06. PC Gamer USA - June 2015
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RAINBOW SIX S I E G E We break down the doors of the squad shooter reboot HOW BIOWARE MAKES RPGS The story behind Dragon Age: Inquisition BATTLEFIELD HARDLINE REVIEWED A worthy spin-off for DICE’s FPS? June 2015 DID VALVE JUST WIN VR? The verdict on SteamVR
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MAGAZINE
Transcript of 06. PC Gamer USA - June 2015
RAINBOW SIXS I E G E
We break down the doors of the squad
shooter reboot
HOW BIOWARE
MAKES RPGSThe story behind
Dragon Age: Inquisition
BATTLEFIELD HARDLINE REVIEWED
A worthy spin-off for DICE’s FPS? June 2015
DID VALVE JUST WIN VR?
The verdict on SteamVR
#266 JUNE 2015 FoundationEDITORIALGlobal Editor-in-Chief Tim ClarkEditor-in-Chief Evan LahtiExecutive Editor Tyler WildeHardware Editor Wes FenlonComputer Large Pixel ColliderUK Editor Samuel RobertsUK Production Editor Tony EllisStaff Writer Chris Livingston Assistant Editor Tom MarksContributors Dave James, Chris Thursten, Tom Senior, Andy Kelly, Phil Savage, Ben Griffin, Joe Skrebels, Richard Cobbett, Sam White, Phil Iwaniuk, Cassandra Khaw, Tom Sykes
ARTArt Editor John Strike Contributors Andy McGregor, Matthew Lochrie, Andrew Cottle
SALES Vice President, SalesStacy Gaines, [email protected] President, Strategic ParthershipsIsaac Ugay, [email protected] Sales Manager, Northern CaliforniaHoward Berman, [email protected] Sales, Manager SouthwestBrandon Wong, [email protected] Sales Manager, East Coast Brandie Rushing, [email protected] Sales Manager, Midwest/Pacific NorthwestJessica Reinert, [email protected]
MARKETINGVice President, Marketing & Sales Development Rhoda BuenoDirector, Consumer Marketing Lisa RadlerNewsstand Director Bill Shewey
PRODUCTIONProduction Manager Mark ConstanceProduction Controller Fran TwentymanProject Manager Clare ScottProduction Assistant Emily Wood
FUTURE US, INC.4000 Shoreline Court,Suite 400, South San Francisco, CA 94080, (650) 872-1642www.futureus.com
Senior Vice President Charlie SpeightVice President, Marketing & Operations Rhoda BuenoDirector, Human Resources Eric Buksa
Future PlcChief Executive Zillah Byng-MaddickNon Executive Chairman Peter Allen
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I’m the last person to cheerlead for companies’ financial results. Our passion and purpose lies in celebrating games as experiences.
But this month I’m compelled to mention to the success of Cities: Skylines. Or more accurately, I’m compelled to call attention to the good values that inspired Cities: Skylines’ success. It became Paradox’s
best-selling game ever on the day it launched. In four days, it had sold 500,000.
The narrative that formed around Skylines as our review and others began to circulate was that Colossal Order’s game was everything we’d wanted from EA’s disappointing SimCity two years ago. Moddability. Massive scale. Transparent simulation. And the bold, innovative feature of being able to play a single-player game while offline. These are native things for a city builder, valuable to the experience of laying concrete and connecting power lines. But they’re also some of the tenets of
PC gaming itself, and putting them on sale in Skylines was an opportunity for many of us to signal our enthusiasm for those ideals.
With SimCity all but paved over by Skylines, it’s a reminder that games can’t adopt “modern” features like always-online at the expense of PC gaming’s decades-old values.
BRINGING YOU THE SCOOPS THIS MONTH...
Tyler Wilde@tyler_wilde Reviewed Metroidvania alike Ori and the Blind Forest on p76, found himself delighted.
Wes Fenlon@wesleyfenlon Got eyes-on with SteamVR. We watched him: it looked like he was a VR bartender.
Chris Thursten@cthurstenReviewed Hotline Miami 2 and got angrier than we’ve ever seen anyone reviewing a game.
Chris Livingston@screencuisineChris reviewed Cities: Skylines on p72 this month, a deserved Sim City successor.
4 JUNE 2015
EVAN [email protected]: @elahti
PC GAMER (ISSN 1080-4471) is published 13 times a year, monthly plus Holiday issue following December issue by Future US, Inc., 4000 Shoreline Court, Suite 400, South San Francisco, CA 94080. Phone: (650) 872-1642. Fax (650) 872-2207. Website: www.futureus.com. Periodicals postage paid in Curtis Circulation Company. Basic subscription rates (12 issues) US: Digital $23.88; Print $19.95; Canada: Digital $23.88; Print $29.95; Intl: Digital $23.88; Print $39.95. Canadian and foreign orders must be prepaid,
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SUBSCRIBER CUSTOMER Future US, Inc., 4000 Shoreline Court, Suite 400, South San Francisco, CA 94080. Phone: (650) 872-1642. Fax (650) 872-2207. Website: www.futureus.com.
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60 Battlefield: Hardline64 LA Cops66 Pneuma: Breath of Life68 Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number72 Cities Skylines74 Assassin’s Creed Rogue76 Ori and the Blind Forest
REVIEWS
10 NEWS The biggest story is the reveal of SteamVR as the virtual reality field grows more competitive
12 THE SPY What’s going on at Konami?
MONITOR
#266 JUNE 2015
14 Mad Max1 8 Volume22 The Flame In The Flood24 Beyond Eyes30 Firewatch 32 The Westport Independent
PREVIEWS
91 GROUP TEST Reviewing small cases in this month’s hardware pages
96 THE RIG The best reasonably priced PC you can buy.
The Hard Stuff
78 NOW PLAYING Chris struggles to fall in love with Evolve in this round-up of what we’re playing
82 TOP 10 FREE DOWNLOADS Selfie sticks in Doom and more as we collect the best free things you can download now
88 REINSTALL Andy revisits Grand Theft Auto III and finds the experience sobering
EXTRA LIFE
JUNE 2015 7
56 STEAMVR Wes gets hands-on with Valve’s long-
awaited entry into VR, the HTC Vive headset, and compares it to the Oculus Rift.
42 STRATEGY GAMES Team PC Gamer collects the 20 best
strategy games you can play right now, and compiles them into this handy list.
48 BIOWARE The writers’ room for Dragon Age:
Inquisition discusses how the Canadian studio makes such superb RPGs.
36
RAINBOW SIX SIEGEHands-on with all-new levels in Ubisoft’s explosive squad shooter
36 Evan heads to Montreal to sample Rainbow Six Siege’s tactical multiplayer42 We collect the best strategy games on PC, from Dawn of War II to Civ IV48 Chris examines the making of Dragon Age and BioWare’s storytelling process56 Is SteamVR even better than Oculus VR’s Crescent Bay?
FEATURES
91 SMALL CASES The majestic Dave James takes a look
at these small form factor cases for those looking for more modest-sized rigs.
8 JUNE 2015
USER REVIEWS
THE HOT MAIL
Wealth of choiceYou talk about the Steam ‘pile of shame’ like it’s a bad thing, but I think it’s a sign of how good we have it. Fifteen years ago, my entire knowledge of games came from those featured in PC Gamer, and if I wanted to buy something, I’d have to go to a shop and generally spend $45 for the pleasure. These days, you wait three or four months and that
same title will go on sale for a third of the cost—and that’s not to mention the many games that start at a lower price from day one, and websites like Bundle Stars that give keys away for virtually nothing. We should celebrate the fact that we can sit there with so many games still to play, and realize that we’re lucky to have such a wealth of choice (if not necessarily quality!).Matthew Bassett
Yes, it’s far from being a real problem, having too many games in your Steam library. Owning those games digitally forever is a privilege compared to the older days of maintaining CD cases, even if a load of them are just there for padding. When was the last time you played Arma Tactics? But hey, if we’re ever trapped in a nuclear bunker with an infinite supply of beans, we might need it, right after we’ve completed every entry in the Divinity series. And we buy into each Humble Bundle in anticipation of that apocalyptic eventuality. It’s true that prices have never been better on PC. Some outlets have been selling Alien: Isolation for under $20 of late, which is absurdly cheap for our game of the year in 2014. It’s too cheap. Pay more. PCG
Legends on lowI received a Samsung
28-inch 4K monitor for Christmas. The problem is, my current graphics card doesn’t have a good enough refresh rate to keep up with it. So currently, it’s gathering dust and I only have, at tops, $300 to spend on a replacement graphics card. I don’t intend to run it at full 4K resolution, but I can’t run any game other than League of Legends on low with it. Any advice you can offer would be really appreciated.James
Sounds to us like you’ve got the resolution set to 4K if nothing’s running properly, James. For most people, 4K is simply outside of the range of their hardware capabilities at this point in time—pretty much all modern GPUs have to stick to good old-fashioned 1080p right now until 4K becomes standard in the distant future. If you’re going to get a new graphics card, we suggest you save up another $30-$80 and grab a GTX 970. That’ll see you through the next few years. PCG
Graphics gripes and your Star Wars selections in this month’s letters
Not enough #EliteDangerous! Resolving that tonight—I’ve got a date with my spaceship. @PsychePlaySidewinder? We’d swipe right on that.
I was suckered by Andy Kelly into the Euro Truck Simulator 2 demo. Bought the game and now I’m hooked.@GRedstormHe’s like a dealer. A dealer in a lorry, going from Grimsby to Rotterdam.
The Forest. It’s in pretty good shape for alpha—there are naked cannibal titties everywhere! @FunkyMyWinkyYeah, it’s clearly been a while since we played The Forest.
Tales from the Borderlands. I really love the Borderlands universe but hate the pseudo RPG FPS genre, so it’s perfect for me!@ploguidic03Thank God they’re making a spin-off about the 20% of Borderlands that you like.
Replaying Fallout: New Vegas and getting myself ready for the hope-to-be-announced Fallout 4. @msoftmikeWe can but hope. What if the Bethesda conference is just the announcement of Wet 2? It won’t be—but what if it is?
Catching up on The Witcher series, because I’ve read the books, and games are like books with pictures... I guess.@StormtamerReading didn’t never do us no good.
USER REVIEWS Arma Tactics, which you may play when the world ends.
The monitor from the PCG rig. It’s not 4K. You don’t need 4K. Yet.
HOT TOPIC USER REVIEWS
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JUNE 2015 9
HOT TOPIC
What’s the best Star Wars game on PC?
USER REVIEWS
The Dead Space games. I love the zero-G and visual/sound design (although it’s mainly film rip-offs), but I hate how the combat mugs you off. @JammoYeah, they’re derivative, but the first two are still cracking games. Just don’t make us play the third one again.
Playing Kentucky Route Zero and the hype is real. It’s such a fascinating game that shows storytelling still matters in gaming. @TheCrumpetMunchIt’s the best game featuring a hobbling old man and a dog ever made. And a route. And office bears.
Guitar Hero WT AllInOne mod, with my PS2 drums-and-guitar set, since I don’t have Rock Band 4 on PC. This is what I love about PC gaming. @BrianoStormYeah, and what’s Activision going to do about it? Presumably, very little. Carry on.
Mmm... check out the @PAYDAYGame spring break. It’s been semi- interesting so far. @JeffTechnoWizAQIs it like a spring break in movies, with all the college people, excessive drinking and partial nudity?
Far Cry 4, AC Unity and Dragon Age Inquisition, all at full ultra 1080p60. Also AC Rogue full ultra at 2880x1620 at 60fps. Loving it. @ShankTheTankBig numbers. Woo!
I still want Empire at War to be good... or at least if they
made another RTS Star Wars game, that would be fantastic.George Martin
TIE Fighter (Secret Order of the Empire missions, &
laying waste in a TIE Defender).Dammy Onafowokan
KOTOR 1 and 2. I hope someone can top those
games someday. Peter Fisher
SWG, pure and simple. As far as MMOs go, The Old
Republic still falls far short of the fun that could be found with player cities and customizable just-about-everything. Sven Wrightsen
Star Wars Episode 1: Racer, without a close second.
Seriously, it’s easily the best racing game I’ve ever played.Brandon Graham
Battlefront 2 was really a lot of fun. Flying a transport to
the enemy ship and disabling the systems from within, spawning as a hero and cutting through hallways. Aayla Secura! Jouni Perkele
Either one of the two Battlefront games (both
have strengths and weaknesses—the new one better be good), or Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. That
one still has the best lightsaber mechanics, in my opinion. Alexander Probst
KOTOR 1 and 2. And another personal favourite was
Shadows of the Empire (N64). That game had everything—action, exploration, collectibles, boss battles, driving and dog fighting, with a good amount of cameos and parallel stuff with the movies. If only quality was a constant in the other Star Wars games. I’ve always wished for a good HD remake of Shadows of the Empire, even if it just meant updated controls.Edwin Malave Maldonado
Dark Forces wins, hands down. This was back in the
days before force powers appeared in every game. The Star Wars universe is so rich and can be used for much more than just Jedi and the same boring powers every game. Chris Bostock
Jedi Knight. Pick any one of them.
Morgan M Lentz
I still think we should absolutely get another TIE
Fighter, with modern graphics and game engine, plus outer-space fights with seamless scaling on to planet-surface battles and back. The feeling when you did a bombing run against a huge vessel was priceless. Tapio Hyppänen
I had the most fun with the original Knights of the Old
Republic and the 1st Rogue Squadron. Believe it or not, I also enjoyed Rebellion thoroughly. Ellison Navales
KOTOR is a really good RPG, Jedi Knight is a good
adventure series, Battlefront II is great for big battlefield-like skirmishes, and The Force Unleashed is a good hack ’n’ slash. Ill Fey
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March, HTC revealed a new VR headset created in collaboration with Valve: the
Vive. The Taiwanese hardware giant says the headset will be available to buy before the end of 2015. A release date for the Oculus Rift remains unconfirmed.
