING THE SYSTEMS
BETTER, I GOT INTO A
SATISFYING GROOVE

curve too tough – I’m old and time is at a
premium – and this instance made me
realise how much we’ve all come to rely on
online guides to get us over the bumps in
our games. At one point, I was standing in
a garage trying to install a new wheel and
replacing it with the same flat one over
and over again. I eventually scrapped the
wheel, causing not insignificant damage to
the rest of the car. Had I not had to
continue, I might have stopped there.
However, there’s a lot you can finagle in
the settings once you know they’re there,
from making death less annoying to
making driving easier, and the
comprehensive suite of accessibility tools
should be commended. Go, Ironwood.

BACK FOR SECONDS

By my second run through, knowing the
systems better, I got into a satisfying
groove. I even left all the impediments in
place. Knowing the punishment for
failure was so severe gave every action
an extra significance, and the initially
irritating car-wrangling steps showed
their value. Those panicky seconds
turning the ignition, not waiting long
enough, having to repeat the process,
and only then remembering to put the
car in gear, all while something dayglo
yellow oozed towards me… these
moments proved to be a highlight.
And the atmosphere is exactly what
you want for this kind of game. Graphically
it’s pretty without being groundbreaking,
just stylised enough to accept the conceit,
just realistic enough to give you the odd
chill. Sonically there are all the moody
vibes and unearthly noises, and the radio
can be tuned to different stations, even if
they all seem much the same. Given all
this, the general cloying and spooky sense
of dread comes free.
I’d say that if this looks like your thing,
it probably is, and the accumulated
inconveniences are outshone by the
possibilities. It might well become a bit
samey, but there’s just enough emergent
gameplay potential there given the variety
of anomalies loose in the woods. You think
you’ve got it sussed then you’re suddenly
flying. The preview officially finished after
two story missions, and a very nice
set-piece finish, yet I still headed out again
to see what I could find now I was in my
groove. The longer you spend in the
Olympic Peninsula, the more sense the
senselessness makes. I want answers, I
like trees, and, even if it kills me, this car
will have five matching doors.
Matt Killeen
27

PREVIEW
Railroads & Catacombs

NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE
Sep 15, 2023 (Early Access)

DEVELOPER
Felipe Aulló

PUBLISHER
IndieArk

RAILROADS &
CATAC OM B S
The roads are rails, but
you cannot comb the cat
he name may conjure images of a goth
railway management game in which
you transport skeletons between the
ossuaries beneath Paris, but in reality
Railroads & Catacombs has far more in common
with Darkest Dungeon than Train Sim
Underworld. Although that actually sounds
like an excellent idea for a game.

T

LINK
railroadsandcatacombs.com

used in research, hint at a more complex
system behind the pickups.
The gothic horror aesthetic and even
the 3D cutout art style are reminiscent of
Darkest Dungeon, but what sets it apart
from that game and Slay the Spire is the
importance of 3D positioning during
combat. While you can’t move your
character around using WASD as you do
when exploring a map, cards such as
Move Away, Jump and Crush – which
moves you a space forward as you attack,
forcing the enemy back – are important
so you’re not standing in a square that’s
going to be filled with something nasty
– like the gloriously named Brown Rain
– in the next turn. These spaces are easily
spotted due to the red hatching applied to
them, so being caught in one is always
entirely your own fault.

ATTACK EFFECTIVELY

Instead of a carriage or staircase to
Being out of position also makes it harder
convey you between areas, here you’re
to attack effectively, so getting into and
on a train. It’s a rickety locomotive that
out of the right place on the grid becomes
requires coal, scavenged from your
more important than just unloading all
victories in the field, and it gradually fills
your offensive cards then popping on
with characters and extra cars as you
some armour when you’re down to one
travel and upgrade. New recruits
last action. I became fond of my
come through a portal to replace
train’s engineer, whose Premonition
PL AYED
those lost in the wilds surrounding
cards allow him to attack enemies
IT
the track, while decks can be fiddled
when they attack, and lead to a flurry
with or have cards removed by a
of ranged counterattacks on the
Railmancer, who has his own carriage.
enemy turn, so you can deal as much
As a roguelite card battler, you
damage by laying in wait with a shield up
choose your destination depending on
as you can by heading into melee. That’s
the difficulty you want to encounter,
not to say his gigantic wrench isn’t an
then send a character (each with
effective weapon, but simple attack cards
different strengths and available cards,
came up much less frequently than they
and who can be upgraded via various
did when using the soldier character.
Warpaths) to explore a series of
Battles go by as quickly as you can
interconnected squares, which may
press the turn-end button. Victory
contain enemies to fight, a boss,
conditions are often based on doing
something valuable or something
damage but not necessarily killing the
mysterious. The mysterious statues
enemies, meaning you’re not left picking
hand out new cards and upgrades, while
off stragglers. And because you’re always
the items of value generally turn out to
able to see where the enemies are on the
be supplies, used for upgrading the train
map, you’re able to avoid them until you’re
or aiding your character, though the
ready, picking up extra cards and making
weird pink lumps labelled ‘tongues’,
camp to reduce the Sanity meter that
affects whether you get the first turn.
As an early access game from a solo
dev, we might expect Railroads &
Catacombs to lack polish, but it’s currently
looking remarkably well crafted and surely
chugging toward the end of its EA period.
Ian Evenden

CHOOSE YOUR DESTINATION
DEPENDING ON THE DIFFICULTY
YOU WANT TO ENCOUNTER
28

Destinations
come with
strings attached.

PREVIEW
Railroads & Catacombs

ABOVE: Your

train crew can
be very sleepy.

LEFT: The number

of hitpoints you’re
going to lose is
helpfully displayed.

29

PREVIEW
Escape From Tarkov: Arena

NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE
December 17, 2023

DEVELOPER
Battlestate Games

PUBLISHER
Battlestate Games

LINK
arena.tarkov.com

time each team still has some players
standing an objective opens up that a
team must capture by standing on it. If
after another 45 seconds each team still
has players alive and the objective has not
been captured, a squad of AI-controlled
characters swarm the map to try and kill
all the remaining players, effectively
forcing the round to end.
It’s a slightly inelegant solution to the
problem of players just camping until a
round ends, but these multi-stage rounds
are much more strategic than just a
scape From Tarkov has some of the most
standard team deathmatch shooter. You’ll
satisfying gun fights in any shooter, with
need to work together to clear angles, and
one well-placed bullet being all you need
running with teammates is the most
to win a fight and a map design that
effective way to make sure you can trade
makes positioning key, so it makes sense to make a
kills and not give away a freebie to the
game that is all about that experience.
enemy team. As rounds progress it
doesn’t become a fight for where the
Escape From Tarkov: Arena is that game.
objective will be, it becomes a fight for the
Built on the same engine as the regular
best vantage point of the objective, as
Tarkov and using all the same systems, it
capturing will leave you exposed. There’s
could be classed as a new mode that is
more thought required when it comes to
being sold as a separate title. But this is
positioning than you find in a similar game.
Tarkov as you have never seen it before.
Teamfight is the mode I’ve gravitated
Without the large maps, the focus on
towards the most, which is a 5v5
looting and the fear of losing your best
best-of-seven competition that typically
gear Arena gives you the chance to
lasts around 15 minutes. Shootout is
shoot people to your heart’s content, P L A Y E D
a 2v2 or 3v3 variation of this formula
and it does it incredibly well.
that instead of being a match
IT
The best way to describe Escape
between two teams, is a round-robin
From Tarkov: Arena is to imagine if
tournament with the top two teams
Call of Duty’s multiplayer was dropped
at the end playing a best-of-three final.
into the Tarkov engine and world. Small to
Maps are shrunk down and things are
medium-sized maps featuring two teams
much slower with players holding angles
fighting it out to eliminate the other or
and waiting for someone to make a move.
secure an objective. There are no abilities,
The larger team matches are quick
no in-match economy and no storyline to
enough that you are never stuck in a losing
worry about, it’s a barebones shooter by
game for too long, but long enough to give
today’s standards that is just about
you a feeling of achievement if you win a
shooting other people in the face.
close match. The Shootout tournaments
on the other hand can feel long if you are
A UNIQUE FORMAT
matched against better players, especially
In the beta, there are two modes available,
as you have to sit out and watch other
but both are essentially the same thing
rounds when you aren’t in a battle.
with different player numbers. Rounds
start out with a minute and a half of
TIME TO FIGHT
combat, where your only objective is to
When you are in somewhat evenly
eliminate the enemy team, if after that
matched fights you get the same rush that
the normal Tarkov experience will give
you. When you aren’t killed by a single
bullet from across the map, which is great
fun if you are doing the killing and not so
much fun if you are on the receiving end,
then fights feel tense and much more than
who can just spray the most bullets at the

ESCAPE FROM
TA RKOV: A REN A

A back-to-basics shooter
that punishes mistakes

E

A 5V5 BEST-OF-SEVEN
COMPETITION THAT TYPICALLY
LASTS AROUND 15 MINUTES

30

For the first time in the Tarkov
universe, you can see exactly
how someone killed you.

PREVIEW
Escape From Tarkov: Arena

ABOVE: All it takes

is one well-placed
bullet to turn a fight
in your favour.

LEFT: Controlling the

best vantage point of
an objective is crucial.

31

PREVIEW
Escape From Tarkov: Arena

RIGHT: You get to
watch matches from
the stands in the
Shootout game mode.
BELOW: All the maps

feel different despite
mostly being of a
similar size thanks to
unique locations.

32

PREVIEW
Escape From Tarkov: Arena

target. Peeking and holding angles while
you can hear someone moving on the
other side gets the heart rate pumping
and you’ll have to have quick reactions to
hit them in the face before they do.
If you can play with a team that has
some comms and coordination, Tarkov:
Arena really comes into its own, with
actual strategy and team positioning
making a big difference. In a competitive
match where the pace is fairly slow and
each kill really matters, I’d go so far as to
say this is the most fun experience I’ve
had in a shooter in a long time. Combat
feels great and it’s very barebones, if you
hit your shots you are likely to win and
there isn’t much else to it, which is a
refreshing change from almost every
other shooter that throws in abilities or
complex grenades.
However, solo play with a team of
random players has proven less fun.
Running around as a solo trying to take on
the world can work and you will for sure
see a lot of people trying to be Superman
in matchmaking, but more times than not,
you’re going to come up against two
players in close proximity and your
chances of winning that fight are slim at
best. So I worry about the longevity Arena
has for solo players, especially with many
players not using the voice comms.

PUZZLING PRESETS

Fighting is, for the most part, great, but it
is outside of the actual playing of the game
where Arena in its current state starts to
fall down. Escape From Takrov has a
massive arsenal of weapons with some of
the deepest customisation options in any
game, but Arena has none of that. Instead,
you are limited to Presets, a loadout of
gear predetermined by the dev team, that
has no customisation options. For balance
reasons you can see why this choice was
made, because with complete freedom to
build whatever loadout you wanted,
players would quickly figure out the
strongest weapons and they would be
the only ones used. But having no
customisation in the Tarkov universe feels
wrong, and surely a system where you
have a set amount of money or another
limiting factor to build a setup would feel
like a more natural fit.

HAVING NO CUSTOMISATION
IN THE TARKOV UNIVERSE
FEELS WRONG

Then there’s the process of how you
unlock these Presets. You’ll start out with
basic ones for each specialist tree, with
different ones for close-quarter combat,
long-range snipers fast fast-firing SMGs.
You’ll need to use a preset to earn XP with
it, to then unlock the next preset in the
tree, the higher up the tree they are the
stronger weapons you get. Each Preset
has an MP score dictating how strong it is,
and after a lot of backlash at the start of
the beta, matchmaking will now take into
account the average MP score from your
previous few matches and match you with
people of similar kits.
In theory, this means you shouldn’t
come up against people with outright
better weapons than you, and when that
was the case it was borderline unplayable
for anyone who wasn’t grinding all day. But
it still presents some problems, most
notably that because of the time it takes
to unlock the next preset (which can be a
lot) you will likely start grinding up one
unlock tree. But then if you want to switch
to a new one, you are going to have to play
some games where people have flat-out
better guns because your MP score from
previous matches will be high while you
are now at the start of a new tree.
The simple solution is to have people
select their preset before matchmaking,
so you never get a situation where there
are players who are almost unkillable
because they have the strongest armour
in the game and you are effectively
throwing paperclips at them with an
underpowered weapon.

POTENTIALLY GREAT

You’d hope that these issues will
eventually be ironed out before a full
launch, but right now the systems that
should be there to keep you playing and
offer progression are actually the most
off-putting unless you love to grind for
hours to unlock one new weapon. But if
you can get past that Escape From Tarkov:
Arena has the potential to be a top shooter
that can offer hours of entertainment.
The actual fights combined with the
interesting rounds make this a fun shooter
with a high skill ceiling to reach. It offers
tense Tarkov-style combat in a format
where it is guaranteed to happen and you
don’t have to worry about losing your
good loot. Even if you have never played
Escape From Takrov before, but are a fan
of shooters that keep it simple then this is
worth a shot and if Arena follows the same
path as the original it will only get better.
Mike Stubbs
33

C O V E R F E AT U R E

Updating LEAGUE OF LEGENDS
is a mammoth task, but this
year Riot Games has taken
more risks than usual

By Mike Stubbs

YA SU O

36

C O V E R F E AT U R E
League of Legends

37

C O V E R F E AT U R E
League of Legends

MEET THE NEW BARONS
With three new Barons to take down you
need to know who you are up against

fter almost 15 years, League of Legends remains one of
the most popular PC games in the world, boasting over
100 million players every month. But keeping a game
fresh and exciting for that long is no easy task,
especially with so many people to please, so Riot
Games has taken some risks with the new 2024 season.
Updating League of Legends is not simple at the best of
times. With millions of players to keep happy ,each patch
has to improve things in some way but not break
everything that players love. Throughout most of the year
the risks are minimal for a new patch, with one arriving
every two weeks Riot tends to keep them relatively small,
making balance changes and introducing one or two new
things at once, be it a new champion, game mode or a
change to a system. It is, usually, only once a year when a
lot of big changes are made all at once, and that is with
the launch of a new season.
Andrei ‘Meddler’ van Roon joined Riot Games in 2011
as a champion designer, before the idea of seasons was
even in place and the focus was just on adding more and
more content to the game. But after a while, he and the
dev team started to realise that just adding more and
more content all the time wasn’t a sustainable option, and
that they would need to change strategy a little.
“Over time we gradually refined [the update system]
and realised, this works well for players if we turn off
[ranked matchmaking] right at the end of the year, we
make a bunch of changes, then we turn it back on once
the game is a bit more stabilised,” explains van Roon, who
has risen through the ranks and is now head of League
Studio, overseeing all of the games built internally at Riot
in the League of Legends universe.

38

HUNTING BARON
The Hunting
Baron keeps the pit
you know, but will
punish enemies that
group together
too closely.

TERRITORIAL BARON

Opens his pit up to
have two entrances
but will deal a lot of
damage, so you need
to be quick to get out
of the way.

ALL-SEEING BARON
The All-Seeing Baron
makes his pit a long
corridor with big
walls, making it
harder to escape if
you need to run.

This was the format for a new
League of Legends season for years.
Around November time the previous
season would end and ranked
matchmaking would be turned off,
which for some players would mean
it was time to take a break. Van Roon
says this was “a pretty healthy cycle”
for players, but for many, it meant
that, when all the fun new features
dropped, there was little competitive
reward to try them out.
At the same time, the new preseason patch would launch, which
included all the major changes coming
for the new season, but with the caveat that this was more
of a test period than a full launch. This gave the team
almost two months to figure out what needed to be
changed, before properly launching
the new season in January, which
often just amounted to turning
ranked play back on. It’s a system
that worked for a while, but in the
current age of live service games, it
started to feel dated.
“I think there’s still some benefit
to the more yearly cycle in some
ways,” says van Roon. “But having the
big changes once a year and some
extended quieter periods through the
year is not necessarily what players
are looking for. And if we’re going
through that disruptive [pre-season]
period anyway, should we just bundle
everything together and really
prioritise rapid follow-up? So that’s
what we’re trying this year.”

COMPARED TO
OTHER YEARS THERE
WAS A LOT MORE
HYPE WITHIN THE
COMMUNITY FOR
THE NEW SEASON

TOP: The map may
have changed, but
you’ll still find
enemies farming the
same places.
LEFT: A lot of changes
have been made to
make top laners more
impactful and make
the lane a true 1v1.

Having learnt from the likes of Valorant, Wild Rift and
Teamfight Tactics, and the hype those games generate by
dropping a lot of new content all at once, the League of
Legends team took a risk with Season 2024. Pre-season
was totally removed and, instead, the first time players got
to experience all the new additions was when it launched
on January 10, complete with ranked matchmaking.
Compared to other years there was a lot more
hype within the community for the new season.
Not only had they had to wait longer to try it
out, but they could also play the full LoL
experience complete with ranked matches
from day one, leading to some chaotic
games as everyone tried to figure out the
best ways to play. Even for those with
more on the line than just rank, the
change has been well received.
“[Our preparation] has been very
different since solo queue did not have the
map we will play on,” says Rasmus ‘Caps’
Winther, a professional player for G2 Esports,
the most successful European LoL team ever. “I
have been playing only in-houses with other [pro]
players instead of solo queue, which has been longer
but a lot of fun since we have voice comms and we were
all trying out the new items and map. For sure, we are not
as prepared as usual, but neither is our opponent and it
will be crazy to see everyone’s read on the meta the first
few weeks if not months.”

VI

DIFFICULT DECISIONS

When it comes to figuring out just what those big changes
each season will be, the team is always thinking up new
ideas, but the real work typically starts around February.
The first phase of development is collating all the ideas
members of the team have, which happens on a massive
whiteboard where everything, good or bad, is added.
39

JINX

40

From there the team leads consider all the options,
before choosing which ones to progress to the next
stage, which is discovery. While a new season will have
a handful of key changes each year, for 2024 there are
three main areas targeted, at the discovery stage this
will be considerably more as many will not work out,
or just prove not to be a priority as the development
progresses. For example, back in February 2023, the
team tested out changes to make split pushing more
viable and updating teleport, but neither made it out
of the discovery stage and have been banked as possible
items to return to in the future.
“We’re building this backlog of problems and
opportunities to solve,” says Matthew ‘Riot Phroxzon’
Leung-Harrison, lead gameplay designer on LoL who
ultimately has the final say on what is included in a new
season. “There’s a lot of stuff that we evaluate, there are
always these types of things that we will throw into
discovery, see if it works out. If it doesn’t, then we’ll just
cut our losses and move to something else. By the end of
this period, we’re like OK what are the opportunities that
we feel have the potential to go the distance?”
At this stage, the team can’t talk publicly about what
they will be changing with a new season, so they have
to rely on their knowledge and others within the studio
to make sure these changes fit what they are looking to
achieve. While there’s a massive group of testers at
Riot, and almost every member of staff plays League in
some way, it’s still a relatively small sample size of the
League player base. Sometimes that means ideas the
team thinks are great turn out to not be loved by the
community at large.
“Sometimes we’re gonna fuck up,” says van Roon.
“We’re a live game, we’re gonna make rapid changes. If
we get something substantially wrong, we’ll follow up on
that pretty quickly. I think it’s one of the blessings and
curses of being able to patch every two weeks. We can

C O V E R F E AT U R E
League of Legends

20% of the champions that just feel
really bad,” says Leung-Harrison.
“The only champions that were
An old favourite gets some big changes this season
perceived as good, were champions
that had mythic items that worked
WARD BRUSH
for them. That’s when we started
2
This new brush is the
perfect place for wards as it
to realise, oh, maybe we’ve dug
always gives vision of the red
1
ourselves a bit of a hole here.”
side tri-brush above.
The first attempt to dig
TRI BRUSH
themselves out of the hole was
The red side now resembles
trying to introduce more mythic
the blue side to make things
items that would plug the gaps the
more even and give junglers a
original system had, but this was
better gank route.
just “stemming the bleeding”
THE CLASSIC
according to Leung-Harrison. It
3
This is still the bot lane you
was also making League, a
know and love, but minor changes
notoriously difficult game to learn,
above make it a riskier place to play.
even harder to understand with all
the new items.
This eventually led to the point where the team knew
afford to take more risks, but sometimes that means we’re
mythic items needed an overhaul, which arrived with
gonna have to rapidly address or revert things.”
the 2024 season. The result is a brand-new item system
One example both van Roon and Leung-Harrison
where the old mythic items have been removed, or
pointed to was the release of the Chemtech Drake in the
adjusted to be less powerful options. Over 100 items
2022 season. Initially launching as part of the pre-season
patch in November 2021, the dragon type was removed by have been changed, added or removed as part of the
patch, making it one of the biggest item overhauls ever.
the end of January, with players finding it frustrating
The early signs are good, and some forgotten
rather than fun. It didn’t return until the following
champions are already starting to come back into the
pre-season patch in November.
meta, but this is a system with so many changes that it is
going to take weeks if not months to balance everything to
FIXING MISTAKES
a reasonable standard.
With the lessons learnt from that
experience, Riot chose Season 2024 as
the time to address another system that
CHANGING THE PLAYING FIELD
has missed the mark: mythic items.
While the item changes were all about fixing an old
Initially introduced in 2021, mythic
system, the other two core areas of the 2024 season were
items were the most powerful items you more about adding new content to LoL and making
could get in League of Legends, each
matches feel fresh. The most noticeable change for
with a unique ability that was designed
everyone is the new look Summoner’s Rift, which has
to suit a small handful of champions to
been given some small but impactful tweaks, hopefully
really allow them to hit their peak.
making the map more even for each side.
“I was part of the crew that was
The changes may not seem significant, this is still the
doing mythic items that year and at
Summoner’s Rift you know, just with new walls being
the time there were a lot of pros that
added to make the red top lane mirror the blue side, the
we saw,” says Leung-Harrison. “It was an
brushes in the mid lane being moved back and the red bot
understandable choice for players and we thought that
side getting a new entrance into the river to match what
the tier of item above legendary was something that
the blue side has. But all of these changes serve some very
players would find exciting.”
important adjustments to how the game is played.
Unlike the Chemtech Drake, the
backlash to mythic items wasn’t
immediate. As a cool new feature,
everyone wanted to try out these new
powerful items and more times than
not they would feel great to use,
adding even more power and cool
abilities to League of Legends. But
over time it started to become clear
that they didn’t work for all the
champions in the game, and a
knock-on of that was that new
champions had to be designed to fit
one of these powerful items, limiting
some creativity for that team.
“60 to 70% of champions felt
good with the mythic item system,
maybe even like 80%, but there were

DISCOVER THE NEW BOT LANE

1

2

3

THE CHANGES MAY
NOT SEEM
SIGNIFICANT, THIS
IS STILL THE
SUMMONER’S RIFT
YOU KNOW

RIGHT: Baron fights
require more focus
with all the skills
he now has.

41

C O V E R F E AT U R E
League of Legends

In the top lane, the goal, along with some other
changes, was to make top laners feel more impactful in
every game and reduce how much ganks can mess with
them. In mid, moving the brushes back is an attempt to
make more champions viable in the lane, specifically
those who suffer from being ganked and have low
mobility. The bot lane is more of a response to the top
lane changes, giving blue-side junglers somewhere to
gank now the top is harder to reach.
It’s also an area that takes a lot more work than
you might think. Reworking an entire item system or
adding brand-new monsters obviously brings a lot of
work, but moving some walls and brushes around
seems like something that would take less time and
resources. In reality, these changes take massive
resources, even going down to figuring out the best
single pixel to place a new object.
“We placed the specifics of the bot lane river brush so
that wards in it will always see the entrance to the red
side brush from the river, no matter where you place it in
the brush,” says Ezra ‘Phlox’ Lynn, game designer on LoL.
“This took a lot of fine tweaking.”

MORE PURPLE MONSTERS!

The map changes combine with some key adjustments
and new additions to the monsters you will find on
Summoner’s Rift to make the environment you play on
feel very different to last season. Many of the monsters
on the Rift have been given new void-themed
makeovers, basically making them a bit stronger and
more purple, and the fan favourite new addition is the
Voidgrubs that are now found in the Baron pit during
the early stages of the game. These cute little guys are
again an attempt to make top laners have a better time,
giving them an objective to take early and on their own,
and an early concept had them as cultist cats.
But for the team, there was one feature they were
determined to make work; being able to ride the Rift
Herald. With the addition of the Voidgrubs taking its
place in the very early game, there were some ideas
thrown around on how to make the Herald more
impactful given it will now appear less often. The one
that started things out, was being able to jump in and
control the Herald and all its abilities.
“We threw it in the test and we were like, this is really
fun,” says Leung-Harrison. “It was sitting in the test
[build] for maybe a month or a month and a half, and

42

people were playing it, but then we were like, oh, man,
this is kind of getting old.”
In the initial version, if you were jumped by enemies
you could suddenly become this giant creature with a
massive health pool and can run away relatively quickly,
which is just annoying for anyone playing against it. But
instead of scrapping the feature, as many testers wanted,
the people behind it and its supporters, one of which was
Leung-Harrison, thought it could work in some format, so
went back to the drawing board.
Around a month later they came back with the version
of the feature that shipped. Instead of becoming the
herald, now you can jump on its back, choose a direction
for it to charge in and loosely control it as it runs. It’s no
longer the instant safety net that it was in its first iteration,
but it does add a fun new option of how to use the Herald.
“That ended up testing a lot better,” says LeungHarrison. “Like it kept the essence of what we were trying
to do with the thing while narrowing down what types of
abusive stuff it could do.”
The final big change when it comes to the monsters is
to Baron, the big purple worm who is the most powerful
creature on the Rift. For almost ten years Baron has
remained largely the same, a powerful monster that takes
an entire team to kill but offers a massive buff to your
minions when slain. All that is still true, but now three
potential variations of Baron can spawn, and they all have
a unique skill set.
The new Barons are a change
designed to offer a little more
randomness to League. It’s never going
to be game-deciding, but certain lineups
might have a better time taking one type
or another or at least have advantages in
one of the new pits compared to others.
It makes taking down Baron something
you need to think about more.

