PC Gamer - October 2015 USA

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The

100GREATESTPC GAMES

22-pagespecial

PREVIEWEDSTAR WARS BATTLEFRONT / EITR

ANNO 2205 / DARK SOULS III

MIRROR’S EDGE CATALYST / MORE!

HITMANDID ABSOLUTION

BREAK THE SERIES?

BUYER’S GUIDGET THE RIGHT GAMIN

PC FOR YOUR BUDG

WHY FIRAXIS’ STRATEGY SEQUELS THE PC EXCLUSIVE YOU DESERVEXCOM

GHOST RECOWILDLANDSFIRST LOOK AT THE OPEN

WORLD TACTICAL SHOOTE

ISSUE 270

OCTOBER 2015PRINTED IN THE US

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REVIEWEDINFINIFACTORY

FINAL FANTASY XIV:HEAVENSWARD

THE MAGIC CIRCLE

RONINMORE!

N L o o k







MakeoverNotice anything different? For the firsttime in a couple years, we’ve made acomprehensive redesign of ourmagazine. Almost every corner of the book has been updated, from letters to

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#270 OCTOBER 2015

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Our team of writers

T Y L E R W I L D E

Twitter@tyler_wilde

Currently playingThe Flame in the Flood

This monthTook a ride up a river inthe roguelike survivalgame, got attacked bymany wolves.

W E S F E N L O N

Twitter@wesleyfenlon

Currently playingStar Wars Battlefront

This monthWas not moved bypiloting iconic moviespacecraft while playingthe new Star Wars game.

C H R I S L I V I N G S T O N

Twitter@screencuisine

Currently playingThe Magic Circle

This monthFitted a tractor beam to arat and made zombiesresistant to fire. Readmore on p74.

4 OCTOBER 2015





09 SENDYour letters on important matters.

Monitor10 THE TOP STORY

Using HoloLens withMinecraft .

12 THE SPYIsDawn of War 3 about to happen?

Previews14 Ghost Recon Wildlands18

Anno 220522 Star Wars Battlefront24

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

26 Company of Heroes 2: TheBritish Forces32

Dark Souls III34

Eitr

Features38 XCOM 2Firaxis brings procedurally generatedlevels toEnemy Unknown ’sPC-exclusive follow-up.

44 THE TOP 100 GAMESOur annual countdown of the 100greatest 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.

84REINSTALLHitman Absolution revisited.

Hardware88 GROUP TESTHi-res monitors reviewed.

94 BUYER’S GUIDEOur new guide to your next PC.

R E V I E WContents #270O C T O B E R 2 0 1 5

38XCOM 2Samuel talks to Firaxis aboutnew enemies, procedurallygenerated levels, new classesand what else is coming in thenextXCOM .

44THE PC GAMERTOP 100The PCG team assembles tofigure out our yearly list of thebest PC games.

88HARDWAREWe’ve had a clean-up of ourhardware section to make itprettier and more useful toyou, including a buyer’s guidefor your next gaming PC.

100GREATESTPC GAMES

TOP

38

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6 OCTOBER 2015






http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/pc-gamer-october-2015-usa 9/100 OCTOBER 2015

SEND A free Steam key for the funniest or

most insightful letter every month

U S E R R E V I E W STry to sort a deck

of interesting HerStory narrative-cardinto order whileuncovering tasty plonuggets. Yum.@skooIt took twenty years

for somebody tofigure out how tomake full-motionvideogames work,but we’re glad thatthey did.

Finally finishedHalf-Life 2: Episode 2and my God—talkabout punchinggamers in the gut anthen leaving for eigh years!@darrarkWedon’t talk aboutit anymore, DarrarkStill too painful.

Playing some WoWbecause the newpatch still has some juices to wring out.@darksaiyanisDon’t drink the WoW

juice. You don’t knowhere it comes from

Currently about 16hours into The TalosPrinciple . Definitelymy GotY so far.@alexharman

BattleBlock

Theater : a co-opplatformer with co-oplatforming and asense of humor.10/10—would jump again!@louisross167Great, now we’relistening to BuckleYour Pants again.

Ark . I have a dodoarmy named afterthe characters ofthe hit TV showSupernatural. Theyslow down the serve

immensely. Worth.@kimpulsively Never let taste ormass extinctionslow 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 choicesdilutes 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 anda slew of AAA games to play. Let’ssee, how about Batman: Arkham

Knight. Hmm. Lots of issues, bad PCport being fixed, patch coming. OK,how about Pillars of Eternity. OhPatch 2.0 with lots of UI changescoming very soon. Think I will wait.

Well, I loved Witcher 1 and 2, and sohere we go—Witcher 3! Oh, patch1.0.7 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 talkedabout loads, but I am getting tired ofall the reboots of series that have hadgames released recently! Forexample, Hitman: Absolution wasreleased less than three years ago, yethere we are being told that a rebootof the series is going to be releasedthis year. Another example is Mirror’s

Edge, which came out less than seven years ago. This one is moreacceptable, 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 someseries have games released toorecently to be rebooted. (Sorry ifI seem very cynical, I’m actuallya nice guy, I pwomise).James-Lachlan McCallum

Calling something a reboot is amarketing ploy. Be pleased that

they’re trying to recapture the spirit

of games you used to love. PCG

DIY gaming As big-budget games move more andmore towards both multi-platformexperiences (see: Batman / TheWitcher ) and controlled multiplayergames ( DOTA 2 et al), I sincerelyhope that the next generation of

videogame players receive theopportunity to tinker with their

games in meaningful ways. I might bedating myself, but for example: Scorched Earth’s (the DOS game)death quotes lack “Beam me up,Scotty!”—the fact that you can fixthat by adding a line to a text file isempowering, and that type of small,personal customization is somethingI hope today’s PC gamers find a wayto 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 alack of depth in stealth games?

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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 onMicrosoft’s E3 stage blewmy tiny mind, and judging by the internet’s reaction Iwas not the only one. It had

to be smoke and mirrors, surely. A fullyinteractive hologram on the scale of aMinecraft world? No way.

On-stage at the Xbox Conference in June,Microsoft’s Saxs Persson showed how,wearing the HoloLens, you could start byplaying Minecraft on a virtual display on awall and then map it onto a table just bysaying the words “create world”. We saw,from the perspective of the wearer, anentire Minecraft world rise from the table.It was like something from a sci-fi movie.

It was a slightly misleading demo, as itturns out. When a rather clunky prototypeof the HoloLens headset was lowered ontomy head at Minecon in London, I foundthat the headset only lets you view

holograms in a window in the center of

your vision. As a speccy nerd I’m used toseeing the world through a letterbox, butfor some people this will probably be a

bigger disappointment. On the plus side, you can still see the people and objects inthe room around you perfectly well,making it definitively easier to make a cupof tea wearing HoloLens than Oculus Rift.

It’s like looking at the room through darksunglasses, but the holograms themselvesare super-bright and colorful. You can tellHoloLens 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 HoloLensdemo worked precisely as advertised atE3—it was fully, impressively interactive.Walking around a virtual, tabletopMinecraft model in physical space, you canexamine it in detail and lean over it like agiant 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 leastnot in this early demo, but you can playwith the world like a god: changing theweather, placing beacons to guide players,summoning lightning to set things on firefor no good reason. I can also see peopleusing it to keep track of collaborative

builds, or indeed just to admire them.Imagine being able to see all the incrediblethings 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

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TRIVERS OF ORANGEGOOP, CORAL-LIKE

FUNGAL GROWTHS, ANDA YELLOW SUN

W H O W A T C H E S T H E S P Y ?

T

H

E

S

P

Y

O P I N I O N G A M E S T E C H

The Spy hasalways looked likethis. Shut up.

he Spy understands that change isa good thing. A change of trousers;change for the bus; even a spot ofregime change, if it’s a suitablyslow Thursday. Even so, The Spyunderstands that change is alsoscary. Think about the things you’dnever want to change. A defused

bomb. A sleeping grizzly bear. The

games industry as you remember itten years ago. Well, good news!The games industry agrees with

you (the bear’s mind isits own).

Alas, novelty andinnovation will alwayslurk on the periphery ofthis business. Here’ssome comfort: rebootsare coming. Reboots,sequels, prequels,requels and preboots.

Deus Ex! Mirror’s Edge!

Hitman! IoInteractive is, to its credit, tryingsomething new. On December 8this year you’ll be able to buy thegame, become a dour bald man,and creatively murder people.However! The game is not actuallyout until 2016, when all themissions will be in place. Earlyadopters get to play an ‘in-progress’

version, with live events

adding new targets to existingareas and so on. But Io seems morethan a little confused about whatthis method of game developmentis actually called. It’s giving playersan early access option, but Hitman won’t—the studio says—be an Early

Access game. “All of the content werelease live to our players will becomplete and polished.”

An episodic game, then? Hm.“We think the word ‘episodic’ setsup the expectation that we will sellindividual content drops forindividual prices,” Io continues.“That’s not something we’replanning to do. That said, there aresome episodic elements to thestory 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, butlet’s move on. “The thing is, thereisn’t really a term to describe whatwe’re doing,” Io writes. “That’swhy we’re calling it a ‘live’experience because it feels likethat’s what it is—something thatlives, grows and evolves.”

How do you pronounce ‘live’ inthat sentence? Is it ‘live’ if playersencounter the same missions at

different times? Does it‘live’ simply by virtue ofthe fact that it changes?

Change and life aren’tthe same thing: just askthat bomb from earlier.

Lost in all of thisconfusion is how muchwill actually be availableto players this December.

As for when it might makesense for reviewers to

offer a verdict on a gamethat is both episodic andnot, early access and notand, in the manner ofcosmic horror both live and

not, well, The Spy leaves

that up to the reviewers. Andpossibly an exorcist.

A single new piece of concept artfor Mass Effect: Andromeda slipped out of San Diego ComicCon showing the surface of analien world and helpfully subtitled‘alien worlds’. Said world has riversof orange goop, coral-like fungalgrowths, and a yellow sun peekingthrough Venusian fog overtowering mesas. It doesn’t givemuch away, but suggests thatFrostbite is capable of generatingfar more natural and detailed openworlds than the ones we tumbledaround in the first game.

A NEW DAWN

Sega has registered a web domainfor Warhammer 40,000: Dawn ofWar III. When Sega acquired the

Games Workshoplicense, a sequel waswhat many fans askedfor—what they got wasCreative Assembly’sexciting-looking,silly-named Total War:Warhammer. Now itlooks like they’re goingto get both.

Relic reinvented

Dawn of War betweenthe first and second game,transitioning from a moretraditional RTS to a squad tacticsgame with RPG elements. It would

be exciting to see another shake-up: perhaps by the time 2016 or2017 rolls around we’ll becontrolling our Space Marines inthird person, or ushering themthrough the mundanity of day-to-day life in a grim future wherethere isn’t war any more becausewe 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 sympatheticthan in the original game, thehumans have shiny armor but areprobably assholes. Into this conflict

baby Thrall is born, and shownfloating off downriver just in case

you didn’t pick up on the Moses bit. The Spy is a little torn on thisone: by all accounts it should beterrible, but director Duncan Joneshasn’t made a bad movie yet. Still,that could always change.

The Spy



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In my live demo, the four playersstarted in wildly different parts of

this vast sandbox

P R E V I EW



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 andJust 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 tooktwo 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 teamstarts 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 mea

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 WARFARE

Drones 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 firesoff 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.