Until now, the Rift has been the poster-child for VR. But even with a $2 billion Facebook buyout, there’s still no sign of a retail version—only developer kits. And the Vive has dual 1200x1080 displays, 70
sensors, and a 90Hz refresh rate. In terms of raw specs, it’s the most powerful VR headset around.
And while headsets like the Rift and Sony’s Project Morpheus rely on cameras for positional tracking, the Vive uses lasers. This means you aren’t restricted by the narrow field of view of a camera, and can move around freely in a virtual world—provided you have the space. HTC says a roaming space of 15x15 feet is ideal.
“The tracking is perfect and it’s super fast,” says Sylvain Cornillon, CTO of Bossa Studios, which holds regular VR events in
the UK. “It’s really reactive and doesn’t need a camera to analyze the image, and uses very little CPU power.”
You can stand up, walk around, and actually explore virtual spaces. You can do this with the Rift DK2, but the instant you step out of the infrared camera’s limited range (and that’s not hard), the simulation stops working. Oculus is almost certainly working on a better solution to this, but HTC has got there first. This, combined with the promise of a release this year, makes the Vive the first serious challenger to the Oculus Rift.
It’s clear that Valve has big ambitions. The company wants to be in at the ground floor of this amazing new tech, which could dramatically change the landscape of videogames. That’s great, but hopefully we won’t see Valve become entirely dedicated to just virtual reality and Dota 2.
Reaction to the Vive has been overwhelmingly positive. The MIT Technology Review calls it “the best virtual reality experience so far.” PC Gamer sister site TechRadar say it’s “finally starting to fulfill the promise of VR.” Now the ball is in Oculus’s court, and it’ll need to do something special to get back on top. Andy Kelly
You might say it’s re-Viving interest in VR.
Valve and HTC make a bold claim for the virtual reality throne
THE TOP STORY
Bigger thanHalf-Life 3
10 JUNE 2015
BUT WHO WATCHES THE SPY?
If you shoot for the king, you better
not miss
The Spy remembers the first time he made somebody ‘disappear’. He was eight years old and a magician was telling him to wave a little magic wand at a curtain. An audience volunteer called Nigel was behind that curtain. He never saw Nigel again. Twelve years later he was strangling a would-be assassin with a set of floral drapes. It’s funny what comes back to you.
Or what doesn’t come back. Respected developer and on-demand bratwurst eulogy coordinator Hideo Kojima is rumored to be departing Konami, where he has worked as the head of Kojima Productions since time immemorial. Kojima’s name is nowhere to be found on press materials for The Phantom Pain, having been elided overnight by the game’s publisher.
It’s an act of political erasure rarely seen in games, where anything that can sell a game is normally used to sell a game. This is like Firaxis deciding to remove ‘Sid Meier’ from Civilization: it just wouldn’t happen. You don’t take a Golden Goose and turn it into a Trotsky Turkey.
In a press release in March, Konami announced a shift towards a more ‘headquarters-controlled’
THE S
PY
The Spy supports underdogs. Also sea-level dogs, slightly elevated dogs, and overdogs.
management structure, which suggests an attempt to reduce the power held by rogue wings of the company. Which is a shame, because those ‘rogue wings’ have traditionally produced all of Konami’s good games.
What does this mean for fans of Metal Gear? MGS V will be fine as the company issued a statement quoting Kojima that confirmed he’ll be around to finish it. He’s already said that it’ll be his last Metal Gear game. This also suggests, however, that the series will subsequently enter the drab corridors of publisher-mandated-sequeldom, the saddest place for any fan-loved series to end up. Do not fret. When we’re all staring down the barrel of Heroes of Metal Gear Saga Online, a free-to-play collectible action figure MMO, The Spy will be here for you. The Spy will join you in weeping into a much-loved cardboard box.
We do not know that Kojima has been forced away—he could have left voluntarily and Konami are hedging their bets. Bet-hedging is not, necessarily, a bad thing. Unless you’re Atari, and ‘hedging your bets’ means ‘threatening legal action against one of the people who made your company’s name’.
Jeff Minter’s company, Llamasoft, released a Tempest-a-like arcade shooter called TxK last year on the PlayStation Vita and planned to release it this year for PC and home consoles. Standing in the way of those plans is Atari, which threatened legal action over the game due to its similarity to Tempest 2000. Jeff Minter is, of course, the creator of Tempest 2000.
This hasn’t been a popular move. Minter represents the company’s heyday—he is a large part of why people associate the name ‘Atari’ with a certain era and a certain type of game. The Spy would argue that he has the right to produce a tribute to his own work. It’s not like he’s built a tribute to one of modern Atari’s recent original releases, like... er... like... Like Atari Fit App or Atari Casino. Classics, The Spy is sure! Classics. But they’re not Asteroids or Tempest or Centipede, which are names that nu-Atari still trades heavily on. This is the company that is turning Asteroids into a gritty multiplayer survival game. Its reasoning for getting lawyer-happy over Tempest makes sense, in awful drab cold terrible business terms, but it’s already a massive backfire in terms of their standing with the games development community. They’re going after Jeff Minter. If you shoot for the king, you better not miss. And if you do miss, you’d better hope you hit a giant neon trapezoid that shatters into a lightning kaleidoscope so you get a million points and then you’re like “shiiiiiit” and when you come to your senses it’s 1994. Spy out. The Spy
RELEASE SEPT 1,
2015
Different raiding gangs come with their own specialized vehicles.
14 JUNE 2015
PREVIEW
READ MEDEVELOPER
AvalanchePUBLISHER
Warner BrosLINK
www.madmaxgame.com
FIRST LOOK Post-apocalyptic survival meets internal combustion.
MAD MAXS
o, you’re Avalanche—a studio with two third-person open-world games, two publishers and, as it turns out, one year to release both
titles. You have to convince a legion of gamers short on time and attention spans that both are worth buying. What’s the pitch? “I’d say that Just Cause’s thing was about having too much to play around with, Mad Max is about having too little.” So says Max’s director of narrative content, Odd Ahlgren. Much to any preview writer’s chagrin, he’s pretty much nailed it.
Research the new Just Cause and you’ll find that it’s the game equivalent of Dick Cheney in an ordinance store—you run from one weapon to the next fighter jet
with literal abandon, dropping everything to try out a new toy. Mad Max, on the other hand, aims to make every little find mean something, from eating maggots to scraping together enough scrap metal to stick spikes on your car.
At first glance, it could be seen to be a triple-A addition to the ever-more- crowded survival-game genre—you’re tasked with finding food when you can, keeping a canteen of water filled, even carting jerrycans of fuel into the back of your car in the event you run low at a crucial moment. The reality, however, is a little more in line with what we’ve come to expect from Avalanche by this point.
Food is an instant health boost, water is essentially an inventoried medpak—even those jerrycans can be used as makeshift grenades. “The Mad Max universe is over- the-top; it’s big stuff,” says game director Frank Rooke. “Big explosions, big personalities, big everything. So to swing from that and go down into micromanaging, that was not what we were trying to do. When you think about that resource
management, yes it’s there—you need to be conscious of fuel, of water, of health—but that’s not driving you solely. You want to be thinking about building a kick-ass car, [who to go and fight], what camp to take on next—just stuff that gets you going through this wild and crazy world.”
That feeling of never having enough isn’t the be-all and end-all, then—it’s the first step. Mad Max aims to keep you moving constantly. Running out of fuel isn’t an Oregon Trail unexpected death, it’s a cue to sling out some binoculars, hike up a sand dune and see who could be most efficiently brutalized and stolen from. Every distraction is another reason to engage with Avalanche’s now-trademark open-world style; gigantic landmasses peppered with toyboxes full of physics-enabled structures, outlandish vehicles and squishy little people.
Central to all of this is Max’s new car. Avalanche claims that this is its most story-driven game yet, rebooting the Mad Max franchise (including the new Tom Hardy film) in an entirely new wasteland—and that includes having Max’s Interceptor, the V8-powered star of the show, taken from
The landscape means there’s no hiding from trouble.
The Mad Max universe is over the top. It’s big stuff. Big explosions, big personalities
JUNE 2015 15
MONITOR
him by a big man named Scrotus. The game revolves around Max and a hunchbacked mechanic building an entirely new car from scratch—Max begs, steals and widows for the pieces, and his pal puts it all together.
Think of the Opus as a sandbox within a sandbox—everything from the engine to the hood ornaments can be tinkered with, and there’s no optimal loadout. Say you’ve taken a liking to firing harpoons into armored tanker trucks, and peeling off their metallic skin to expose vulnerable gas tanks—you’d best cover yourself in armor to weigh down the car, and invest in some grippy road tires. If you prefer a close-up approach, tune up the engine, whack on some wheel grinders and cover your chassis in spikes to impale any cheeky boarders seeking to interrupt proceedings.
Car combat is the heart of the game—impromptu chases open up as enemy raiding parties ambush you from nearby camps, you chase after convoys, or you spot a scrap-laden hauler ripe for nabbing and driving back to your own stronghold. That would explain why the feel is so precise—at its best, Mad Max is as much a driving game
as it is an action one (and the effort to make it so is, in part, why you won’t see any of Just Cause’s aerial fun here).
“It’s all grounded in physicality,” says Alex Williams, senior game designer. “We’ve got a good handling system, and when you’re steering into a car, depending on your mass and speed, that’s how much damage you do.” That applies to enemy cars, too—all of which can be stolen and driven.
“We’ve designed distinct enemy types,” Williams continues, “where there are better ways of taking out each guy. If you see tons of boarders on a car, it’s a good idea not to get close. You want to burn them or blow them up with [the unfortunately named DIY rocket launcher] Thunderpoon. Grinding cars come up beside you with spikes on their sides, so you might want to use the harpoon to yank off their side
panels. We’ve also got the Boombug, which is a suicide car—if he comes up next to you and sets all his fuel on fire, you might want to take out his wheels so you can get away.”
It’s the kind of ersatz class system that drives combat in games like the Arkham series—every combination of enemies has you prioritizing targets and playing in different ways, forcing you to learn every necessary technique. Which is an apposite comparison, considering how much Avalanche draws on Rocksteady’s fine work in its own melee-combat sections.
Befitting a game that takes place, at least in the beginning, at the bottom of a vaporized sea, ammo is not exactly plentiful in Mad Max. As such, Max himself is all fists and fury, a take on Batman who is both less agile and less worried about dropping goons in the most permanent way. While getting out of your car in the wide-open world is rarely advisable, enter one of the dozens of enemy camps (each one entirely unique, I’m told) and you’re suddenly thrown into miniature mazes, stuck somewhere between my-first-Zelda-dungeon puzzle solving and Colosseum
Firing harpoons into armored tanker trucks, and peeling off their metallic skin
Chumbucket is Max’s bestfriend. Max has yet to realize this.
Get out of your car for a sweet sense of isolation.
16 JUNE 2015
PREVIEW
combat, as courtyards lead you into 12-on-one brawls with tooled-up loons.
It begins as familiar punch ’n’ parry stuff, before building up to include Shadow of Mordor-like instant executions (early, horrible highlight: Max using a shotgun to compromise a man’s stomach), context-sensitive kills and, apparently, the ability to stick explosive javelins into bad guys’ chests. It’s cumbersome but satisfying; you won’t be pulling off any of the Dark Knight’s weird-looking, 20-foot horizontal leaps, but a low healthbar on both sides makes every fight a short, sharp shock.
As you’d expect, Max has an upgrade tree of his own, although this looks far more straightforward than his car’s—there are four stages of knuckleduster power levels alone. More worrying is the Legend system, which improves Max’s stats based on actions performed in-game, flashing up notices when you’ve, say, punched 50 people’s faces off. Considering The Elder Scrolls realized the folly of that simplistic a system some years ago, I’d question how Avalanche has made it much better, but that’s something that will no doubt be
revealed over more than the couple of hours’ play I’ve had thus far.
Like any open-world game, there’s much you won’t see until you’ve played for tens of hours. Its two-hour day-night cycle promises to bring new factions of enemies and ambient events, depending on when you’re playing. Weather systems will create catastrophic dust and lightning storms, forcing you off-track, if only to watch your
enemies get caught in the maelstrom. Taking the concept of over-stuffing a game to its extreme, even the edges of the world map are apparently only ‘soft borders’, so God knows what you’ll find beyond them.
Avalanche has always taken glee in making its worlds the real stars of the game—helped by a history of characters so dumb, it’s a surprise they’re able to put on clothes—but the studio’s come up against a
challenge in the wasteland. Turning a desert into a compelling place to spend a few real-time days in has been a matter of imbuing it with a sense of history—you begin in a long- since-gone ocean, your first stronghold a broken lighthouse that sits surreally over the undulating landscape. Further to the north, there’s the old coastline; then, apparently, more recognizable remnants of civilization; and, finally, Gastown, home of Scrotus and, here’s hoping, the Interceptor.