LOOKING AHEAD

NOW THREE
POTENTIAL
VARIATIONS OF
BARON CAN SPAWN,
AND THEY ALL HAVE
A UNIQUE SKILL SET

The initial reaction to the launch of the
2024 season has been mostly positive,
and there is no doubt that the new
system of launching everything at once
and doing away with pre-season has worked out for fans.
This has been one of the most anticipated new seasons in
years and fans seem to be generally happy with all the big
changes, which these days is a rarity.
For the team at Riot, the next few
weeks are all about refining the
changes they have just made and
looking more generally at how they
impact the game. What they discover
will likely lead to some of the changes
we will see this time next year, but
already there are some ideas the team
are discussing. Teleport and split
pushing are back on the menu as areas
to look at, the success of the Baron
changes has raised the question of
whether Dragon fights can be made
more dynamic, and some even want to
change how the bases look. Next year
we could see all, or even none, of these
released, but there’s a long way to go
before that arrives.

TOP: There’s no

feeling quite like
destroying the
Nexus in LoL.

LEFT: Riding the Rift

Herald is the most fun
addition this season.

W H AT C O U L D 2 0 2 5 B R I N G ?
Despite the new season just launching,
the team already has ideas for 2025

TELEPORT CHANGES

Teleport “leads to some
stagnation in pro play” according
to the devs, so it’s on the list of
things to explore further.

NEW BASES

After years of looking the same,
2025 could be the year we get
a visual overhaul of the bases
and how they are set up.

SPLIT PUSHING

Split pushing was on the agenda
for 2024 but was cut early on, so
2025 could be the year it gets an
overhaul to make it viable.

DRAGONS

After the success of Baron
changes this year, the team
wants to see if they can do the
same for Dragons next year.

TRYDAMERE

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45

With GRAND THEFT
AUTO VI finally,
officially revealed.
PC Gamer charts
the rise, rise, and
rise of one
of gaming’s
biggest series
By Rick Lane

F E AT U R E

1999

Grand Theft
Auto: London
He’s nicked my motor!
n 1998, DMA Design’s
parent company BMG
Interactive was acquired
by Take Two Interactive, and a
new publishing label named
Rockstar Games was established
under former BMG executive
producer Sam Houser. Rockstar’s
first project was GTA: London
1969, a period mission pack for
Grand Theft Auto developed by
Rockstar Canada.

I

Hello doctor? Tiny
cars are driving on the
bathroom wall again!

1997

Grand Theft Auto

Essentially the same game with a
’60s skin, GTA London received
the same criticisms as the original,
although it was praised for its
soundtrack which captured the
vibe of ’60s London. GTA: London
also sees Dan Houser’s debut as the
series’ chief writer, becoming a
much more significant role as the
series progressed. The expansion
was followed in short order by
GTA: London 1961. Set eight years
earlier and featuring the same
protagonist, 1961 was a PC
exclusive release available for
free by download only.

Where it all began
he project that became Grand
Theft Auto began life as an
isometric fighting simulator
similar to Syndicate Wars. Too
similar, in fact. When Bullfrog
made its sci-fi sequel public, GTA’s
developer DMA Design changed trajectory,
coming up with a plan for a top-down
vehicle game called Race ‘n’ Chase.

T

Race ‘n’ Chase’s design document describes
it as “a fun, addictive and fast multiplayer
car racing and crashing game”. But the
defining lines in the document have little
to do with racing. “It will also be possible
for players to get out of their car and steal
another one,” the document reads. “This
will mean controlling a vulnerable
pedestrian for a short time. Trying to steal a
car may result in an alarm being set off
which will, of course, attract the police.”
Grand Theft Auto’s top-down blend of 2D

sprites and 3D buildings was cutting edge
when development started in 1995. But by
the time it released in November 1997, the
game was visually outdated. Combined
with awkward controls, reviews of the
game were decidedly mixed. Even DMA’s
own developers thought the project was
unlikely to succeed, with former DMA
dev Colin MacDonald admitting there
“wasn’t a lot of confidence” in the game.
But Grand Theft Auto had something
that precious few games did in 1997
– a sense of freedom. Yes, you could
progress through the game’s linear
sequence of missions. But you could also
make money by stealing cars and selling
them at the local docks, run over
pedestrians just for the hell of it, and
lead the police on a merry chase. This
freedom shone through the game’s rough
visuals and controls, propelling Grand Theft
Auto to commercial success.
47

1999

Grand Theft
Auto 2
Back to the future
rand Theft Auto 2’s
futuristic setting makes
the game a curious outlier
in retrospect. But the choice of
setting made more sense at the
time. The series had just spawned
two expansions set in the past, so
why not place the sequel in the
distant year of 2013?

G

Set in the imaginatively named
Anywhere City, GTA 2 is a
fascinating artefact, straddling the
line between DMA’s original concept
and how the series would be
envisioned by the Housers. While it
uses the same ramshackle engine of
the first game, new elements like
comedic radio stations and a
live-action intro exhibit a flashiness
that would become central to later
Grand Theft Auto games. The sequel
also features a fascinating Respect
system that divides the city into
different factions, with the player’s
actions in the world affecting their
reputation with those organisations.

GTA’s shift into 3D
was transformative.

2001

Grand Theft Auto III
Hitting the big time
t had always been DMA’s
ideal to make Grand Theft
Auto a fully 3D game. But
back in 1995, the technical
demands had been too
prohibitive to render a 3D city of any
meaningful size. With the sequel, the
studio had experimented with full 3D
prototypes, but had ultimately chosen
to stick with the top-down perspective.
With the advent of the PlayStation 2,
however, Rockstar and DMA felt the
hardware was now capable of meeting
their ambitions.

T

The goal of GTA III was simply to convert
the freeform anarchy of previous games
into 3D. This was exciting enough in and
of itself. But the third game still finds
space to add several new features, like
bespoke minigames for taxis and police
cars, drivable boats and even an
(extremely hard to control) plane. But
beyond the move to 3D, the most
48

significant additions GTA III makes are
tonal rather than mechanical. It’s here that
the series begins to develop its cinematic
aspirations, introducing a more involved
story inspired by gangster fiction like
Scorsese movies and The Sopranos, told
through mo-capped animated cutscenes.
It’s also here where the acerbic social
satire is brought to the fore of the series,
most notably in ChatterboxFM’s hourlong loop of radio chat show, hosted by
real-life radio talk-show host Lazlow
Jones. Cowritten by Jones and Dan
Houser, ChatterboxFM took roughly five
months to create, and would come to be
one of the most fondly remembered
aspects of the third game.
GTA III would go on to be a huge
success, selling 14.5 million copies. And this
time, the critical reception backed those
sales up, with game receiving glowing
reviews. The series may have been around
for several years at this point, but GTA as we
know it today was born here.

F E AT U R E

2002

Grand Theft
Auto: Vice City
A Ray of sunshine
lthough GTA III was a huge leap
forward for the series, there were
still areas where the newly
renamed Rockstar North could
clearly improve. While technically
impressive, Liberty City lacked definition as an
urban space, having only been based on New
York midway through development. Silent
protagonist Claude wasn’t much of a character
either, an empty vessel with no personality.

A

CLAUDE WAS REPLACED BY
TOMMY VERCETTI, A
WISECRACKING MOBSTER

These were the issues Rockstar sought to
address with Vice City, and it did so in
spectacular fashion. Vice City swapped the grey
skyscrapers of Liberty City for the sun-soaked
beaches and neon-lit nightclubs of an alt-history
1980s Miami. Meanwhile, the voiceless Claude
was replaced by Tommy Vercetti, a wisecracking
mobster sporting a Hawaiian shirt and a vocal
performance by none other than Ray Liotta.
Combined with improved storytelling, mission
design and possibly the best selection of music in
the whole series, Vice City remains one of
Rockstar’s finest hours.

GTA got better looking,
but was it ever really
this stylish again?

49

F E AT U R E

2004

Grand Theft Auto:
San Andreas

San Andreas took
players to three cities
rather than one.

A new State of affairs
rand Theft Auto
had always
aspired to create,
in the words of
former Rockstar
North president Leslie
Benzies, a “living, breathing 3D
world”. San Andreas was the
first entry to commit to the
‘living’ part. Expanding the
scope to an entire fictional US
state rather than a single city,
San Andreas casts players as
CJ Johnson, who becomes
embroiled in the state’s gang
life following the murder of
his mother.

G

Alongside its massive map, what
separates San Andreas from
previous GTAs are its in-depth
role-playing systems, letting you
go to the gym, eat in restaurants,
play basketball and pool, mod
cars and rob houses at night.
GTA 2’s respect system returns to
govern character relationships
with CJ, while you can also take
over sections of the city through
its Gang Wars system. San
Andreas was by far the most
mechanically ambitious GTA had
ever been, and in terms of letting
you live a specific life, Rockstar
arguably hasn’t bettered it.

NIKO BELLIC, THE CLOSEST
GTA HAS COME TO A TRULY
EMPATHETIC ANTI-HERO

50

2008

Grand Theft Auto IV
GTA gets real
fter San Andreas,
Rockstar struggled to
find a way forward
with Grand Theft
Auto, with Sam
Houser calling San Andreas a
“nightmare” to follow up. But with
HD-era consoles bringing a huge
leap in visual fidelity, Rockstar
eventually settled on realism as
the defining characteristic of
Grand Theft Auto IV.

A

The setting would once again be
Liberty City, yet unlike GTA III, it
wouldn’t be a generic American
metropolis vaguely themed after
New York. It would be exhaustive
pastiche, built from thousands of
photos and hours of footage of the
city where Rockstar was based. This
would be built in a new graphics
engine, RAGE, complemented by a
revolutionary new physics system
that not only gave cars realistic
weight and inertia, but also powered
how the player walked and ran
around the city, and how NPCs

staggered and crumpled when shot.
Rockstar also overhauled the combat
system, previously a weak point,
bringing it in line with modern
cover-shooters like Gears of War.
Most dramatically of all, Rockstar
eschewed the cinematic parodies of
previous games, instead attempting a
more a serious, bespoke story about
an eastern-European immigrant
struggling to escape his violent past
and striving to realise the American
Dream. The result was Niko Bellic,
the closest GTA has come to a truly
empathetic anti-hero.
There were trade-offs for
Rockstar’s fixation on realism. The
world was slightly smaller than that
of San Andreas, and Rockstar also
dropped the innovative roleplaying
systems. Nonetheless, the
unprecedented attention to detail in
GTA IV not only resulted in huge
commercial success and near
universal critical acclaim, it also
transformed Grand Theft Auto from
one of the biggest names in gaming
into a global cultural phenomenon.

And you think
YOUR morning
commute is hell.

51

2009

GTA IV: The
Lost and Damned
Guns of Anarchy
ockstar followed GTA IV
with the series’ first
expansion in a decade. Yet
unlike the GTA: London add-ons,
which switched up the base game’s
location and historical period, The
Lost and Damned was set in the
same Liberty City as GTA IV, but
introduced a new story and
playable character – Johnny
Klebitz, vice president of The Lost
motorcycle club.

R

The mission to bomb the
Rockefeller Christmas Tree
was an unusual segue.

2009

GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony
With friends like these...
ix months after The
Lost and Damned, Rockstar
released a second expansion
for GTA IV. Swapping the player’s
perspective once more, The Ballad of
Gay Tony revolved around Luis
Fernando-Lopez, a former drug
dealer who becomes the bodyguard
and best friend of nightclub owner
‘Gay’ Tony Prince.

S

Like The Lost and Damned, The
Ballad of Gay Tony adds numerous
new features, swapping the former’s
Gang Wars system for the similarly
52

structured Drug Wars, and
introducing player scores for
individual missions. As with that
first expansion, however, the main
draw was the story, which featured
some of the most outrageous GTA
characters to date, alongside the
usual serving of gang conflicts and
snowballing chaos. Together, the
two expansions arguably represent
the series’ narrative high-point,
taking the lessons learned writing
GTA IV and creating even sharper
stories with a more interesting mix
of characters.

The Lost and Damned introduced
several new features to the
experience, such as mid-mission
checkpoints, new minigames like
arm wrestling and air hockey, NPC
bikers who could accompany
Johnny on missions, and a Gang
Wars system partly inspired by San
Andreas. The real draw, though
was its fantastic, Sons of Anarchyinspired story, which saw Johnny
juggling conflicts with other
motorcycle gangs, political
tensions in his own club, and the
attention of the police and the
New York mafia.

F E AT U R E

OFFERS ONE OF THE MOST
REMARKABLE SANDBOXES
EVER CONSTRUCTED
“I’m telling you, I
had right of way!”

2013

Grand Theft Auto V
A living, breathing world
here Grand Theft Auto
IV had brought a
technical overhaul to
the series, Grand Theft
Auto V sought to
expand upon that foundation.
Hence, as IV had looked to Liberty
City for inspiration, V looked to San
Andreas. Not only did V borrow a
chunk of San Andreas’ map to form
its setting, it also picked up an idea
discarded by Rockstar during that
game’s development – the ability to
switch between three different
playable characters.

W

On the subject of character, Grand
Theft Auto V returned to the sillier
tone and cinema-inspired plot of the
early 3D games. Its tale of retired
bank robbers returning to their
dubious trade drew heavily from
classic heist movies, particularly
Michael Mann’s Heat. The writing
is more comic and absurdist, with
larger-than-life characters and
missions that more frequently throw
players into ridiculous situations.

This came at the cost of some
narrative depth. The game’s three
protagonists are harder to like than
Grand Theft Auto IV’s Niko.
Moreover, while the campaign
features some fantastic missions,
especially its signature heists, many
of its smaller missions are intensely
railroaded, giving the player little
room to express themselves.
Outside of missions, however,
GTA V offers one of the most
remarkable sandboxes ever
constructed. Los Santos and its
surrounding county is a triumph of
environment design, from the golden
shores of Vespucci beach to the
forested wilderness surrounding
Mount Chiliad. Moreover, GTA V’s
simulation of a modern society in
motion is second to none. The way
pedestrians react when you bump
into them, the overheard phone calls
and conversations the way the world
so naturally moulds itself around
your input. A decade on from release,
simply wandering around Los Santos
remains a mesmerising experience.
53

INSPIRED BY THE
REAL-LIFE ESCAPADES
OF BONNIE & CLYDE
2013

Grand Theft Online
Hey buddy, wanna buy some multiplayer?
rand Theft Auto’s multiplayer history is
sporadic to say the least. The original game
and San Andreas had limited multiplayer
modes, but the majority were purely singleplayer. It
isn’t until Grand Theft Auto IV that the series gets
proper multiplayer functionality, which allowed up
to 32 players to fight, race and cause general chaos
across Liberty City.

G

GTA Online swings the other way, as if Rockstar was
trying to make up for those lost multiplayer years all
at once. Essentially a separate game that uses GTA V’s
map, GTA Online allowed players to create their own
criminal miscreant and attempt to make it big in a
world crawling with other players. Straddling the
line between standard multiplayer experience and
MMO, it let players fight each other or work
together in the world itself, while also partaking in
more specific activities like racing, deathmatches
and more bespoke Contract Missions.
Initially hindered by server issues and a
repetitive grind, GTA Online found its feet over
time. The game adapted easily to emerging
live-service models, truly coming into its own
with the Heists update in 2015. This introduced
five large-scale cooperative missions to the game
similar to the singleplayer’s signature set pieces.
Since then, more Heists have been added,
alongside other new features like stunt races,
nightclub businesses and, more controversially,
the Diamond Casino.
Though flawed, GTA Online has been
instrumental in maintaining the series’
relevance during the long wait for a sequel
to GTA V. It’s also been enormously
lucrative for Rockstar, having generated in
the region of $8 billion for the company
since 2013. Consequently, it’s hard to
imagine that a follow-up of some sorts
isn’t in the works alongside the upcoming,
singleplayer sequel.
54

F E AT U R E

2025

Grand Theft Auto VI
Back in the game
ockstar’s reveal
of Grand Theft
Auto VI got off to
a bumpy start.
Not only was
in-development footage of the
game leaked online last year, but
the trailer itself spilled onto the
internet slightly before the
planned reveal. Nonetheless, the
upshot is the same. Grand Theft
Auto VI is coming in 2025, and
Rockstar has provided the first
details of what players can
expect from the sequel.

R

Grand Theft Auto VI is set in the
fictional US State of Leonida
– GTA’s fictional equivalent
of Florida. Players will be
returning to Vice City, which, as
you’d expect from the studio
that most recently released Red
Dead Redemption 2, looks
eye-poppingly realistic. The
trailer shows a Miami-like
beach thronged with a diverse
range of NPCs, glittering
downtown areas with towering
skyscrapers and lavish resort
districts lined with expensive
cars. But as with Grand Theft
Auto V, it appears the action
won’t be limited to Vice City
itself. The trailer shows
numerous rural locations,
such as a highway strung
across an archipelago of
islands, and an airboat
barrelling through Evergladelike marshlands.
The story, meanwhile,
centres around two
protagonists, Lucia, the
series’ first female lead in
over two decades, and a
second, male character
whose name is not yet
confirmed. In 2022, a report
by Bloomberg claimed the
game’s plot will be inspired
by the real-life escapades of
Bonnie & Clyde, and the
reveal trailer supports that
claim. It includes a scene
of Lucia and her partner
holding up a convenience

store, while another scene shows
Lucia sat on her partner’s lap on a
bed, uttering the phrase, “The only
way we’re gonna get through this is
by sticking together.”

WAFFLE HOUSE

As present, there’s no information
on how VI will play. We can safely
assume that mechanics will involve
a mixture of driving, shooting and
open-world shenanigans. But
specific mechanics and new
features are still under wraps.
Footage that leaked prior to the
game’s reveal showed Lucia and
her partner holding up a waffle
house. But there’s no guarantee this
location or mechanic will feature in
the final game.
That said, the trailer does
provide some sense of the sequel’s
tone. Lucia and her partner seem
more grounded as characters than
GTA V’s Michael and Trevor. Then
again, the trailer is also full of social
media clips of weird events, like an
elderly lady wielding two hammers
in the street. But these clips are
based on real videos of events that
occurred in Florida, suggesting that
Rockstar isn’t going to have to
stretch to fill its game with weird
stuff while also telling a story with
rounded, believable characters.
Two other points worth noting.
This is the first GTA in over 20
years to launch without Dan
Houser and Leslie Benzies on
the team (Sam Houser remains
president of Rockstar). It’ll be
interesting to see how that affects
the general direction of the game,
although Dan Houser only left
Rockstar fairly recently, so his DNA
may still be present in the game.
Finally, Rockstar is yet to
directly confirm the game is
coming to PC. For the moment,
only PS5 and Xbox One have been
announced as platforms. But this
has been the case with Grand Theft
Auto since 2001, and all the games
have found their way to PC
eventually. Grand Theft Auto VI will
be no different. We’ll just have to
be a little extra patient.
55

F E AT U R E
Total War: Warhammer III

A thousand years of wrongs put
right in TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER III
By Matt Elliott

56

F E AT U R E
Total War: Warhammer III

57

F E AT U R E
Total War: Warhammer III

ne of the
wonderful,
tragic things
about
Warhammer
dwarfs is their
terminal decline.
A realm that once spanned the Old
World has been shattered by the
incursion of orcs, goblins and vile
ratmen. Most attempts to rebuild
their empire end in disaster. It’s an
endless cycle of failure, loss and
shame, and they’re extremely
grumpy about it.

O

That’s about to change. The Age of
Reckoning is upon us. The Immortal
Empires mode in Total War:
Warhammer III offers the most
complete and detailed map of the
Old World that exists. It stretches
far east, to the lands of Grand
Cathay, and back west to the New
World of Lustria and Naggarond.
But the conquest that follows isn’t
about scale. It’s about detail. In this
feature, we’re going to concern
ourselves with the heart of what was
once the Karaz Ankor, or Everlasting
Realm; a mighty domain that once
included multiple mountain ranges
and hill settlements. The map in
Warhammer III is pockmarked
with sacred dwarf holds that have
fallen into the foetid clutches of
greenskins and skaven-kind. For a
race that venerates tradition and
ancestry, this is the gravest insult,
the deepest shame. The Great Book
of Grudges, the Dammaz Kron,
demands a reckoning. The holds
must be reclaimed.

58

It’s not as easy as sweeping
through the map and colonising
every suitable settlement, though.
The inspiration for this article comes
from the expanded universe of
Warhammer Fantasy. Read enough
books about the Dawi – which,
apparently, I have – and you’ll learn
just how much they’ve lost. The
Doom of Dragonback by Gav Thorpe
is the primary inspiration for this. It
details the fall of a hold called
Ekrund. It’s not the biggest or most
important location in the Old World,
by any means, but the detail and
colour in the book made me
immediately want to fire up the game
and fix things. Much like preventing
the fall of Constantinople in Medieval
II, the beauty of Total War is that I
get to change history. The dwarfs of
Games Workshop’s Black Library
might have failed, but we won’t.
Of course, Ekrund isn’t the only
location that needs reclaiming.
There’s Mount Silverspear, Karak
Varn, Black Crag, and more. The
Warhammer novels are full of places
that you wouldn’t even know were
dwarf holds without their tragic
backstories. But Total War gives us
the power to not only liberate these
holds, but give them back their
proper titles. And it’s with this
vengeful thought in mind that we
muster the throngs and begin a new
age for the Karaz Ankor.
It’s natural to assume that the
dwarf in charge of the reclamation
should be the High King himself,
Thorgrim Grudgebearer. He’s the
custodian of the Dammaz Kron, and
the man in charge of righting (and

BELOW: Peak

Belachad
Ironhammer:
shrugging off
goblin artillery like
it’s soggy tissue.

writing) the most heinous crimes in
dwarf history. But choosing him
feels cheesy. He’s an incredibly
powerful character who starts out in
a strong position. The grim beauty of
dwarf lore is that the quest for lost
glory is probably doomed. There is,
therefore, only one dwarf for the job:
Belegar Ironhammer of Clan
Angrund, a man so shamed by the
loss of his ancestral hold that he’s
haunted by the literal ghosts of
failure. He’s the poster boy for Dawi
decline; a frothing, furious, clenched
jaw of a hero. He will lead us to
victory and, if not, at least he can’t
be any angrier or ashamed than he
currently is. There’s another reason
for picking Clan Angrund, too. In
The Doom of Dragonback, the few
dwarfs who survive the fall of
Ekrund move east and establish
new mining colonies in The Vaults:
the same region in which Belegar
lives in exile. It’s possible to imagine
that some of the warriors who
accompany Ironhammer on his
quest are descendants of those who
fled Ekrund, or died defending it.

WORSE STILL, I’M IN A RACE TO
GET THERE AGAINST A CUNNING
AND BRUTAL ENEMY: SKARSNIK
KARAK EIGHT PEAKS

TOME TO KILL
The Black Library bangers that inspired this quest

THE DOOM OF
DRAGONBACK
BY GAV THORPE

Unique among
Warhammer Fantasy
stories in that it
features a teenage
(in dwarf years)
female protagonist,
this is basically a
disaster movie in a
Dawi hold. Everything
goes wrong and it’ll
make you sad, in a
good way.

GRUDGE BEARER
BY GAVIN
THORPE
An epic tale that
basically sums
up why there’s no
dwarf word for
‘forgiveness’. Like
the Dammaz Kron
in-game, it’s a
collection of wrongs
that must be set
right, and what that
actually means for
the dwarfs involved.

SKARSNIK
BY GUY HALEY

If you fancy seeing
the everlasting war
between greenskins
and dwarfs told
from another
perspective, this
is for you. Although
if anything, it’ll
make you even
more afraid of the
brutal cunning (or
cunning brutality)
of Skarsnik.

HONOURKEEPER
BY NICK KYME
Read this if you
want a reason
to start a war with
a faction other
than greenskins
or skaven, or if
you’ve ever
wondered why
dwarfs are so
suspicious of
those capricious,
capering and
pointy-eared elves.

ABOVE: Turn around,

lads! There’s a feral
chav dragon about
to feast on you.

Sadly, Belegar has a problem. He is a
king in exile; the rightful ruler of
Karak Eight Peaks, a hold once
second only to the dwarf capital,
Karaz-a-Karak, in terms of wealth
and prestige, that now lies in the
clutches of the enemy. Building any
kind of army or momentum with
Belegar is almost impossible until you
reclaim the most famous lost dwarf
hold of them all. Until then, you
suffer massive maintenance costs for
your armies, so before I can even
contemplate heading to Ekrund or
Black Crag, I have to recapture a
huge, heavily-fortified, fully
garrisoned city. Worse still, I’m in a
race to get there against a cunning
and brutal enemy: Skarsnik. As
detailed in Guy Haley’s eponymous
novel, once Skarsnik takes root in
Eight Peaks, it’s incredibly difficult to
get rid of him. He’s like mould in a
student flat. I need to build an army
that can survive the trip east from
The Vaults to Karak Eight Peaks, and
do so quickly. Once that’s done,
Belegar’s forces will range north to
59

CROSSBOWS WILL BE FINE FOR
THINNING OUT MY LIGHTLY
ARMOURED GREENSKIN ENEMIES
liberate the lost holds of Black Water,
and back west to Ekrund, the
inspiration for this feature. The
likelihood is that all of these locations
will be held by different factions, but
this is no time for caution. We’ll fight
a war on multiple fronts if necessary.
It’s a difficult start. Like going on
holiday with children or elderly
parents, there’s always some last
minute rigmarole that prevents you
from setting off. But instead of
misplaced comfort blankets or beta
blockers, the problem here is skaven
incursions and the unwanted and
inexplicable attention of undead
pirates. Eventually I’m able to give
the vampires enough of a pasting that
they sue for peace, but the ratmen
represent a persistent problem. I
don’t have the time or resources to
crush them, so instead I focus on
buildings that will improve my
defences. It means my starting area
will be less productive, but it’s hardly
an everlasting realm if I abandon the
settlements I began with.
I don’t have time to upgrade my
settlements and unlock top-tier units,
60

R E V E N G E I N C A R N AT E
How Belegar spent his
time restoring the Karaz Ankor
37%
MURDERING
GROBI SCUM

24%
PEST CONTROL

Skaven are everywhere in
the Old World. Including,
apparently, beneath the
holds Belegar already owns.
An inconvenient
distraction.