E very E3, Ubisoft reveals something big toget 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 thosereveals, it’s a little bit pie in the sky at the moment, but this looks a little more colorful and ambitiousthan the usual Clancy fare.

The military shooter series goes big, explosive and airborne

T O M C L A N C Y ’ SG 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

RELEASE

2016DEVELOPER

Ubisoft ParisPUBLISHER

UbisoftLINK

ghost-recon.ubi.com

N E E D T O K N O W

F I R S T

L O O K

OCTOBER 2015 1

P R E V I EW

Ghost Recon Wildland

http://ghost-recon.ubi.com/

http://ghost-recon.ubi.com/



“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 incompletely 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, markingtargets 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 FREE

I 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 himinto 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 LIKEWILDLANDS

WANTS TO BE A FULLY

FREEFORM SHOOTER

A cactus, the symbol ofa diverse open world.

P R E V I EW

16 OCTOBER 2015





P R E V I EW

Dams and bridges are often busted whendiscovered—repairing them is a priority.

Space elevators let you elevate space.

Flying cars and drones rampup as your city gets larger.

People in vacuum greenhousesshouldn’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 newSimCity once promised. “This isthe 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 the1970s 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 generator

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, an

the studio has split the essentials ofAnno

2070 . Street-based economies on Earth,

influence-area-based on the Moon. “That

was a message from the players after2070 ; they said that this was the

maximum complexity they could take.”

Many factories and utilities are

expensive to build, but modular and chea

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.

UNINCORPORATED

Other 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 wit

events, or reintroduce the combat

currently conspicuous by its absence.

My only concern is the speed with

which I completed the main city-buildingcontent. 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.

TheAnno 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 EW

Anno 220

Anno 2205 follows directly on from theprevious Anno game, 2070—a futuristiccity-builder damned by its appallinguPlay implementation. The setting is

again the future, but after another leap forward,with the Moon once again within mankind’s grasp.

When medieval town-buildingturns 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”

RELEASE

November 5DEVELOPER

Ubisoft Blue BytePUBLISHER

UbisoftLINK

www.bit.ly/Anno2205Ubi

N E E D T O K N O W

P L A Y E D

I T

Modular factories makeexpansion simple.

The Moon reallyneeds a dust.

OCTOBER 2015 1











Icompleted Mirror’s Edge four times, so Iknow the game stupidly well—andCatalyst feels almost exactly like the

Mirror’s Edge of 2008. The platformingseems identical, and my muscle memory and senseof timing from the first game served me wellduring my first hands-on at E3.

RELEASE

Spring 2016

PUBLISHER

EA

DEVELOPER

DICE

LINK

www.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 EC A T A L Y S T

It’s not quite a sequel, not quitea 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-worldplay 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 in2016 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 EW



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The details of the latest Company of Heroes 2 expansion pack are all beginning to sound more than a littlefamiliar. New commanders, new units,

new strategies, eight new maps. Everything you’dexpect from an expansion. So what does The BritishForces bring that’s different? Regional accents?

Lots of mention of Winston Churchill? It has thosethings. But it also amounts to more Company ofHeroes 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 ALONE

The 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 welcometo 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

RELEASE

September 3DEVELOPER

Relic EntertainmentPUBLISHER

SegaLINK

www.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 FH 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 Britishtanks just don’t get on.

26 OCTOBER 2015

P R E V I EW

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







@originpc



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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 thebits 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 DRAGONS

Dark 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 anddual-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 whiplashat this year’s E3. First, anticipation: itsexistence was leaked, and I wondered ifit 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, butlacked that certain something director HidetakaMiyazaki 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

RELEASE

2016

DEVELOPER

FromSoftware

PUBLISHER

Bandai Namco

LINK

www.darksouls3.com

N E E D T O K N O W

F I R S T

L O O K

MoreSouls lore forfanatics to dig into.

P R E V I EW



A fire, a sad dude in armor– looks pretty Dark Souls .

In case you worried itwas looking too normal.

The return of a series that peoplewill obsess over for lifetimes.

P R E V I EW



This is pretty much the 2D Dark

Souls you’ve always wanted

A

t E3 I stepped into a caravan and triedout Eitr, a very cool-looking 2D dungeon

crawler inspired by Dark Souls and adisparate range of sources such as Zelda,

Golden Axe, Diablo and the excellent console-only brawler Fight Night Round 4. Like Dark Souls , youcarry a flask that replenishes your health, and between tricky fights with enemies in dankenvironments you sit at fires, but it’s much morethan an indie copycat—I loved my first hands-onsession and can’t wait to play more.Samuel Roberts

RELEASE

2016

PUBLISHER

Devolver Digital

DEVELOPER

Eneme Entertainment

LINK

www.eitrthegame.com

N E E D T O K N O W

P L A Y E D

I T

E I T RN I N E R E A L M S

Each of the nine levels isinspired by a different realm

from Norse mythology,conveniently granting the

developers access to fire and iceworlds, as well as giants fromJotunheim. Even dank worlds

look gorgeous with thishigh-end pixel art.

T H ES H I E L D M A I D E N

Eitr ’s redheaded heroinewas, according to the team at

Eneme Entertainment, inspiredby the shieldmaiden Lagertha

Lothbrok from the TV show Vikings.She carries a range of weapons,such as bows, swords and axes,

which grant her randomlygenerated new skills when

she finds them.

34 OCTOBER 2015

P R E V I EW



BACKO F F !

As in Dark Souls , defendingwith your shield and dodging is

key to survival againstopponents—you take damage even

when defending. This particularbaddy was the boss of my demo,and memorizing his animations

was the key to defeatinghim.

AR E AA T T A C K S

This particular beastactivates a succession of

area attacks that you have tododge at specific moments, or

risk taking heavy damage.When I figured this out, I

battered his ass todeath.

OCTOBER 2015 3

P R E V I EW

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

XCOM 2

OCTOBER 2015 3

n Enemy Unknown,the alien invaderswere on your turf.In XCOM 2, you’reon theirs. Thatsignificantly changesthe pace and dynamicof the game. In thedemo Firaxis showsme, I see civilianscrowded behind

barriers, futuristic police cars right out of theTotal Recall remake, armored fascist twats knownas Advent and floating holographic billboards. Thealiens control everything. In XCOM 2’s world, youlost the war against the extraterrestrial invadersof Enemy Unknown, and this is not your planet anymore. You must take it back.

“We began the process of defining XCOM 2 by

looking at how players responded to XCOM: EnemyU nknown,” creative director Jake Solomon tells me.“By asking: what did they enjoy? What didn’t theylike and how can we make it better? What was ourcommunity requesting? How do we renew andrefresh 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 thatmost players lost their initial playthrough of

Enemy Unknown, and we realized there was aninteresting 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 yourstrategic arsenal and to mitigate the repetition of levedesign of the original, the latter being one of my fewmajor issues with Firaxis’ first attempt at the series.

After a while in EU , no matter where you were goingin the world to fight the alien horde, you knew thelayout. One of the biggest changes to XCOM 2 is thatlevels are now procedurally generated—but don’tconfuse this with the levels being randomized. Firaxitried that and it didn’t quite work. Instead, levels areprocedurally generated in a way that is designedto feel somewhat handcrafted to the player.

MAP HAPPY

“We had to figure out a lot of new systems to makethe procedural maps work,” senior producer Garth

DeAngelis says. “It was actually a very differentpipeline 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 thenumber of height-based parcels we want to work on(parcels being an element of the procedural mapsystem). So all of that we sort of had to build from the

ground up. We could take elements from what welearned from Enemy Unknown because we

didn’t want it to be completely procedural, because random turned out to be not too



XCOM 2


40 SEPTEMBER 2015

fun. So we still had hand-placed moments—it’s agreat-looking map, but you get the value of: ‘I haven’tseen this before’, which is really, really powerful.Unlike EU , where we had a lot of maps but we startedhearing feedback of ‘it’s the museum map again. I’vedone this before’. You’re not going to have that feelingon XCOM 2.”

Solomon sheds some light on how it works. “Whenyou head into a mission, the game rolls the dice andplaces the appropriate modules on the parcel. Youmight be able to recognize something like an Adventcheckpoint, but that won’t give you any insight intowhat lies beyond that.”

LEVEL UNKNOWN

Most of the decisions made from the outset forXCOM 2 were intended to support a more replayablegame—levels that are impossible to predict certainlyencourage replays, and inspiration for that came fromanother part of the Firaxis office. “We wanted torefine that fundamental experience of Enemy

Unknown, and give it the replayability of a game likeCivilization,” Solomon explains. “Players told us theywanted more maps, and we wanted to provide aprocedural map system this time around. We wantedhigher-fidelity characters. We wanted better-lookingdestruction. And we really wanted to have bettermodding support for the game from the outset.”

Concealment is probably the biggest change—itputs the start of the fight in the player’s hands, lettingyou stealthily line up your squad’s positions at thebeginning of each mission before pulling the trigger.You can quietly line up your characters in overwatch,so when the enemy prepares to retaliate, your wholeteam can open fire on any enemies in range.

“Combat’s still turn based, move-and-action stylelike the Enemy Unknown,” says Solomon. “But now

that the levels are built procedurally, you can’t predictwhere 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 visualrange, or attack, the enemies aren’t going to know

you’re there. This gives the player control over howthe fight’s going to start.”

“As soon as you load into that map, you see yourguys are completely concealed,” says DeAngelis.“They’re speaking in hushed tones, there’s this reallycool ambient music, and it allows the playermechanically 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 EnemyUnknown, 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 S

Inspired 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 A

A turn-based RPG fromex-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 theirSaturday morning cartoon

villain look and get real ugly.

T U R R E THacking these automatedturrets lets you shut themdown or even use them to

attack XCOM’s foes.




XCOM 2

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 canpull your guys out of cover with their tongues beforeconstricting them to death. The specialist, meanwhile,has a drone-like device called the Gremlin that can beused to remotely hack turrets. Every soldier can hack,

but the specialist is the only class that can improvetheir hacking ability. Inthe demo, there are

three hacking optionsfor the turret: disable,control and improvedcontrol, the latter twoof which will make thegun open fire on nearbyenemies. The Gremlinhas its own ability tree, and while it’s treated as aseparate flying unit, movement with it still uses up thespecialist’s turn. “Those two classes are very innatewith the resistance theme as well,” DeAngelis says.

But don’t expect any of your MECs from EnemyWithin to carry across, either. In XCOM 2’s canon,that expansion simply didn’t happen, according toDeAngelis. “You lost within the first third of [ Enemy

Unknown ]. So MECs, gene mods, all that stuff—wewanted a clean slate with that.”

SNAKE MILK

The aliens have certainly stepped up the threat levelsince EU . The viper is a giant python with seeminglyhuman breasts—an image that, to be honest, I washappy to live my life without. Returning foes are

nastier. XCOM’ s meleeheavies the berserkers

are much closer toscary sci-fi trolls thanthe slightly PowerRangers-ish look theyhad in the first game. Ifthey get close enough,

you’re done for. I seethe berserker in this demo smash a squad memberout of the way and into a vehicle. “Super deadly, thedeadliest melee move in the game—you want tostay away from them,” DeAngelis says.

