Table of contents for Issue 293 in PC Powerplay

Hello everyone. I’m Ben, and I’m your new editor. With thanks to David for all his good work over the years, it’s my turn for a go at this. Though, it’s not my first time at the helm of this legendary magazine. I launched PC PowerPlay back in 1995 and was the editor for the first five years. Maybe we still have one or two readers from back then that remember that incredible time:) Now, it’s a slightly different world. The internet is everywhere, and yes indeed you sure can get a lot of gaming goodness there, but what made PCPP the best in the old days still holds true today. It’s quality, readers. Good writing, careful planning, and access to the top devs that like to show and tell…

HIGHS Take-yo time Ghostwire: Tokyo’s director is interested in making a sequel. MM-No Final Fantasy XIV producer Yoshida recently asked that players in a new PvP mode stop saying “Nice job!” to opponents. Lego May Cry Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga arrived with an unexpected quality: air-chains and infinite combos. LOWS That sucks Bethesda has also delayed Arkane’s vampire co-op shooter Redfall to the first half of 2023. You bet Streamer Félix Lengyel aka xQc, admitted spaffing about $2 million on gambling in April. Deus Next? Square Enix has sold Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, and three game studios for $300 million. A bargain?…

NEW HEROES Overatch 2’s PvP beta only features one new hero at the moment (Sojourn), but more are planned for the final release. A CAMPAIGN The part of Overatch 2 that returning players will actually have to pay for is the new PvE campaign. 5V5 Overatch 2 moves away from the 6v6 format in favour of 5v5, dropping one Tank role from each team. PUSH MODE Push is a new mode that will replace the old 2CP objective maps. It’s a bit like two concurrently moving payloads.…

I thought he who controlled the spice controlled the universe, but it turns out he who controls the spice mostly just pays hellish taxes. Here I am on Arrakis, spreading Fremen warriors to more and more territories so I can collect enough spice to rule the desert planet. And yet I have to pay most of my haul to the Spacing Guild as a bribe? And they want more every month? Forget this competition between the Atreides, Harkonnen, Fremen, and Smugglers factions: I hope 4X strategy game Dune: Spice Wars eventually includes a win condition that lets me tell the Spacing Guild to piss off. They’d probably nuke me from orbit, but I worked hard for that spice, braving sandworms and massive storms and treacherous spies. If I’m gonna go…

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum seems to share its titular character’s split personality. In a 20-minute remote preview, I got to see the Gollum: contextual stealth takedowns, ledge shimmying, and ‘Gollum vision’, but also the Smeagol: an open-ended, combat-free platforming puzzle. Which one will win out is hard to say. The demo begins in one of the game’s two primary locations: Mordor. I was a bit uncertain before the demo at how well this grey and red hellscape could carry half of a game, but Daedalic’s done a decent job injecting more colour: some yellow sulphur and even a bit of greenery that differentiates its Mordor from Peter Jackson’s portrayal. The Mordor gameplay mostly covers the tutorial, so it’s possible the stealth system could have more tricks up its…

There’s a world in which Stormgate doesn’t exist. In that world, Bizarro Blizzard decided that StarCraft II was worthy of a sequel pronto. But in this world, the key minds behind StarCraft II got tired of waiting for the chance to maybe, someday, make StarCraft III. So they stopped waiting, and started making Stormgate instead. It’s easy to see how Stormgate began life as the dream of a StarCraft that would never be. It’s a humans vs aliens RTS set in the future, but with a splash of fantasy. It promises to deliver classic 1v1 battles for competitive veterans. But generic brand StarCraft this is not: after checking off some must-have features, Stormgate’s developer actually seems focused on convincing players the genre isn’t washed up just yet. “There’s an opportunity…

Grand Master Kai looms over my crew via hologram like a Greek cybergod. It’s our bimonthly report and he’s not happy. Our Inquisitor’s desire to procure knowledge about the Nurgle plague has accelerated its spread, and he wants to know who’s responsible. Do I cover up for Inquisitor Vakir and piss off Brother Ectar, or do I throw Vakir under the bus? Whatever I do, someone will be unhappy, and that will have knock-on effects. I go for the third option: tell the Grand Master that the mission is going exactly as planned. He buys it, and seeing as we’re doing so well in our campaign (which we’re really not) he diverts our requisitions and armoury access to some other chapter that needs them more. My reluctance to attribute blame…