The good things about
goblins is that there are
lots of them, and killing
them feels amazing. It
does take rather a
lot of time,
though.

8%
GRUMBLING

The beer was too
flat. The enemies
too soft. The
elves too nearby.

12%
RETAKING

Actually retaking the dwarf
holds we set out to liberate.

19%
FLOUNDERING
Faffing around
trying to save
our floundering
High King.

so I focus on preserving the decent
ones Belegar starts with: hammerers,
a tier-four unit that specialises in
damage output, and rangers, a missile
unit that can snipe and outflank
enemies. Aside from that, I pack my
army with dwarf warriors and
quarrelers. Even the most basic dwarf
units are doughty, immovable objects,
and crossbows will be fine for
thinning out my lightly armoured
greenskin enemies. It’s not an
overpowered army, by any means.
Too many fights on the way there
and I won’t have the muscle to retake
Eight Peaks, and the whole exercise
will be doomed. One reassuring
thought, however, is that at least my
northern borders will be safe. As I
mentioned earlier, High King
Thorgrim Grudgebearer starts with a
crushing grip on key dwarf locations.
There’s a chance he might even make
it to Ekrund and the Black Mountains
before me, and I’ll have to use
diplomacy to reclaim them. Either
way, at least they’ll be back under
Dawi control. It’s also useful knowing
that the greenskins and skaven have

F E AT U R E
Total War: Warhammer III

another faction to bother, which
might help me move east.
Belegar’s forces finally reach
Karak Eight Peaks, expecting to see
Skarsnik sitting upon the cold throne.
But… he’s not. In his place is a faction
called the Crooked Moon Mutinous
Gits, who apparently took over the
hold while Skarsnik was out hunting.
This is good news in many respects,
since they’re a weaker faction. But it
also means that Skarsnik is still out
there, plotting. My forces are slightly
diminished, but still strong enough
to besiege Karak Eight Peaks. It
eventually falls. The first legendary
hold is back in dwarf hands. Belegar’s
shame is lessened. But his work is
only beginning.

BELOW: Losing the

Dwarf capital is so
humiliating that I’m
ashamed to even
caption this.

fate of Karaz-a-Karak. Somehow, the
most powerful dwarf faction of all
seems to have been displaced by a
band of minor greenskins. Instead of
providing an immovable bulwark
behind which I can reclaim the lost
glories of the Dawi, they’ve become a
broken, fragmented mess. Allying
with them is like trying to hang a
duffel coat on a sugar sculpture. Part
of me wants to ignore them and carry
on to Ekrund or Black Water. But
then I think about what brought me
here. So many of the holds fall
because dwarfs from different lands
fail to work together. And, more than
that, this is about honour and history.
What’s the point of reclaiming an
empire if we don’t have a king? It’s
like building the world’s best kennel
for a dog you accidentally buried
while laying the foundations.
And so, in a third act plot twist
any Black Library author would be
proud of, I decide to save High King
Thorgrim and ensure he retakes his
seat in Karaz-a-Karak (he actually
takes his seat with him wherever he
goes, because he’s like that, but I’m
sure you understand the analogy). It’s
a precarious task. His faction is so
depleted I have to keep gifting them
settlements so they don’t go extinct,
like an anxious zookeeper
encouraging pandas to shag. Worse
still, he keeps losing the settlements
I give him to raiding orc forces.
Eventually, I nurture him back to a
state of health where I can turn
around for two minutes without him
accidentally tripping over a snotling
and shattering his kneecaps, but he’s
in no state to besiege the greatest

dwarf city of them all. Instead, I have
to do it for him, leading a powerful
force of grizzled Dawi the gates of
Karaz-a-karak before ejecting the
capering goblin filth that’s taken up
residence there. It’s an easy fight,
but it does make me feel better
immediately gifting a vital settlement
to a faction that has nothing to offer
in return. It’s so un-dwarf-like that
it does feel like the finale to a
Warhammer novel; a dwarf king
hellbent on reclaiming land, who
nevertheless gives up the greatest city
in the Karaz Ankor because it’s the
right and proper thing to do.
After that, reclaiming the lost
holds proves easy. My forces colonise
the neighbouring province of Black
Water, and, in doing so, reclaim the
fabled Bugmans Brewery for
dwarfkind. The Bloody Hands
faction, who control Ekrund, have
concentrated so much effort on
destroying Thorgrim that I can easily
swoop in and colonise the smaller
settlements that surround the
province capital. Then, just when it
feels like it can’t get any more literary,
Gotrek and Felix, themselves the
subject of 17 Black Library novels,
turn up. It’s a sign. We march on
Ekrund, retake it, and chase the
greenskin filth from the land. It’s
tempting fate, but this looks like
a renewed dwarf empire. Ekrund
is reclaimed. The Black Water is
under our control. And even Mount
Silverspear has been wrested from
the grasping hands of the chaos
dwarfs. No Warhammer novel about
dwarfs would ever end this well. Let’s
enjoy it before Skarsnik arrives…

WILD RUSH

The wild rush to Eight Peaks was
disorientating, so I’ve missed the
state of the map. It’s… odd. There are
elves living next door to me, like
we’re in a cheerful high-fantasy
sitcom. Lizardmen have ventured
north, yet seem quite content to
ignore me. But strangest of all is the
61

HOW WE REVIEW

We 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
game, our expert will revisit it and tell you whether it
holds up today. With jokes.

OUR SCORING
SYSTEM EXPLAINED

00%-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.
Examples Family 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.
Examples Trials of the Blood Dragon
40%-49% Flawed and disappointing.
Examples Aliens: Colonial Marines
50%-59% Mediocre. Other games probably do it better, or its
unique qualities aren’t executed well.
Examples Primordia, Homefront: The Revolution
60%-69% There’s something to like here, but it can only be
recommended with major caveats.
Examples No Man’s Sky, Ghost Recon: Wildlands
70%-79% A good game that’s worth playing. We like it.
Examples Prey, NieR: Automata

Crysis point
The cinematic FPS adventure game
Crysis, released back in November
2007, quickly become known as a
technical showcase for the nextgeneration of PC gaming graphics.
To run Crysis at anywhere near its
maximum settings on release
required a monster of a PC gaming
rig, loaded with state-of-the-art
components. The result was that
most PC gamers didn’t
experience Crysis as its
developer, Crytek, intended.
Fast forward to today, and
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
seems to be actively
pursuing its own Crysis
point. If you can run the
game on its maximum
‘Unobtanium’ settings, then
you’re in for a spectacular, nextgen visual treat. However, like our
review this issue reveals, right now
many PC gamers won’t get that
experience or, even a stable one.

80%-89% A great game with exceptional moments or
features, and touches of brilliance. We love it.
Examples Overwatch, Night in the Woods
90%-94% A compelling recommendation for most PC
gamers. Important to PC gaming, and likely ahead of its time.
Examples Bayonetta, Dishonored 2
95%-96% Far and away one of the best games we’ve ever
played. We recommend it to the entire world.
Examples Half-Life 2, Kerbal Space Program

ROBERT JONES
PRINT EDITOR

robert.jones@futurenet.com

97%-100% Advances the human species. Boosts the
immune systems of nearby children and small animals.
The Editor’s Choice award is
granted in addition to the score,
at the discretion of the PC Gamer
staff. It represents exceptional
quality or innovation.
Find out more
www.bit.ly/pcgreviews

62

LET US KNOW
WHAT YOU THINK

Email us via letters@
pcgamer.com with your
reactions, or simply
tweet us your thoughts
@PCGamer

70

64

Contents
64
68
70
74
76
78
80
82

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
Gangs of Sherwood
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
Cocoon
House Flipper 2
Disney Dreamlight Valley
Against the Storm
A Highland Song

78

84 Last Train Home
FREE GAMES

88 The Roottrees are Dead
89 Tommy Gun Witches
89 The Two Rivers Hypothesis
THEY’RE BACK

90 Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
91 Tropico 5
91 Wilmot’s Warehouse

This month’s flipping mad reviewers…

NOAH SMITH

RICK LANE

JODY MACGREGOR

DANIELLA LUCAS

MAT T ELLIOT T

Specialist in
Painting himself blue

Specialist in
Merry men

Specialist in
Hunting heretics

Specialist in
Scrooge McDuck quotes

Specialist in
Totalitarianism

Currently playing
Avatar: Frontiers
of Pandora

Currently playing
Gangs of Sherwood

Currently playing
Warhammer 40,000:
Rogue Trader

Currently playing
Disney Dreamlight
Valley

Currently playing
Tropico 5

This month
Had his presence
announced by a flying
robot skull in a wig.

This month
Released a rap album
with Scrooge McDuck
called ‘Money Bin Mad’.

This month
Learned the Na’vi
language. Used it to
say naughty words.

This month
Wore green tights and
disappeared into the
woods after dark.
Wouldn’t say why.

This month
Demanded everyone in
the PC Gamer Towers
bar salute while hailing
him as ‘El Presidente’.

82
63

REVIEW
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

THE FRONTIER IS CLOSED
A Pandora’s box of technical issues in AVATAR: FRONTIERS OF PANDORA
By Noah Smith

A

vatar: Frontiers of Pandora transcends its progenitor
series Far Cry with awe-inspiring presentation, a
captivating world and tense combat, but at present it’s
buried under a mountain of technical trouble and it could
take months to unearth a genuinely great game with
patches and driver support.

NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
A Far Cry-like set in the
world of James
Cameron’s Avatar
EXPECT TO PAY

game-breaking bugs and
When it’s working, navigating
£50
performance issues: we’re talking
Pandora is a total joy: sprinting at
DEVELOPER
full-on system crashes, consistently
mach five across the forest floor and
Massive Entertainment,
poor performance, and bizarre
parkouring across the serpentine
Ubisoft Shanghai,
progress-erasing interface bugs
tree roots that connect dense jungle
Dusseldorf
(namely a perpetually greyed-out
brush to rock formations suspended
PUBLISHER
‘continue’ button that
in zero gravity. Avatar’s
Ubisoft
only works again after
psychedelic Ecco the
REVIEWED ON
Avatar’s
the game is deleted
Dolphin’s colour palette
AMD Ryzen 7 7700x,
and
subsequently
meets Starship
32GB RAM, AMD
psychedelic
Radeon RX 6600
reinstalled). For these
Troopers’ industrial scisci-fi
look
is
reasons, getting
fi look is translated
MULTIPLAYER
translated
sufficiently immersed
beautifully from film to
Yes
in Frontiers of Pandora
game, and the skyboxes
beautifully
LINK
is extremely difficult.
especially are some of
ubisoft.com/en-gb/
It’s been my
the best I’ve ever seen.
game/avatar/
frontiers-of-pandora
experience that post-launch, these
The sheer density and variety of
issues have gotten worse, not better,
reactive flora and fauna is stunning.
even when using some of the flagship
The whole thing is jaw-dropping.
AMD hardware advertised in
The audio is also a standout, with
a score that dynamically shifts from
ambient strings that accent the
natural sounds of Pandora to
pulsating drums and droning synths
during combat. It’s a soundscape that
Pandora’s most dangerous occupants
I expect will see a lot of success
outside the game as probably one of
the most diverse and interesting
ASMR sound palettes I’ve ever heard.

YOU’RE NOT IN K ANSAS ANYMORE

FAILURE TO LAUNCH

For me, the gorgeous presentation
has been undercut by the usual
suite of technical issues that
accompany big multi-platform
releases – frequent hitching, fps
drops (AMD Adrenaline says I’m
getting 90, but it looks a feels a lot
more like 45), and blurry FSR3
scaling, which Ubisoft originally
attributed to a lack of a day one
driver update. That driver update
has come, though, and the issues
haven’t subsided.
My time with the game has
been consistently impeded by a
frustratingly common suite of
64

HAMMERHEAD

IKRAN

AMP SUITS

RDA AIR FORCE

Titanic, aggressively territorial
grazers, Hammerheads will
pulverise you if given the chance.

Hastily converted loaders used
by the RDA to patrol Pandora.
No life-support systems.

Tameable pterodactyl-dragon
hybrids, a bond with one marks
a Na’vi as an adult.

Military surplus from the Third
World War exported en masse to
Pandora. Vulnerable to archery.

partnership with Frontiers of
Pandora. Bad FSR3 implementation
seems to be the culprit behind most
crashes, but even with that disabled,
walking into a Na’vi hometree or
stepping into an area with dense
foliage (which scholars will note is
75% of the game) would almost
always prompt the same result. For
this review, I wasn’t even able to
spend any time above Pandora’s
jungles on the back of an Ikran,
because getting to one required me to
climb a tree that 20 times out of 20
crashed me to the desktop on
different hardware, driver, and
settings configurations.

HUNTING AND GATHERING

My wings (and adulthood!) denied
to me, I spent most of my time in
Frontiers of Pandora stalking across
the lush jungle floor. Resource
gathering by means of foraging
and hunting is the primary means
by which you source special
ammunition and crafting materials
for new gear, but Frontiers of Pandora
puts an environmentally conscious
twist on what would otherwise be
a purely extractive (colonial, even)
approach to harvesting. Killing a deer
quickly or gently removing the fruit
from a tree will yield higher quality
resources, which can be donated to
the communal baskets at the various
Na’vi clan hometrees in exchange for
rare materials and unique rewards. I
did roll my eyes when I took down
a Sturmbeast (imagine a six-legged
dinosaur buffalo) for the first time
and my Na’vi said a short prayer
to Eywa, thanking her for sharing
her gifts – I get what it’s going for,
but attaching these traditional
Indigenous harvesting practices to
the borderline ecocidal Far Cry
hunting system comes off as
ridiculous, especially when you say a
solemn prayer after punching a dog
in the back of the head eight times.
I can’t overstate just how much
the minimalist user interface and
emphasis on exploration is a

Pandora’s bioluminescent
flora and fauna is never
not eye-catching.

LEFT: Frontier’s jungle

floor is the most
dense forest I’ve
seen in a game

BELOW: The artisan

Aranhe Clan rewards
you with dyes and
cosmetic materials.

65

RIGHT: RDA facilities
are dangerous
killzones that require
thoughtful,
considered stealth
to overthrow.
FAR RIGHT: The
Human resistance
feels really out of
place – don’t expect
to see it appear
in the movies.

66

REVIEW
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

a neoconservative Judge Holden,
welcome departure from Ubisoft’s
have had all their edges sanded off.
traditional approach to open world
Their unflinching brutality is only
design. Objective markers only show
ever alluded to with Na’vi
up when you engage Na’vi senses
occasionally mentioning they’ve
(detective vision), which has made
gotten word of “village massacres”,
my time on Pandora a mostly
peaceful one, occasionally punctuated a shallow parallel to the Mai Lai
massacre that’s at odds with the
by intense combat with enemy
setting. In Frontiers of Pandora, the
patrols. There’s still a bevy of side
RDA is so bereft of
missions and objectives
its characteristic
and collectibles and all
Your arsenal imperialist brain rot
the usual open world
that it’s easy to forget
junk here, but not
is a blend of
that it got kicked off
having a constant
Na’vi and
Pandora after a failed
reminder of just how
human
shock and awe military
much bullshit there is
operation designed to
to still do makes
weaponry
“blast a hole in the
Frontiers of Pandora
Na’vi racial memory”.
feel a lot more chill.
It’s satisfying to see these guys get
Your arsenal is a blend of Na’vi
murdered by tie-dye coloured
and human weaponry: longbows and
dragons precisely because they are
bigger, heavier longbows, lacrosse
gang members with MBAs. Without
sticks that lob grenades and poison
the confidence to draw meaningful
traps, as well as assault rifles and
parallels between the RDA and both
shotguns. It’s a melting pot of
modern and historical imperialism,
weapons that each fill an enjoyable
some of sci-fi’s best villains have been
niche in Frontiers of Pandora’s
reduced to security guards.
combat sandbox. Archery in general
It’s not just the weak antagonists:
just feels fantastic, impaling some
Frontiers of Pandora’s is shackled to a
company footsoldier with an arrow
jarring, awkwardly written and
that feels like it was shot out of a
tone-deaf narrative. At the first
railgun did not get old.
human resistance base, your Na’vi
It’s a bit trite to say, “It makes you
character will be subjected to endless
feel like a Na’vi!”, but Frontiers of
inane babbling – there’s constant
Pandora consistently emphasises just
how different Na’vi physiology is, and gawking and cracks about the
differences between human and
the abilities it adds to the Ubisoft Far
Na’vi physiology, and without the
Cry formula are great, the best being
option to push back, it comes off as a
a charge and double jump.
thoughtless backing track of nonstop
microaggressions that will likely be
THOUGHTLESS BEAUTY
uncomfortably familiar to any
Remember the mech suits from the
first movie? Those are most of what
you’ll be fighting across Pandora,
though they’ll occasionally be
supported by light infantry and air
support. They’re total pushovers if
you can isolate one, but having to
deal with even two at once was
Breakdown of time spent in
enough to get me to start thinking
Frontiers of Pandora
about combat strategically.
There was a great moment early
on where I had to face down five
mech suits that had me switching
between weapons a la Doom Eternal
– lobbing grenades to knock them off
balance, cracking their dumb truck
windscreens with arrows, and then
spraying down the pilot with a quick
burst from my gun.
While fun to pincushion with
arrows, I can’t help but feel that the
invading Resources Development
Administration, who in the films is a
modern day mining company run by

HUNTING AND
G AT H E R I N G

10%

Hunting, gathering
resources,
and crafting.

10%

Doing sidequests
for clan rewards.

15%

Harassing RDA
patrols and
destroying
RDA facilities.

20%

Indigenous person. Worst of all is
a nuclear-weapon level title drop
which identifies the Na’vi
ambassador program that your
character is raised in as a “Residential
School”. That label totally misapplied,
and Frontiers of Pandora doesn’t
capture the extreme range of abuse
present at these ‘schools’ with its
depiction. It’s a tasteless and
irresponsible comparison, made all
the more jarring in a series that
succeeds in honest portrayals of
imperialism and colonialism.
The issue of cultural appropriation
and impropriety in the context of
Avatar is needly – for what’s it worth,
I’m Indigenous and have been ride or
die for these movies since the first
one came out in 2009. Ultimately,
Frontiers of Pandora’s eye roll
inducing dialogue is way out of step
with both films, and the need to
undercut everything with a smarmy
joke consistently fails to portray some
of the most interesting aspects of
both human and Na’vi culture.
A point from the first film that I’ve
always appreciated is how the Na’vi
see industrial society as a type of
mass insanity, an idea that Frontiers
of Pandora has left unexplored. The
game hasn’t added anything to
Cameron’s world, and I’ve even
noticed a few things that conflict
with the film: remember the big
‘Dragon’ gunship? There’s a few of
those in Frontiers of Pandora despite
that being a one-off military vehicle.
Though the narrative that Ubisoft
has crafted to stand alongside
Cameron’s is at best baffling and at
worst offensive, the immersive
environment feels like a step forward.
That world, impressive as it is, is
undercut by inexcusable performance
and atrocious stability.
Your experience may differ: one
person at PC Gamer who’s using a
GeForce RTX 2080 Super says that
the game has run fine for him. I’m
not the only one experiencing
frequent crashes, though: other
players have reported the same issue
on different hardware configs. I hope
that these issues will be rectified, but
for now, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
just isn’t worth the headaches.

Exploring Pandora’s
lush jungles.

45%

Fighting with
game-breaking
technical issues.

VERDICT
Avatar: Frontiers of
Pandora’s stunning
presentation and world
design are failed by
atrocious tech issues.

50
67

REVIEW
Gangs of Sherwood

STAID MARIAN
GANGS OF SHERWOOD’s four-player fighting is all too frivolous and all too fleeting

L

By Rick Lane

ike its babbling crew of outlaws, Gangs of Sherwood tries to
compensate for its fundamental shortcomings with a brash
persona and propulsive energy. It’s a fast-paced, four-player
shooter-slash-brawler with a vividly drawn alt-fantasy world,
a knockabout comedy tone, and lively combat. Unfortunately,
these colourful distractions fade away all too quickly, revealing Robin
Hood rummaging through your purse as he tries to lift £35 out of it.
and incongruent text fonts that
Oddly, what I like most about Gangs
constantly obscures the action. It
of Sherwood is the thing I was least
makes Gangs of Sherwood look like
convinced by before playing – the
one of those dodgy fake game adverts
setting. Gangs of Sherwood takes the
that appear before a YouTube video.
familiar Robin Hood tale and plonks
This isn’t the only area where
it in an alternate, sci-fi history.
Gangs of Sherwood undermines
Generally I’m not a fan of gaming’s
quality foundations.
fixation with
The game adopts a
alternative takes on
The humour distinctly British
Robin Hood. But Gangs
comedic tone, shooting
of Sherwood quickly
runs out
between
won me over with its
of ideas after somewhere
Fable and the games of
vivid combination of
a couple
Planet Moon Studios. It
steampunk and
made me laugh several
medievalism. For what
of hours
times early on. I’m
is clearly a budget title,
particularly fond of
Gangs of Sherwood
the puppet-show briefings that take
chews through some impressive
scenery, with dramatic backdrops and place before missions. These are
charmingly goofy and more elaborate
some monumental combat arenas.
than they need to be. Sadly, the script
Unfortunately, the environmental
provides diminishing comic returns.
artistry is spoiled by some of the
Since the characters never stop
worst UI design I’ve ever seen. It’s a
talking, the humour runs out of ideas
horrifying mess of clashing colours

NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
Third-person
cooperative battler
with middling comedy
and combat
EXPECT TO PAY
£35
DEVELOPER
Appeal Studios
PUBLISHER
Nacon
REVIEWED ON
AMD Ryzen 5 3600,
32GB RAM, Nvidia
GeForce RTX
2080 Super
MULTIPLAYER
Yes
LINK
gangsofsherwood.com

after a couple of hours, and the jokes
become increasingly recycled.
Likewise, combat shows initial
potential. Whichever character you
play as, battles are about combining
light and heavy attack combos to deal
massive damage to enemies. For
example, Robin’s baseline moveset
involves using close-range melee
attacks to generate magical ‘star’
arrows that hover in the air around
the battlefield. By hitting an enemy
with a charged shot from your bow,
you can unleash these purple arrows
at enemies all at once. The game
quickly bolsters these basic abilities
with several other abilities, like a
‘drill’ arrow that deals damage over
time, and an explosive arrow that
throws enemies into the air. It’s a
sprightly and satisfying system,
letting you pull off some tasty
manoeuvres after a few missions.
So what’s the problem? First,
Gangs of Sherwood is far too easy.
Your characters don’t just level up
across the game. There’s a separate,
in-mission levelling system that
gradually bolsters your health as you
progress through the map. This
means missions are always hardest
at the start, whereas dying requires

ABOVE: I didn’t expect the depiction of

Nottingham to be THIS realistic.

68

Who’s been doodling on
my computer monitor?!

The game’s visual design
is pretty creative.

TOP: Robin’s Star

Arrow ability is a
little confusing at
first, but can be
supremely powerful.

ABOVE: While playable
solo, the game is
definitely better
with other people.

active effort beyond the halfway
point. Moreover, combat is so
formatted around arena-based
encounters that it becomes deeply
repetitive, and while characters
initially have pleasing skill
progression, later abilities tend to
be less useful or less interesting.

OCCASIONAL SIDEQUESTS

The deeper you reach into Gangs of
Sherwood, the more perfunctory its
systems feel. The game has loot, but
it’s very basic, either just gold to buy
skills and the odd outfit, or relics that
afford minor stat or effect boosts. The
main missions are enjoyable enough
to fly through, but little of the story
has any lasting impact. And at just
five hours long, the game wraps up so
fast that you won’t have unlocked all
your character’s abilities by the time
the credits roll.
Even at the cut-down price of £35,
Gangs of Sherwood’s flawed, frivolous
co-operative battling makes it is a
tough sell in a year so stacked with
fantastic games. It isn’t entirely
devoid of merit. At half that price,
you’d just about get your money’s
worth provided you can wrangle a
full complement of players.
VERDICT
Shows initial promise,
but both the script and
the systems run out of
steam before the end of
its brief running time.

50

THE GANG’S ALL HERE
These guys are in the game

ROBIN OF
LOCKSLEY

Can stack star
arrows for
bonus hits.

MAID MARIAN

Specialises in bladed
weapons. Light
attacks can
throw daggers.

FRIAR TUCK

Specialises in a
massive club.
Doubles as a healer.
Gives amazing hugs.

LITTLE JOHN

Specialises in
punching. Can
go berserk.
Drinks cortados.

69

REVIEW
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader

MARKET DOWN
WARHAMMER 40,000: ROGUE TRADER gets the tone right, but combat’s a drag
By Jody Macgregor

W

e’ve just defeated a cult, foiled a plot, saved a world. A
bureaucrat says the triumphant parade has already
been organised. We’ll get to ride a battle tank, and
halfway it’ll stop and a small crowd will mob us. It’s
all stage-managed. The mob has been carefully vetted,
as the bureaucrat explains, “Members of the military. Young people,
attractive and physically fit. A few healthy children.”

immediately being burned at the
In moments like this, Rogue Trader
stake. Instead, consequences manifest
nails the dystopian satire of
in a three-track morality system
Warhammer 40,000. When I want
where the three values increase
people to know how important I am,
independently. You earn Iconoclast
I have a robot skull in a barrister’s
points for compassion,
wig that flies around
for pushing back
announcing my
They’d
against the Imperium’s
presence and title. One
of the entertainments
probably insist disregard for
Dabbling
at a coronation is just
on burning the individuality.
in Chaos in return for
‘shooting prisoners’.
babies just to power earns Heretical
points, and embodying
SUBTLETY’S FOR
be sure
Imperial values earns
COWARDS
Dogmatic points.
Rogue Traders are an
This is perfect for Owlcat. In the
ideal part of Warhammer 40,000
Pathfinder games, which had D&D’s
to make a videogame about. A
alignment system, Owlcat tended to
merchant/privateer/explorer in
charge of a ship the size of a city with interpret Lawful alignments in a “we
should kill goblin babies because
thousands of crew I’ll never meet,
they’ll grow up evil” way, which
and who live and die based on my
made playing a paladin a jarring
decisions, a Rogue Trader is allowed
experience. In Rogue Trader, that’s
to talk to aliens and skirt the edge of
the kind of thing a Dogmatic person
heresy in ways the average citizen
would say, only they’d probably insist
isn’t. You’re free to navigate a deeply
on burning the babies just to be sure.
messed-up society without

A T Y P I C A L C H A O S C U LT I S T L A I R
Dedicated to Slaanesh, god of excess

Too sensual for
the 41st millennium.

