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The
100GREATEST PC GAMES
22-pagespecial
PREVIEWED STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT / EITR
ANNO 2205 / DARK SOULS III MIRROR’S EDGE CATALYST / MORE!
HITMANDID ABSOLUTION
BREAK THE SERIES?
BUYER’S GUIDEGET THE RIGHT GAMING
PC FOR YOUR BUDGET
WHY FIRAXIS’ STRATEGY SEQUEL IS THE PC EXCLUSIVE YOU DESERVE
XCOM
GHOST RECON WILDLANDSFIRST LOOK AT THE OPEN
WORLD TACTICAL SHOOTER
ISSUE 270 OCTOBER 2015 PRINTED IN THE US
US $8.99
REVIEWED INFINIFACTORY
FINAL FANTASY XIV: HEAVENSWARD
THE MAGIC CIRCLERONINMORE!
New Look!
MakeoverNotice anything different? For the first time in a couple years, we’ve made a comprehensive redesign of our magazine. Almost every corner of the book has been updated, from letters to hardware. We really like the way that the fonts we’ve selected and the tweaked treatments on reviews and previews give PC Gamer a more mature, slightly cleaner look—one that suits digital readers and print alike.
Let us know at [email protected] how you feel about what you’re holding, generally or specifically.
T A L K T O P C G A M E R
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#270 OCTOBER 2015
PC GAMER (ISSN 1080-4471) is published 13 times a year, monthly plus Holiday issue following December issue by Future US, Inc., 4000 Shoreline Court, Suite 400, South San Francisco, CA 94080. Phone: (650) 872-1642. Fax (650) 872-2207. Website: www.futureus.com. Periodicals postage paid in San Bruno, CA Curtis Circulation Company. Basic subscription rates (12 issues) US: Digital $23.88; Print $19.95; Canada: Digital $23.88; Print $29.95; Intl: Digital $23.88; Print $39.95. Canadian and foreign orders must be prepaid, US funds only. Canadian price
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EDITORIALGlobal Editor-in-Chief Tim ClarkEditor-in-Chief Evan LahtiExecutive Editor Tyler WildeHardware Editor Wes FenlonComputer Large Pixel ColliderUK Editor Samuel RobertsUK Production Editor Tony EllisStaff Writer Chris Livingston Assistant Editor Tom Marks
CONTRIBUTORS Dave James, Chris Thursten, Tom Senior, Andy Kelly, Phil Savage, Ian Dransfield, Daniella Lucas, Matt Elliott, Dan Griliopoulos, Ben Griffin
ARTArt Editor John Strike Freelance Designers Andy McGregor, Matthew Lochrie, Andrew Cottle
SALES Vice President, SalesStacy Gaines, [email protected] President, Strategic ParthershipsIsaac Ugay, [email protected] Sales Manager, Northern CaliforniaHoward Berman, [email protected] Sales, Manager SouthwestBrandon Wong, [email protected] Sales Manager, East Coast Brandie Rushing, [email protected] Sales Manager, Midwest/Pacific NorthwestJessica Reinert, [email protected]
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Tel +44 (0)207 042 4000 (London)Tel +44 (0)1225 442 244 (Bath)
Our team of writersT Y L E R W I L D ETwitter@tyler_wilde
Currently playingThe Flame in the Flood
This monthTook a ride up a river in the roguelike survival game, got attacked by many wolves.
W E S F E N L O NTwitter@wesleyfenlon
Currently playingStar Wars Battlefront
This monthWas not moved by piloting iconic movie spacecraft while playing the new Star Wars game.
C H R I S L I V I N G S T O NTwitter@screencuisine
Currently playingThe Magic Circle
This monthFitted a tractor beam to a rat and made zombies resistant to fire. Read more on p74.
4 OCTOBER 2015
09 SEND Your letters on important matters.
Monitor10 THE TOP STORY Using HoloLens with Minecraft.
12 THE SPY Is Dawn of War 3 about to happen?
Previews14 Ghost Recon Wildlands18 Anno 220522 Star Wars Battlefront24 Mirror’s Edge Catalyst26 Company of Heroes 2: The British Forces32 Dark Souls III34 Eitr
Features38 XCOM 2Firaxis brings procedurally generated levels to Enemy Unknown’s PC-exclusive follow-up.
44 THE TOP 100 GAMESOur annual countdown of the 100 greatest PC games you owe it to yourself to play, in 22 majestic pages.
Reviews66 Infinifactory68 FFXIV: Heavensward70 Ronin72 Rocket League74 The Magic Circle
Extra Life76 NOW PLAYINGWhat we’ve been playing on PC.
80 TOP 10 DOWNLOADSOur round-up of the best free things.
84 REINSTALLHitman Absolution revisited.
Hardware88 GROUP TESTHi-res monitors reviewed.
94 BUYER’S GUIDEOur new guide to your next PC.
Contents #270 O C T O B E R 2 0 1 5
38 XCOM 2Samuel talks to Firaxis about new enemies, procedurally generated levels, new classes and what else is coming in the next XCOM.
44 THE PC GAMER TOP 100The PCG team assembles to figure out our yearly list of the best PC games.
88 HARDWAREWe’ve had a clean-up of our hardware section to make it prettier and more useful to you, including a buyer’s guide for your next gaming PC.
100GREATEST PC GAMES
TOP
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6 OCTOBER 2015
OCTOBER 2015 9
S E N DA free Steam key for the funniest or most insightful letter every month
U S E R R E V I E W S Try to sort a deck
of interesting Her Story narrative-cards into order while uncovering tasty plot nuggets. Yum.@skooIt took twenty years for somebody to figure out how to make full-motion videogames work, but we’re glad that they did.
Finally finished Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and my God—talk about punching gamers in the gut and then leaving for eight years!@darrarkWe don’t talk about it anymore, Darrark. Still too painful.
Playing some WoW because the new patch still has some juices to wring out.@darksaiyanisDon’t drink the WoW juice. You don’t know where it comes from.
Currently about 16 hours into The Talos Principle. Definitely my GotY so far.@alexharman
BattleBlock Theater: a co-op platformer with co-op platforming and a sense of humor. 10/10—would jump again!@louisross167Great, now we’re listening to Buckle Your Pants again.
Ark. I have a dodo army named after the characters of the hit TV show Supernatural. They slow down the server immensely. Worth.@kimpulsivelyNever let taste or mass extinction slow you down!
Softly does itIt’s very hard to design
around choices in stealth games. If the rules are: you can stab everyone, knock ‘em out or avoid them, your design then becomes about making levels where all three options are equally viable. Which, in my experience, feels less like the awesome dynamic system they envisioned and more like something you can bumble your way through.
A very valid argument could be made that says giving players choices dilutes your game design and makes a blander experience. That said,
I have an enormous boner for stealth games and will replay them until I’ve successfully completed a ‘no touching anyone for any reason’ run. Which in turn makes it all the more disappointing when I stealth up to a part that is obviously intended to be a combat set piece and break the game a little.Mike Patrick
There’s nothing worse than when a fight gets in the way of your attempt to not touch anybody and spoils your stealth-boner. Or so we’ve heard. PCG
Not a patch on consolesGreat. Finally got my rig updated and a slew of AAA games to play. Let’s see, how about Batman: Arkham Knight. Hmm. Lots of issues, bad PC port being fixed, patch coming. OK, how about Pillars of Eternity. Oh Patch 2.0 with lots of UI changes coming very soon. Think I will wait.
Well, I loved Witcher 1 and 2, and so here we go—Witcher 3! Oh, patch 1.0.7 coming soon. Better wait. Jane Mutter
Patience is a virtue. And also an unfortunate consequences of doing your gaming on the PC, sometimes. This is how it can be. Oh well. PCG
Don’t call it a comebackI know this topic has been talked about loads, but I am getting tired of all the reboots of series that have had games released recently! For example, Hitman: Absolution was released less than three years ago, yet here we are being told that a reboot of the series is going to be released this year. Another example is Mirror’s Edge, which came out less than seven years ago. This one is more acceptable, but I wish they would just call it a sequel or prequel.
Don’t get me wrong, some reboots turn out great, such as XCOM: EU (one of my favorite games). But some series have games released too recently to be rebooted. (Sorry if I seem very cynical, I’m actually a nice guy, I pwomise). James-Lachlan McCallum
Calling something a reboot is a marketing ploy. Be pleased that they’re trying to recapture the spirit of games you used to love. PCG
DIY gamingAs big-budget games move more and more towards both multi-platform experiences (see: Batman / The Witcher) and controlled multiplayer games (DOTA 2 et al), I sincerely hope that the next generation of videogame players receive the opportunity to tinker with their games in meaningful ways. I might be dating myself, but for example: Scorched Earth’s (the DOS game) death quotes lack “Beam me up, Scotty!”—the fact that you can fix that by adding a line to a text file is empowering, and that type of small, personal customization is something I hope today’s PC gamers find a way to experience. Ryan Thompson
It’s happening. Dota 2 is gaining a powerful custom game creation toolset. The new Unreal Tournament is being made by the community. Thanks largely to Minecraft, publishers again see the value of putting the player in control. PCG
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W I N N E R !
Does too much choice lead to a lack of depth in stealth games?
T H E P C G A M E R V I E W O F T H E W O R L D
O P I N I O N T E C H G A M E S
The HoloLens demo on Microsoft’s E3 stage blew my tiny mind, and judging by the internet’s reaction I was not the only one. It had
to be smoke and mirrors, surely. A fully interactive hologram on the scale of a Minecraft world? No way.
On-stage at the Xbox Conference in June, Microsoft’s Saxs Persson showed how, wearing the HoloLens, you could start by playing Minecraft on a virtual display on a wall and then map it onto a table just by saying the words “create world”. We saw, from the perspective of the wearer, an entire Minecraft world rise from the table. It was like something from a sci-fi movie.
It was a slightly misleading demo, as it turns out. When a rather clunky prototype of the HoloLens headset was lowered onto my head at Minecon in London, I found that the headset only lets you view holograms in a window in the center of
your vision. As a speccy nerd I’m used to seeing the world through a letterbox, but for some people this will probably be a bigger disappointment. On the plus side, you can still see the people and objects in the room around you perfectly well, making it definitively easier to make a cup of tea wearing HoloLens than Oculus Rift.
It’s like looking at the room through dark sunglasses, but the holograms themselves are super-bright and colorful. You can tell HoloLens to display a virtual screen on any blank wall, or—and this is the magic part—you can look at a horizontal surface and
make it do the thing where the Minecraft world rises up in front of you.
From this point onwards my HoloLens demo worked precisely as advertised at E3—it was fully, impressively interactive. Walking around a virtual, tabletop Minecraft model in physical space, you can examine it in detail and lean over it like a giant to peer inside the buildings. You control everything by voice and gesture, and it made me feel weirdly powerful.
You can’t actually place blocks, at least not in this early demo, but you can play with the world like a god: changing the weather, placing beacons to guide players, summoning lightning to set things on fire for no good reason. I can also see people using it to keep track of collaborative builds, or indeed just to admire them. Imagine being able to see all the incredible things people have built, without leaving your own living room. As a long-term Minecraft tourist, it’s an appealing idea. Keza MacDonald
MINECRAFT FOR REALExploring a MINECRAFT world using the dream-weaving HOLOLENS
10 OCTOBER 2015
I CAN SEE PEOPLE USING THIS TO KEEP TRACK OF
COLLABORATIVE BUILDS, OR JUST TO ADMIRE THEM
T H E T O P S T O R Y
TRIVERS OF ORANGE GOOP, CORAL-LIKE
FUNGAL GROWTHS, AND A YELLOW SUN
W H O W A T C H E S T H E S P Y ?
THESPY
O P I N I O N G A M E S T E C H
The Spy has always looked like this. Shut up.
he Spy understands that change is a good thing. A change of trousers; change for the bus; even a spot of regime change, if it’s a suitably slow Thursday. Even so, The Spy understands that change is also scary. Think about the things you’d never want to change. A defused bomb. A sleeping grizzly bear. The games industry as you remember it ten years ago. Well, good news! The games industry agrees with you (the bear’s mind is its own).
Alas, novelty and innovation will always lurk on the periphery of this business. Here’s some comfort: reboots are coming. Reboots, sequels, prequels, requels and preboots. Deus Ex! Mirror’s Edge!
Hitman! Io Interactive is, to its credit, trying something new. On December 8 this year you’ll be able to buy the game, become a dour bald man, and creatively murder people. However! The game is not actually out until 2016, when all the missions will be in place. Early adopters get to play an ‘in-progress’
version, with live events
adding new targets to existing areas and so on. But Io seems more than a little confused about what this method of game development is actually called. It’s giving players an early access option, but Hitman won’t—the studio says—be an Early Access game. “All of the content we release live to our players will be complete and polished.”
An episodic game, then? Hm. “We think the word ‘episodic’ sets up the expectation that we will sell individual content drops for individual prices,” Io continues. “That’s not something we’re planning to do. That said, there are some episodic elements to the story in the sense that it’s being delivered in chunks over time.”
The Spy is sure that there’s a word for when something is
delivered in chunks over time, but let’s move on. “The thing is, there isn’t really a term to describe what we’re doing,” Io writes. “That’s why we’re calling it a ‘live’ experience because it feels like that’s what it is—something that lives, grows and evolves.”
How do you pronounce ‘live’ in that sentence? Is it ‘live’ if players encounter the same missions at
different times? Does it ‘live’ simply by virtue of the fact that it changes? Change and life aren’t the same thing: just ask that bomb from earlier.
Lost in all of this confusion is how much will actually be available to players this December. As for when it might make sense for reviewers to
offer a verdict on a game that is both episodic and not, early access and not and, in the manner of cosmic horror both live and not, well, The Spy leaves
that up to the reviewers. And possibly an exorcist.
A single new piece of concept art for Mass Effect: Andromeda slipped out of San Diego Comic Con showing the surface of an alien world and helpfully subtitled ‘alien worlds’. Said world has rivers of orange goop, coral-like fungal growths, and a yellow sun peeking through Venusian fog over towering mesas. It doesn’t give much away, but suggests that Frostbite is capable of generating far more natural and detailed open worlds than the ones we tumbled around in the first game.
A NEW DAWNSega has registered a web domain for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III. When Sega acquired the
Games Workshop license, a sequel was what many fans asked for—what they got was Creative Assembly’s exciting-looking, silly-named Total War: Warhammer. Now it looks like they’re going to get both.
Relic reinvented Dawn of War between
the first and second game, transitioning from a more traditional RTS to a squad tactics game with RPG elements. It would be exciting to see another shake-up: perhaps by the time 2016 or 2017 rolls around we’ll be controlling our Space Marines in third person, or ushering them through the mundanity of day-to-day life in a grim future where there isn’t war any more because we got it all sorted out.
Lastly, The Spy has heard many reports of embargoed Warcraft movie footage from Comic Con. The orcs are far more sympathetic than in the original game, the humans have shiny armor but are probably assholes. Into this conflict baby Thrall is born, and shown floating off downriver just in case you didn’t pick up on the Moses bit. The Spy is a little torn on this one: by all accounts it should be terrible, but director Duncan Jones hasn’t made a bad movie yet. Still, that could always change. The Spy
In my live demo, the four players started in wildly different parts of
this vast sandbox
P R E V I E W
This is an open-world game that looks like a cross between regular tactical team shooter Ghost Recon, Arma 3, MGSV’s freeform action/stealth approach and Just Cause’s chaos and scale. A mishmash of game types bolted on to a series that sort of faded away with 2012’s Future Soldier. I saw Wildlands in action at E3 this year, and it’s certainly impressive to watch four players run around in this giant world simultaneously, then come together to tactically figure out the multipart sandbox missions.
Even so, I wonder if it’s in such an embryonic a state that we won’t see it released for another two years or so, much like The Division debuted in 2013 with possibly unattainable good looks and a ludicrous tablet drone element. It took two whole E3s to come and go before I could play The Division and it’s still miles off release. Will Wildlands still look this pretty when it gets here?
Ghost Recon Wildlands is set in an immense Bolivian landmass where a cartel has a stranglehold on the government, turning this part of the world into a drug state. In my live demo, the four players started in wildly different parts of this vast sandbox, just to show off the environmental variety and how far apart players can be in the same game. One soldier was driving across white salt flats,
another was in a canyon of red-colored cliffs, a third was pissing about in the mountains, and the fourth was in a tropical green jungle somewhere. Players are apparently free to do whatever they want in this shared open world while coexisting within it. The different starting locations bode well for a colorful, interesting environment. This is the biggest world Ubisoft has ever created (suck it up, Far Cry 4).
The mission today is to kidnap an informant called Alvarez, who works for a crime boss called Nina Flores. The team starts by saving some hostages, taking one of their captors out and interrogating another to get Alvarez’s location. The action shifts across the map to an enemy-occupied village, where the cartel has staged a massacre to show they mean business. The squad is planning to steal a helicopter from this little town; every vehicle in the game is up for grabs, from buggies to aircraft to boats and vans. That’s just one of the marked changes from any Ghost Recon to date.
CONTEMPORARY WARFAREDrones have been a part of Ghost Recon long before they were delivering Amazon packages and taking fingers off with their tiny rotors, and in Wildlands players can again use them to hover overhead and pick enemy targets in advance of an attack. The village, one of many in the game, is impressively scaled and detailed—it looks like a real place from the air. I’m shown that there’s a concert going on in the village as well as a market, giving it some civilian life rather than it just being an empty combat arena.
The team sneaks through a long field of dry grass towards a helipad, and fires off a round to start an inter-faction gunfight, where enemies take each other out. The Ubisoft team points out that there’s also the option to sneak in at night, and that weather conditions have an effect, too. I ask how that makes a difference beyond a visual filter change.
Every E3, Ubisoft reveals something big to get people talking. Last year it was Rainbow Six Siege, the year before, The Division, in 2012 it was Watch Dogs, and
this year it’s Ghost Recon Wildlands. As with those reveals, it’s a little bit pie in the sky at the moment, but this looks a little more colorful and ambitious than the usual Clancy fare.
The military shooter series goes big, explosive and airborne
T O M C L A N C Y ’ S G H O S T R E C O N W I L D L A N D S
PLAYERS ARE APPARENTLY FREE TO DO WHATEVER THEY WANT IN THIS SHARED OPEN WORLD
RELEASE2016
DEVELOPERUbisoft Paris
PUBLISHERUbisoft
LINKghost-recon.ubi.com
N E E D T O K N O W
F I R S T L O O K
OCTOBER 2015 15
P R E V I E W
Ghost Recon Wildlands
“What we have is a living, breathing world with its own ecosystems,” says lead game designer Dominic Butler. “With bad weather conditions we’ve got rain, low visibility at night—our detection for AI will be reduced. It’s going to give the Ghosts lots of opportunities. We’ll have some elite soldiers who have countermeasures to this. The Ghosts also have a set of countermeasures. It’s really up to the player how they want to approach, what tools they want to utilize. Sometimes it’s going to be environment, sometimes it’s going to be the tools we give them.”
The Ghosts (or army guys) jump in the helicopter and travel across the world towards Alvarez’s location. It’s here I really get a sense of the scale of Ghost Recon Wildlands that’s hinted at by the trailers.
There’s a mountain in the distance, green fields between big dry stretches of land, and settlements dotted around. This looks as big as a Just Cause game, and based on my hands-on with Just Cause 3 last issue, it’s arguably a bit more detailed. But then that was an actual game I could play, which is coming out this year. Wildlands is in pre-alpha, and while this demo is being played live, it’s so ambitious in scale that I want to try it myself before getting carried away. That’s why I’m trying not to get too excited about the prospect of me and three pals dicking about in completely different parts of a giant open world simultaneously, then linking up to knock down missions when we fancy it. It almost seems too good to be true in a world this big.
Talking of Just Cause: one of the four players base-jumps out of the team’s helicopter and parachutes towards the ground. I’m beginning to see how freedom of approach has so much potential in Wildlands. Missions aren’t about the choice between two weapons, it’s entirely about picking your angle, location and strategy. One player can set themselves up as a sniper, marking targets for all to see while the others plan their own approach to the mission. The demo conveys a good sense of decision making and proper teamwork. I can already tell I’d want to be able to pick my weapon types according to the strengths and weaknesses of the rest of the team.
The difficulty is something I wonder about. For me, Ghost Recon always sat in the midpoint between a game like Call of Duty and Arma, having some of the former’s bombast but enough difficulty that it was rarely wise to charge in guns blazing. That seems to be the case here, too, even with all the parachuting.
“Sometimes you’re going to get yourself into a situation you didn’t predict at all, and we don’t necessarily want to aggressively punish the player for that,” Butler says. “But definitely, they’re going to feel the consequence of their actions. So rather than have a hard block of, ‘you did it wrong,’ it’s more like, here’s a system reacting to that, and you’ve got to change your plan to continue to your goal.”
WEAPONS FREEI noticed XP racking up in the corner of the screen, so expect progression to play a big part in Wildlands. Ubi won’t be drawn into talking about that yet. “At this stage, all we can say is that choosing your tools and leveling up is clearly part of what [our] special forces do,” says senior producer Nouredine Abboud. He cites the gunsmith game mechanic from Ghost Recon Future Soldier as an example of how they’ve explored such things in the past.
When the raid kicks off, one of the ghosts takes Alvarez hostage, throws him into a trunk and drives off. It’s a pretty straightforward mission and a really tiny slice of a game in pre-alpha, but I can already see the potential in so many different systems linking up. There’s even a whiff of The Phantom Pain to it, in sandboxes where the time of day or approach dictates how things play out. With that to consider, along with the positioning of your character, which weapons you use and a selection of vehicles to choose from, it sounds like Wildlands wants to be a fully freeform shooter. Like I said earlier, it seems a bit too good to be true.
I’m encouraged by Butler’s explanation of the approach to mission structure—it’s exactly what I want Wildlands to be, maybe more of an open-world game than a military shooter. “It’s more than it’s an open approach—what we try to do is give the player a goal, a singular objective, that’s clear to them but open to interpretation as to how they want to achieve it. So rather than say ‘do A, B, C, D’, we just say ‘do A’. It’s up to you how you do it and we give them a wealth of options on how they do it.”Samuel Roberts
IT SOUNDS LIKE WILDLANDS WANTS TO BE A FULLY FREEFORM SHOOTER
A cactus, the symbol ofa diverse open world.
P R E V I E W
16 OCTOBER 2015
Look how absurdly pretty butimpossibly large it is.
You’d think the locals would burytheir garbage further away.
P R E V I E W
Ghost Recon Wildlands
OCTOBER 2015 17
P R E V I E W
Dams and bridges are often busted when discovered—repairing them is a priority.
Space elevators letyou elevate space.
Flying cars and drones ramp up as your city gets larger.
People in vacuum greenhouses shouldn’t throw stones.
18 OCTOBER 2015
You’re a corporate leader, managing cities on both Earth and the Moon. The game is ‘multi-session’: you gradually build cities all over the Earth and head to the Moon to build outposts. All resources—Moon- or Earth-based—can be traded between your cities, allowing them to specialize, as the new SimCity once promised. “This is the most believable game world we think we’ve created so far,” Dirk Riegert, creative director, tells me.
It certainly boasts a love of detail. There’s a rugged extremism to the seas rolling beneath the sharp-cragged mountains and the virgin plain, which comes as a welcome contrast to the soulless modernity of the steel-and-glass housing. The equatorial spaceport with its space elevator, the desalination plants like sea-surface turbines, and the flying cars, are all nostalgically Arthur C Clarke.
