Table of contents for Issue 296 in PC Powerplay

Tis year already looks like it’ll be bringing some heavy-hitting RTS games with it. What’s that? You’d be interested in playing one from a studio that includes developers that worked on StarCraft II and Warcraft III? Especially if it was free? Well, it’s funny you should say that actually… Set in a post-apocalyptic future fusing elements of sci-fi and fantasy, you’ll be blasting monsters with high-tech weaponry across a regularly updated campaign, alone or with up to two others. eSports are being integrated with both 1v1 and 3v3 tournaments, and - importantly - Frost Giant has committed to avoiding both play-to-win mechanics and NFTs. RELEASE 2023 DEV Frost Giant Studios PUB Frost Giant Studios LINK playstormgate.com…

FEATURE RELEASE 2023 DEV Ubisoft Bordeaux PUB Ubisoft LINK ubisoft.com/en-us/game/assassins-creed/mirage If you think you want a remake of the original Assassin’s Creed, then time has softened your memory of its mindnumbingly repetitive structure and arbitrary, flag-chasing investigations. Mirage is the better option: a return to stealth, urban parkour, and the Middle East that folds in the more sophisticated mechanics and storytelling of the series as we know it today - embodied by protagonist Basim, formerly a supporting character in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Expect a focus on targeted murder over RPG-style adventure, enabled by a clue-gathering phase and the busiest toolbelt an assassin has ever had, Ubi’s found room for some blatant noughties nostalgia, too - you’ll flit between Assassin’s bureaus, as Altaïr once did. and even visit a mountain fortress…

The world of Atlas Fallen is ruled over by a cruel god, who demands that its people harvest and offer up ‘essence’ to it. The gauntlet which rather unexpectedly starts talking to you has other ideas. Turns out its plan involves repeatedly whacking giant monsters with shapeshifting weapons, either alone or with a friend. Traversal looks fun, incorporating what can only be described as sandsurfing. Combat meanwhile is fast and flashy, with a momentum system that rewards relentless attacks with powerful moves, at the cost of increased damage from your enemy. This sandy adventure could turn out to be a glass act. RELEASE 2023 DEV Blizzard PUB Focus Entertainment LINK focus-entmt.com/en/games/atlas-fallen…

RELEASE 2023 DEV Starward Industries PUB 11 Bit Studios LINK invinciblethegame.com This retro-future sciencefiction game, based on a novel of the same name, looks like it could be a serious sleeper hit next year. Boasting exquisite visual design, with loads of detailed, analogue props, it invites players into a mystery on a remote world, Aegis III, in the space boots of Yasna, an astrobiologist out to search for her lost crewmates. A narrative focused first-person adventure, you’ll be tackling heady cosmic themes by figuring out how to use an arsenal of science gadgets, all exquisitely animated with chunky interfaces. There’s something a little reminiscent of Alien Isolation or Observation to it - dense sci-fi with tactile interaction. How much you like the sound of poking around dusty exosolar caverns using…

RELEASE 2023 DEV Arkane Austin PUB Bethesda LINK bethesda.net/en/game/redfall Arkane enters the fray of cooperative shooters, with a vampiric twist. The genre has become a little more crowded with 2022 having brought us Back 4 Blood and the sublime Warhammer 40,000 Darktide, but Redfall has a few extra tricks up its sleeves to potentially help it sink its fangs into the competition. It’s an open world for one, letting up to four players explore the titular town of Redfall, Massachusetts to hunt down the undead. Each playable character has unique abilities and gear, with customisable loadouts. and the mix of powers looks to bring Arkane’s immersive sim credentials into the mix, combining the Left 4 Dead formula with the more open problem solving of something like Dishonored. Hopefully that leads…

The team behind XCOM has given me my next mission objective. It’s not to destroy an alien relay, extract a VIP from a hot zone, or board a crashed UFO. Instead, I’m to watch a movie with a friend in Marvel’s Midnight Suns. It’s a western, if the Eastwood-esque figure flashing across the television set is anything to go by, though the particulars of the film’s plot turn out to be entirely unimportant. Movie night is merely a pretext to have a deep conversation with a new teammate, named Nico, We bond over our evil moms: hers a philanthropist sorceress who murdered children, mine a demonic goddess who banished me to a cold grave in the late 17th century. Nico, whose superpower appears to be cheeriness in the face of…