It’s escorted by two tall white mechs that looksimilar to the geth in Mass Effect. “The berserker wasaccompanied by Advent MECs, which are also heavyfirepower—they don’t need to take cover, they have

It’s an image that, to behonest, I was happy to

live my life without

In the open air, facingberserker. It doesn

look good for this gu

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 4



F E A T U R E

XCOM 2

more you can do, there’s so many more knobs you can

turn now that feed into the resistance theme,” saysDeAngelis. “You can change their gender now if youwant, set their nationality—all of that stuff that youcouldn’t do in Enemy Unknown gives even moreagency to the player.” When you pick a nationality, thegame will autoselect a matching voice, but you canstill change it if you want. That personalization wasfundamental to Enemy Unknown and remains so here.

Your best friends, family members and pets will stilldie, only now they canperish with an accent of

your choosing.“The most important

aspect of XCOM is thatit’s about playing

catch-up, that it’s not apower fantasy, and that

you’re always just aheadof disaster,” Solomon says. “ XCOM ’s a game aboutloss and managing that loss. So any story you buildinto XCOM has to have this as its basis. Given the arcof 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 giantaircraft called the Avenger. I fear the studio is going tospend most of the next few months making it clearthat this enormous airship is a reference to the trooptransport from UFO: Enemy Unknown, as opposed to

a ship in the sky where Nick Fury lives.

In theory, Firaxis ismaking a game we can

play forever

Living on a skybase is anexcellent excuse to wearcool sunglasses.

42 OCTOBER 2015


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 advancedform, too. “We wanted the aliens to feel deadly in

XCOM 2—they’ve evolved in the 20 years and haveput the Advent in place as cannon fodder, becausethey’re doing a lot of nefarious things behind thescenes. 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 lesspredictable, whichforces you to react onthe spot at a greaterfrequency than you didin EU . Presentation isgenerally more

ambitious. The goal inthe demo is to have oneof your guys blow up agold statue of an alien and human holding hands—apiece of Advent propaganda. When the explosive isdetonated by your crew, a mini cutscene playsin-game where it crumbles dramatically beforethe action resumes. It feels a lot more consideredthan Enemy Unknown.

This effect is heightened by the back-and-forthdialogue between your player-created characters,where they now seem to chat during every move. Inthe demo it almost feels like traditionally scripteddialogue, but you can pick the nationalities and even

the accents from a whole range. “There’s so much




XCOM 2

This change from EU ’s underground base brings

up a few questions. As PCG’s Tom Senior points outto me, it’s not like a skybase has hidden thermal ventsor decks you didn’t know were there—so expect somechanges to the way base management works, or atleast in the way it’s presented. “You can imagine, withthe 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 designhas been hard at work thinking of ways to get themechanics to support that.”

WE ARE THE MODS

I think the PC exclusivity of XCOM 2 was necessaryfor this entry. In announcing it, Firaxis led with apro-modding sentiment, while underlining the fact

that it has always been synonymous with PC. I askSolomon about why they went PC-only after EU arrived on consoles and even tablets in a respectableform. “PC gaming is in a golden age. It’s the tip of thespear in terms of innovation, in types of gameplay

being explored, in relationships between developersand their audience, and for Firaxis, it’s our home. It’swhere we want to be.”

The modding potential of XCOM 2 is as rich asanyone could ask for. Again, Civ provided a point ofinspiration to Solomon and his team. “We’re luckythat 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 owncreative expression of the franchise, and this andhelps our game live on over time.”

DeAngelis goes in depth on the tools that will beavailable to players. “I can tell you a lot of effort hasgone in, across the engineering front, [to make sure]that everything can be modded. Obviously we haveUnreal Engine 3. We have a modified version ofthat—so the editor is going to be released. You caneither do total conversions, or partial gameplay editswith our gameplay source that we’re going to beproviding as well. So if you just want to edit units andstats that’s going to be easy to do if you have theknowledge to do so in the scripts. It’s one of our corepillars 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 explainshow procedurally generated levels eliminaterepetition, how mods can expand the life of XCOM 2indefinitely, and how exciting the new tactical optionare, is that Firaxis is making the XCOM sequel thatfulfills every fan’s wishlist. I can’t think of anythingelse I’d ask for. In theory, Firaxis is making an XCOMgame that we can play forever. “Between theprocedural maps, between the procedural objectives,the way more enemies and abilities that you’re gonnasee, I think that’s right,” DeAngelis agrees. “That’sultimately what we want to accomplish. We want fan

to play much, much longer.”

M E C M A R K 2Taller than your units,XCOM 2 ’s robotic enemies

are fearsome creations.

3A 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’strue, 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?

4C 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-fiworld. Can’t wait to see more of it.

1T 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.

2R 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 throughthe viper to avenge your fallen comrade.

24

3

1

OCTOBER 2015 4


http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/pc-gamer-october-2015-usa 44/10044 SEPTEMBER 2015

100GREATEST

GAMESThehighlights of

three decades ofgaming on the

PC.

M E E T T H E T E A M

Jordan Erica Webber Freelancer

TimClarkGlobal editor-in-chief

Chris LivingstonStaff writer

Tom MarksAssistant editor

DanGriliopoulosFreelancer

Tony EllisProduction editor

JohnStrikeArt editor

Evan LahtiEditor-in-chief

TylerWildeExecutive editor

Wes FenlonHardware editor

Samuel RobertsEditor

ChrisThurstenDeputy editor

Andy Kelly Section editor

TomSenior Web editor

PhilSavageNews editor

TOP

The

AND: Shaun Prescott, AU Editor

Richard Cobbett, Freelancer Jody Macgregor, Freelancer Ian Birnbaum, Freelancer Omri Petitte, Freelancer

44 OCTOBER 2015


http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/pc-gamer-october-2015-usa 45/100 OCTOBER 2015 4

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 EDGE

RELEASED 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 PARABLE

RELEASED 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.

96

SPIDER AND WEB

RELEASED February 1998 | LAST POSITION New entry

Tony: Every time you screw up your

infiltration mission in this deceptive textadventure, 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?

99

SAM & MAX: HIT THE ROAD

RELEASED November 1993 | LAST POSITION Re-entr

Chris L: Ridiculous puzzles, oddball

characters, and a disturbingly accurateportrayal of roadside America feature in

this 2D LucasArts adventure. Two

freelance cops, one a wry dog in a suit an

the other a violent, naked rabbity thing,

investigate the mystery of a missing

bigfoot. Includes country music and the

destruction of the west coast.

98

very year, theinternational PC Gamerteam puts its headstogether to hash out alist of the hundred PCgames you need to play.This year, we’re

stressing ‘play’. With ahandful of exceptions,every game on the list isone that you can accessand enjoy today. Wherethat’s not the case, it’s because that game isspecial and we feel youshould know about itanyway. The hope isthat you’ll read throughthis list and discover aclassic that you’d neverotherwise have played.

Our selection process

is democratic andsubjective. Everymember of the jury putforward their personaltop 15 games of all time,and those lists werecombined to produce ourlonglist. Finally, oneperson each from the UKand US teams entered aroom (well, a Skype call),went through the entirething, and emerged witha final list that we’re

proud of.Enjoy.

F E A T U R





P E R S O N A L P I C K SSENSIBLE SOCCER

RELEASED 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.

88

TERRARIA

RELEASED 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 nexttime 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’dhave 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 4

RELEASED 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 canalmost 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 2

RELEASED 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 agame 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.

84

87

86

85

Samuel Roberts

SPEC OP STHE LI NE

This adaptation of Heart oDarkness is a shooter thadares to make murder inta rote, exhausting activityto underline a wider pointabout the effect of war on

soldiers. It is half-

successful in doing that.The choice of Dubai as an

escalating warzone and thunsettling sense of moraambiguity made Spec Opmemorably bleak, and alsrendered the likes of CoD

worthless to me bycomparison.

TimClark

H E R S T O R Y

Having grown up on policeprocedurals like PrimeSuspect and Inspector

Morse, the genre’s almostotal absence in games halong been frustrating. He

Story ’s trawl throughchopped up interviews wita single suspect scratchethat itch in a particularly

British way. It’s more than just a didshedoit—by thetime you’re done with the

files, it feels less about thcrime and more about how you feel about this personThere’s nothing else quite

like Her Story .

F E A T U R



DON’T STARVE

RELEASED 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.

83

PSYCHONAUTS

RELEASED 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 levelrepresents 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 aresuperb. 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 IV

RELEASED 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’sI 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+


Wes: The original version of Cave Story , released for free

in 2004, was a one-man labor of love by Japanesedeveloper 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.

79

82

81

80

Chris Livingston

F U L L T H R O T T L E

I’m still not sure howLucasArts made a huge,gruff, imposing biker anendearing and bumbling

underdog, but they pulled itoff in this 1995 2D

adventure. Ben, framed formurder, must solve

puzzles, deal with rivalgangs, and prevent amotorcycle company being

turned into a minivanmanufacturer. It’s got great

characters and voiceacting, and even some

driving and combat. Mostimportantly, it lets you tryto use wind-up bunnies to

stop a speeding truck.

Andy Kelly

L . A . N O I R E

It’s not as clever as thinks itis, but this detective

adventure from Rockstar is

a lavish, atmosphericperiod piece that recreates

1940s Los Angeles instunning detail. The cases

are more linear than thegame would have you

believe, but cracking themis still fun. From his lowlybeginnings at the trafficdesk, to chasing a serial

killer as a homicidedetective, Phelps’ journeythrough the LAPD is full ofgorgeous world-building,

interesting characters, andgrisly crime scenes.

F E A T U R E

P E R S O N A L P I C K S

48 OCTOBER 2015



NO ONE LIVES FOREVER 2

RELEASED 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.

75

HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC III


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.

74

THE SIMS 3

RELEASED June 2009 | LAST POSITION Re-entry

Chris T: Arguably no game has done more

to expand the audience for PC gamingthan 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.

77

ANACHRONOX

RELEASED June 2001 | LAST POSITION Re-entry

Tony: Your dead secretary lives inside

your mousepointer. One of your partymembers 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.

76

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

73

DOOM II

RELEASED May 1994 | LAST POSITION Re-entry

Phil: Yes, Doom II is another great id

shooter that builds on the design lessons

ofDoom to provide more labyrinthine

levels filled with demons and secrets.

What makes Doom II special isn’t so muc

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 orThe 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, becausefor me, Doom II was a series of tools for

bringing imaginative worlds to life.

72

ELITE: DANGEROUS

RELEASED Dec 2014 | LAST POSITION New entry

Chris T: Space trading, combat and

exploration made special by an

extraordinary commitment to making yo

feel like you’re really there, in the cockpit.

This is one of the best virtual realitygames around for that reason, but the

effect is powerful regardless.

Andy: Elite ’s galaxy is a scale replica of ou

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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50 OCTOBER 2015

71

MONKEY ISLAND 2:LECHUCK’S REVENGE

RELEASED 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 andhumor. And who could forget insult

swordfighting. I am rubber, you are glue!

70

GRIM FANDANGO

RELEASED 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: OBLIVION

RELEASED 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.

66

TOTAL WAR: SHOGUN 2

RELEASED 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.

65

RETURN TO CASTLE WOLFENSTEIN


Chris T: I loved the silly, violent, gothic

singleplayer campaign as a teen, butmultiplayer 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 2004


Wes: When a shooter still has an online

population 11 years later, it probably didsomething 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.

