Inhaltsverzeichnis für Issue 275 in PC Powerplay

E3 is still several months away, but it’s still close enough to answer the one that’s on everyone’s mind: Yes, Cyberpunk 2077 will be there, according to an official tweet. And yes, Cyberpunk 2077 was at the previous E3, so barring disaster on an unprecedented scale there was no reason to expect that it wouldn’t be back for 2019, too. The hope is that it will be a publicly-playable appearance this time around, rather than last year’s behind-closed-doors sessions, a hope that’s bolstered by the fact that CD Projekt said last summer that the game is fully playable from start to finish. Cyberpunk’s 2018 turn was the game’s first appearance at E3, which is kind of remarkable given that it was announced a full six years earlier. The good news…

Last month saw the Asia Pacific Predator League Grand Final kick off in Bangkok, with 16 teams competing to dominate PUBG, and 10 leading DOTA 2 teams fighting it out – all for a prize pool of $US250,000. South Korean team Afreeca Freecs Fatal made it to the final circle in the PUBG tourney, and took home an impressive $US75,000 and a Predator notebook each, while TNC Predator, from the Philippines, took home the bacon in the DOTA 2 finals. Representing Australia, Team Immunity may not have won, but they didn’t disappoint, either. In the 12th round of the event TI scored 20 kills – the highest kill-count of any competing team, while TI member Nick101 ranked the second most lethal player, with 29 fatalities with his trusty Mini 14…

GRIS DEVELOPER NOMADO STUDIO • PRICE $24 https://nomada.studio/ I’m guessing Gris will get its share of reviews and that most reviewers (and we have another review this issue, but Meghann’s appreciation for music is worth indulging – Ed) will highlight the art. It’s a pretty game where colours are collected incrementally. Red is first then, around 20 minutes later, green. I didn’t know how much I wanted green until it was there. I became even more fond of the music and sound design, however, very early on. A dust storm blew in and the piano transformed into swirling organ and vocal parts. These little musical accoutrements defined Gris for me, because I can appreciate how thoughtfully sound was implemented. Progression often happens, for example, as you collect stars and bring…

THE PERMAFROST HAS MELTED, UNLEASHING A TERRIFYING ALIEN VIRUS. AN EERIE MIST ROLLS ACROSS THE PLANET, COMPELLING PEOPLE TO WANDER INTO THE OCEAN, WHERE THEY EMERGE AS HIDEOUS, MUTATED MONSTERS. THE WORLD IS A MESS, AND IN TURN-BASED STRATEGY GAME PHOENIX POINT, IT’S YOUR JOB TO CLEAN IT UP. When the game starts in 2047, most of humanity has been killed, abducted, or transformed into alien monstrosities,” says lead designer Julian Gollop, who is perhaps best known for creating the original X-COM series. “But there are a few isolated groups that have managed to survive.” “The Phoenix Project organisation you’re the leader of is very diminished,” he says. “You’re being attacked on all sides by various different powers. But out of the ashes of the devastation of the virus, which…

When Civilization codesigner Bruce Shelley embarked on Age of Empires, it was going to be a cross between Civ and RTS games like Warcraft and Command & Conquer. Those lofty ambitions were never quite matched by Age of Empires, but Rise of Nations got a lot closer. Also designed by a Civ alumnus, this time Brian Reynolds, it made all of human history an RTS playground. Reynolds threw lots of concepts more common in turn-based games into the mix, including territory, attrition, and overseeing multiple settlements, but it was all manageable, even with the real-time pace. It looked poised to usher in an exciting new era of RTS games, but despite being brilliant, it never did.…

Total Annihilation’s unique approach to RTS games in the 90s didn’t lead to many imitators, which is possibly why Chris Taylor decided to make a spiritual successor to his own game. Supreme Commander took Total Annihilation’s foundation, and then made it bigger. Huge. It was no wonder that it was an early adopter of dual-screen support. Recent years have seen a greater yearning for a Total Annihilation-style game. Planetary Annihilation, with its conflicts taking place across solar systems, upped the scale, but lost something by trying to appeal to the esports crowd. 2016’s Ashes of the Singularity was the latest in the line, though hopefully not the last.…