If it comes together, it won’t be the vistas you’re traveling for, it’ll be the stories behind them. And that brings us back to that first question of how you differentiate this from Just Cause. Where that game revels in the surface level—a beautiful world and lots to play with—Mad Max seems to be aiming for something below the surface, keeping you fighting for the next upgrade worth using, the next place worth going to. It’s just that you get to harpoon gates off their hinges and engage in gut-tighteningly exciting car chases along the way to get there. Joe Skrebels
Weather systems will create catastrophic dust and lightning storms, forcing you off-track
Chumbucket handles most of theweaponry from the back of the Opus.
Camps require vehicle combat (to get in)and melee combat (to get out again).
They might be psychopaths, but enemies are often polite enough to step out of their cars for fisticuffs.
JUNE 2015 17
MONITOR
Some critics have compared Mike Bithell’s new stealth game to the VR missions in the original Metal Gear Solid. Once I noticed the most
basic similarity in color scheme and visual style, I found it a hard comparison to shake.
MGS broke down Metal Gear’s stealth into its core components in levels that functioned as stealthy self-contained time attack challenges. Volume is like a whole game of that, offering similarly inventive ways to manipulate enemies and reach the exit, with a little bit of a Stealth Bastard-inspired structure in there, too.
Unlike Snake, your character, Locksley, can’t kill anyone. But like MGS, before its more experimental first-person crotch-
shooting sequels, this is stealth in absolutes. The patrolling enemies have vision cones that are 1:1—if you wander into them, there’s no ambiguity about whether a guard saw you. The objective in each level is to collect gems
dotted around the map and escape, but if a guard successfully pursues you for a few seconds, it’s game over. Lose him, and the guard will hit the alarm and others around the level will start searching for you. There are variations of guard, too. There’s a sniper whose vision cone stretches into long-range and another who can see in 360 degrees, which makes sneaking past in the conventional way pretty much impossible.
That’s where Locksley’s tools come in. There’s the bugle, a projectile-based noisemaker that lets you aim, shoot and lure an enemy from their post before sneaking past. There’s the veil, which Bithell describes as the Hitman button: pretend to be someone else for a very short space of time so you can sneak by an enemy quickly. There’s also a decoy move where you can send a clone of yourself running
through a guard’s line of sight and get them to chase. Then there’s my personal favorite, the oddity, which you can stick to any surface to draw the fascinated attention of any guards in range; Metal Gear’s equivalent of this is basically filthy magazines, the bane of any private military force. These tools ensure each level has a number of solutions, and because you can only carry one at a time, a bit of experimentation might be required. There’s a basic whistle move to draw enemies out, too, and sticking to cover keeps you safe from any patrolling goons.
It amounts to an enjoyably precise stealth game that’s simple to learn. Using the bugle to make an enemy move just inches off their spot, then quickly zipping around them and progressing to the next few gems is satisfying, and the frequent in-level checkpointing means it doesn’t feel frustrating, either. I think I only yelled the f-word once during my demo, which bodes well considering I’ve thrown and broken expensive peripherals after being caught in stealth games in the past. Samuel Roberts
READ MEDEVELOPER
Mike BithellPUBLISHER
Self-publishedLINK
www.mikebithellgames.com
RELEASE SPRING
PLAYED IT Exploring Mike Bithell’s sound-based stealth puzzler.
VOLUME
It doesn’t feel frustrating. I think I only yelled the f-word once during my demo
Surviving this is very unlikely.
Sticking to cover out of sight loses enemy attention.
At first sight, it looks like he’s avoiding the attention of bouncers at a nightclub.
18 JUNE 2015
PREVIEW
The Flame in the Flood is a roguelike-and-survival hybrid inspired by elements of FTL and Don’t Starve—but together they
feel like something new. A girl called Scout, and her dog, Aesop, make their way down a dangerous river, trying to escape a coming flood. Crafting items helps keep her alive.
I played two sessions of the GDC demo, which timed out at ten minutes. You start by a campfire, then climb onto Scout’s raft—which is the cool-looking squashed wreckage of a car—and, journeying with the faithful dog, try to keep the raft afloat by paddling out of the way of incoming rocks and other dangers. Along the way, you’ll see settlements where you can dock
and gather supplies, trying to keep your energy bars high enough to survive.
My first time down the river, I did OK. I set a snare trap for a rabbit on the first place I landed, then chased the poor bastard into it so that I
could get a good meal. I stopped off at an abandoned house and got a decent night’s rest. I got back on the boat, headed back downstream, and avoided objects along the way in the hope that the next piece of land would offer equally kind circumstances.
The second time through, my fortune was piss-poor. I crashed my raft and caused some serious damage really early on, which seemed to make it harder to steer. The first
island I landed on, I was greeted by a wolf, which was much bigger than Scout and seemed to be one of the game’s primary threats—a dev mentioned that it was pretty unlucky to encounter one this early. At this stage in the game, Scout could only temporarily ward them off. After taking damage from the creature, and a fairly pitiful run at gathering supplies, I got back on the damaged raft and headed further
downriver. A dark storm kicked off, which took a huge toll on Scout’s energy bars, and I just about made it to the end of the demo without dying of thirst. If the demo hadn’t been timed, though, I’d almost certainly have been dead a few moments later: there was nothing to drink and nowhere to sleep on the island. That’s the gamble you take whenever you dock. While this is a permadeath game, you can assign items to the seemingly immortal dog Aesop and he can carry those for Scout to the next playthrough. Good boy.
Later on, with enough of the right items, you can create traps for wolves, which provide even greater components for building items than the rabbits do early on.
The success of The Flame in the Flood depends on how successfully the game randomizes these various bits of the world, something that’s impossible to figure out at this point. I enjoyed the feeling of docking at a new location without knowing what threats awaited—similar to arriving at a new system in FTL, but with the added bonus of a little exploration, too. Samuel Roberts
READ MEDEVELOPER
The Molasses FloodPUBLISHERIn-house
LINKwww.themolasses
flood.com
RELEASE SUMMER
PLAYED IT Escape downriver in this gorgeous hybrid from ex-BioShock devs.
THE FLAME IN THE FLOOD
This is a bit closer to The Flame’s current look. It’s a handsome, unique art style.
I set a snare trap for a rabbit on the first place I landed, then chased the poor bastard into it
Don’t worry, the dog doesn’t die. He can never die.
Most of the areas in the demo took about two scary minutes to explore.
22 JUNE 2015
PREVIEW
The first thing I felt when I saw this was actually a pang of worry, because Beyond Eyes is precisely the sort of game that will
inevitably have a certain type of below-the-line blowhard querying whether it’s actually a game at all. I’ll get back to that.
You are Rae, a young girl traumatized by the accident that left her blind. Your best friend, a stray cat, is missing, and you have to venture into the world to look for it.
“The game is more about overcoming fears and facing problems head on,” says Sherida Halatoe, who began prototyping Beyond Eyes while studying game design at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, in the Netherlands. “It’s kind of a coming
of age story.”The idea began with
its art style, which is absolutely arresting. Rae is a forlorn smudge in an unfinished watercolor. As you guide her through the world, foliage sprouts, flowers bloom, and objects are
painted in once they’re close enough to touch or be heard. Because not everything arrives at the same speed, it’s a bit like watching stop motion footage from a nature documentary.
“I wanted to make the game so every screen could come from a story book,” Halatoe explains. “Because she’s been blind from a young age ...her memories of the world are influenced by how children
perceive the world.” The world looks like a picture book because that’s how Rae remembers it.
There are implications to the art style beyond prettiness. When Rae hears the tinkle of water she initially assumes it to be a fountain, but as she gets closer the colors desaturate and it morphs into a sewer grate. What at first seems to be sheets drying on a clothesline turns out to be a more sinister
scarecrow. These disappointments, and more immediate threats like a barking dog and a busy road to cross, have an instantly detrimental effect on Rae’s mood. Her head hangs and her shoulders hunch. Bright pastels are replaced with bleak smears.
Overcoming these obstacles is less about solving puzzles, though Rae can perform rudimentary interactions, than it is about overcoming her fear and pressing on. Encouragement is offered by the occasional sounds she intuits might be the cat, which appears for a few seconds, glimmering golden, before she loses it again.
Halatoe expects the game to last between two and four hours, depending on how thoroughly you plan to explore.
“When she starts out, [Rae] kind of feels that being blind is all that she is. And by progressing she learns about herself. I wanted to make a story about someone who might initially be thought of as a victim, but actually learns to manage herself and grows in the process a little bit.”
And why is it definitely a game? Because Beyond Eyes already seems worth playing. Tim Clark
READ MEDEVELOPER
Tiger and SquidPUBLISHER
Team 17LINK
www.beyondeyes-game.com
RELEASE 2015
FIRST LOOK Help a blind girl find her cat in the prettiest game at GDC.
BEYOND EYES
Yeah. A static image really can’t do justice to this.
What at first seems to be sheets drying on a clothesline turns out to be more sinister
24 JUNE 2015
PREVIEW
I thought I understood Firewatch before I played it. It’s a narrative game, set in the Wyoming wilderness in 1989, with a story that unfolds
through dialogue between Henry (that’s you) and Delilah, the voice at the other end of your walkie-talkie. I thought I’d played games like this before: games where I explored a confined virtual space and interacted with objects to prompt clues, dialogue, moments of discovery that nudged me along the path of a set story. Games like Gone Home.
But Firewatch is not that game, entirely due to its setting. This is a hard distinction to grasp until you’ve played it, but the open, explorable environment changes the way
Firewatch doles out bites of story. It stretches the boundaries and structure of what I expect from a narrative-focused game. I thought I had a mental category to put Firewatch into. Turns out I don’t. I’m probably going to have to create a new one.
Which is great: it’s rare for a game to spill over the edges of the shape we expect it to fill. In Firewatch’s case, there are a few elements that add up to this unusual shape.
The demo I played picks up about 45 minutes into the game. Henry—marriage failing, DUI on his record, a little too much weight around the middle—is starting his first day as a lookout for the forest service. It’s an escape from, well, mostly everything.
The voice of Henry’s boss Delilah crackles over the radio to give him instructions: go find some unruly teenagers who have been setting off fireworks, and make sure they haven’t set the forest ablaze.
And from there, Firewatch blooms into an openly explorable chunk of wilderness. Not open world in the Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto sense, but a generously sized area that coaxes you towards points of interest
while offering plenty of room to walk around. And I wanted to, because the game is so beautiful.
So, back to that unusual shape: part of it comes from the subtlety of Firewatch’s level design. Gullies and canyons that funnel you to and from more-open areas, chunky rock outcroppings that are identifiably climbable while still looking natural, paths that diverge and reconnect to give you multiple ways to move from one story point to another. In the area I played, the game’s designers had managed to balance the openness of a natural environment with the necessity of pushing you towards important places. It’s the kind of thing you may not even notice because it feels natural—but that’s the trick, isn’t it?
I did brush up against the edges of this little chunk of the game world, thick patches of trees and brush that blocked off my exploration, but these blockades still felt, more or less, like natural parts of the forest.
Firewatch further spills out of its container when you start talking to Delilah. Imagine the bits of commentary you got in classic point-and-click adventures from
READ MEDEVELOPER
Campo SantoPUBLISHERIn-house
LINKwww.campo
santo.com
PLAYED IT Venture into the wild in Campo Santo’s quirky first-person game.
FIREWATCH They definitely have PCs in Wyoming, right?
It’s rare for a game to spill over the edgeof the shape we expect it to fill
30 JUNE 2015
PREVIEW
RELEASE 2015
looking at every object in the environment—protagonists like Monkey Island’s Guybrush Threepwood would talk to themselves or you, the player—but turn that commentary into a conversation. Looking at any interactive object or an interesting location prompts Henry with the option to pull out the walkie-talkie and talk to Delilah, with multiple dialogue choices that reflect how you want to play the character.
This is an old bit of game design doing something new: it’s building character, adding color commentary and pushing the story forward all at once. It’s something that seems simple but is more ambitious the more you think about it: there’s tons of voiceover dialogue in the short 20-minute segment I played, and there were two options I didn’t hear for every bit of conversation I chose.
I talked to Firewatch designer Nels Anderson a bit about the amount of dialogue going into the game, and he explained that’s it’s only feasible for their small team because they don’t have to do any animation or lip-syncing for voice.
Firewatch is a first-person game, and Delilah is a voice on a radio. That makes it relatively cheap and easy to throw new dialogue in, which they’ve done to further flesh out the world.
In the demo, Henry eventually finds the troublesome teenagers skinny-dipping in a lake, and has the option to pick up their boombox and do whatever with it. I carried it for about ten minutes, but I could’ve
tossed it in the lake. Earlier in development, that didn’t prompt any reaction from the teens, Anderson told me—which would’ve felt wrong. So they recorded more dialogue to make them react naturally.
The demo I played ends with a hike back up to Henry’s lookout tower as the sun sets, casting the environment in shades of orange and red, and then the blue-purple of night. It introduces a bit of mystery and
already shows an interesting relationship blossoming between Henry and Delilah. It’s the first ‘day’ of many that will make up Firewatch, with each day containing a piece of essential story that moves along a set narrative. According to Anderson, there will be freedom to explore within that structure, and new parts of the world will become accessible as time passes.
Days and nights don’t pass based on a time system in Firewatch—in other words, the events of ‘day seven’ are set, and the day won’t end until you experience that bit of the narrative—but players can go off the beaten path to spend time in the wilderness before progressing the story.
Firewatch is telling a type of story on an environmental scale I don’t think we’ve seen before. It left me excited, but wondering if Campo Santo will be able to maintain the interesting dialogue and environmental design across a much larger world. It’s hard to pick up on the ambition, and how unusual this structure feels, until you’ve put hands on it. Anderson says that will happen in the second half of 2015. Wes Fenlon
Each day contains a piece of essential story that advances a set narrative
The walkie-talkie helps present thestory without expensive cutscenes.