67

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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100PC GAMES

50 OCTOBER 2015



OCTOBER 2015 5

VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE: BLOODLINES


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.

64

PLANETSIDE 2


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, butit’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, thatPlanetSide 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.

BASTION

RELEASED 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 GOLD

RELEASED 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 beingsuch 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.

60

63

62

61

Wes Fenlon

ODDWORLD:STRA NGER’S

W R A T H

This endlessly creativeshooter has smart designdecisions at every step.Live animal ammunitionlike the puke-inducing

Skunkz replaces ordinarybullets, and the level desigalways offers a shortcutback to town. Capturingbounties alive instead ofkilling them requires a

great mixture of planningquick thinking and jumpinfrom stealth to shooting t

melee combat on the fly.

Shaun Prescott

S U P E R M E A T B O

People get so hung up onlegacies, and who

pioneered what, and wher

stuff fits on the continuumof any given genre. I do toosometimes, but I still thinSuper Meat Boy is the bestwitch-oriented platformeof all time. It’s better thanany bloody Mario game.

can’t imagine anotherplatformer ever feeling th

good, and I can’t imagineany other game making m

so red hot furious whilesimultaneously sating

every game-oriented urgeI’ve ever had.

F E A T U R


OCTOBER 2015 5



BRAID


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.

59

ULTIMA UNDERWORLD


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 youcould 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 samechain, 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 SOULS


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. Ruinedstatues, 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, PLEASE


Tom S: This is an exceptional example of game design as

an empathic tool, and a careful examination of themechanics 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.

55

58

57

56

PhilSavage

U P L I N K

This is a game about thetype of hacking you see in

films and on TV. It’s notrealistic, but it is tense,

dramatic and laced throughwith absurd cyberpunk.

More than that, Uplink is adeft open-world game set

entirely on the internet. Itfeatures varied locations,

open-ended objectives andthe chance to break off and

do things outside of thebasic campaign structure.Through a simple interfaceand handful of tools, you’regiven immense power over

this world.

TomSenior

DA WN OF WA R 2:R E T R I B U T I O N

Frankly I’m disappointed atthe lack of orbital strikes inthis list. Time to fix this with

a nod to the Space Marines’incredible giant laser attack

in marvellous, meaty RTSDawn of War 2: Retribution .As well as six campaigns—

which can all be playedcooperatively—it also

features the excellent LastStand 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.


F E A T U R E

52 OCTOBER 2015



TOWERFALL: ASCENSION


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.

51

BATMAN: ARKHAM ASYLUM

RELEASED 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.”

50

RESIDENT EVIL 4 HD


Samuel: The strongest entry of Capcom’s

super-refined survival horror classicseries, 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.

53

DAYZ


Andy: A brutal online zombie survival

game, but where other players are oftenmore 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.

52

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

49

MASS EFFECT

RELEASED Nov 2007 | LAST POSITION New entry

Chris: There was a time when people wer

disappointed that BioWare was making a

sci-fi shooter instead of another Star War

game. Those people turned out to be

wrong. Beautiful and brilliantly written, M

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 makin

you the captain in a ’90s sci-fi TV series,

complete with a cool spaceship, a quirky

crew and sexy aliens with lumpy heads. It

genius was its rich, adult characterisation

that had me rushing through missions so

could get back on the ship and continue

that conversation.

Samuel: The original feels far removed

from its successors. The Mako, nixed inlater outings, embodied a raw sense of

exploration still unique to this first game.

48

PILLARS OF ETERNITY


Tony: This was an unashamed attempt to

recreate the fondly remembered, low-tec

RPGs of old, and it succeeds wonderfully.

You’re not some lone, moody superman

here, you’re part of a colorful, ragbag teamof 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 i

interesting ways, rewarding creativity.

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47

GUILD WARS 2


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 aroadmap for the next half-a-decade and

more of the game’s continued life.

46

DAY OF THE TENTACLE

RELEASED 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 fromcolonial 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 2


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.

42

THE WITCHER 3

RELEASED 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.

41

FALLOUT


Chris T: Post-apocalyptic Fallout isn’t just

notable for kicking off one of the mostbeloved 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’.

44

HALF-LIFE

RELEASED Nov 1998 | LAST POSITION Re-entry

Chris L: One of the best and most

influential FPS games ever. Favoringscripted 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.

43

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

54 OCTOBER 2015

TOP

100PC GAMES



FALLOUT 3


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.

40

CITIES: SKYLINES


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, thebafflingly 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 INFINITE


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-drivenmasterwork 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 V


Tyler: The latest game (I don’t feel like including Beyond

Earth ) in the vital turn-based 4X series in which you directa 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

toCiv 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.

36

39

38

37

Tony Ellis

DA RK C ORNERSO F T H E E A R T H

This horror game succeedbetter than any at weavin

the horror into an actual game , as opposed to anover-extended series of

jump scares. A sense ofdread suffuses the town

where you begin yourinvestigations. The Gilma

Hotel is a nightmare ofmusty rooms, pursuit, anfrantically blocking doors

with furniture. Next, stealt your way across windy,nighttime streets with awhole town of croakinginbreds out to kill you.

JohnStrike

SOLDIER OFF O R T U N E

In a dazzlingly unfair turn oevents, this hasn’t made i

into the top 100 this yearIts ultra-violence,knife-throwing and

dismemberment were amassive deal at the time

putting it on a similarnaughty step as GTA andCarmageddon . Sadly, the

noughties are where itstayed. Dismemberment

did not become animportant contribution to

the games we play today. was a fantastic shooter,and everyone loved John

Mullins’ ridiculousmoustache. Well, I did.


OCTOBER 2015 5

F E A T U R



F E A T U R E

THE WALKING DEAD: SEASON 1


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.

35

LEAGUE OF LEGENDS


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 theMOBA 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 inSeoul, 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 CHERNOBYL


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.

31

34

33

32

ChrisThursten

I N V I S I B L E , I N C .

This is a dazzlinglywell-designed turn based

stealth sim. It’s aboutplanning and executingknife-edge cyberpunk

heists against mountingodds, but despite the stiff

difficulty it is completelyfair. It gets my personal nodfor teaching me an

important lesson aboutdesign: games don’t needto be random or opaque to

offer a meaningfulchallenge. Invisible, Inc.’selegant systems allow youto experience triumph anddisaster and never feel likethe game screwed you over.

Evan Lahti

G A N G B E A S T S

Everyone is made ofPlay-Doh in this game that,

appropriately enough,

softens and rounds-off thehard edges of conventional

wrestling games,particularly their emphasis

on button mashing andcombos. Failing

miserably—being liftedover the antlers of a bluereindeer, then hurled into

the blades of an enormous,fan—is fun because it

creates physical comedyfor the rest of the group.

The focus isn’t on hotcompetition, but on playful,

ragdolled calamity.

DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION


Tim: It’s hard to think of many series that survived a new

developer coming in and creating a sequel. Fallout: NewVegas 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.


56 OCTOBER 2015

F E A T U R E







XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN


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.

16

PLANESCAPE: TORMENT


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 yourespawn, 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 rightlyso. 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 2


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 trickshots 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 II

RELEASED 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 byplotting, 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.

12

15

14

13

TylerWilde

ZORK: GRANDI N Q U I S I T O R

The last Zork game is myfavorite point-and-clickadventure. It’s compact,

but dense with humor andself-parody, and fun,sometimes tricky but

non-frustrating puzzles.Erick Avari is fantastic asthe titular Inquisitor—thefarcical FMV use actuallyholds up—and I still quote

his lines today. (“Shuneverything, and then shunshunning.”) Plus, you hav

a spell that turns purplethings invisible and Hadehas a phone line. All that

for $6!

Tom Marks

FE ZThere are moments when

some ofFez

’s puzzles feetoo obscure to solve; butincredibly, everything in th

game can be decoded bycryptic clues, hidden in

plain sight. Virtually everysecret can be figured outand understood withouthaving to exit the game—though keeping a piece of

paper handy will help.These complex butachievable puzzles,coupled with Fez ’s

phenomenal art and soundgive it a comfortable seat

on my personal list.


F E A T U R

OCTOBER 2015 5



PORTAL


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.

9

FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS


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 storyof 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.

10

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 orDishonored , 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

8

DEUS EX

RELEASED 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

isstill one of the best games of all time. Itwill remain so until someone can

genuinely improve on its wonderfully

intricate level design.

7

GRAND THEFT AUTO V

RELEASED 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

F E A T U R E



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 withi

stories and multi-layered level design that

necessitates several playthroughs. One

thing in particular the game gets right ove

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 th

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 swordthrough 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 mak

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

DISHONORED

6

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’tknow 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: itlooks spectacular too.

Too late, he remembered thatWilkins was frightened of swords.

TOP

100PC GAMES



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 aBattlefield medic

thinks about the horrors of war, but I know

exactly whatTF2 ’s Medic thinks about the

fact you’re not on that point, dummkopf.

Evan: Like you’re all saying, what

separatesTF2 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 withinTF2

’s market)?

RELEASED October 2007 | DEVELOPER Valve | PUBLISHER In-house | LAST POSITION 7TEAM 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 therewith 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 atthe 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 visualaesthetic like no other game.

Still going strong.

TOP

100PC GAMES



MASS EFFECT 2

2 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 workthrough, 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 abou

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 lik

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 u

consider it the tightest RPG BioWare has ever made—it

doesn’t have the divisive, more traditional type of comba

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



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 environmentalstorytelling 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 FPSthat 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 adystopian 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 ofcommunity-based development. Its

RELEASED November 2004 | DEVELOPER Valve | PUBLISHER In-house | LAST POSITION 3

existence has made PC gaming richer an

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 th

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 a

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 gradual

introduce the Antlion bugbait, the

sawblades of Ravenholm and of course

the gravity gun—still one of the greatesttoys 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 o

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 bugg

rides, it’s perfectly paced. Half-Life 2 is

what happens when a bunch of extremely

talented people sit down and say “howcan we tell one story, really well?”

Still one of gaming’smost iconic images.

OCTOBER 2015 6

F E A T U R



It’s a puzzlegame that

makes you feellike a talenteddesigner, 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 Ato B. One a time, andsevering any joins in

the process—so you’ll need a plan for

reassembly.

I N V E R T E DC O N V E Y O R

It’s a conveyor, butupside down. Gravitystill applies, so you’llneed lifters to keepsomething up there.

L A S E RDestroys blocks at adistance. Far moreversatile than the

eviscerator as it canbe connected to

sensors.

P A I N T E RChanges the color of

the block thatpasses in front of it.

Used to facilitatesome of the new

puzzles.

C O U N T E RA smart sensor!

Thank you! If youneed to separate outa certain percentageof your blocks, thishelps enormously.

Let’s recap. Infinifactory is a creativepuzzle game where you turn block-based factory components into

complex machines. Each level has adifferent layout, a different schematicto match, and a different set of inputsthat dispense various componentsand building materials at a fixed rate.It’s your job to negotiate all of thesedifferent factors, a taskthat is 50% industrialdesign and 50%trainset construction.