It would be so, so easy to write off Teardown as just a tech demo. A simple framework of maps, tools, and missions built to show off developer Dennis Gustaffson’s incredible voxel destruction technology. But over its 18-month stretch in Early Access, Teardown has proven itself not only a stunning display of technical prowess, but also a bloody good little heist-’em-up, and the most creative sandbox platform since Garry’s Mod. Teardown is, first and foremost, all about that destruction. It’s a game of wooden shacks, concrete walls, metal catwalks, and plaster corridors – all of which respond appropriately to being wailed on with a sledgehammer. Despite its blocky appearance, Teardown’s worlds break in wonderfully convincing ways. Metal pipes bend when supports are removed, while plaster walls chip away to expose…

There’s no canon version of the Arthurian legend, and as such it’s fertile ground for reinterpretation. From Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur to T H White’s The Once and Future King, or from Frank Miller’s Cursed to John Boorman’s gorgeous but somewhat flawed Excalibur, everyone has their own notion of what it is and what it represents. In my case, it was a lifelong thing for Cherie Lunghi. King Arthur: Knight’s Tale sidesteps much of this by picking up where NeocoreGame’s 2009 dark fantasy King Arthur – The Role-playing Wargame left off, and where most retellings stop. Arthur and Mordred have killed each other at the Battle of Camlann, and the Lady of the Lake has taken Arthur’s body to Avalon. The Lady awakens the deceased Mordred on the legendary…

Taking inspiration from an unusual source, Ravenous Devils is a cooking strategy game with a twist – the meat you use comes from the people you kill. However, it’s so keen for you to get the joke that there’s a reference to a barber in the opening. So just in case it wasn’t clear, this is Sweeney Todd: The Game. Sadly, the promise this concept inspires is fleeting, as you discover that running a capitalist cannibal empire is surprisingly dreary. Setting up shop in an appropriately squalid building, the murderous couple at the centre of this is Percival and Hildred. Percival, a tailor instead of a barber, spends his day selling clothes and murdering his clients. Hildred runs the pub underneath, using the bodies Percival sends her way as the…

VR first gained momentum at the same time that 3DTV lost it. When Palmer Luckey launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new headset unit in 2012, panel manufacturers were still half-heartedly extolling the idea of families sitting around the telly in wildly expensive glasses, watching something between a discernible movie and a magic eye. Few of us were listening though. If we were never fully committed to that future before, the idea of fully immersing ourselves in a virtual environment thanks to this Luckey chap’s new doohickey only accelerated 3DTV’s demise. The campaign raised over US$2.5 million from 10,000 backers by the time Mr Zuckerberg came knocking. At the time of Facebook’s US$2 billion acquisition of Oculus in 2014, the mainstream press started taking notice. Arguably the most influential figure…

ROCKSTAR REPORTEDLY HALTS RED DEAD REDEMPTION REMASTER BECAUSE OF GTA TRILOGY MESS Planned overhauls of Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto 4 have apparently been put on the back burner. Nothing succeeds like success, as the old saying goes, and nowhere is that more true than in videogames. Sequels have been a foundational part of the business for years, and more recently remakes and remasters have become big, bringing our favourite games from years gone by onto new hardware. But two huge and obvious candidates for the remastering treatment – Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto 4 – have reportedly been halted by Rockstar. The problem, according to Rockstar insider Tez2, is the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition, a remastered set of Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, and…

PLEASE, TOUCH THE ARTWORK DEVELOPER Thomas Waterzooi PRICE $1-4.50 + DLC WEBSITE store.steampowered.com/app/1097100/Please_Touch_The_Artwork Art galleries are the only place my husband and I argue. We nearly broke up at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, over our divergent interpretations of modernist sculpture. One thing I think we can all agree on, however, is that Piet Mondrian’s abstract geometric paintings were begging to be made into a puzzle game. Please, Touch the Artwork consists of three galleries, which are inspired by the artworks Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue (1921), Victory Boogie Woogie (1944), and New York City (1942). Things get surprisingly difficult across more than 150 levels, the first of which require dragging lines and filling colours, by solving the order in which each puzzle piece is presented.…

What Ferrari wouldn’t do for a pause button this season. Each race, Leclerc and Sainz start from the front of the grid and demonstrate a pace advantage over everyone else for about 20 laps… and then suffer a new variety of disaster. The only throughline between these upsets is that the people in pit lane wish they’d done the last five minutes differently. That’s what F1 Manager 22 offers – the experience of being a team principal in motorsport’s most prestigious category, with all the pressure and poring over technical minutiae that comes with it – and a pause button. Going hands on with F1 Manager 22, what’s striking is not just how advantageous the pause button is, but how real-world time melts away while you deliberate over tyre compounds.…