Mods and map editors have had an incalculable impact on strategy games. Defense of the Ancients spawned MOBAs, of course, but so many great ideas and, indeed, developers have sprouted from mods, while the communities that build up around them can sustain a game long after the patches and official content have ceased. Total conversion mods like A Game of Thrones for Crusader Kings II and The Third Age for Medieval II: Total War are considerably better than most official licensed games, especially now that they’ve seen years of updates, while others answer important what-ifs: Like what if Fallout was a grand strategy game? Yeah, there’s a mod for that.…

DEVELOPER NOMADA STUDIO • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.nomada.studio Gris is beautiful. It is beautiful in that highly stylised, minimalist way that works well in both 2D platformers and in art prints. It is beautiful in its carefully chosen color palettes and its delicate animation effects. However it is beautiful in ways that both strengthen and weaken it as an overall experience. Gris is a 2D platforming mood piece about navigating grief. You play as a nimble, blue-haired girl, and you must gradually bring color and life back to a world of monochrome ruins. To do this, the girl must jump, float, swim, and slam her way through stunning environments, collecting glowing lights and adding them to the sky above a hub area as constellations. Tonally, Gris inhabits the same arena as Journey, Abzu, Unravel, Flower……

DEVELOPER MODE 7 GAMES • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.frozensynapse2.com Some people will argue the ‘Soulslike’ label needs to die. They’ll tell you it’s overused, hackneyed, and that there are other catch-all terms to describe hybrid ARPGs, which don’t rely on comparison. I think these people are wrong. Ashen, a low-fantasy action roleplayer, closely echoes many of the ideas and systems found in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series. It knows exactly who its audience is, and, for all intents and purposes, is a Soulslike game. In place of Estus Flasks, for example, Ashen gives players sap-filled Crimson Gourds that deliver health boosts in limited supply. In the absence of Souls, Ashen trades in Scoria — a currency farmed from fallen enemies that helps facilitate progression. Gathered Scoria is lost upon death, and can…

DEVELOPER BANDAI NAMCO STUDIOS • PUBLISHER BANDAI NAMCO ENTERTAINMENT www.bandainamcoent.com/games/ace-combat-7 Aerial combat games can be split down the middle, more or less, according to which half of the ’90s they hark back to. Is it an ode to After Burner, all effortless loops and rolls? Or is it the kind of rigorous flight sim that flew so high in the decade’s latter half, almost invariably taking its name from a plane (see Falcon 4.0, B-17 Flying Fortress, et al), where even correctly retracting your landing gear is a real achievement. You don’t need me to tell you that Ace Combat 7 is the former. You can see by the screenshots, by the very name, that this is about getting you up in the air and feeling like Maverick ASAP, laws…

1 ALLIED Your rebel allies can delay enemy troops. 2 TAKE A BREAK Resting is vital to heal, craft, and repair your troops’ weapons. 3 ON THE MOVE Enemy squads can move once a turn, even when your own units are resting. 4 STORY NODE A major objective, useful for advancing the story. 5 SPAWN POINT A guard post, these continually spawn new armies until defeated. 6 ‘OPTIONAL’ An optional objective (but in reality you’ll do them all).…

PC gaming enthusiasts with deep pockets have had access to Nvidia’s Turing RTX graphics cards for several months now. They’re good cards, though their steep price tags keep them well outside the reach of the majority of PC gamers. Most gamers just aren’t interested in dropping $800+ on the (until now) most affordable RTX card — the RTX 2070. Widespread ray tracing adoption will never happen at those prices. The RTX 2060 is now the cheapest RTX series card, though calling a $600+ card cheap is a misnomer for sure. The RTX 2060 is the successor to the GTX 1060 in name only pretty much. The number of Cuda cores has increased from 1280 to 1920, memory bandwidth increased from 192GB/s to 336GB/s and of course the price has gone…

PRICE From $2449 www2.razer.com/en-au/ Razer has always offered some of the best looking laptops money can buy, and the 2019 black-anodised aluminium Razer Blade Stealth is no exception. Returning to the 13-inch form factor, we’re continually surprised by how small modern ultrabooks can be. Sliding in at a 1.48cm thickness, the new stealth earns its Razer name and the 30.5 x 21cm footprint and 1.28kg weight mean this device is just about as portable as a laptop can be. Despite being so compact the Blade Stealth manages to maintain a nicely weighted keyboard with a decent travel distance for an ultraportable. This keyboard is skirted by a pair of subtle speaker grills that combine with an additional two undercarriage speakers to create Dolby Atmos three dimensional sound — which isn’t…