On the Moon, there’s another visual language, all realistic and low-g, like the 1970s Moon landings. The prefab bunkers are squat, small and always low. The great mining engines scraping away at the regolith for non-Earth minerals like helium-3, contrast with the glassed-in hydroponics facilities, where racks of glossy plants rotate in a misty hothouse.
Amid these structures are field generators to shield them from meteor impacts.
That last touch is a compromise between plausibility and playability that makes the hard-SF fan in me groan, but I understand. “We try to mix both aspects,” says Riegert, “but if we have to make a choice, it’s a game so gameplay comes first.” In a similar vein, road traffic is just art and has no effect on the economy, and the studio has split the essentials of Anno 2070. Street-based economies on Earth, influence-area-based on the Moon. “That was a message from the players after 2070; they said that this was the maximum complexity they could take.”
Many factories and utilities are expensive to build, but modular and cheap to expand—for example, by adding another robot-pressing line. They can also be improved by adding logistics support, robot workforce, or money-saving techniques—their layout is extremely flexible. By contrast, very large structures, like bridges or dams, can only be built in particular locations.
UNINCORPORATEDOther sections hinted at wider specialization: your company levels-up as your population increases, facing off against other companies and enabling you to
progress up a tech tree—which was a blank slate in the version I played. There were also two types of grayed-out maps visible on Earth that I wasn’t allowed to play. I’m guessing that these are either a different biome, quest-oriented maps with events, or reintroduce the combat currently conspicuous by its absence.
My only concern is the speed with which I completed the main city-building content. I had a single hands-on session lasting barely an hour, with an alpha build and a pile of resources. Within that, I managed to build cities on the Earth and the Moon at the highest level. Quests, limited resources and varied landscapes will extend the lifespan, as they did for Banished, as will your own quest for perfection, but it’s a little worrying.
The Anno model was rather archaic before it made 2070’s brave leap into the future. 2205’s timeline jump isn’t as big, but its new mechanics are promising. Dan Griliopoulos
P R E V I E W
Anno 2205
Anno 2205 follows directly on from the previous Anno game, 2070—a futuristic city-builder damned by its appalling uPlay implementation. The setting is
again the future, but after another leap forward, with the Moon once again within mankind’s grasp.
When medieval town-building turns into moon-mining
A N N O 2 2 0 5
“THIS IS THE MOST BELIEVABLE GAME WORLD WE THINK WE’VE CREATED SO FAR”
RELEASENovember 5
DEVELOPERUbisoft Blue Byte
PUBLISHERUbisoft
LINKwww.bit.ly/Anno2205Ubi
N E E D T O K N O W
P L A Y E D I T
Modular factories make expansion simple.
The Moon really needs a dust.
OCTOBER 2015 19
P R E V I E W
Egotistical Admiral Ackbar demands representation on Mount Rushmore.
Well, that’s one thing you can’t do in Battlefield.
Sadly, vehicles are floaty in more ways than one.
22 OCTOBER 2015
Survival mode is a singleplayer/co-op mode meant to supplement the larger multiplayer versus modes, and as straightforward a ‘horde’ mode as you can get. Series fans will be happy to know that AI enemies are back, though in the six-wave survival matches I played, they showed up in smaller groups of half a dozen or so at a time, not the map-filling droves that once covered older Battlefront multiplayer maps.
My co-op partner and I had to survive in a Tatooine canyon while waves of stormtroopers came at us. Each wave or two the game introduced new enemies, such as more heavily armed and armored troopers, sniper troops, jumpjet stormtroopers, and AT-STs. According to DICE, matches in the final survival mode will last for 15 rounds, which is good—even my first time playing the game, and being a poor shot with the controller, my co-op partner and I had no trouble blasting through six waves in ten minutes.
Survival is one of three one-or-two player modes; the others are Trials, which are more scripted and will recreate moments from the films, and Battles,
which pit you and a friend against the AI in larger-scale encounters.
DICE is building maps specifically for Survival mode—they’re not recycled from other modes or the larger multiplayer maps. That sounds great, but the canyon I fought in seemed surprisingly ill-suited. It was very large for such a limited mode: long enough to take a couple minutes to walk across, with significant verticality. This was fun to get around using Battlefront’s great jetpack (which gives you one short rocketboost into the air, not prolonged flying), but from what I played, there’s almost no strategy to Survival, and thus little reason to explore the map.
The size of the Hoth map in Walker Assault mode, on the other hand, feels appropriately sprawling. I got into a 40-player match, putting stormtrooper boots onto the snowy ground to escort an AT-AT towards the besieged rebel base, and it felt like Battlefront.
WALKING SIMULATORDamage adds up quickly, and I was surprised how many kills I got by haphazardly aiming at distant Rebel
troops, all controlled by other players, and holding down the trigger.
The Imperial’s objective in Walker Assault is to push forward to four sequential control nodes and take
them offline, letting the AT-AT cross the map and destroy its target. The Rebels can occasionally disable the AT-AT with an ion cannon, making it vulnerable to damage. The biggest difference from classic Battlefront is how support vehicles are spawned. Instead of simply sitting on the map, they’re activated by scattered power-ups, which only appear to the side they belong to. Some allow the Imperials to spawn in a TIE fighter or AT-ST, others provide smaller upgrades. Flying the TIE fighter unfortunately felt about as floaty as the shooting controls, but I’m hopeful that this, too, will be better on PC with a flight stick or a mouse.
It mostly feels like the same old Battlefront, and I did enjoy my time on Hoth. But Battlefront’s charm was in its goofiness and the way it pulled in expanded universe material. Without that silliness, the simplicity of the new game ends up feeling a bit shallow.Wes Fenlon
P R E V I E W
Star Wars Battlefront
Thirty seconds into survival mode, I was yearning for a mouse. Here I was, finally playing Battlefront after a couple of years of waiting, and it just felt... floaty.
Imprecise. Trying Battlefront on a PS4 at E3, I couldn’t help feeling a tinge of disappointment at controls that felt weightless and detached from the physicality of my character.
Hands-on with this surprisingly simple large-scale shooter
S T A R W A R S B A T T L E F R O N T
THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE FROM CLASSIC BATTLEFRONT IS HOW THE VEHICLES ARE SPAWNED
RELEASENovember 2015
DEVELOPEREA Digital Illusions
PUBLISHEREA
LINKwww.starwars.ea.com/starwars
N E E D T O K N O W
P L A Y E D I T
Daniel Craig sneaks-in another cameo.
OCTOBER 2015 23
Icompleted Mirror’s Edge four times, so I know the game stupidly well—and Catalyst feels almost exactly like the Mirror’s Edge of 2008. The platforming
seems identical, and my muscle memory and sense of timing from the first game served me well during my first hands-on at E3.
RELEASESpring 2016
PUBLISHEREA
DEVELOPERDICE
LINKwww.mirrorsedge.com
N E E D T O K N O W
P L A Y E D I T
M I R R O R ’ S E D G E C A T A L Y S TIt’s not quite a sequel, not quite a prequel—so what is it?
I guess I won’t be needing those ‘Faith no more’ puns any more.
My demo took place in a tiny snippet of what is apparently a seamless open world. It consisted of a series of rooftops and three tasks to perform: a speed run, a chain of combat encounters, and a challenge to climb to a high point. The run was standard Mirror’s Edge and the climb encouraged me to be more methodical, but what this boxed-off 13-minute demo couldn’t do was outline how open-world play will work. The whole thing honestly felt like it could have been a level from the first game.
The combat was a little too simple for my tastes, but might suit players who found the original too challenging. Attacks are now mapped to the X button on an Xbox controller, rather than the trigger, and as long as you press it at vaguely the right time, Faith will quickly take an enemy out, sometimes with a lovely third-person finishing animation. There are no guns this time around.
Despite my reservations, it’s a treat to know there’s a Mirror’s Edge coming in 2016 where all the best things about the original are intact. For all its faults, that first game’s ideas were well worth a second visit. Samuel Roberts
24 OCTOBER 2015
P R E V I E W
The details of the latest Company of Heroes 2 expansion pack are all beginning to sound more than a little familiar. New commanders, new units,
new strategies, eight new maps. Everything you’d expect from an expansion. So what does The British Forces bring that’s different? Regional accents? Lots of mention of Winston Churchill? It has those things. But it also amounts to more Company of Heroes 2, and that’s good news.
of damage was very welcome. I forgot, however, about dealing damage. My team lost all three matches.
Even so, I’ve already found a lot to like about The British Forces. A new selection of commanders opens up more tactical approaches (including strengthening your ground troops, which I probably should have done). And there’s the undeniable joy of unlocking your best tank and watching it roll onto the battlefield, unaware of just how quickly it’s going to explode because you forgot to cover your flanks and oh god it’s another Tiger on the horizon.
It’s testament to my—admittedly brief—time with the game that I came away from The British Forces wanting more. I’m already a fan of Company of Heroes 2, which helps, and more of that
good RTS stuff is always welcome. Even if your forces are getting pounded, the enemy commander has called in a victory flourish of artillery and your lone sniper died because you didn’t pay attention to where he was going, I still came away wanting more. It’s just so damn exciting.
STAND ALONEThe British Forces will be another standalone, multiplayer-only expansion to Company of Heroes 2, meaning you won’t have to have bought anything else from the game to play it. You’ll also be welcome to battle online against players using other, existing factions and armies on maps you don’t actually own—though you won’t be able to specifically choose them. Frankly, I wish Relic would just hurry up and make the whole thing a modular free-to-play ‘service’, because that’s the way it’s oh-so-slowly heading. The framework is solid, it’s just waiting for someone to pull the trigger. For now, though, we’ll get by with what’s shaping up to be another great expansion for an RTS of ever-increasing appeal.Ian Dransfield
UNLOCK YOUR BEST TANK AND WATCH IT ROLL ONTO THE BATTLEFIELD
RELEASESeptember 3
DEVELOPERRelic Entertainment
PUBLISHERSega
LINKwww.companyofheroes.com
N E E D T O K N O W
P L A Y E D I T
And yes, it does include the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish
C O M P A N Y O F H E R O E S 2 : T H E B R I T I S H F O R C E S
German tanks and British tanks just don’t get on.
26 OCTOBER 2015
P R E V I E W
Company of Heroes 2: The British Forces
I played three hour-long, four-on-four multiplayer matches pitting the Brits against the Axis forces. It was more than enough to get a handle on what makes the new forces stand out—namely how damn resilient the troops are when they’re in cover. While the Germans were relying on their array of tanks and other such high-impact war machines, I was happy to keep things simpler, smaller, and nimbler. Being able to soak up a surprising amount
32 OCTOBER 2015
Praise the sun.I got to see half an hour of Dark Souls
III in a small demo room at E3, with Miyazaki himself walking us through it. The world I saw, featuring a towering gothic castle reminiscent of Anor Londo, captured the same majestic, eerie ambiance of the first two games. The difference is scale. The castle is huge and clearly rendered in 3D, despite its distance.
The general scale of the environment feels grander and more imposing, and there’s a noticeable chunkiness to the graphics. Dark Souls has always created a feeling of isolation and vulnerability as you traverse it alone, and I think that sensation will be heightened by taller structures and more geometry in Dark Souls III. From the bits and pieces I’ve seen of Bloodborne on the PS4, the size of the environments here will feel similar, but with Dark Souls’ art style intact. One genuinely breathtaking moment came near the very end, when the player finally drew close to the castle, and it absolutely towered above him,
ethereal light cascading into the courtyard where he stood. A couple of people in the audience ooohed softly.
HERE BE DRAGONSDark Souls III will have deeper ties to its predecessors than just its art style. The story, what little bits Miyazaki would disclose, concerns the Lords of Cinder. There are dragons, and Miyazaki hinted that Dark Souls III may take place before the first games. Series mainstays such as Estus flasks, bonfires, imposing knight enemies, jump attacks, greatswords and dual-wielding weapons are all returning.
Miyazaki talked about refining movement and combat for the sequel. Movement will be “more intuitive,” and it’s definitely faster overall, if not as fast as Bloodborne. Miyazaki showed this off with a revamped shortbow, which could be fired while strafing around an enemy. It looked fast and fun to wield, and I can see bows being a much bigger deal for Dex players in Dark Souls III.
Weapons will have unique two-handed abilities called Weapon Arts. The longsword, for example, has a ‘ready’
position where the shield is put away and two special attacks can be triggered that break blocking stances. Greatswords have an upward strike that can launch
enemies into the air. Dual wielded scimitars have a whirlwind attack that can hit multiple enemies. Miyazaki’s goal of deepening the game also includes expanding the roleplaying experience with a wider variety of viable character builds.
The character models were definitely more detailed, with the same twisted, creative monster design we’ve come to expect. The boss at the end of the area, called Dancer of the Frigid Valley, was everything I expected from a Dark Souls boss. It was large, dwarfing the player character, but thin, all hunched over and gangly limbs, a twisted death bride with a flowing translucent veil whisking along behind. And very large swords.
From what I saw, Dark Souls III has no intention of reinventing the series, but with Miyazaki calling the big shots, it seems to be in good hands, expanding in scale and refining the combat and movement. I think that’s all most fans would ask for.Wes Fenlon
Dark Souls 3 gave me emotional whiplash at this year’s E3. First, anticipation: its existence was leaked, and I wondered if it could be real, so soon after Dark Souls
2. Then, celebration: it was real, and coming to PC! Then, apprehension: Dark Souls 2 was great, but lacked that certain something director Hidetaka Miyazaki brought to the first game. At last, Miyazaki stated that he was co-directing the game, with a hand in worldbuilding and level design.
Miyazaki returns for Dark Souls’ grand finale
D A R K S O U L S I I I
A TWISTED DEATH BRIDE WITH A FLOWING TRANSLUCENT VEIL WHISKING ALONG BEHIND
RELEASE2016
DEVELOPERFromSoftware
PUBLISHERBandai Namco
LINKwww.darksouls3.com
N E E D T O K N O W
F I R S T L O O K
More Souls lore forfanatics to dig into.
P R E V I E W
OCTOBER 33
A fire, a sad dude in armor– looks pretty Dark Souls.
In case you worried it was looking too normal.
The return of a series that people will obsess over for lifetimes.
P R E V I E W
This is pretty much the 2D Dark Souls you’ve always wanted
At E3 I stepped into a caravan and tried out Eitr, a very cool-looking 2D dungeon crawler inspired by Dark Souls and a disparate range of sources such as Zelda,
Golden Axe, Diablo and the excellent console-only brawler Fight Night Round 4. Like Dark Souls, you carry a flask that replenishes your health, and between tricky fights with enemies in dank environments you sit at fires, but it’s much more than an indie copycat—I loved my first hands-on session and can’t wait to play more.Samuel Roberts
RELEASE2016
PUBLISHERDevolver Digital
DEVELOPEREneme Entertainment
LINKwww.eitrthegame.com
N E E D T O K N O W
P L A Y E D I TE I T R
N I N E R E A L M SEach of the nine levels is
inspired by a different realm from Norse mythology,
conveniently granting the developers access to fire and ice
worlds, as well as giants from Jotunheim. Even dank worlds
look gorgeous with this high-end pixel art.
T H E S H I E L D M A I D E N
Eitr’s redheaded heroine was, according to the team at
Eneme Entertainment, inspired by the shieldmaiden Lagertha
Lothbrok from the TV show Vikings. She carries a range of weapons, such as bows, swords and axes,
which grant her randomly generated new skills when
she finds them.
34 OCTOBER 2015
P R E V I E W
B A C K O F F !
As in Dark Souls, defending with your shield and dodging is
key to survival against opponents—you take damage even
when defending. This particular baddy was the boss of my demo, and memorizing his animations
was the key to defeating him.
A R E A A T T A C K S
This particular beast activates a succession of
area attacks that you have to dodge at specific moments, or
risk taking heavy damage. When I figured this out, I
battered his ass to death.
OCTOBER 2015 35
P R E V I E W
EITR
F E A T U R E
XCOM 2
C O V E R F E A T U R E
XCOM 2
By Samuel Roberts
XCOM 2 envisions a dystopia where humanity lost the war.
38 OCTOBER 2015
C O V E R F E A T U R E
XCOM 2
39
n Enemy Unknown, the alien invaders were on your turf. In XCOM 2, you’re on theirs. That significantly changes the pace and dynamic of the game. In the demo Firaxis shows me, I see civilians crowded behind
barriers, futuristic police cars right out of the Total Recall remake, armored fascist twats known as Advent and floating holographic billboards. The aliens control everything. In XCOM 2’s world, you lost the war against the extraterrestrial invaders of Enemy Unknown, and this is not your planet any more. You must take it back.
“We began the process of defining XCOM 2 by looking at how players responded to XCOM: Enemy Unknown,” creative director Jake Solomon tells me. “By asking: what did they enjoy? What didn’t they like and how can we make it better? What was our community requesting? How do we renew and refresh that sense of struggle and triumph?”
Solomon and the team took inspiration for XCOM 2’s bleak premise from the way people actually played Enemy Unknown the first time through: badly, which I can empathize with. “We realized that most players lost their initial playthrough of
Enemy Unknown, and we realized there was an interesting and unique opportunity to have XCOM 2 begin with XCOM losing the invasion.”
I think XCOM 2 is the Enemy Unknown sequel fans want. It’s been developed to expand your strategic arsenal and to mitigate the repetition of level design of the original, the latter being one of my few major issues with Firaxis’ first attempt at the series. After a while in EU, no matter where you were going in the world to fight the alien horde, you knew the layout. One of the biggest changes to XCOM 2 is that levels are now procedurally generated—but don’t confuse this with the levels being randomized. Firaxis tried that and it didn’t quite work. Instead, levels are procedurally generated in a way that is designed to feel somewhat handcrafted to the player.
MAP HAPPY“We had to figure out a lot of new systems to make the procedural maps work,” senior producer Garth DeAngelis says. “It was actually a very different pipeline and system than we had in Enemy Unknown, because it was completely handcrafted. So we found best practices for how you make the number of buildings work relative to open spaces, relative to the number of height-based parcels we want to work on (parcels being an element of the procedural map system). So all of that we sort of had to build from the
ground up. We could take elements from what we learned from Enemy Unknown because we
didn’t want it to be completely procedural, because random turned out to be not too
XCOM 2
C O V E R F E A T U R E
fun. So we still had hand-placed moments—it’s a great-looking map, but you get the value of: ‘I haven’t seen this before’, which is really, really powerful. Unlike EU, where we had a lot of maps but we started hearing feedback of ‘it’s the museum map again. I’ve done this before’. You’re not going to have that feeling on XCOM 2.”
Solomon sheds some light on how it works. “When you head into a mission, the game rolls the dice and places the appropriate modules on the parcel. You might be able to recognize something like an Advent checkpoint, but that won’t give you any insight into what lies beyond that.”
LEVEL UNKNOWNMost of the decisions made from the outset for XCOM 2 were intended to support a more replayable game—levels that are impossible to predict certainly encourage replays, and inspiration for that came from another part of the Firaxis office. “We wanted to refine that fundamental experience of Enemy Unknown, and give it the replayability of a game like Civilization,” Solomon explains. “Players told us they wanted more maps, and we wanted to provide a procedural map system this time around. We wanted higher-fidelity characters. We wanted better-looking destruction. And we really wanted to have better modding support for the game from the outset.”
Concealment is probably the biggest change—it puts the start of the fight in the player’s hands, letting you stealthily line up your squad’s positions at the beginning of each mission before pulling the trigger. You can quietly line up your characters in overwatch, so when the enemy prepares to retaliate, your whole team can open fire on any enemies in range.
“Combat’s still turn based, move-and-action style like the Enemy Unknown,” says Solomon. “But now
that the levels are built procedurally, you can’t predict where the enemies will appear. There are going to be patrols, and they’re going try and figure out the level, just like you are. But now we have concealment, which means until you enter into enemy visual range, or attack, the enemies aren’t going to know you’re there. This gives the player control over how the fight’s going to start.”
“As soon as you load into that map, you see your guys are completely concealed,” says DeAngelis. “They’re speaking in hushed tones, there’s this really cool ambient music, and it allows the player mechanically to set up an ambush how they want to before they engage completely. Once you fire a shot it becomes classic XCOM combat.”
You have two new classes at your disposal: the ranger, an extension of the assault class from Enemy Unknown, and the specialist, both of which the demo
T H E N E W G E N E R A T I O N Inspired by XCOM (or X-Com)
X E N O N A U T SInspired by the earlier X-Com
games, and well worth your time.
D E A D S T A T EThis zombie survival RPG’s
combat has shades of XCOM.
T H E B A N N E R S A G AA turn-based RPG from ex-BioWare veterans.
I N V I S I B L E , I N C .Klei’s turn-based strategy game
is immaculately designed.
T H E B U R E A U : X C O M D E C L A S S I F I E DThis weak spin-off turned XCOM into a trite shooter.
Berserkers lose their Saturday morning cartoon
villain look and get real ugly.
T U R R E THacking these automated turrets lets you shut them down or even use them to attack XCOM’s foes.
C O V E R F E A T U R E
does a good job of showing off. The former carries a blade that can be used to easily cut down the vipers, XCOM 2’s deadly snake-like alien enemies who can pull your guys out of cover with their tongues before constricting them to death. The specialist, meanwhile, has a drone-like device called the Gremlin that can be used to remotely hack turrets. Every soldier can hack, but the specialist is the only class that can improve their hacking ability. In the demo, there are three hacking options for the turret: disable, control and improved control, the latter two of which will make the gun open fire on nearby enemies. The Gremlin has its own ability tree, and while it’s treated as a separate flying unit, movement with it still uses up the specialist’s turn. “Those two classes are very innate with the resistance theme as well,” DeAngelis says.
But don’t expect any of your MECs from Enemy Within to carry across, either. In XCOM 2’s canon, that expansion simply didn’t happen, according to DeAngelis. “You lost within the first third of [Enemy
Unknown]. So MECs, gene mods, all that stuff—we wanted a clean slate with that.”
SNAKE MILKThe aliens have certainly stepped up the threat level since EU. The viper is a giant python with seemingly human breasts—an image that, to be honest, I was happy to live my life without. Returning foes are
nastier. XCOM’s melee heavies the berserkers are much closer to scary sci-fi trolls than the slightly Power Rangers-ish look they had in the first game. If they get close enough, you’re done for. I see
the berserker in this demo smash a squad member out of the way and into a vehicle. “Super deadly, the deadliest melee move in the game—you want to stay away from them,” DeAngelis says.
It’s escorted by two tall white mechs that look similar to the geth in Mass Effect. “The berserker was accompanied by Advent MECs, which are also heavy firepower—they don’t need to take cover, they have
It’s an image that, to be honest, I was happy to
live my life without
In the open air, facing a berserker. It doesn’t
look good for this guy.
The variety of locations in XCOM 2 will exceed the limited amount players saw in Enemy Unknown. Here’s what you can expect.
OCTOBER 2015 41
XCOM 2
more you can do, there’s so many more knobs you can turn now that feed into the resistance theme,” says DeAngelis. “You can change their gender now if you want, set their nationality—all of that stuff that you couldn’t do in Enemy Unknown gives even more agency to the player.” When you pick a nationality, the game will autoselect a matching voice, but you can still change it if you want. That personalization was fundamental to Enemy Unknown and remains so here. Your best friends, family members and pets will still
die, only now they can perish with an accent of your choosing.
