Table of contents for #247 January 2016 in PC Powerplay

Rocket League developer Psyonix has announced a partnership with Valve to deliver free Portal-themed DLC to its fans. The content will become available on December 1st and players will be able to obtain the items just by playing the game, as players are rewarded at the end of every match. The DLC will consist mostly of customisable upgrades for the cars and will include a cake (topper), conversion gel (rocket trail), propulsion gel (rocket trail), repulsion gel (rocket trail), aperture laboratories (antenna), cake sticker (antenna), companion cube (antenna), personality core (antenna) and PotatOS (antenna). Yes please!…

SHELTERED DEVELOPER UNICUBE PUBLISHER TEAM 17 SOFTWARE DUE APRIL 2016 www.unicube.net A post-apocalyptic strategy game that shuts you in a small underground fortress with a family to control. As dust storms rage and the days whittle away, you must maintain your new home, gather supplies, and above all else, survive. Interact with other survivors, band together, or fight to the death, the game lets you decide what’s best for your family, but your actions could have grave consequences as you’re stranded in this nuclear wasteland. BESIEGE DEVELOPER SPIDERLING STUDIOS PUBLISHER SPIDERLING STUDIOS DUE 2016 www.besiege.spiderlinggames.co.uk Build, destroy, build again. There is no story, rhyme nor reason for you to hurtle a small wooden car with various explosives tucked through the structures of your enemies, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.…

DEVELOPER BETHESDA GAME STUDIOS PUBLISHER BETHESDA SOFTWORKS PRICE $79.95 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL www.fallout4.com WILKS: I’m officially obsessed with Fallout 4. After putting 25 or so hours into one character, due to a lack of Steam Cloud sync between my home and office PC I started a new character at work that I have now put 67 hours into. And after all that time I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of what the game has to offer. I’ve unlocked a heap of locations and done my best to either explore them all or take notes on which places have proven too deadly or inaccessible due to lockpicking/hacking skill levels, but the majority of the game map is still a whole heap of nothing. I’ve barely started on…

DEVELOPER TREYARCH PUBLISHER ACTIVISION PRICE $59.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL www.callofduty.com Perhaps more than any Call of Duty release before now, the single and multiplayer elements do a wonderful job of reflecting each other’s inherent nature. In short: they’re both examples of how you convince your fan base that the people behind the game have gone mad. The multiplayer features a new movement system that pitches your abilities somewhere between that of Spider-Man and Boba Fett, while the campaign is an elite example of how to rewrite well-trodden ground in a way that is neither entertaining nor original. Despite that, Blacks Ops III somehow manages to be not that bad when approached with a certain mindset. That multiplayer movement system, for instance, which allows you to run along walls…

DEVELOPER UBISOFT QUEBEC PUBLISHER UBISOFT PRICE $60.95 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL, UPLAY assassinscreed.ubi.com “Here is where the vehicles come in, ridding travel of the awful, snaillike trudge that characterised Unity” After the disaster that was Assassin’s Creed Unity, the best thing Ubisoft could do with its latest attempt at faux-historical recreation is take it back to basics. Help us remember why we still so consistently gift the series so many column inches. Forget the gimmicks, bin, the slew of back-of-the-box features and, most importantly, make sure the thing works as players might reasonably expect it to. Cynical as it undeniably is to begin a review of a new game by referencing the dismal last, it feels like it’s the only way to accurately position Syndicate within the realm into which…

PRICE $2149 www.asus.com.au We’ve become accustomed to associating Asus’ Republic of Gamers brand with the top tier of pricing, but it appears the company is now extending this to more affordable offerings. Take the new GL552 gaming laptop for instance; with a sticker-price just over two grand, it’s damn cheap for a gaming laptop. With a screen size of 15.6 inches, this laptop sits smack-bang in the middle of laptop form factors. Weighing 2.5kg its heavy enough that you probably won’t want to lug it around all day. The entire chassis is built from plastic, which helps to keep the cost and weight down, but doesn’t inspire massive amounts of confidence regarding the build quality. At least it’s a good looker, with the striking lines apparently meant to be reminiscent…