A memorable sunset.
Henry’s lookout tower: could do with an elevator.
I guess they must haverun out of orange.
JUNE 2015 31
MONITOR
If you don’t report on an event in The Westport Independent, it never happened. That’s the rule. You manage a newspaper covering the
four districts of Westport, under the control of a dictatorship in 1949. Speak out against the loyalist government in print, and you risk being shut down. Twist and censor your stories to remove any sign of dissent towards the guys in charge, and you’ll drive support towards the rebels.
This is a game about being an editor, which is novel to me in particular because no other games are about that subject matter (probably because, in my experience, being an editor is mostly about not especially fantastical things, like eating
burritos the size of vital organs and making sure PC Gamer doesn’t use too-many-hyphens-when-it-isn’t-necessary). This is a marginally more politically charged editor role than mine, though, as The Westport Independent tackles
complex subjects you might see in the regular news: crippling tuition-fee increases that only hurt the poor, unemployment, outsourcing, police violence, even celebrity bullshit.
The version of events you choose to present to the people will influence their perception of the government. But tell too much of the truth and the guys in charge will find your behavior suspicious and
subversive. An early story I encountered covered the closure of a magazine that dared speak out against the loyalists, telling me that a similar fate awaited my own paper if, for example, I criticized the government for wasting money building a statue of the president, or continuously spotlighted their most problematic moments.
You choose four stories a day to run in any order you like. For each article, you
craft the details of the story, then pass it on to your writers. You can choose between two different headlines. One is usually a literal explanation of events, and the other is either sensational, a cover-up of the truth or a complete lie. You then pick which parts of the story you’d like your writers to focus on out of a list of bullet points, crossing the parts out that you don’t want to run. With the aforementioned president-statue story, you could delete the information about how much it costs entirely, so it’s just a story about building a statue. That’s exactly what I did: I concealed the cost of this obvious vanity project, so it basically became a piece of propaganda. You can censor, or crusade in the face of possible closure.
Once you select the parts of the story you want to focus on, you pick a writer for each story out of your staff of four. They all have different allegiances for and against the government, as well as personal interests in certain subjects. You have the option to force your team to write some articles even if they tell you they can’t bring themselves to do so, as Andy Kelly might if I told him he had to write about FIFA games forever,
READ MEDEVELOPER
Double Zero One Zero
PUBLISHERCoffee Stain Studios
LINKwww.doublezeroone
zero.com/westport
PLAYED IT An editor plays a Lucas Pope-inspired game about being an editor.
THE WESTPORT INDEPENDENT
Tell too much of the truth and the guys in charge will find your behavior suspicious
PC Gamer readers: in the east they like BioWare RPGs, in the north they like indie games (not really).
Of course, this is the sort of story I’d normally run in PC Gamer.
32 JUNE 2015
PREVIEW
RELEASE 2015
instead of, say, Metal Gear and Euro Truck Simulator 2.
Having chosen who will write what, and the order in which the stories will run in that day’s edition, you then pick where the paper will be distributed in the four regions of Westport. Each of the North, South, East and West regions are interested in specific types of stories, and have differing socio-economic profiles you have to be mindful of when choosing what slice of your print run will be sold there.
The goal is to sell newspapers, but you have scope to do that however you want. I tried nuking the richer, northern districts with celebrity-news-focused stories, for example. While my sales went up in those regions, there aren’t as many people there to buy the newspapers as there are in the poorer eastern and southern districts, where they’re more interested in societal
news, so my sales suffered. The next time I published the paper, however, I sold more copies in the northern districts, because I’d expanded my readership there.
You affect a whole host of different values through your choices. It’s far from binary—though, aside from the bars measuring the suspicion of the government and support for the rebels, it’s hard to work out at this point exactly what the pay-off is of supporting one over the other.
A kind of sub-series of stories plays out, depending on what you decide to publish. The game’s celebrity news is focused around the long-suffering fictional actor Harold Finn, whom I decided to criticize multiple times in the paper, including running one sensational story about him gaining weight that had no editorial value whatsoever. Running an initial piece about one subject can trigger a whole running
narrative over the next few days. You can make the news in The Westport Independent, or you can choose not to. That’s the point. The premise is seemingly inspired by Lucas Pope’s free game The Republia Times, but it offers a more complex, if still very fanciful, cross-section of how the publishing industry works.
The main points I wonder about are how the promised dynamic endings will reflect your approach as editor, and how accurately your approach can be measured in a game
with so many different stats operating in the background.
I found this first snapshot of The Westport Independent to be really engaging and mostly well-written, though, and I applaud developer Double Zero One Zero’s attempt at tackling subject matters that games never normally touch, in a way that’s still breezy and entertaining to play. Samuel Roberts
The goal is to sell newspapers, but you have scope to do that however you want
Bend the truth to your will.
Anne may be more educated than me, but can she quote every line the spy says in Red Alert?
Today’s lead story will be ‘guy does stuff’.
The visual style evokes Lucas Pope’s The Republia Times
You can choose not to run articles if they don’t suit your agenda.
JUNE 2015 33
MONITOR
36 JUNE 2015
After seven years, RAINBOW SIX SIEGE is smashing through the House of FPS it helped build
with a focused, high-fidelity design. By Evan Lahti
JUNE 2015 37
will protect this bathroom with my life. In 40 seconds, five SWAT dudes are going to C4 their way into the two-
story house we’re defending. For the entirety
of that time, one-hundred percent of my focus is on figuring out the best way to fortify a toilet. My team has to defend a hostage, an AI- controlled character we can’t allow to be captured. This round, that hostage has spawned in the master bedroom, which happens to be adjacent to the now tactically-significant lavatory on the second floor. The odds that I’ll fire a submachine gun while standing in a bathtub are as high as they’ll ever be.
I need to work fast to put up defenses. My character, Castle, carries two bulletproof barricades, his special equipment. I hold F to stamp the barrier to one of the wall segments, and it stretches upward and downward like a giant steel accordion to reach floor to ceiling. Down the hall, Smoke, our gas expert, is erecting standard wooden barriers over doorways. Pulse lays his final spool of barbed wire in the kitchen. The pre-match clock
shrugs off its last few seconds while we’re still finishing.
Defensive prep is one of my favorite phases of Rainbow Six Siege because it makes me feel like I’m in an R-rated Home Alone. Every trap or defense we lay is a deterrent to entering a specific room, a soft counter to certain types of executions. If we do our jobs right, these defenses will pare down the number of angles that the attackers can hit us from. If we spread our resources too thin or fail to use them toward a shared strategy, we may as well have set up paint-can pendulums or broken Christmas ornaments to stop special forces.
Siege’s defensive phase tells me that Ubisoft understands that it needs to be meaningfully, mechanically different to the multiplayer FPSes that have dethroned Rainbow Six during its seven years of dormancy. And while it’s concerning that Ubisoft has shown just two maps and one mode of a game that’s meant to release this year, every round I’ve played of it has left me wanting more. Siege’s values—awareness, communication, planning, intensity, fidelity—resonate with every bone in my competitive-FPS loving body.
Operation: OperatorsWhat’s equally exciting is that you may not need to have love for Counter-Strike or Quake III in your skeleton like I do to appreciate what Siege is about. Siege is a shooter, but none of the battles I’ve fought in it have been won solely on aim. The maps are exclusively indoors, and (unless they’re revealed later) there are zero scoped weapons.
Victory hinges on your team tactics, positioning, what tools you choose to bring to a fight and when and where you apply them. That begins at the character selection screen that precedes each round. Here, each player picks an operator and their equipment. These 20 specialists generally pull from the same pool of weapons—submachine guns, shotguns, assault rifles, pistols—but each has a piece of special gear. Mute, a defender, throws out jamming devices that look like high-end wireless routers to block remote-controlled drones and prevent remotely detonated devices from triggering. Rook deploys a bag of armor for his teammates to pick up. Sledge smashes through light
READ MEPublisher UbisoftDeveloper Ubisoft MontrealLink rainbow6.ubi.com/siege
ROUGH OPERATORS
Ten of the twenty planned Siegers
SledgeSASHammer breaks destructible surfaces
ThermiteFBI SWATThermite charge can destroy reinforced walls
AshFBI SWATFires a breach charge from distance
TwitchGIGNShock drone can zap enemies, disable traps
ThatcherSASEMP grenades disable electronics
MuteSASJams camera drones, remote detonators
SmokeSASChemical gas bomb deals DOT
CastleFBI SWATCarries durable Kevlar barriers
PulseFBI SWATCan see through walls with heartbeat sensor
RookGIGNGives armor plates to teammates
ATTACKERS DEFENDERS
There are more than a half-dozen entrances to the plane.
38 JUNE 2015
barricades with a single swing of his hammer. Or you can play as a recruit, who lacks a special ability but picks from a wider range of basic gear—recruits were the only operative I saw who could carry a ballistic shield, for instance.
Which operators your team picks changes the texture of your tactics, but not so much that I’d call Siege a class-based game. That’s good: for the most part, the focus is still squarely on pure, breach-and-clear maneuvers and decision making, not item gimmicks. Mute’s jamming devices can stop nearby breaching charges from detonating, for example, but Sledge’s hammer or a few grenades don’t give a damn about his fancy technology. Use Mute’s jammers in conjunction with Castle’s bulletproof barricade, though, and you’ll have a surface
that’s really tough to crack. “That combination together is very, very good, and we’re seeing a lot of people use it and its been working out pretty well,” Andrew Witts, game designer on the destruction system, tells me. “But at the same time, there’s a pretty good combo on the attack side that can just kind of break that defense entirely.”
In my best round as Smoke, I separate myself from my team on defense and creep up into the third, uppermost level of the massive passenger plane we’re guarding the hostage in. I’m lurking, four or five rooms away from the protective reach of my teammates’ eyes, ears, and guns. I peer down a box-shaped hole in the floor just as two enemies step into the frame.
Because attackers almost always know where the hostage is once
Siege’s combat phase starts, getting a bona-fide drop on them like this is rare. And nostril-dilatingly satisfying. I unload half a magazine and backpedal away. No kill notification pops up on-screen, but I’m pretty sure I incapacitated him—I saw a few shots connect with his back and calves.
I hurl Smoke’s gas charge down the hole and jab the middle mouse button again to detonate. Tense seconds pass as the gas hisses out—it does damage over time, and my hope is that it’ll block any of my victim’s friends from reviving him. Another six seconds, and a kill notification appears with my name on it. It worked! I scuttle back to our ring of defenses, mentally fist-pumping the whole way in the knowledge that my good luck and good timing has thrown the attackers off-stride.
Time bombSiege’s three-minute clock is a key ingredient to the game’s fun, and I
Attackers get assault rifles, defenders get SMGs.
Metal walls and other surfaces are unbreakable.
Bunching up is dangerous.
JUNE 2015 39
say that as someone with a distaste for arbitrary time limits in games. Having a single life and three minutes to live it means that mundane decisions, such as which door you choose to enter from, become quite meaningful.
Every second counts. An extra 40 ticks are tacked on for the defensive setup and scouting phase, where the attacking team drives tiny, remote-controlled drones to locate the hostage and get a look at the configuration of obstacles in their path. When I first played Siege last June at E3, I was skeptical that the attackers’ godlike ability to spy on the defenders’ every move at the beginning of each round made Siege a better competitive game. It seemed too easy to spot the unprotected window or blind spot and exploit it.
I’m much less sour on this aspect of Siege after playing it more. I’ve grown to like the way that scouting acts as a micro-skirmish before the real encounter. Because the attackers’ drones can be destroyed, the defenders also have to focus on
denying as much information as possible during the first 40 seconds. You can assign someone to hunt drones, but that means you’ll have one fewer body putting up barricades and barbed wire. On the other hand, will those defenses have much of an impact if the enemy already knows exactly where they are, and where your guns are pointed? It’s excruciating to watch a drone slip through your feet just as you put up a barricade.
Being a good scout can be equally tough. In one round on Siege’s Plane map, too many of our drones were destroyed and we failed to find the hostage. But we’d spotted two or three defenders (and their obstacles) near the cockpit—we were positive they were bunkered there. We meticulously cleared the top floor of the plane, spamming SMG fire through walls as we spent a breaching charge to crack open a conference room, one of the four possible hostage areas. We burst in as the dust cleared, ready to fight. No one was there. Whoops.
NOW BOARDING
“Your attention is drawn to the following...”
CockpitConference room
Cargo hold Side entrances
Upper floor
Passenger seating
Vertical entry vent
1
2
3
5
6
7
4
4
75
1
2
3
6
You know they’re in the
next room, but not where
40 JUNE 2015
With a minute and a half left, we had no choice but to sprint downstairs, where pristine defenses awaited us. They had rifles primed behind steel half-walls, a deployable bit of cover, and we didn’t have enough gear left to poke holes in their barricades. We didn’t notch a single kill.
House of shardsIt’s worth underlining what an intricate, high-fidelity destruction system Siege has. To break a wooden barrier with melee, I have to target unbroken spots of wood three times before the whole thing crumbles. If I’m shooting naked drywall, I can carve holes with my gun to peek through. “Destruction is the means [by which] you exercise your creativity, in terms of tactics,” says Witts. “It’s what makes new navigational opportunities for you, breaching a wall, bypassing a chokepoint that’s really locked down and forging a new path to the objective. Or blowing a hole and gaining an unexpected line of sight ...Destruction really falls into the center of our gameplay experience.”