You are doing this inorder to please youralien captors, giving thegame a comic streak

that treads the linebetween black comedyand outright slapstick. The sci-fisetting justifies both the freeformnature of the environments you buildin (you’ll spend a bunch of timeconstructing factories on asteroids)and also allows Infinifactory to showoff a surprisingly pretty side,particularly in its later missions. It’snot 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 giveit a score. That version of the game was anaccomplished puzzle game, my favorite in years, with acampaign you could see from start to finish. It felt

done. Playing the finished version of Infinifactory today feels like playingthe game and its first expansion pack. It’s more done.

You zip around by way of analways-on jetpack and manipulate

blocks in much the same manner as

Minecraft’s creative mode. Every toolavailable to you behaves according toconsistent, heavily simplified physics.Complexity arrives in the form oflogic devices: sensors, blocks withdifferent toggle states, and so on.

These are introducedto you slowly, withpuzzles dedicated toexplaining each. Soon,the potential forcreative combinationskyrockets.

Since its early access

launch, Infinifactory has gained threemini-campaigns that follow the mainstory. Each is built around a set ofnew blocks that change the way you

build in variously subtle and drasticways. The laser is a variant on the

block-destroying eviscerator withmuch longer range and, crucially, theability to be toggled on and off. Thecounter is a sensor that activates aftera user-specified number of blockshave passed it. My favorite is the

teleporter, which acts as anenvironmental modifier. Teleportersmove one block at a time (or theplayer) between separate areas of theworld. Their usefulness is offset bythe need to reassemble whatever it isthat you tried to teleport on the otherside: building devices to sensibly feedconstructions in and out ofteleporters is a gratifying challenge.

CREATIVE ASSEMBLYThe genius of Infinifactory is not thatit’s a very well-designed puzzle game:it’s that it makes you feel like atalented designer too. There’s atremendous satisfaction to watchinga machine you’ve slaved overdiligently follow your orders. It’s the

videogame equivalent of thoseincredibly compulsive looping gifs offactory processes, but you madeit—and the pride you experience incoming 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 agif of your creations at the touch of a

button (these have been upgraded ina recent patch, too) and that, forthose who want to take thingsfurther, there’s the option to createand share user-generated puzzles viathe Steam Workshop.

It’s nice to be able to finally givethis the outright recommendation itwarranted earlier in the year. This isthe most generous game Zachtronicshas made, opening up SpaceChem’slofty problem-solving to anybody

who can place blocks but withoutsacrificing too much intellectualheadroom in the process. The bestsolutions blow my mind, but I’mhappy with my own ones too. It’s thataccessibility that makes Infinifactory special: not only is it clever, but itshares its cleverness with you.

93The pleasure of creativeblock-building meets thesatisfaction 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 W

WHAT IS IT?

A block-based puzzlegame about factory

construction.

EXPECT TO PAY

$25

DEVELOPER

Zachtronics Industries

PUBLISHER

In-house

REVIEWED ON

Intel i5-2500K, 16GBRAM, GeForce GTX 970

MULTIPLAYER

Leaderboards only

LINK

www.zachtronics.com/infinifactory

GIANTS OF INDUSTRYBlock-based puzzler INFINIFACTORY rolls off the production

line as an instant classic. By Chris Thursten

The new blocks added since launch

http://www.zachtronics.com/infinifactory






It’s fun to simply watch your creations work.

New blocks make timingdevices like this easier.

The timeless eleganceof an industrial laser.

Not the most elegantsolution, honestly.

OCTOBER 2015 6

R E V I EW

Infinifactory



FLIGHT OF FANTASYFINAL FANTASY XIV’s first expansion balances

tradition with adventure in HEAVENSWARD. By Daniella Lucas

Flying makeseven the mostmundane of

delivery questsa real joy

R E V I E W

FFXIV has long been trying tobalance the trappings of a traditionalFinal Fantasy game with being an

MMO to rival the likes of World ofWarcraft—and to great success. Itsfirst expansion, Heavensward, adds ahuge new section to the map ofEorzea, the power of flight andseveral new classes, all withouttipping those finallybalanced scales. WhereTESO fails tocohesively marry thesingleplayer prestige ofSkyrim with a worldfilled with otherpeople, FFXIV and its

expansion succeed.Taking you into theheart of the once sealed-off city ofIshgard, Heavensward opens on asolemn note. Given the previoustragedy and revelations in the city ofUl’Dah that saw your friends in direstraits in the lead-up to theexpansion, it’s a fittingly frosty start.And to see it you’ll have to havecomplete the main questline of ARealm 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 ofMoogles. It’s all part of the DNA of the series. But despite theMMOs 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 willtake you a while if you’re starting as acompletely new player, but the

journey is well worth it. And with boosts to help first timers level-upquickly and cut dungeon queuetimes, you don’t have to worryabout being left behind.

The new areas are vast anddesigned to take fulladvantage of the newflying mounts. Campspepper the snow-

besieged hillsof Western Coerthas,while the Sea of Cloudsswims with tiny islands

waiting to be explored.It’s a real shame that you can’t take advantage of thatflight-based design straight away. Youhave to earn your wings first, and ittakes ages to do so.

You’re stuck hoofing it until youunlock all of the aether currents inany given area to learn what thesurrounding winds are like. Someare dotted around the hills andobscure high points, while others are

unlocked during quests. It does startto feel dull as you run from one endof the map to the other doing classicMMO busywork. But once you getthem all and you finally take flight, allof that tedium is forgotten. Taking tothe skies is glorious. Dipping betweenthe trees of the Chocobo Forest, orthe fluorescent pompoms of theChurning Mists is a sight to behold.Flying makes even the most mundane

of delivery quests a real joy.

NEW CLASS

The fighting is equally grand. Thenew classes (gun-toting Machinist,sword-wielding Dark Knight andglobe—uh, spinning?—Astrologian)add a nice mix to party line-ups, asdo the new skills for existing classesthat accompany the level cap rise to60. With every new move comes anew layer of strategy to consider.While many players are still findingtheir feet over what works best, it’s

the sense of greater choice that’smost exhilarating. There’s no oneway to do things anymore.

There’s a lot on offer here, andwhile I sunk over 40 hours into themain storyline I have yet to see theend of it. The amount of new thingsto do is equal to that of the basegame, which is a huge feat foran expansion, and there’s still plentymore on the way.

If you already play FFXIV then Heavensward gives you even moreof what you know and love. Forthose that have been eyeing up those

chocobos from the sidelines, there’sno escaping the catching up you’llhave to do, but that shouldn’t put youoff. Even if you don’t know yourTonberrys from your Cactuars, it’swell worth playing for the sheer

variety of adventures. Now isdefinitely 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 designedto unlock the abilityto fly for the normalchocobo you gotearlier, it’ll unlock itfor ol’ Tubby, too.

2A W A K E N H I MNext, head to

Tailfeather wherethis farmer’s boywill send you outto awaken yourchocobo’s instinctsby summoning it tobattle alongside you.

3G E T A F E E LAfter you’ve done

this you’ll be sent onerrands to a fewdifferent locationsso that yourfeathered friend canget a taste of thewind in its beak.

4F L O A T F R E EHead back to

Tailfeather tocomplete the quest,and then BOOM.Your fat rolls will befree to ripplebeautifully in thebreeze. Lovely.

How to make your fat chocobo fly

87

A hugely enjoyableaddition to the world ofEorzea, with plenty ofroom to spread your

wings and explore.

V E R D I C T

N E E D T O K N O W

WHAT IS IT?

The first expansionof the formerly

troubled, but nowutterly excellent, MMO.

EXPECT TO PAY

$40

DEVELOPER

Square Enix

PUBLISHERIn-house

REVIEWED ON

i5-3230 CPU, 8GB RAM

MULTIPLAYER

MMO

LINK

na.finalfantasyxiv.com/heavensward

68 OCTOBER 2015

http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/heavensward/






Some views can only be fullyappreciated on wingback.

The Tailfeather camp lies inthe heart of Chocobo Forest.

Their wings may be tiny,but even chocobos can fly.

You’ll have plenty of tales to tell aroundthe campfire after your adventure.

Ravana is the firstPrimal you face.

R E V I EW

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

OCTOBER 2015 6



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 toalways be

moving

It looks like a stealth game andsometimes 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 whatdistances it from its most visiblesource of inspiration.

Each of its five chapters has threelevels: two in whichyou infiltrate buildingsto hack terminals, anda third where youconfront and kill one ofthe five executivesresponsible for thedeath of your father.

Set in sprawling officebuildings, each level iscomposed of a number of self-contained sections. At first, you’reunseen—free to lurk in the darkness,taking out guards and planning youropening strike. But soon you’ll needto jump into the light, at which pointthe action pauses. Each combat turnis defined by the enemy’s actions. If ared laser sight is pointed at you, onthe next turn they’ll fire. If they’vefired, on the next turn they’ll re-aim.

Why yes, Ronin does look a lot like Gunpoint. A 2Daction-stealth game that takes place in the interiors ofa stylishly futuristic city, its similarities are numerous.You hack computer terminals, use the mouse to planand 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 turnsin the same position to get yourselfkilled. That’s the central puzzle ofeach encounter. The easiest solutionis to jump into guards, knockingthem down and giving yourself a

couple of turns beforethey recover.

At a basic level it’san enjoyable system tomanipulate, enhanced

by unlockable skills.These are tied to a limit

break meter that builds

as you stun and kill. Fillit completely, and you’re given a free action. More often,it’s worth spending your accruedpoints on a potentially life-savingspecial move. By the end of the game,I could create decoys, throw mysword, and send out a circle ofdaggers that temporarily downed all

visible guards. There’s even a teleportmove that lets you instantly slam intoany visible enemy to send themflying. If they’re standing by a

window, this is an instantdefenestration button.

As I grew more familiar with thecombat, inconsistencies became moreapparent. For starters, you don’talways have enough information toplan a move. The jump tracer doesn’taccount for enemies, so it’s difficult toknow where you’ll end your turn if

you go for a stun—an omission thatled to my death on more than one

occasion. Invisible, Inc. proved theworth of complete transparency inturn-based feedback, and it’s a lessonI wish Ronin had learned.

RONIN ON THE SPOT

More frustratingly, your moveset isrestricted in combat. You can’t climbor run, only jump, and you’re unableto fine-tune actions mid-turn.Outside of combat, you can pause atany moment to plan and executemoves. I suspect the limitations are anecessary tradeoff to keep the

difficulty intact, but they seem toundercut game’s core fantasy of balletic, fluid action expressedthrough stop-and-start systems.

Each level has three optionalobjectives: don’t kill a civilian, don’ttrigger a lockdown, and kill allguards. Except, they’re not reallyoptional. You need to complete allthree to earn a skill point used tounlock Ronin’s best toys, and thatmeans you’re incentivized to re-tryeach checkpoint over and over.

With a growing collection of skills, Ronin stays interesting. The level

design is largely excellent, offeringplenty of varied scenarios, albeit onlya handful of enemy types.

Ultimately Ronin doesn’t live up tothe quality of its inspirations, but itdoesn’t really need to. It does enoughto make for a fun four-to-six hourcampaign of gratifying swordplay.

P U S H I T T O T H E L I M I T

H O L O G R A P H I CD E C O YMore trouble thanit’s worth.

T H R O W S W O R DRemember to getit back again.

T H R O WD A G G E R SKnock downeverything.

T E L E P O R TIf an enemy isnear a window,use this.

Ronin’s skills explained

74A fun, if lightweight,stealth combat game.The turn-based fightingisn’t perfect, but remains

entertaining enough.