You’ve made a deal with the demon who stole your partner’s face: if you win at a game of cards, she’ll be freed. But if you lose, the creature will add your face - and indeed your immortal soul - to his repertoire, slipping it on as easily as a mask. It’s a strong setup for a relatively simple card game, and the demon’s taunting and grotesque appearance do a lot to reinforce that the outcome matters. Win, and the demon is bound to his word. Lose and you’re bound to yours. I played twice and arrived at both (satisfying) outcomes. Essentially, all you’re doing is comparing cards. You can have two cards in your hand at once, and the highest number wins when one is plonked on the table.…

There’s a bit in James Cameron’s classic sci-fi moisten-’em-up, The Abyss, in which a team of deep sea divers inhale a new type of liquid oxygen. It’s a tortuous process that eventually allows them to visit areas inaccessible to divers using normal breathing apparatus. And it’s very similar to relearning the controls in Mirror’s Edge. There’s something about getting your claws around the game’s controls that feels stilted and unnatural, especially for a game with impeccable visual precision. It’s impossible to look at Mirror’s Edge and not know exactly where you want to go. But the first 15 minutes of stop-start confusion makes you feel like a lonely grandma trying to navigate TikTok. In fairness, it’s not necessarily the game’s fault; more that everything we’ve played in the years since…

HARDWARE Tech Tales TECH TALES The dawning of a fresh year is traditionally a time of introspection and inner growth. A time to nurture one’s inner stoic, take an honest inventory of your failings and unfulfilled ambitions, and to give them form. This is a new year. You haven’t done any of the bad things yet. Alright, it’s still so early in 2023 that you’re using the sunlight in the day to prepare a breakfast of leftover chocolates and stuffing, but you’ve got the fire under you. This year, you’re going to do it. You’re going to do… something or other. What nobody tells you about new year’s resolutions until you’re too old and unmotivated to act on it is that the trickiest part is deciding on an undertaking that’s…

EXTRA LIFE The games we love right now ROBIN VALENTINE THIS MONTH Tried to clean symbiote gunk out of spandex. ALSO PLAYED Marvel Snap, Nadir, Legends of Runeterra I’ve lamented before in these pages that one of the key things almost all superhero games get wrong is their enemies. You play as these hugely powerful icons, but usually spend all your time fighting generic goons or boring robots - I'm looking at you, Marvel’s Avengers. Such encounters are dry, lacking the drama of a comic book storyline, and often they mess with the power fantasy, slapping huge healthbars on nameless soldiers that make even Mjolnir feel feeble. It’s largely a concession to the medium videogames, the logic presumably goes, need a steady stream of fights against a set library of…

CHAINSAW LEGS Even the mightiest warrior only has two arms. By weaponising other, currently redundant limbs, we can increase every space marine’s killing potential by 100%! THE ENERVATOR Simply impale your enemy with this blade and they’ll be set ablaze, melted from the inside out, and their heart will calcify and explode. causing severe fatigue. BLACK LIB-RAY Downloads the text of the entire Horus Heresy novel series to date into your enemy’s brain, inducing a lore overdose fatal to all but the biggest nerds (who can simply be punched instead). POWER RAKE Lay a few of these along your enemy’s route of attack, and watch them defeat themselves With their own heavy footfalls! Also useful for tending particularly stubborn gardens. …UNTIL APR 03…