A good Wi-Fi connection, and the router that enables it, can make or break your performance in an online game. When a wired connection isn’t convenient or possible, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got the stability to capture the point in Overwatch, pull off that Battlefield V turnaround, or conquer the kill-leading squad in Apex Legends - no matter who else the Internet is being used for at the time. The fanciest computer in the world won’t help you win if your connection is unreliable. Getting the perfect Wi-Fi set-up across your house is essential to living your best life. A good router, and a strong Wi-Fi mesh solution, means never needing to worry about whether anything’s downloading before starting up a game, and not needing to hold off…

It’s even more important for gaming, of course – a good keyboard can be the difference between a win or a loss in your favourite MOBA, where quick, accurate keystrokes and effective hotkey programming is important, and being able to switch weapons quickly and move smoothly is essential in an FPS. But an impressive keyboard will also improve just about every other experience you can have with your computer. A good keyboard is one that makes using it satisfying: it feels and sounds good to press the keys, it looks great in front of your monitor, and it lets you customise and make changes based on how you’re using it. It should last for a long time, and it should be intuitive and easy to use. The Thermaltake Level 20…

Daedalic Entertainment is best known for publishing quirky (but good) point-and-click adventure games, but Barotrauma is something else entirely. It’s a 2D submarine simulator for up to 16 players, set in the alien ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa, a deeply inhospitable place that is both passively and actively trying to kill you. You and your team of explorers are on Europa because the Earth is a mess and you’re looking for a better place to live, and for some reason you’ve decided that your best choice is a moon where survival is only possible beneath the surface. But unlike Subnautica, , the hardware in Barotrauma seems to require a little more hands-on effort. Players will be able to choose from one of five different classes, including the captain (only one…

On April 9 we’ll finally have the chance to enjoy Phoenix Wright on PC. The Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy package contains the 14 episodes that make up the first three games. It’s available to pre-purchase on Steam now for US$29.99. Phoenix Wright started out on handhelds like the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS. It’s a comedy adventure game series in which you snoop around crime scenes and talk to suspects to gather clues. At the climax of the case you deploy these clues as smackdowns in absurd but surprisingly tense courtroom scenes. They are great games to travel with, and the DS version encouraged people to yell “OBJECTION” into their device to trigger Wright’s famous point. I’m not sure how well they will translate to a full-monitor…

Livestreaming is easier than ever, but it can still be hard on a PC. Many streamers use dual-PC setups in which one system is used to actually play a game and the other to stream it. But this week Nvidia announced that a new version of OBS, the software underpinning many livestreaming setups, is optimised to let people who use Nvidia GPUs host quality streams from a single PC. The optimisation arrives via improved support for the NVENC hardware encoder used by Nvidia’s GPUs. Most streamers use GPUpowered encoding rather than relying on their CPUs because that allows them to use their graphics cards to their full potential instead of being bottlenecked by their processor. That can be taxing on the GPU, though, leading to lower in-game frame rates. According…

Like the wargames of the ’70s and ’80s, collectible card games have increasingly been going digital. Some, like the wildly popular Magic: The Gathering, started out as physical games before digital spin-offs cropped up, while others, like Hearthstone, were developed as videogames from the ground up. While the settings, rules and mechanics often differ a great deal between them, these strategy-adjacent games task players with creating decks of armies, heroes, buildings, spells, or just broad concepts. Hybrids have been appearing too, like Card Hunter, which mixed tabletop RPGs with CCGs and tactical combat, and Valve’s upcoming Artifact, inspired by Dota 2.…

There’s always a new Warhammer game knocking around, whether it’s inspired by the fantasy universe or its 40K sibling, and not surprisingly, quite a few of them have been strategy games. The licence hasn’t always been used well, but there is variety. Even just in the last few years we’ve seen claustrophobic turn-based tactics like Space Hulk, massive wargames like Warhammer 40,0000: Armageddon, grand strategy in the form of Total War: Warhammer, and even a 4X game, Warhammer 40,000: Gladius, which reimagined the genre without diplomacy. If you’ve got an idea for a new Warhammer game, give Games Workshop a shout; it will probably let you take a crack at it.…