PRICE $239 www.crucial.com They’re still not in the same league as mechanical hard drives, but golly gosh SSD prices continue to plummet. The BX200 is the latest example of a super-affordable SSD, packing in almost half a Terabyte of storage for just over $200. But as you’ll soon see, there’s a price to be paid for such affordability, and we’re going to use this review as a cautionary tale for some of these budget SSDs. This drive is the successor to the BX100, Crucial’s very successful budget model from earlier this year. However, the new drive has made the jump to TLC (triple-level cell) NAND memory for the bulk of its storage. The problem is, TLC is pretty darned slow compared to the SLC memory better drives use, delivering speeds…

PRICE $89.95 www.roccat.org Over the last year or so, German peripheral developer Roccat seems to have turned a corner, going from a very flashy design philosophy to one that is based around subtlety and clever features. The new Kiro mouse is a fine example of this new philosophy. It’s a clever, great looking mouse that emphasises comfort and button placement thanks to its modular design. Built to be truly ambidextrous, the Kiro utilises a similar modular approach to the excellent Roccat Nyth, but instead of reconfiguring the size and placement of thumb buttons users can instead choose on which side of the mouse these buttons fit by swapping out magnetic side panels. It’s an extremely smart design that makes the mouse equally useable and comfortable in either hand. Of course,…

Asus has just expanded its mobile gaming range with the new 6th gen Core-i7-powered GL552 laptop. It may not sound exciting, but under the hood it’s all business. A Core-i7-6700HQ CPU is the main muscle, backed by a GTX 960M with up to 2GB of GDDRS VRAM. This feeds shiny pixels into a 15.6in 1920 x 1080 IPS display, and you can control some of those pixels via low-profile, high-response backlit keyboard. The GL552 also boasts GameFirst network settings, up to 1TB of storage and a 128GB SSD. And if you like the idea of Samsung’s latest M.2 drive, you can even easily easily upgrade thanks to a slide-off panel that reveals the M.2 port and memory slots. The ROG GL552 is available now at Harvey Norman, Dick Smith, and…

DEVELOPER DICE PUBLISHER EA PRICE $89.95 AVAILABLE AT ORIGIN, RETAIL www.origin.com/Battlefront While playing Dice’s reboot of Battlefront, there were many occasions when I had to look twice at my screen to remember I was playing a game and not watching one of the films. Battlefront is a modern marvel of visual technology, a shining beacon of the power to immerse that today’s powerful GPUs and CPUs can deliver when placed into the hands of graphics masters like the gals and guys at Dice. It truly comes closer to photorealism than any game I’ve seen. And yet, as some beardy guy in a flowing brown robe once said, “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.” Dice’s other hallmark, their ability to craft deep, addictive, and nuanced virtual battlefields, that are…

DEVELOPER BLIZZARD PUBLISHER BLIZZARD PRICE $54.95 AVAILABLE AT BLIZZARD, RETAIL us.battle.ner/sc2/ What to do with a problem like StarCraft? It’s hard now to remember just how massive the official announcement for StarCraft II was, all the way back in 2007. If only because in the proceeding five years, the professional circuit has become obsessed with the MOBA, leaving StarCraft, once the darling of the eSports scene, tucked against the wall without a dance partner. That being said, StarCraft is by no means dead. Millions of people watch professional matches. It’s just not the darling it once was – which leaves this review in a difficult position. How can you recommend – or not – the third part of a trilogy which invested players are already going to devour anyway? Maybe…

DEVELOPER AVALANCHE PUBLISHER BANDAI NAMCO PRICE $59.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL justcause.com The good news: within four minutes of starting Just Cause 3 you can indeed drive a sports car through a field of sunflowers. The bad news? This isn’t emergent gameplay, but rather a scenario the developers clearly set up to happen. As a piece of visual art, Just Cause 3 is almost beyond criticism. Its crisp realisation of a vast Mediterranean archipelago combines the best of what today’s PCs can do, when it comes to texturing, visual effects, physics-based destruction and lighting. Which is why it’s such a shame there’s so little game to back all this up. Just Cause 3 is essentially a streamlined version of Just Cause 2 with next generation graphics. It’s simpler, more direct.…