MONITOR News. Development. Opinion Call of Duty’s now been part of the gaming scenery for two decades, and ever since the original Modern Warfare (2007) took it into the stratosphere, it has become a regular blockbuster release. That cadence matters, and the sheer size of the series has meant that CoD has become a focal point for Microsoft’s proposed US$65 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. There were two years between the first two games: ever since, it’s had a yearly entry like clockwork. No other shooter releases like this, but that reliability became a huge factor in CoD’s growth. Over the last decade especially it has come to inspire fierce loyalty among its huge fanbase before, in 2020, Warzone offered a free-toplay CoD and saw huge success. This year’s mainline…

special report GATES MONITOR News. Development. Opinion A year after CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 2, the studio followed with the Enhanced Edition, an enormous update with the patch notes to prove it. A 102 item changelog detailed everything from corrected item descriptions to “fixed reverb in sewers in Chapter 3”, on top of a lengthy list of more substantial additions: new quests, cinematics and ending sequences. A fledgling CD Projekt had done the same thing with the first Witcher in 2008, and though I can’t find it online, I swear I once pored over a multi-page PDF describing every change made to that first adventure. I don’t know if any developer is more committed to documenting the minutia of changes to a massive game (other than Bayl2 Games with…

FEATURE Park Beyond THERE’S GOLD IN THEM THRILLS Before we strap in for Park Beyond, let’s learn some stomach-churning facts about extreme roller coasting. This approach wouldn’t be corkscrewing off on an odd tangent, either. As far as park construction goes, this management sim veers more ‘loop-de-loopy’ than any game that’s laid new track since Chris Sawyer’s tycooning years. And, though I abhor a buzzword, the prospect of Limbic Entertainment’s ‘Impossifciation’ additive has me excited; giddier than a questionablysecured child approaching a sheer drop. The process of providing deathadjacent amusement, both to video game NPCs and IRL people, has seen much evolution. Gone are the days when ‘thrill-seekers’ could be sated by a circular trot on skewered fake horsies. Since the early 1800s, punters have buckled into railed cars for…

RELEASE 2023 DEV Bethesda Game Studios PUB Bethesda LINK bethesda.net/en/game/starfield The best bits of Bethesda RPGs don’t demo well. At least, that’s the self-soothing mantra I repeated while watching Starfleld’s lacklustre summer showcase - 15 minutes of impactless shooting and Todd Howard in a leather jacket. A slight variant on Fallout 3’s lockpicking system wasn’t enough to shake the sense that it was still 2008. Yet the bigger picture - and it’s a very big picture, comprising over 1,000 planets - offers reason for hope. This is an apparent return to Elder Scrolls openness, the freedom to ignore the urgency of the main plot and define yourself by which factions you join. You’re first invited to sign up to Constellation, a group of space explorers based in New Atlantis, Jemison…

Another throwback to an early period in Assassin’s Creed’s evolution, Skull and Bones has had a much longer and stormier journey than Mirage. Intended to expand on the celebrated ship combat and ocean exploration of Black Flag, it’s previously been a session-based team shooter and a Rust-style survival game. Now it’s more akin to Sea of Thieves - an open world in which the Indian Ocean is shared by 20 players, each taking on contracts to transport contraband or track down treasure, with the aim of achieving greater infamy and captaining bigger ships. Before finally, of course, sinking each others’ ships. RELEASE March 9,2023 DEV Ubisoft Singapore PUB Ubisoft LINK ubisoft.com/en-us/game/skull-and-bones…

RELEASE 2023 DEV Blizzard PUB Blizzard LINK diablo4.blizzard.com/en-us Regardless of whether you’ve been looking forward to this for the last three years or not. we can surely all agree that a game where one of the characters can turn into a bear is worth a second look. It’s been a while, but it’s almost time to return to the somewhat inappropriately named land of Sanctuary. It’s going to be the grim, loot-tastic Diablo ARPG experience fans know and love (to be disturbed by), but there will be changes. Customisation features are being expanded, for example: individual armour pieces can be dyed, and you’ll be able to mould character faces to your liking. In terms of direct effects on gameplay, there will be three new stats: angelic, demonic, and ancestral power.…

FEATURE RELEASE 2023 DEV Team Cherry PUB Team Cherry LINK hollowknightsilksong.com This sequel to the beloved, hand drawn hack and slash platformer is as highly anticipated as it gets. Set in a fantasy world inhabited by (adorable) bugs, this delightfully gloomy adventure evokes Dark Souls in its structure of safe points, boss fights, and unlockable shortcuts. Building on the original with a new protagonist, Hornet, it brings fresh fluid movement to the format with the character’s graceful gliding and sliding thanks to her ability to weave threads of silk (hence the title). There’s a real heft to her animations in spite of how speedy she is. Rather than a journey into the deep, Hornet is on a quest to the kingdom’s peak, battling various imaginative foes en route through a…