Command & Conquer defined a generation of RTS games, but after Westwood was closed by EA in 2003, the series started to lose its shine.EA Los Angeles started strong with the rather different Command & Conquer: Generals, but quickly returned to the Tiberium and Red Alert series. The sequels were well received, but they played it safe at a time when other RTS titles, ones without Command & Conquer’s legacy, were innovating and experimenting. 2010’s Tiberian Twilight veered in the other direction, putting all of its eggs in the multiplayer basket. It proved to be a bit of a misstep, and since then the series has been relegated to browser and mobile games.…

DEVELOPER DAVID SZYMANSKI • PUBLISHER NEW BLOOD INTERACTIVE https://jefequeso.itch.io/ I was just about hip-deep in corpses and spent shotguns shells when I read the writing on the wall. Scrawled in blood, a message: ‘Don’t go in the ruins.’ I heard a raspy noise behind me. It wasn’t quite an animal sound, but it wasn’t human, either. I turned and found something much worse than a bad guy. A closed door marked Ruins Access. The raspy breathing came again from just behind it. I felt an actual chill run down my back. Dusk is a homage to late 90s corridor shooters like Doom, Quake and Half-Life. It’s also a love letter to weird cultist horror films like The Hills Have Eyes and Deliverance. More importantly, it’s great. Waking up hanging from…

DEVELOPER ATLUS • PUBLISHER SEGA www.catherinethegame.com What next, Persona 5 on PC? It’s hard not to believe that’ll happen someday soon, now that I have got Catherine in my Steam library. It’s been an exciting few years for previously console-only cult classics coming to PC, especially from the likes of SEGA. Catherine is a real oddity: Part-relationship and life simulator, and part-pretty good block-climbing puzzle game. What’s appealing is its unusual subject matter. You’re Vincent, a 30-something in a long-term relationship with Katherine, who wants to settle down, and for Vincent to find a better-paying job. Vincent, though, wakes up next to another girl called Catherine. After cheating, he begins to experience nightmares where he’s in his underwear, climbing towers of collapsing blocks. The main part of the game is climbing…

DEVELOPER CAPCOM • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.onimusha2001.com Onimusha is a series that burned brief and bright for Capcom. It began in 2001 and was pretty much over by 2006, encompassing four main entries and two spin-offs. The original isn’t the series peak, but it’s a fun relic of the era of survival horror games that was popularised by Resident Evil. I would only play this re-release in 2019 if you’re an old fan, or curious about this generation of games that never had much of a presence of PC. Onimusha is an offbeat series, a mix between historical epic and fantasy that sadly didn’t survive the leap to the HD era like Resident Evil and Devil May Cry did. While the second game — with its innovative trading system, multiple playable…

DEVELOPER CAPYBARA GAMES • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.whatliesbelow.com Like a reverse-world version of Hideo Kojima’s solar-powered dungeon-crawler Boktai, Capy’s uncompromising roguelite demands to be played in total darkness. Here, you’ll find yourself instinctively leaning in to better make out your minuscule character and their surroundings. It may not do much for your posture, but you’ll feel a physical connection to your brave adventurer, likewise peering anxiously into the gloom. An very slow opening sees the camera descend towards a tiny speck that becomes a sailboat, tossed around a roiling sea. Eventually, it lands, and you begin a long climb to the labyrinth you’re here to explore. In its early hours, Below is heady, powerful stuff. Its aesthetic works wonders with scale, leaving you feeling vulnerable. Its gloomy environments are shrouded in…

PRICE $599 www.nvidia.com.au Finally we have a somewhat affordable RTX card! RTX generation Founders Edition cards are a big step forward compared to their blower cooler equipped ancestors. The card is surrounded by an aluminium shroud including a solid backplate that looks great, helps with cooling, and adds rigidity to the card. The RTX 2060 Founders Edition has an excellent array of display outputs, with two DP 1.4 connectors, a single HDMI 2.0b, USB Type-C and a DVI-DL port. The more premium MSI can’t match that. The Founders Edition doesn’t have the cooling surface area of the MSI, so it can’t match its boost clocks or the essentially silent noise levels. That’s to be expected though given its lower spec. The FE isn’t noisy though, far from it. What really…