“The most important aspect of XCOM is that it’s about playing catch-up, that it’s not a power fantasy, and that you’re always just ahead
of disaster,” Solomon says. “XCOM’s a game about loss and managing that loss. So any story you build into XCOM has to have this as its basis. Given the arc of an XCOM game, it made perfect sense to have XCOM 2 have XCOM as a resistance movement.”
At the time of writing, Firaxis isn’t talking base management, which has XCOM on the run in a giant aircraft called the Avenger. I fear the studio is going to spend most of the next few months making it clear that this enormous airship is a reference to the troop transport from UFO: Enemy Unknown, as opposed to a ship in the sky where Nick Fury lives.
In theory, Firaxis is making a game we can
play forever
Living on a skybase is an excellent excuse to wear cool sunglasses.
42 OCTOBER 2015
C O V E R F E A T U R E
XCOM 2
a micromissile ability where they can take out any units that are clumped together in an area of effect.” Sectoids, XCOM’s greys, return in a more advanced form, too. “We wanted the aliens to feel deadly in XCOM 2—they’ve evolved in the 20 years and have put the Advent in place as cannon fodder, because they’re doing a lot of nefarious things behind the scenes. So when you come across them it’s very hard, and you need to use group tactics to take them down.”
More variety in enemy attacks makes combat less predictable, which forces you to react on the spot at a greater frequency than you did in EU. Presentation is generally more ambitious. The goal in the demo is to have one of your guys blow up a gold statue of an alien and human holding hands—a piece of Advent propaganda. When the explosive is detonated by your crew, a mini cutscene plays in-game where it crumbles dramatically before the action resumes. It feels a lot more considered than Enemy Unknown.
This effect is heightened by the back-and-forth dialogue between your player-created characters, where they now seem to chat during every move. In the demo it almost feels like traditionally scripted dialogue, but you can pick the nationalities and even the accents from a whole range. “There’s so much
C O V E R F E A T U R E
XCOM 2
This change from EU’s underground base brings up a few questions. As PCG’s Tom Senior points out to me, it’s not like a skybase has hidden thermal vents or decks you didn’t know were there—so expect some changes to the way base management works, or at least in the way it’s presented. “You can imagine, with the resistance theme, is that we want you to feel like you’re on the run,” says DeAngelis. “We really want you to feel like you’re sparking a resistance, so design has been hard at work thinking of ways to get the mechanics to support that.”
WE ARE THE MODSI think the PC exclusivity of XCOM 2 was necessary for this entry. In announcing it, Firaxis led with a pro-modding sentiment, while underlining the fact that it has always been synonymous with PC. I ask Solomon about why they went PC-only after EU arrived on consoles and even tablets in a respectable form. “PC gaming is in a golden age. It’s the tip of the spear in terms of innovation, in types of gameplay being explored, in relationships between developers and their audience, and for Firaxis, it’s our home. It’s where we want to be.”
The modding potential of XCOM 2 is as rich as anyone could ask for. Again, Civ provided a point of inspiration to Solomon and his team. “We’re lucky that our studio has had a wonderful and long-standing mod community for Civilization, and even EU, which had limited modding support, got fantastic work from very dedicated guys like the Long War
team. Modding is one of those elements that brings people together in the community through their own creative expression of the franchise, and this and helps our game live on over time.”
DeAngelis goes in depth on the tools that will be available to players. “I can tell you a lot of effort has gone in, across the engineering front, [to make sure] that everything can be modded. Obviously we have Unreal Engine 3. We have a modified version of that—so the editor is going to be released. You can either do total conversions, or partial gameplay edits with our gameplay source that we’re going to be providing as well. So if you just want to edit units and stats that’s going to be easy to do if you have the knowledge to do so in the scripts. It’s one of our core pillars in XCOM 2 that we felt like we were short on in Enemy Unknown—that we want to get right.”
It’s not like EU had a ton of room for improvement. My reaction, as DeAngelis explains how procedurally generated levels eliminate repetition, how mods can expand the life of XCOM 2 indefinitely, and how exciting the new tactical options are, is that Firaxis is making the XCOM sequel that fulfills every fan’s wishlist. I can’t think of anything else I’d ask for. In theory, Firaxis is making an XCOM game that we can play forever. “Between the procedural maps, between the procedural objectives, the way more enemies and abilities that you’re gonna see, I think that’s right,” DeAngelis agrees. “That’s ultimately what we want to accomplish. We want fans to play much, much longer.”
M E C M A R K 2Taller than your units, XCOM 2’s robotic enemies are fearsome creations.
3 A D V E N T C L O W N SHuman puppet forces for the aliens and your
basic cannon fodder. Sinister and annoying it’s true, but not too much trouble for you.
W H A C K I N G D A Y What’s going on in this XCOM 2 battle?
4 C A R O F T H E F U T U R EThe future! Forget contemporary suburbia,
XCOM 2’s backdrop is a stylish futuristic sci-fi world. Can’t wait to see more of it.
1 T H E V I P E R P I TThis snake asshole killed one of your team,
and can use a turn to drag another out of cover, exposing them to gunfire and her crush attack.
2 R A N G E R D A N G E RThis is your ranger, one of XCOM 2’s new
classes, and she just sliced that blade through the viper to avenge your fallen comrade.
24
3
1
OCTOBER 2015 43
100GREATEST
GAMES The
highlights of three decades of
gaming on the PC.
M E E T T H E T E A M
Jordan Erica WebberFreelancer
Tim ClarkGlobal editor-in-chief
Chris LivingstonStaff writer
Tom MarksAssistant editor
Dan GriliopoulosFreelancer
Tony EllisProduction editor
John StrikeArt editor
Evan LahtiEditor-in-chief
Tyler WildeExecutive editor
Wes FenlonHardware editor
Samuel RobertsEditor
Chris ThurstenDeputy editor
Andy KellySection editor
Tom SeniorWeb editor
Phil SavageNews editor
TOP
The
AND: Shaun Prescott, AU Editor Richard Cobbett, Freelancer Jody Macgregor, Freelancer Ian Birnbaum, Freelancer Omri Petitte, Freelancer
44 OCTOBER 2015
OCTOBER 2015 45
Chris T: In almost all of the great competitive shooters, movement is just as essential as aim. This is why Tribes II remains such an important game to me: it combined exciting spinfusor rocket-duels with an unequalled sense of momentum. It’s hard to go back to plodding around Call of Duty after skiing down a sci-fi mountain at 250km/h. The series’ persistent commercial failure is almost a badge of honor. Tribes was only ever going to play to a small, dedicated crowd, but that’s pretty much what ‘special’ means.100
TRIBES IIRELEASED March 2001 | LAST POSITION Re-entry
MIRROR’S EDGERELEASED November 2008 | LAST POSITION 33
Samuel: A unique, arty first-person platformer from a studio renowned for shootymen series, Mirror’s Edge makes parkour traversal and jumping feel convincing in a gorgeously stark dystopia. It’s a divisive game, sure, and the combat is particularly contentious—but a game this original with these production values is well worth celebrating.
97
THE STANLEY PARABLERELEASED October 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry
Phil: A game about games; a story about stories. That sounds unbearable, but The Stanley Parable is a wonderfully funny exploration of choice and consequence. As you walk through the halls of a deserted office building, a narrator vocalizes your next steps. Do you follow, or rebel against the story? Whatever you choose, hilarity follows.
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SPIDER AND WEBRELEASED February 1998 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tony: Every time you screw up your infiltration mission in this deceptive text adventure, you wake up back in the chair. “No,” the Interrogator says, “that’s not how we caught you. Try again.” And you’re whirled away into another flashback. In spinning the story of your capture and downfall, can you somehow turn it into a story where you win?
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SAM & MAX: HIT THE ROADRELEASED November 1993 | LAST POSITION Re-entry
Chris L: Ridiculous puzzles, oddball characters, and a disturbingly accurate portrayal of roadside America feature in this 2D LucasArts adventure. Two freelance cops, one a wry dog in a suit and the other a violent, naked rabbity thing, investigate the mystery of a missing bigfoot. Includes country music and the destruction of the west coast.
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very year, the international PC Gamer team puts its heads together to hash out a list of the hundred PC games you need to play. This year, we’re stressing ‘play’. With a handful of exceptions, every game on the list is one that you can access and enjoy today. Where that’s not the case, it’s because that game is special and we feel you should know about it anyway. The hope is that you’ll read through this list and discover a classic that you’d never otherwise have played.
Our selection process is democratic and subjective. Every member of the jury put forward their personal top 15 games of all time, and those lists were combined to produce our longlist. Finally, one person each from the UK and US teams entered a room (well, a Skype call), went through the entire thing, and emerged with a final list that we’re proud of.
Enjoy.
F E A T U R E
46 OCTOBER 2015
95LEFT 4 DEAD 2RELEASED November 2009 | LAST POSITION 52
Evan: I can point to a dozen little features I love about Left 4 Dead 2. The toylike guns. The way its gushy gore tech preserves the act of splitting open basic Infected. The absurd rock stage finale (complete with pyrotechnic weapons) at the end of Dark Carnival. Ellis. Among all of the stuff that forms L4D2’s identity, its structure is one of the most underappreciated.
Whatever map you’re on, whatever your skill level, almost every L4D2 match produces a narrative with a seamless but clear beginning, middle, and an end. Usually it’s a series of highs and lows: “Just as we found a grenade launcher Coach got pulled out the window by a Smoke. But then Rochelle threw a Molotov and we barely made it to the elevator!”
94GONE HOMERELEASED August 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tyler: You return from a college trip to a storm and an empty house. Your family is missing and the phones are out, so you poke around their stuff—books, notes, diary entries, secrets—to discover what’s been going on in the past year. It’s an eerie, emotional puzzle that happens in your head, where experience and empathy piece together a thoughtful coming-of-age story.Chris T: Gone Home proves that a challenge doesn’t need to be something that registers on the screen. There are no threats or countdowns. This is a meditative game, as much about your attention to detail and ability to interpret information as anything else—but it is definitely, nonetheless, a game.
PLANTS VS. ZOMBIESRELEASED May 2009 | LAST POSITION New entry
Wes: Plants vs. Zombies didn’t invent tower defense, but it eased players into a complex strategy game with a gradual difficulty curve and irresistibly cute characters. At once casual and addictive, it remains the only place you can find an anthropomorphized watermelon catapulting its own fruit at a moonwalking Michael Jackson zombie.
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COMMAND & CONQUER: RED ALERT 2RELEASED October 2000 | LAST POSITION New entry
John: In contrast to Tiberian Sun’s seriousness, Red Alert 2 ramps up the silliness while offering a ton of fab new features. Garrison huge civilian landmarks with infantry units and cast sizzling great thunderstorms over enemy bases. Then sit back, relax, and watch the laughably low-budget cutscenes.
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HOTLINE MIAMIRELEASED October 2012 | LAST POSITION 53
Tim: It’s testament to the brutal efficiency of this first game that it only took a few tweaks to the formula for the sequel to feel bloated and substantially less fun. Still, the splattercore joys of the original remain undimmed. Stab, slam and blast your way through gaudy floorplans. Die, rinse (the blood out) and repeat. The very rawest of feedback loops.
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FREESPACE 2RELEASED September 1999 | LAST POSITION 96
Tyler: One of the best space combat games ever. The graphics are dated (that’s what mods are for) and the tutorial is a bit painful (“don’t touch the controls until you are told to do so”), but beyond that it’s a perfect mix of simulation and arcade, with a great story. For the longest time, FreeSpace 2 kept the glory of the space sim genre alive all on its own.
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Tom S: In turn-based strategy games the story is normally entirely of your own making, but Alpha Centauri strikes a magic balance that allows your faction’s tale to unfold in parallel with the awakening of the planet. It’s also remarkably atmospheric, thanks to some excellent writing and consistent visual design. From the UI to dialogue and even tech descriptions, there’s a hard sci-fi credibility most strategy games lack. Even now, my negotiations with Chairman Yang and Lady Gaia, are lodged in my imagination.93
ALPHA CENTAURIRELEASED February 1999 | LAST POSITION 23
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P E R S O N A L P I C K SSENSIBLE SOCCERRELEASED July 1992 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tim: Whatever new whizzbangery EA’s trillion-strong FIFA team comes up with, for sheer ‘GET IN YOU BASTARD!’ thrills they will never surpass scoring from halfway with an aftertouch-enabled shot that looked more like a parabolic curve than anything an actual soccer ball might do. Such is/was the joy of Sensible Soccer, the top-down, bobble-headed masterpiece that ate lives in the mid-’90s. It’s considered an Amiga and ST icon, but I came to it on PC, where I wasted months trying to build the dynastic success on Tyneside that cruelly eluded Kevin Keegan.
88TERRARIARELEASED May 2011 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tom M: A crafting/mining game similar to a 2D version of Minecraft, Terraria puts an extra emphasis on combat with magical weapons, hundreds of different types of enemies, and dozens of large bosses. You could put hundreds of hours into it, and still find something new to do the next time you play. It’s also been updated a huge amount: even if Re-Logic never patched Terraria again, it would have still added more to its game than most developers offer through DLC packs and season passes. Shaun: A lot of people write it off as Minecraft 2D, but in practice it’s a very different beast—especially if you harbor a lifelong preference for sidescrolling platformers. Spend a couple of hours and it’s nothing but a rote, grindy 2D survival game, but persevere and it becomes an obsession. If I had this game as a kid I’d have never learnt to read and write, but I bet I could dig a pretty mean hole.Tom S: Every dawn there’s a chance a goblin army will invade the surface world. Deep underground, chests hide items that let you summon huge flying eyeballs, or the feared Wall of Flesh. Terraria is secretly a horror game, and even better enjoyed with friends.
FAR CRY 4RELEASED November 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tony: You tool around a massive open world, shooting bad guys and liberating armed camps singlehanded. But it’s the fabulous, faux-Kashmir setting that nails it: not just one of the most beautiful game worlds we’ve ever seen, but one of the most vivid, so richly detailed you can almost smell the incense at the roadside shrines. Andy: For my money, the best Far Cry setting. The sheer verticality of Kyrat, and the ability to buzz through its mountain passes and across its rivers in a gyrocopter, makes it one of the most exciting playgrounds on PC. It’s still stuffed with too much open-world filler, mind.
EURO TRUCK SIMULATOR 2RELEASED October 2012 | LAST POSITION New entry
Phil: You’re a truck driver. Your job is to take multiple tonnes of wood shavings, or other utilitarian goods, to some grim industrial city somewhere in Europe. It’s a game of endless motorways, fuel management and speeding fines. It’s also the most compelling simulator it’s possible to play. ETS2 is plain, functional and yet strangely charming.Andy: It’s unironically brilliant, but you won’t realize this until you play it. I installed it mainly just to laugh at it, but 40 hours later I count it among my favorite games of all time. It’s a bizarrely peaceful experience.
BATTLEFIELD 3RELEASED October 2011 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tom S: CoD is famous for its set-pieces, but Battlefield 3 generates those war movie moments in unscripted multiplayer warzones. It was competitive enough to inspire our John Strike to run a clan for years, but forgiving enough to let irregular players enjoy the spectacle. I spent hours breaking down choke points in Rush, gasping at the outstanding sound design.
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Samuel Roberts
S P EC O P S T H E L I N E
This adaptation of Heart of Darkness is a shooter that dares to make murder into a rote, exhausting activity, to underline a wider point about the effect of war on
soldiers. It is half-successful in doing that. The choice of Dubai as an
escalating warzone and the unsettling sense of moral ambiguity made Spec Ops memorably bleak, and also rendered the likes of CoD
worthless to me by comparison.
Tim Clark
H E R S T O R YHaving grown up on police
procedurals like Prime Suspect and Inspector
Morse, the genre’s almost total absence in games has long been frustrating. Her
Story’s trawl through chopped up interviews with a single suspect scratches that itch in a particularly
British way. It’s more than just a didshedoit—by the time you’re done with the
files, it feels less about the crime and more about how you feel about this person. There’s nothing else quite
like Her Story.
F E A T U R E
DON’T STARVERELEASED April 2013 | LAST POSITION 77
Tim: Wake up in the wilderness. Scratch together enough rocks and twigs to build a rudimentary camp. Forage for veg and trap rabbits. Get eaten by dogs. Start again. Build a bigger camp. Freeze to death. Miscalculate firewood and die to an unseen monster in the night. Don’t Starve is Tim Burton does Walkabout. It is repetitious, adorable, maddening, funny and—unlike so many of the current survival games—a joy to be in at all times. Eventually you gain a sense of control over what once seemed an impossibly punishing world, which is when complacency kicks in and a dumb mistake kills you anyway.
83PSYCHONAUTSRELEASED April 2005 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tom M: A fantastically weird platformer with sharp writing and a sharper sense of humor. Everyone who’s played Psychonauts has their favorite level. It may be hard to choose just one when the quality of them all is so high, but there will be that one that sticks with you. Each level represents the personality of whichever character’s mind they take place in, and your favorite can say just as much about you as it does them. Stylized graphics have let Double Fine’s game age well, and the downright absurd amount of collectables can keep you playing for a very long time. Tom S: I still have nightmares about that rubbish meat circus level, but when every level in a platformer adopts a different dreamlike context, you’re always going to get the occasional duff idea. Fortunately, the rest of Psychonauts’ settings are superb. The fluorescent Spanish streets of Black Velvetopia still look beautiful, and the warped paranoid suburbs of the Milkman Conspiracy are as funny and unnerving as ever. Even though the platforming is straightforward, Psychonauts’ vivid, imaginative world has rightly left fans clamoring for a follow-up game all these years later.
SAINTS ROW IVRELEASED August 2013 | LAST POSITION 57
Tom S: A parody of videogames in all their glorious stupidity, this completes the series’ remarkable transition from dull gray GTA clone to hilarious nonsense power trip. Look out for the great rocket sequence set to Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing. Also you have superpowers. And you’re the president of the United States. Just play it.Shaun: I sometimes boot up Saints Row IV just to jump around collecting things for an hour. Sometimes I spend long stretches of time burning down city avenues crushing every vehicle in my way. It also features the best use of ‘What Is Love’ by Haddaway in a videogame, ever.
CAVE STORY+RELEASED November 2011 | LAST POSITION 54
Wes: The original version of Cave Story, released for free in 2004, was a one-man labor of love by Japanese developer Daisuke ‘Pixel Amaya’. It was also an indie masterpiece that predated the indie scene in the west (and is still finding its feet in Japan), combining the exploration and secrets of Metroid with faster-paced action and a mysterious setting. The feel of the combat and movement is up there with the likes of Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Cave Story+ added remixed music, updated graphics and a new level, but is otherwise the same precisely tuned platformery.
DIABLO IIIRELEASED May 2015 | LAST POSITION 26
Tom S: Monsters in Diablo III explode with a unique, screen-shaking crunch that remains satisfying after hundreds of hours. The skill system, which lets you swap abilities in and out of your taskbar at will, is merely an enabling device that gives you exciting new ways to generate that crunch. Whirlwind axe crunch. Leap attack crunch. Meteor strike crunch.
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Chris Livingston
F U L L T H R O T T L EI’m still not sure how
LucasArts made a huge, gruff, imposing biker an endearing and bumbling
underdog, but they pulled it off in this 1995 2D
adventure. Ben, framed for murder, must solve
puzzles, deal with rival gangs, and prevent a
motorcycle company being turned into a minivan
manufacturer. It’s got great characters and voice
acting, and even some driving and combat. Most importantly, it lets you try to use wind-up bunnies to
stop a speeding truck.
Andy Kelly
L . A . N O I R EIt’s not as clever as thinks it
is, but this detective adventure from Rockstar is
a lavish, atmospheric period piece that recreates
1940s Los Angeles in stunning detail. The cases
are more linear than the game would have you
believe, but cracking them is still fun. From his lowly beginnings at the traffic desk, to chasing a serial
killer as a homicide detective, Phelps’ journey through the LAPD is full of gorgeous world-building,
interesting characters, and grisly crime scenes.
F E A T U R E
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48 OCTOBER 2015
NO ONE LIVES FOREVER 2RELEASED September 2002 | LAST POSITION 79
Chris T: Imagine Deus Ex, set in the ’60s, with a brilliant sense of humor and powerful female lead. Imagine comedy spy gadgets that were also great fun to use. Then consider that there are two of these games, that the last one was released thirteen years ago, and there’s no sign that they’re coming back. Then bellow at the sky, helplessly.
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HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC IIIRELEASED February 1999 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tom M: A classic strategy game that still stands tall 16 years later—in no small part thanks to modders, who’ve helped the original outshine even a recent HD remake. Heroes of Might and Magic III sports a heady mix of RPG and strategy, putting you in charge of both leveling-up powerful heroes and managing their fantasy armies.
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THE SIMS 3RELEASED June 2009 | LAST POSITION Re-entry
Chris T: Arguably no game has done more to expand the audience for PC gaming than The Sims, and the third iteration, which cut down on the previous micromanagement, is still the best. A mix of creative architecture, social manipulation and plate-spinning that manages to be just as time-absorbing as the best traditional management games.
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ANACHRONOXRELEASED June 2001 | LAST POSITION Re-entry
Tony: Your dead secretary lives inside your mousepointer. One of your party members is a planet, and guns are powered with radioactive rodents (‘glodents’). Ion Storm’s wildly inventive JRPG was crammed with minigames, comedy and fun ideas. It also had some of the earliest in-engine cutscenes, adding a layer of cinematic sizzle and class.
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Chris L: Its detractors are quick to list the oft-respawning enemies, the irritating malaria, the crummy guns that explode in your hands—and I completely agree. That doesn’t stop this open-world FPS from being one of the boldest ever. I love the immersiveness (your character has to physically hold the map and look down at it), the harsh and beautiful world, and the story that slowly reveals you’re just as terrible as everyone else. Most of all, I revel in the hilariously unpredictable bushfire and combat systems.
FAR CRY 2RELEASED October 2008 | LAST POSITION New entry
73DOOM IIRELEASED May 1994 | LAST POSITION Re-entry
Phil: Yes, Doom II is another great id shooter that builds on the design lessons of Doom to provide more labyrinthine levels filled with demons and secrets. What makes Doom II special isn’t so much what id did at the time, but what the community is still doing to this day. Doom II’s mod community is an enduring phenomenon, and has, over the past ten-and-a-bit years, produced a variety of experiences—everything from the violence-enhancing tweaks of Brutal Doom, to the total conversions of Pirate Doom or The Adventures of Square.Shaun: I spent countless days building wads for Doom II back in the ’90s. I don’t think I ever beat the game itself, because for me, Doom II was a series of tools for bringing imaginative worlds to life.
72ELITE: DANGEROUSRELEASED Dec 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry
Chris T: Space trading, combat and exploration made special by an extraordinary commitment to making you feel like you’re really there, in the cockpit. This is one of the best virtual reality games around for that reason, but the effect is powerful regardless.Andy: Elite’s galaxy is a scale replica of our own Milky Way, which means that in the course of playing the game you’ll only see a tiny fraction of it. But what a fraction. Even if you don’t indulge in combat, trading, or any of the other ways to spend your time in this space sandbox, there’s fun to be had just exploring, staring slack-jawed at the stunning cosmic scenery. It’s a game you play your own way, at your own pace.
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71MONKEY ISLAND 2: LECHUCK’S REVENGERELEASED December 1991 | LAST POSITION 55
Andy: This island-hopping piratical adventure is the best Monkey Island. The writing is at its peak and hopeless hero Guybrush Threepwood is even more lovable than before. This time the wannabe pirate finds himself on the trail of the treasure of Big Whoop.