The citybuilder, as first established by Will Wright, was about taking a green Californian field and turning it into a fume-belching industrial hellscape. It’s a premise that’s rather lost its feel-good factor in our environmentally conscious age, and even direct successors like Cities: Skylines have leaned into geothermal power plants and electric cars. Terra Nil flips the concept entirely, asking you to restore a blackened wasteland to its former natural glory. Purify the soil, grow coral reefs, and introduce parrots, fish and flamingos. Then recycle all your buildings, and leave the map looking as if you were never there at all. RELEASE Early 2023 DEV Free Lives PUB Devolver Digital LINK devolverdigital.com/games/terra-nil…

FEATURE RELEASE Summer 2023 DEV Team Reptile PUB Team Reptile LINK team-reptile.com Ablatant spiritual successor to Jet Set Radio, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk embodies the style and pace of the classic skating game, but puts more emphasis on player expression. You choose your character, customise your outfits, and create your own graffiti in an open world city. You won’t just be rollerblading - you can hop on a skateboard and a trick bike too. And, of course, there’s a full trick system for putting all three to work with grinds, slides, wall-runs, and all sorts of other fancy motions my old thumbs probably won’t be able to pull off. Style is all-important - you’re not just showing off. you’re gaining a reputation. Get well-known enough in each district, and you can…

Warhammer 40K eats people. I don’t mean that it will consume your life, or that your home will be taken over by the countless models that you don’t have time to paint. No, I mean the setting itself is fuelled on corpses - whether it’s the soldiers of the Astra Militarum dying in crusades, the Administratum clerks toiling over documents, or the criminals forced into permanent sentence. It’s a truth that Warhammer 40K: Darktide understands; whether it’s you or the Poxwalker you’re about to cleave in half, you’re both just meat in some god’s army. In a not-sodifferent life, that medicae servitor, tending to the wounded while encased in machinery, might have had your face instead. Plainly stated, it sucks to be a human - or an ogryn - in…

REVIEW Floodland Floodland, in a lot of ways, is an epilogue to the traditional citybuilder. Civilisation is in rains as a result of climate change, and now you have to rebuild with the flotsam and jetsam we left behind. There’s no lush, untouched meadow to stick a motorway on, as in Cities Skylines. There are a lot of smashedup cars and collapsing houses, rotting boats and wonky skyscrapers, and you’ll plunder all of these to rebuild society, for good or ill. Even before you’ve set down your first structure, you’ll need to scout the area, sending settlers into the fog of war in search of resources. The most urgent is rubbish, which you’ll cobble together into homes, along with job stations so you can put your citizens to work. It…

FREE GAMES REVIEWS COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH by Tom Sykes You’ve been hired to shift garbage in this subtle but effective trucking sim, although there are certainly worse places you could perform the job. Sunset Shift is set on a beautiful island that has been commandeered by the rich elite, who holiday in villas in each of the island’s four scattered towns. All you have to do - in a ridiculously well-paid job - is spend a couple of hours each day collecting their rubbish. You spend the game in the confines of a bin lony, navigating winding roads as you meander from town to town. The roads are well laid out, with the towns being built on a circuit that you can take clockwise or anti-clockwise, so you…

THEY’RE BACK OLD GAMES REVISITED by Matthew Elliott These days we’re used to games looking like Pixar designed an advert for the NRA. The likes of Fortnite and Overwatch casually mix bouncy, cartoon visuals with lethal assault weapons and we struggle to raise an eyebrow. But when Borderlands was originally released, it stood ont against a canvas of muddy shooters with box art full of bald men standing with their backs facing the camera. Visually, Borderlands still feels like rubbing popping candy in your eyes. The environments can sometimes feel brown and uninspiring, like finger food at a children’s party, but the character design is always impeccable. Even when you accidentally end up hating a character, such as in the case of Claptrap, you can’t help but admire the way…