PRICE $3099 www.aorus.com Just because this Aorus laptop is opposite the Asus in this issue, please don’t expect a direct comparison between the two. At a thousand dollars more, the Aorus is obviously a premium product, while Asus has gone for a more economical offering. And yet, many of the interior components are comparable, but the smaller size of the Aorus illustrates the price hike that occurs when shrinking a gaming laptop. The X3 ships with a 13.9 inch display, but it’s incredibly crisp thanks to the 3200 x 1800 resolution. However, it’s not an IPS panel, instead using IGZO technology to deliver a wider viewing angle than cheaper TN panels. It’s a good looker though, as expected for a three grand laptop. Despite the small size, Aorus has squeezed…

PRICE $320 www.asus.com.au Despite onboard motherboard audio advancing in leaps and bounds, we still think that a dedicated sound card is a worthy inclusion for those who really care about their audio. Obviously the sound outputted by your system is going to be highly reliant on the speakers or headphones you use, but there’s no point pairing a $350 set of cans with a low-end motherboard audio codec. With a street price exceeding $300, the new Asus Strix Raid Dlx is obviously targeted at the upper end of the audiophile spectrum, and demands a quality set of speakers or headphones to go with it. The Dlx is actually the flagship model in a range of three new Strix cards from Asus, and it’s got the best specs of the lot.…

PRICE $137 www.geil.com.tw Now that Skylake and its hunger for high-speed DDR4 memory is here, it’s time to ditch those shabby old DDR3 modules and upgrade. The thing is, at Skylake’s default memory speed of 2133MHz, it’s not actually that much faster than DDR3 in real world scenarios. Enter kits like this one from memory masters Geil, which promises an easy 3000MHz frequency, without costing the Earth. Considering most 2133MHz kits with twin 4GB sticks cost around $130, the fact that Geil can deliver such speedy memory for the same price is simply incredible. Factor in the weak Aussie dollar, and we’re not sure how the company is doing it. Installing the kit into our Skylake testbench was easy enough, though the modules are rather high, something worth bearing in…

PRICE $1249 www.gigabyte.com.au Our current favourite high-end GPU is undoubtedly Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 980 Ti. It’s basically as powerful as a Titan-x GPU for $500 cheaper, whips AMD’s Fury x into a bleeding little pile of chunks, and does it all without sounding like there’s a hairdressing salon in your PC. One of our favourite versions of the Gtx 980 Ti is Gigabyte’s Windforce 3, but they’ve just released a new model that goes one better – the horribly named GV-N98TXTREME W-6GD. Let’s see why this is quite possibly the sexiest graphics card for those with money to burn, yet a fetish for water. Looking at the product picture reveals the obvious change from the Windforce. It’s out with air-cooling, and in with an All-in-One water cooling solution. Gigabyte has…

LETTER OF THE MONTH PAY OUT Hello, I am an American Payday 2 player. Your payday 2 review score is high and very visible on Metacritic’s site. Because of this, I would like to request Payday 2 be re-reviewed if your team has the time. Microtransactions and very unpopular decisions regarding the Completely Overkill Pack has ruined the reputation of the game at the time. Lowering the critics’ Metacritic score might be some way to get the attention of the developers that the game has taken a turn for the worse. Steven Snyder Hi Steven – we’ve considered doing re-reviews for patches but unfortunately, due to the nature of magazines they aren’t really feasible. We work on a long lead time, so by the time we can get around to…

DEVELOPER CREATIVEFORGE PUBLISHER GAMBITIOUS PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.gambitious.com The difficulty in designing a turn-based game is that the little details have to perfect in order for it to stand out from the crowd. With plenty of time to digest what’s happening, and with an intelligent approach the best means of success, the player has every incentive to fully understand even the most unassuming of design choices. It’s not a genre that allows developers to hide from their audience. Everything contained within that digital packet will be picked up, spun around and observed in extreme detail. It’s a shame that developer CreativeForge opted for turn-based tactics specifically because of that relentless observation their game opens itself up to. On the surface Hard West has everything you’d want and realistically…