2 DEBAUCHEES

1
2

1 STATUARY

3

Having an
unsanctioned
amount of fun.

3 HUMAN HARP
Music?
God-Emperor
save us, someone
might dance.

4

70

4

HANDCUFFS

No sex please,
we’re Imperial.

NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
Mass Effect but
isometric, dystopian,
turn-based and not that
much like Mass Effect
EXPECT TO PAY
£43
DEVELOPER
Owlcat
PUBLISHER
Owlcat
REVIEWED ON
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X,
32GB RAM, Nvidia
GeForce RTX 3080
MULTIPLAYER
Yes
LINK
roguetrader.owlcat.
games

The Pathfinder games also had a
management tier that put you in
charge of a kingdom or a crusade,
making world-shaping decisions. I
always get invested in these systems
in spite of their clunkiness, and Rogue
Trader has the best yet. Building a
network of colony worlds means
working up a tree of projects for each
of them, like researching Ergonomics
for the overcrowded mining planet,
which means that the convicts who
work there will, between shifts, be
tranquillised and put in pods.
Rewards for these projects include
boosts to my Profit Factor and the
occasional item, but aren’t so
game-changing you’ll feel obliged to
micromanage. It’s OK to engage with
them superficially if you don’t want
the hundred-hour playtime to
balloon even further.
There’s also space combat, which
treats void cruisers like sailing ships
that fire broadsides at each other
while turning in arcs on a flat 2D
plane, as in the tabletop game
Battlefleet Gothic. It’s great, and
assigning companions to the stations
of my ship gives me access to a
manageable number of special
abilities on cooldown, like making a
short-range warp jump to hop ahead
five spaces or choosing one of my
ship’s shields to reinforce each turn.
It does get unwieldy once the
number of enemies goes up, with a
fight against six light cruisers who
each fart out a cloud of bombers at
regular intervals really dragging on. It
doesn’t help that space battles don’t
end immediately when the cruisers
are taken out, and instead I have to
mop up every last fighter and
torpedo, or wait for them to detonate.
But for the most part spaceship
combat is a nice change of pace.

STRANGER THINGS

Exploration is the other layer of
the management cake, framed as
remapping the Koronus Expanse
after warp storms alter jump routes
through the system. Since

FAR LEFT: The wall

art’s all classic
40K illustrations.

BELOW: Nothing

heretical going
on here, officer.

Looks great, but
combat is often
not that exciting.

71

FAR RIGHT: Show me
your army list, this
doesn’t seem legit.
BELOW: Priests who

worship electricity
aren’t big on health
and safety.

72

REVIEW
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader

bonuses to allies and penalties to
intersystem travel in 40K means
allies who stand in them. On
stepping into a universe where
subsequent turns he can shift those
howling daemons devour souls and
zones around or change what they
strong currents of emotion manifest
do, in addition to managing all the
as demigods, that’s an interesting
time. Once I recruit a Navigator I can stuff with exploits because he’s an
operative, as well as activating
spend the occasional point, earned
various tech-priest abilities with his
by making discoveries, to upgrade
cybernetics. It’s a lot.
the safety of a route, but most of
them remain risky and
result in spooky
HUFF AND BUFF
It’s just that
narrative events.
In the Pathfinder
These pick-a-path
there’s a lot of games, prebuffing was
interludes have a
for the harder
combat, and vital
dream-like vibe, with
fights. You had to faff
most of it’s
consequences including
about before big battles
random body-swaps
casting spells to make
boring
and unexplained
sure you had the right
phenomena. A few too
resistances and stat
many events just result in a fight with boosts. There’s none of that in Rogue
daemons and zombified or rebellious
Trader, and at first I thought that was
crew, but when they’re creepy
a blessing. It turns out the prebuffing
paragraphs that end with several
has been replaced by ‘mid-buffing’,
hundred crew lost or another section
stacking abilities throughout the
of the ship being sealed off forever
course of each fight to insure you’ve
and us just continuing on because we got enough momentum to activate
must, they remind me of Sunless Sea
your heroic abilities and boosting
in the best way.
everyone’s damage to deal with
Rogue Trader is loosely based on a
increasingly spongy enemies.
tabletop RPG that Fantasy Flight
There are things about the combat
Games published, but where Owlcat’s I like. There’s artful slow-mo that
Pathfinder games tried to recreate
adds emphasis to the Sister of Battle’s
their tabletop inspiration with
bursts of bolt-pistol fire or the
relative faith, here the dev has almost Psyker’s lightning arcing from target
completely rewritten the rules.
to target. And using psychic powers
Spaceship combat is better, but the
results in veil degradation, which
squad-level combat where you and
five companions have turn-based
tactical battles with rebels, daemons
and aliens not so much.
Everyone has action points that
Some of the early companions you’ll meet
let them activate abilities, only one
of which per turn can be an attack
(except if you’ve got an ability that
lets you break that rule, of which
there are several). Many are buffs
and debuffs or designed to be used
in combination with other abilities.
Operatives get an ability that lets
YRLIET
CASSIA
HEINRIX
them analyse targets to pile
One of the alien
A three-eyed mutant
An Interrogator who
‘exploits’ on them, then other
Aeldari who regards
Navigator who pilots
works for the
abilities that either strip those
you as little better
your ship through
Inquisition and
exploits away to reduce armour and
than an animal.
the warp.
keeps you in line.
gain a bonus to hit, or give allies the
power to strip exploits when they
attack and gain bonus damage.
A handful of abilities like this can
be flavourful and make for interesting
decisions, but in Rogue Trader
everyone has a laundry list of them
providing percentile bonuses. I’ve
PASQUAL
ARGENTA
ABELARD
The tech-priest who
A nun with a gun, no
Your Seneschal, and
specialised my tech-priest into a
keeps your ship
patience for
the obligatory
grand strategist who designates three
running with prayer
heretics, and a
boring first
zones of the battlefield at the start of
and sacred oil.
mysterious past.
companion man.
every fight, each giving different

MOTLEY CREW

adds whispering voices, shadow
tentacles and other visual effects as
well as random Perils of the Warp
like a blastback of psychic damage or
straight-up summoning a daemon.
It’s just that there’s a lot of combat,
and most of it’s boring. There’s never
one interesting tactical battle when
there could be three samey ones to
grind down your resources.
The proliferation of abilities and
passive bonuses to those abilities
makes character progression a chore.
Everyone levels up constantly, and
making decisions for the six party
members plus the three left behind
who need to rotate in for their
personal quests is absolute tedium.
The other thing that sapped my
goodwill is bugs. I had to restart after
a quest-blocking bug 18 hours in, and
had characters insist I help them
with problems I already solved or
offer their services after being
recruited. One enemy ran back to the
beginning of the map on the first turn
and hid there, meaning after dealing
with his friends I had to trek back in
turn-based mode to finish the fight.
Allies sometimes don’t act on their
turns, and distant enemies sometimes
take a full minute to decide what
they’re doing. The camera doesn’t
always move where it’s supposed to
when dialogue pops up during
battles, meaning I have to read it in
the log after. The log reverts to
Russian when describing Perils of
the Warp, and explains why I have
to reroll successes by saying
“%Reason%”. Two of my combat
abilities stopped working for a
while, and the tech-priest’s utility
mechadendrites, which are
supposed to give him a +10 bonus to
Demolition and Tech-Use, instead
give him a +1,020 bonus.
If you played Owlcat’s previous
RPGs at launch, you’ll be familiar
with the feeling you’re playing the
worst version of the game. Months
down the road there will be
expansions and a fleet of bug fixes.
Given that Kingmaker had a new
combat system patched in, it’s not
impossible that Rogue Trader could
get a significant overhaul. Until then,
keep the parade on hold.
VERDICT
Warhammer 40,000:
Rogue Trader gets
40K’s atmosphere right,
but it’s buggy and the
rules are a mess.

59
73

ABOVE: Secret paths

lead to creatures
known as moon
ancestors.

FAR RIGHT: Green
switches are the most
basic means of
making things move.

You often find yourself
being transported on
strange vehicles.

74

REVIEW
Cocoon

OUT OF THIS WORLD
COCOON is a beautiful, tactile, ingenious puzzle adventure
By Jon Bailes

A

fter a short stint wandering the orange canyons of Cocoon’s
opening area, you come across a curved groove in the
ground. At one edge sits a large metallic ball, which you grab
and yank until it reluctantly leaves its rectangular base, yet
remains connected by a chewing gum string. Once the gum’s
elasticity approaches its limit, the base starts to move too, gliding across
the mouth as if you’re opening a zip.

NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
A puzzle adventure
game directed by Jeppe
Carlsen, former lead
designer at Playdead
EXPECT TO PAY

world you were in a moment ago
As a puzzle adventure, the joy of
£20
exists here only as a large orange
Cocoon is in figuring out how to
DEVELOPER
marble, which functions as a kind of
overcome obstacles and progress,
Geometric Interactive
power cell in your new surroundings.
but it’s also in the execution. Taking
PUBLISHER
You hoik it onto your back then
hold of the ball in this instance is
Annapurna Interactive
deposit it on small
an obvious course of
REVIEWED ON
plinths to make bony
action given that the
Intel Core i7-10750H,
Certain plinths bridges appear, or
beetle-winged
16GB RAM, Nvidia
summon smooth
humanoid you guide
GeForce RTX 2070
enable you
plasticky platforms.
around can only
MULTIPLAYER
to return to
Certain plinths enable
manipulate the world
No
the
original
you to return to the
via a single action
LINK
original planet. With
button. You drag the
planet
cocoongame.com
some warping back and
zipper along the groove
forth you might find
and that activates a
ways to shift an obstacle in one world
platform. Job done. But this is a far
with a mechanism in the other.
more pleasing exercise than pulling a
Soon you acquire two orbs, three,
lever. The tinfoil tint of the ball, the
four, each also a world of its own. In
pliability of the gum, the pink flesh
that ripples as the zipper makes its
journey. It’s all so very tactile.
In this way, Cocoon makes
incredible meals of its puzzles within
vibrant worlds that could have
Each colour contains its own world
adorned prog rock album covers.
When you’re pressing switches and
activating bridges here, you’re not
simply pressing switches and
activating bridges. Even the platform
that responds to the zipper is actually
an enormous flat robot bug that rears
up and embeds its front claws in the
ORANGE
GREEN
canyon wall. In these and many other
Carrying the desert aura, you’ll
Inside is a swamp land where
use orange to cross invisible
you’ll get your feet wet. Carry
moments, Cocoon is properly,
bridges that light up.
green to ascend and descend.
delightfully surreal.

WONDER BALL

SMALL WORLD

Once you get further into the game,
the puzzles become more substantial
as well. Mainly that’s down to
Cocoon’s star feature, which
introduces itself when you reach a
kind of round rubber platform, and
watch as your beetle person flies up
and out of the world itself. Now
you’re in a grey environment, and the

some sequences, you remain inside a
single biome for a while, forging
forward without worrying about its
position in the greater scheme of
things. Some other sequences focus
on one of your orb’s unique powers,
like the way orange solidifies
otherwise invisible walkways within
its aura, creating new paths, but only
when you’re carrying it.
Ultimately, though, frequent world
hopping becomes a necessity and
Cocoon pushes the concept to
marvellous conclusions. What if you
need to carry the orange orb, for
example, but that takes you to a place
where you need the green orb? Well,
how about stashing green inside the
orange world first, then retrieving it
once you reach your destination?
Cocoon builds on the ramifications of
such concepts iteratively, and won’t
let you wander far off track. Its
puzzles are clever but not
complicated, endlessly strange yet
logical. At times, it asks you to think a
little wider, backtracking slightly to
find what you need, but it never
overwhelms or allows you to get lost.
Nor does Cocoon ever relax its
audiovisual design, which provides
the perfect environment for puzzles,
making no sense then perfect sense
as soon as you toy with it. Its
architecture blends natural vistas into
cellular structures, always with a
seasoning of the ordinary that you
can grasp in an instant. Pillars jut
from the ground spaced narrowly
enough for you to pass but not an orb,
ensuring you can enter but a trolley
can’t. Fields of lollipop plants wobble
like mushrooms as you push through.
A transport vessel resembles a giant
jam sandwich biscuit. Cocoon is a
game about the texture of puzzles,
and rarely have they felt this good.
VERDICT

PURPLE

Its world feels like being trapped
inside a giant body. The purple
orb can travel through growths.

WHITE

This orb containing an
industrialised world enables you
to shoot lasers at various target.

Cocoon is a puzzle
adventure of rare
ingenuity that thrives
on its tactility as much
as its design.

90
75

REVIEW
House Flipper 2

FLIP SERVICE
Live the property fantasy, debt-free, in HOUSE FLIPPER 2
By Tom Sykes

Y

ou can see why the original House Flipper was such a hit. Its
cosy fantasy of home ownership and fulfilling work was a
soothing balm after a miserable day at the office, and that
fantasy is only strengthened in this sequel. The basics remain
the same: jobs appear in your email, from cleaning tasks to
full-on home renovation, and you can use the profits to buy properties
from the auction house, ready to be glowed up and flipped for a profit.

NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
A casual building sim
about restoring houses
and selling them
for profit
EXPECT TO PAY

extremely annoying. But, overall, the
Accept a job and you’ll appear
£32.50
graft is rewarding. It’s not so detailed
outside the house with your bag of
DEVELOPER
a renovation sim that it feels
tools. Bin bags to collect the rubbish,
Frozen District,
exhausting or overwhelming, nor so
one measly cloth to wipe down the
Empyrean
casual that you barely need to be
surfaces, a roller for painting, and so
PUBLISHER
there. Renovating feels
on. I haven’t played the
Frozen District,
cosy, an element
previous game, but the
PlayWay SA
One of the
expanded for House
interface for managing
REVIEWED ON
these tools seems
Intel Core i7-10750H,
most satisfying Flipper 2.
16GB RAM, Nvidia
neater and easier to
things I’ve
GeForce RTX 2060
grasp here. It’s no
TOWN AND OUT
done in a game There’s now a
longer mimicking an
MULTIPLAYER
No
in-game tablet, so
wholesome story
all year
menu icons are free to
campaign tying all your
LINK
be a little more gamey:
freelance jobs together,
houseflipper2.com
larger and more colourful, easier to
as you tackle projects across the town
identify at a glance.
of Pinnacove. You’ll gradually expand
Straddling simulation and more
your operation, from Crayfish Coast
casual play – which is really the
to Suburban Pinnacove and
whole ethos behind House Flipper
ultimately Coralroot Forest, taking on
– these actions mimic real life, to an
extent. When building a brick wall,
you watch a lovely animation play,
but all you’re doing is holding the
mouse button down, as your
Restoring and building houses isn’t enough
character plucks bricks and mortar
from thin air. Mostly, I’m happy with
this middle ground – smashing walls
1
down with the sledgehammer feels
particularly satisfying – but I’d feel
3
more connected to the work if I also
had to clean up the rubble.
Generally, the acts of cleaning and
tidying, building and buying are slick
and easy to pick up, but the game
does struggle with its 3D space
2
sometimes. Occasionally I had to
balance on furniture and agonisingly
adjust the mouse cursor to position
MIND PALACE
TIME TO
TICK TOCK
From the menu,
Mind the time,
KILL
ornaments on high shelves. There’s
you can tackle
however, as your
Take on challenges
no real way to delete things either, so
Assembly missions
score will reduce if
to build items, like
you either have to sell or replace
in your workshop. As
you take too long.
this clock. The
it’s not part of your
Cleared Assembly
errant items. Having to find and buy
process is in-depth,
house, it seems to
missions reward you
with mechanics you
the original flooring in the online
exist outside of time
with store discounts
won’t find in the
shop, when all you’ve done is put one
and space.
for related items.
main game.
floorboard in the wrong place, is

S O M E A S S E M B LY R E Q U I R E D

1

76

2

3

bigger jobs and earning more money
in the process. You’ll want to earn
three stars (the best possible score)
on jobs, and only partly because it
earns more money and it feels more
satisfying to properly finish the job.
You’ll also want to please your clients,
who are a more overt presence this
time around, thanks to the phone
calls that pop up as you work.
As I restored a bedroom for a
grandmother who was eagerly
awaiting her grandson’s arrival, I was
touched to open a box and discover
his train set. Delicately assembling it
on his desk – because I wanted to,
not as a marked objective – is one of
the most satisfying things I’ve done in
a game all year.
On the flip side, there’s the new
Sandbox mode featuring no clients at
all. Design a house from scratch
without having to worry about
money, and with a more
comprehensive range of tools that let
you speedily set down walls and even
sculpt the surrounding environment.
But building houses is only part of
the Sandbox experience – the
integrated modding tools let you
share them with other players. Right
now, there are only a handful online,
but I downloaded a couple to test
them out and was quickly exploring
player-made houses.
The most interesting thing about
Sandbox houses is that you can turn
them into jobs. That is, run-down
properties in need of renovation.
Slather them in mud, smash up the
floorboards and sprinkle junk all over
the worktops, then upload them for
other players to fix. It’s sure to be the
defining feature of this quietly
confident sequel, which doesn’t make
many big changes – it just opens up
its homes to the community.
VERDICT
House Flipper 2 is more
of a touch-up than a
full-on renovation,
but Sandbox mode
is exciting.

81

I’m sure the Toblerone
headquarters is smaller
than it used to be.

FAR LEFT: You have

a gun that turns
unwanted items
into profit.

LEFT: Hit Q to

highlight objects that
need to be dealt with.

BELOW: No need to

worry about patterns.
Just point and tile.

77

REVIEW
Disney Dreamlight Valley

DISNEY CROSSING
DISNEY DREAMLIGHT VALLEY scratches that Animal Crossing itch, but at a price

O

By Daniella Lucas

ver the pandemic everyone seemed to find comfort in
the gentle virtual maintenance of their Animal Crossing
islands. Pootling about, talking to villagers, and designing
things just so. Nothing else has come close to replicating
that weird state of zen that comes with pulling weeds
and paying debts. Until now.

NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
Casual life sim
EXPECT TO PAY
Expect to pay: £33.50
for base game, £58.50
for base game and DLC

agenda for you. A lot of areas and
Disney Dreamlight Valley is very
crafting opportunities are locked off
much like Animal Crossing in that
DEVELOPER
until you hit an appropriate point in
you start on a barebones island,
Gameloft
the main story and gather enough
hunt down some tools, help out a
PUBLISHER
resources to do so. Though a little
money-hungry animal (this time it’s
Gameloft
confining, it gives the game a
Scrooge McDuck rather than Tom
REVIEWED ON
welcome sense of
Nook) and gradually
Intel Core i5-8250U,
direction. There’s still a
shape things to your
8GB RAM, Intel
Theming and lot of freedom in what
liking. The valley starts
HD Graphics 620
order
you
tackle
things
off in a right old state,
customisation
MULTIPLAYER
in, too, so those
having been overcome
No
are where
roadblocks never really
by The Forgetting, a
LINK
the game
feel like they get in the
curse leading to
disneydream
way, instead just giving
boarded-up buildings
really
shines
lightvalley.com
you a focus as you
and an infestation of
work towards
giant thorns. Slowly,
unlocking your favourite characters.
you start to clean up, and things go
Things do get a bit grindy after a
from derelict chic to homely hamlet.
while though. During the first dozen
As you invite more villagers to join
hours, things unlock at a brisk pace,
you and unlock more options to
beautify your town.
Dreamlight uses a simple
gathering and crafting system for the
vast majority of its gameplay. You
mine rocks with your pickaxe to get
How long it takes for your island to look good
stone, forage for colourful flowers,
farm and fish to make food, and pick
I am a
up wood from trees to turn into
Disney
town-planning
gorgeous furniture pieces at your
Dreamland
genius.
crafting table. There are lots of basic
pieces to mess about with, from
benches to cupboards, but you’ll also
Things are
find items inspired by specific Disney
clearing
properties, such as the tea set from
up, houses
popping up.
Beauty and The Beast, or Mickey
Mouse ears to wear. This theming
Shabby
and customisation are where the
chic
Better get
game really shines – you can really
those
make your own little Disney paradise.
gardening
Leaving it so
There are seasonal events too where
gloves on.
long it’s
you can earn even more stuff,
overgrown
including exclusive character outfits,
again.
Wait, that
ice rinks and even a Ferris wheel.
train set costs
Unlike Animal Crossing, which
HOW much?!
Thorny
sees you roaming around your
wreck
island freely to set your own goals,
Dreamlight Valley has a more fixed

ISLAND STYLE

78

and new options are regularly opened
up to you; but after that, things
noticeably slow down, and suddenly
you need to spend a lot more time
gathering to get the materials you
need to progress.
No matter how many signs of The
Forgetting you might clear away,
you’ll never be able to be rid of the
true curse of Dreamlight Valley: its
currencies. Despite being a game
with an upfront cost, it features a
free-to-play style microtransaction
currency called Moonstones, needed
for all the coolest items and even
some quests. They can be earned in
play, but it’s a very slow process, and
there’s no way you’ll be able to keep
up with what’s available.

SPENDING CHOICES

As an adult, I can happily justify to
myself any irresponsible spending
choices I make, but when you
consider that a big portion of this
game’s audience will be children
keen to play with their favourite
Disney heroes, it takes on a sinister
tone. The game was originally
intended to be free-to-play, and it
shows despite now having a
significant upfront price tag. Perhaps
the developer has taken a few too
many lessons from Uncle Scrooge.
Underneath all the muck of
pricing problems the Disney magic
still shines. Befriending the likes of
Mickey, Elsa and Stitch while
watching your island transform into a
paradise is satisfying. It has filled the
Animal Crossing-shaped hole in my
life, so it’s disappointing that I can’t
in good conscience recommend it for
the full price it is now. You’re better
off waiting for a sale and committing
yourself to being choosy about
spending those Moonstones.
VERDICT
Steep costs and
microtransactions taint
Disney Dreamlight
Valley’s otherwise
dreamy life sim.

68

Mickey’s homestead is
ruined by prickly thorns
– a bit like the game itself.

FAR LEFT: You
can also do a spot
of farming for
cooking ingredients.
LEFT: There’s loads

to craft, but gathering
materials takes a
lot of time.

Dreamlight castle is where
you can unlock other worlds
and recruit new characters.

79

REVIEW
Against the Storm

LEAVE IT TO BEAVERS
Building doomed cities and loving it in AGAINST THE STORM

T

By Len Hafer

he basic idea baked into a city builder is that I’m creating
something to last. So when Against the Storm presented
me with the premise that each of my handmade habitats
would be wiped away by a terrible tempest as part of an
unavoidable, cataclysmic cycle, I wasn’t sure how to feel
about it. But it is one of the most clever, engaging, and endearing
strategy games I’ve played in years.

and negative modifiers, which could
In the world of Against the Storm,
be anything from a ghostly presence
some kind of horrifying, magical
that randomly kills unhoused
disaster has turned the once-idyllic
villagers to a creepy species of tree
fantasy countryside into a rainthat also gives you meat, in addition
soaked, ruin-strewn morass in which
to wood. I’m sure it’s fine. While
everything outside of the magicallykeeping the central hearth fire lit
shielded capital, The Smoldering
at all costs, you
City, is annihilated by
send your intrepid
hurricane-force gales
You’re
humans, beavers,
every year. As the
queen’s viceroy, your
completely out lizards and other
job is to set out during
of luck in the anthropomorphised
animals out to chop
the brief windows
baked goods through the woods and
during which the land
is traversable to found
department discover new glades
while collecting
productive settlements
resources to build
that will take you closer
houses, workshops and decorations.
to a set of mysterious seals. By
While the strong silhouettes and
completing these seals, you will
low polygon count of its models,
permanently lengthen the storm
buildings and trees can evoke a
cycle and draw closer to
bright, fairytale wonderland, the
understanding what happened.
dangers that lurk between the
Each new settlement site comes
branches are more like the original
with a varied set of possible positive

ABOVE: A bright fairytale kingdom of wonder, but

one that hides lurking danger.

80

NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
A roguelike city builder
about making the best
of a doomed world
EXPECT TO PAY
£30
DEVELOPER
Eremite Games
PUBLISHER
Hooded Horse
REVIEWED ON
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X,
32GB RAM, Nvidia
GeForce RTX 3080
MULTIPLAYER
No
LINK
eremitegames.com

Brothers Grimm stories. Central to
everything are two meters measuring
the queen’s grace and her impatience.
Filling the grace meter first signals
that you have won the map, and can
set out from this foothold to reach
further into the gloom and start
another. But maxing out her
impatience means the expedition is
deemed a failure and recalled, and
the time you’ve spent there won’t get
you any closer to a seal.
Impatience simply rises over time,
but grace can only be earned by
completing semi-randomised
missions and keeping your villagers
happy. Everyone needs food and a
house. But each of Against the
Storm’s races also has specific desires
as you move up the hierarchy. This
doesn’t only create an interesting
balancing act, but also adds a bit of
personality to each race.
Fulfilling these needs becomes an
engaging resource puzzle, especially
since the blueprints you receive for
workshops and industrial buildings
are also semi-randomised. Everyone
loves pie and biscuits, but if you
simply don’t have a mill to make flour
this run, you’re completely out of
luck in the baked goods department.

Everyone needs
food and a house
to stay happy.

TOP: You desperately

need wood to survive,
but each tree felled
causes forest hostility
to increase.

ABOVE: Yep,
defo nothing to be
concerned about here.