Really, though, the story is just an excuse for genuinely funny jokes, colorful characters, and absurd puzzles. In this age of internet walkthroughs, you can play it without repeatedly getting stuck and just enjoy the world, characters and humor. And who could forget insult swordfighting. I am rubber, you are glue!
70GRIM FANDANGORELEASED October 1998 | LAST POSITION 21
Tom S: A game about lost souls traveling through the afterlife could have so easily been mawkish, but this post-mortem drama was created by LucasArts developers at the height of their powers. Manny Calavera manages to play the charming underdog while wearing the suavest suits you’ll see in a videogame. Glottis is still one of PC gaming’s cuddliest sidekicks. Together they’re the perfect team to take on Grim Fandango’s scenery-chewing villains. Hardboiled detective fiction, Casablanca and beatniks all receive an affectionate roasting from a script overflowing with gags. The remastered version was released earlier this year, preserving this late-’90s treat, so new audiences can discover how much fun it is in the afterlife.
THE ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVIONRELEASED March 2006 | LAST POSITION 72
Chris L: Bethesda’s sprawling fantasy RPG set a new standard for other games to match, offering hundreds of hours of adventure, including a world-saving main quest and loads of engaging side-missions. Best of all, guild quests are tailored for different playstyles, whether you’re a slippery thief, a powerful mage, a deadly assassin, or all of the above.
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TOTAL WAR: SHOGUN 2RELEASED March 2011 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tom S: Total War’s most beautiful armies do battle in Total War’s most focused game. The reduction in scale to feudal Japan means less empire management and more war. The fractured state of the nation during the Ashikaga Shogunate guarantees boisterous campaigns punctuated by shaky alliances and top-notch siege battles.
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RETURN TO CASTLE WOLFENSTEINRELEASED November 2001 | LAST POSITION 55
Chris T: I loved the silly, violent, gothic singleplayer campaign as a teen, but multiplayer is where it still stands out. This is a fine example of the attack/defend team shooter template that also finds expression in Enemy Territory, Brink, and, nowadays, Dirty Bomb. Return to Castle Wolfenstein has the Mauser rifle, though, so it wins.
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UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004RELEASED March 2004 | LAST POSITION 60
Wes: When a shooter still has an online population 11 years later, it probably did something right. Or, in the case of Unreal Tournament 2004, pretty much everything right, from the blistering movement speed to the tuned weapon spread to the overwhelming array of maps and modes. Or, as Stan Lee would put it: InstaGib. ‘Nuff said.
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John: Do you remember Max Payne for its John Woo-inspired bullet-time, or those beautifully written noir-esque illustrated sequences that punctuate the story so well? Max tells of ‘The Beretta stirring nervously under my coat’ which is a particular favorite of mine, moments before he’s ambushed on the station platform. It was a pioneering game, particularly in how it represented bad drug trips and nightmares. The level where you run in slow motion along a trail of blood is particularly chilling.69
MAX PAYNERELEASED July 2001 | LAST POSITION New entry
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50 OCTOBER 2015
VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE: BLOODLINESRELEASED November 2004 | LAST POSITION 86
Chris T: Bloodlines is an open-world first-person RPG and was one of the first games to use the Source engine. The new tech meant it wasn’t particularly stable when it launched, and even now you’ll need community patches to get it working at its best. If anything, however, the tech problems compounded the sense that this game was destined to be a cult classic. Its depiction of vampire-haunted LA is atmospheric and frequently scary despite the well-trodden subject matter, and the story responds organically to how you play and what type of vampire you are. Some of the very best side-stories in the genre, too.
64PLANETSIDE 2RELEASED November 2012 | LAST POSITION 93
Andy: Battlefield has been doing big-scale battles for years, but PlanetSide 2 blows it out of the water. Using a variety of land and air vehicles, and several infantry classes, it’s your job to wrestle control of territory from other factions. It’s a pretty basic take on BF’s Conquest mode, but it’s the scale that makes it. Organized assaults on bases are exhilarating, with ground troops clashing, tanks exchanging fire across valleys, and aircraft dueling in the sky. Cresting a hill and seeing a battle unfold is a dazzling, strangely beautiful sight—at least until you charge into the thick of it, then it’s just sheer chaos.
To get the most out of it, however, you need to work with other players. Solo, it’s a lonely and aimless experience. It’s only when you’re charging a base with a group of likeminded players, preferably with a commander organizing things, that PlanetSide 2 becomes one of the best multiplayer first-person shooters on PC. There’s something for everyone, whether you want to be a gunship pilot, a transport driver, a spy, an anti-tank trooper, or any number of roles. It’s free-to-play, but uncommonly generous with it. You can enjoy it, and advance your character, without spending a cent.
BASTIONRELEASED July 2011 | LAST POSITION 75
Phil: “He gets up,” the narrator says as you press the button to get up. Thus, in three words, this action-RPG expresses the clever relationship between the on-screen events and the way the narrator folds them into his story. Bastion’s art and soundtrack are oft-praised, and rightly so, but it makes this list because those elements are backed up by satisfying combat. Tom M: During a fight, every well-timed button press is rewarded, just as every mistake is punished. Bastion lets you choose the way you fight, and all of its weapons and abilities can be effective—if you know how to use them.
THIEF GOLDRELEASED November 1998 | LAST POSITION New entry
Chris T: The original Thief doesn’t hold up as well as its successors, but it earns inclusion on this list for being such an important part of FPS history. This was the game that established that you didn’t need to run at 60km/h and carry a shotgun all the time. It opened the door to slower, more methodical approaches to play, leading not only to the stealth genre but also horror and, many years later, the ‘walking simulator’. Without Thief there’s no Deus Ex, no BioShock, no Gone Home. If you’re interested at all in the history of game design on the PC, you need to have played it.
MORROWINDRELEASED May 2002 | LAST POSITION New entry
Chris T: This remains unique among Bethesda’s open worlds, a genuinely alien fantasy landscape populated by people, creatures and factions that take time to truly understand. It offers the experience of being a stranger in a strange land, and over time the modding community has fixed almost everything that you might take issue with.
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Wes Fenlon
O D DWO R L D: S T R A N G E R’S
W R AT HThis endlessly creative
shooter has smart design decisions at every step. Live animal ammunition like the puke-inducing
Skunkz replaces ordinary bullets, and the level design
always offers a shortcut back to town. Capturing bounties alive instead of
killing them requires a great mixture of planning,
quick thinking and jumping from stealth to shooting to
melee combat on the fly.
Shaun Prescott
S U P E R M E AT B OYPeople get so hung up on
legacies, and who pioneered what, and where stuff fits on the continuum of any given genre. I do too, sometimes, but I still think Super Meat Boy is the best twitch-oriented platformer of all time. It’s better than any bloody Mario game. I
can’t imagine another platformer ever feeling this
good, and I can’t imagine any other game making me
so red hot furious while simultaneously sating
every game-oriented urge I’ve ever had.
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BRAIDRELEASED April 2009 | LAST POSITION 64
Wes: Braid led the charge of the modern independent game movement, and you can feel its influence in every puzzle platformer with lush 2D art released since. We often think of platformers as reflex games, but Braid revels in its braininess, slowly layering new challenges into its time control conceit. Later puzzles are unrivalled in their ability to foster determined experimentation followed by utter despair (surely this is impossible) followed, at last, by the euphoria of success. At the end of Braid, you don’t feel like you’ve simply completed its many puzzles. You feel like you’ve outsmarted them.
59ULTIMA UNDERWORLDRELEASED March 1992 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tony: Before Doom, before even Wolfenstein 3D, this was the game that took players out of two dimensions into immersive, texture-mapped, first-person reality. And where id’s games would be mere shooters when they arrived, this was a sophisticated fantasy RPG, where you could swim, talk to people, pick things up, develop skills and cast magic. You could even look up. And incredibly, we got it all at once, all in one game.
Ultima Underworld was a leap forward in gaming technology that has yet to be equalled. In the narrative of videogame evolution, this is the bit where one monkey smashes another monkey’s brains in because he was told to by a monolith.Chris T: I’m always banging on about how Thief invented the meditative FPS, and that’s true if you stick to shooters. Ultima Underworld is a vital part of the same chain, however, developing the idea of first-person fantasy in a way that The Elder Scrolls would, decades later, run with. This was an RPG developed with the goal of immersing yourself in a world that was entirely yours to explore and manipulate: a fantasy that developers still chase, that players still flock to Kickstarter to support.
DARK SOULSRELEASED August 2012 | LAST POSITION 10
Tom S: On the surface Dark Souls is merely an incredible action-RPG, famous for its difficulty and multiplayer that let players invade each other’s worlds. Dig deeper and you discover a masterpiece of interactive storytelling. Ruined statues, item descriptions and seemingly innocuous NPC lines are all fragments of a dark mythology that must be gradually assembled. Soon it becomes apparent that the soul-gathering systems you exploit to grow in power are a fundamental part of a story full of tragic dilemmas. The world is choking on its final breath, but is it better to embrace the dark or recklessly rekindle the flame?
PAPERS, PLEASERELEASED August 2013 | LAST POSITION 29
Tom S: This is an exceptional example of game design as an empathic tool, and a careful examination of the mechanics of corruption. As a border official in a fictional state, you’re required to enforce the increasingly draconian rules of your superiors while supporting your family on meager earnings. It’s a game about politics, immigration, and an unresolvable friction between individual morality and systemic socio-economic pressure. As you stamp visitors’ passports, interrogate them and subject them to body scans, critical choices arise. It’s a harrowing and unforgettable piece of work.
QUAKE IIIRELEASED December 1999 | LAST POSITION 88
Chris T: Quake-style deathmatch is in the middle of a resurgence and there’s every reason to revisit the moment when it peaked. There’s something about landing a rocket kill here that no other shooter can match: a combination of ballistics and instinct. It’s almost cerebral, but then a rocket smashes into a spaceman who explodes into chunky pieces.
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Phil Savage
U P L I N KThis is a game about the
type of hacking you see in films and on TV. It’s not realistic, but it is tense,
dramatic and laced through with absurd cyberpunk.
More than that, Uplink is a deft open-world game set entirely on the internet. It features varied locations,
open-ended objectives and the chance to break off and
do things outside of the basic campaign structure. Through a simple interface and handful of tools, you’re given immense power over
this world.
Tom Senior
DAW N O F WA R 2: R E T R I B U T I O N
Frankly I’m disappointed at the lack of orbital strikes in this list. Time to fix this with a nod to the Space Marines’ incredible giant laser attack
in marvellous, meaty RTS Dawn of War 2: Retribution. As well as six campaigns—
which can all be played cooperatively—it also
features the excellent Last Stand horde mode that sets you and a couple of friends against hundreds of foes.
Go Imperial Guard Commander and shout “Ogryyyyns” every time
you drop them into battle. Hours of fun.
P E R S O N A L P I C K S
F E A T U R E
52 OCTOBER 2015
TOWERFALL: ASCENSIONRELEASED March 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tom M: A couch co-op brawler, Towerfall: Ascension is a fast-paced 2D archery game that embodies everything great about the local-multiplayer renaissance we are currently enjoying. We gave it the ‘Best Multiplayer Award’ in our 2014 game of the year awards, and it has since got even better with the release of its Dark World expansion.
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BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUMRELEASED August 2009 | LAST POSITION New entry
Chris L: Never before had a superhero game truly made us feel like a superhero. Arkham Asylum changed that by combining Batman’s slippery stealth abilities with an exciting and dynamic combat system, not to mention gadgets galore, fantastic visuals, and an enjoyable story. PC gamers could finally and confidently state: “I’m Batman.”
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RESIDENT EVIL 4 HDRELEASED February 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry
Samuel: The strongest entry of Capcom’s super-refined survival horror classic series, Resident Evil 4 is probably the best-paced action game ever made. The boss battles, ingenuity and variety of combat encounters and puzzles are marks of a game with no filler or dull moments—it’s now better on PC than anywhere else.
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DAYZRELEASED December 2013 | LAST POSITION 12
Andy: A brutal online zombie survival game, but where other players are often more dangerous than the undead. If you’re not being eaten by zombies you’re starving to death, falling off stuff and breaking your legs, or being force-fed poison fruit by bandits. An amazing anecdote generator set in a vast, beautiful Eastern European landscape.
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Tim: Blood Money was remarkable for its amazing crowd scenes, which arguably remain an unfulfilled promise in game design. The standout was stalking a dude in a giant crow suit through a packed Mardi Gras, but even without the NPC overload gimmick Blood Money felt like a confident ‘best of’ for the series. Part of that was thanks to the evocative locations—abandoned amusement parks, white picket fence suburbia, even a visit from Santa—which made it a true American nightmare.
HITMAN: BLOOD MONEYRELEASED May 2006 | LAST POSITION Re-entry
49MASS EFFECTRELEASED Nov 2007 | LAST POSITION New entry
Chris: There was a time when people were disappointed that BioWare was making a sci-fi shooter instead of another Star Wars game. Those people turned out to be wrong. Beautiful and brilliantly written, ME tells a story that still holds together as a standalone piece. It has BioWare’s best ending sequence, too.Tony: Mass Effect’s good idea was making you the captain in a ’90s sci-fi TV series, complete with a cool spaceship, a quirky crew and sexy aliens with lumpy heads. Its genius was its rich, adult characterisation, that had me rushing through missions so I could get back on the ship and continue that conversation.Samuel: The original feels far removed from its successors. The Mako, nixed in later outings, embodied a raw sense of exploration still unique to this first game.
48PILLARS OF ETERNITYRELEASED March 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tony: This was an unashamed attempt to recreate the fondly remembered, low-tech RPGs of old, and it succeeds wonderfully. You’re not some lone, moody superman here, you’re part of a colorful, ragbag team of bickering friends, who go on exciting adventures by day and heal up at night in village inns with more floorspace than an Amazon warehouse.Andy: More than just an homage to games like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale, Pillars is an RPG that feels both old-school and contemporary. The dense, well-written dialogue brings you deep inside its hard-edged fantasy world, while the smart, tactical combat makes every enemy encounter a delight. Multiple skills, powers, and spells are yours to combine in interesting ways, rewarding creativity.
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47GUILD WARS 2RELEASED August 2012 | LAST POSITION 39
Chris T: Why has nobody ever aped Guild Wars 2’s business model? This is a massive, exciting fantasy MMO with no subscription fee, offering a huge amount of stuff to do for the price of the box alone. That’s not even the whole draw: the painterly environment design is, to my eyes, peerless, and the class system does more to break free of the healer-damage-tank trinity than other RPGs dare.Phil: After launch, ArenaNet went on to offer one of the most generous update programs I’ve see, over more than two years. The coming expansion represents a roadmap for the next half-a-decade and more of the game’s continued life.
46DAY OF THE TENTACLERELEASED June 1993 | LAST POSITION 45
Andy: Of all the wonderful adventure games released by LucasArts, this might be the funniest—and the most absurd. Starring a trio of time-traveling teenagers, it’s a comedy puzzler that takes you from colonial times to the far-flung future, and yet it’s all set around one shabby hotel. The puzzles are absurd to the point of farce, such as shrinking a jumper in a dryer for thousands of years to thaw out a frozen hamster, but that’s all part of the game’s weird charm. The surreal, Saturday-morning-cartoon art style, top-notch voice acting, and historical humor make Day of the Tentacle one of the highlights of Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer’s illustrious careers in adventure game design.
SYSTEM SHOCK 2RELEASED August 1999 | LAST POSITION 22
Chris T: This was the moment where the shooter and the RPG genres converged, scared the shit out of you, and convinced you that maybe it was OK to fancy an AI just a little bit. System Shock 2 is special for all of these reasons and many more, but not least for being a game both terrifying and substantially about inventory management.
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THE WITCHER 3RELEASED May 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry
Andy: Blending a mature, well-written story with a stunningly beautiful open world and some fantastic monster designs, The Witcher 3 is one of the best modern RPGs on PC. Lavish production values, likeable characters, and some genuinely brilliant quests (especially ‘Family Ties’) make this the best game in the series to date.
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FALLOUTRELEASED September 1997 | LAST POSITION 38
Chris T: Post-apocalyptic Fallout isn’t just notable for kicking off one of the most beloved RPG series of all time. It’s special because it allowed you to be an utter monster, expanding the bottom half of the moral spectrum to include ‘helping corrupt crime bosses take over entire towns’ and ‘arranging the death of everybody you know’.
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HALF-LIFERELEASED Nov 1998 | LAST POSITION Re-entry
Chris L: One of the best and most influential FPS games ever. Favoring scripted events over cutscenes and chapters over levels, Valve showed us shooters could provide more than just gunplay. The platforming feels a bit tiresome today, but it’s still an exciting experience with an inventive narrative that many have aped but few have matched.
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Evan: Plenty of FPS games reproduce fragments of the backyard wars most of us waged as kids. But none paint the whole picture: loading your gear piece by piece into a backpack, piling into a vehicle with your buddies, rolling in the grass, screaming for a medic, barking abbreviated words at each other over a radio. Arma’s ludicrous fidelity is all in service of this childlike experience of dramatized war. Another year of mods, maps, and new official content and Arma 3 will have supplanted its predecessor.45
ARMA 3RELEASED September 2013 | LAST POSITION 41
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FALLOUT 3RELEASED October 2008 | LAST POSITION 28
Samuel: Rebooted Fallout is strongly about 3D world design—and there’s no comparison with the layout, detail and variety of the Capital Wasteland. I still think this is the best game Bethesda has made, with thoughtful sidequests and memorable characters. I’d take this over Skyrim every time.Tyler: When I first stepped out of the vault, I was in awe of Fallout 3’s scope. It lacked some of the charm of Fallout and Fallout 2, and I understand its critics, but to me it makes up for all that in scale, freedom, and the ability to slip live grenades into people’s pockets.
40CITIES: SKYLINESRELEASED March 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry
Chris L: 2013’s SimCity didn’t just leave fans disappointed and angry, it also left a huge city-building void just waiting to be filled. Cities: Skylines arrived not just at the perfect time but in the best possible way: despite a small development team, Colossal Order produced a fun, engaging, and extremely attractive city builder. Priced at half what most games go for and featuring a slick UI, easy to understand controls, charming visuals, and a surprisingly complex traffic simulation, Skylines instantly became both a critical hit and a hot seller. What’s more, it avoided EA’s missteps by providing a fully offline experience yet still allowing the game to become a communal treasure due to mod support.Shaun: Cities: Skylines is my favorite kind of game because it’s heaps of fun not to play. Witnessing the mod scene, the bafflingly dystopian road networks and eerie social experiments has been as thrilling as actually playing the game. Colossal Order had a huge task resuscitating the city building genre, but they managed to do so in a way that makes it difficult to imagine Skylines ever being usurped—especially with post-launch support as good as this.
BIOSHOCK INFINITERELEASED March 2013 | LAST POSITION 13
Samuel: Every 30 minutes there’s a skyline of gorgeously detailed floating buildings that makes me stop and say, “Jesus, humans created this!” Infinite feels to me like the last of a dying breed—the supposedly auteur-driven masterwork with an absolute ton of money behind it. I love so much of what’s here: the escalating oddness of the story, the strange dream-like atmosphere of the rich setting and the carefully lean interactions between Booker and Elizabeth. Burial at Sea, too, while clearly drunk on fan service, is a farewell to Levine’s BioShock that’s well worth indulging in.
SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION VRELEASED September 2010 | LAST POSITION 25
Tyler: The latest game (I don’t feel like including Beyond Earth) in the vital turn-based 4X series in which you direct a civilization from early agriculture to the space race, winning through expansion, war, and diplomacy. I was tempted to put Civilization IV down, as I am every year, but with the expansions and the many, many mods on Steam Workshop, Civilization V is the best choice for newcomers to the series.Tom M: It had a rocky launch and saw many fans return to Civ IV. But after many expansions and updates, it has become the polished pinnacle of the series.
EVE ONLINERELEASED May 2003 | LAST POSITION 65
Andy: EVE Online is the best story generator on PC. Its completely player-generated tales of political intrigue, corporate espionage, and massive stellar wars have made the headlines of major news organizations. If MMORPGs are about living another life, then EVE Online is perhaps the purest expression of that concept on PC.
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Tony Ellis
DA R K C O R N E R S O F T H E E A R T H
This horror game succeeds better than any at weaving
the horror into an actual game, as opposed to an over-extended series of jump scares. A sense of dread suffuses the town
where you begin your investigations. The Gilman
Hotel is a nightmare of musty rooms, pursuit, and frantically blocking doors
with furniture. Next, stealth your way across windy, nighttime streets with a whole town of croaking inbreds out to kill you.
John Strike
S O L D I E R O F F O R T U N E
In a dazzlingly unfair turn of events, this hasn’t made it into the top 100 this year.
Its ultra-violence, knife-throwing and
dismemberment were a massive deal at the time,
putting it on a similar naughty step as GTA and Carmageddon. Sadly, the
noughties are where it stayed. Dismemberment
did not become an important contribution to
the games we play today. It was a fantastic shooter, and everyone loved John
Mullins’ ridiculous moustache. Well, I did.
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THE WALKING DEAD: SEASON 1RELEASED April 2012 | LAST POSITION 20
Wes: Telltale blazed a new corpse-ridden trail in narrative gaming here, abandoning much of the puzzle solving and item collection of point-and-click adventures in favor of conversation and gut-wrenching choices. Strong writing and characters give those decisions real weight. Tony: This is—brilliantly—a survival game where the character you most want to survive isn’t you. Eleven-year-old Clementine is totally dependent on you for her continued existence, and that knowledge freights every decision you make. In most games you play a jerk. In this one you play a dad, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking.
35LEAGUE OF LEGENDSRELEASED October 2009 | LAST POSITION 66
Tom M: What started out as a clone of the Defense of the Ancients mod for Warcraft III has become the largest esport in the world. Played by millions worldwide—and watched by even more—League of Legends pushed competitive videogames into the public eye. LoL is pretty much the MOBA that made MOBAs cool, simplifying the most complex systems while still maintaining enough depth to foster an enormous competitive scene.
But its popularity didn’t reach this level immediately; it took League of Legends a year or two before it truly found its footing. Riot has given the game constant updates, revamping champions, graphics, and items on a regular basis, and it’s allowed League of Legends to grow bigger than any other game to date. For example, the Season 4 World Championship Finals filled an entire Olympic soccer stadium in Seoul, South Korea.
Through iteration, League of Legends has found its own style and voice, no longer trying to replicate the success of Defense of the Ancients. After five years, it still stands as a shining example of what a MOBA can be, holding up against countless competitors now trying to replicate it.
STALKER: SHADOW OF CHERNOBYLRELEASED March 2007 | LAST POSITION 70
Andy: It’s an appropriate name, because Stalker’s wasteland is always in the shadow of the blown-out Chernobyl reactor. It’s where your trek through The Zone inevitably leads, and the journey is eerie and desolate. Whether it’s monsters, radioactive anomalies, or bandits, there’s always something terrible to worry about.Evan: And so few of those threats are named, explained, or formally introduced before you bump up against them. Stalker trusts you to fumble your way through its nuked zoo without a brochure. I also love the weapon handling, an unusual split between simulation and arcade.
WORLD OF WARCRAFTRELEASED November 2004 | LAST POSITION 34
Andy: Although it’s showing its age, WoW is responsible for the online RPG as we know it today. It’s a game that broke away from the confines of PC gaming and became a worldwide phenomenon. Celebrities on talk shows revealed that they played it. South Park did an episode on it. Now there’s a film coming. Blizzard defined the language of the MMORPG.