PRICE $769 (2TB), $385 (1TB), $199 (500GB), $139 (250GB) www.samsung.com/au/ We never expected to see a new NVMe solid-state drive (SSD) from Samsung this soon — especially with the 970 Evo and 970 Pro launching just last April — but here we are looking at the new Samsung 970 Evo Plus. While it might seem like a minor upgrade unworthy of a fully numbered sequel, the Samsung 970 Evo Plus is a worthy successor, with the fastest speeds and some of the lowest prices seen on its NVMe SSD products. The entire NVMe SSD world is engaged in something of a race to the bottom to offer the cheapest and fastest storage, and it seems Samsung has had to bend to market dynamics. Samsung has brought is prices down across…

PRICE $85 corsair While we got sent the white Corsair M65 RGB Elite, you can pick it up in black too, if that’s more your aesthetic. And, usually we would go for a black color option, as we don’t like how dirty white peripherals can get. At least, that’s the way we thought before we got our hands on this mouse. It’s absolutely gorgeous, the white chassis perfectly complements the gray side panels and mouse wheel. And, the way that the RGB shines through the slots in the back of the mouse, creating a lighting pattern beneath it. Seriously, this is some next-level mouse design and it impressive how modern it feels despite largely sticking to the same look as the original M65 RGB, released in September 2014. No matter…

Back in the late 1990s, the first wave of 3D accelerators made proper 3D real-time rendering viable at last. And the Pentiums and Athlons of the time had become powerful enough to handle basic physical effects too, such as some in-game objects falling under gravity or bouncing off walls. It was an age when the idea of a game being “photorealistic” some day, was seriously looking less like science-fiction, and more like an inevitability. Still, it was early days. Very early days. Quake was the first proper 3D rendered game, and even without a 3D accelerator, it could bounce a grenade off solid surfaces, and have an LPB’s rocket exhaust light up the environment as it hurtled toward your face. But those effects were extremely limited. When you killed a…

As a PC gamer, you understand why the question “how many games are in the Jagged Alliance series” doesn’t have a simple answer. IPs flip back and forth between publishers all the time, because PC gaming is an industry that’s 1% megahit, 99% living on the razor’s edge of insolvency. Any franchise that looks like it has even the tiniest bit of legacy with gamers gets bought up and flogged, even if the actual game has nothing to do with the original. See also: Prey. Jagged Alliance though is something unique. While it wasn’t the only turn-based tactical squad game of the mid-to-late 1990s, it had a free-flowing strategic layer unlike anything else, and incredible depth. By the time the original developers were ready to let their baby grow wings…

Epic said it was exploring a Fortnite respawn system in their AMA last week, though it sounded like a feature in the earliest stages of testing. But some eagle-eyed players have spotted a peculiar van around the map since Season 8 hit, and it could point to a respawn system coming much sooner than we thought. To see one of the mysterious vans for yourself, pop into a playground match and spawn over Retail Row. It’ll be sitting on the south side of The Block, though it despawns if you get too close. I was able to hop into replay mode and use the drone camera to get my own image. While word of the van spread, Fortnite leaker FortTory dug through the game files looking for anything that might…

An AMD patent filing from 2017 that was recently made public shows AMD exploring the implementation of variable rate shading (VRS) technology in its next-generation GPUs. Although the patent doesn’t specify which future architecture will get it, there’s a good chance AMD will try to have the technology built into its upcoming Navi GPUs, considering Nvidia has already integrated VRS into its latest Turing architecture. VRS resolves certain sections of a frame in full detail (like the center of the screen, on which your eyes tend to focus) and reduces the detail on other parts of the frame to lower the rendering load. In other words, the shading in the game will happen at a variable rate (thus the “variable rate shading” name). AMD hasn’t stated that this technology will…