Despite this, I wouldn’t label Siege’s weapon handling as realistic. Bullet and explosive damage does
degrade based on how many layers of material an attack has to pass through. Witts tells me: “if you hit drywall and then the wooden stud [within the wall] and manage to make it through and manage to also penetrate the drywall the other side, the damage you’re gonna do to a player is gonna be X percent less because it’s calculating all those layers.” Damage drops off as bullets travel a further distance as well.
This often translates to a tense guessing game when you’re on the opposite sides of a wall with an enemy. You know they’re in the next room over, but not exactly where, or whether they’re prone or moving. If you miss your blind shot, the hole you just made in the wall is the only bullseye they’ll need to return accurate fire and their bullets could do full damage if they shoot clean through it.
It’s a pleasantly intricate system with interesting risks and rewards like this, but I also didn’t expect Siege’s destruction tech to be so damn sensual, a lot of which is owed to its sound design. When you bash a wooden barricade, there’s a reflexive, twig-like snap interrupted by a cascade of clunky, hollow balsa sounds, like the cheapest IKEA
BREAKING THROUGH
Different defenses require different ordnance
Basic melee attack
Guns
Sledge hammer
Frag grenade
C4 charge
Breach charge
Exothermic charge
Gla
ss
win
dow
Woo
den
barr
icad
e
Ceili
ng a
nd
floo
r
Woo
den
and
dryw
all
Kevl
ar
barr
ier
Rei
nfor
ced
wal
l
Unb
reak
able
sc
ener
y
Less damage Can make holes Two hits Three hits Multiple hits
I didn’t expect it to be so damn sensual
JUNE 2015 41
RAINBOW SIX SIEGE
dinner table being thrown down a flight of stairs. When I fire Ash’s M203-style breach launcher, there’s a clink of metal-on-metal as the ’nade spits out, then a high-pitched whirr as the bomb burrows into the wall, followed by the plastic click of a new cartridge slotting in. Even when a breach goes wrong, the particle and sound effects that surround it are downright enjoyable.
Siege’s audio fidelity makes listening a skill, but one piece of operator equipment undermined the need for using my eyes and ears to
spot shadows and footsteps. The first time I play as Pulse, I find a safe spot in the cargo area of the plane and whip out his heartbeat monitor, a boxy gadget that stows my shotgun as I equip it. The viewfinder’s deep-purple screen takes up about a third of my monitor, and through this window I can see enemies through walls in real-time, each player represented by a floating heart icon. A minute into the round, still five-on-five, I see one of the hearts creep slowly up to the wooden barrier we’d placed to block, and shout to my
teammates to blast through the barrier. Easy kill.
It felt great that my information directly led to a kill, and that my teammates had to trust me to open fire—if they missed, degrading the barrier with bullets might compromise their position.
In retrospect, it felt a bit unearned. I hope Ubisoft adds a cooldown to the heartbeat monitor in the finished game, because as it stands it’s an always-available wallhack with a 20-meter range.
In other respects, Siege is a game permeated by tense uncertainty. Because clear lines of sight are so hard to come by, you never truly know when, where, and how an enemy will strike. And when a barricade cracks, or a breaching charge goes off, the urgency you feel to report this new, essential information to your team is exhilarating. It’s a wonderfully deliberate FPS, one defined more by your decisions than your reflexes.
But there are tons of unanswered questions. There will be more multiplayer modes than the one Ubisoft has shown, but we don’t know what form they’ll take. Siege is said to have a singleplayer and co-op campaign, but zero details have been released. It’ll be essential to have smart, skill-driven matchmaking.
Some smoke still needs to clear, but Siege has already made a solid impression on me. The three-minute tactical vignettes it writes are simultaneously intense, disposable, and memorable. If Ubisoft can overdeliver on maps, use pre-release to demolish bugs, and continue to make multiplayer the centerpiece, I think this format of FPS will find a big audience among SWAT wannabes and casual types alike.
Looks like an office, is infact a three-storey superjet.Synchronizing your movements with
teammates to cut down angles is key.
There was a wallthere a second ago.
Pulse’s heartbeat monitor is a bit of a wallhack.
A siege is no time for a selfie!
Defenders can exit the house, but it isn’t advised.
42 JUNE 2015
Team PCG’s favorite games of plotting and planning, both
real-time and turn-based.
T H E T O P 2 0
STRATEGY GAMES
JUNE 2015 43
Endless Legend1 One of last year’s real sleeper hits, Endless Legend is a 4X fantasy
follow-up to Amplitude’s Endless Space—a pretty good game, but apparently not the full measure of the studio’s potential. Shadowed at the time of its release by the higher-profile launch
of Civilization: Beyond Earth, Legend is easily the best game in the genre since Civ 4. It’s deep and diverse, with fascinating asymmetrical factions, sub-races, hero units, quests to discover, and more. It looks gorgeous, too. CT
2 3 Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Red Alert is possibly lighter on strategy than any other game in this list. Were you the first to build a tech center and send 25 mammoth tanks to the enemy’s base before they could do it to you, or to dispatch a chinook full of Tanyas behind their construction yard? Congratulations, you’ve won every skirmish ever! In a way, the lack of balance is part of the appeal of this ’90s peak for the Command & Conquer series, but the escalating chaos of its battles, on land, air and at sea, also ensure that it’s still worth a play today. Plus, it’s freeware now. SR
Neptune’s PrideAs much a social experiment as a
strategy game, Neptune’s Pride pits friends against one another in a battle for control of a star system. The rules are simple: upgrade your stars and get them to build ships, then deploy them to poach more stars. The war unfolds slowly in real-time over the course of a week or so, and may slightly ruin your life during that period. The simple but elegant ruleset leaves lots of room to make and break alliances, and before you know it your friend’s getting up at 3am to launch sneak attacks while you sleep. A simple game that orchestrates amazing drama. TS
Developer Iron Helmet Games Released 2013
By simplifying the XCOM formula, Firaxis cut a more direct route to the things that the series has always been about. This is, fundamentally, a squad action game where you should really care about your squad. Whether you get there by grafting them into towering mechs or by naming them after your friends (or both), Enemy Within stands above other strategy games as the one most likely to make you care about the decisions you make. CT4
XCOM: Enemy Within
Developer Westwood Studios Released 1996
Developer Firaxis Released 2013
Developer Amplitude Studios Released 2014
44 JUNE 2015
TOP 20 STRATEGY GAMES
For this version of Sid Meier’s game of world dominance, Firaxis built a new engine from scratch. It was the first game in the long-running series to use 3D visuals, and features the unmistakable voice of late Star Trek legend Leonard Nimoy. Among a vast array of improvements, the much more intelligent, aggressive AI stands out. It’s also notable for being the first Civ game to make modding easier, which has resulted in some amazing player-made expansions. Civilization fans could debate for hours which is the best in the series, but this is my favorite. AK
6Civilization IV
Galactic Civilizations IIIf you’ve ever wanted to conquer space with an army of customizable doom-ships, this is the strategy game for you. It has smart, creative AI, and a full-size game can take weeks to complete. You have to balance economic, technological, diplomatic, cultural and military power to forge alliances, fight wars and dominate the galaxy. Reminiscent of the Civilization games, but on a much grander scale, and with a lot more depth in places. AK
Mechanically, Homeworld is a phenomenal three-dimensional strategy game, among the first to successfully detach the RTS from a single plane. It’s more than that, though: it’s a major victory for atmosphere and sound design, whether that’s Adagio for Strings playing over the haunting opening missions or the beat of drums as ships engage in a multiplayer battle. If you liked the Battlestar Galactica reboot, you should play this. CT
8 Supreme CommanderOnly Total War can compete with
the scale of Supreme Commander. It’s still exhilarating to flick the mousewheel and fly from an individual engineer to a map of the entire battlefield, then flick it again to dive down to give orders to another unit kilometers away. When armies do clash—in sprawling hundred-strong columns of robots—you’re rewarded with the most glorious firefights a CPU can render. It’s one of the few real-time strategy games to combine air, ground and naval combat into single encounters, but SupCom goes even further, with artillery, long-range nuclear ordnance and megalithic experimental bots. TS
Developer Gas Powered Games Released 2007
5 Developer Stardock Released 2006 Developer Firaxis Released 2005
7Homeworld
Developer Relic Entertainment Released 1999
JUNE 2015 45
9 10 Warcraft III Most notable today for being the
point of origin for the entire MOBA genre, Warcraft III is also an inventive, ambitious strategy game in its own right. The pioneering inclusion of RPG elements in the form of heroes and neutral monsters adds a degree of unit-specific depth not present in its sci-fi stablemate, and the sprawling campaign delivers a fantasy story that—if not exactly novel—is thorough and exciting in its execution. It also has the best ‘repeated unit click’ jokes in the business. CT
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
In addition to being the preeminent competitive strategy game of the last decade, StarCraft II deserves credit for rethinking how a traditional RTS campaign is structured. The human-centric Wings of Liberty is the place to start: an inventive adventure that mixes up the familiar formula at every stage. From zombie defense scenarios to planets that flood with lava every few minutes, you’re forced to learn and relearn StarCraft’s basic elements. CT
Developer Blizzard Released 2010
Total War’s transition to full 3D marks a point before the escalation in complexity that would lead to longstanding AI problems. The original Rome presents a simple, compelling image of ancient warfare and delivers on it phenomenally. It’s a great introduction to one of the most interesting eras in military history. CT11
Rome: Total War
Developer Blizzard Released 2002
Developer Creative Assembly Released 2004
Warhammer 40,00: Dawn of War II 12 It was tempting to put the excellent first Dawn of War on the list,
but the box-select, right-click to kill formula is well represented. Instead let’s appreciate the experimental sequel, which replaced huge units with a handful of rock-hard space bastards, each with
a cluster of killer abilities. In combat you micromanage these empowered special forces, timing the flying attack of your Assault Marines and the sniping power of your Scouts with efficient heavy machine gun cover to undo the Ork hordes. TS
Developer Relic Entertainment Released 2009
46 JUNE 2015
Sins of a Solar Empire 13 Sins captures some of the scope of a 4X strategy game but
makes it work within an RTS framework. This is a game about star-spanning empires that rise, stabilize and fall in the space of an afternoon: and, particularly, about the moment when the
vast capital ships of those empires emerge from hyperspace above half-burning worlds. Diplomacy is an option too, of course, but also: giant spaceships. Play the Rebellion expansion to enlarge said spaceships to ridiculous proportions. CT
14 15 DEFCON DEFCON’s sinister blue world map
is the perfect stage for this Cold War horror story about the outbreak of nuclear war. First, you manage stockpiles, and position missile sites, nuclear submarines and countermeasures in preparation for armageddon. This organization phase is an interesting strategic challenge in itself, but DEFCON is at its most effective when the missiles fly. Blooming blast sites are matched with casualty numbers as city after city experiences obliteration. Once the dust has settled, victory is a mere technicality. It’s nightmarish, and quite brilliant in multiplayer. TS
Crusader Kings II Crusader Kings II is a political
strategy game. It’s as much about who your imbecilic niece is marrying as it is about leading armies into battle. Every landed character is simulated, and each one has goals and desires. It’s complex—you can blame the feudal system for that—but offers clear and immediate drama on a personal level. Its simulation corners you into desperate situations and encourages you to do terrible things to retain power. One time I executed a newborn baby so that his older and smarter sister could reign instead. Feudal times were messed up. PS
Developer Paradox Released 2012
Some games would try to step away from the emotional aspect of a war that happened in living memory. Not Company of Heroes. It’s torrid and difficult and brutal. Sure, its methods are pure Hollywood—the muddy artillery plumes could have come straight from Saving Private Ryan—but the result is the most intense RTS ever made, brilliantly capturing the tactical standoff between WWII’s asymmetrical forces. TS16
Company of Heroes
Developer Introversion Released 2006
Developer Relic Entertainment Released 2006
Developer Ironclad Games Released 2008
JUNE 2015 47
TOP 20 STRATEGY GAMES
The trick of Frozen Synapse is that both sides take their turn at the same time. You’re not just planning the moves of your own squad of cybersoldiers, but also predicting those of your opponent. Before you commit, you get to preview your theoretical turn, and that allows you to attempt some audacious moves. My best ever play involved deliberately sending a soldier into the line of fire just long enough to distract the enemy, leaving them open to a flanking attack. Exhaustive previews ensured the real thing played out with immaculate casualty-free precision. It felt amazing to pull off. PS
17Frozen Synapse
Developer Mode 7 Games Released 2011
Strategy expert Tim Stone described this, in our 2012 review, as a “fresh and friendly” wargame, praising the convincing, challenging AI. You’ll need to use genuinely clever battlefield tactics to beat these computerized generals. The simple interface removes the usual barrier to entry that most wargames have, but there are hidden depths to uncover as you learn the intricacies of its systems. AK
20 Rise of Nations Age of Empires gave us the chance
to encompass centuries of military progress in half-hour battles, but Rise of Nations does it better, and smartly introduces elements from turn-based strategy games like Civ. Instead of marshalling troops from a single base, you build cities all over the map to grow your nation’s borders. When borders collide civs race through the ages and try to out-tech each other in a hidden war for influence, all while trying to deliver a knockout military blow with javelins and jets. There aren’t enough games that let you crush longbowmen with amphibious tanks and stealth bombers. TS
Developer Big Huge Games Released 2003
Xenonauts Its deep strategic systems and clean turn-based combat make Xenonauts a triumph of rebooted game design. If you’re an old fan of the X-COM series, forget about finding your old install disks or putting up with 20-year-old graphics: playing Xenonauts is the best way to relive those glory days with deeper systems. And if you’re new to X-COM, this game will let you explore the series’ classic roots with added depth and details. AK
18
19
Developer Goldhawk Interactive Released 2014
Unity of Command
Developer 2x2 Games Released 2012
48 JUNE 2015
HE A R TThe ideas that became
DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION. By Chris Thursten
IN YOUR
JUNE 2015 49
It’s been almost six months, but it’d be understandable if you haven’t
played or finished Dragon Age: Inquisition yet.