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Chris Thursten
I N V I S I B L E , I N C .This is a dazzlingly
well-designed turn based stealth sim. It’s about
planning and executing knife-edge cyberpunk
heists against mounting odds, but despite the stiff difficulty it is completely
fair. It gets my personal nod for teaching me an
important lesson about design: games don’t need to be random or opaque to
offer a meaningful challenge. Invisible, Inc.’s elegant systems allow you to experience triumph and disaster and never feel like the game screwed you over.
Evan Lahti
G A N G B E A S T SEveryone is made of
Play-Doh in this game that, appropriately enough,
softens and rounds-off the hard edges of conventional
wrestling games, particularly their emphasis
on button mashing and combos. Failing
miserably—being lifted over the antlers of a blue reindeer, then hurled into
the blades of an enormous, fan—is fun because it
creates physical comedy for the rest of the group.
The focus isn’t on hot competition, but on playful,
ragdolled calamity.
DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTIONRELEASED August 2011 | LAST POSITION 17
Tim: It’s hard to think of many series that survived a new developer coming in and creating a sequel. Fallout: New Vegas and Max Payne 3, maybe, but the high watermark for cuckoo development is DX: Human Revolution. Here’s a game that captured the spirit of the original, while updating the systems for modern tastes and managing to tell its own interesting story. A feat so impressive that I could even forgive those parlous boss battles.Samuel: Its extraordinary black and gold environments, gruff-yet-compelling lead and up-to-date combat make this the DX game I’d recommend above all others in 2015.
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FTL: FASTER THAN LIGHTRELEASED September 2012 | LAST POSITION 11
Samuel: Every time I boot up FTL I think that this is the time I’ll find I’ve finally seen everything. This is the time that I’ll be bored of the variables, and discover I’ve mastered the combat. But that’s never been the case with this tight space strategy game, which has such a perfect balance of personalization, light narrative and reactive tactics.
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DRAGON AGE: ORIGINSRELEASED November 2009 | LAST POSITION 15
Chris T: BioWare’s throwback to classic RPGs was a dazzling success. The series has had its ups and downs since then, but Dragon Age: Origins remains a cracking combat system tied to a powerful (and very long) story with characters that will stick with you for a long time to come. Unless you get them all killed, of course. Then they’re dead.
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STARCRAFT IIRELEASED July 2010 | LAST POSITION Re-entry
Tom S: The most polished and refined example of the RTS format invented by Dune 2, StarCraft II boasts a surprisingly excellent campaign bolstered by inventive unit progression and well-paced missions. StarCraft II’s esports profile might be waning these days, but that doesn’t affect the quality of its beautifully balanced competitive modes.
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DIVINITY: ORIGINAL SINRELEASED June, 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry
Wes: Larian thoughtfully updated the classic cRPG with a turn-based combat system that’s intimidating in its open-endedness. That applies to questing, too: you have the freedom to slaughter every NPC you meet. The modern touches of a physics system (try trapping bosses with chairs!) and campaign co-op make for a must-play RPG.
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Phil: Baldur’s Gate II was the best of the classic RPGs—a perfect blend of well-written characters, tactical combat, and a world of intrigue and surprise. My favorite part of any RPG is exploring its towns and cities, and in the original Baldur’s Gate that required hours of humoring yokels in a grueling trek just to get to the city. Baldur’s Gate II is much more generous. Amn is huge; simultaneously beautiful and seedy. You’re free to explore it from the first chapter, and encouraged to revel in its amazing variety.
BALDUR’S GATE II: SHADOWS OF AMNRELEASED September 2000 | LAST POSITION 24
25HEARTHSTONERELEASED March 2014 | LAST POSITION 44
Tim: Despite the endless grousing about RNG, ‘pay to win’, and card balance, the success of Blizzard’s spin on wizard poker shows no sign of slowing. Since last this list was compiled, the game has cemented its status as a budding esport, while at the same time hoovering up new users thanks to the phone version. One of the reasons it has caught fire on Twitch—regularly placing in the top three most-watched—is that the slow pace lends itself to casters discussing the players’ decisions. Viewers have time to consider what they would do, and the satisfaction of seeing how other lines play out. A bigger reason for the success, though, is that Blizzard’s Team 5 seems to have kept up a most un-Blizzard-like pace with the expansions, with new cards refreshing the meta just before it gets damagingly stale.
24SPELUNKYRELEASED August 2013 | LAST POSITION 43
Wes: Spelunky is a game you can play forever. Not just because it’s a roguelike platformer, meaning every death sets you back to square one. Or because its levels are randomly generated and infinitely varied. Or because it’s packed with secrets and challenges a diehard community has been discovering and tackling for years. Spelunky’s greatness lies in how all its systems intricately and thoughtfully interact in predictable (yet somehow still surprising) ways. Everything affects everything else, from AI enemies to traps to the physics applied to your friend’s careening body after death. You can spend years mastering its platforming and still delight in moments of never-before-seen random interaction.
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23DOOMRELEASED December 1993 | LAST POSITION 27
Chris L: There are plenty of classics to remember fondly, but few you’d actually want to play today. Doom, id’s seminal first-person shooter, is still great: fast, frenetic, and fun. It also marked the first time I ever shot a friend over a phone line. It was during co-op. It was an accident.Andy: It’s a genuinely iconic PC game, which still has a loyal and passionate following today—from people who still enjoy its multiplayer to a thriving mod scene. Its format is perfectly simple: reach the end of the level, killing every demon in your path. But thanks to fiendishly clever old-school level design and kinetic pacing, it’s is much more than the sum of its parts.
22ARMA 2RELEASED June 2009 | LAST POSITION 48
Chris T: Arma 2’s dedication to a realistic depiction of military life is its greatest strength and the reason it can be quite off-putting at first—my enduring memory of it is the whistle-thunk sound that precedes being shot from three miles away. Put in the hours, however, and it becomes something very special. It inspired a multiplayer community whose dedication to military protocol verges on historical re-enactment, and its sandbox approach to war formed the basis of many incredible mods. I still mostly get shot from miles away, mind.Evan: Other than the next entry on this list, no other PC game embodies ‘game as platform’ as much as Arma 2. Chris T: I agree, Evan!
DOTA 2RELEASED July 2013 | LAST POSITION 16
Chris T: Valve’s lane-pushing masterpiece brings out the best and the worst in its players. This is dazzlingly complex competitive team strategy serving as a stage for human drama. It’s a big-money professional sport, a hobby, and a way of life. Soon, with the addition of custom games, it’ll become a game development platform too.
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KERBAL SPACE PROGRAMRELEASED April 2015 | LAST POSITION 90
Phil: KSP is deceptive. It’s a game about building rockets, and using them to send bumbling green aliens into space. Yet behind this quirky charm lurks a powerful and realistic physics and space engineering simulator. Kerbal Space Program challenges you to learn actual rocket science—if only to keep those guys alive just a little longer.
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COUNTER-STRIKE: GLOBAL OFFENSIVERELEASED August 2012 | LAST POSITION 14
Evan: In a couple of years, Valve has taken what was originally meant as a way of repackaging CS for last-gen consoles and transformed it into the premier modern competitive FPS on any platform. Integrated skill-based matchmaking (and, let’s be honest, thousand-dollar knives) has reinvigorated the CS scene.
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ALIEN: ISOLATIONRELEASED October 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry
Andy: It took a while, but in 2014 we finally got the Alien game we always dreamed of. The one where we’re cowering, terrified prey. Inspired by Ridley Scott’s subtle, masterful original film, rather than James Cameron’s action-packed sequel, The Creative Assembly created one of the most terrifying horror games on PC, with an inspired retro-futuristic art style.
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Tom M: Minecraft is a game that gives you an endless amount of choice. Want to fight monsters? Sure thing. Want to explore an endless world? Go ahead. Want to stay put and build huge structures? That’s fine too. You are dropped in a procedurally generated landscape, told to punch trees, and the rest is completely up to you. Shaun: I’ll be the first to admit that I never expected it to transcend niche cult status. Then, suddenly, my ten-year-old nephew was playing it and so were all his friends.21
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XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWNRELEASED October 2012 | LAST POSITION 6
Evan: Three years later, I’m realizing how crucial Enemy Unknown’s art is to its appeal. It is soft and serious, a Saturday morning cartoon hurled against its will into an alien invasion. It’s toylike and gritty—your operatives stand stoic in the barracks, unsmiling, as you dress them up in bright red armor and slap a mohawk on them. Record stores, gas stations, and abandoned bars are perfect dioramas: it’s inherently fun to blast and break familiar spaces with combat. Samuel: As good as turn-based strategy gets (until XCOM 2 comes out), this is empowering and great fun.
16PLANESCAPE: TORMENTRELEASED December 1999 | LAST POSITION 35
Tony: Imagine a fantasy RPG set not in another formulaic medieval Bavaria, but a world where grotesque metal buildings bake under an alien sun, and the tavern regulars include demons and wanderers from every plane in the AD&D Monster Manual. Now imagine that when you respawn, the world doesn’t. That your previous actions and bad choices have left a trail of corpses and devastated former companions behind you. Now imagine that you’ve been doing that for a very long time. Congratulations. You’re in Torment.Andy: I’ve never been taken anywhere by a videogame that’s quite as weird, fascinating, or surreal as Torment’s world. It’s built on the foundations of the Infinity engine, with a similar interface and feel to games such as Baldur’s Gate, but it couldn’t be more different. It’s famous for its walls of vivid, evocative text, and rightly so. It’s a game brimming with amazing writing, painting its bizarre world in rich, minute detail. I also like how in almost every case, it’s possible to avoid conflict through dialogue or other means. Planescape: Torment is one of the smartest, darkest RPGs ever made, and there’s been nothing else like it on PC, or any format, since.
PORTAL 2RELEASED April 2011 | LAST POSITION 19
Tyler: It’s not as compact and essential as Portal, but it’s an excellent companion and a much grander realization of its humor and brilliant puzzle design. The gels are a great addition, but leaping through portals, making trick shots and dunking your own body, is still the star.Tom S: Portal 2’s co-op mode understands players so well. There are puzzles clearly designed to let your partner screw you over with the press of a button, but you can hug and make up with co-op emotes afterwards. GLaDOS’s attempts to turn you against one another play into the little soap opera perfectly.
CRUSADER KINGS IIRELEASED February 2012 | LAST POSITION 37
Phil: You’re a feudal lord, or maybe even a king. Congratulations, you are now consigned to a life beset by plotting, backstabbing and assassination. Your only defense? Plot, backstab and assassinate right back. Get past the dry delivery and you’ll find a gripping strategy about the twisted relationships of powerful people.Chris L: What I love is how personal the game becomes, rare for a grand strategy game. Instead of a faceless leader, you’re a person, an individual, and your life is tangled up with friends, enemies, and family. It makes the smallest struggles feel just as important as the largest.
MASS EFFECT 3RELEASED March 2012 | LAST POSITION 8
Chris T: ME3 is a love letter to the series’ fans. It’s a game about endings, about seeing characters you’ve spent dozens of hours with get their moment in the spotlight. Coupled with its DLC, it’s a staggering achievement in interactive cinematic storytelling. Also the multiplayer is very good, which nobody expected. You can play as a tubby little Volus. Incredible.
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Tyler Wilde
ZO R K : G R A N D I N Q U I S I T O R
The last Zork game is my favorite point-and-click adventure. It’s compact,
but dense with humor and self-parody, and fun, sometimes tricky but
non-frustrating puzzles. Erick Avari is fantastic as the titular Inquisitor—the farcical FMV use actually holds up—and I still quote
his lines today. (“Shun everything, and then shun shunning.”) Plus, you have
a spell that turns purple things invisible and Hades has a phone line. All that
for $6!
Tom Marks
F E ZThere are moments when some of Fez’s puzzles feel too obscure to solve; but,
incredibly, everything in the game can be decoded by cryptic clues, hidden in
plain sight. Virtually every secret can be figured out and understood without having to exit the game—though keeping a piece of
paper handy will help. These complex but achievable puzzles, coupled with Fez’s
phenomenal art and sound, give it a comfortable seat
on my personal list.
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PORTALRELEASED October 2007 | LAST POSITION 9
Tom M: “Now you’re thinking with portals,” isn’t just a cute line from a trailer; it’s a genuine accomplishment. The original Portal essentially asked you to rewire your brain and change how you think about moving through 3D space. Chris L: To my mind, the perfect game. Hilarious writing, challenges that escalate at just the right pace, and a boss fight that lets you put everything you’ve learned to use. Its short running time definitely left players wanting more, but also meant it never had the chance to grow stale.
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FALLOUT: NEW VEGASRELEASED October 2010 | LAST POSITION 59
Samuel: Last year I tried to break Fallout: New Vegas by declaring war on everyone. I shot my way out of Mr House’s casino and I insulted Caesar to his face and killed most of his mates. Even so, the main story of this strong successor to both Fallout 3 and the original Black Isle games still offered ways to continue the story. On that level, New Vegas offers a more interesting main quest than Fallout 3 with greater scope for player expression. The world, too, showed us a seedier side of the post-apocalypse.
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Chris T: I’ll always value Thief for the sense it gives you that you’re breaking into real, lived-in places—not game levels. This is what has always made the series special. Garrett is a reluctant hero: most of the time, your objective is to simply get into someone else’s building, steal their stuff, and get out without being spotted. This is a lot simpler than Deus Ex, No One Lives Forever or Dishonored, but somehow more compelling—and the sense of vulnerability you feel when you know you’re about to be caught is unparalleled. Thief II’s approach to combat is bleakly realistic: if you choose to stand and fight an armed guard in this game, he will kill you. 11
THIEF IIRELEASED March 2000 | LAST POSITION 31
8DEUS EXRELEASED June 2000 | LAST POSITION 4
Tony: Deus Ex is all about freedom of action, and none of the sequels made me feel as free as the original. Its maps were huge, with none of the constraining stealth-loading and subdivision we’re lumbered with today. You could walk all around the Statue of Liberty before choosing your own way in. And that freedom—Liberty, if you will—to find your own way through a problem was part of the aesthetic at every level. Phil: Deus Ex is an ugly game with poor combat, laughable voice acting and appalling AI. And yet, despite those incontrovertible facts, it’s once again near the top of this list. That’s how good it is. It’s 2015 now—we have amazing graphics and giant, complex open worlds—and Deus Ex is still one of the best games of all time. It will remain so until someone can genuinely improve on its wonderfully intricate level design.
7GRAND THEFT AUTO VRELEASED April 2015 | LAST POSITION New entry
Tony: It’s the best open world bar none. Incredibly detailed when you get up close, incredibly varied when you pull back. Mountains! Windfarms! Vineyards! Lumber mills! Half the time, it’s enough simply to drive around this incredible world-in-a-bottle and stare. When I do feel like tackling a mission, the freedom to at least choose which Hauser movie-stereotype I play goes a long way to fixing the one-note characterization that dogged the previous games. Samuel: There is no greater pleasure to be had in videogames than quickly stealing a military jet from Fort Zancudo and evading all the anti-aircraft missiles on the way out. A generous masterpiece, GTA V looks stupidly beautiful on PC.
60 OCTOBER 2015
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Chris T: The do-it-your-own way stealth FPS is a genre close to my
heart and important to PC gaming as a whole, and the first half of Dishonored is one of the best examples of the form ever made. Each of these assassination missions is a network of social interactions, security protocols and inventive architecture that amount to a delicate machine. Your job is to break that machine using versatile gadgets and magic powers, and doing so conveys a
powerful sense of creativity and control. You really do own your ideas in Dishonored, and although the morality system is a little underbaked, the feeling that you did it ‘your way’ remains. Years after the game’s release, the very best players are still finding new ways to kill people in it.Chris L: The quality of Dishonored’s level design really becomes apparent on subsequent playthroughs. No matter what combination of powers you’re using,
and how you choose to tackle each target, each level still feels custom tailored just for your style.Samuel: Lady Boyle’s Last Party is everything Dishonored is good at in one level: confident art direction, stories within stories and multi-layered level design that necessitates several playthroughs. One thing in particular the game gets right over some other immersive sims is that it makes every form of interaction feel fun, whether you choose to play in a stealthy way or more aggressively. While the morality system offers narrative consequences to your actions, there’s no fun-penalty if I decide to shoot a guy in the head. And I like doing that as a player. Never being caught might be the default win state, but it’s still great to put a sword through a guy. And if you do lean more towards ‘ghosting’ a level, enemies who turn to dust when you slit their throats, crossbow darts and spring razors all make your hard work worthwhile. Tony: Dishonored has all Thief’s transgressive thrill of sneaking around someone else’s mansion, learning its little secrets, but it delivers a whole lot more besides. Because here you are powerful. Scary. If you’re caught by a guard, it’s bad news for the guard, not for you. Mainly because he’s dying screaming as he’s devoured alive by magic rats.
RELEASED October 2012 | DEVELOPER Arkane Studios | PUBLISHER Bethesda | LAST POSITION 32
DISHONORED6
THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM
Tyler: Skyrim is a playground. I never really cared for the story, and
maybe it’s not the best Elder Scrolls on its own, but it is a massive, moddable fantasy world in which I can embrace vampirism, stick buckets on shopkeepers heads, and fight dragons. That’s irresistible to me, and modders have done a huge amount of work adding items, cities, dungeons, and islands, earning Skyrim a position near the pinnacle of Steam’s top concurrent player list for four years. Chris T: I spent hundreds of hours completely lost in the world Bethesda built, forbidding myself from installing mods so that I could see the campaign through ‘properly’. Then I retired that particular Dragonborn and lost another few hundred hours to breaking the game
RELEASED November 2011 | DEVELOPER Bethesda | PUBLISHER In-house | LAST POSITION 25with mods in exciting and complicated ways. A peerless sandbox.Tim: I spent maybe an actual month crafting an axe that could one-shot any creature in the game. After that I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was the best of times.Phil: Skyrim is a brilliant adventure toolbox. Bethesda’s systems-based design lets you do as much or as little as you want. Maybe you’ll take residence in a town, and never leave that town, and murder everybody in that town. Or maybe you’ll visit every corner of the map and become the head of every major institution in the land—even the evil ones.Tony: Endless adventures are hidden away in this game, like hoards of buried gold. Also there are actual hoards of gold.
Skyrim is not only huge: it looks spectacular too.
Too late, he remembered that Wilkins was frightened of swords.
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62 OCTOBER 2015
Tom M: This is a game with incredible staying power, which has
received hundreds of patches over the years. TF2’s lasting appeal comes from the well-balanced counterplay that exists between its nine classes, who Valve has given funny and lovable personalities to through events outside the game.Chris T: I can’t get over how brilliant the comics are. The game itself is one of the
best knockabout shooters ever made: you’d never see it in a professional tournament, but it’s a reliable source of gun-centric silliness. Its lasting popularity is a lesson to other first-person shooter developers: make it fun, make it free, something something hats.Chris L: The cartoony art style was a brilliant idea: the game will never look outdated. And, embracing community
contributions means there’s always new items to gawk at. This game’s got legs. Hats, and legs.Phil: It’s got faces too: wonderfully expressive faces that imbue each character with a distinct personality. I have no idea what a Battlefield medic thinks about the horrors of war, but I know exactly what TF2’s Medic thinks about the fact you’re not on that point, dummkopf.Evan: Like you’re all saying, what separates TF2 is the way lore is worked into every scrap of it. What other game made the announcement of a Mac port into a bespoke event with its own comic, trailer, and in-game item (that became its own currency within TF2’s market)?
RELEASED October 2007 | DEVELOPER Valve | PUBLISHER In-house | LAST POSITION 7
TEAM FORTRESS 2
BIOSHOCK
Wes: BioShock’s impeccable writing and immensely detailed world-
building are so good that its combat tends to be unfairly maligned in comparison. Sure, the weapon feedback isn’t up there with the best shooters, and Vita Chambers can rob combat of some valuable tension. But I still delighted in exploring the environment, picking out the perfect place for an ambush, and unloading on a Big Daddy the moment it walked into my bolt traps. I loved the frantic dance of juggling between armor-piercing pistol rounds and explosive shotgun shells, and how BioShock’s other systems came into play: hacking turrets and sentry bots, and luring splicers and Big Daddies into fighting each other. The freedom to approach combat however I
RELEASED August 2007 | DEVELOPER Irrational Games | PUBLISHER 2K Games | LAST POSITION 5
4
wanted cemented just how alive the world of Rapture felt.Chris T: BioShock was such a huge success, and so massively influential, that it’s hard to imagine it represented a risk at the time. It really did, however: 2K took a gamble on a cerebral horror-shooter that didn’t look like any other game out there and tried to do more with the FPS than any other game would dare. From its peerless environmental storytelling to its most famous twist, it’s still the best game in the series. There’s a reason Irrational was so keen to return to Rapture: it was in Andrew Ryan’s undersea nightmare that the team made their strongest statement. This is a world in the process of collapse, a dream gone wrong, a slice of history, ideology and horror waiting to be peeled apart.
3
BioShock has a visual aesthetic like no other game.
Still going strong.
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100PC GAMES
MASS EFFECT 22 Tim: The Godfather Part 2 or Empire Strikes Back of the series, in the sense that the characters felt more vivid and the darkness
threatening them that much deeper. The third game ultimately wound up with too much resolution to work through, whereas ME2 still felt pregnant with so much possibility. And mysteries are, or course, always more exciting than their resolutions.Chris L: Typically I’m the guy who impatiently speeds through the talky parts of games to get back to the action. Here, the opposite is true. I’ve never, ever enjoyed just talking to characters as much as I do in this series, particularly in ME2. Only when I’ve squeezed every last possible word out of everyone do I finally pick up a gun, and when the battle is over I’m excitedly running back through the ship, hungry for more chit-chat. The characters and dialogue are simply unmatched.Chris T: It’s been five and a half years and I’m still angry that they made me go and work for Cerberus.
Samuel: This had the Mass Effect plot I wanted: the moral ambiguity, the characters who weren’t necessarily allies and—sorry, I’m boring—my Shepard’s ultimate love interest, Miranda. The shooting was much improved, and all the individual character sidequests are outstanding. BioWare ensures that you’re given a reason to care about all of these people by delving into each of their backgrounds—even Jacob, so often written off as the boring guy on the Normandy, has a difficult relationship with his father that tells you a lot about that character’s motivation. The crew is BioWare’s best: new members like Thane, Legion, Samara and Kasumi join the most-liked from the previous game, such as Garrus and Tali. I think what keeps Mass Effect 2 high in this list is that most of us consider it the tightest RPG BioWare has ever made—it doesn’t have the divisive, more traditional type of combat the first game had, and the story is thrilling throughout, with nothing that proved as contentious as Mass Effect 3’s finale. It’s the perfect BioWare game.
RELEASED January 2010 | DEVELOPER BioWare | PUBLISHER EA | LAST POSITION 1
F E A T U R E
TOP
PC GAMES
100
64 OCTOBER 2015
HALF-LIFE 2
Chris L: Expectations for the sequel to Half-Life were high, perhaps even impossibly high, but Valve somehow managed
to exceed them. Gordon Freeman returns to find a world destroyed by the events of the first game, and Half-Life 2 sticks with the same excellent environmental storytelling and scripted sequences that made the original so engrossing and immersive. There’s a great blend of combat, vehicle-based action sequences, horror, and of course the game-changing gravity gun that can be used as a weapon, a tool for puzzle-solving, or just for playing catch with a huge, friendly robot.Chris T: It’s very rare that a modern shooter comes close to matching Half-Life 2’s sense of pace or variety. This is a masterfully-constructed campaign that effortlessly moves between moods and modes of engagement. Over a decade later, I can’t think of a singleplayer FPS that has bettered it in terms of all-round
excellence. That, I think, is the real reason the lack of a sequel is such a tragedy: as much as I want to see how Gordon Freeman’s story ends, what I really want is for somebody—anybody—to make a game that is better than this.Phil: One minute you’re being hunted through the streets and waterways of a dystopian city. Another, you’re using physics to survive a zombie-infested nightmare town. Half-Life 2 is a road trip, a sci-fi adventure, a rebel uprising, and much more besides. It’s a decade old, and yet it’s still impossible to find a singleplayer FPS that is this effortlessly varied and confidentially brilliant.