NZXT has combined its powers with Blizzard Entertainment to create a special edition case from its popular H500 model, one of the best PC cases, just in time for the current Overwatch League season. Aside from the aesthetics, not much is different about the actual case design. It comes in a black, white, and orange color combination, and both the front of the case and the side are adorned with the Overwatch logo, while the entire Overwatch name is also on the side of the case. Other than that, since NZXT is using its own H500 model, expect the same all-metal chassis, tempered glass panel, and simplified cable management and water-cooling installation.…

The Three Kingdoms campaign is set in ancient China, 190 AD. The Han dynasty has collapsed, and Dong Zhou has captured the child emperor. Now the warlord lurks in the palace, bullying anyone who stands against him. Every cruel overlord needs a Darth Vader, so Dong Zhou convinces the greatest warrior in the land, Lü Bu, to slay his own foster father and become Dong’s enforcer and heir. The resulting family dynamic is… difficult. At a glance, the Total War formula appears unchanged. On the turn-based campaign map you guide your faction’s research, upgrade settlements with new buildings, conduct diplomacy, and move armies around like pawns to capture enemy settlements. When armies clash, you can take charge of your forces in huge real-time battles set in gorgeous battlefields. However, after…

TV shows featuring videogames are usually rubbish, but not Time Commanders. The BBC show gave teams of four a historical army to lead and an enemy to fight, with captains barking out orders and the rest of the team relaying them to staff from the show. There were planning sessions, teams poring over maps, and tons of heated discussions, but the thing that brought the battles to life was our pal Rome: Total War. Products can’t be promoted on the BBC, so the game wasn’t mentioned, but it was the show’s linchpin. All of the Time Commanders’ orders were acted out on a modified version of the game, and it looked incredible. Only two series were produced, but it was briefly resurrected in 2016.…

When Civilization codesigner Bruce Shelley embarked on Age of Empires, it was going to be a cross between Civ and RTS games like Warcraft and Command & Conquer. Those lofty ambitions were never quite matched by Age of Empires, but Rise of Nations got a lot closer. Also designed by a Civ alumnus, this time Brian Reynolds, it made all of human history an RTS playground. Reynolds threw lots of concepts more common in turn-based games into the mix, including territory, attrition, and overseeing multiple settlements, but it was all manageable, even with the real-time pace. It looked poised to usher in an exciting new era of RTS games, but despite being brilliant, it never did.…

Strategy games weren’t entirely excommunicated from consoles. Tactical RPGs thrived, from Final Fantasy Tactics to Valkyria Chronicles. The latter, in particular, took advantage of console and handheld control schemes, so there was no sense that you’d be better off with a mouse and keyboard. There was an abundance of them on handheld consoles, and being able to play large, complex strategy games on the bus or on the loo was something of a revelation. They’ve been making their way onto PC recently, too. Valkyria Chronicles appeared in 2014, followed by Valkyria Chronicles 4 in September, along with several entries in the devilish Disgaea series.…

DEVELOPER CAPCOM • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.residentevil2.com One of the most remarkable things about this Resident Evil 2 remake is that it makes zombies — the slow, shambling, groaning kind — exciting again. The undead in this game are incredible, horrible things: shuffling lumps of bloody meat who batter down doors, tumble through broken windows, and lunge hungrily from the shadows. They’re physical, clumsy, and an absolute joy to kill — if you have the ammo to spare. Shoot a leg off and they keep coming, dragging themselves along the floor, reaching at you with pale, clawing hands. Turn a corner, and as the beam of your flashlight catches their glassy white eyes they screech and trudge towards you, arms outstretched, jaws slung with glistening blood. They don’t sprint or explode…

“You can take pride in playing like a professional soldier.” DEVELOPER NEW WORLD INTERACTIVE • PUBLISHER FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE www.insurgency-sandstorm.com I’ll never forget the screaming. We’d just locked down checkpoint C, a three-storey townhouse in a war-torn village, and the six of us had taken up positions guarding all windows and entry points, waiting for the counterattack. First a silence, then a racket of assault rifle bullets and panicked shouts. We were repelling them. The timer had almost expired. Then a squadmate threw a speculative incendiary grenade at a doorway, and the screaming started. The area was being contested, and the insurgent contesting it had just been set alight. The round ended with six of us watching in mute horror as he crawled, wailing, through the fire, into the hallway…