Hyper Luminal has an interesting business model. It develops games, but also offers QA services to other companies (clients have included Sumo Digital and Disney). Scotty, as development manager, looks after the QA team. Before entering the game industry, he had a very different - but curiously related - job. Growing up, there wasn’t much of a tech industry around him. “I did what most people do around my parts, and entered the oil and gas industry,” says Scotty. In foreshadowing of his future role, he was a quality controller. He would test pipes that came in, ensuring that they were suitable to pass on to the welders. A solid job, but not one that satisfied his passion for games. “I quit my job, moved south, and pursued a college…

FEATURE RELEASE 2023 DEV Petroglyph Games PUB Frontier Foundry LINK playthegreatwar.com There’s no shortage of war games waving their proverbial arms in your face and screaming “look at me, I’m realistic”. For this game, set during the First World War, the claim seems more than just marketing blurb - the developer has even partnered with the Imperial War Museum. Although largely a traditional RTS, The Great War: Western Front won’t exclusively involve directing action on the battlefield. Part of the experience involves playing the part of theatre commander, managing morale and researching technology that will feed into the war. It’s acting as field commander that will see you ordering units around and adapting tactics moment to moment. Persistent battlefields present a challenge that most similar games do not. You’ll deal…

The latest entry in the never-ending series takes players to a medieval fantasy world where kingdoms use big crystals and the summoning of weird monsters to maintain their power. Cue our protagonist…Clive. Huh. A very normal name for a dude in a Final Fantasy videogame. Anyway, he’s on a quest for revenge which will see him through what appears to be a grimdark take on your usual Final Fantasy affair, channelling some of the grit and self-seriousness of The Witcher or Game of Thrones. It’s coming to PS5 in June, but a PC release date is yet to be announced, so we may have a longer wait ahead of us. RELEASE 2023 DEV Square Enix PUB Square Enix LINK na.finalfantasyxvi.com…

FEATURE THE NEW VISUALS TAKE SOME GETTING USED TO HOWEVER, DOING AWAY WITH THE ICONIC SEPIA TONE IN FAVOUR OF A MORE VIBRANT ENVIRONMENT RELEASE March 24,2023 DEV Capcom PUB Capcom LINK residentevil.com After the Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes, the legendary fourth game is getting the same treatment, reimagining the lauded classic as something shinier and faster paced. Having survived the events of Raccoon City, Leon Kennedy is now (the game takes place in the year 2004) tasked with rescuing the U.S president’s daughter from a cult in remote Spain. Thus begins a horror action adventure that’s like few others. Based on recent hands-on time, the game doesn’t deviate much from the original, focused more on adding new bells and whistles than messing with the core formula. It’s…

RELEASE Early 2023 DEV A44 Games PUB Kepler interactive LINK playflintlock.com The success of Dark Souls and Elden Ring flew in the face of received AAA wisdom - proving that big budget games can be difficult, obtuse, and trusting of their players, yet still find a huge audience. Flintlock is an early result of that new understanding - a story-driven open world of the sort you might associate with Sony, but anchored by a brutal Souls-like combat system. You play as Nor, an explosives expert on the frontline of a war against the gods humanity once worshipped. These former deities have opened the door to the afterlife, which, like a vacuum cleaner stuck on reverse flow, is now spewing an army of the undead into the world of the living.…

A decade since the first game, this grogeous looking platformer puts players in the role of Lumina, a young ‘Teslamancer’, who has been left stranded after her airship crashed. To get her back home to safety, you’ll have to explore a massive mechanical tower, battle some intimidating Viking enemies and bosses, and solve plenty of puzzles. All of it is wrapped up in a painterly art style that brings its Scandinaviansteampunk infused world to life. Its brain-teasers are all based on real electromagnetic physics, playing into the scientific themes. Though that does mean you will, in fact, need to know how magents work - including, apparently, “curved magnets”. RELEASE Spring 2023 DEV Rain Games PUB Modus Games LINK store.steampowered.com/app/1698220/Teslagrad_2…