That variety extends beyond the game itself to a mod scene that has benefitted from the Source engine’s flexibility. Mods like Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable grew from weird experiments into full, commercial products. Half-Life 2 was the genesis of Valve’s role as an enabler of community-based development. Its
RELEASED November 2004 | DEVELOPER Valve | PUBLISHER In-house | LAST POSITION 3
existence has made PC gaming richer and more surprising.Samuel: Half-Life 2’s appeal to me, too, is its variety—it tackles every variant on the first-person shooter set-piece and sets the standard every time. Ridiculously tight.Tom S: Games are still catching up with Half-Life 2. It doesn’t need to scrawl tutorial hints on the walls. It doesn’t give you objective markers. It doesn’t give you a button prompt to remind you to watch a scripted event you might not be looking at. It uses lighting, level geometry and psychological tricks to guide you without you even noticing. Valve knows what you’re most likely to do in a given room with a given tool, and uses this to gradually introduce the Antlion bugbait, the sawblades of Ravenholm and of course the gravity gun—still one of the greatest toys in FPS history.Andy: I played this recently, and doing a no-guns run of Ravenholm was the most fun I’ve had in an FPS for ages. You’re madly scouring the environment for things to pluck out and ping at pursuing headcrab zombies. I’d play a whole game of it, in fact, but the great thing about Half-Life 2 is that it’s always giving you something new to do. Valve’s subtle use of lighting and smart level design to guide you to the end of the map is still impressive, and I’m not sure why more developers don’t copy their tricks.
I love when the gravity gun becomes temporarily super-powered and Freeman runs wild in the Citadel. A cathartic moment, especially when Breen is trying to taunt you through his many monitors and you yank them off the wall and throw them down a pit. Tony: Open-world games are more popular now than they’ve ever been, yet here at the PCG top spot is a game that is brilliant precisely because it is linear. From its intense battles to its oddly lonely buggy rides, it’s perfectly paced. Half-Life 2 is what happens when a bunch of extremely talented people sit down and say “how can we tell one story, really well?”
Still one of gaming’s most iconic images.
OCTOBER 2015 65
F E A T U R E
It’s a puzzle game that
makes you feel like a talented designer, too
66 OCTOBER 2015
R E V I E W
S P I R I T O F I N V E N T I O N
T E L E P O R T E RMoves blocks from A to B. One a time, and severing any joins in
the process—so you’ll need a plan for
reassembly.
I N V E R T E D C O N V E Y O R
It’s a conveyor, but upside down. Gravity still applies, so you’ll need lifters to keep something up there.
L A S E RDestroys blocks at a distance. Far more versatile than the
eviscerator as it can be connected to
sensors.
P A I N T E RChanges the color of
the block that passes in front of it.
Used to facilitate some of the new
puzzles.
C O U N T E RA smart sensor!
Thank you! If you need to separate out a certain percentage of your blocks, this helps enormously.
Let’s recap. Infinifactory is a creative puzzle game where you turn block- based factory components into complex machines. Each level has a different layout, a different schematic to match, and a different set of inputs that dispense various components and building materials at a fixed rate. It’s your job to negotiate all of these different factors, a task that is 50% industrial design and 50% trainset construction.
You are doing this in order to please your alien captors, giving the game a comic streak that treads the line between black comedy and outright slapstick. The sci-fi setting justifies both the freeform nature of the environments you build in (you’ll spend a bunch of time constructing factories on asteroids) and also allows Infinifactory to show off a surprisingly pretty side, particularly in its later missions. It’s not all conveyor belts and starscapes: there are dazzling nebulae, cyberpunk skylines, and alien forests.
When I wrote our review of the alpha version of Infinifactory back in February, I felt like I should give it a score. That version of the game was an accomplished puzzle game, my favorite in years, with a campaign you could see from start to finish. It felt
done. Playing the finished version of Infinifactory today feels like playing the game and its first expansion pack. It’s more done.
You zip around by way of an always-on jetpack and manipulate blocks in much the same manner as Minecraft’s creative mode. Every tool available to you behaves according to consistent, heavily simplified physics. Complexity arrives in the form of logic devices: sensors, blocks with different toggle states, and so on.
These are introduced to you slowly, with puzzles dedicated to explaining each. Soon, the potential for creative combination skyrockets.
Since its early access launch, Infinifactory has gained three
mini-campaigns that follow the main story. Each is built around a set of new blocks that change the way you build in variously subtle and drastic ways. The laser is a variant on the block-destroying eviscerator with much longer range and, crucially, the ability to be toggled on and off. The counter is a sensor that activates after a user-specified number of blocks have passed it. My favorite is the
teleporter, which acts as an environmental modifier. Teleporters move one block at a time (or the player) between separate areas of the world. Their usefulness is offset by the need to reassemble whatever it is that you tried to teleport on the other side: building devices to sensibly feed constructions in and out of teleporters is a gratifying challenge.
CREATIVE ASSEMBLYThe genius of Infinifactory is not that it’s a very well-designed puzzle game: it’s that it makes you feel like a talented designer too. There’s a tremendous satisfaction to watching a machine you’ve slaved over diligently follow your orders. It’s the videogame equivalent of those incredibly compulsive looping gifs of factory processes, but you made it—and the pride you experience in coming up with a solution feels ‘earned’ in a way it does in few other games. It’s appropriate, then, that Infinifactory allows you to output a gif of your creations at the touch of a button (these have been upgraded in a recent patch, too) and that, for those who want to take things further, there’s the option to create and share user-generated puzzles via the Steam Workshop.
It’s nice to be able to finally give this the outright recommendation it warranted earlier in the year. This is the most generous game Zachtronics has made, opening up SpaceChem’s lofty problem-solving to anybody who can place blocks but without sacrificing too much intellectual headroom in the process. The best solutions blow my mind, but I’m happy with my own ones too. It’s that accessibility that makes Infinifactory special: not only is it clever, but it shares its cleverness with you.
93The pleasure of creative block-building meets the satisfaction of puzzle-solving. One of the year’s best games.
V E R D I C T
N E E D T O K N O WWHAT IS IT?
A block-based puzzle game about factory
construction.
EXPECT TO PAY$25
DEVELOPERZachtronics Industries
PUBLISHERIn-house
REVIEWED ONIntel i5-2500K, 16GB
RAM, GeForce GTX 970
MULTIPLAYERLeaderboards only
LINKwww.zachtronics.com/
infinifactory
GIANTS OF INDUSTRY Block-based puzzler INFINIFACTORY rolls off the production
line as an instant classic. By Chris Thursten
The new blocks added since launch
It’s fun to simply watchyour creations work.
New blocks make timingdevices like this easier.
The timeless eleganceof an industrial laser.
Not the most elegantsolution, honestly.
OCTOBER 2015 67
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Infinifactory
FLIGHT OF FANTASY FINAL FANTASY XIV’s first expansion balances
tradition with adventure in HEAVENSWARD. By Daniella Lucas
Flying makes even the most mundane of
delivery quests a real joy
R E V I E W
FFXIV has long been trying to balance the trappings of a traditional Final Fantasy game with being an MMO to rival the likes of World of Warcraft—and to great success. Its first expansion, Heavensward, adds a huge new section to the map of Eorzea, the power of flight and several new classes, all without tipping those finally balanced scales. Where TESO fails to cohesively marry the singleplayer prestige of Skyrim with a world filled with other people, FFXIV and its expansion succeed.
Taking you into the heart of the once sealed-off city of Ishgard, Heavensward opens on a solemn note. Given the previous tragedy and revelations in the city of Ul’Dah that saw your friends in dire straits in the lead-up to the expansion, it’s a fittingly frosty start. And to see it you’ll have to have complete the main questline of A Realm Reborn and all of its
There are a lot of expectations to live up to when your game bears the Final Fantasy name. They all need to have epic, twisting storylines, magical landscapes, and plenty of Moogles. It’s all part of the DNA of the series. But despite the MMOs of the collection possessing all of these things, there
are many who still don’t consider them to be ‘proper’ Final Fantasy games. Those people are missing out.
subsequent patches first. Yes, it will take you a while if you’re starting as a completely new player, but the journey is well worth it. And with boosts to help first timers level-up quickly and cut dungeon queue times, you don’t have to worry about being left behind.
The new areas are vast and designed to take full advantage of the new flying mounts. Camps pepper the snow-besieged hills of Western Coerthas, while the Sea of Clouds swims with tiny islands waiting to be explored. It’s a real shame that
you can’t take advantage of that flight-based design straight away. You have to earn your wings first, and it takes ages to do so.
You’re stuck hoofing it until you unlock all of the aether currents in any given area to learn what the surrounding winds are like. Some are dotted around the hills and obscure high points, while others are
unlocked during quests. It does start to feel dull as you run from one end of the map to the other doing classic MMO busywork. But once you get them all and you finally take flight, all of that tedium is forgotten. Taking to the skies is glorious. Dipping between the trees of the Chocobo Forest, or the fluorescent pompoms of the Churning Mists is a sight to behold. Flying makes even the most mundane of delivery quests a real joy.
NEW CLASSThe fighting is equally grand. The new classes (gun-toting Machinist, sword-wielding Dark Knight and globe—uh, spinning?—Astrologian) add a nice mix to party line-ups, as do the new skills for existing classes that accompany the level cap rise to 60. With every new move comes a new layer of strategy to consider. While many players are still finding their feet over what works best, it’s the sense of greater choice that’s most exhilarating. There’s no one way to do things anymore.
There’s a lot on offer here, and while I sunk over 40 hours into the main storyline I have yet to see the end of it. The amount of new things to do is equal to that of the base game, which is a huge feat for an expansion, and there’s still plenty more on the way.
If you already play FFXIV then Heavensward gives you even more of what you know and love. For those that have been eyeing up those chocobos from the sidelines, there’s no escaping the catching up you’ll have to do, but that shouldn’t put you off. Even if you don’t know your Tonberrys from your Cactuars, it’s well worth playing for the sheer variety of adventures. Now is definitely the time to get involved.
E X C E E D T H E W E I G H T L I M I T
1 D O A Q U E S TTalk to this guy in
Ishgard for a quest. While it’s designed to unlock the ability to fly for the normal chocobo you got earlier, it’ll unlock it for ol’ Tubby, too.
2 A W A K E N H I MNext, head to
Tailfeather where this farmer’s boy will send you out to awaken your chocobo’s instincts by summoning it to battle alongside you.
3 G E T A F E E LAfter you’ve done
this you’ll be sent on errands to a few different locations so that your feathered friend can get a taste of the wind in its beak.
4 F L O A T F R E EHead back to
Tailfeather to complete the quest, and then BOOM. Your fat rolls will be free to ripple beautifully in the breeze. Lovely.
How to make your fat chocobo fly
87A hugely enjoyable addition to the world of Eorzea, with plenty of room to spread your wings and explore.
V E R D I C T
N E E D T O K N O WWHAT IS IT?
The first expansion of the formerly
troubled, but now utterly excellent, MMO.
EXPECT TO PAY$40
DEVELOPERSquare Enix
PUBLISHERIn-house
REVIEWED ONi5-3230 CPU, 8GB RAM
MULTIPLAYERMMO
LINKna.finalfantasyxiv.com/heavensward
68 OCTOBER 2015
Some views can only be fully appreciated on wingback.
The Tailfeather camp lies in the heart of Chocobo Forest.
Their wings may be tiny, but even chocobos can fly.
You’ll have plenty of tales to tell around the campfire after your adventure.
Ravana is the first Primal you face.
R E V I E W
Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward
OCTOBER 2015 69
COPY KATANAA mixture of stealth and turn-based combat, RONIN isn’t quite as good
as its obvious inspirations. By Phil Savage
The trick is to always be
moving
It looks like a stealth game and sometimes plays like a stealth game, but there are frequent occasions where you’re forced into battle. Ronin is first and foremost about fighting, and the turn-based swordplay is what distances it from its most visible source of inspiration.
Each of its five chapters has three levels: two in which you infiltrate buildings to hack terminals, and a third where you confront and kill one of the five executives responsible for the death of your father. Set in sprawling office buildings, each level is composed of a number of self-contained sections. At first, you’re unseen—free to lurk in the darkness, taking out guards and planning your opening strike. But soon you’ll need to jump into the light, at which point the action pauses. Each combat turn is defined by the enemy’s actions. If a red laser sight is pointed at you, on the next turn they’ll fire. If they’ve fired, on the next turn they’ll re-aim.
W hy yes, Ronin does look a lot like Gunpoint. A 2D action-stealth game that takes place in the interiors of a stylishly futuristic city, its similarities are numerous. You hack computer terminals, use the mouse to plan and execute jumps, and stick to any wall or ceiling you
fling yourself against. Ronin is less derivative than it first appears, though, thanks largely to the prominence of combat.
The trick is to always be moving. It takes two turns to down a guard: one to land near them, and one to strike them down. It takes two turns in the same position to get yourself killed. That’s the central puzzle of each encounter. The easiest solution is to jump into guards, knocking them down and giving yourself a
couple of turns before they recover.
At a basic level it’s an enjoyable system to manipulate, enhanced by unlockable skills. These are tied to a limit break meter that builds as you stun and kill. Fill it completely, and
you’re given a free action. More often, it’s worth spending your accrued points on a potentially life-saving special move. By the end of the game, I could create decoys, throw my sword, and send out a circle of daggers that temporarily downed all visible guards. There’s even a teleport move that lets you instantly slam into any visible enemy to send them flying. If they’re standing by a
window, this is an instant defenestration button.
As I grew more familiar with the combat, inconsistencies became more apparent. For starters, you don’t always have enough information to plan a move. The jump tracer doesn’t account for enemies, so it’s difficult to know where you’ll end your turn if you go for a stun—an omission that led to my death on more than one occasion. Invisible, Inc. proved the worth of complete transparency in turn-based feedback, and it’s a lesson I wish Ronin had learned.
RONIN ON THE SPOTMore frustratingly, your moveset is restricted in combat. You can’t climb or run, only jump, and you’re unable to fine-tune actions mid-turn. Outside of combat, you can pause at any moment to plan and execute moves. I suspect the limitations are a necessary tradeoff to keep the difficulty intact, but they seem to undercut game’s core fantasy of balletic, fluid action expressed through stop-and-start systems.
Each level has three optional objectives: don’t kill a civilian, don’t trigger a lockdown, and kill all guards. Except, they’re not really optional. You need to complete all three to earn a skill point used to unlock Ronin’s best toys, and that means you’re incentivized to re-try each checkpoint over and over.
With a growing collection of skills, Ronin stays interesting. The level design is largely excellent, offering plenty of varied scenarios, albeit only a handful of enemy types.
Ultimately Ronin doesn’t live up to the quality of its inspirations, but it doesn’t really need to. It does enough to make for a fun four-to-six hour campaign of gratifying swordplay.
P U S H I T T O T H E L I M I TH O L O G R A P H I C D E C O Y More trouble than it’s worth.
T H R O W S W O R DRemember to get it back again.
T H R O W D A G G E R SKnock down everything.
T E L E P O R TIf an enemy is near a window, use this.
Ronin’s skills explained
74A fun, if lightweight, stealth combat game. The turn-based fighting isn’t perfect, but remains entertaining enough.
V E R D I C T
N E E D T O K N O WWHAT IS IT?
2D stealth combat with turn-based battles.
EXPECT TO PAY$13
DEVELOPERTomasz Wacławek
PUBLISHERDevolver Digital
REVIEWED ONWindows 7, Intel i7 970
GTX, i5-3570K CPU, 8GB RAM
MULTIPLAYERNone
LINKwww.bit.ly/1LD7uS1
70 OCTOBER 2015
R E V I E W
Well, shit.
Damn, I was going to use that as the review title.
Being a Ronin means always bending your knees.
The jump arc shows how far you’ll leap in a single turn.
His one weakness? Windows.
See. Look atthe knees. Bent.
Ronin
OCTOBER 2015 71
R E V I E W
TORQUE SPORT ROCKET LEAGUE is a game about cars and soccer
for people who care about neither. By Matt Elliott
Driving is delicious. Cars
ease around like butter in a heated pan
I’ve never played a game that needed a tutorial less. Drive car at giant ball; hit ball into net; score points. Rocket League’s competitive core has existed for millennia, and this helps make a preposterous concept feel primal. This, in turn, is a laughable way of describing a game that would be called moto carball if it actually existed in real life.
Like dry martinis and penises scribbled in unattended notebooks, Rocket League is a celebration of distinction through simplicity. Driving is delicious. Cars ease around like butter in a heated pan, but always feel under your control. You accumulate boost by driving over markers on the arena floor, and unleashing it is a thunderous rush, firing you across, over and around the pitch. Because matches take place in smooth, enclosed spaces, you can drive up walls and across ceilings as a shimmer of perpetual motion. Cars can also jump and dodge, both of which can be used defensively and offensively. The weight of the cars,
Let’s not waste energy exploring why soccer should replace its paper chain of squalid billionaires with cars, and accept it as fact. A fact that Rocket League proves with simple and immediate ease. Yes, this is a game about cars playing soccer, and that’s just about as developed a plot as you’ll require.
as well as your ability to apply unruly boost to jumps, adds a pleasingly haphazard element; something like athletic soccer players leaping above the opposition to header high balls, but with less shirt-pulling.
The vehicles feel light and buzzy—somewhere between Micro Machines, and those swift, slidey remote controlled cars that only seem to appear on Christmas Day. This
contrasts nicely with the fat, beefy bounce of the ball, which gormlessly invites impact like a punchable cousin. And that’s it. I feel almost guilty reducing a review to ‘ball’ and ‘car’, but there are only ever those two
things in the field of play, and crucially, they both feel great. There are no weapons, but certain markers fill your boost and let you obliterate other players. Mercifully, it’s the generous, instantly-respawning type of obliteration. Destruction is the only conspicuous deviation from the clean and simple business of driving around and scoring goals, but in most of the games I played it was a rarity,
and certainly never frequent enough to be irritating.
Alternatively, you can set teams of four against each other, in matches that become so frantic that they’re less like footy, more like a lost, confused beach ball bashed between bumper cars. Playlists of duels, doubles, standard 3v3 matches and the appropriately named Chaos 4v4 mode are all available online, with ranked playlists limited to duels, doubles and 3v3. There’s a reason why online play is the first option on the menu, as here’s a game that feels designed to be played with actual people, and this is absolutely where it thrives. I rarely had to wait long for a game, and if players dropped out mid-session they were immediately replaced by AI bots. Best of all, it’s refreshingly simple to get back into another game, so very little time is spent lingering in lobbies.
SIMPLE PLEASURESIf playing online isn’t your thing, there are exhibition matches and full seasons you can solo. The length and difficulty can be altered, and while it doesn’t offer much in the way of depth—cars and soccer, remember?—I still found myself bonding with pretend teammates. Perhaps I’m just lonely.
The offline modes do reveal the game’s minor inadequacies, however. Team AI can be flaccid and unreliable, especially against tougher opponents, and the same simplicity that makes Rocket League so immediately playable can cause things to get repetitive when played alone; a criticism that only becomes apparent precisely because it’s so damn addictive. It’s a simple thing done brilliantly well, kept interesting by the thrill of competition.
N U T M E G S A N D B O L T S
1 B O O S THelps you to
whack the ball with some vigor, but also allows for excellent mid-air acrobatics when applied during a jump.
2 J U M PHop up to hit high
balls, or block lobbed balls for epic saves. Press twice for a probably-impossible double jump. Heck, it’s all impossible!
3 D O D G EFlip forward,
sideways and backwards for an extra boost of momentum, which will send the ball flying impressively.
4 S L I D EPowerslide
around the arena to change direction easily and knock shots sideways. Also: looks cooler than disco cucumbers.
5 R A MFill your boost
meter with powerups and slam into an enemy vehicle, destroying them utterly. It’s not even a cardable offence.
Five silky skills every MVP should master
87Rocket League is fast, fun and relentlessly enjoyable. The best soccer game without feet.
V E R D I C T
N E E D T O K N O WWHAT IS IT?
A car soccer game and superior sequel to
Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered
Battle-Cars.
EXPECT TO PAY$20
DEVELOPERPsyonix
PUBLISHERIn-house
REVIEWED ONi5-3230 CPU, 8GB RAM
MULTIPLAYERUp to eight
LINKwww.psyonix.com
72 OCTOBER 2015
R E V I E W
They call me ‘the man that gravity temporarily ignored’.
You can tinker with unlockable goodies in the garage.
Wheel, vroom, ball, GOAL!
Games take place in giant cages—more gaol than goal.
OCTOBER 2015 73
R E V I E W
Rocket League
HEAVY METAExploit an unfinished adventure game while playing it,
in THE MAGIC CIRCLE. By Christopher Livingston
Contains a lot of jokes about
crowdfunding, game tropes and
games media
74 OCTOBER 2015
Before long, you’ll gain the ability to make changes to the game by tampering with its programming. Specifically, you can alter the behavior of the game’s entities. After trapping a hostile dog-creature, for example, you can change its alignment from viewing you as an enemy to seeing you as a friend. You can assign it new enemies, which it will then attack. You can also completely strip it of attributes, leaving it inert while storing those properties in your library to be applied to other creatures. None of this involves writing code yourself, mind you: it’s accomplished by simply selecting words from a list and dropping them into fields. When you exit the customization screen where you set these values, the creature’s behavior is changed.
T he Magic Circle casts you as a playtester for a game that has been in development for ages and is still nowhere near completion, something most gamers can easily grok in this age of Kickstarter campaigns and Early Access. What began as a sci-fi game has become a swords and sorcery adventure,
and as you progress through the unfinished world you’ll find the spines of a pixelated space station poking through the fantasy crust, with long-forgotten robots and drones mingling among the wizards and spiders.
You can’t use these abilities directly, so overcoming obstacles becomes a matter of altering the behavior of your growing AI menagerie. Once you’ve stolen an ability or value from an enemy, you’re clear to use it to edit any creature or
entity you might fancy. Rocks can be made to float in the air, providing you a nice stepping stone. Zombies can be made fire resistant and rats can be fitted with tractor beams. This gives you multiple ways
to tackle obstacles, solve puzzles and defeat enemies. It’s also a lot of fun to play with between puzzles: who could resist sending a loyal army of mushrooms fitted with helicopter blades and repulsor beams to attack a few fire monsters? There are certainly shades of Double Fine’s Hack ’n’ Slash to the premise.
You’re not the only human in the game: the developers, represented by floating eyeballs, are working on it as you play, though most of their work amounts to them bickering loudly with each other. As you might expect in a game about an unfinished game, The Magic Circle contains a lot of jokes about crowdfunding, development, game tropes and games media, and provides some insightful and funny observations on those fronts. While the tone is initially light and playful, however, the writing eventually sags under its own weight. The performances grow melodramatic and overwrought, and there are long stretches where the developers argue, or a rogue AI speaks to you while you simply sit there, waiting for them to finish (during Early Access, the ability to skip a couple of these scenes—though not all of them—was added).