DEVELOPER CLIFFHANGER PRODUCTIONS • PUBLISHER HANDY GAMES jaggedalliance.com Jagged Alliance: Rage is in love with busywork. At every stage of the game I’m bombarded with basic maintenance tasks, survival elements, weapon degradation and looting—so much looting. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was more variety to the combat, but sadly I found myself using the same few tricks over and over. It works like this: You take your two mercs (you won’t unlock another for hours) and liberate a jungle island one turn-based combat encounter at a time. Each merc is a bundle of skills and quirks. This is the game’s biggest strength, as each character feels different, if not exactly balanced. Raven is a sniper who can’t carry heavy weapons. This is more useful than Ivan, a tank…

PRICE $679 au.msi.com MSI’s RTX 2060 Gaming Z is the first custom RTX card we’ve had in our labs, and like MSI’s Gaming cards usually are, it’s an improvement over the Founders Edition in almost every way. The MSI Gaming Z is solidly built yet remains quite compact compared to the very large Trio Gaming cards. There’s a solid machined backplate and no high end GPU in 2019 would be complete without an attractive dose of RGB lighting. The MSI features three DP 1.4 ports along with a single HDMI 2.0b port though curiously no Type-C port. The card requires just the solitary eight pin power connector. Particularly impressive is the boost clock of the MSI which increases to 1830MHz, a nice bump over the 1680MHz of the Founders Edition…

PRICE $929 www.msi.com We’ve spoken a lot about manufacturers turning away from gaming motifs, jazzy lights, and pointy angles in favor of sleeker designs, a more premium feel, and a better quality of product. It’s something we’ve been requesting for ages. You can say that RGB sells; we feel good design sells better. MSI’s MEG Z390 Godlike didn’t seem to catch that memo. The layer of over-the-top glam adorning this bulky E-ATX beast was enough to make even our experienced selves take a step back, aghast. From the LED-dotted infinity mirror on the rear I/O cover to the vertically aligned OLED display, showcasing the MSI dragon beating the crap out of some ninjas on startup, to the huge drake motif on the bottom chipset perpetually glowing with rainbow lighting, everything…

PRICE $199 www.thermaltake.com.au Thermaltake’s Level 20 brand has become somewhat diluted of late. It used to be about over-the-top tech indulgence, as typified by the original, BMW-designed Level 20 case. Following cases have been a little less insane with each new iteration, and you can now pick up budget-level gear that bears the Level 20 moniker. This epically-proportioned new keyboard is, however, truly deserving of the brand. First up — it is big. Built around an elegantly curved and notched slab of aluminium, the Level 20 RGB takes some getting used to, especially if you’re used to using a trim ten-keyless design (which is my standard these days). But it’s very comfortable to type on, and its sturdy mass keeps it rigidly locked in place on your desktop, regardless of…

PRICE $279 www.westerndigital.com Western Digital’s Black series NVMe SSD’s have impressed us in the past, though perhaps they lacked that final edge that put them ahead of the likes of the class leading Samsung 970 series. Fast forward to today, and we have the latest iteration of the Western Digital Black, the SN750. It’s targeted at gamers and hopefully irons out a couple of the quirks found in earlier generation models. Western Digital is now fully integrated with SanDisk, meaning WD SSDs are now completely designed and built in house. This means WD joins a small club including Samsung who also have this capability. Can WD now go head to head with them? The WD Black 1TB is a standard form factor M.2 2280 (80mm length) NVMe drive that makes…

Overwatch Lego $19.99+ • Lego shop.lego.com/en-AU/ From a measly $20 right up to $140 you can own one of six Overwatch Lego sets, which range from a single character (Bastion) through to set pieces with minifigs for something like Watchpoint Gibraltar with Mercy and Winston. POWERED UP: It’s Overwatch. It’s Lego. What’s not to love? PLAYED OUT: The sets with the minifigs aren’t as cool as the bigger builds like Bastion, Reinhardt, and D.Va. There also isn’t a full set of heroes (yet) so if you’re a weirdo who hates all the current options, you’ll have to wait. Or maybe make your own! Samsung Galaxy Fold ~$3000 • Samsung www.samsung.com/au/ Bendable displays are something phone manufacturers have been talking about as a concept for a while, and it looks like…