Do so before you read this article.
To say that spoilers follow is an understatement—this is an
exploration of the entire game, from plot-critical choices to the
post-credits sequence.
You certainly should play Inquisition, too—it rightly earned our Best Singleplayer award last
year, and tells one of the most exciting, personal, dramatic and
funny fantasy stories ever brought to PC.
Just don’t read the following unless you want to know how that
story ends.
50 JUNE 2015
nly a few developers can be said to own an entire style of game. You might have described something as an ‘id shooter’ a couple of years ago, but the association doesn’t quite stick any more—after all, the best ‘id shooter’ of the last couple of years was made by MachineGames. You could make a stronger case for ‘Bethesda RPG’ denoting a particular mixture of open-world exploration, lightweight narrative and systems-driven freedom. Along similar lines, chances are you would know what I was talking about if I described something as a ‘BioWare RPG’. Over the last 17 years, culminating in last year’s Dragon Age: Inquisition, the Canadian developer has established a framework for videogame roleplaying unlike any other studio.
Companion characters, complex choices, and stories that maintain their consistency through multiple games are part of that framework. As is a philosophical and practical focus on player agency, and a tonal dexterity that allows BioWare to fold thoughtful considerations of personal identity and full-tilt epic fantasy into the same experience. This is how I’d delineate a BioWare RPG from any other type of RPG on a technical basis. But there’s another way to think about genre, and it’s particularly
relevant here: feeling. In the 1990s, id Software defined a feel of shooter, all about hair-trigger catharsis. Bethesda took the wanderlust inspired by the line ‘see that mountain? You can go there’ and turned it into a genre. BioWare has achieved something similar, but the territory this developer presses into is emotional rather than physical. If you know what I’m talking about when I speak of a ‘BioWare RPG’, I suspect you know it as a feeling.
RPGs, above all other types of games, act upon your heart as well as your head—in fact, I’d argue that this is among the better ways to redefine ‘RPG’ in a world where
everything has a character progression system. BioWare has done more than any other mainstream developer to explore the ‘heart’ part of that equation, and this effort is reflected in the studio’s passionate and diverse fanbase, and even in the angry petitioning it sometimes inspires. One way or another, BioWare makes people care.
Over the years that I’ve been a fan of BioWare’s work, I’ve been waiting for another company to imitate the team’s approach—and that hasn’t happened. Given the opportunity to talk to the Inquisition creative team in some depth, the matter of BioWare’s idiosyncrasy is the issue I’m most keen to understand. I suspect that it has less to do with technical constraints and more to do with cultural values—so that’s where I start.
“We have to keep in mind player agency,” says Dragon Age writer Sheryl Chee, identifying something integral to not only the RPG but BioWare’s creative process. “When you’re talking about agency, you’re talking about how you’re trying to put yourselves in the shoes of various types of players,” adds Patrick Weekes, recently-appointed lead writer on the series. “It’s not just gay players or female players—it’s also the powergamer, the completionist, the guy that wants to search out the story. You’re trying to put yourself into various mindsets at the same time.”
Former lead writer David Gaider adds: “it’s also about balancing the story we want
A HISTORY OF IDEAS BioWare has contributed much to the narrative RPG over the years
Baldur’s Gate (1998)Revived the computer RPG with a renewed focus on narrative and simulation. Also space hamsters.
Baldur’s Gate 2 (2000)Made save file imports work for the first time in a (then) modern RPG.
Neverwinter Nights (2002)New emphasis on multiplayer and player-built custom content.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003)Translated the traditional CRPG to third person.
Jade Empire (2005)Blended action-game combat with traditional RPG storytelling, proving ‘RPG’ didn’t mean ‘stats’.
Mass Effect (2007)Fully-voiced main character and cinematic presentation for player-controlled dialogue.
You’re trying to put yourself into various mindsets at the same time
...but not without its shareof dramatic moments.
Fantasy motifs supporta more human narrative...
JUNE 2015 51
INSIDE BIOWARE
to tell versus the responsibility we have regarding what we say about our fans. A lot of developers can—though not deliberately—narrow down who they think their audience is. It’s apparent to the audience if you don’t see yourself reflected in the game.”
Interrogating a situation from multiple points of view is a theme that links the team’s creative process to the kinds of scenarios in the game itself. For BioWare, inclusivity and social responsibility are essential to effective fantasy.
“The thing that gets me is that there are—let’s call them ‘fans’—out there that think it’s impossible for us to be inclusive and focus on the epic fantasy moments that we need to have,” Gaider says. “All it means is that, as a team, at some point we sit down and have a conversation about what the story says that we haven’t fully considered. What does it say to a female player, or a gay player, or a straight male player? What interpretations are possible, and are we OK with that? It’s our responsibility to give that some thought.”
The notion that a game designer’s responsibility to create entertainment stretches into the realms of social responsibility is currently, unfortunately, a politically charged one. It needn’t be. It is a practical fact, as much to do with the quality of a game as any other technical consideration. You can see this by looking at where the Dragon Age team variously exceeded and fell short of their own standards: Inquisition succeeds enormously in terms of inclusivity, allowing the player to define their Inquisitor to a fine degree alongside companions who represent a diversity of worldviews, political beliefs, and sexualities. The game has, however, presented problems to one of the player-types that Weekes identifies: the
completionist. Inquisition’s open-world spaces are peppered with numerous, low-impact collection and fetch quests. These are flavor, and should never be considered to constitute the bulk of the experience. But it took PCG news editor Phil Savage and me two months to convince our editor, Samuel, to stop hunting bear claws and leave the Hinterlands.
“We underestimated, to some degree, the completionist drive,” says Mike Laidlaw, creative director on the Dragon Age series. “It was possible, as a completionist, that you could damage your own pacing. It’s something I look at and go ‘that right there? That’s a lesson.’”
In discussing the problem of the ‘Hinterlands prisoner’, Laidlaw makes a connection to an earlier problem: the player who bored themselves in earlier BioWare RPGs by feeling that they had to click on every single dialogue option before they could progress. “One of the most intriguing places this happened was when we moved to the conversation wheel,” he says. “There were two reactions—one group of players were upset that it seemed like the game had been reduced. You had other players, though, who looked at the ‘investigate’ option and thought ‘oh, so it’s OK to miss those!’”
BioWare games often split responsibility for the pacing of the game with the player, and in this case the issue is one of proportion: the game gives the player too little clear instruction about what she is expected to do next, and so she sticks with what she knows. The solution comes from clearer presentation. But the player needs to be free to spoil their experience if the agency they’re given is to have any meaning. The team’s job is to negotiate the right balance rather than force an ‘ideal’ result. “Having ‘investigate’ options can really ruin the pacing of a story,” Gaider says, “so you have to walk the line and try to find the places where it’s appropriate.”
For Inquisition, the Dragon Age team implemented new conversation mechanics for delivering the types of information
Dragon Age: Origins (2009)Offered massively divergent ways to start the game, not just end it.
Mass Effect 2 (2010)Completed what Jade Empire started, becoming a full-fledged action game with strong storytelling.
Dragon Age 2 (2011)Placed new emphasis on diversity in perspective, gender and sexuality. Divisive but brilliant.
Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011)Allowed multiple players to participate in Mass Effect-style conversations.
Mass Effect 3 (2012)Introduced ‘Narrative’ difficulty for players who just wanted to play for the story.
Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014)Married traditional linear RPG storytelling with an open world.
It’s apparent to the audience if you don’t see yourself reflected in the game
Ten years later and stillno eye contact.
52 JUNE 2015
INSIDE BIOWARE
normally buried in ‘investigate’ trees. Being able to pop up the conversation wheel in the open world allows the player to seek out more information if they want it, or walk away from conversations entirely. It’s up to them, and if it alters the tone of the narrative then the player owns that decision. This, I think, is the flipside of BioWare’s commitment to its social responsibilities: its willingness to ask the player to ‘perform’ the story they’d like to receive, and the thought that goes into building better tools to let them do so.
This notion is expanded in Inquisition with the introduction of a new set of emotional response options that occur after key events: no longer restricted to being simply happy, angry or sad, the range available to the player includes stoic, puzzled, upset, and so on. “You always want
to give the player a chance to react, in game, to whatever has happened,” Gaider says. “To let the player acknowledge it, and to have that be acknowledged by the game.”
“In past games we’ve forced a reaction or shied away from it,” Weekes adds. “Having
the reaction wheel allows us to have someone be angry, be sad, or if they’re the player that doesn’t care they can be like ‘THAT SUCKS. MOVING ON.’”
Gaider continues. “We ask the player—do you have any feel... feelings about this? And the player can turn it to ‘sad’.”
“Way to not say ‘feels’,” adds Weekes.These responses don’t alter much about
the narrative beyond the conversation in which they occur, but that’s not the point—the point is to allow the player to feel like they’ve expressed themselves, even if they don’t have any power to change what has happened. It’s an intelligent, realistic way of incorporating an emotional performance as part of a game, delineating ‘the power to change something’ from ‘the power to feel ways about stuff’ in a manner that was less clear in, say, the Mass Effect series.
To my mind, the complaining and petition-signing that followed the downbeat initial ending of Mass Effect represents a failure of a portion of the game’s playerbase to uphold their part of the bargain. Instead of acknowledging BioWare’s power to have bad things happen to good people if it suited the story, many fans claimed the ‘right’ to a happier outcome. I ask the Dragon Age team if they felt that they had the freedom to confront the player with outright tragedy in the same way. Player mages and elves, for example, are all but exempt from the prejudices that follow both of those groups around the world of Thedas.
“Personally, and I can’t speak for the rest of the writers on this, I have got negative feedback on anything I have shipped where I exclude player choice based on the player’s race or background,” Weekes says. “Where I have got a more positive reaction is if I allow a player of any race or background to access bonus content. Unless we were making a game that really wanted to explore what it felt like to be discriminated against, we wanted to avoid creating a situation where most players can do something, but elves can’t. That would be realistic in the world, but we don’t think it’s what players want.”
“There’s a difference between restricting player choice and having the world reflect your decisions,” Gaider says. Nonetheless, there are certainly instances where the
ONE CHOICE Who sacrifices themselves in the Fade?
Diplomatic
Humorous
Aggressive
Mage
Warrior
Rogue
AlistairMust have survived Origins.
Can’t have become king. Can’t have become a drunk.
Popular on Tumblr.
LoghainMust have become a
Grey Warden in Origins.Must have survived Origins.
Is a sixty year old man.
StroudLoghain must be dead.Alistair must be dead,
king, or drunk.Has a cool moustache.
Male Female
HAWKEOR
A WARDEN
That felt like something terrible, but I’d never start a petition to save Hawke’s mom
Stop! In the name of love.Before you break my Hawke.
“Behold! The tragic decisionspider awaits you!”
JUNE 2015 53
Dragon Age team have restricted the player in order to deliver a greater dramatic blow.
“Sheryl can speak to this,” Weekes says. “She killed Hawke’s mom. That felt like something terrible but I’d never start a petition to save Hawke’s mom.”
“We don’t shy away when it feels appropriate,” Chee says.
“It’s a case of walking a fine line between having drama in your story and punching the player just because you can,” Gaider adds. “I don’t know that we always walk that
line successfully, but that’s part of the story—you gotta deliver bad news.”
I’m fascinated by the respect and consideration that goes into managing the power dynamic between BioWare and the players of BioWare games. One area where their approach shifted, in this regard, was in the provision of love interests for the player between Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition. This is another area of contention for fans, something that the most ardent BioWare supporters invest a lot of thought into and something that attracts complaints from a reactionary contingent that believe that the developer is progressive at their expense. In Dragon Age 2, every companion bar Sebastian was available as a potential love interest to both a male and female player character. In Inquisition, companions have more specific sexual preferences and this often ties more closely into their background or outlook. The player is more restricted, but these restrictions make your relationships more
meaningful. I ask Mike Laidlaw about the thought that went into that change.
“I think of the characters in Dragon Age 2 as bisexual,” he says. “I think there’s a tendency to hide bisexuality ...and I dislike that. When we started out to make Inquisition I looked at reactions to Dragon Age 2 and it felt almost too convenient’, a little unreal. I didn’t want to back away from bisexual or pansexual characters but not everybody is for everybody. That’s not always going to work out.
“The two things that came out of it was a desire to have characters who were straight, who were bi, who were gay,” Laidlaw continues. “We wanted to make sure that the romances were different, were fresh, didn’t just amount to ‘I love you, I love you too, and now kiss.’ The other big thing for
me was making it so that they didn’t follow a script that was quite as predictable as we have done in the past. That better matches how life works.”
Over time, BioWare RPGs have steadily moved away from ‘simulation’ in the way that it is generally considered to operate in games, but their increased willingness to present complex social situations demonstrates a way of achieving detail that a systems-driven game never could. This commitment to a particular kind of believability exists in tension with not only player expectations (as in the case of the guy who takes to the forums to demand to romance everybody) but also budget. It costs time and money to render many different possible interactions at this level of detail, and the willingness to invest
Leliana: only mostly dead.That’s slightly alive!