NOT SO FASTThere are a couple of other issues: for a game where you’ll be crisscrossing the landscape repeatedly to explore, it’s annoying that you can’t sprint (though fast-travel is possible between scattered nodes). And while it fits in with the premise that the mostly black-and-white game world (with some neat exceptions) is visually unappealing, it doesn’t really help the fact that the game world is visually unappealing.
You can expect between 4-6 hours of play, and there’s a relatively enjoyable minigame that becomes available after completing the story. You can also continue exploring to find secrets you may have missed. Despite its issues, The Magic Circle’s concepts are both clever and put to good use, and editing monsters to solve puzzles is always enjoyable.
78Visually drab and a bit too taken with its own story, but otherwise a clever and fun exercise in creative problem-solving.
V E R D I C T
N E E D T O K N O WWHAT IS IT?
An adventure game about exploring
an unfinished adventure game.
EXPECT TO PAY$20
DEVELOPERQuestion
PUBLISHERIn-house
REVIEWED ONWindows 7, Intel i7
x980 3.33GHz, 9GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce
GTX 960
MULTIPLAYERNone
LINKwww.magiccircle
game.com
A K I N D O F M A G I C Other monsters I would like to edit
G T A 4 ’ S R O M A NNot really a monster, but I’d like to board up his mouth.
H A L F - L I F E 2 ’ S P O I S O N Z O M B I E S I’d add a weakness: poison! Problem solved.
S P E L U N K Y ’ S B A T SNo more flying at an angle. Maybe no more flying, period.
L E F T 4 D E A D ’ S W I T C HShe’s sensitive to noise, so I’d remove her ears. Maybe even her whole head.
F A L L O U T ’ S D E A T H C L A W SRemove the claws. Or maybe the death. Both?B I O S H O C K
I N F I N I T E ’ S H A N D Y M E NTheir weakness is their heart, so I’d add ten more.
R E V I E W
Like Neo, you can change the code. Kung fu still eludes you.
Just what I always wanted.
I’m being followed by a feralmushroom and a zombie. As I planned.
Trap a monster, then start adjusting its code.
The developers deleted things, but you can bring them back.
OCTOBER 2015 75
R E V I E W
The Magic Circle
76 OCTOBER 2015
Witchers are powerful mutants, feared throughout the land, able to singlehandedly kill monsters no normal
man could. So why are these two yokels in a tavern trying to pick a fight with me? I love The Witcher 3, and it’s one of my games of the year, but my experience of playing it never quite fits with the lore.
This dawned on me when I was forced to run away from a group of bandits because they were a few levels higher than me. The White Wolf. The Butcher of Blaviken. The guy who ran away from some drunk peasants with his tail between his legs. Nobody seems that bothered by my scarred face, cat-like eyes and dark reputation. There’s a guy in White Orchard who spits “freak!” every time I walk past.
Admittedly, I don’t know much about witcher lore, but I do understand that witchers aren’t like Superman: they can be killed. Geralt just happens to be an especially powerful one. But it still doesn’t quite work for me. An RPG needs a level system, of course, but it jars with what Geralt is supposed to be. The experience he has. It made more sense in the first game when he’d lost his memory, but by Wild Hunt he’s regained it.
“Why are these two yokels in a tavern trying to pick a fight with me?”Not feeling as empowered as I’d like in THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT
AN RPG NEEDS A LEVEL SYSTEM, OF COURSE, BUT IT JARS WITH WHAT GERALT IS SUPPOSED TO BE
A N D Y K E L L YTHIS MONTH Decided it was time to even the odds.
ALSO PLAYED Batman: Arkham Knight
Now that’s a proper test of Geralt’s developed talents.
E X T R A L I F ECONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING
PUB BRAWLSBoxers and MMA fighters often talk about the problem of drunk people trying to start fights with them, despite being majorly outclassed, just to show off to their buddies or prove themselves. So perhaps that explains the red-nosed yokels in the tavern. But it doesn’t explain why I can get easily trounced by some generic enemies in
the woods, just because I haven’t reached a certain level. Given
all of Geralt’s combined experiences, in the first two
OCTOBER 2015 77
It’s been seven months between me finishing the second chapter of The Evil Within and starting the third.
I’m in a village that looks like Bree from The Lord of the Rings, only the high fantasy drunks with West Country accents have been replaced with zombies who have barbed wire coming out of their faces. This is an impressive enemy-laden horror sandbox; a perimeter of old residential buildings inside a stonewalled compound, with a misty courtyard separating them.
BULLET SPONGESYou can’t really justify using more than two bullets per foe in The Evil Within: one for an initial headshot preceding a pistol whip melee attack, then one more to finish the job. Sadly, I end up using a lot more than this.
I manage just one stealth kill—I notice a lady seething while she’s looking out of a window and knife her in the head—but the rest are clumsy
shootouts where I’m forced to make a break for it after wasting bullets. I find a house with a trap where pulling a switch fires wooden stakes from the ground and performs an instant kill. I lure enemies back to this dangerous habitat, one-by-one, and take them out with detached malice. It’s what a coward would do.
To escape the village I need a chainsaw. Sadly, the only guy who has one is this big dude called a Sadist, who’s chained up behind a fence in a barn and cohabits this living space with some pigs. To psych myself up for the fight I decide to hit a pig with an axe, but the animation as it squeals and falls over makes me feel far worse.
I trigger the Sadist fight by putting an explosive crossbow bolt in his head. So far so good! Unfortunately, I used a lot of my ammo failing to kill villagers—after my last crossbow bolt misses, I empty my last few handgun and shotgun rounds either into the guy or at nearby scenery and find myself in a bit of a pickle. So armed with only my wits I lure chainsaw man back to the spike trap. I wait a few seconds then activate it—instant death. I take his chainsaw, cut through the fence and leave.
That was a proper Shinji Mikami horror game struggle—I love it. I’m left feeling remorse for the pigs I’ve killed, but nothing for the people.
“I feel remorse for the pigs I’ve killed”
games and the books too, the guy should have surely reached his level cap by now.
It’s a tricky problem, from a game design standpoint, making a player feel powerful as well as offering a challenge. Rocksteady pretty much perfected this with their Batman games. You know you can easily beat that group of enemies up, but it’s how you do it that’s satisfying. The longer your combo chain, and the more abilities you use, the better it feels. I think that could have worked in The Witcher 3. There’s no way of knowing.
SUPREME BEINGSo I switched the game to easy. Yeah, I know. But (a) I don’t really play games like this for the combat. It’s all about the story and world for me. And (b) I feel more like Geralt. Or at least my idea of him. I no longer run away from fights, but there’s enough of a challenge in some of the tougher battles that it doesn’t feel like a total cakewalk. I’m having a much better time, and there isn’t as much of a disconnect in my head between the lore’s version of Geralt and the one I’m in control of. It’s still there, but it’s not as jarring.
A lot of games are guilty of this disconnect between a character and how they act in the game, of course. But for whatever reason it feels more pronounced to me in The Witcher 3. Perhaps it’s because the game focuses so strongly on Geralt and his past. The writers spend so much time building and developing his character, only for it all to fall apart when he confronts an enemy that’s a few levels too high. Even so, Wild Hunt is a hell of an RPG, and I can’t wait to explore more of the gorgeous islands of Skellige.
Wasting ammo and murdering swine in THE EVIL WITHIN
Your foes soak up more ammo than is useful.
S A M U E L R O B E R T STHIS MONTH Killed an animal that didn’t deserve it.
ALSO PLAYED Batman: Arkham Knight, XCOM: Enemy Unknown
THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW
N O W P L A Y I N G
Another rustic village, more hapless yokels to fight. *sigh*
78 OCTOBER 2015
THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW
N O W P L A Y I N G
To polish up my sneaking skills in preparation for the next Hitman game I’m doing a series of excruciating hamstring
exercises and revisiting 2012’s Absolution. As this is PC Gamer magazine and not Men’s Health I will focus on the latter here, specifically the player-created assassination challenges of Contracts mode.
I jump in at the deep end. This Contract has had 25 plays and zero likes, and the title is ‘Kill them noob’, so I already know its creator has complete disdain for humanity. To achieve a perfect rating he wants me to shoot a wrestler who looks like Danny Trejo, a luchador called The Patriot, and a nondescript goon who must have done something serious to piss him off, all while dressed as a scientist. Because if there’s one place you’d expect to see a scientist, it’s at a rowdy underground wrestling event. The second I unholster my pistol I’m shot from all sides by men in big hats. I am not a good assassinator.
Next I play on The Hotel where my target is a lady with a facemask who resembles Mrs Doubtfire. I slink down a ladder into the basement and bash a goon with a wrench, an item so effective here you feel like 47 should carry it in his briefcase rather than a sniper rifle, but
the janitor to my immediate left sees the whole thing and takes off screaming. That’s why you should always check your corners for janitors. As I desperately sprint after him to talk him round/hit him hard in the head, I start to feel like my methods are very Route One. Where once I skulked around poisoning donuts, dropping pianos on heads, shooting glass-bottomed hot tubs so the bathers spilled out, and rigging BBQs to blow, now all I’m doing is smacking people with blunt objects like an angry mechanic.
These challenges feel too basic, so I create my own. First, though, you have to complete a run yourself: the people you kill, and how you kill them, form the
“I must shoot a wrestler who looks like Danny Trejo”Meet Agent 47, the world’s loudest secret agent, in HITMAN: ABSOLUTION
stipulations of your Contract. I choose the Gun Shop as my location, which I immediately regret, because everyone has guns. Using a heroic sucker punch I surprise-KO an unfortunate named Toby Anderson then give his body a few confirmation gunshots before every soul in the store—including a doddery old bloke who suddenly gains the mobility of an Olympian—opens fire.
CHANGING PLACESTo apologize I change into Toby’s clothes and vow to continue his life—you know, as some kind of homage for a life cut short. But everyone takes it as some sort of profound insult and continues shooting. Come on, guys, is this what Toby Anderson would want?
Grudgingly conceding that I’m much too loud to be a silent, or even moderately quiet killer, I hide away in an airvent and wait for the commotion to die down, then exit the level and finalize my rather basic Contract: kill Toby Anderson with a pistol.
It’s not exactly classic Hitman, is it? Where’s your creative spark, 47? Thankfully it looks like his next game is reintroducing sandbox silliness, and my hamstrings are ready. All I want is to kill literally anyone in the world as ridiculously as possible with absolutely no penalty. Is that too much to ask?
B E N G R I F F I NTHIS MONTH Discovered that the cure for baldness is bullets.
ALSO PLAYED GTA V, Her Story
WHERE ONCE I DROPPED PIANOS ON HEADS, NOW I’M HITTING PEOPLE WITH BLUNT OBJECTS
This is what happens when you don’t hold the door open for someone in Texas.
What, can’t a scientist enjoya little wrestling now?
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I love Team Fortress 2. Sort of. I play it approximately once a year, for a few hours, and then I stop. In between
these bouts of actually playing the game I read the improbably funny comics and improbably funny official blog. I watch the machinima. For some reason, TF2 is one of the best-written games I’ve ever encountered even though there’s very little writing in the actual game. That’s the thing about Team Fortress: I love it, but I have no idea what it actually is.
This year’s visit was prompted by the Gun Mettle update. This is a buy-in event that gives you optional objectives called contracts to fulfill in the course of a regular match. As explained in the (improbably funny) tie-in comic, completing these grants you access to new weapons that aren’t available anywhere else. None of this is particularly new to online shooters, but it adds a degree of RPG-lite number-wranglin’ that TF2 previously lacked.
It’s a fun diversion to pile onto a game that is as chaotic and unreadable as I remember. In latter-day TF2, Soldiers wrapped in Christmas lights
battle Demomen with katanas while Pyros wearing robot heads fire laser-throwers at Spies that murder people with magical icicles. Entering this environment as the Medic is both utterly overwhelming and deeply familiar. I don’t know these maps and I don’t know what any of these new items do, but I do know that pointing my medi gun at friendlies and holding the fire button is probably the right thing to do. One of my Gun Mettle contracts is to rack up assists as a medic, handily, so I complete that one by attaching myself
“I love it, but I have no idea what it actually is”Stopping by to visit TEAM FORTRESS 2
to whichever Soldier, Heavy or Pyro seems to be doing least badly.
GUN FANCIERI complete the contract, earning myself a new medi gun clad in appalling tartan that switches from red to blue depending on what team I’m on. Diving into the options to bind a key to ‘inspect item’ allows me to stare at my own gun provided I’m not currently firing it. Team Fortress was already a competitive shooter, a dress-up game, and a short film series. Why not an interactive gun ogling experience? Why not.
Having finished the Medic contract, I switch over to an old favorite—Sniper with the huntsman bow. TF2 like this is entirely a game about firing arrows slightly over the lip of cover and waiting for the gratifying ‘ping’ that signifies a headshot. I like to imagine the crash-zoom killcam that the other guy is seeing, hear in my mind’s ear the muttered ‘bullshit’ that invariably follows. They are right: it is bullshit. I could do that for hours, plinking arrows hopefully over walls, without ever questioning why. See you next year, Team Fortress 2.
C H R I S T H U R S T E NTHIS MONTH Spent $6 to support another year of TF2 tie-in comics.
ALSO PLAYED Her Story, Dota 2, Elite: Dangerous
IT’S A FUN DIVERSION TO PILE ONTO A GAME THAT’S AS CHAOTIC AND UNREADABLE AS I REMEMBER
This is king of the hill. We’re the kings of the hill. Hooray for us!
Playing medic is a mix of cowardiceand holding the left mouse button.
FREE GAMES STUFF FROM THE WEB by Tom Sykes
T O P 1 0 D O W N L O A D S
80 OCTOBER 2015
1 VOICE OF VAMANA
GRATUITOUS SPACE BATTLES 2
FREEWARE Enjoy a rendezvous with Arthur
SHIPS Ship-shape and Bristol fashion
Ifeel confident in saying that Connor Sherlock’s Voice of Vamana is inspired by the works of Arthur
C Clarke—because how could it not be? It’s a first-person exploration game that unfolds at a glacial pace, with a terrifically slow beginning where you float from your space shuttle to the alien structure you’ve been sent to investigate.
Too many space games trivialize distance with handy warp drives or jetpacks, but when you finally approach Vamana’s structure, and gain access to it, it feels like you’ve earned it.
Sherlock makes up for the lack of life and detail in his artificial world by means of a well-acted radio channel that accompanies your lonely investigation, and even enhances it in a way by
Positech’s Gratuitous sequel lets you design your own spaceships, and fans have been busy
drawing iconic intergalactic vessels from popular culture. Try these.
making you feel like a real person with a real friend in your ear, rather than the floating camera we so often play as in first-person games. There’s a bit of platforming, a modicum of puzzling once you’ve made your way inside, but Vamana’s main strength is in its sound and visual design. This is a place that feels alien and oppressive, magical in a way, thanks to the ship’s cavernous interior, and the odd devices that transform it in interesting ways.
What will happen when you’ve pressed all the switches—what awaits you in the bowels of this frightening ship? I’m not going to tell you, obviously, that was an entirely rhetorical question, but I will say this: it’s a rare game that makes you both excited and scared to reach its conclusion.
DOWNLOAD AT www.bit.ly/VoiceOfVamana
N Y A NHonor the memory of Nyan Cat, the intergalactic feline who, even as I type this, continues its solitary voyage into deepest space. You’ve got that tune stuck in your head now, haven’t you?
www.bit.ly/Gratuitous3
A P O P H I S B A T T L E S H I PGiven the design and name, I’m pretty sure this is from Stargate SG-1, which featured an Egyptian space god named Apophis as its first-season villain. He was fond of gold.
www.bit.ly/Gratuitous2
B O R G C U B EGive Picard terrifying flashbacks with this impressive Borg slab, which wants to convert all organic beings into squishy cyborgs. Enjoy a cup of tea, Earl grey, hot, while you play, for maximum authenticity.
www.bit.ly/Gratuitous1
Be prepared to hold Shift and W endlessly . 2
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3 PORTAL STORIES: MEL
This is a huge mod boasting 22 levels, a new story with a different voice actor companion, a
ton of custom assets, and even a new decal for the gun. (It’s yellow now. Yellow is cool.) You don’t need Portal 2 installed to play, but you do need to own it. Related: everybody should own Portal 2.
Mel is a clear labor of love, and if the team at Prism Studios can’t match the vocal performances of the original, that’s only because that would be impossible. Mel’s devious puzzles are supported by detailed environments that stop this from feeling like a simple rehash.
DOWNLOAD AT www.bit.ly/PortalMel
JENNY LECLUEIndie developer Stephen Lavelle recreates the soapy business of washing with his typical flair and eye for
detail. We all shower, hopefully, but who else would think to notice all the tiny details of showering, like the pineapples, the tubes of magical ingredients, and the fact that we all involuntarily crap when we squat down? This is a
scatological, childish game of messing around with stuff.
Your interactions are simple and consistent: pick stuff up and drop it again with the left mouse button, while the right performs such actions as squeezing open, chopping or mashing. It’s all good, clean fun.
DOWNLOAD AT www.bit.ly/ShowerGame
SHOWER GAME
1 MIRROR MIRRORTransform your shower
into a freaky hall of mirrors, and see your low-poly wang from a whole new angle.
2 REVERSE GRAVITYTidy the mess you’ve left
in the shower by fundamentally messing with the laws of physics.
3 SEX CHANGEChange your sex with a
handy perfume, combining it with a different product to turn your new tits golden.
1
3
2
MOD New protagonist, new AI, new gun
FREEWARE Do you miss Marple? Try this instead
While we wait for Mografi to finish the Kickstarted adventure Jenny LeClue, we have this playable
mini adventure to whet our appetites. Jenny LeClue: The Journal of Professor Zazer asks us to investigate a creepy mansion; it’s a very short point-and-click, but a funny and fairly stonking one with it.
The full game will feature cliffhangers, choices, and a more advanced adventuring system, but there’s enough here to gain a glimpse of where this delightful detective game is heading. The titular Jenny LeClue is a great gaming protagonist: a hardy kid detective with a torch and no qualms about breaking and entering. It’s like Veronica Mars had a nerdy kid sister.
DOWNLOAD AT www.jennyleclue.com
5
4
FREEWARE The world’s most detailed shower sim
Mel feels like a proper expansion pack.
FREE GAMES STUFF FROM THE WEB by Tom Sykes
T O P 1 0 D O W N L O A D S
82 OCTOBER 2015
6 THE GOLDEN GATE
Gothic 2 is still regarded by many as the best Piranha Bytes game, with the richest world, story and
systems of their many RPGs about heroic dudes in faction-heavy fantasy lands. You’ll be giving up on sleep entirely if you decide to tackle the fan-made Golden Gate too. It adds several new guilds to join, and a whopping hundred extra quests to undertake, and extends the story past the end of Night of the Raven.
Or it will do, anyway—at the time of writing, only the first (of four) chapters has been completed.
Like another recommended mod, Requiem, The Golden Gate makes shields usable in combat; it also adds new textures and a few extra animations to the game. Don’t expect a flawless translation from the Polish original that released last year—or even English voices.
DOWNLOAD AT www.bit.ly/GothicGolden
MOD American Gothic. Well, Polish actually
Another Portal mod? You spoil us, Portal community. And it’s another mod that gives the portal gun a new
coat of paint. Those neat pink and yellow stripes reflect Hazmat’s new portal colors, which have put Valve’s traditional orange and blue wall-holes out to pasture. The palette of environmental objects has been updated to match the garish new look—but there’s more to Hazmat’s
than its color scheme. It also adds seven new maps themed after the clinical, non-apocalyptic testing facility of the original game, while mixing-in puzzle elements from the sequel.
Professional and polished, it’s not quite on the scale of Portal Stories: Mel, but if you’re after a slice of regular portalling that manages to keep things fresh in the process, you’ve found it.
DOWNLOAD AT www.bit.ly/HazmatPortal
8 HAZMAT’S PORTAL MAP PACK
MOD Formerly known as Nick’s Portal Map Pack
VA-11 HALL-ADEMO The Cyber House Rules (thanks, Futurama)
Cyberpunk bartending game VA-11 HALL-A has been in development for a while now, under the
watchful eye of publishers Ysbryd Games (which, full disclosure, includes sometime PC Gamer freelancer Cassandra Khaw). This new demo offers a glimpse of this Snatcher-like adventure, which is shaping up to something special.
It’s a rare cyberpunk game that doesn’t cast you as a hacker and/or freedom fighter of some sort, but that’s not to say your bartending persona won’t be meddling with the world in this one, albeit on a much smaller scale. Your job is to serve drinks and listen to your customers, while offering up advice with a slice of lemon, and on the rocks.
DOWNLOAD AT www.bit.ly/ValhallaBar
7
“What’s up with this weird freaky grass?”
Tickle Portal 2 pink (and, er, yellow) with this mod.
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REGULAR HUMAN BASKETBALLFREEWARE Featuring giant, clumsy, human-powered mechs
Sorry for including a normal, boring basketball game this month, but I was running short and had to
think of something. As you can see, it’s a pretty standard B-ball game featuring a couple of beefy humans, a bouncy orange ball—oh and the two enormous mechs you see at matches all the time. As with real basketball, each player controls a death machine by physically
clambering inside it, and pressing buttons to operate its limbs, as well as the handy magnet that carries the ball to your opponent’s net. Regular Human Basketball is from the devious minds behind multiplayer horror-roguelike Crawl, so it’s odd that this QWOP-like game of flailing robots doesn’t do anything new with the venerable sport.
DOWNLOAD AT www.bit.ly/RegularBasketball
9 THE ESCAPISTSLEVELS Treat yourself to some great escapes
Mouldy Toof’s game explores the flipside of Prison Architect’s intense jail management sim,
putting you in the orange jumpsuit of a recently incarcerated crim who is hoping to break out at the nearest convenient opportunity.
You’re given a number of ways to achieve this in the main game, which incorporates a variety of increasingly difficult prisons, and the community has been busy working on more. There’s a huge number of jails available on the
Steam Workshop, perhaps because the devs have been rewarding the best efforts with game-themed hoodies.
The user-made prisons range from mods based on games, TV and films, to facilities set in space, and modified locations from history. One thing unites them all: your desire to see the back of them, by hook or by crook. I’ve tracked down three of the best to save you the trouble. See if you can dig, shiv, or otherwise scheme your way out of the places of incarceration on the right.
DOWNLOAD AT www.escapistgame.com
PRISON BREAKSGet out of jail free with our get out of jail three
3 S T A L A G L U F T I I ICreator Vic Ramone reckons his map is “probably 99.99%” identical to the German POW camp featured in the Steve McQueen classic, and that’s good enough for me.
www.bit.ly/Escapists3
2 U S S L O C K W I N GA genuine space prison, with all the shiny gray floors and walls you would expect. Escaping this is going to be tricky, what with space famously lacking an atmosphere.
www.bit.ly/Escapists2
1 B L A C K B E A R D ’ S S H I PPrison ships are particularly miserable, given the watery fate that awaits you even if you do manage to escape. As if that wasn’t enough, this one adds pirates.
www.bit.ly/Escapists1
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OLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES
R E I N S T A L L
“The biggest mistake Io made was thinking its story was any good”
OLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES
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Our review was brutal. Tom Francis rightly criticized the long-awaited sequel for being a step
backwards from the magnificent Blood Money. Expectations were high, and Io Interactive delivered a game too obsessed with story and scripted set-pieces to provide the assassination sandbox we wanted.