Scavenge scraps from your surroundings. Hunt local fauna to keep yourself alive. Construct a shack to protect yourself from the elements. Fashion weapons from sticks and stones. Hide from the sunlight. Sleep in an ornate coffin. Drain the blood of the innocents. You know, standard survival game stuff. Food and drink mean little to a vampire, so despite the traditional trappings of its genre, breakout hit V Rising offers no hunger or thirst meters. Instead, it’s your need for blood that checks off that particular survival staple. Every time you feed, you’ll drain your prey dry while filling up your own Blood Pool, which decays gradually over time, or significantly faster while using some of your special vampiric powers. Run out of the red stuff and you’ll eventually starve to…

Back in 2013, the original Rogue Legacy won the hearts of many a roguelite fan, with a twist on the genre that saw failure go hand-in-hand with progress. And nearly a decade on, Cellar Door Games faces not only the weight of expectation that comes with creating a sequel, but competition from an army of titles inspired by its formula. Far from buckling under the pressure, the dev has crafted a follow-up that revitalises the series with fresh ideas. Once again, you step into the shoes of a randomised hero tasked with navigating the levels of a procedurally generated castle. Said castle is a gruelling gauntlet teeming with tough enemies to defeat, tricky obstacles to overcome, and valuable gold to steal. If, or more likely, when your hero reaches the…

This latest sequel in the long-running strategy series bills itself as the most accessible entry yet. This is true, in the same way that the tail is the most accessible part of a tiger. Stardock’s long running 4X series officially has a tutorial now, in the form of a little robot helper accursedly nicknamed ‘Space Clippy’. But Space Clippy doesn’t help much when a game explains everything as if it’s arrived from another dimension. Take modules as an example. What are modules, you ask? Well, so did I. At first I thought modules were optional extras you could select to tailor your starbases (which act as both resource harvesters and deployable control points, with modules helping improve those functions in various ways). But then I ran out of modules, whereupon…

1 GRINDER This ominous contraption gobbles up bodies and spits out mince. Hildred keeps mentioning how little she actually cleans it, which is surely going to impact her establishment’s hygiene rating. 2 OVEN Where meat and flour are transformed into the best pies (that are made from humans) you can buy. While that kitchen might look unwelcoming, what with all the viscera, at least the ovens work well. 3 BODIES Surely every London kitchen has a hole for where the bodies can pile high? While it might not look like the most sanitary option, rest assured that with business booming, they don’t stay there for too long.…

HTC VIVE PRO 2 $2,199 Massive FOV, massive resolution, 120Hz refresh rate. It runs a bit hot during longer sessions, though. HP REVERB G2 $959 The huge 4320x2160 resolution rivals the Vive, but HP’s offering doesn’t quite have the FOV. OCULUS QUEST 2 $529 Popular on the grounds of its affordability and convenience, it’s also one of the quickest to set up. VALVE INDEX AUD$TBA The big boy. It does feel the most premium of the lot of them, but official Australian release is still delayed...…

It’s official: Starfield is not launching November 11 2022 as originally planned. It’s instead now aiming at “the first half of 2023”, according to an official Twitter update. Bethesda repeatedly claimed that the game wouldn’t be delayed, but the marketing has told a different story. With a focus on developer waffle over substantive reveals, the official videos have been light on concrete info. With only brief in-game clips shown, it’s been hard to believe that the game was only months way. Director Todd Howard has dubbed it “Skyrim in space”, but he’s keen to emphasise that it aims to do more with character customisation than Skyrim did: “Some things we didn’t do [in older games]: the backgrounds, the traits, defining your character, all of those stats... a lot of the…

It’s not often that a multiplayer shooter decides to reinvent itself six years into its life. In the age of service games that never stop updating, Blizzard is taking a chance by revamping large parts of its competitive FPS and slapping a ‘2’ on the end of it. Overwatch 2 is not a sequel in the way we understand them. What I’ve seen of the multiplayer PvP beta so far feels more like an expansion. Overwatch 2 will have more heroes, more maps and an intriguing PvE story mode, but Blizzard is also taking this opportunity to completely upend the meta it’s spent six years building with one simple rule change – Overwatch 2 is no longer a 6v6 game. One tank slot is gone and it’s now 5v5. Hearing…

My childhood memories of The Colonel’s Bequest have proven to be fragmented and inaccurate. I remember being convinced that I’d completed it, even if the ending dialogue raised questions about my competency. When I was 12 and games were hard, no game was going to tell me it wasn’t finished yet. I also think I retrogamed this for PCPP around ten years ago, probably butchering my write up with rose tinted nostalgia. But, at the wise old age of 43, I may finally be ready to take an honest look at this bizarre experience and its unusual design. Sierra made a lot of adventure games, spanning various parser, then point and click, interfaces. They also experimented with genre, notably in Quest for Glory, where (as in a roleplaying game) you…