V E R D I C T

N E E D T O K N O W

WHAT IS IT?

2D stealth combat withturn-based battles.

EXPECT TO PAY

$13

DEVELOPER

Tomasz Wacławek

PUBLISHER

Devolver Digital

REVIEWED ON

Windows 7, Intel i7 970GTX, i5-3570K CPU,

8GB RAM

MULTIPLAYER

None

LINK

www.bit.ly/1LD7uS1

70 OCTOBER 2015

R E V I E W



Well, shit.

Damn, I was going to usethat as the review title.

Being a Ronin means alwaysbending your knees.

The jump arc shows how far you’ll leap in a single turn.

His one weakness? Windows.

See. Look atthe knees. Bent.

Roni

OCTOBER 2015 7

R E V I EW



TORQUE SPORTROCKET LEAGUE is a game about cars and soccer

for people who care about neither. By Matt Elliott

Driving isdelicious. Cars

ease aroundlike butter ina heated pan

I’ve never played a game thatneeded a tutorial less. Drive car atgiant ball; hit ball into net; scorepoints. Rocket League’s competitivecore has existed for millennia, and

this helps make a preposterousconcept feel primal. This, in turn, is alaughable way of describing a gamethat would be called moto carball ifit actually existed in real life.

Like dry martinis and penisesscribbled in unattendednotebooks, RocketLeague is a celebrationof distinction throughsimplicity. Driving isdelicious. Cars easearound like butter in aheated pan, but always

feel under your control.You accumulate boostby driving over markers on the arenafloor, and unleashing it is athunderous rush, firing you across,over and around the pitch. Becausematches take place in smooth,enclosed spaces, you can drive upwalls and across ceilings as ashimmer of perpetual motion. Carscan also jump and dodge, both ofwhich can be used defensively andoffensively. The weight of the cars,

Let’s not waste energy exploring why soccer should replace itspaper chain of squalid billionaires with cars, and accept it asfact. A fact that Rocket League proves with simple andimmediate 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 pleasinglyhaphazard element; something likeathletic soccer players leaping abovethe opposition to header high balls,

but with less shirt-pulling.The vehicles feel light and

buzzy—somewhere between Micro Machines, and those swift, slideyremote controlled cars that only seemto appear on Christmas Day. This

contrasts nicely withthe fat, beefy bounce ofthe ball, whichgormlessly invitesimpact like a punchablecousin. And that’s it. Ifeel almost guiltyreducing a review to

‘ball’ and ‘car’, but thereare only ever those twothings in the field of play, andcrucially, they both feel great. Thereare no weapons, but certain markersfill your boost and let you obliterateother players. Mercifully, it’s thegenerous, instantly-respawning typeof obliteration. Destruction is theonly conspicuous deviation from theclean and simple business of drivingaround and scoring goals, but in mostof the games I played it was a rarity,

and certainly never frequent enoughto be irritating.

Alternatively, you can set teams offour against each other, in matchesthat become so frantic that they’reless like footy, more like a lost,confused beach ball bashed between

bumper cars. Playlists of duels,doubles, standard 3v3 matches andthe appropriately named Chaos 4v4mode are all available online, with

ranked playlists limited to duels,doubles and 3v3. There’s a reasonwhy online play is the first option onthe menu, as here’s a game that feelsdesigned to be played with actualpeople, and this is absolutely where itthrives. I rarely had to wait long for agame, and if players dropped outmid-session they were immediatelyreplaced by AI bots. Best of all, it’srefreshingly simple to get back intoanother game, so very little time isspent lingering in lobbies.

SIMPLE PLEASURES

If playing online isn’t your thing,there are exhibition matches and fullseasons you can solo. The length anddifficulty can be altered, and while itdoesn’t offer much in the way ofdepth—cars and soccer,remember?—I still found myself

bonding with pretend teammates.Perhaps I’m just lonely.

The offline modes do reveal thegame’s minor inadequacies, however.Team AI can be flaccid andunreliable, especially against tougheropponents, and the same simplicity

that makes Rocket League soimmediately playable can causethings to get repetitive when playedalone; a criticism that only becomesapparent precisely because it’s sodamn addictive. It’s a simple thingdone 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 withsome vigor, but alsoallows for excellentmid-air acrobaticswhen applied duringa jump.

2 J U M PHop up to hit high

balls, or block lobbedballs for epic saves.Press twice for aprobably-impossibledouble jump. Heck,it’s all impossible!

3 D O D G EFlip forward,

sideways andbackwards for anextra boost ofmomentum, whichwill send the ballflying impressively.

4 S L I D EPowerslide

around the arena tochange directioneasily and knockshots sideways. Also:looks cooler thandisco cucumbers.

5 R A MFill your boost

meter with powerupsand slam into anenemy vehicle,destroying themutterly. It’s not evena cardable offence.

Five silky skills every MVP should master

87Rocket League isfast, fun andrelentlessly enjoyable.The best soccer game

without feet.

V E R D I C T

N E E D T O K N O W

WHAT IS IT?

A car soccer game andsuperior sequel to

Supersonic AcrobaticRocket-Powered

Battle-Cars .

EXPECT TO PAY

$20

DEVELOPER

Psyonix

PUBLISHER

In-house

REVIEWED ON

i5-3230 CPU, 8GB RAM

MULTIPLAYER

Up to eight

LINK

www.psyonix.com

72 OCTOBER 2015

R E V I E W



They call me ‘the man thatgravity temporarily ignored’.

You can tinker with unlockablegoodies in the garage.

Wheel, vroom,ball, GOAL!

Games take place in giantcages—more gaol than goal.

OCTOBER 2015 7

R E V I EW

Rocket Leagu



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 tomake changes to the game by

tampering with its programming.Specifically, you can alter thebehavior of the game’s entities. Aftertrapping a hostile dog-creature, forexample, you can change itsalignment fromviewing you as anenemy to seeing you asa friend. You can assignit new enemies, whichit will then attack. Youcan also completelystrip it of attributes,leaving it inert while

storing those propertiesin your library to be applied toother creatures. None of thisinvolves writing code yourself, mindyou: it’s accomplished by simplyselecting words from a list anddropping them into fields. When youexit the customization screen whereyou set these values, the creature’sbehavior is changed.

The Magic Circle casts you as a playtester for a game that has been in development for ages and is still nowhere nearcompletion, something most gamers can easily grok in thisage of Kickstarter campaigns and Early Access. What beganas a sci-fi game has become a swords and sorcery adventure,

and as you progress through the unfinished world you’ll find the spines ofa 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 abilitiesdirectly, so overcoming obstacles

becomes a matter of altering the behavior of your growing AImenagerie. Once you’ve stolen anability or value from an enemy, you’reclear to use it to edit any creature or

entity you might fancy.Rocks can be made tofloat in the air,providing you a nicestepping stone.Zombies can be madefire resistant and ratscan be fitted withtractor beams. This

gives you multiple waysto tackle obstacles, solve puzzles anddefeat enemies. It’s also a lot of fun toplay with between puzzles: whocould resist sending a loyal army ofmushrooms fitted with helicopter

blades and repulsor beams to attack afew fire monsters? There arecertainly shades of Double Fine’s

Hack ’n’ Slash to the premise.

You’re not the only human in thegame: the developers, represented byfloating eyeballs, are working on it as

you play, though most of their workamounts to them bickering loudlywith each other. As you might expectin a game about an unfinished game,The Magic Circle contains a lot of

jokes about crowdfunding,development, game tropes and gamesmedia, and provides some insightful

and funny observations on thosefronts. While the tone is initiallylight and playful, however, thewriting eventually sags under itsown weight. The performances growmelodramatic and overwrought, andthere are long stretches where thedevelopers argue, or a rogue AIspeaks to you while you simply sitthere, waiting for them to finish(during Early Access, the ability toskip a couple of these scenes—thoughnot all of them—was added).

NOT SO FAST

There are a couple of other issues: fora game where you’ll be crisscrossingthe landscape repeatedly to explore,it’s annoying that you can’t sprint(though fast-travel is possible

between scattered nodes). And whileit fits in with the premise that themostly black-and-white game world(with some neat exceptions) is

visually unappealing, it doesn’t reallyhelp 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 becomesavailable after completing the story.

You can also continue exploring tofind secrets you may have missed.Despite its issues, The Magic Circle’sconcepts are both clever and put togood use, and editing monsters tosolve puzzles is always enjoyable.

78Visually drab and a bittoo taken with its ownstory, but otherwise aclever and fun exercise in

creative problem-solving.

V E R D I C T

N E E D T O K N O W

WHAT IS IT?

An adventure gameabout exploring

an unfinishedadventure game.

EXPECT TO PAY

$20

DEVELOPER

Question

PUBLISHERIn-house

REVIEWED ON

Windows 7, Intel i7x980 3.33GHz, 9GB

RAM, Nvidia GeForceGTX 960

MULTIPLAYER

None

LINK

www.magiccirclegame.com

A K I N D O F M A G I C Other monsters I would like to edit

G T A 4 ’ SR O M A NNot really amonster, butI’d like toboard uphis mouth.

H A L F - L I F E2 ’ S P O I S O N Z O M B I E S I’d add aweakness:poison!Problemsolved.

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 sensitiveto noise, so I’dremove her ears.Maybe even herwhole head.

F A L L O U T ’ SD E A T H C L A W SRemove theclaws. Or maybethe death. Both?

B I O S H O C KI N F I N I T E ’ SH A N D Y M E NTheir weaknessis their heart, soI’d add tenmore.

R E V I E W

http://www.magiccirclegame.com/






Like Neo, you can change thecode. 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 startadjusting its code.

The developers deleted things,but you can bring them back.

OCTOBER 2015 7

R E V I EW

The Magic Circl



THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW

N O W P L A Y I N G

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 atavern 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 WITHWHAT GERALT IS SUPPOSED TO BE

A N D Y K E L L Y

THIS MONTH

Decided it was time to even

the odds.

ALSO PLAYED

Batman: Arkham Knight

ow that’s a proper testf Geralt’s developed talents.

E X T R A L I F ECONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING

PUB BRAWLS

Boxers 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 explainsthe 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



E X T R A L I F

N O W P L A Y I N G I D O W N L O A D S I R E I N S T A L

OCTOBER 2015 7

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 buildingsinside a stonewalled compound, with

a misty courtyard separating them.

BULLET SPONGES

You 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 dangeroushabitat, 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, bu

the animation as it squeals and falls ove

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 alot 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 a

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 forthe pigs I’ve killed”

games and the books too, the guy

should have surely reached his level capby 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 BEING

So 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 moreammo than is useful.

S A M U E L R O B E R T S

THIS MONTH

Killed an animal that

didn’t deserve it.

ALSO PLAYED

Batman: Arkham Knight ,

XCOM: Enemy Unknown


N O W P L A Y I N G

Another rustic village, morehapless yokels to fight. *sigh*




N O W P L A Y I N G

To polish up my sneaking

skills in preparation for

the nextHitman game

I’m doing a series of

excruciating hamstringexercises 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 donesomething 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, andrigging 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 wrestlerwho 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 namedToby 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 PLACES

To 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 muchtoo 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 classicHitman , 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 N

THIS MONTH

Discovered that the cure for

baldness is bullets.