DEVELOPER UBISOFT MONTREAL PUBLISHER UBISOFT PRICE $60.95 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, UPLAY, RETAIL rainbow6.ubi.com Rainbow Six is a remarkably malleable franchise. It started out as the tent pole to a whole series of books and follow-on games featuring the eponymous Rainbow Six team, and a roster of Special Forces operators from around the globe. It melded tactical planning with a split second, unforgiving ballistics model, and cemented the series as one of the classic tactical shooters. It became a more traditional shooter through Rainbow Six: Vegas, and moved away from the established Rainbow team, while also ditching the planning phase – it was still very tactical, and at times very challenging, however, but it did seem watered down some. Now Siege continues to iterate on the basics of the franchise, both…

PRICE $220 www.razerzone.com Ouch. $220 for a gaming mouse. That’s got to be a record, but it’s no surprise to see that Razer is the company behind this ultra-elite gaming mouse. It’s claimed to be the world’s most advanced gaming mouse, but can Razer really justify such a stratospheric price when $100 mice seem to be perfect already? For this price, the Apple-like unboxing experience is to be expected – we couldn’t help but think what an impressive gift this thing will make at Christmas, as it just reeks of dosh. Inside the huge case is the mouse and recharging stand – yep, this thing is wireless. Don’t let your warning bells go off yet though, as it can also be run in wired mode. Within the box is the…

PRICE $1149 www.powercolor.com When a graphics card includes a special mounting bracket to stop it shrugging free of the shackles of its PCIe slot, you can rest assured it’s a behemoth. The new Devil 13 from Powercolor is one such heavyweight, with a slightly absurd weight of two kilograms. There’s a good reason for all this extra baggage though, as hidden beneath the frankly gigantic heatsink is not one, but two AMD Radeon R9 390 processors. No wonder it costs so darn much. Given the rather outrageous cost, the initial presentation of the product is a welcome sight. It’s packed in a beautiful box that reveals two trays within, and it’s all luxuriously padded in soft black rubber. Within the first tray is a rather strange sight, Razer’s highly customizable…

PRICE $578 www.dlink.com.au We’re big fans of Ethernet here at PCPP, as Wi-Fi tends to be flakier than a leper with dandruff. As more devices get loaded onto a Wi-Fi network, and nearby networks encroach on your radio waves, we’ve seen supposedly high-power devices fail over a range of less than ten metres. D-Link’s new Taipan router aims to solve these problems by blasting out one of the fastest Wi-Fi networks ever offered to consumers. The question is – does it work? The AC3200 designation indicates that this thing can churn out 3200Mbps of bandwidth – that’s the equivalent bandwidth of three combined Gigabit Ethernet networks. As usual though, the devil is in the details. The Taipan actually pumps out three different networks – one on the 2.4GHz band with…

PRICE $3,399 (I7; 512GB SSD; 16GB RAM) www.microsoftstore.com/au You won’t buy this as a gaming machine; it’s just too expensive compared to buying a real gaming laptop with a proper GPU. But if fortune smiles upon you and you possess the stunningly designed and manufactured Surface 4 Pro, take heart that it can do games – as long as you have an i5 or i7 model with the better integrated Intel graphics. The unusual native res is 2736x1864, but if you need to drop that to gain frames it holds up better than most, retaining a crisp and sharp look down to around 1440x900 or so. At that res, a playable 40fps can be expected from Battlefield 4 at low detail. Fan noise is an issue when the CPU is…

Early 2016 sees the release of several Virtual Reality (VR) devices to the market heralding the next big step forward in gaming, and computing in general. These products promise an experience that will put you into the game, so let’s take a look at just how these VR devices work and what they’ll do for us. VR products fall into two distinct categories – Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (AR). VR is where the person is shown a virtually generated environment designed to trick them into thinking they are actually in that environment (this is what the Oculus Rift type device does). AR is where the user wears a device (i.e. glasses) that projects virtual objects into the wearers’ field of view, making them think the objects are part of…