CUTTING DEEPER

At the same time, cutting deeper into
the woods increases the hostility of
the forest. This looming air of
wilderness menace, which freaks
everyone out a bit, also goes up
passively the longer you spend in one
place, which makes it harder to keep
everyone safe and satisfied.
It seems like all of these layered
considerations would become
overwhelming, but in motion they fit
together beautifully and prompt you
to make meaningful decisions.
Even when I’m not able to land on
my feet, I’m rewarded for my time in
some small way. The Smoldering City
offers a progression tree in which you
use resources gained from each
expedition to unlock benefits from
increases to stats, to new blueprints
that can change how you set up an
economy. This small amount of
incremental progress, assuring me
that my next expedition will always
be just a bit better equipped than my
last, has been a great motivation to
keep going even if I hit a bit of a
slump. I’m thrilled every time to pull
on my boots and get out into it again.
This isn’t just a great city builder. It’s
really something special.
VERDICT
Eremite Games’ Against
the Storm is a welldesigned, charming,
enthralling roguelike
city builder.

91

STORMING TO VICTORY
How not to get washed away

1 FF OO RR TA HG I N G

Humans, beavers,
lizards and more
must venture into
the wilderness.

2 IGMRPAACTEI E N T

Complete missions
to fill the Queen’s
grace bar and win
the area.

3 BF IURRENSI N G

A settlement’s
hearthfire must
always be supplied
with wood to burn.

81

REVIEW
A Highland Song

WILD ADVENTURES
A HIGHLAND SONG is a mix of genres grafted onto a beautifully presented story

E

By Alexander Chatziioannou

xperimental, genre-bending approaches to interactive
storytelling have always been inkle’s stock-in-trade,
from the increasingly ambitious multi-part adaptation
of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! to the high-seas intrigue of
Overboard!. And A Highland Song is arguably inkle’s
most multi-faceted work yet.

NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
A platformer, a rhythm
game, a branching
story – in other
words, another inkle
narrative experiment

where a moderately unusual rock will
Moira McKinnon has never been to
be named something dramatic like
the sea. She does not get along with
EXPECT TO PAY
£15
her mother who insists she cannot go Woe’s Wedding or Devil’s Tail.
to school because she wouldn’t fit in.
DEVELOPER
Her father has been absent for all her STROLLING, JUMPING,
inkle Ltd
life and her little brother is a bore. So
Of course, aimless wandering and
PUBLISHER
when Uncle Hamish, a
gawking at the local
inkle Ltd
kooky lighthousesights are just the
REVIEWED ON
The Scottish simplest modes of
keeper who regularly
Intel Core i5-9600K,
mails her postcards
engaging
with
A
16GB RAM, AMD
scenery is
Radeon 5700 XT
with fanciful stories
Highland Song.
vividly
painted
about heartbroken
Platforming is the base
MULTIPLAYER
in browns and component in the
selkies and furious
No
giantesses, asks her to
luscious greens game’s generic DNA,
LINK
visit in time for Beltane
even if Moira’s
shorturl.at/jlCU9
– the Gaelic May Day
preternatural
– she does what any restless teenage
athleticism eliminated any challenge
girl would do in her place. She
from the equation as I leapt across
hurriedly packs a knapsack, hurls a
chasms, rode a landslide, or sprang
farewell insult to her mother, and sets from crag to crag with the
off across a horizon of hillcrests.
A Highland Song makes for a
breathtaking first acquaintance. The
Scottish scenery is vividly painted in
the earthen browns and luscious
An intrepid adventurer in the spotlight
greens of pine forests, and later, when
the peaks get higher and the
temperatures lower, with the harsh
BACKGROUND
Moira doesn’t
whites of a sudden blizzard.
get on with her
Gallivanting through these idyllic
mother, while her
environments is a joy in itself and,
father has been
initially at least, the game does a great
sadly absent all
her life.
job of conveying the exhilaration of
Moira’s newfound freedom via
MISSION
myriad little visual touches: the pep
Moira is on a
oozing from every frame of her jump
quest to visit her
animation; the carefree bobbing of
Uncle Hamish, who
has invited her to
her ponytail as she gallops up the
visit his lighthouse.
gentlest of slopes; the ability to zoom
out for a heart-stopping panoramic
EQUIPMENT
view (which doubles as the best
On her mission
option for orienting yourself ).
Moira relies on her
trusty knapsack,
A meticulously crafted
headtorch and
soundscape of cawing magpies,
sturdy hiking boots.
murmuring brooks, and Moira’s own
panting breath completes the illusion
of this enchanting place – a world

MEET MOIRA MCKINNON

1

2

3

82

assuredness of a mountain goat. On
the contrary, climbing up a sheer
precipice to reach the higher peaks
and catch a glimpse of the Atlantic
played more like a spatial puzzle.
Yet another mode of traversal
involves the much-hyped rhythm
runs, predetermined stretches of
(mostly) flat land where our heroine
picks up the pace and jauntily skips
to the tune of rousing Scottish folk
songs performed by Talisk and
Fourth Moon – respected bands of
that scene. I appreciated them as
uplifting musical interludes but,
otherwise, these sections felt both
half-baked as minigames, and
somewhat disconnected from the
overall experience.
In fact, while both rhythm runs
and the game as a whole seemed to
constantly propel me forward, I
found that learning to slow down was
key to my enjoyment. But if adjusting
the pace to my liking was within my
control other, less malleable, aspects
of the game still pointed to that
familiar incongruity. While the
absence of a map is perfectly
reasonable in the context of a game
about getting lost, the intricate level
design coupled with awkwardly
implemented controls comprised
an excessive punishment for my
wanderlust. Every time I got
disoriented, the fear of running in
circles around the same cluster of
hills or getting stuck at the bottom of
a ravine funnelled me hastily back to
the nearest landmark. As a result,
reaching the lighthouse for Beltane
(on the second attempt), prompted
two, similarly incompatible reactions:
a certain moisture in the eyes at a
not-so-shocking, but nevertheless
movingly orchestrated, revelation;
and a sigh of relief.
VERDICT
A Highland Song is a
mismatched mix of
genres grafted onto a
moving, beautifully
presented story.

71

Got to say, that
looks well
dangerous.

Exploration is
a key part of
the game.

LEFT: Yeah, Lynx

Africa will have
that effect.

BELOW: The game’s
landscapes are
consistently gorgeous.

83

REVIEW
Last Train Home

BULLETS TRAIN
Survival RTS LAST TRAIN HOME delves into historical tale-telling

I

By Jonathan Bolding

n Last Train Home, a military management game and tactical RTS,
you’re in charge of the Czechoslovak Legion as the Russian civil
war breaks out. Unable to return home by going west, you make a
desperate plan: capture an armoured train and traverse Siberia.
Your management of the journey is both on the train, assigning
jobs and doling out supplies, and on the battlefield, controlling units of ten
soldiers in pausable, tactical RTS battles.
outstrip what anyone expects from
Last Train Home is not so much
a game at this level of budget.
concerned with historicity as with
Much of the historical fervour in
giving you a glimpse into the
Last Train Home is underwritten by
desperate mood of a time and place.
the narrator: Captain František
The Czech legionaries don’t want to
Langer, a historical figure whose
fight on either side of the Russian
presence feels authentically Czech.
Civil War. They really just want to
The real-life Langer
go home, but nobody
was a doctor, poet and
wants a large band of
Conveys a time playwright who fought
unaligned armed
with the Legion across
soldiers meandering
and place
It gives the
about – least of all the
with fidelity Siberia.
writers leeway to
Red revolutionaries,
in emotion
ensure his lines are not
who quickly become
just fitting, but poetic
your primary enemies.
and
detail
– both his narration,
It’s historical fiction
in-scene lines and FMV
that reduces the events
performance are written (in English)
of tens of thousands of people over
and delivered (in Czech) with soul
years down to dozens over months,
but it’s well-done fiction that conveys befitting one of the great literary
countries of the 20th century.
a time and place with fidelity in
I’ll illustrate by quoting the
emotion and detail rather than
in-game Langer, saying that amid the
precision of events. It’s also richly
presented, with music and art that far violence of the civil war the sheer

ABOVE: Soldiers have traits. Antonin is an

avaricious, religious, handy, sickly, herbalist.

84

NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
Survival management
and pausable RTS
EXPECT TO PAY
£35
DEVELOPER
Ashborne Games
PUBLISHER
THQ Nordic
REVIEWED ON
AMD Ryzen 9 5900,
32GB RAM, AMD
Radeon RX 6800 XT
MULTIPLAYER
No
LINK
lasttrainhome.
thqnordic.com

human misery simply never ended,
“as did the fighting which went on
and on without relent, a restless
storm upon a human sea”.

BULLETS TRAIN

Managing to survive that storm is
your real job. Your soldiers have to
become multi-skilled people:
riflemen and boiler-stokers and
machine gunners and engineers and
doctors and scouts and cooks all at
once, jobs you have to blend for them
in an almost subversively open-ended
system of RPG-esque character
classes. Managing personnel is a welldesigned delight where you need to
balance running lean with the idea
that your best engineer could get
blown up by a stray shell on any
given mission. People wear out faster
than equipment does.
At the same time you’ve got to
keep them fighting, fed and warm by
collecting supplies and managing
your train, but every mile walked and
battle fought eats into reserves of
energy and health that’ll have to be
recovered lest their bodies and
morale collapse. You send them out
to defend from enemies, sure, but
also on optional side missions – a Red

Some cutscenes
include superb
FMV sections.

Every soldier
assigned to a car is
represented in-game.

TOP:

ABOVE: Loading

screens are
accompanied by
excellent paintings.

militia is looting civilian farms, or a
convoy is moving supplies.
The weakest bit of Last Train
Home is the RTS combat. The
core design of it is perhaps too
micromanagement-intensive,
over-reliant on your ability to pause
the game and redirect your troops
mid-combat. That’s forgivable
enough, as it’s fun to set up ambushes
with overlapping fields of fire,
pausing to optimally throw a grenade
or snipe a machine gunner. The real
problem is that you don’t really want
to shoot: since literally every bullet is
desperately scrounged for, getting
into a big firefight is the worst.
You end up preferring stealth, but
the controls just aren’t there for a
robust experience playing it as a
stealth strategy game. There’s no
dedicated button to differentiate
between melee and ranged attacks.
In other years that might have been
forgivable, but in a tome that saw a
best-in-genre stealth strategy release
in Shadow Gambit, anything but a
very competent stealth strategy
experience just feels bad. Still, don’t
come for the RTS specifically – come
to this one for the human history and
you won’t be disappointed.
VERDICT
Last Train Home is a
rich, interesting, and
honest experiment in
history-as-game: if
you’re interested, play it.

79

CLEVER CLASS COMBOS
Some classes synergise in obvious ways, others are creative

+

+

+

+

MEDIC + MG

GRENADIER
+ SCOUT

RIFLEMAN
+ WORKER

DOCTOR
+ ENGINEER

Both medics and
machine gunners
tend to hold back
during stealth
segments, so drop
expensive abilities
like suppressive fire
and carry a medical
satchel instead of
taking an extra
soldier. Gun ’em
down, patch ’em up.

You might think that
giving the scout very
loud grenades is bad,
but using their scout
ability to peek over a
wall and then throw
grenades from a
stealthy position is
the height of tactics.
Plus, the grenadier’s
sprint is handy too.

Riflemen use fitness
to be ultra-tough,
and their willpower
passive lets them
add it to combat
effectiveness. Where
does worker come
in? Guess what stats
they pump doing
all the upgrades
you need?

Both of these benefit
from intelligence, but
you won’t use this
engineer to run the
train. Instead, this
soldier works on the
wounded when
someone’s hurt,
and swaps to the
armoury car making
ammo otherwise.

85

FREE GAMES REVIEWS
COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH by Tom Sykes
The family tree, or a tiny
section. This is from very
early in the game.

A FAMILY AFFAIR

T

Solving a family size mystery in THE ROOTTREES ARE DEAD

he Roottrees are Dead stands on the shoulders of Tim
Sheinman’s Family, a similarly browser-based detective game
that had you investigating a music scene and filling in a family
tree of linked musicians. In Jeremy Johnston’s Roottrees, it’s
a literal family tree, as you’ve been hired by a mysterious
client to decipher the complicated genealogy of the Roottree family, and
determine who will inherit the family fortune, after a terrible plane crash.

(deliberately limited) internet
Sitting down in front of this big
browser, scour a library database for
flowchart late at night, mug in hand,
relevant books, and hunt through
soft jazz music piping out of the
periodicals for any mention of the
browser tab, it really makes you feel
Roottree family, who are one of the
like a detective. Sheinman fans will
immediately be at home as they fill in more notable dynasties in the USA.
But you have to figure
names on the family
out the right search
tree, with the game
Determine who terms to locate each
confirming your right
answers and adding
will inherit the cleverly buried clue, as
reveal who beget
more documents to the
family fortune you
who, and match faces
evidence folder in dribs
after a terrible to names, to advance
and drabs. You spend
plane crash
the story.
the whole game
It’s difficult and
looking at this family
time-consuming,
tree – which is so big
but extremely satisfying, with an
you’ll need scroll and zoom in and
interface that lessens the drudgery by
out – but also at your (essential)
letting you pin your notebook to one
in-game notebook, collected
half of the screen. You pepper names
documents and the ’90s internet.
across the family tree and are
If 90% of detective work is sitting
intermittently rewarded with a
in front of a computer, then this is
sudden fade to black: a cue that
one of the more authentic detective
games. You’ll type search terms into a you’ve just set down three correct
88

NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
A detective game in
which you have to piece
together a complex
family tree
EXPECT TO PAY
Free
DEVELOPER
Jeremy Johnston
PUBLISHER
Jeremy Johnston
REVIEWED ON
Intel Core i7-10750H,
16GB RAM, Nvidia
GeForce RTX 2060
MULTIPLAYER
No
LINK
bit.ly/Roottrees

identities. Now, you can get on with
solving the rest.

ROOT POINT

In general, you’re left alone to simply
get on with your sleuthing, but there
are interruptions at specific
milestones where the larger plot is
moved along a little. It’s a riveting
story, because the Roottree family
is so interesting.
You’ll come to know these
characters intimately, thanks to
their detailed histories but also the
fictional photos that are sent to the
documents folder. These were made
using AI tool Midjourney, so the
algorithm only knows which existing
artwork they’ve been cobbled from,
but they do help to breath a sense of
life into the Roottree family.
If you can forgive the AI artwork,
this is an exceptional detective game
that will likely consume your
existence for several days.
VERDICT
You’ve always wanted to
stare at a murder board,
moving bits of string
around, and this is the
next best thing.

86

FREE GAMES REVIEWS

BELOW: The best character by far is your beer-chugging, egg-scoffing boss.

EVERY WITCH WAY
Bubble, bubble, recoil and trouble in TOMMY GUN WITCHES

I

’m not sure that I’ve seen lore
used as a punchline before, but
it’s a beautiful running gag in
this urban fantasy where witches
are real, and they wield submachine
guns. Every titbit about the setting
is delivered so matter-of-factly by
the noir-style narration that it only
highlights its inherent absurdity.

NEED TO KNOW
EXPECT TO PAY
Free

DEVELOPER
Cosmic Void

LINK
bit.ly/TommyGunWitches

Here we have witches that dress like
Payday robbers, hiding the green skin
of the witch from The Wizard of Oz.
And they use Tommy guns because,
well, I suspect because it makes for a
catchy title. The urban fantasy of The
Dresden Files has been mashed down
into one half-hour game: a gorgeous,
first-person adventure game where
you interview suspects and solve
simple puzzles across a modern city.
You play as a sentinel,
investigating the murder of a man in
a hotel room. Which witch did the

deed, and why did she leave her
sacred mask and Tommy gun behind?
The pixel art is sumptuous and
suggestive of a whole city, while the
dialogue plays it straight and
manages to find the humanity in a
setting that borders on parody. There
are a few puzzles to solve, generally
by combining inventory items and
discovering where to use them, and
for me they found the sweet spot
where I was stumped a couple of
times, but not long enough for me to
resort to a walkthrough.
My only complaint is that
conversation feels a bit too
streamlined, with no dialogue options
to make and no variation in the
ending, which resolves the story quite
abruptly and with little player input.
Still, this is a creative slice
of urban fantasy from a
developer adventure fans
need to watch.

80

BELOW: There’s a believable sense of weight to the submersible.

CRAFT WORK
Driving a submersible in THE TWO RIVERS HYPOTHESIS

T

he Two Rivers Hypothesis
is pure aesthetic and
atmosphere, with little
beneath that – but what aesthetic
and atmosphere. It’s a game where
you pilot a submersible around a
dark and flooded facility, exploring
tunnels until you discover the
ending. But it’s not a simple case of
pressing WASD and waggling the
mouse around.
No, it’s all mouse-driven, with
on-screen buttons for moving the
craft in the cardinal directions, going
up and down and turning, as well as
moving the camera. Controlling the
craft is an exercise in mild frustration,
then, that feels appropriate for the
bulky thing you’re steering. It should
feel cumbersome to explore this
place, inciting fear as you blindly turn
a corner and drive it down another
pitch-black corridor.

As you find your bearings, you’re
assailed by emails that tell of the
facility crew and their ultimate fates.
Are you one of them? Are you trying
to escape? Two Rivers is reluctant to
reveal too many details. But the
atmosphere as you explore the place
– the mounting dread and sense of
anticipation – is almost too much to
bear, building to a crescendo before it
abruptly cuts out.
Assisting in that atmosphere is the
flickery VHS filter, which is overused
in the indie space but feels relatively
fresh here. The effect adds a layer of
authenticity that makes the dark,
ponderous exploration all the scarier.
Of course, in retrospect I realised
that a lot of it was just in my
imagination. It wouldn’t work
a second time, because I
know what’s here. Still, as
an aid to feeling spooked,
this is worth a look.

72

NEED TO KNOW
EXPECT TO PAY
Free

DEVELOPER
Grubwall

LINK
bit.ly/RiversHypothesis

89

THEY’RE BACK
OLD GAMES REVISITED by Matthew Elliott
BD-1 doing an impression of
the gobby kid who insults you
then calls his big cousin.

FORCE FEEDBACK

S

STAR WARS JEDI: FALLEN ORDER is a stellar experience

ometimes, it’s a single mechanic that makes you vibe with a
game. The whomp of a crowbar in Half-Life. Grayson Hunt’s
gigantic boot in Bulletstorm. In the case of Star Wars Jedi:
Fallen Order, for me, it’s the simple act of illuminating dark
places with your lightsaber. Forget using your phone; this is
an elegant torch for a more civilised age.
moments, like when it tells me to
It’s one of many vague, ephemeral
‘Press [F] to use The Force’.
feelings that Fallen Order gets right.
One of the problems with Star Wars
– and being a Star Wars fan – is that SITH DOWN
it’s hard to quantify what makes a
I even learn to love Cal, who’s
piece of expanded universe media
perhaps the least engaging Star Wars
enjoyable. Rey exploring a crashed
protagonist since Ezra Bridger at his
Star Destroyer: cool as
most insufferable. He’s
shit. Rose and Finn
so smooth he looks like
He’s so
riding cosmic
a non-stick pan with
donkeydogs:
Force powers. Even in
smooth he
excruciatingly lame. I
the sequel, Star Wars
looks
like
a
don’t know why. It
Jedi: Survivor, you can
non-stick
just is. But so much
tell there’s a featureless
pan
here captures the
face lurking under the
distant, unquantifiable
beard, in the same way
feeling of being Star
you know when the foil
Warsy. Show me a mangled,
milk bottle lid is going to tear. Some
Venator-class Star Destroyers and
of the locations, too, fail to provide
somehow I’m back in that same,
the sort of crystallised mental images
hopeful place I was seeing A New
of Hoth and Dagobah. Take Bogano,
Hope for the first time, or, more
for example: a place that sounds
relevantly, uncovering revelations in like the Star Wars equivalent of a
Knights of the Old Republic. I can
plus-size men’s fashion outlet. It’s a
even forgive the game’s clumsier
drab, strangely horizonless location;
90

NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
Those Bits From Star
Wars You Love But
Can’t Quite Articulate:
The Game
EXPECT TO PAY
£35
DEVELOPER
Respawn Entertainment
PUBLISHER
EA
REVIEWED ON
Intel Core i7-7700,
16GB RAM, Nvidia
GeForce GTX 1070
MULTIPLAYER
No
LINK
store.steampowered.
com/app/1172380/
STAR_WARS_Jedi_
Fallen_Order

like someone set a game in postapocalyptic Norfolk. But as a first
step into a larger world, it’s a
tolerable way of preparing you for
what comes next. And, if nothing
else, you’ll be very glad to leave.
These grumbles would drag Fallen
Order into the murky underplaces of
the trash compactor if the combat
didn’t feel great. But thankfully, it
sings. The beauty of lightsaber
combat is recreated wonderfully,
each thrum and spark designed to
make me feel like I’m seven years old
again. And, for a game about flashing
around the most dangerous weapon
in the galaxy, it’s surprisingly stern,
at times echoing Sekiro’s kinetic,
rhythmic challenge. There’s still
plenty of space to menace hapless
bucketheads – and shooting their
own blaster bolts back at them never
gets old – but you certainly get the
sense Cal is a chipper padawan
rather than seasoned master.
VERDICT
A planet-spanning
adventure that’s only
slightly hampered by Cal
who resembles a
magnolia wall.

77

THEY’RE BACK

BELOW: It looks nice until you realise they’re smuggling rum .

HAVANA LAUGH

T

Bananas and brutality in TROPICO 5

he Tropico games occupy a
strange space in the strategy
world. They’re bright, wry,
and irreverent. They seem frivolous
at first glance, like cookie clicker
mobile games featuring banana
republic dictators. But they’re
underpinned by a deep knowledge
of political systems and a bleak
appraisal of human behaviour.

NEED TO KNOW
EXPECT TO PAY
£17

DEVELOPER
Haemimont Games

PUBLISHER
Kalypso Media Digital

Tropico 5 is no different. At times it
feels like it should be depressing, but
it’s somehow not. You might start off
with noble goals, but as soon as your
premiership is threatened, your
outlook changes. Because who’s
going to bring peace, fairness, and
prosperity to the people if you’re not
in charge? You might want to use
your power for good, you’ll eventually
end up assassinating old ladies so
they don’t threaten your progressive
reforms. Power always corrupts.

75

BELOW: Ahh, stock take. A chance to kick back, relax, and… take stock.

STOCK AND LOAD

O

The tone of the game is expertly
summed up by little factoids that
appear on the loading screens.
Burmese dictator Ne Win, for
example, apparently bathed in
dolphin blood to restore his youth.
The wink-and-smile approach to
totalitarianism hides any real human
cost, and that’s exactly the point.
From your elevated position as El
Presidente, you don’t see people, you
see subjects. And the decisions you
make become increasingly terrible,
because you’re operating from a
position of relative weakness against
international muscle. Why not side
with the Axis powers if it means
casting off the yoke of colonialism?
It serves Britain right for being a
pompous, supercilious bully. It’s
a simpler game than many
of its prisoners, but the
decisions you make remain
deliciously complex.

Order out of chaos in WILMOT’S WAREHOUSE

ur final tenuous link
to order is Wilmot’s
Warehouse, a game that
looks, at first glance, like playing a
corrupted cartridge from a 1990s
console. A migraine pretending to
be a videogame. But it’s also so
compelling it’ll make you want to
organise not only your own
underwear drawer, but your
partner’s, too.
At its simplest, it’s a game about a
cheerful square, Wilmot, who gets
deliveries of brightly coloured
icons and has to arrange them in a
warehouse with some semblance of
order. But it’s also not that. At times
it’s like a therapist is opening up your
head and explaining, in great detail,
why you never get anything done. As
soon as you start batching items by
type, you begin to understand which
bits of your brain are broken. Of

course the martinis go with the
trumpets! Just like the magnets go
with the soup. Before long you’re
whispering long lines of unrelated
words to yourself, like activation
codes for a parochial British Winter
Soldier. “Tambourine. Banana.
Squiggly doodad. Umbrella. Smiley
bear.” This feeling is amplified if you
play Wilmot’s Warehouse with a
friend. Not only do you have to work
together to organise everything, but
you soon see how differently you see
the world. One man’s sleigh bell is
another man’s brass knuckles. Trying
to unify your collective approach in
the face of ever more complicated
deliveries is a compelling challenge.
Yet despite the potential for chaos
and arguments, Wilmot’s Warehouse
is therapeutic. Perhaps it’s
because it’s a fleeting
opportunity to bring clarity
to an chaotic world.

86

NEED TO KNOW
EXPECT TO PAY
£12.80

DEVELOPER
Hollow Ponds

PUBLISHER
Finji

91

104
BUYER’S
GUIDE

Build a great gaming PC
no matter your budget.

94
GROUP
TEST

Six new mainstream
graphics cards reviewed
and rated.

100
TECH
REPORT

Why have PC gaming
graphics stopped
improving quickly?

102
TECH
TALES

Misadventures in
UnrealEd, 1998’s game
dev gateway drug.

93

GROUP TEST

MAINSTREAM
GRAPHICS
CARDS
These entry-level and
mid-range graphics cards
are where the bulk of
PC gamers spend
their cash, but
which are worth
the money?
By Jacob Ridley

94

HARDWARE
Group Test

T

he most popular
graphics card of
a generation is
rarely the
best-performing.
Instead it’s the one the most
people can reasonably afford.
The most popular cards,
according to Steam’s monthly
hardware survey, are the RTX
3060, GTX 1650, and GTX
1060. Unsurprising, but
what’s somewhat more
shocking is you have
to look pretty far
down the list
to find any
high-end
GPUs
noted
at all.

Nvidia and AMD sell higher
volumes across the lower
rungs of the GPU market. The
so-called ‘mainstream’ cards.
What constitutes a
mainstream graphics card is a
constantly shifting definition
and not easily defined by price
alone. In the early days of PC
gaming, £399 was kingly
money to spend on an add-in
card, whereas nowadays that’s
barely more than budget.
Blame inflation, and try not to
think about it too much.
There are heaps of options
available to the budding PC
gamer with a reasonable
amount to spend. At every
conceivable budget between
£250 and £600, there are
multiple cards competing for
your attention. That’s why I’ve
grabbed one of each arguably
mainstream card today – some
more entry-level, some more
mid-range – to help you
decide on the best
value for your rig.