ALSO PLAYED

GTA V , Her Story

WHERE ONCE I DROPPED PIANOS ONHEADS, NOW I’M HITTINGPEOPLE 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?



E X T R A L I F


OCTOBER 2015 7

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’sthe 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’ thatTF2

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 murderpeople 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 noidea what it actually is”Stopping by to visit TEAM FORTRESS 2

to whichever Soldier, Heavy or Pyro

seems to be doing least badly.

GUN FANCIER

I 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 ‘inspec

item’ allows me to stare at my own gun

provided I’m not currently firing it. Team

Fortress was already a competitiveshooter, a dress-up game, and a short

film series. Why not an interactive gun

ogling experience? Why not.

Having finished the Medic contract,

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 arrow

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 N

THIS MONTH

Spent $6 to support another year ofTF2 tie-in comics.

ALSO PLAYED

Her Story , Dota 2 , Elite:

Dangerous

IT’S A FUN DIVERSION TO PILE ONTOA GAME THAT’S AS CHAOTIC AND

UNREADABLE AS I REMEMBER

This is king of the hill. We’re thekings 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 andBristol fashion

Ifeel confident insaying that ConnorSherlock’s Voice ofVamana is inspired bythe 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 beginningwhere you float from your spaceshuttle 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’sGratuitous

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 thatfeels 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, theintergalactic feline who, even as I type this,continues its solitary voyage into deepestspace. You’ve got that tune stuck in yourhead 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 surethis is from Stargate SG-1, which featuredan Egyptian space god named Apophis asits first-season villain. He was fond of gold.


B O R G C U B EGive Picard terrifying flashbacks with thisimpressive Borg slab, which wants toconvert all organic beings into squishycyborgs. Enjoy a cup of tea, Earl grey, hot,while you play, for maximum authenticity.


Be prepared to holdShift and W endlessly . 2



E X T R A L I F


OCTOBER 2015 8

3 PORTALSTORIES: MEL

This is a huge mod boasting 22 levels, a newstory with a different voice actor companion, a

ton of custom assets, and even anew decal for the gun. (It’s yellownow. Yellow is cool.) You don’t need Portal 2 installed to play, but you doneed to own it. Related: everybodyshould own Portal 2.

Mel is a clear labor of love, and ifthe team at Prism Studios can’tmatch the vocal performances ofthe original, that’s only because thatwould be impossible. Mel’s deviouspuzzles are supported by detailedenvironments that stop this fromfeeling like a simple rehash.

DOWNLOAD AT www.bit.ly/PortalMel

JENNY LECLUE

Indie developer Stephen

Lavelle recreates the soapy

business of washing with

his typical flair and eye fordetail. 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 itagain 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

1MIRROR MIRRORTransform your shower

into a freaky hall of mirrors,and see your low-poly wang

from a whole new angle.

2REVERSE GRAVITYTidy the mess you’ve left

in the shower byfundamentally messing with

the laws of physics.

3SEX CHANGEChange your sex with a

handy perfume, combining itwith a different product to

turn your new tits golden.

1

3

2

MOD New protagonist, new AI, new gun

FREEWARE Do you missMarple? 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 properexpansion 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 bymany as the best PiranhaBytes game, with therichest world, story and

systems of their many RPGs aboutheroic dudes in faction-heavyfantasy lands. You’ll be giving up onsleep entirely if you decide to tacklethe fan-made Golden Gate too. Itadds several new guilds to join, anda whopping hundred extra queststo undertake, and extends the storypast the end of Night of the Raven.

Or it will do, anyway—at the time ofwriting, only the first (of four)chapters has been completed.

Like another recommendedmod, Requiem, The Golden Gate makes shields usable in combat; italso adds new textures and a fewextra animations to the game. Don’texpect a flawless translation fromthe 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 PORTALMAP PACK

MOD Formerly known as Nick’s Portal Map Pack

VA-11 HALL-ADEMO The Cyber HouseRules (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 isshaping 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 thisweird freaky grass?”

Tickle Portal 2 pink (and,er, yellow) with this mod.



E X T R A L I F


OCTOBER 2015 8

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 gameexplores the flipsideof Prison Architect’sintense jailmanagement sim,

putting you in the orange jumpsuitof a recently incarcerated crim whois hoping to break out at the nearestconvenient 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 modifiedlocations 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 ourget 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 GermanPOW camp featured in the Steve McQueenclassic, 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 shinygray floors and walls you would expect.Escaping this is going to be tricky, what withspace famously lacking an atmosphere.


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’tenough, this one adds pirates.


10





E X T R A L I F


OCTOBER 2015 8

Our review was brutal.Tom Francis rightlycriticized thelong-awaited sequelfor being a step

backwards from the magnificent Blood Money. Expectations were

high, and Io Interactive delivered agame too obsessed with story andscripted set-pieces to provide theassassination sandbox we wanted.

Despite this, I’ve always had a softspot for it. It’s a rubbish Hitman game, sure, but it’s an enjoyable15-hour chunk of mostly goodaction-stealth, with a few missions Ithink are among the best in theseries. When a new Hitman gracedthe cover of our last issue, I decidedto reinstall Absolution to see if time

has been kinder to it.

The biggest mistake Io made wasthinking its story was any good, andmaking that the focus of the game.It’s horribly written, and trieshopelessly to humanize Agent 47. Alot of developers fall into this trap,thinking we care about their

characters as much as they do.Imagining they require depth andcomplexity, when, really, they’re justa means to an end. It’s not Lara Croftthe 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 coolassassinations. That’s it.

The cutscenes in Absolution aretiresome and endless, made all theworse by longtime series voice actorDavid Bateson’s stilted, lifelessperformance. That last detail isn’t Iofault, though. Realizing his hammy

voice acting would jar with its grittynew David Fincher-inspired visualstyle, Io hired TV veteran WilliamMapother (Lost, Justified) to play 47But when people found out, therewas an uproar, and Io was forced to

bring Bateson back. Bad idea. Ioshould have stuck to its guns anddefended its artistic vision instead of

kowtowing to Bateson’s groupies, because the guy can’t act.

UNFORGIVEN

This increased focus on story meansthat between the proper Hitman-style contracts, of which there are afew, you’re forced to play throughclunky, badly designed scriptedevents, including a woeful rooftopchase involving a helicopter. I’m notsure why Io thought the gameneeded 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 W

RELEASED

2012

PUBLISHER

Square Enix

DEVELOPER

Io Interactive

LINK

www.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



OLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES

RE I NS TA L L

railroading you into a single playingstyle. There was a six-year gap

between Blood Money and Absolution,and in that time, Io appeared toforget why people fell in love with itsgames in the first place.

Another glaring flaw is thestructure. Unlike the huge, open-ended missions of Blood Money,Absolution’ s levels are, criminally,split into chunks. There are loadingbreaks as you transition betweenareas, and it auto-saves. The lack ofany manual save system whatsoevermeans if you want to experiment, youhave to repeat entire chunks of themission—and in a game where guards

like to have massive conversationsbefore they start their patrol, this isan exercise in frustration. And again,it displays a baffling lack ofunderstanding about why we lovedthe other games.

IT COULDBE WORSE

Bad sequels to great games

A S S A S S I N ’ SC R E E D I I IThe worst Creed yet, full of lamescripted events andinstant fails.

R E S I D E N TE V I L 6How didCapcom go fromthe sublime Resi

4 to this?

D U K E N U K E MF O R E V E RA disastrousfollow-up to Duke

Nukem 3D . Theabyss of sequels.

F E A R 2This poor sequelhad none of theoriginal game’sbrutal, kineticcombat.

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 decentgame. I’m someone who has always

appreciated strong world-building,and Io’s artists are some of the best inthe business. Absolution is anastonishingly pretty game, set in acluttered, believably lived-in world.They went overboard with the bloomlighting, to the point where itsometimes looks like the aftermath ofa nuclear explosion, but the amountof detail squeezed into the levels ismad. The Terminus hotel is straightout of David Fincher’s Seven: a grimy,dilapidated building, populated bylowlifes and pounded by rain. Hope isan archetypal dusty American desert

town, its streets lined with stars-and-stripes bunting.

These amazing spaces make forsome genuinely brilliant missions,with a similar freeform feel to thoseof Blood Money—albeit hampered by

the stupid auto-save system and thelevels being split into chunks. There

are loads of ways to infiltrate theTerminus. Hope is similarly stuffedwith options. A mission in a strip clubinvolves you using a massive crowdof hooting horny men to wanderaround unseen, planning your hit.There are moments where it feelslike classic Hitman, and these, I think,are just about worth all those rooftopchases, sniping sections, and otherlame set-pieces.

HIT AND MISS

If you keep comparing Absolution to Blood Money you’ll have a terrible

time, but take it as it is and there’s alot of fun to be had. If Blood Money is2001: A Space Odyssey, then

Absolution is 2010: The Year WeMake Contact. Inferior in almostevery respect, but an enjoyable



E X T R A L I F


OCTOBER 2015 8

continuation of the series regardless.The problem is, for every standoutmoment there’s a massive sinkhole ofawful waiting to swallow you up. It’sprobably the most inconsistent gameI’ve ever played in terms of quality.

One of the main plot threadsinvolves Agent 47 protecting a14-year-old girl called Victoria, but

because the writing is so messy, it’s

hard to care about her at all. Youdon’t feel the same drive and urgencyhe apparently does, which weakensthe narrative massively. The story

becomes little more than adistraction, getting in the way of thereason for playing a Hitman game:hitting men. The new incarnationshown off at E3 seems to besidelining story in favor of goodold-fashioned murder sandboxes,thank God.

Absolution is a peculiar quality dipin an otherwise brilliant series. I’m

not sure why it happened, but I have

a theory. Io used Absolution to showoff its new Glacier 2 engine, and I get

the feeling it was still finding its feetwith the tech. It had the visualsnailed. I mean, just look at thoseenvironments. But perhaps it hadproblems making levels as big andseamless as Blood Money’s. Andperhaps this impacted the gamedesign too, forcing the studio to cutcorners. That’s total conjecture, butI’ve seen similar things happen inother games. Assassin’s Creed III wasthe debut of Ubi’s AnvilNext engine,and was similarly hamstrung as aresult. Both games, in fact, take thepower away from you at the last

moment and play some of theirassassinations out in cutscenes, ratherthan giving you control over them.That should never happen.

MERCIFUL RELEASE

But even with its flaws, and alukewarm critical reception, Hitman:

Absolution still sold almost 4 millioncopies. Its Metacritic score currentlysits at a respectable 79. Even thoughmany 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, wemight never have seen another Hitman game. It’s been around for years, but there’s still a lot of potentiain the series—for more complexsimulation, more freedom, and moreways to creatively kill people.Hopefully we’ll see some of that inthe 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 designwas as good as the art.

UNINSTALLPhil thinks Absolution should never be absolved

“Nice try, Andy, but a Hitman game with a helicopter chasesequence is indefensible. As is aHitman game that, at the end of your mission, triggers acutscene in which Agent47 fails to kill his target.Absolution does both,and deserves to befiled away in yourSteam Library undera special categorycalled ‘the bin’.”