DEEP DESERT This stretch of sand will quickly sap the supplies, and then health, of any lesser warriors attempting to cross it on foot. FREMEN SIETCHES Independent Fremen communes will send raiding parties at you unless you form an alliance by trading water. SANDSTORMS Massive storm clouds roam the map, destroying ornithopters and armies outside protective villages. SANDWORMS Leave troops outside a village too long, especially in combat, and a worm will arrive to swallow your entire army.…

Having grown up in the era of Disney’s film renaissance, I am well versed in all things mouse. I know the songs by heart, have watched every animated movie, and have visited Disneyworld more times than an adult probably should. But what’s never really jelled with me is Disney games – the last one I enjoyed was Toy Story 2 for the PlayStation. Until now. Disney Dreamlight Valley feels like a Disney game created just for me. It combines all the things I love most in games: life-sim, character customisation, narrative-driven stories, and very cute critters. There’s faithful voice acting and music throughout, and many easter eggs for Disneyphiles to find. It’s a Disney game made with millennials in mind, featuring beloved characters from the ’90s films alongside modern favourites…

To kill things, shoot them until they die. How strange that something so brutal should appear so utterly banal. It’s an excellent tip, however, for navigating Turbo Overkill’s dark, cyberpunk world, and we’re glad the game chose to give it to us as almost our first interaction. Turbo Overkill’s devs have seen Blade Runner. Possibly more than once. They’ve also played Bayonetta, MadWorld, Syndicate (the good one), System Shock, Apex Legends, and Doom. The game mashes these all together with absolute glee, the grin on the faces of the devs evident with every corner you turn. The setting is Paradise City, where the grass is anything but green and the girls are quite likely to shoot you. The ‘you’ in question is Johnny Turbo, a cross between Cyberpunk’s V and…

I’ve never given much thought to the ‘skip dialogue’ button in a videogame, but after playing The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe I can’t stop thinking about it. The button is just one of several new features explored in the “expanded reimagining” of 2013’s The Stanley Parable, which once again turns the act of playing a game into a hilarious, surprising and thoughtful examination of games and game development, players and player choice, and yes, even simple buttons. But what even is Ultra Deluxe? It’s not just a remaster, though the original game has been faithfully rebuilt in Unity. You can play through it once again as office worker Stanley, who realises he’s the only one in the building and sets out to discover why while a gentle storybook-style narration guides…

Modern MotoGP is in a golden era. 2021 saw eight different winners across 18 races, and so far this season we’ve had three different riders on the top step in four races, including two taking their maiden victories. It’s unpredictable, packed with talent and spectacle, and guaranteed entertainment every race. Naturally, then, the focus of Milestone’s licensed bike sim MotoGP 22 is the 2009 season. An all-new mode, titled Nine: Season 2009, takes you back to a bygone era when Rossi, Lorenzo, Stoner, and Pedrosa jostled their 1,000cc machines around each other for the wins, by way of a documentary-style video series directed and narrated by filmmaker Mark Neale, and a series of challenges intertwined between them. The challenges are straightforward, the objectives always focusing on either overtaking or gapping…

If you’re on the hunt for the best DDR5 RAM to pair with your shiny new Intel 12th gen system, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve tested many DDR5 memory kits over the last few months ourselves and we’ve picked out the top kits, at different price points, to suit systems at different performance levels. Back when DDR5 made its debut, it was expensive and very difficult – if not impossible – to find in many markets. That’s all changed now, and while DDR5 remains expensive compared to DDR4, it’s nice to see a PC component trending downwards in price, instead of up. In general, spending big money on RAM isn’t recommended unless you have a high-spec rig to use it with. As prices fall though, you may find…

Marketing around games has changed considerably over the last two decades. There are far fewer young women in lingerie trying to make a network adapter look sexy, for example, or gamers whose entire heads are exploding due to the intensity of the latest title. But in the realm of PC hardware, at least one maxim has remained more or less unwavering: buy this thing, and you’ll magically see your own prowess as a gamer transform. There’s more sophistication to the message now. Esports team-endorsed products. MMO mice. MLG gamepads. Still, it boils down to the same idea PC hardware was sold on in the Razer Boomslang days: that there’s some kind of linear relationship between money spent and k:d. And that ignores the greater truth about the reason we invest…