THERE ARE HEAPS OF
OPTIONS AVAILABLE TO
THE BUDDING PC GAMER
95

HARDWARE
Group Test

1

2

3

Radeon RX 7800 XT

GeForce RTX 4070

AMD £479

NVIDIA £579

Bang for your buck

Power-savvy pick

Look through the latest
graphics card releases
and you’ll find few really
stand out for value for money.
The RX 7800 XT is one of the
good ones, however. It delivers
frame rates loosely level with the
RX 6800 XT and RTX 3080 for
significantly less cash.
The RX 7800 XT is a modern
Radeon card in a couple of ways.
For starters it’s constructed of
chiplets, 5nm and 6nm chips,
and is one of the first few
graphics cards to ever do so. It
also is built with AMD’s latest
RDNA 3 architecture for top
shader performance, and comes
with 16GB of memory to ensure

1

you’re unlikely to run out while
gaming. This card truly delivers
excellent frame rates versus the
RTX 4070 it’s ostensibly quite a
lot cheaper than. For purely
rasterised performance, this is
the card to go for, especially now
that AMD offers a suite of
upscaling and frame generation
technologies. AMD’s card does
fall flat, however, once ray tracing
is enabled, and there’s no
denying Nvidia has the better
software tech right now.

VERDICT
Beefy VRAM
Often matches RTX 4070
Poor ray tracing performance

Delivering a tantalising
mix of RTX 3080-grade
performance and high
efficiency, the RTX 4070 is one of
the more well-balanced GPUs of
its generation. Even in the face of
AMD’s cheaper option, the RTX
4070 is an attractive proposition,
though that’s in some part
thanks to the RTX 40-series’
secret sauce. The 4nm GPU
humming away at the centre of
the RTX 4070 maintains solid
frame rates for 1440p. You can
push it to 4K and expect decent
results at times, too, which is
surprising from a card that
demands 200W. Though it loses
points for only having 12GB of

2

GDDR6X memory – we’d like
more for the money.
The RTX 4070 does score
bonus points for DLSS and
frame generation support,
courtesy of the Ada Lovelace
architecture. These features can
help take the edge off rendering a
game like Alan Wake 2, which is
one of the finer examples of what
Nvidia’s 40-series generation can
do. The RTX 4070 also trumps
AMD’s alternative when it comes
to ray tracing.

VERDICT
Excellent efficiency
RTX 40-series features
Not quite cheap enough

SPECS ARCHITECTURE: RDNA 3 / TRANSISTORS: 28.1B / VRAM: 16GB GDDR6 / MEMORY SPEED: 19.5 GBPS /

SPECS ARCHITECTURE: ADA LOVELACE / TRANSISTORS: 35.8B / VRAM: 12GB GDDR6X / MEMORY SPEED: 21 GBPS /

MEMORY BUS: 256-BIT / TBP: 263W

MEMORY BUS: 192-BIT / TBP: 200W

96

4

COMPACT, LOW-POWER,
AND GENERALLY QUICKER
THAN AN RTX 3060

GROUP TEST

GeForce RTX 4060 Ti

GeForce RTX 4060

NVIDIA £389

NVIDIA £289

Surface level

In disguise

Considering how the
RTX 3060 Ti was my
favourite graphics card
of the RTX 30-series generation,
you’d expect me to be similarly
pumped for its replacement.
Alas, the RTX 4060 Ti isn’t quite
the diamond in the rough the
RTX 3060 Ti once was.
The RTX 4060 Ti actually
offers fewer CUDA cores than an
RTX 3060 Ti. Moreover, it has
fewer RT cores, Tensor cores,
and ROPs. It even has half the
memory bus width. For those
reductions, it is surprisingly the
faster card in our benchmarks.
But how is that possible? That’s
achieved through a larger L2

3

cache, at 32MB to 4MB, and
running the GPU nearly 1GHz
faster. From framerates alone
you can make the case for the
RTX 4060 Ti as a mid-range GPU
worth sticking inside a gaming
PC. It’s far from sluggish. My
issue is that it doesn’t look like
much of a generational
improvement over the RTX
30-series, and the more you pry
into its silicon the more apparent
that becomes. At least it’s the
same price – a small silver lining?

VERDICT
Faster than a 3060 Ti
Just don’t look at the specs
160W TGP

Aimed squarely at the
1080p gaming crowd,
the RTX 4060 is the
cheapest way to score an RTX
40-series graphics card on
desktop. It’s also the cheapest
way to score frame generation
and DLSS 3.
This card is compact,
low-power, and generally quicker
than an RTX 3060. At 115W, it’s
massively more efficient than the
170W card it ostensibly replaces,
too. So it’s a major upgrade? Not
so fast. The RTX 4060 comes
with just 8GB of GDDR6 memory,
a reduction on the maximum
12GB configuration on the RTX
3060. Also a smaller memory

4

bus, and fewer CUDA cores, RT
cores, and Tensor cores. It does
partially make up for those
deficiencies with a healthy cache
and clock boost, but nevertheless
feels like less card.
The RTX 4060 benefits from
a lower price tag than the RTX
3060 at launch, which helps to
partially mitigate the reductions
seen across key specs. Though
there’s no shaking the feeling it
looks more like an RTX 4050 in
ways rather than an RTX 4060.

VERDICT
Faster than a 3060
Barely over 100W
Unimpressive silicon

SPECS ARCHITECTURE: ADA LOVELACE / TRANSISTORS: 22.9B / VRAM: 8GB GDDR6 / MEMORY SPEED: 18 GBPS /

SPECS ARCHITECTURE: ADA LOVELACE / TRANSISTORS: 22.9B / VRAM: 8GB GDDR6 / MEMORY SPEED: 17 GBPS /

MEMORY BUS: 128-BIT / TBP: 160W

MEMORY BUS: 128-BIT / TBP: 115W

97

HARDWARE
Group Test

6

3

THIS INTEL CARD
REPRESENTS THE
HIGH-END OF THE
ALCHEMIST ARC LINEUP
98

HARDWARE
Group Test

5

BENCHMARKS
3DMark Time Spy Extreme performance graph
(‘GPU Index score’ values)

RX 7800 XT
8,953

RTX 4070
8,573

RTX 4060 Ti
6,296

RTX 4060
4,930

RX 7600
4,993

Arc A770
6,484*
*Intel Arc GPUs tend to skew higher in 3DMark synthetic benchmarks compared to in-game
performance.

Radeon RX 7600

Arc A770

AMD £260

INTEL £340

Affordable, unexciting

Still truckin’

There’s not a great deal
of competition at the
very budget end of the
graphics card market. At the
tail-end of the last generation,
you had AMD, Nvidia, and Intel
all battling it out with fairly
reasonably priced cards, but
nowadays it’s only really AMD
offering anything new under the
£299 mark. It’s a good thing AMD
does offer the RX 7600 at this
sort of budget-friendly price tag,
otherwise we’d be in a really
sticky situation. The bad news is
that AMD’s RX 7600 isn’t an
entirely exciting GPU. It’s a
resolutely 1080p graphics card
with 8GB of GDDR6 memory,

5

and it doesn’t make waves in
benchmarking. Perhaps I’m
being too mean about this little
card. It’s compact, runs modern
games just fine, and offers a
modern architecture at a price
where Nvidia doesn’t bother to
tread. For that, it’s certainly got
its place in the market. Though
it’d have been great to see
something really set the budget
GPU world on fire – the RX 7600
doesn’t do that, at least not at the
price it’s selling for today.

VERDICT
Reliable performance
Relatively high power
Quite boring

Intel is still around in the
budget graphics card
game with the same
first-generation product it
released back in late 2022.
There’s no sign of Battlemage,
the second-generation Arc GPUs,
though we’re expecting some
movement early next year.
This Intel card represents the
high-end of the Alchemist Arc
lineup. As such, it’s practically
beefy in some regards next to the
other cheaper cards in this test.
The 16GB of memory is matched
only by the RX 7800 XT, and the
256-bit memory bus and 225W
TBP both speak to a high
performing card. Unfortunately,

6

that’s not always the case, as
driver issues are still a common
enough occurrence on Arc
despite Intel pumping out
improvements. The good news
is that Intel hasn’t been afraid to
drop the price of the A770 in
light of fresh competition. Often
under MSRP, this card should
only be considered with a
discount. Though word of
warning: if you want to play older
games or you can’t enable
resizable BAR, look elsewhere.

VERDICT
Overkill, in ways
Regular driver updates
Regular driver issues

SPECS ARCHITECTURE: RDNA 3 / TRANSISTORS: 13.3B / VRAM: 8GB GDDR6 / MEMORY SPEED: 18 GBPS / MEMORY

SPECS ARCHITECTURE: ALCHEMIST / TRANSISTORS: 21.7B / VRAM: 16GB GDDR6 / MEMORY SPEED: 16 GBPS /

BUS: 128-BIT / TBP: 165W

MEMORY BUS: 256-BIT / TBP: 225W

99

T EC H
REP O RT

Lumen and Nanite-powered titles like
Robocop: Rogue City offer a glimpse at
what’s to come for PC visuals.

YOU’VE BEEN FRAMED

R

Graphics have stopped improving. Why?

ecently our heads have been gently
vibrating with the tremendous
possibilities of DLSS 3 and path tracing.
We’ve been imagining the impossibly
vivid worlds we’ll soon be prancing about
in, rubbing our eyes in theatrical disbelief at what
we’re seeing. What a time to be a PC gamer, and an
owner of a GPU that costs north of a grand.

Thing is: games have looked pretty much the same for the last
four years. The last big innovation in PC graphics was ray
tracing, an advanced light-behaviour simulation that promised
us movie-grade CG visuals in real-time graphics engines.
What we got in reality were some cool puddles and car
bonnets that utterly tanked our frame rate.
But that’s OK now, because we’ve got DLSS. It supersamples frames using deep learning AI data, interpreted by
the Turing cores on your Nvidia GPU, leading to sharper
images at lower than native resolutions. It even generates
frames since DLSS hit version 3.
Now, snarkiness aside, that is actually great. The
AI-powered tech might have looked like somebody smeared
your monitor with Vaseline when it was first implemented, but
it’s much more useful now. Downsampled images look a bit
closer to native resolutions, and who doesn’t like extra
frames? Snooker commentators, probably. And only them.
100

But as nice as those new technologies are, they don’t
actually make games look better. Specifically, they don’t raise
the ceiling of visual fidelity in the same way that tessellation
did when DirectX 11 brought it in. They just make it a bit easier
for us to run games at close to their max graphics presets.
As a result, we’re not seeing the same heart-thumping
leaps forwards in 3D graphics. Ray tracing and its slightly
more highfalutin cousin path tracing have worked wonders
to remaster older titles like Quake II and Portal, but they’re
also really resource-hungry. So if you’re making a
multiplatform game, it doesn’t make much sense to burn
through tons of budget to push ray tracing implementation
on the PC version alone, for a subset of your audience who
can actually afford to enable those effects.
Unreal Engine 5 gives us a glimmer of what the future
might look like, and developers have released tech demos that
do look years ahead of mainstream graphics. But it’s a similar
story with UE5 and ray tracing, both offering a higher fidelity
ceiling that only a small portion of the end users can enjoy.
All of which is to say, PC graphics don’t seem to be getting
observably much better. Cyberpunk 2077 released four
calendar years ago. If a new game released tomorrow with the
exact same visual fidelity, we’d be proclaiming its beauty. That
tells us something about the pace things are moving along at.
That sensation’s amplified when you take a longer view
of PC gaming. The ’90s and ’00s were a famously iterative

Duke’s
demise
The best
illustration of
how quickly fidelity
once moved in PC
gaming is Duke
Nukem Forever.
It wasn’t that
3D Realms just
kept forgetting to
finish it. When
development began
in 1997, Forever was
going to be a Build
Engine shooter akin
to Duke Nukem 3D.
But by Christmas
’98 when it was
scheduled to
launch, Unreal and
Half-Life had
changed the
landscape. Their
polygonal 3D
visuals made Duke
look outdated by
comparison. Thus
began decades of
starting again in a
new game engine.

HARDWARE
Tech Report

FAR LEFT: At least you

can count on Remedy
to go hard on visuals
every game. Take a
bow, Alan Wake 2.

LEFT: Exhibit B: Half

Life 2 from 2004,
royally showing up
2001’s best graphics.

I M M O R TA L P I X E L S

CRYSIS

Crytek purposely integrated techniques
that 2007’s cards couldn’t handle, but
later generations could.

Four games that keep looking better every year

CYBERPUNK 2077

It mainly looks better now because it’s
running faster than flip-book speed, but
DLSS 3 has helped Night City out.

period that saw videogame graphics motored along by
constant tech breakthroughs and an ever-growing audience
to fund it all. Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Half-Life 2,
two games revered for their scarcely believable visuals in
their respective eras, released within three years of each
other. Think about that: in a shorter period than
Cyberpunk’s release to the present day, we went from
marvelling at bullet decals in the Quake III engine’s finest
castle wall textures to exploring City 17.
Our eye for detail has definitely refined in recent years
to compensate for the slowdown,
though. We appreciate the difference
between shadow techniques and
antialiasing methods, native and
upscaled rendering resolutions, and
we’re trained to scan every reflective
surface in a scene and appraise the ray
tracing happening within them. That’s a
beneficial evolution for PC gamers, too
– we can actually see the differences
between graphics presets and appreciate some of the hard
work and ingenuity developers have used to make scenes look
gorgeous while using as few resources as possible. But
nobody needed to tell us what Half-Life 2 was doing differently
to Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Nobody needed to zoom in or
slow down the gameplay footage to notice the differences.
How did we get here? Two reasons: console wars and
Moore’s law. Even before PC gaming hit mainstream
popularity, console manufacturers fought each other for
market share using better graphics as their primary weapon.
And that made all the sense in the world when the pace of
tech innovation meant that Nintendo could release the NES,
SNES and N64 within just over a decade. You looked at a

GTA V

Rockstar’s cunning art direction has let
Los Santos age better than Rob Lowe.
Still looks spectacular after eight years.

THE WITCHER 3

Another 2015 alumnus that never seems
to date. Super-high texture resolutions
for the time have kept it looking sharp.

16-bit game versus your 8-bit trash and you knew you had to
buy the new thing.

INTERNALISED MINDSET

The game industry internalised that mindset decades ago
and hasn’t truly left it behind – even after Moore’s law broke
and it stopped making sense to try. Manufacturers have
been struggling to make transistors any more dense for
around a decade now. Computing power isn’t doubling every
two years any more and developers don’t have increased
power to work with in order to achieve
better graphics. To make games like
Alan Wake 2 look as sumptuous as they
do, they need to find workarounds,
efficiencies, optimisations. And that
takes time and money. A lot of it.
We still expect games to keep looking
better, because better visuals has been
the killer feature we’ve been sold games
and systems on for decades past. But we
no longer have the same rate of increase in computer speeds
to power it. So developers have to do their best, sometimes at
the cost of focusing on gameplay depth or innovation.
Looping back to 2024’s exciting buzzwords, then, a
technology like DLSS takes on newfound significance. It’s
not making games look better per se, but it is offering a
solution to the computing speed slowdown. In a way, it’s
circumnavigating Moore’s law. In a PC gaming landscape
where the majority of players own DLSS 3-capable GPUs,
developers finally find that extra juice to work with, a
breakthrough that empowers them to push graphics further
in the knowledge that their audience can enjoy the results.

HOW DID WE GET
HERE? TWO REASONS:
CONSOLE WARS AND
MOORE’S LAW

Phil Iwaniuk

101

HARDWARE
Tech Tales

T E C H TA L E S

ANOTHER LEVEL

R

Misadventures in UNREALED, 1998’s game dev gateway drug

ecruitment into game development is a
many-tentacled thing in 2023. You might
decide to study a degree in one of its
specific disciplines, or enrol in the
university of YouTube and have a crack
at some amateur projects with a view to building up
your portfolio. There are masterclasses with legendary
industry figures. There are internships and game jams.

In 1998, there was UnrealEd. Bundled in with
Epic Megagames’ scandalously pretty
first-person shooter were all the creation
tools Cliff and the gang used to make
the game. Just there on the disc. For
free. For many of us at the time, that was
an offer we couldn’t refuse.
For many of us who were also 12
years old and idiots, UnrealEd proved an
utterly baffling foray into a scary world
we hadn’t previously considered. Spend
an hour looking into that white box of a new project, trying to
make wireframes, textures, anything appear, and you very
gain an appreciation for the people who put games together.
It’s incredible to think that many of today’s experienced
game developers started in this same place, because in ’98
there was absolutely no hand-holding. Indeed, after the first
time I loaded Unreal Editor and tried to make sense of it was a
catastrophe. I opened a new project, expecting to find an
interactive tutorial and all manner of exciting tools to play
with. Instead I found four empty panels. I clicked on one of
them. Nothing happened. I clicked again. Nothing happened.
An hour passed in similar fashion. I closed the program.
It was PC Gamer magazine that coaxed me back. A few
months after Unreal came out it ran a step-by-step guide to
making your first level in these hallowed pages, designed to
be as buffoon-proof as possible. In the absence of an internet
connection, that feature was my alpha and omega of
information. If it wasn’t written down in the slightly dog-eared

pages of that magazine, that was the end of the line. I’d either
have to intuit a solution using my innate computing brilliance,
or give up and go and eat a packet of Golden Wonder.
Thanks to that guide, I at least started to understand the
panels and menus I was looking at. UnrealEd is arranged into
several ‘viewports’ – a 3D first-person view, a wireframe of
the level from above, front and side. You click and drag the
mouse to navigate around, then use the menus to populate
your level with geometry, textures and actors. Twelve-yearold Phil was captivated by the idea of using actors in a level
editor, and subsequently less enthused
to learn that ‘actors’ in Unreal Editor
really means ‘objects of any kind’.

WE UNDERSTOOD
THAT GAMES HAD A
PERFORMANCE
CEILING

KEEPING IT UNREAL

UNREAL TOURNAMENT 1999
Well this one makes sense. An
innovative online-focused take
on first-person shooter with
surprisingly good netcode for ’99.

102

A SIMPLE PROJECT

The level that the guide was instructing
me to build wouldn’t have given Warren
Spector any sleepless nights. It was a
corridor leading to a room with a light in
it, a simple project that taught the basics
so that we might go forth and use those basics to craft
wondrous new experiences culling the Skaarj.
Some young enthusiasts no doubt did exactly that, finding
their place in the world as creators of virtual experiences.
Most of us didn’t do that. We realised we were better at
playing the games than making them, but even the most
rudimentary attempt at making them had changed the way
we looked at the medium. Permanently.
For the first time, we understood that games had a
performance ceiling, imposed by the hardware of the time.
There were limits to the geometry, the texture resolution and
the number of actors, because we had limited hardware
resources to spend on it all and we could see those resources
depleting as we added more. Huh. So this game development
stuff is actually about being smart and efficient, not just
dreaming up cool gameplay passages.
The biggest revelation about it all was that I didn’t need
any specialised hardware to make a game. Here was the

Four games built in the original Unreal Engine

DEUS EX 2000

Warren Spector’s Ion Storm found
incredible gameplay versatility
within an engine designed for
straightforward shooters.

CLIVE BARKER’S UNDYING
2001
EA’s horror game had loads of
presentational tricks to deliver
the scary.

XCOM ENFORCER 2001

A shooter set in the XCOM universe
that proved you can throw a good
licence and engine at a game and
still make something forgettable.

PHIL IWANIUK

Phil Iwaniuk is
excited to
share more
news on Room
With a Light:
Remastered as
we get closer to
its 2041 release
window. Insiders
say it’s likely to
be delayed.

creation kit that Epic had used to make
Unreal, running on my Pentium II and
Voodoo 2. The barrier for entry into
game development was the exact
same as the barrier for playing the
game. Regardless of how we Unreal
Editor inductees fared individually, we
all internalised that much. Game
development was right there at our
fingertips, sometimes even bundled in
with the games we bought. All we had
to do was figure out how to build
something worth playing.
Half-Life followed suit several
months later in winter ’98, bundling
the Worldcraft creation toolkit on the
disc with the game. If anything it was
even more impenetrable, but
nonetheless it spawned a huge variety
a mods. Important, industry-changing
mods like Counter-Strike, Team
Fortress Classic, and They Hunger. So
as most of us who bought Unreal and
Half-Life at the time look back and
consider those bundled toolkits
irrelevant extras, we should
remember that in fact, they were
every bit as seismic as the games
they shared a disc with.

BELOW: Not a lot about this made sense if you weren’t already a game developer.

Phil Iwaniuk

103

YOUR NEXT PC

BUYER’S GUIDE
Build the best PC for your budget

BUDGET

ADVANCED

MID-RANGE

KEY
Budget build

Mid-range build

Advanced build

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

You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This
recommended build will see you through.

You’re looking for the best PC on the market and
superior components. But you still want to spend smart.

104

HARDWARE

MOTHERBOARD
PROCESSOR
MEMORY

T-Force Vulkan Z 16GB

POWER SUPPLY

Pure Power 12 M 550W

SSD

WD Black SN770 500GB

HDD

WD Blue 1TB 7200rpm

CASE

EN NEW
TR
Y

COOLER

Laminar RM1 (included with CPU)

Zauron

DISPLAY

Nvidia £290
One of the cheaper ways to score Nvidia’s
latest gaming architecture and DLSS 3
support.

Mobiuz EX240

KEYBOARD

T O TA L
£1,050

GeForce RTX 4060

KM250 RGB

MOUSE

Enjoy 1080p gaming without
breaking the bank

Core i5 13400F
Intel £199
Intel’s added four more cores to its
entry-level Core i5 and it’s become even
more fantastic value.

ASRock £112
This is as cheap as we want to go while still
offering room for expansion and upgrades
down the line.

G203

HEADSET

BUDGET
BUILD

B660M Pro RS

GRAPHICS CARD

Buyer’s Guide

HS55 Stereo

Intel Free
There’s room for an upgrade here,
but on a budget the included CPU cooler
will work just fine.

Teamgroup £40
Goodbye 8GB, hello 16GB of speedy
DDR4-3200.

Be Quiet! £91
We have to run a 550W PSU for the RTX
4060, as per Nvidia’s recommendations.

Western Digital £41
It’s finally time to ditch SATA and go for
an NVMe drive even in a budget machine
such as this.

Western Digital £38 (not in budget)
You don’t need a HDD, so feel free to cut this
to save cash (we don’t budget it), but one
sure helps if you’re a virtual hoarder.

Aerocool £32
This Aerocool will let your components
breathe and has space for further expansion
and cooling.

BenQ £132
You can get an excellent gaming monitor for
not a huge sum of cash nowadays, and this
BenQ is our favourite on a budget.

G.Skill £49
It’s actually mind blowing what you can pick
up for this little cash: A hot-swappable
mechanical board that looks lovely.

Logitech £24
A classic shape delivered in a sleek shell, this
mouse fits all hand sizes and grips.

Corsair £40
CorsaIr’s budget cans are comfy and have
a surprisingly excellent microphone for
the money.

105

HARDWARE

106

MOTHERBOARD
GRAPHICS CARD

RX 7700 XT

COOLER

Laminar RM1 (included with CPU)

MEMORY

Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4-3200

POWER SUPPLY

Pure Power 12 M 650W

SSD

WD Black SN770 1TB

HDD

WD Blue 1TB 7200rpm

CASE

H7

DISPLAY

S2722DGM

KEYBOARD

T O TA L
£1,553

Intel £199
Yes, this is the same CPU as the budget
build. It’s simply too good value to miss and
perfect for high fps gaming.

KM250 RGB

MOUSE

Our recommended build for
playing the latest games

Core i5 13400F

MSI £177
This MSI board delivers everything we need
in a compact package and allows us to use
much cheaper DDR4 memory.

DeathAdder V2

HEADSET

MID-RANGE
BUILD

B660M Mortar WiFi

PROCESSOR

Buyer’s Guide

Blackshark V2

AMD £430
If you can spare the extra cash, the RX 7800
XT is a tantalising upgrade. Nevertheless,
we’ll opt for AMD’s cheaper card.

Intel Free
Intel bundles a redesigned CPU cooler with
some 13th Gen processors. This little chip
chiller will serve us well for a while

Corsair £36
With plenty of capacity at 16GB, this
unembellished memory has everything you
need for gaming and more.
Be Quiet! £107
This larger Be Quiet! PSU offers a stable
platform with modern PCIe 5.0 connectivity.

Western Digital £63
There are faster PCIe 4.0 drives, but this is
the best value for money SSD around.

Western Digital £38 (not in budget)
Just like in the budget build, this HDD isn’t
strictly necessary or in the costing, but it’s
nice to have plenty of extra space.

NZXT £100
It’s very clever of NZXT to design such an
easy PC case to build into, and make it look
so gorgeous too.

Dell £260
With a snappy 165Hz refresh rate and a
1440p resolution, this Dell is an enviable
blend of monitor performance.

G0.Skill £49
You could spend more for a full-size gaming
keyboard, but this G.Skill will certainly
suffice for most gamers.

Razer £47
Tried and tested, this Razer mouse is a
superb companion for competitive gaming
without breaking the bank.

Razer £85
The Blackshark V2 offers up some killer
audio quality to rival the greats. And at a
reasonable price too.

HARDWARE

MOTHERBOARD
PROCESSOR
GRAPHICS CARD
COOLER

Kraken X63

MEMORY

Trident Z5 RGB (2x16GB)

POWER SUPPLY

Prime TX-1000

BOOT DRIVE

WD Black SN850X 2TB

DATA DRIVE

NM790 4TB

CASE

5000D

DISPLAY

T O TA L
£5,393

GeForce RTX 4090

34 QD-OLED (AW3423DWF)

KEYBOARD

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

Ryzen 9 7950X3D

ROG Azoth

MOUSE

ADVANCED
BUILD

MEG X670E Ace

G502 Lightspeed

HEADSET

Buyer’s Guide

Arctis 7 Wireless

MSI £715
There are cheaper X670 boards than this,
but we’re going extreme and this is one of
the most fully featured around.