HARDWARE

88 OCTOBER 201588 OCTOBER 2015

By Dave James

GROUP TEST

U P G R A D E

The most dramatic panel upgrade you can buy

HIGH-RESOLUTIONMONITORS



HARDWAR

OCTOBER 2015 8

HARDWAR

OCTOBER 2015 8

There is a battle going on inthe PC gaming world, andno, it’s not between WarnerBros and the people who bought Arkham Knight on

PC. It’s the battle over high resolution vshigh refresh rate in your monitor. Ichecked out high refresh rate screens afew months back, so now let’s turn ourattention to the high-res guys.

Q&AWhy can’t I have both ahigh-res screen and asuper-speedy one?At the moment theresimply aren’t the panelsavailable to cope withdriving something like a3440 x 1440 or 4Kresolution at the sort of120Hz+ speedsassociated with highrefresh rates. And it’staken long enough forPCs to acquire the displaconnections capable ofeven driving a 4K screenat 60Hz.

So why would I want ahigher resolution overa higher refresh rate?It depends what’s mostimportant to you. Smoot

framerates are within threach of us all, almost nomatter what yourhardware. All you have todo is sacrifice resolutionBut how many folk with a1440p screen downgradtheir gaming res to 1080for the sake of higherframerates?

OK, what benefits arethere to a higher res?At the start of the latestresolution revolution,few. Make the move up toa 4K monitor and your

textures look blockier,switch to an ultrawideresolution and the gamemay not support the newfield of view. But that’s achanging now, and gamelike GTA V or The Witche

3 add far more drama toimages on ultrawidesand 4K screens than onlower resolutions.

DictionaryResolution The pixelcount for a given image,

in the form of the numbeof horizontal pixels by thvertical count. Matchingthe output resolution of game to the nativeresolution of a panel isimportant in maintaininga clear image.

4K AKA Ultra HD iseither a resolutionof 3840 x 2160 or4096 x 2160 pixels.

Refresh rate The numbeof times, per second, agiven screen is updated,or ‘refreshed’.

Group Tes



HARDWARE

90 OCTOBER 2015

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 thesame 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.

1 2

PHILIPS BDM4065UC

www.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 folkare 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 31MU97

www.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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OCTOBER 2015 9

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 tosee 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 makesit 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-B1

www.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 th

US, making it expensive for what you get, while in Europe it’s

one of the most affordable 4Ks around.

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92 OCTOBER 2015

PHILIPS BDM3470

www.philips.com$1,900

SAMSUNG S34E790C

www.samsung.com$1,136

65I’m still not completely sold on the goodness of abent screen. As with curved TVs, the benefits arepretty intangible, although I did expect to be moreenamored with one on my desktop where I can be inthe sweet-spot in perpetuity. I think the problem isthat curved monitors don’t curve far enough toreally make a difference. The radius is so subtle that

it’s barely perceptible, and any effect it has on yourgames is mostly down to the fact these screens arebuilt at a 3440 x 1440 resolution.

I’m also not sold on Samsung’s use of a VA panelfor the S34E790C either. The 40-inch VA panel inthe 40-incher feels superior to this, and the IPSpanels of both the BDM3470UP and theLG34UC87-P are just plain better. The black levelsmay be improved over the IPS, but the whites areway out and the colors are nowhere near as good.

When you’re a manufacturer asking this muchmoney for this kind of screen you’re introuble. I’d be far happier with the3470UP any day of the week.

There’s also few of the problems getting gamesrunning I experienced in the early days. Flawlesswidescreen used to be vital to get game displayingproperly at 3440 x 1440, but now it’s only really theolder titles which struggle. Playing GTA V , especiallyin first-person mode, is a fantastic experience. Youcan see far more of the world in your peripheral

vision, which is always a bonus when you’re on therun from the cops.

The 8-bit AH-IPS panel is a beauty too, deliveringcrisp colors and fantastic contrast levels. Again it’s acase of great white, but relatively mediocre blackreproduction. You do get a lot more control over thepicture quality compared with the cheaper AOCpanel, which allows you to offset any issues you getwith dark images. But there is an elephant in theroom and that’s the price—which is a ridiculous$1,900 at the time of writing because of Philips’lackadaisical US distribution. Just wait awhile: this quality screen will surely hitits 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-P

www.lg.com$1,000

7So yes, another curvy panel, but this time it’s alovely IPS version which puts the Samsung VA toshame. As it’s IPS, the black levels aren’t so hot, butthe white saturation is far better—though not thesame immaculate reproduction you get on thePhilips ultrawide. You also get impressive-lookingcolors 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 aknee into the panel and giving it a bit of bend. Andgenuinely I find the flat ultra-widescreen monitorsdeliver just as dramatic gaming performance as thesupposedly more-immersive curved screens.

This LG however does harbor aspirationstowards professionalism, with a solid base, decentout-of-the-box calibration and Mac-sensitiveThunderbolt connections. Those add unnecessaryexpense if you’re only going to be gaming, but ifyou’re considering a curved monitor forgaming then you’re already all aboutthe 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.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

LG 31MU97

1,149

8.8 million

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

LG 34UC87-P

1,000

5 million

PRICE ($) PIXEL COUNTNumber of pixelsin native res

PIXEL RESPONSE (ms)Speed that pixels canchange colour

STACKED UP

1

2

3

4

5

6

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

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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.

HARDWARE

94 OCTOBER 2015

KEY

Build the best PC for your budget

Y O U R N E X T P C

BUYER’S GUIDE



HARDWAR

Buyer’s Guid

OCTOBER 2015 9

T O T A L

$ 9 5 5

BUDGET

BUILDEnjoy 1080p gaming without

breaking the bank

H81M-P33MSI $46

A bargain-priced microATX board that pairsnicely with the Pentium G3258, letting youoverclock into 4GHz+ territory.

Pentium Anniversary G3258Intel $70

Ludicrously cheap and overclockable, thedual-core G3258 rivals far more expensiveprocessors in gaming performance.

AMD R9 380 2GBSapphire

$200

AMD’s R9 380 is a refreshed R9 285, but itstill packs enough power to handle 1080pgaming at a decent price.

Hyper 212 EVOCooler Master

$35

A legendary cooler, still the best for its veryreasonable price. Overclock to your heart’s

content with this.

Crucial Ballistix Sport1600MHz (8GB)Crucial

$51

Cheap, low-profile, and reliable. Does its jobThe best 8GB you’ll find.

EVGA 500W 80PLUS CertifiedATX12V/EPS12VEVGA

$45

A reliable PSU with enough juice to run yourCPU and a reasonably power-hungry GPU.

BX100 250GBCrucial

$85

Thinking about skimping and goingHDD-only? Don’t. The BX100 is much fasterand a fantastic performer for the price.

Carbide 200RCorsair

$75

The 200R gets the job done with toollesstrays and plenty of space. ATX-sized, so youcan upgrade that microATX board later.

VX2263SMHLViewsonic

$130

An affordable 1080p monitor with vibrantIPS image quality and low response times. Areal bargain.

CM Storm QuickFire RapidCoolermaster

$80

A no-frills mechanical keyboard with astandard layout and Cherry switches. Werecommend Browns or Reds for gaming.

Deathadder 2013Razer $58

Don’t skimp on your gaming mouse. Get oneof the best. Try the Logitech G502 if you hava giant hand or prefer more weight.

HyperX CloudKingston

$80

Our favorite gaming headset, and it happento be as cheap as plenty of inferior cans. Agood buy for any gaming rig.

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MID-RANGE

BUILDOur recommended build for

playing the latest games

T O T A L

$ 1 , 6 0 7

Z97-AAsus $149

A reliable mobo from Asus, as usual. Doesn’thave gaming-brand bells and whistles, butcan overclock just fine and has an M.2 slot.

Core i5-4690KIntel $235

Nearly the performance of an i7 at a betterprice. Fantastic gaming performance andgreat overclocking potential. No-brainer.

GTX 970 4GMSI $335

Offers the best price/performance ratioright now, and MSI’s model is cheap andoverclockable with a quiet cooler.

Hyper 212 EVOCooler Master $35

If it ain’t broke... the Hyper 212 EVO is a greatcooler for the price. Save a bit of money in

your mid-range build.

Vengeance Pro 1866MHz DDR3(16GB)Corsair$100

Corsair reliability, speed that doesn’t costtoo much, and 16GB for use down the line.

CX600MCorsair$65

80Plus Bronze efficient, with enough powerfor a good gaming PC. Modular design is agreat perk that cuts down on cable tangles.

850 EVO 250GBSamsung $90

Samsung retains its top spot on the SSD pilewith the fantastically priced, very speedy850 EVO. Still the best price/performance.

S340NZXT $70

The stylish S340 has some nice touches,such as removable dust filters and space forhuge liquid cooling radiators.

G257HUAcer $280

A step-up from 1080p to 1440p territory,with a vibrant IPS display and good responsetimes at a strong price.

K70 VengeanceCorsair$110

A great, full-size mechanical keyboard withan ergonomic wrist rest. We recommendCherry Brown or Red switches for gaming.


There’s not a huge range of price differenceson the best mice, so stick with the best for your mid-range build too.

HyperX CloudKingston

$80

Even for our medium build, we stillrecommend this decently-priced headset.There’s nothing better for the money.


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ADVANCED

BUILDGo above and beyond with a PCpowerful enough to end worlds

T O T A L

$ 2 , 9 4 0

HARDWAR

Buyer’s Guid

OCTOBER 2015 9

Maximus VII HeroAsus $225

Fantastic overclocking and stability, with agreat UEFI BIOS from Asus and M.2. Bonus:on-board power, reset, CMOS, etc, buttons.

Core i7-4790KIntel $339

Intel’s top quad-core CPU: performance on par with its much more expensive X99 chipsand great for multi-threaded applications.

GTX 980 Gaming 4GMSI

$520

Right now the GTX 980 is the best valuesingle-GPU card for ultra 1080p and 1440pgaming, bar none.

H90Corsair

$88

Quiet even under heavy load, the H90 getsthe cooling job done with a single 140mm

radiator, easily fitting a variety of cases.

Ripjaws X SeriesDDR3-2133 16GBG.SKILL

$109

16GB of fast, reliable RAM at 2133MHz. For high-end build, it’s worth the step up.

Supernova 850W G2 80 Plus GoldEVGA $145

A reliable, quiet, gold-rated EVGA powersupply, modular, with enough juice to sustatwo overclocked graphics cards and a CPU.

850 EVO 500GBSamsung $162

The 850 EVO is so good, there’s not muchneed to step up to the more expensive 850Pro for a gaming rig. Just get a bigger drive.

Fractal Design Define R5Fractal

$111

A beautiful and functional case, the R5 hassound absorption, water-cooling support,dust filters and masses of drive space.

Predator XB270HAbprz144Hz G-SyncAcer $800

Simply the best: a 27” 1440p 144Hz IPSdisplay, with Nvidia’s variable refresh tech.

K70 VengeanceCorsair

$110

Even for a more expensive PC, there’s noneed to splash out on a pricier keyboard thathe K70 Vengeance.


Even if you’ve got money to burn, theDeathadder really is the best mouse you cabuy right now.

H WirelessSteelSeries $273

Our favorite wireless gaming headset, withgreat sound quality and a convenient batterswapping system for long gaming sessions.


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I T ’ S A L L O V E R . . .

Welcome back, Commander. It has been 20 years. Aliens rule the Earth. We arereactivating 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



Helping gamers with mental health issues.

takethis.org



Documents

PC Gamer - October 2015 USA