Despite this, I’ve always had a soft spot for it. It’s a rubbish Hitman game, sure, but it’s an enjoyable 15-hour chunk of mostly good action-stealth, with a few missions I think are among the best in the series. When a new Hitman graced the cover of our last issue, I decided to reinstall Absolution to see if time has been kinder to it.
The biggest mistake Io made was thinking its story was any good, and making that the focus of the game. It’s horribly written, and tries hopelessly to humanize Agent 47. A lot of developers fall into this trap, thinking we care about their characters as much as they do. Imagining they require depth and complexity, when, really, they’re just a means to an end. It’s not Lara Croft the character who defines the Tomb Raider games: it’s what she does. Similarly, no one really cares about Agent 47 as a person. He’s an excuse
to pull off amazingly cool assassinations. That’s it.
The cutscenes in Absolution are tiresome and endless, made all the worse by longtime series voice actor David Bateson’s stilted, lifeless performance. That last detail isn’t Io’s fault, though. Realizing his hammy voice acting would jar with its gritty new David Fincher-inspired visual style, Io hired TV veteran William Mapother (Lost, Justified) to play 47. But when people found out, there was an uproar, and Io was forced to bring Bateson back. Bad idea. Io should have stuck to its guns and defended its artistic vision instead of kowtowing to Bateson’s groupies, because the guy can’t act.
UNFORGIVENThis increased focus on story means that between the proper Hitman-style contracts, of which there are a few, you’re forced to play through clunky, badly designed scripted events, including a woeful rooftop chase involving a helicopter. I’m not sure why Io thought the game needed these. They are everything a Hitman game shouldn’t be: linear, scripted, action-packed, and
HITMAN: ABSOLUTION
N E E D T O K N O WRELEASED2012
PUBLISHERSquare Enix
DEVELOPERIo Interactive
LINKwww.hitman.com
The special today isDEATH on a bed of PAIN.
This rubbish Hitman game is not as bad as you remember. By Andy Kelly
86 OCTOBER 2015
OLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES
R E I N S T A L L
railroading you into a single playing style. There was a six-year gap between Blood Money and Absolution, and in that time, Io appeared to forget why people fell in love with its games in the first place.
Another glaring flaw is the structure. Unlike the huge, open-ended missions of Blood Money, Absolution’s levels are, criminally, split into chunks. There are loading breaks as you transition between areas, and it auto-saves. The lack of any manual save system whatsoever means if you want to experiment, you have to repeat entire chunks of the mission—and in a game where guards like to have massive conversations before they start their patrol, this is an exercise in frustration. And again, it displays a baffling lack of understanding about why we loved the other games.
IT COULD BE WORSEBad sequels to great games
A S S A S S I N ’ S C R E E D I I IThe worst Creed yet, full of lame scripted events and instant fails.
R E S I D E N T E V I L 6How did Capcom go from the sublime Resi 4 to this?
D U K E N U K E M F O R E V E RA disastrous follow-up to Duke Nukem 3D. The abyss of sequels.
F E A R 2This poor sequel had none of the original game’s brutal, kinetic combat.
Disguises aren’t asuseful in Absolution.
If all else fails, grab ahuman shield.
There’s far toomuch of this.
And, yet, I still think it’s a decent game. I’m someone who has always appreciated strong world-building, and Io’s artists are some of the best in the business. Absolution is an astonishingly pretty game, set in a cluttered, believably lived-in world. They went overboard with the bloom lighting, to the point where it sometimes looks like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, but the amount of detail squeezed into the levels is mad. The Terminus hotel is straight out of David Fincher’s Seven: a grimy, dilapidated building, populated by lowlifes and pounded by rain. Hope is an archetypal dusty American desert town, its streets lined with stars-and-stripes bunting.
These amazing spaces make for some genuinely brilliant missions, with a similar freeform feel to those of Blood Money—albeit hampered by
the stupid auto-save system and the levels being split into chunks. There are loads of ways to infiltrate the Terminus. Hope is similarly stuffed with options. A mission in a strip club involves you using a massive crowd of hooting horny men to wander around unseen, planning your hit. There are moments where it feels like classic Hitman, and these, I think, are just about worth all those rooftop chases, sniping sections, and other lame set-pieces.
HIT AND MISSIf you keep comparing Absolution to Blood Money you’ll have a terrible time, but take it as it is and there’s a lot of fun to be had. If Blood Money is 2001: A Space Odyssey, then Absolution is 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Inferior in almost every respect, but an enjoyable
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continuation of the series regardless. The problem is, for every standout moment there’s a massive sinkhole of awful waiting to swallow you up. It’s probably the most inconsistent game I’ve ever played in terms of quality.
One of the main plot threads involves Agent 47 protecting a 14-year-old girl called Victoria, but because the writing is so messy, it’s hard to care about her at all. You don’t feel the same drive and urgency he apparently does, which weakens the narrative massively. The story becomes little more than a distraction, getting in the way of the reason for playing a Hitman game: hitting men. The new incarnation shown off at E3 seems to be sidelining story in favor of good old-fashioned murder sandboxes, thank God.
Absolution is a peculiar quality dip in an otherwise brilliant series. I’m not sure why it happened, but I have
a theory. Io used Absolution to show off its new Glacier 2 engine, and I get the feeling it was still finding its feet with the tech. It had the visuals nailed. I mean, just look at those environments. But perhaps it had problems making levels as big and seamless as Blood Money’s. And perhaps this impacted the game design too, forcing the studio to cut corners. That’s total conjecture, but I’ve seen similar things happen in other games. Assassin’s Creed III was the debut of Ubi’s AnvilNext engine, and was similarly hamstrung as a result. Both games, in fact, take the power away from you at the last moment and play some of their assassinations out in cutscenes, rather than giving you control over them. That should never happen.
MERCIFUL RELEASEBut even with its flaws, and a lukewarm critical reception, Hitman: Absolution still sold almost 4 million copies. Its Metacritic score currently sits at a respectable 79. Even though many hardcore Hitman fans (including our own Tom Francis) lamented its inferiority to its predecessors, it seems the brand was
strong enough to ensure people still bought it. Which is for the best, because if it was a total failure, we might never have seen another Hitman game. It’s been around for years, but there’s still a lot of potential in the series—for more complex simulation, more freedom, and more ways to creatively kill people. Hopefully we’ll see some of that in the new game, titled simply Hitman: with luck, that’s an indication of its back-to-basics approach.
IF YOU KEEP COMPARING ABSOLUTION TO BLOOD MONEY, YOU’LL HAVE A TERRIBLE TIME
If only the level design was as good as the art.
UNINSTALLPhil thinks Absolution should never be absolved
“Nice try, Andy, but a Hitman game with a helicopter chase sequence is indefensible. As is a Hitman game that, at the end of your mission, triggers a cutscene in which Agent 47 fails to kill his target. Absolution does both, and deserves to be filed away in your Steam Library under a special category called ‘the bin’.”
88 OCTOBER 201588 OCTOBER 2015
By Dave JamesGROUP TEST
U P G R A D E
The most dramatic panel upgrade you can buy
HIGH-RESOLUTION MONITORS
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There is a battle going on in the PC gaming world, and no, it’s not between Warner Bros and the people who bought Arkham Knight on
PC. It’s the battle over high resolution vs high refresh rate in your monitor. I checked out high refresh rate screens a few months back, so now let’s turn our attention to the high-res guys.
Q&AWhy can’t I have both a high-res screen and a super-speedy one?At the moment there simply aren’t the panels available to cope with driving something like a 3440 x 1440 or 4K resolution at the sort of 120Hz+ speeds associated with high refresh rates. And it’s taken long enough for PCs to acquire the display connections capable of even driving a 4K screen at 60Hz.
So why would I want a higher resolution over a higher refresh rate?It depends what’s most important to you. Smooth framerates are within the reach of us all, almost no matter what your hardware. All you have to do is sacrifice resolution. But how many folk with a 1440p screen downgrade their gaming res to 1080p for the sake of higher framerates?
OK, what benefits are there to a higher res?At the start of the latest resolution revolution, few. Make the move up to a 4K monitor and your textures look blockier, switch to an ultrawide resolution and the game may not support the new field of view. But that’s all changing now, and games like GTA V or The Witcher 3 add far more drama to images on ultrawides and 4K screens than on lower resolutions.
Dictionary Resolution The pixel count for a given image, in the form of the number of horizontal pixels by the vertical count. Matching the output resolution of a game to the native resolution of a panel is important in maintaining a clear image.
4K AKA Ultra HD is either a resolution of 3840 x 2160 or 4096 x 2160 pixels.
Refresh rate The number of times, per second, a given screen is updated, or ‘refreshed’.
Group Test
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That’s not just Philips flexing its screen size muscles. There’s a genuine benefit to running 4K at this size, which makes it probably my favorite way to play 4K games. While scaling has improved, running a 4K resolution on anything below 31 inches is often an exercise in eyestrain. Not so with this mammoth Philips screen. The VA panel at this pixel pitch means text and icons are almost at exactly the same size as a 27-inch 1440p screen, and upgraded high-res textures look stunning, producing a genuine fidelity boost over lower res gaming.
And, because it’s using a VA panel rather than the familiar TNs associated with affordable 4K monitors, it gives a really impressive picture too. Colors are vibrant and blacks are deep and inky. There’s a little bleed at the very edges, making things slightly dim or differently colored, but otherwise it’s a lovely gaming panel. It’s surprising how quickly you get used to this huge screen, and how it’s still the only 40-inch 4K panel on the market.
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PHILIPS BDM4065UCwww.philips.com $909
That’s because, unfortunately, AMD drivers are still finicky about what until recently were non-standard resolutions. I had some issues with the ultrawides in this test using my Radeon R9 290X, but did finally get them working. I had to switch entirely over to Nvidia’s GTX 980 Ti to get the full 17:9 resolution displayed on this screen, however.
And it is a damned good screen, so you AMD folk are missing out. The contrast levels are excellent, with clear separation between colors, and the white levels are absolutely impeccable. The black levels are typically IPS-weak, however, which did make Arkham Knight a little lossy on the detail front.
But that extra little width that comes with the slightly higher resolution—and the fact this is a 31 -inch screen—makes for a great gaming experience. The pixel pitch is tighter than the 40-inch Philips, but with the IPS panel it’s all still happily legible. The big issue is price: if we’re talking 4K I’m always going to go for the cheaper, bigger Philips panel.
LG 31MU97www.lg.com $1,149
Bigger is quite often better, and with the awesome—if a little poorly-named—BDM4065UC that is most definitely true. And I’m not just talking in terms of the 4K resolution, as this thing offers a full 40 inches of panel.
And you thought there was just one 4K resolution. As if to correct that misconception, LG has created the 31MU97 with a native resolution of 4096 x 2160 and a 17:9 aspect ratio. Just don’t try it with an AMD card, whatever you do.
90% 81%
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3 4The Acer XB280HK houses one of those Nvidia G-Sync modules, offering synchronized framerates for compatible graphics cards. But where it’s generally paired with high-refresh-rate gaming screens here it’s working with a 4K panel running at a conventional 60Hz. That means you get both G-Sync-smooth gaming and super high resolutions. Sure, it’s just a TN panel—we’re only just starting to see frame-syncing with IPS/VA screens—but it’s one of the latest iterations, delivering improved color reproduction and better viewing angles.
It doesn’t have the edge over a proper IPS or VA panel, but it delivers better image quality than the 1440p old-school TN of the Asus Swift. In the 4K space it’s largely a toss-up for me between the massive Philips or the G-Sync skills of the Acer. The drama of the huge screen just wins out for me, although I would find it a massive wrench dragging myself away from smooth frame-syncing. Why is there no perfect panel? Tell me why.
ACER PREDATOR XB280HK www.acer.com $680
That’s quite shocking, making the B2888UHSU-B1 more expensive than the Acer XB280HK with its similarly 4K panel and extra G-Sync hardware. It’s also a huge shame as if it was following trends with the European market I’d be recommending it as a great value entry into 4K.
The TN panel is as good as we’ve seen from the current 4K crop and that 1ms response time makes it a great fit for gaming. It’s not the most aesthetically pleasing, but it’s no ugly duckling either, with a height-adjustable stand and inoffensive black bezel around the outside of the screen itself. I’m not a fan of the touch-sensitive controls—they’re not particularly sensitive to the touch, which makes them frustrating to use.
Unfortunately, at this needlessly high price tag there really is no way to recommend this otherwise perfectly acceptable high-res screen. There is no value to splashing out on a panel that’s offering less than its competitors for more money.
IIYAMA B2888UHSU-B1www.iiyama.com $823
The point where high refresh rates come into their own is in terms of smoothness, which is where Nvidia’s G-Sync tech can be a plus. Luckily for the 4K faithful you don’t have to sacrifice G-Sync for Ultra HD fidelity.
This iiyama panel is a perfect example of how we are still not one world. iiyama doesn’t have good distribution channels in the US, making it expensive for what you get, while in Europe it’s one of the most affordable 4Ks around.
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PHILIPS BDM3470www.philips.com $1,900
SAMSUNG S34E790Cwww.samsung.com $1,136
65I’m still not completely sold on the goodness of a bent screen. As with curved TVs, the benefits are pretty intangible, although I did expect to be more enamored with one on my desktop where I can be in the sweet-spot in perpetuity. I think the problem is that curved monitors don’t curve far enough to really make a difference. The radius is so subtle that it’s barely perceptible, and any effect it has on your games is mostly down to the fact these screens are built at a 3440 x 1440 resolution.
I’m also not sold on Samsung’s use of a VA panel for the S34E790C either. The 40-inch VA panel in the 40-incher feels superior to this, and the IPS panels of both the BDM3470UP and the LG34UC87-P are just plain better. The black levels may be improved over the IPS, but the whites are way out and the colors are nowhere near as good.
When you’re a manufacturer asking this much money for this kind of screen you’re in trouble. I’d be far happier with the 3470UP any day of the week.
There’s also few of the problems getting games running I experienced in the early days. Flawless widescreen used to be vital to get game displaying properly at 3440 x 1440, but now it’s only really the older titles which struggle. Playing GTA V, especially in first-person mode, is a fantastic experience. You can see far more of the world in your peripheral vision, which is always a bonus when you’re on the run from the cops.
The 8-bit AH-IPS panel is a beauty too, delivering crisp colors and fantastic contrast levels. Again it’s a case of great white, but relatively mediocre black reproduction. You do get a lot more control over the picture quality compared with the cheaper AOC panel, which allows you to offset any issues you get with dark images. But there is an elephant in the room and that’s the price—which is a ridiculous $1,900 at the time of writing because of Philips’ lackadaisical US distribution. Just wait a while: this quality screen will surely hit its proper $800 price soon.
Samsung is the king of the curve. It brought the curved TV into our living rooms and suddenly everyone followed suit. Then the curve came to our desktops, paired up with the ultra-widescreen 21:9 aspect.
These ultra-widescreen displays have really grabbed my imagination. Since getting my hands on this Philips screen’s half-brother from AOC I’ve been utterly hooked on the extra gaming drama, rivaled only by 40-inch 4K.
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LG 34UC87-Pwww.lg.com $1,000
7So yes, another curvy panel, but this time it’s a lovely IPS version which puts the Samsung VA to shame. As it’s IPS, the black levels aren’t so hot, but the white saturation is far better—though not the same immaculate reproduction you get on the Philips ultrawide. You also get impressive-looking colors compared with the VA screen—which you ought to given that this thing costs a princely $1,000. That does seem a lot simply for sticking a knee into the panel and giving it a bit of bend. And genuinely I find the flat ultra-widescreen monitors deliver just as dramatic gaming performance as the supposedly more-immersive curved screens.
This LG however does harbor aspirations towards professionalism, with a solid base, decent out-of-the-box calibration and Mac-sensitive Thunderbolt connections. Those add unnecessary expense if you’re only going to be gaming, but if you’re considering a curved monitor for gaming then you’re already all about the unnecessary.
This is one serious ultra-widescreen monitor and no mistake. But it’s not all work and no play—despite the somewhat severe-looking stand—this is another quality IPS screen, here boasting that divisive curved panel.
12
34
56
7
LG 31MU97
1,149
8.8 million
5
Philips BDM4065UC
909
8.3 million
3
iiyama B2888UHSU-B1
823
8.3 million
1
Acer Predator XB280HK
680
8.3 million
1
Samsung S34E790C
1,136
5 million
4
Philips BDM3470
1,900
5 million
5
LG 34UC87-P
1,000
5 million
5
PRICE ($) PIXEL COUNTNumber of pixels in native res
PIXEL RESPONSE (ms)Speed that pixels can change colour
STACKED UP
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34
56
7
28 inch 1ms
28 inch 1ms
31 inches 5ms
40 inches 3ms
34 inch 5ms
34 inch 4ms
34 inch
3840 x 2160
3840 x 2160
4096 x 2160
3840 x 2160
3440 x 1440
3440 x 1440
3440 x 1440
TN
TN
IPS
VA
IPS
VA
IPS 5ms
Panel size Native resolution Panel type Response rate (GtG)
ESSENTIALS
82%
7
Budget buildPC gaming is for everyone. Pick the parts you want to
build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price.
Mid-range buildYou want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This
recommended build will see you through.
Advanced buildYou’re looking for the best PC on the market and
superior components. But you still want to spend smart.
H A R D W A R E
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B U D G E T
M I D - R A N G E
A D V A N C E D
KEY
Build the best PC for your budget
Y O U R N E X T P C
BUYER’S GUIDE
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Buyer’s Guide
OCTOBER 2015 95
T O T A L$ 9 5 5
BUDGET BUILD
Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank
H81M-P33MSI $46A bargain-priced microATX board that pairs nicely with the Pentium G3258, letting you overclock into 4GHz+ territory.
Pentium Anniversary G3258Intel $70Ludicrously cheap and overclockable, the dual-core G3258 rivals far more expensive processors in gaming performance.
AMD R9 380 2GBSapphire $200 AMD’s R9 380 is a refreshed R9 285, but it still packs enough power to handle 1080p gaming at a decent price.
Hyper 212 EVOCooler Master $35A legendary cooler, still the best for its very reasonable price. Overclock to your heart’s content with this.
Crucial Ballistix Sport 1600MHz (8GB)Crucial $51Cheap, low-profile, and reliable. Does its job. The best 8GB you’ll find.
EVGA 500W 80PLUS Certified ATX12V/EPS12VEVGA $45A reliable PSU with enough juice to run your CPU and a reasonably power-hungry GPU.
BX100 250GBCrucial $85Thinking about skimping and going HDD-only? Don’t. The BX100 is much faster and a fantastic performer for the price.
Carbide 200RCorsair $75The 200R gets the job done with toolless trays and plenty of space. ATX-sized, so you can upgrade that microATX board later.
VX2263SMHLViewsonic $130An affordable 1080p monitor with vibrant IPS image quality and low response times. A real bargain.
CM Storm QuickFire RapidCoolermaster $80A no-frills mechanical keyboard with a standard layout and Cherry switches. We recommend Browns or Reds for gaming.
Deathadder 2013Razer $58Don’t skimp on your gaming mouse. Get one of the best. Try the Logitech G502 if you have a giant hand or prefer more weight.
HyperX CloudKingston $80Our favorite gaming headset, and it happens to be as cheap as plenty of inferior cans. A good buy for any gaming rig.
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MID-RANGE BUILD
Our recommended build for playing the latest games
T O T A L$ 1 , 6 0 7
Z97-AAsus $149A reliable mobo from Asus, as usual. Doesn’t have gaming-brand bells and whistles, but can overclock just fine and has an M.2 slot.
Core i5-4690KIntel $235Nearly the performance of an i7 at a better price. Fantastic gaming performance and great overclocking potential. No-brainer.
GTX 970 4GMSI $335Offers the best price/performance ratio right now, and MSI’s model is cheap and overclockable with a quiet cooler.
Hyper 212 EVOCooler Master $35If it ain’t broke... the Hyper 212 EVO is a great cooler for the price. Save a bit of money in your mid-range build.
Vengeance Pro 1866MHz DDR3 (16GB)Corsair $100Corsair reliability, speed that doesn’t cost too much, and 16GB for use down the line.
CX600MCorsair $6580Plus Bronze efficient, with enough power for a good gaming PC. Modular design is a great perk that cuts down on cable tangles.
850 EVO 250GBSamsung $90Samsung retains its top spot on the SSD pile with the fantastically priced, very speedy 850 EVO. Still the best price/performance.
S340NZXT $70The stylish S340 has some nice touches, such as removable dust filters and space for huge liquid cooling radiators.
G257HUAcer $280A step-up from 1080p to 1440p territory, with a vibrant IPS display and good response times at a strong price.
K70 VengeanceCorsair $110A great, full-size mechanical keyboard with an ergonomic wrist rest. We recommend Cherry Brown or Red switches for gaming.
Deathadder 2013Razer $58There’s not a huge range of price differences on the best mice, so stick with the best for your mid-range build too.
HyperX CloudKingston $80Even for our medium build, we still recommend this decently-priced headset.There’s nothing better for the money.
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ADVANCED BUILD
Go above and beyond with a PC powerful enough to end worlds
T O T A L$ 2 , 9 4 0
H A R D W A R E
Buyer’s Guide
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Maximus VII HeroAsus $225Fantastic overclocking and stability, with a great UEFI BIOS from Asus and M.2. Bonus: on-board power, reset, CMOS, etc, buttons.
Core i7-4790KIntel $339Intel’s top quad-core CPU: performance on a par with its much more expensive X99 chips and great for multi-threaded applications.
GTX 980 Gaming 4GMSI $520Right now the GTX 980 is the best value single-GPU card for ultra 1080p and 1440p gaming, bar none.
H90Corsair $88Quiet even under heavy load, the H90 gets the cooling job done with a single 140mm radiator, easily fitting a variety of cases.
Ripjaws X Series DDR3-2133 16GBG.SKILL $10916GB of fast, reliable RAM at 2133MHz. For a high-end build, it’s worth the step up.
Supernova 850W G2 80 Plus GoldEVGA $145A reliable, quiet, gold-rated EVGA power supply, modular, with enough juice to sustain two overclocked graphics cards and a CPU.
850 EVO 500GBSamsung $162The 850 EVO is so good, there’s not much need to step up to the more expensive 850 Pro for a gaming rig. Just get a bigger drive.
Fractal Design Define R5Fractal $111A beautiful and functional case, the R5 has sound absorption, water-cooling support, dust filters and masses of drive space.
Predator XB270HAbprz 144Hz G-SyncAcer $800Simply the best: a 27” 1440p 144Hz IPS display, with Nvidia’s variable refresh tech.
K70 VengeanceCorsair $110Even for a more expensive PC, there’s no need to splash out on a pricier keyboard than the K70 Vengeance.
Deathadder 2013Razer $58Even if you’ve got money to burn, the Deathadder really is the best mouse you can buy right now.
H WirelessSteelSeries $273Our favorite wireless gaming headset, with great sound quality and a convenient battery swapping system for long gaming sessions.
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EADS
ET
I T ’ S A L L O V E R . . .
Welcome back, Commander. It has been 20 years. Aliens rule the Earth. We are reactivating the XCOM Project for one mission, and one mission only: can
somebody, anybody, come and replace my lightbulb.
. . . U N T I L
SEPTEMBER 15
98 OCTOBER 2015
9000
9019
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