AMD £669
AMD’s 3D stacked chips are awesome for
gaming, thanks to heaps of cache. This
Ryzen 9 is the best of the bunch

Nvidia £1,500
The RTX 4090 is immense, in every way. The
performance it offers is unmatched by any
GPU out there.

NZXT £155
One of the most stunning AIO coolers rebuilt
with an updated pump, though you’ll have to
request an AM5 bracket for AMD compatibility.

G.Skill £118
This is a new memory standard for a new era
of memory speed. DDR5 is blisteringly and
fantastically quick.

Seasonic £340
An ATX 3.0 PSU would also be good here, but
we’ve tested this Seasonic and know it’s
worthy of such a build.

Western Digital £110
You could drop in a PCIe 5.0 SSD into this
build, but it’s even too overkill for us right
now. The SN850X is a superb PCIe 4.0 drive.

Lexar £189
With 4TB of storage, it’s going to take one
seriously big Steam library to get anywhere
close to filling this drive up.

Corsair £140
We swear this stylish mid-tower is bigger
on the inside. It’s the PC equivalent of
the TARDIS.

Alienware £929
You could be much more sensible on your
screen than this. For this build, however, we
only want the best.

Asus £250
This keyboard’s secret? Lubed switches.
Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. It’s also
wireless and very well made.

Logitech £120
With a lengthy battery life and a phenomenal
sensor to keep you gaming at your best, the
G502 is undoubtedly one of the finest.

SteelSeries £158
If you’ve settled on a wireless keyboard and
mouse, the last thing you want is a pesky
cable to your headset.

107

CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING

“Two wolves ran out of some trees
and killed me almost instantly”
My harrowing first nights in the surprisingly cruel world of LEGO FORTNITE
ith its cheerful,
kid-friendly looks and
the trend of survival
games being a bit
more forgiving these
days, I figured Fortnite’s new Lego
survival mode would be a fun
crafting sandbox where you bonk
monsters on the head with swords
and grab their loot.

W

I was wrong. Lego Fortnite does not
pull its punches. You know how your
first full in-game day of Minecraft can
wind up being a harrowing survival
experience? It’s almost the same here.
I spawned alone, though into a
shared world – a nice feature of Lego
Fortnite is once someone has given
you their world key, you can play in
their world even if they’re not online.
Morgan and Tyler W had played a bit
already, but were both working (like
suckers) when I started. I could see
108

CHRISTOPHER LIVINGSTON
THIS MONTH
Was saved from the Lego
afterlife by a wandering catgirl.
ALSO PLAYED
Icarus, GTA Online,
Balatro demo

on the map where they’d built a little
settlement, but the game wasn’t kind
enough to spawn me there, where a
tutorial-giving NPC had instructed
them on crafting basics. Instead, it
dropped me on almost entirely the
opposite side of the map.
I started running toward the
village, gathering sticks, stones and
berries along the way. Then I died.
Two wolves ran out of some trees
and killed me almost instantly. I also
learned that when you die, you lose
all of your stuff and have to travel to
your dropped backpack to get it.

TOP: The promised

land: a few
sloppily-built shacks.

Losing 100% of your stuff upon
dying? What is this, DayZ?
After I’d gotten my stuff back, an
angry boulder popped out of the
ground and ran me over, and while I
was fleeing from it a couple of spiders
jumped on my face. Dead again, so I
had to make another run to get my
tiny collection of junk. This time a
little gang of Lego men ran from
some castle ruins and beat me to
death. What the hell, Lego game?
By the time I’d built a workbench
and a shelter to keep the rain off it
– I have no earthly idea why, but you
can’t use workbenches in the rain
– night had fallen, which meant that

DEAD AGAIN, SO I HAD TO
MAKE ANOTHER RUN TO GET
MY TINY COLLECTION OF JUNK

N O W P L AY I N G
THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW

SIGIL II is hard-asnails tough.

My hero!

“Its soundtrack by
Thorr is incredible”
Ripping and tearing in SIGIL II
ROBERT JONES
THIS MONTH
Chainsawed a Cyberdemon.
Died horribly.
ALSO PLAYED
Crysis, Max Payne 3

skeletons began popping out of the
ground literally everywhere. Dead
again, and this time I respawned even
further from the town.

A SAVIOUR APPEARS

I set off one more time, prepared to
face death yet again, but just before
night fell I finally happened upon a
tiny bit of luck: I met an NPC catgirl
named Tabby.
As we chatted, I was delighted to
see that Tabby had a sword and not
just a wooden pickaxe. She quickly
thrashed an incoming skellie, so I
invited her to explore with me, which
meant that for the rest of the night I
ran around in circles while she
fought off skeletons, spiders and
wolves, protecting me all the way to
Morgan and Tyler’s village.
I’ve now built a little house for me
and Tabby, crafted a proper sword of
my own, and I’m protected by several
friendly NPC villagers who swarm
over any skeletons stupid enough to
try invading. But, yeah, I had a
surprisingly tough beginner
experience with Lego Fortnite! That’s
not a bad thing: It’s always satisfying
to overcome the early challenges of a
survival game, I just wasn’t expecting
there to be quite so many of them in
a Lego game.

deliver chainsaw
death to the demon
horde, all the while
dodging incessant
gunfire, balls of fire
and flying, shrieking, flaming skulls.
Oh, and did I mention I’m doing
this in hell, with lava and poisonfilled pits all around? This is John
Romero’s SIGIL II, the hard-asnails unofficial sixth episode for
Doom, and it’s simply awesome.

I

As someone who played the OG
Doom when it released, I played and
loved Romero’s first return to making
full episodes for the game that made
him, John Carmack, and the rest of
the id Software team development
legends back in the 1990s, with the
original SIGIL released back in 2019
dramatically rekindling the original
Doom fires. And there was no better
fire stoker than Romero, who always
brought an extra level of Doom Guy
inferno to the legendary FPS.
SIGIL II builds on SIGIL by
taking everything up to an even more
metal, insane level. If you thought
you needed to rip and tear to the
maximum in SIGIL then think again,
as this episode really is the most
devious, hellishly hard and brutally

satisfying episode of Doom ever
made. And its soundtrack by Thorr is
just incredible.

ICON OF SIN

SIGIL II’s levels are something to
behold, a hybrid of the human and
hell worlds, and vary dramatically in
size and complexity. Romero clearly
loves to surprise gamers and keep
them on their toes, as there is a
subversion here, a twisted, warpedness to how levels flow and how
enemies appear and attack that is
fresh and adrenaline inducing.
It’s clear that, despite Romero
very carefully building SIGIL II as an
extension to the original Doom, the
master level designer has elevated his
craft to a new plane, all the while
maintaining that made-in-the-1990s
feel. A good example of this is how
Romero introduces extra levels of
verticality within these levels, or
shootable Baphomet eyes that allow
progress or unlock secrets.
But it’s the synergy of the whole
experience that reminds just how
groundbreaking the original Doom
was. In SIGIL II, with heavy metal
blazing in your ears, a shotgun in your
hands, the armies of hell encircling
you, FPS nirvana is attained.

109

N O W P L AY I N G
THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW

“Rogues can be tanks. Mages can
be healers. Nothing’s off the table”
SEASON OF DISCOVERY’s been just weird enough to hook me
played World of
Warcraft vanilla back
in the day – before
any expansions came
out – and I was bad at
it. I was a human rogue with ‘leet’
in his name, and I somehow levelled
into my mid-40s without even
touching poisons. In my defence, I
was 12 years old at the time.

I

Ultimately, I was too much of a noob
to really get it. Before WoW Classic
happened I dipped my toes into
private servers, and I didn’t really
get it as an adult either. WoW Classic
– as Folding Ideas’ Dan Olson puts it
– isn’t actually that hard, at least, not
in the classical sense. It’s a game
where patience and foreknowledge
trump mechanical skill.
The appeal for try-hard guilds lies
in going back to the game armed with
a ton of knowledge and cleaning
house. It’s like using a time machine
to travel to the past, then defeating a
renowned swordsman because you
know how to make a gun.
As an adult, I enjoy games that
challenge my muscle memory
– learning bosses in Sekiro or
perfecting a challenging rotation in

HARVEY RANDALL
THIS MONTH
Broke a lobster man out of ice
jail with three strangers.
ALSO PLAYED
Lords of the Fallen, Remnant 2

FFXIV. Vanilla WoW doesn’t push
those same buttons, so it was a fun
nostalgia trip, nothing more. One
thing I did miss, though, was this
sense of going on an adventure.

ADVENTURE, QUEST

WoW and its modern contemporaries
aren’t designed around patience
anymore, which means an emergent
adventure isn’t really in the cards.
This sense of exploration was dented
by WoW Classic, too – it’s a “solved
game”. In vanilla WoW, it took 156
days for a guild to take down
Ragnaros. In WoW Classic, it took six.

MY SHAMAN HAD TO TEAM UP
WITH THREE OTHER BUDS TO
FLAME-SHOCK A MAKURA

Enter Season of Discovery, WoW
Classic’s weirdest experiment. It
manages to shake off the shackles of
knowledge by saying, “No changes?
We’re going to make all the changes.”
The max level cap for this season is
25, and all classes have new ‘runes’
which shake up the meta. Rogues and
Shamans can be tanks. Mages can be
healers. Nothing’s off the table.
What’s more, these runes have to
be gathered by going on quests – not
those ‘kill five boars’ quests you’re
used to, but actual, genuine quests,
most of which don’t appear in your
quest log. They’re weird and
demanding in a way modern
MMOs can’t be any more.
For example, to unlock an AoE
fire spell that let me tank, my Shaman
had to team up with three other buds
to flame-shock a Makura out of a
block of ice. Some were your more
typical questlines, sure, but you
mostly just get to go on adventures.
Now, everyone has something in
common with my 12-year-old self:
nobody has any idea what they’re
doing. There are mods to help, but
the player base is figuring this stuff
out together. And you know what? It
actually rules.

FAR LEFT: While

getting this
screenshot, I helped
four other Shamans
get their rune. Pay
it forward.

BELOW: Waitin’ at

the crossroads.

110

EXTRA LIFE
NOW PLAYING

I

UPDATE

I

MOD SPOTLIGHT

I

HOW TO

I

DIARY

I

WHY I LOVE

I

REINSTALL

I

MUST PLAY

Ignore the signs,
nothing is safe.

“Pushes me to beat every level
without taking a scratch”
Is there anything cooler than a Ghostrunner? Yes, it’s GHOSTRUNNER 2
he Ghostrunner series
of games are as cool
as they come. The
futuristic cyberpunk
megastructures. The
slick first-person combat. The
dynamite synthwave beats that fuel
every jump, slide and/or wall run.
The cyber-assassin protagonist who
wields a katana. Even the name
itself, Ghostrunner, is ridiculously
cool. It immediately offers intrigue.

T

Developed by Polish studio One
More Level, the original debuted in
2020 and did reasonably well in
terms of sales at 2.5 million units
sold globally. While it was great to
see a Best Action Game nomination
for Ghostrunner 2 at The Game
Awards 2023, in a way I still think
it’s quite overlooked by general
audiences. It’s essentially Blade
Runner meets Mirror’s Edge for
anyone looking in from afar,
something that you would think
would be able to grab the general
consumer in an age where
Cyberpunk 2077 is mainstream.
Having spent over half a dozen

M AT T P OSK IT T
THIS MONTH
Parkouring my way through
a futuristic dystopian cit.
ALSO PLAYED
Fortnite, Starfield

hours in the sequel, I’m impressed
by its extensive combat
improvements, new additions
– like a flashy Kawasaki-inspired
motorbike – and refined gameplay.
For one, the controls have seen an
overhaul – a risky move when
precision is key to its overall flow. It
took me a bit of time to get used to
the new layout, first baulking at the
change within the opening minutes.
It was only when my arsenal
expanded it became clear this was a
smart move.

AHRIMAN LEAPS BACK ONLY
TO THROW RED WAVES TO
TEAR ME APART INCH BY INCH

PERFECTION

With its one-hit, one-kill, do-or-die
structure, every move needs to be
pulled off to perfection to proceed.
Sure, checkpoints exist. And trust me,
I’m glad they do considering the
death count racked up. But where’s
the fun in that? Ghostunner pushes
me to beat every level without taking
a scratch. The feeling of defeating
Ahriman the Destroyer, the first boss
fight encountered, in one sweet,
smooth run is up there with the same
satisfaction as a Souls-like boss.
Starting on a free-standing
platform, Ahriman leaps back only to
throw red blistering waves ready to
tear me apart inch by inch, before
then trying to circle behind for a
fatal blow. I’m having none of this,
slashing away his health meter until a
good quarter is removed. I’m then
kicked back into the darkness – is
this the end? No! I’m saved just in the
nick of time by a mysterious soldier
who provides a grapple opportunity,
catapulting me back to the battle.
A few minutes on, I’ve been able
to whittle away Ahriman’s health and
finish the fight for good. Victory!
111

U P D AT E
WHAT’S NEW IN THE BIGGEST GAMES

METAL GEAR SOLID MASTER
COLLECTION VOLUME 1
Modders are fixing Konami’s underbaked, underloved MGS ports. By Joshua Wolens
h, Metal Gear. For
years, this series felt
like the missing jewel
in PC gaming’s crown,
an absent masterpiece
that had me pondering a PS3
purchase once every five months or
so. Now most of it is finally here,
but in such a subpar state that,
frankly, I’m still eyeing that PS3.

O

Between audio issues, speed issues,
controls seemingly designed by
people who have only ever had the
concept of a keyboard loosely
described to them, and internal
resolutions that range from 240p (for
MGS 1) and 720p (for the “HD”
versions of MGS 2 and 3), the Metal
Gear Solid Master Collection leaves a
lot to be desired. Credit where it’s
due, Konami has been patching the
games since they hit Steam in late
October, but will they ever be what
they should be? Probably not. Or at
least, not because of Konami.
But the studio has been doing
some work, not least of which was
fixing the absolutely haywire DLC
system the games shipped with.
The original, laudable vision for
the Master Collection was to allow
players to download basically every
extant version of each game in the
set: you would be able to download
both the Japanese and English
versions of MGS 2 and 3, as well as
the different regional versions of
MGS 1, via a Download section in
each game’s launcher.
That was the plan. In reality,
trying to download that stuff on PC
just meant the game in question
tried to fire up a nonexistent Steam
page, leaving players with no actual
way to download those extra
editions. Worse, it meant that many
players only had access to the PAL
versions of MGS 1, which were
tuned to run on old-fashioned
50Hz screens and ran at 25fps.
112

NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE
October 24, 2023

DEVELOPER
Konami

PUBLISHER
Konami

LINK
konami.com

That, at least, has been repaired.
Konami moved relatively quickly to
integrate the alternate MGS versions
into Steam’s perfectly functional
DLC management system, and the
most recent patch has erased the
Download section from each game’s
launcher entirely.
Other issues are being tweaked
too, including some that were
actually introduced in the original
Bluepoint remasters. That means that
L3 is no longer assigned to a dizzying
number of different actions in MGS 3,
which previously guaranteed your
interrogations would end with you
either accidentally executing your

GEAR MODS
Essential mods for the Master Collection

MGSHDFIX

MGSM2FIX

MGS3 CROUCH WALK

M G S A LT-TA B PAT C H

Adds ultrawide support, custom
resolutions, and even an HD UI to
MGS 2 and 3 plus MG 1 and 2.

There should be a middle ground
between standing tall and
crawling around on your belly.

Not quite as all-encompassing as
the HD mod for MGS 2 and 3, but
getting better every day.

On Nexus Mods. Sometimes you
have other stuff you need to do,
or you’re playing at work…

quarry or else holstering your gun. It
also means some of the audio bugs in
the collection have been just about
ironed out. The company has even
listed which bugs it’ll fix next: texture
glitches in MGS 2 and 3 and hitching
cutscenes in MGS 1.

PRETTY GOOD

Modders descended on the Master
Collection almost as soon as it came
out. In fact, the very first fan patch
to run MGS 2 and 3 at internal
resolutions north of 720p came out

THE SCENE HAS
ONLY GONE
FROM STRENGTH
TO STRENGTH
less than ten hours after the games
released. Since then, the scene has
only gone from strength to strength.
For MGS 2 and 3 hardworking
modders have already managed
ultrawide support, hi-res UI scaling,
borderless mode, corrected cutscene
aspect ratios and adjustable mouse
sensitivity for those of us doomed
to play these games with Konami’s
lacklustre KBAM support.
MGS 1 is a little different. Being an
emulated version of the PS1 game, it’s
harder to mess about with, but
modders are still putting in a valiant
effort. One in particular, a hero
named nuggslet, has managed to
crowbar pixel-perfect scaling into
whatever emulation wrapper is
running the game.
It’s not the faultless 16:9 you can
find if you load up the game in
something like PlayStation emulator
Duckstation, but it’s a start, and it’s
probably more than Konami will ever
see fit to do. Give modders enough
time, and these games will finally get
the remasters they deserve.

FAR LEFT: On the plus

side, at least Metal
Gear 1 and 2 run fine.

Even Big Boss’s youthful
good looks can’t make up
for MGS3’s muddiness.

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MOD SPOTLIGHT
MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED

LETHAL COMPANY
Make the horror more horrifying. By Christopher Livingston
here’s nothing more
fun than jumping into
a game with a bunch
of friends, and that
fun only increases
when some of that jumping is due
to jump scares. Low-fi indie game
Lethal Company is the current
co-op horror hotness, casting you
and your friends as employees of
a corporation that’s sent you to
salvage scrap from abandoned
moon stations. As you scamper
around in sci-fi facilities looking
to meet your salvage quotas, you
quickly discover why these bases
were abandoned, and as always the
answer is: horrifying monsters.
Calamity and hilarity ensues as you
watch your teammates die horribly
just to bring back a coffee mug, two
pickle jars and a drinks can.

T

Another great thing about Lethal
Company is that it’s proving to be an
114

NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE
October 23, 2023

DEVELOPER
Zeekerss

PUBLISHER
Zeekerss

LINK
shorturl.at/izX24

extremely flexible game when it
comes to modding. Despite only
being out for a few months, the co-op
horror adventure has lots of mods
that make it possible to wear new
accessories, change the rules, and add
even more horrific monsters to the
already terrifying game. Plus, if you
want to play with more than four
players, there are mods for that too.
Let’s start right there: the More
Company mod will let you bring
more friends along for the ride.
Instead of just four friends you can
now play with eight, and that
suggests you’ll have twice as much
fun. If that’s not already enough, the
mod also includes a bunch of new

LEFT: Mods let you

customise your entire
game on the fly.

BELOW: Is that
your friend? Or
an imposter?

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which lets you add players even after
a mission has begun, so they don’t
have to wait for the session to end
before they can join.

S C A R E TA C T I C S

FRIGHT NIGHT

Other great co-op horror games

PHASMOPHOBIA

You and your fellow ghost hunters
document different spectres in a
haunted house.

SONS OF THE FOREST

An open-world base builder
doesn’t seem like it would be
scary… but there’s evil afoot.

OUTLAST TRIALS

Survive a “therapy” session in a
research facility filled with
murderous lunatics.

DE AD BY DAYLIGHT

One player is a killer like Freddy
Kruger or Michael Myers, the rest
are teens trying to stay alive.

cosmetics for you and your friends to
wear including sunglasses, hats, cat
ears, and more. If going from four to
eight players isn’t enough, there’s
another mod called Bigger Lobby that
lets you play with… let me just double
check my notes on this… yes, up to 40
players! That’s absurd, but if you have
39 friends and you can’t bear to leave
even a single one out of your game
night, I’d give it a try. You might also
enjoy the mod called Late Company,

BELOW: Turn it into a

real party by doubling
the player count.

Now that you’ve got more friends
playing, you may want some new
ways to communicate with them.
Giving them the finger, perhaps? The
More Emotes mod not only lets you
flip the bird to your buddies, but also
adds a few other emotes like clapping
and performing the touchdown
dance The Griddy. Now when several
of your friends get torn apart by
monsters just so you can bring back a
tea kettle and a dustpan to scrap, you
can celebrate appropriately.
Speaking of monsters, Lethal
Company’s abandoned space bases
are already full of horrors, with
everything from giant spiders to
massive worms to flying monkeys.
And there’s not just sci-fi critters but
supernatural ones, like a horrifying
ghost girl and even a mask that if
picked up can possess a player and
turn them against their friends. But if
things weren’t already bad enough,
there are mods that add to the scares.
The Skinwalkers mod is especially
spooky, as it’ll record clips of your
voice chat while you’re playing, then
repeat them back to you, making it
sound like your friends are talking
when they aren’t. As if it’s not spooky
enough hearing the disembodied
voices of your friends from the
darkness, it can really cause problems
during the game. If you hear a friend
say something like, “Where are you?”
and you open your mic to answer

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them, your voice may be overheard
by one of the monsters.
Another mod, Mimics, has a
different way of tricking you into
dying. In Dungeons & Dragons,
Mimics classically disguise
themselves as treasure chests to
lure gold-hungry adventurers into
touching them, so what’s the spooky
space base equivalent? How about an
exit door? There’s no sight more
welcoming than the way out of the
cursed facility you’re stuck inside, but
occasionally that door is just a trap
and anyone who opens it will be
eaten by… well, by something that has
a mouth the size of a door.

SCREAM MACHINE

If you’re looking to make your
experience more challenging than it
already is, there’s a mod called Brutal
Company Plus that increases monster

THERE
ARE MODS
THAT ADD TO
THE SCARES
spawns, makes every creature
available no matter what moon you’re
on, and adds new randomised events
that will keep you on your toes. It’s
customisable, too, letting you tweak
your starting cash and loot drops to
give you a fighting chance. Another
great way to customise your Lethal
Company experience is a mod called
GameMaster, which lets the host
decide just how much carnage and
chaos they want to inflict. It comes
with a built in-menu to spawn
monsters at will, adjust deadlines and
credits, and buy items for players.
The really nice thing about this mod
is that only the host needs to install it
rather than everyone.
Finally, there are a couple of
mods that make some sensible
additions to the game. The FOV
Adjust mod lets every PC gamer do
what they always instantly want to
do in games: change their FOV
setting. And the Minimap mod adds
a nice little map to the top right of
your screen which will show
teammates, loot, and other features,
plus it can be toggled on and off and
resized while you’re playing. To find
these mods (and many more) check
out the Nexus Mods page or mod
depository Thunderstore.
115

HOW TO
GET MORE FROM YOUR GAMES

SURVIVE IN LEGO FORTNITE
Build your village and weather the wilderness. By Sean Martin
NEED TO KNOW
DIFFICULTY
Easy
TIME
A couple of hours
VITAL LINKS
How to get knotroot
pcgamer.com/
lego-fortnite-knotrootlocation
Where to find marble
pcgamer.com/
lego-fortnite-marble

PLAY AROUND

GOOD EATS

DODGE ROLL

Before you start, consider what
1 sort of game you want to play. While
the Survival mode is a fun challenge, you
may just want to build stuff, in which case
Sandbox might be better. This mode lets
you tweak and customise your world,
removing enemies and villagers.

The first and most important part
2 of surviving is eating lots and often.
Luckily, grub is rather plentiful, and you
can find raspberries, pumpkins and corn
growing all over. You can even eat the raw
meat you get from killing animals, though
don’t try this at home.

When you find yourself facing down
wolves, roller crabs, or spooky
skeletons, remember that you can dodge
roll in combat. Simply press CTRL and
you get a short period of invulnerability,
letting you get behind your fearsome foe
to whack them with a weapon.

3

CAVE IN
If you’re
puzzled about
where to find
resources, you
should check
underground.
Entrances to this
network are marked
with cave symbols
on your map and are
easy to recognise
since they’re just big
rocky outcrops with
shadowy entrances.

5

VILLAGE PEOPLE
Once you build a Village Square,
you’ll be able to recruit new
villagers every time you upgrade your
settlement. These blocky buddies carry
out specific jobs, and you can even take
them with you on an adventure if you want
a little backup in combat.

4

WORKBENCH
UPGRADES
The most
important
crafting station is
your workbench,
letting you create
the tools you need
to harvest new
resources. You can
also improve your
existing workbench
via the upgrade tab,
allowing you to craft
new tools.

6

116

EXPLORE NEW BIOMES
Exploring new biomes is one of the
best ways to find materials. Areas
like the desert might seem a bit
threatening with their hard-hitting
enemies, but you can always run away
and dodge attacks if you find yourself in
a tight spot.

7

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Nurture your newly founded settlement

1

VILLAGERS

Your village’s inhabitants
are the most valuable
resources, carrying out
whatever job you assign
them, and even fending
off enemies who get
too close.

3

2

BUILDINGS

FARMS

Whether it’s a humble
log cabin or a medieval
grand manor, you can
construct all sorts of
buildings provided you
have the materials.

Though food isn’t
exactly scarce, you can
grow your own provided
you grab some fertiliser
and craft the shovel
to get some soil.

HOT AND COLD

ANIMAL WHISPERER

CRAFTING STATIONS

The deadliest part of venturing into
8 new biomes like the sandy desert
or snowy mountains is actually the
temperature difference. If left too long,
this starts reducing your health, so
be sure to grab spicy peppers and
snowberries to mitigate these effects.

Interacting with animals is a great
9 way to get resources, whether
you’re petting sheep for wool, cows for
milk, or feeding animals for fertiliser.
Giving animals a tasty snack will also let
you lure them into pens so you can start
your very own herd.

Though perhaps obvious to any
survival game fan, it’s important to
build new crafting stations to process
materials and unlock new upgrades.
When you harvest a material like rough
amber, for example, you’ll unlock the Gem
Cutter crafting station.

10

SLEEPY HEAD
Night is a
dangerous
time, with skeletons
spawning from
underground to
attack anyone that
comes near. Sadly,
since the game is
online, you can’t
sleep through this
ordeal. In fact, sleep
is entirely pointless
since it doesn’t
affect respawning.

12

STORAGE SPACE
While Lego Fortnite’s inventory is
quite roomy, you’ll soon find it
packed with resources, especially if you
hoard lots of food. Building a chest in your
village will give you a place to store spare
materials rather than lugging them with
you across the map.