Inquisition is notable for having fewer, more significant cameos than its predecessor
BioWare excels at showingcharacters at rest.
54 JUNE 2015
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those resources is something specific, at the moment, to BioWare and its RPGs.
Whenever a longstanding, fan-favorite character returns in a future game, this represents a willingness on the part of the studio to invest heavily into making that happen. Often, a player’s delight at one cameo will lead them to expect more—and, ultimately, to be disappointed when they don’t get to see every familiar face in a new game. Inquisition is notable for having fewer, more significant cameos.
“We think about this a lot,” Laidlaw says. “Who would come back? Well, who would care. Who would add something, emotionally, to the texture of the game. If it’s a character who shows up simply to show up, it falls flat.”
“If we did bring back everybody it’d be like a parade,” Gaider says. “We’ve got two games in the past, one expansion and some DLC. We can’t have them just come marching back. We’ve done some of that , and I don’t think it works particularly well so we just pick our battles.”
Recurring characters also represent different levels of risk based on how complicated their backdrops have become. Someone like Varric is an example of a low-risk inclusion. “He is a very popular character and he had places to go,” says Chee. Varric had a stake in the stories of both Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition and, crucially, is guaranteed to have survived
Dragon Age 2. Other examples aren’t as simple. I ask the group if there are any choices regarding companions that they’ve regretted presenting to the player.
“Daaaaave?” says Chee. “Er, yes,” Gaider replies. “Sometimes I want to write a letter to past-Dave and say ‘future-Dave does not appreciate your decisions.”
He continues. “It’s not necessarily regret, but there are definitely ‘aw, if only’ situations where a character who turned out to be super cool could die. That creates
a ‘Schrödinger’s character’, and as such they become much more risky to include in future titles.”
“We keep half-killing Alistair, for example.” Gaider says. “At this point he’s only 10% alive.”
When a character enters this state, the team refers to it as becoming ‘quantum’. Sometimes, being quantum means not coming back, or coming back in a limited capacity. Other times, more rarely, the team will make a decision to alter that fact entirely—as in the case of Leliana, who can ‘die’ in Origins but returns in a major role in Inquisition regardless.
“That was my call,” Laidlaw says. “I thought that Leliana had a lot to add to the games and I decided that we were going to bring her back. The writing team has been very graceful in humouring me.”
“Poor Sheryl’s nightmare was to write those parts of Leliana where there were many different choices from previous games,” says Gaider.
Chee ticks off the options. “She could have died, you could have romanced her, you could have romanced her and then you died, you could have never recruited here, you could have ‘hardened’ her.”
“Leliana interacting with Morrigan is two quantum states coming together,” Gaider says. “We created antimatter.”
Nonetheless, there are moments when the team embraces the complexity they’ve created for themselves in order to get access to the dramatic potential it possesses. A good example of this is the mission ‘Here Lies The Abyss’, which concludes with the dramatic decision to sacrifice either Hawke or one of three different Grey Wardens from prior games—all characters that can exist in multiple states (see the diagram on page 52). I noted the complexity of that moment to Mike Laidlaw.
“One of the things I had as a goal for the game is that we had at least a few really big moments were you were like ‘oh wow—my previous games really did make a difference’. In terms of the combinatorial
When a character enters this state, the team refers to it as becoming ‘quantum’
A dragon fights a dragon ina flying temple. RPGs!
JUNE 2015 55
explosion of having three characters talking to a character who might have three personalities, who might be male or female, who might be one of three different classes—it was challenging, but it was the fun kind of challenge.”
In this instance, dealing with the complexity was worth it because it capitalized on something that only BioWare can really offer. I asked Laidlaw if they were tempted to take it further—to include other well-known Grey Wardens like Hawke’s siblings Carver and Bethany, Anders, or, the real elephant in the room, the player’s own Warden Commander from Dragon Age: Origins.
“We considered all of those,” he says. “The Warden introduces an enormous complication. The thing that I was personally really leery to do was force a voice onto a non-voiced character. A lot of people really wanted the Warden and I understand that. The problem is that this is such a personal attachment that I was not confident we could do it to the point where it would have that universal appeal. I feel like there’s a sort of respect to saying ‘no, your character is too special to appear here’. The disappointment of the Warden not being there is more palatable than the Warden being there and not being right.”
It’s a double bind that encapsulates the effect BioWare has on its most hardcore fans: Origins gave the player so many tools to create a character that they imaginatively invested in that said character, despite their supreme importance, has become too important to include in the series.
The team is also motivated by a desire to keep things moving and changing. This is the reason for Inquisition’s post-credits twist—the moment when the companion Solas is revealed to be the lost elven trickster god Fen’Harel, the Dread Wolf. It’s a left-field reveal, something that will only mean something to people who have been reading a lot of codex entries over the course of three games, and the ‘death’ of Flemeth in that scene functionally closes off a mystery that has been lingering over
the series since Origins. Laidlaw calls it their ‘Marvel tease’, and compares it to the glimpse of Thanos at the end of the Avengers movie—a gesture forward that is not intended to be understood right away.
“I look at that as more of a forward-looking opportunity that adds a wrinkle to the world,” Laidlaw says. “What it replaces is the ‘what’s up with Flemeth’ mystery, that being a fundamental question that everybody was clamoring for us to resolve. I’ll tell you how that part works, but then I’m going to introduce a new mystery because I don’t want the line to die.
“What it says is ‘more’s to come’ in a slightly less explicit way than ‘007 will return’,” he continues. “It also says ‘hey, are you interested in this? There’s a lot of Dragon Age stuff out there, and there are a lot of people who would be happy to help you out’. In a way, it builds community.”
In that sense, the Solas reveal starts the cycle over. If BioWare’s style is defined by its uncommon willingness to invest serious time and effort into granting the player large amounts of creative agency over the course of multiple games, then there need to be points where new players—those who haven’t been playing these games since 2009—have a chance to join as equals. Fan service has a responsibility to create new fans.
Another fundamental part of the equation is that the BioWare team are part of that same community of fans that Laidlaw describes. “The other big goal with that reveal,” he says, “and maybe this is just us having a bit of fun, is that the whole writing and art team spent the entire game knowing that it was coming. We spent the entire time thinking ‘what can we do with this, how can we seed this.’ Solas was written by Patrick who just had the best time putting in all these sneaky little references.” They’re there, too, if you go looking from them—from Solas’ mural in Skyhold to the wolf statues found more or less everywhere you go.
The reason nobody else makes BioWare RPGs is, I suspect, because no other studio
QUANTUM LEAP
VarricPlays a major role in two games, but can’t die or abandon the player—rare for a companion.
CassandraCan’t die or leave, but she might be Divine. Functionally speaking, she is quantum-Pope.
ColeYou may refuse to recruit him, and he may be more or less human by the end of the game.
BlackwallMay or may not have been recruited, and then he might abandon you—or die in prison.
StenThere’s a couple of ways for him to die in Origins, and he might be the new Qunari Arishok.
IsabelaCan be ignored, can leave, can be handed over to die—or romanced and run away with.
AlistairCan be dead (twice), a Grey Warden, a king, a father, a drunk, or some combination of the above.
The InquisitorCan’t die, but can be one of four species, either gender, and may or may not be a dick.
HawkeCould be dead, a viscount, a rebel, male, female, and with one of several love interests.
The WardenCould be dead, king, queen, a consort, a Warden Commander, three races, either gender...
How ‘quantum’ are your favorite Dragon Age pals?
FINE, THANKS FOR ASKING
QUANTUM ENTANGLED‘OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD’says Corpheus’s Magic 8-Ball.
Tragically, Morrigan still can’t afford clothes.
combines these elements in quite this way—a communal investment in each universe that extends to the players who play the game, a sense of collective responsibility for the player’s experience that binds game systems and social issues, a love of character, and a willingness to invest deep in solving complex multiple-path narrative problems just because they can. It’s not one trick; it’s many, and collectively they amount to a ‘feel’ of roleplaying game that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
MONTH 2015
H A S VA LV E WO N T HE V R WA R?
Why playing with Valve’s new STEAMVR headset feels like looking into the future. By Wes Fenlon
JUNE 2015 57
y first real “holy shit” virtual reality experience was putting on the Oculus Rift Crescent Bay headset for the first time. I already thought VR was cool, but I’d never experienced true immersion—what Oculus likes to call presence—until Crescent Bay. It’s such a powerful feeling that when I put on the SteamVR headset I was afraid I wouldn’t experience it again. What if it had just been a fluke? What if my brain stopped buying the illusion? What if ‘presence’ stopped feeling uncannily real?
Those were the thoughts swirling in the back of my mind as I put on the SteamVR headset (also called the HTC Vive). Turns out, they didn’t need to. I’m more convinced than ever that VR is a game-changer—and industry-changer—when the technology can convey and hold the sensation of presence. And SteamVR is the best virtual reality experience I’ve ever tried.
Better than Crescent Bay. I didn’t experience even a twinge of motion sickness wearing Valve’s headset.
None. And I’m sensitive. “There are a number of techniques being employed to solve [the motion sickness problem],” Valve’s Chet Faliszek told me when I contacted the company after GDC to talk more about SteamVR. “Authoring, framerate, resolution, and more. As many have experienced, it was one of the key teething problems with all early VR and something we put very high on the priority list to address.”
Both Crescent Bay and SteamVR refresh at 90 Hz, so framerate obviously isn’t the only factor at play. But where the Oculus Rift Crescent Bay uses a wide-angle camera to perform positional tracking via dots on the headset, SteamVR uses a pair of laser emitters perched in opposite corners of a room to coat the space with laser beams, and sensors in the headset (and on a pair of controllers) to detect your exact positioning. This laser-based tracking system is the key differentiator between the two headsets. Valve’s solution is incredibly accurate, with no perceptible lag.
The tracking worked flawlessly in my demo. I could move my head to look freely and walk around my small demo room (about 4.5x4.5 meters) to explore the virtual environments of Valve’s demos. Oculus has repeatedly said that the
58 JUNE 2015
Rift is a “seated experience,” even though they demo Crescent Bay standing up. Valve, meanwhile, is embracing the potential of standing and walking around.
Does that mean you’ll need a big empty room for virtual reality gaming? When I asked Valve what size rooms it will support, Faliszek said they were still experimenting. “We have run tests with smaller and larger spaces, and plan to make this a scalable option for customers and developers,” he said.
The smartest feature of their VR software is a grid overlay that magically fades into view when you approach a wall in the physical world. With the consumer headset, you’ll be able to precisely define the walls of your room, and the positional tracking system will alert you when you get close. Another smaller area is highlighted around your feet to show the recommended ‘safe zone’ for walking, well away from any walls.
In one demo, for example, I was under the sea on the deck of a wrecked ship. Fish darted around me, and I peered over the prow to stare down into a rocky canyon below. When I walked across the deck, a neon blue grid appeared a couple of feet in front of me—think of the Star Trek holodeck when it’s deactivated—representing one of the walls of my room. I reached out to touch it, and sure enough, it was
exactly where it should be. Valve calls it the chaperone system. The first time you use a SteamVR headset this November, you’ll tune that system to your room. “There is a short program you run that takes just a few minutes and uses the actual headset to define the bounds,” Faliszek said. “It is important that the user is able to define the area they want to stay in and not have it just dependent on the room layout.”
Valve’s biggest advantage over Oculus, however, is its in-house controllers. The VR controllers
resemble Sony’s PlayStation Move, if you replaced the big glowing balls with satellite dish sensor arrays. The controllers have triggers on the back where your index fingers rest, and a clickable thumbpad on the front just like the pads on the Steam controller. The thumbpad can be divided up into different ‘buttons’—to teach you how to use it in the very first demo, Valve has the circle split into a dozen or so wedges that correspond to different colors. Clicking one and then pulling the trigger blows a different colored balloon.
Because the controllers are outfitted with sensors, they show up on-screen exactly where your hands should be. It’s a huge boon for the immersion of VR. More importantly, the controllers offer a better way to interact with VR games than a typical gamepad. Or at least, they will with some types of VR games. Developers may still find that they want an analog stick to control movement (although I think the trackpads may work well for that purpose), but Valve’s controllers undoubtedly offer a much closer analogue to hands for interacting with a virtual environment.
One of the demos was clearly designed to showcase exactly this. It put me in a cartoony kitchen and tasked me with making soup and a sandwich by combining different ingredients. I had to look around the room, spot some mushrooms and tomatoes, and pick them up by pulling the trigger on the controller, which was represented in the virtual world by a cartoony gloved hand.
At first, my instincts with motion controls made me aim at the ingredients and press the trigger. Nothing happened. Then I realized
SteamVR (The Vive)
Oculus Rift Crescent Bay
DisplayTwo 1080x1200 AMOLED screens
combined.Two screens combined, unknown specifications. Similar pixel count,
but to my eye, Crescent Bay has the higher pixel density.
Refresh rate90Hz 90Hz
OpticsClear, with an overall larger field of view than Crescent Bay, but
not quite as sharp.
A slight edge for Oculus, which has a clearer picture.
TrackingValve’s laser-based ‘Lighthouse’
tracking system is definitely more advanced than Oculus’s IR. Will it
be more expensive, too?
Crescent Bay can track 360-degree head motion, but has
no special controllers to follow, which is less immersive.
MobilityValve used a belt strap to support
some of its cable system, but I still managed to tangle my feet in
cables twice in 15 minutes.