A new game set in the post apocalyptic world of Hyper Light Drifter, taking the series into 3D with a rogue-lite adventure that can be played cooperatively with friends. You’ve got swordplay, platforming, and hoverboards coming together into the mix of its iconic fantasy and sci-fi aesthetics. It seems much more high energy than the decidedly melancholy vibes of the original, however. The studio’s last game, Solar Ash, did fumble the move to 3D a bit, impressing visually but not quite delivering mechanically. Here’s hoping Hyper Light Breaker fares better. RELEASE 2023 DEV Heart Machine PUB Gearbox Publishing LINK hyperlightbreaker.com/en…

1 CITY LIMITS 1 Expansion is no mean feat, requiring piers to be researched, and built on both islands, and settlers to colonise it, taking lots of supplies with them. 2 SPREAD THIN The benefits include access to piles of resources, but if you want to share them with the main island, people will have to ferry them back and forth. 3 EX-TENSION The other benefit is keeping feuding clans apart. You’ll for go integration bonuses, but at least they won’t come to blows being on separate islands.…

Google Earth has finally been used for something other than finding your old house, or seeing if you were in the photo when the mapping car passed by. Yes, it’s been turned into a horror game, where a dark secret hides behind a cute mascot and a low poly veneer. The conceit is that this is Google Earth if it came about in the 1990s. So it has a delightfully boxy, Windows 95-style interface, and all the scenery is pixelated to hell. You can’t explore the whole Earth, of course, but a few rural locations, which are barred on all sides by impassable barriers. Mapfriend’s framework is exceptional. As in real Google Earth, you explore each scene by dragging the camera around, and then clicking on the floor to advance…

Confession: this month’s They’re Back was always centred around Axiom Verge, but the initial plan was to pick two other grass-adjacent games to go with it. But I’ve already done House Flipper and the comedy lawnmower games leave me cold, so you’re getting three games named after peripheries instead. Axiom Verge has all the hallmarks of a classic indie Metroidvania in that it looks old in a way that old games never actually used to look, and it’s bastard hard in a way that you only realise once it’s too late and you’re already addicted. It’s the platforming equivalent of a multi-course meal in a restaurant, but instead of being fed fresh bread, you’re getting a drill that lets you chop through obstructions. The variety of gadgets on offer is…

TECH REPORT HARDWARE Cometh the hour, cometh the bombastic marketing campaign from Nvidia. Acronyms are thrown at you and you’re encouraged to nod along at comparison wipes in games while RTX and DLSS are toggled on and off. This one’s got 9728 CUD A cores how many’s yours got? That few? No no, that won’t do. You need this new one now. And it’s yours for $2,500. No matter how hard Nvidia’s PR teams have worked on the launch of team green’s new RTX 40-series cards, there’s still just one spec that stands out and it’s the price. The flagship 4080 card costs twice that of its predecessor, the RTX 3080, which retailed for $1,139 at launch in September 2020. Of course, buying a graphics card for something close to MSRP…

EXTRA + LIFE CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING MOLLIE TAYLOR THIS MONTH Watched Donald Duck have many, many tantrums. ALSO PLAYED Overwatch 2, The Sims 4 I’ll level with you, I’ve been stressed out lately. I do not handle stress well. It’s times like these where I need something low-effort, something that keeps me out of the deadly gamer limbo - come on, you know the one. Where you still want to stay engaged with your hobby but can’t be bothered to even hold a mouse half the time. Thankfully, Disney Dreamlight Valley has been doing a bang-up job of being my crutch in these hard times. There’s a criterion when I’m trying to combat the dreaded gamer limbo. The game needs to be interesting enough to hold my attention, but…

EXTRA LIFE The games we love right now MAX WILLIAMS THIS MONTH Spied on the neighbours for a personal vendetta. ALSO PLAYED House Flipper With its Welcome to The Game titles seeing you painstakingly trawl the dark web for codes hidden in its itcs, Reflect Studios has web-based horror down to a fine-tuned, almost obnoxiously detailed art. This time sidestepping the dark web to focus on a local neighbourhood watch group, Scrutinised is so ripe with unsettling details it includes a no-death Detective Mode so you can take them all in properly. Detective Mode shifts gears from a survive the night style set-up to good old-fashioned investigative fun. Like a really messed up hidden object game. Scrutinised already has less enemies to worry about than Welcome To The Game 2,…