11

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TRYING TO GET
RICH QUICK IN

STARFIELD
PA R T 1
From one side of the galaxy to the next with
the one and only Jett Johnson. By Mat Poskitt

118

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eet Jett Johnson. A wise-cracking
24th-century jerk-of-all-trades who at
one time made the Kessel Run in 11
parsecs, or so he tells people. Jett’s been
doing these odd jobs for a while now;
once a pro, now he’s gotten sloppy. The end goal is to
earn enough credits to retire somewhere desolate and
peaceful at the edge of the galaxy, where he can live
away his days drinking cocktails with teeny tiny
umbrellas that wouldn’t look out of place in the hands
of Del Boy. Another few years should do it.

M

THE RULES
1. Take no prisoners:
always opt for the
‘Attack’ option
when offered.
2. Sarcasm at its finest:
choose the most
sarcastic or rudest
dialogue at all times.
3. Avoid Constellation
missions and instead
help out anyone who
needs it… for a price.

Anyone who has jumped into Bethesda’s new space epic
will be well aware that Starfield begins in a mining
outpost, the last place my plucky protagonist wants to be.
I’ve decided that Jett isn’t a fan of caves… or mining… or
his supervisor Lin. Even if she clearly fancies the socks of
him. “I wish she’d stop staring,” Jett thinks, as they head
down an elevator. In reality, Jett’s more interested in his
co-worker, Heller, but a mysterious Artifact located on the
second moon of Aneslon, Vectera is why he’s primarily
here. It could be worth a pretty penny.
Having successfully infiltrated a mining operation that
is being funded by some jumped-up do-gooders called
Constellation, Jett somehow convinces Lin to leave
retrieval of the Artifact to him and him alone. A foolish
move. He grabs it, only to receive a vision of time, space
and a bleak future where alcohol is banned from the
Settled Sytems. Instead of inspiring Jett, it terrifies him.

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was once in prime condition, now has a bit of a belly, yet
can still react like a cat when needed. Multiple lines fall
under his eyes, conveying that he’s been from one side of
the galaxy to the other.
The name Jett is often associated with aviation along
with meaning adventurous and bold, a fitting title for our
man in the sky. As a superhero fan I enjoy alliteration, so
Johnson comes naturally. A quick Google search yields
results that Jett Johnson is an Australian Supercar racer,
something I could imagine my Jett doing in another life,
so it sticks. Throw in a dash of Captain Jack Harkness’
bravado from Doctor Who and a likeable uselessness

AS A SUPERHERO FAN, I ENJOY
ALLITERATION SO JOHNSON
COMES NATURALLY
similar to that of Peter Quill from Guardians of the Galaxy,
and we have our leading man. Will Jett end up a hero? Or
will he continue sinning in this godforsaken cosmos? I’m
not even sure at this point.

BYE BYE, BARRETT

Leaving the mining outpost, Constellation member
Barrett arrives to pick up the Artifact with a band of
pirates shortly following. Not interested in getting
involved with local politics, Jett tries to sneak off to
commandeer the former’s ship. Locked. Reluctantly
SPACE SCOUNDREL
returning to the firefight, he quickly dispenses the rogues
Awoken by the beaming face of Heller and the
in the hope of being compensated in some way. Instead,
uncomfortable glare of Lin, it’s time to put the finishing
Barrett lectures him about being part of ‘something
touches to our space scoundrel. Like every character
bigger’ and a lot of yada yada about joining Constellation.
creator, I spend far too long poring over the minute
He even loans his spaceship and robot in goodwill as he
details. Naturally, the ears of Jett Johnson have always
stays behind to clear up the mess he made. See ya sucker!
been one of his defining features, I’m just not certain in a
Unable to veer off into the outer reaches of space yet,
universe where you wear a space helmet for large parts
this bloody robot (who Jett is half-tempted to kick out of
whether it will make or break any relationships. Who
the airlock) is making me stick to my promise by first
knows. Lin seemed to like them, after all.
heading to the planet Kreet to fend off some more pirates.
Going for more of a 24th-century Han Solo, I’ve
It’s here, face-to-face with one of the pirate captains of the
inadvertently made Kurt Russell as Jack Burton from Big
Crimson Fleet, where I expect to enforce my first rule of
Trouble in Little China. Just with a bit more timber. He
always engaging in combat whenever
offered in dialogue. That doesn’t
Heller (left) and Lin (right)
happen. An unfortunate bug means
mesmerised by Jett
the conversation fails to start, leaving
Johnson’s good looks.
this bewildered pirate shouting vague
threatening remarks from afar until I
decide to do the only decent thing
remaining – and put him out of his
time-loop misery.
We make it to Constellation
headquarters on New Atlantis. Walter
Stroud, some benefactor bloke, is
surprised I brought the ship back. “If
we hadn’t insisted on installing those
emergency protocols, I guarantee you
this rock breaker here would be
halfway to Neon,” he tells the other
members of Constellation.
They talk some mumbo jumbo
about finding answers to the universe
while Jett pockets a shiny compass
off one of their desks. Eventually, an
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invitation to join their crusade is offered. Jett’s not
interested, especially after experiencing that psychedelic
trip caused by the Artifact. “Good luck!” I imagine him
half-heatedly saying, slamming the door on the way out.
“Now, where to get a drink.”

SAVED BY THE BELL

BELOW: Asteroids or

bumper cars?

120

A good dozen or so hours later, I’ve made my way across
several star systems, earned some credits through a few
bounty missions and traded up Barrett’s spaceship (I
wonder if he’s still waiting for me on Vectera to return it)
for a new deluxe model found in a secret outpost on the
Denebola I-b moon. Dubbed the Razorleaf, it’s faster,
stronger and has plenty of fuel to get that little bit closer
to the edge of the galaxy. It’s just the name that doesn’t
suit, sounding more like a Pokémon attack than a place for
Jett to call home. After much careful consideration, I dub
this flying machine The Kapowski after my ’90s crush,
Kelly Kapowski from Saved by the Bell. Oh, how his
enemies will run in fear.
Heading to the tropical resort outpost of Paradiso on
Porrima II for a much-needed break, I notice a large
unidentifiable ship drifting in space above the planet.
Hailing the vehicle, it appears that its communications are
down. Usually, Jett wouldn’t have a problem zooming off
to the nearby sandy beaches, however, a strange feeling
compels him to dock. Most likely the thought of extra
credits to tip the bar staff when he keeps them up four
hours after they should have closed. “Here we go again,”
he announces to the emptiness of the Kapowski.
A trio of humans – dressed somewhat like the
virtual ABBA reunion – led by Captain Diana
Brackenridge welcome Jett aboard the ECS Constant.
The irony of the situation amuses him. Having now
completed its near-200-year journey from Earth, the
coloniser’s new planet is already inhabited. And with
communications failing, Jett is asked to play diplomat
between the two parties. It’s a big ask, one that may
result in the closure of Paradiso. That’s a sacrifice he’s
not willing to make. From seemingly nowhere, he
explains that “diplomacy may require compromise”,
briefly peeling back the curtain on the man he used to
be via that nugget of advice.

HERO, ANTI-HERO
OR SOMETHING
E L S E E N T I R E LY ?

1

Jett Johnson has
seen better days

1

2

HAIR

Long luscious hair that blows in
the wind. Needs washing four times
a day to obtain this look.

2 DAD BOD

The ultimate ‘dad bod’
– somewhere in-between
Tony Soprano and Jax Teller.

3

CLOTHES

3

A fashion sense that briefly
came back into style, and then
quickly left again.

Landing a few hundred yards in front of Paradiso, the
beauty of its surroundings slaps Jett in the face like his
second wife after catching him in bed with their maid of
honour, the priest and half the band on their wedding
night. If it’s not the auburn palm trees drenched by a
blazing sun, it’s the American-style diners scattered across
the rocky terrains that lead to a blue lake that’s begging
for a swim. What takes away from this tranquil setting is
the corporate marines and general abundance of people
blanketing every corner. If there was ever any peace and
quiet here, it’s now long gone.
Coming back to his senses, Jett heads for negotiations.
Oliver Campbell is the man in charge, a self-serving
bureaucrat who has no intention of giving away handouts
to a group of cosmic freeloaders who just showed up on
his doorstep. I can tell talking with this guy is futile,
awaiting the opportunity from a dialogue prompt to
attack. It’s a prompt that never arrives.
Three options are presented. The first is to convince
the ECS crew to settle on the planet under the jurisdiction
of the Paradiso Group until they pay
off their debts, basically selling them
into slavery. The second is to
purchase a Grav Drive from Jett’s
own credits (unthinkable) that the
Paradiso group will then help to
install free of charge, so the ECS can
find a new suitable planet. And the
third is to make the ship ‘go away’ no
questions asked. None of these are
particularly enticing while the greedy
smirk from the CEO burns into Jett’s
eyes, offering a fourth option: kill
Oliver Campbell.
I’d love to say that this is when
Campbell is blasted into a million
pieces, the Paradiso Group falls into
disrepute, the ECS takes over
creating a better mankind and in
their gratitude, Jett gets a piece of
land on a tropical remote island, the
end. Starfield has other ideas. You see,

EXTRA LIFE
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IF THERE WAS EVER ANY
PEACE AND QUIET HERE,
IT’S NOW LONG GONE
even though Campbell has taken more bullets than
Rambo in a Quentin Tarantino flick, it seems his destiny
is to live due to being a non-killable NPC. With this
disappointing revelation, alongside keeping to my set of
three rules, regretfully it’s time for the ECS to disappear.
A quick reset to the moment before Jett tried to make
Swiss cheese of Oliver, and with a deep sigh, we launch
into the atmosphere.

TOUGH CHOICES

As the ship gets closer I ponder whether Jett would do
this. Sure, he’s made some mistakes, insulted more people
than Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes and killed
countless people for money but never an entire survival

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crew. How many Mai Tais would he need to drink to
forget this nightmare? It’s all becoming a bit much.
Serendipitously, a thought crosses my mind seconds
before firing at the stationed ship. The phrasing of the
second option: “Hypothetically, what could make a ship
like that go away?” Where’s the word ‘Attack’? There isn’t
any. It’s typically always there when combat is expected.
It isn’t though. Not this time. It’s a technicality! A small,
convenient technicality, mind – but that’s good enough for
me and that’s good enough for Jett.
Landing back at Paradiso, miraculously the option to
purchase a Grav Drive is still available. It’s a sign! Or
maybe just a costly venture that will put Jett’s dreams
back a couple more years. Whatever the reasoning, it’s a
way out. I’m sent to HopeTech on the planet Polvo to
meet engineer Bennu St James, who offers me the Grav
Drive for an extortionate 40,000 credits! Jett’s powers of
persuasion manage to knock the price down to 25,000.
“That seems very reasonable. Thank you!” says Jett,
behind gritted teeth. Well, if it avoids a bloodbath, it’s
something. Paradise can wait.

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ABOVE: Jett’s seen a

lot of strange stuff…
and he knows when
to make an exit.

Take me down to the
Paradiso City…

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WHY I LOVE
WHAT MAKES GAMES SPECIAL

PROJECT WINGMAN’S 11
MISSION, COLD WAR

TH

A do or die, winner takes all dogfight over the Bering Strait. By Noah Smith
LEFT: Cold War’s

international scale
gives it a truly
larger-than-life
atmosphere.

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roject Wingman’s 11th
mission, Cold War,
has a million-dollar
premise. A rapidly
escalating military
crisis over the Bering Strait has
snowballed into the largest air
battle in history, pulling fighter
squadrons the world over into a
furball orders of magnitude beyond
what any military expected. You’re
at the centre of a history-defining
air battle, a front-row bucket seat
for the moment that the revolt
you’ve sold your skills to
transforms into a world war, and
I love every part of it.

P

The mission briefing starts with
sirens and klaxons shrieking in the
background, your commanding
officer warning you that the second
this presentation is over, he better see
you run to your plane, because this is
it. The sky is so dense with
competing planes that tilting your
plane’s nose in any direction will
elicit a chirping lock tone. Project
Wingman’s weighty, deliberate flight
model feels best here; the constant
back and forth between high speed
pursuits and desperate, please-don’tstall-out-the-engine high-G turns are
exhilarating. It’s made better by a
sound effect palette that conveys how
hard you’re pushing this machine,
your airframe groaning painfully as
you lean into a turn that’d tear lesser
jets apart, your purring engine
steadily building up to a ferocious
roar as you hammer the throttle
open. I always play in first person,
where there’s a touch of screen shake
that sells the fantasy of being trapped
inside a subsonic aluminium coffin
completely.

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EXPECT TO PAY
£19.50

LINK
humblegames.com

OUR REVIEW
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FIGHTER PILOT JARGON
Need to know top gun terminology

3

2
1

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subculture. The music is further
complemented by this constant shrill
beeping your plane makes as missiles
swarm all angles. Still, in the
hundreds of times I’ve replayed this
mission, I’ve started to substitute the
soundtrack with music of my own
choosing – Death Grips’ Bottomless
Pit, Black Midi’s Sugar/Tzu, and
Thee Oh Sees’ The Dream were my
playlist, and it totally elevated the
frantic experience.

BIG NAME HUNTING

1 “BANDIT”

Callout for a
plane confirmed
as hostile.

2 “SPIKED”

Callout for an
incoming infrared
missile launch.

3 “VAPES”

Callout for
condensation trails.
Not disposable.

Project Wingman’s gorgeous cloud
and moisture rendering makes this
fevered dogfight all the better: a
blanket of turbulent thunderstorms
and blizzards just above sea level
bump and jostle your craft as you
burn through, while the lighter cloud
cover at higher altitudes provides
brief moments of reprieve from an
endless barrage of incoming missiles
and fighters rapidly gaining on you.
The accompanying thumping

THEY’RE THE STRONGEST
INDEPENDENT FIGHTER
SQUADRON IN THE WORLD
bassline, orchestral strings, and, in a
page ripped from Ace Combat Zero,
a Spanish guitar, recontextualises
combat as dance. I love how much
this sound captures the romantic
essence of the ace pilot fantasy,
where the self-aggrandising
mythologies of the old British and
German flying aces formed the
genesis of modern-day fighter pilot

NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE
December 2020

I

The theming here is A+: The
Federation, a globe-spanning
ultra-liberal hegemony that’s
superseded the United Nations in
the wake of global cataclysm, has
fully committed to eliminating the
majority of rival air power, even going
as far to deploy the Peacekeepers in
full at the mid-mission mark.
You get a brief taste of this elite
squadron in an earlier mission.
They’re the strongest independent
fighter squadron in the world, tasked
with ending wars before they start,
and now you have to face them
down, at full strength, one versus
eight. It’s a great fight, with the
Peacekeeper planes having some
fancy vector thrust manoeuvres that
let them suddenly change direction
and escape your lock. Downing even
one is a battle of endurance – your
only chance is staying loose, bailing
on tails you can’t keep up with and
merging onto others, waiting for just
the right moment, and then punching
the throttle, closing on the exhausted
ace like a viper. It’s intoxicating
snuffing out these living legends one
by one, and when you have five
racked up on the scoreboard, the
remnants go running.
Cold War is the mission where
Project Wingman cements itself as
one of the all-time greats in the niche
genre of arcade air combat. Cold
War’s perilous 20 minutes have been
an escape for me for years now, and I
don’t think that will ever change.

LEFT: Keep up with

the Peacekeepers’
acrobatics and punish
them when they take
time to breathe.

123

R E I N S TA L L

I got the itch to return to one of the
previous decade’s golden children
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Shadow of Mordor’s photo mode
takes better glory shots of my
kills than I’d remembered.

SHADOW OF MORDOR
Revisiting Middle-earth’s nemesis system. By Lauren Morton
here are few gaming
accomplishments
more satisfying than
the thrill of pulling off
kills in stealth action
games. The sweetest of feats can be
achievements or timed runs or trick
shots but there’s something extra
special about a grudge kill. Shadow
of Mordor, the Warner Bros. action
game of 2014, was a factory for
satisfying kills with its nemesis
system that became the centre of
any conversation about the game.

T

After recently working my way
through other stealth romps like Styx:
Master of Shadows and Hitman 3, I
got the itch to return to one of the
previous decade’s golden children to
see if it’s everything thought.
The way I remember Shadow of
Mordor was as an understudy to
Assassin’s Creed. It has tons of

climbing, opportunities for silent
kills, kills from above and all the
other stabby stealth skills of classic
Creed. Coming back to it, I was
anticipating plenty of verticality,
clutch kills using the environment,
and some good melee combat when
everything goes wrong.
I was partially right. I don’t think
Shadow of Mordor’s world design and
structures are all that much to write
home about, unless I’m retroactively
giving old Assassin’s Creed games
more credit than they’re due too.
Shadow of Mordor’s crumbling
Middle-earth infrastructure is largely
repetitive and none too intricate.
Climbing up ruins and creeping
stealthily across ropes connecting
them feels serviceable now, but pretty
basic. There’s not too much puzzle or
exploration in spidering up the side
of the same broken stone arches all
over the map. It’s a wide but not high

map, structures and strongholds of
a couple of stories evenly spaced out
across the barren crags in the corner
of Middle-earth.

SHADOW OF ITSELF

The world itself felt grander at the
time but doesn’t really inspire awe
in this decade – like returning to a
childhood playground and realising
that I can reach up and touch the
monkey bars that once seemed quite
intimidating. Even though it doesn’t
have the towering structures I’d
remembered them as, the climbing
and creeping across structures is still
enjoyable. There’s some suspension
of disbelief required in how easy it is
for me to lose the attention of a horde
of orcs just by scaling the opposite
side of a stone wall, but it sure does
make me feel stealthy to do it.
Sprinting across the rock landscapes
and hauling up towers, jumping
across gaps between buildings with
ease and prancing along ropes
connecting them is the kind of

NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE
September 30, 2014

DEVELOPER
Monolith Productions

PUBLISHER
Warner Bros

LINK
warnerbrosgames.com

125

R E I N S TA L L
OLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES

Crossing swords
with my quarry
never gets stale.

versatile traversal I was hoping for
and that I got in spades.

FIGHT OR FLIGHT

Even though the Middle-earth ruins
city planning feels just passable,
there’s still a lot of satisfaction in
combat. The basics are initially
repetitive – one button to swing
Talion’s sword and another to aim his
bow – but quickly get compounded
as I unlock parries, vaulting over orcs’
heads, executions and finishing
moves. It all weaves together about

as well as I remember with only a
little clunkiness to Talion’s general
movement. As I stalk towards the
general location of an orc captain on
my kill list, I’ll often begin by
crouching in a patch of bushes, using
a skill attached to my bow to lure
away nearby uruks to pick them off.
Inevitably I’ll miss one, and being
spotted by one orc turns into fighting
five or more of his cohort as they
rush me simultaneously.
Those are the weaker moments
of standard combat in Shadow of

HUNTER’S HUBRIS
The emotional journey of orc slaying
ORCS
KILLED
First stealth
kill, I am the
orc slayer.

I am the agent of
downsizing in
Sauron’s army.

First death and
first nemesis
acquired.
Height of hubris,
taking on a
mob of orcs.

126

SELF
CONFIDENCE

Mordor, getting surrounded and
mobbed by a gaggle of stock baddies.
There’s initially a little glee in
whacking the orc in front of me,
quickly parrying the one swinging at
my back, and vaulting over another to
continue the attack. But after about
ten seconds it becomes clear that I
can’t pull a finishing move on the orc
I’ve downed because I’m constantly
parrying another, which interrupts
that kill. I’m surrounded by nearlydead orcs managing to just cover for
one another all while arrows rain
down from the one archer I didn’t
pick off. In a fight between Talion
and ten orc toddlers, the strength in
numbers does eventually win out.
Those dogpiles become untenable,
leaving me only one recourse: turning
tail and running. Since those packs of
gathered orcs don’t really disperse in
a natural fashion, those failures to
manage the crowd force me off to
pick at some other fortress, hoping
that the enemy AI will reset and
settle while I’m away.
The times when I can keep a
brawl with stock orcs to a headcount
of three or four though – firing off a
quick bow shot at the one running to
raise the alarm, killing the one I’ve
downed, and then snagging the final
assailant in Talion’s ghostly grip to

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Every infiltration
begins with a
couple of kills.

ABOVE: Higher rank

captains have a range
of resistances and few
weaknesses.

RIGHT: Ghostly
interrogation is a
staple of my
captain-hunting
strategy.

interrogate him for information about
his captain – that’s the glory of
Shadow of Mordor’s basic combat.

KILLTACULAR

The part of Shadow of Mordor that’s
barely aged is its nemesis system. Its
method of creating and preying upon
grudges became its defining feature
when it launched and for good
reason. The nemesis system still kills.
I hopped into a fresh save file of
Shadow of Mordor and decided that
my personal goal would be to kill as
many orc captains in Sauron’s army
as possible without ever letting them
re-hire new talent. What main quest?
Sauron’s army has three tiers of
orc captains who I can either stumble
upon in the wild or pick off lesser
orcs to learn their general location
and eventually their strengths and
weaknesses. If I ever die by their
hand, those orcs get promoted up a
tier and can gain additional strengths
too. So I just won’t die. That’s the
challenge I set myself.
I started my killing spree with
the middle management of Sauron’s
army, whichever orcs were hanging
out nearby on the bottom rung of the
ladder. The first three kills are easy
enough – orc captains with small
entourages milling about in

THE PART OF SHADOW OF
MORDOR THAT’S BARELY
AGED IS ITS NEMESIS SYSTEM
crumbling ruins. I pick off their
guards quickly and then take out
each captain with a short sword fight
and execution move.
The next captain throws a wrench
in my plans. He’s got the Summoner
trait, which lets him call for help
when in danger. Thus my complaints
about unwieldy mobs of orcs. After
that, an orc captain I definitely killed
seems to have come back from the
dead, ambushing me as I’m stalking
one of his higher-rank brethren
saying that I gave him a scar, and
sure enough his face has large pink
sword marks. Each successive fight
takes more work as I find captains
clustered together at the same
outpost, requiring much more finesse
from my plans. Others have traits that
make them fearful of certain attack
types, forcing them to retreat and me
on a chase to run them down.
This is where the stealth action
of Mordor shines: the five minutes I
spend casing a fortress for an orc
captain who’s vulnerable to

takedowns. I perch atop crumbling
arches watching his entourage come
and go, never leaving him fully open
to my death-from-above leap.
Eventually I had to decide whether
I should flush him out by blowing
up a nearby campfire and risk him
running away, or dive right in the
centre of his posse for that takedown
I want so badly. I spend several hours
at my task of orc captain eliminator
without realising it. So I’d say that the
nemesis system holds up well.

PATENT TRENDING

The success of the nemesis system
naturally begs for other games using
it as inspiration. And yet they haven’t.
In 2021, after a few years of trying
to get it approved, Warner Bros
acquired a patent for “Nemesis
characters, nemesis forts, social
vendettas and followers in computer
games,” the nemesis system as we
know it. We’ve yet to see it legally
enforced in any public fashion, but it
did have a chilling effect.
Patented or not, I hope we’ll see
takes on the nemesis system from
outside Warner Bros. Even by
another name, there’s excitement
around evolving enemies. Until
someone else takes the bait, Shadow
of Mordor is worth returning to.
127

EXTRA LIFE
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LAUREN
MORTON

In 2023 I fully respecced
into cosy games, so
here’s my shortlist of
chill farming, puzzling,
and life sim-ing of
recent months that
you shouldn’t miss.

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LANGUAGE IMMERSION

CLIMB TIME

CREEPY COSY

CHANTS OF SENNAAR

JUSANT

PLANET OF LANA

rundisc.io/chants-of-sennaar

dont-nod.com/en/games/jusant

planetoflana.com

In this beautiful adventure game,
you have to solve puzzles in order to
learn languages. Gather the clues
around you and take notes on their
translations to reconnect the five
societies of the tower. This is the
game I thought about most this
year even while not playing it.

I can’t believe the studio behind
Life is Strange made a puzzle
platformer and it’s great. The back
and forth motion of pulling gamepad
triggers to grip each handhold just
makes perfect sense. The world and
puzzles stay fresh throughout and I
couldn’t rest until I’d hit the peak.

From the puzzle platforming
school of children in deadly
situations, Lana manages to be
beautiful and creepy in equal
measure. This one had my heart with
its opening sequence of soundtrack
and gleeful jumping, punctuated by
the arrival of the robots.

LIFE ONLINE

PALIA
palia.com

Proving that not all MMOs need
to be RPGs, Palia’s farm and life
sim world is answering my need
for online games to push their
boundaries. It’s still in early access,
but it can already keep me choring all
evening. I’ve got faith it’s paving the
way for more cosy MMOs.

128

I

MUST
P L AY
A PERSONAL LIST
OF THE BEST
GAMES YOU CAN
PLAY RIGHT NOW
by Lauren Morton

VILLAGE PEOPLE

DISNEY DREAMLIGHT VALLEY
disneydreamlightvalley.com

Dreamlight Valley hit full 1.0
release in December 2023 and it just
keeps growing. I’m still enamoured
with how customisable the entire
island is and its cooking system that
encourages experimentation. The
Disney character storylines are all
cute too, playing off one another.

JOURNEY ONLINE

STARDEW-EST

COSY CITIES

SKY: CHILDREN OF THE LIGHT

ROOTS OF PACHA

FABLEDOM

thatskygame.com

rootsofpacha.com

grenaagames.com

The social MMO from Journey’s
developers still isn’t officially on PC,
but as of writing it’s had a demo
available on Steam for several
months. Yet another example that
online games need not be RPGs, this
puzzle platforming game makes sure
to throw the occasional challenge in.

If you don’t know better, it’s easy to
assume Roots of Pacha is the next
game by Stardew Valley’s developer.
Soda Den’s prehistoric farm sim is so
satisfyingly similar while still bringing
new ideas on crop discovery and
animal taming, plus there’s no
combat, which I prefer.

City builders don’t have a
reputation for being cute but this
fairytale management game is. I lost
a weekend to the Early Access
version, building out my perfect
growing city, defeating enemies and
zooming in to watch all its adorable
citizens go about their days.

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