Oculus maintains the Rift is primarily a seated experience, making cables less of a hassle.
ControlsVR controllers that may become
the standard. Wand-shaped, accurately tracked, comfortable.
Nothing, so far, but Oculus did acquire Nimble, a company that
was working on VR hand tracking.
STEAMVR VS CRESCENT BAY
The VR contenders side by side
Display
Refresh rate
Optics
Tracking
Mobility
Controls
SENSOR PROTOTYPE Two of these are enough to cover a decent-sized room.
CONTROLLER PROTOTYPE Replace your hands with handy paddles!
The controllers show up on-screen exactly where your hands should
JUNE 2015 59
STEAMVR
I had to actually reach out and put my hand in the right place in 3D space to grab the ingredients.
One problem Valve hasn’t solved yet is cable management. The device did have a belt that I could strap around my waist to help keep the cables under control, but it’s not enough to completely solve the problem. I walked around the room to explore the boundaries of each demo as much as I could, and ended up wrapping the cables around my feet a couple of times. Because I was moving slowly and carefully, disentangling myself was as simple as rotating in the opposite direction to the one I’d followed to get myself tangled in the first place. But if I’d been playing, say, a high-speed first-person shooter, I could have easily tripped and damaged something. Myself, for example.
The demos did just as great a job at selling presence as Oculus’s reel of Crescent Bay experiences. One of my favorites was a simple paint program for drawing in 3D. Something about the accuracy of the tracking, coupled with the controller, made pointing and drawing in 3D powerfully satisfying. It was like recreating an awesome long-exposure photograph of someone waving around a flashlight, then being able to walk around and look at it in three dimensions.
The best of the demos, inevitably, was Valve’s Portal-themed offering, which is sadly not Portal 3. The five minute slice of Aperture made me realize how much I miss Valve’s attention to detail and touch for comedic timing. The demo placed me in a room in Aperture labs. Portal 2’s ATLAS robot walked in, and a disembodied voice in the testing
facility asked me to open him up to fix a malfunction. It was funny, of course. The demo was barely interactive, but I peered into an exploded-out view of ATLAS’s robot guts, leaning in and out, spinning them around to read the fine print on his parts, and never lost my feeling of presence. The same held true for the entire 15 minutes I was wearing the headset, in fact, except when I intentionally broke presence by stepping through a railing, or looked down and noticed I didn’t have a body.
Valve plans to launch developer kits of SteamVR this spring, with a
consumer release promised for November. Cost remains a giant looming question mark. And as convincing as Valve’s tech demonstrations were, content remains a giant looming question mark, too. Will there be real VR games we want to play at launch? The feeling of presence is greatly enhanced by being able to stand and walk around, but that’s going to require an entirely new way of designing game environments and movement. Most people will be walking around in their living rooms, with only a few feet of space to spare on any side.
Will virtual reality games put us on rails, and only let us walk around in a small radius? Or will designers teleport us from one space to another? Will AI characters take tracking data into account so they don’t collide with your virtual body, shattering immersion?
Virtual reality is a long, long way from being a solved problem. But from what I’ve seen, Valve’s hardware is good enough to support an audience of gamers, not just developers and early adopters. Now we just need some games to play on it. Can I suggest a game with a ‘3’ in the title?
HEAD-MOUNTED CAMERA Valve’s earliest VR demos involved wearing one of these.
‘TELESCOPE’ PROTOTYPE An early design for a single-eye, low latency system.
Valve’s booth at GDC detailed the entire history of its VR project up until now.
60 JUNE 2015
REVIEW
I have a lot of questions
about my bullets
AWE & DISORDERBATTLEFIELD HARDLINE is an exploding spectacle of reckless law enforcement. By Tyler Wilde
Battlefield Hardline’s multiplayer has launched without disaster. There are glitches and dumb physics, but hell, it
works, and it’s fun. After Battlefield 4, that deserves a clap. A slow, slightly sarcastic clap, but a clap.
It’s fun, but in the words of Roger Murtaugh, I’m getting too old for this shit. It’s exhausting. I pine for Battlefield 1942’s simple structures, sprawling terrain, and Lee-Enfield rifles. The same fundamentals are still here—big maps, classes, vehicles, 64 players—but the speed and firepower make it a struggle to live long enough to enjoy them.
It’s got the rhythm of an old car lurching forward and then bouncing back off its front tires. I spawn into a helicopter and blow up immediately, or spawn on my squadmate and instantly trade lives (somehow) with a guy right in front of me, or spawn and get run over, or spawn and drive head first into an RPG. Objectives are pelted with explosives and there’s always someone with a shotgun around the corner (or crouching in the corner). When crappy, short lives
like these pile up one after the other, the screen gets a good flipping off.
The only thing I wouldn’t mind going faster are the unlocks. There aren’t all that many guns, but not having the good ones is a barrier to fun. I spent the first several hours struggling with the Mechanic’s default MP5K, losing short range duels I felt I should have won. So I switched to the Operator’s assault rifle and had a better experience. Then I realized I had a battlepack sitting unopened with my Deluxe Edition ACWR carbine. Suddenly I’m getting tons of kills, and that’s some bullshit. My apparent skill level shouldn’t jump a bunch of notches because I have a special weapon. I like progression systems because they give me something to work toward, but I’m interested in lateral progression. It shouldn’t feel like I’m walking head first into a gale of bullets until I progress.
Glitch shooterAnd while Battlefield’s signature glitchy physics anomalies can be fun, I have a lot of questions about my bullets. Hardline has not launched
disastrously, but I have experienced occasional frustrations—apparent hits that don’t register, or being killed through a door before it opens and before I should have even been visible to the enemy.
But if all that doesn’t aggravate you so much that you step away, there’s plenty to enjoy. My favorite mode is Hotwire, which epitomizes Hardline’s speed. It’s still about capturing and controlling points, but those points are now cars that must be driven around the map. Because driving cars in circles is how you uphold the law, and also break it.
There are three basic activities: finding RPGs/blowing up cars, providing air support, and driving or riding in cars. You also get little shootouts when you cross paths with the enemy on the way. Bouncing around in a car, music blaring, leaning out the window to spray bullets, it’s hard not to have fun.
The big problem is that while the new cars are mostly nice to control on a keyboard, they sometimes want to go faster than the server, stuttering and rubberbanding against each other as the physics sorts itself out. One time I collided with a motorcycle and flew into the ocean—and I was in a sedan. The maps also feel way too small, so that I was often driving out of bounds.
Heist, in which the criminals must steal two packages and deliver them, works well on maps big enough to support it. In some cases it’s a meatgrinder, but the Bank Heist map especially can be tactically rewarding. Coordinated squad work is essential, and I only wish people talked to each other more.
I also really enjoy Blood Money on maps with vehicles. Both teams must retrieve cash from a central repository and deliver it to their vaults, but can also steal from each other’s vaults. There’s just
What is it?A multiplayer focused first-
person shooter with cops ‘n’ robbers flavor.
Influenced byBattlefield 4, Call of Duty:
Modern Warfare
Reviewed onCore i5-3570, 8GB RAM,
GeForce GTX 760/ Radeon R9 290
AlternativelyBattlefield 4, 84%
Copy protectionOrigin
Need to know
Cash blaster
What a round of Blood Money looks like from above and on the ground
1 The cash pileA slaughter house. Both
teams must steal money from this central repository. Full of fire, explosions and bullets. Life expectancy: ten seconds.
2 Run!Run as fast as you
can (or grab a ride) to your vault to deposit your cash. If you’re killed, all that money falls to the ground for an enemy to pick up.
3 Reckless drivingAbout halfway
through, it’s time to start hitting the enemy vault to reduce their pile. But first you have to get there. Motorcycles work well.
4 ThieveryNow just load up
your bag before someone notices. As a voice will alert them, you can bet they will notice, and probably shoot you.
1
2
4 3
JUNE 2015 61
You can now hang out of windows as a passenger, but good luck hitting anything with that rifle.
So, any way I can resolve this? No?
There seems to be less focuson big ‘levelution’ destruction.
A viable tactic: park a truck with a big gun, sit and shoot.
“You don’t think we look a little... conspicuous?”
Wait, did I tell you about Invisible Unicycle Mode?
62 JUNE 2015
420 blaze it.
Evidence! They won’t get away with eating that much gum.
Before most big fights, you can tag enemies and plan your attack.
I was here earlier, hencethe chalk outline.
Making arrests earns more points. Also feels pointless.
Arrests don’t always go as planned.
JUNE 2015 63
REVIEW
The catch is that you can’t arrest more than three guys at once
constantly stuff to do. Grab an armored truck and drive it into the enemy vault if you want, or just chase around their money carriers, or steal some cash yourself, or find a Stinger and blow up a helicopter. You’re going to be blown up too, any second now, so just go nuts. It’s a madhouse. It’s tiring. And it’s an enjoyable, loud, farcical chaos that will probably get old, but for now is a big, dumb exploding playground.
Conquest and TDM are back, too. Conquest is still fun even though it has nothing to do with the cops and robbers theme, and TDM is where people go to speed through the progression—that hasn’t changed. There are also two new 5v5 modes, and while they’re fine (Counter-Strike on big, open maps, essentially), they’re not being played much. I don’t expect Hardline to compete with CS:GO anyway.
Thin blue lieThe campaign is to The Shield what Call of Duty is to Tom Clancy novels. They’re both stories of betrayal and corruption—tough men with tough jawlines making tough choices—but any grounding in actual police work is upended by car chases and shootouts and last second escapes, explosions and impossible odds.
“This city is a battlefield... and you’re walking a fine line, kid.”
“No, sir, I’m taking a hardline.” Pew pew!
All right, it’s not that dumb. The story’s fine: you, a good and honest cop, are a pawn in a corrupt force’s drug game, and it’s time to take out the trash. (Also not a real line, I’m just summarizing here.) The acting is good—there are some talented folks involved—although whenever Nicholas Gonzalez or Kelly Hu sweat it looks like their creepy Plasticine faces are melting.
Police work is simple in Hardline: arrest criminals, shoot criminals when you can’t arrest them, find evidence. It has so little basis in reality, my initial unease about the subject matter—modern police corruption and brutality isn’t a frivolous subject, especially right now—almost wholly evaporated. I had to laugh when I was reprimanded because my partner punched a guy after the two of us
filled a hotel with bodies. The bad guys are gun-toting lunatics, you’re a gun-toting lunatic. It’s a lot like Max Payne in that respect.
It plays a little like Payne, too. There’s no shootdodging, but each room is something to try and try again until the puzzle is solved. Generally, I solved the puzzle like Max would: by shooting everyone. I’m crouch-walking between cover, conserving ammo and taking shots carefully, and it doesn’t take much to kill me. This is true, at least, on the hardest mode, which is how I recommend you play. It’s a decent shooter campaign, with the freedom to take on most areas from a variety of positions and with the arsenal and gadgets of my choosing.
In one part, I have to breach one of two buildings, the outsides of which are guarded by patrolling baddies. So, what’s a cop to do but load up with a grappling hook, zipline, revolver, and P90 submachine gun? I approach around an unguarded side of the right building, and fire my grappling hook to the roof. I could have gone any other way, but this way I’m up and out of sight quickly. As I creep through the roof access door, I’m spotted. A quick finger on ‘G’ flashes my badge. “Freeze!”
Unlike Max, Nick Mendoza can actually do police stuff. Flashing your badge at isolated enemies causes them to drop their guns and surrender, at which point you can take them down and cuff them. Then they fall asleep. Seriously, there are ‘Z’s above their heads.
The catch is that you can’t arrest more than three guys at once, and if you’re spotted cuffing someone, they’ll open fire. It’s the most ridiculous thing about Hardline’s campaign, and not a great a deal of fun. Later in the game, I was in a small room with about eight guys. Tossing a shell draws guards to me one at a time so they can be arrested in my secluded arrestin’ spot. I cleared the room slowly, building a pile of sleeping goons in my little corner. Hard as it would’ve been, the John Wick approach would’ve been more fun. And the fact that you can arrest criminals makes it even weirder that you can shoot them, bringing back some of that unease. Either I’m Max Payne or I’m Lennie
Briscoe, either this is a shooter or it’s Police Quest—I don’t think you can have it both ways.
I’m rewarded for police-like behavior with points, but it doesn’t feel worth it. Sometimes you have to collect evidence to progress, but I didn’t go above and beyond. Because it’s boring. Oh, and I had a couple of mandatory stealth and car chase sequences that weren’t much fun.
When it’s not infuriating, Hardline is weird, brutal fun. The multiplayer is the important bit, and it’s a parade of points, mini-achievements, goofy car crashes, motorcycles flying into helicopters, and incendiary grenades. It’s too much too fast, with a low time-to-kill that makes every life fleeting. It’s not elegant, but the lawless bedlam has its moments. When I’m doing well, getting kills and screaming around a map in a stolen sports car, it’s worth it.
Expect to pay $60 Release Out now Developer Visceral Publisher EA Multiplayer 64 player team-based Link www.battlefield.com/hardline
76A hard campaign and over-stimulating but fun multiplayer make for a good time amid infuriating deaths.
Enforcing the law
Nick Mendoza sticks to a strict code Are the suspects armed?
Yes No
No
Arrest them Congratulations! You’ve earned some police points. But another
criminal has become alerted. You’d better shoot him. I see
Well, you can hide. But you know you have to shoot the criminals in
the next section anyway, right?
You’re playing a different game
How many are there?
Fewer than four Four or more
Shoot them
I didn’t know that
I don’t want to
OK
YesAnd are you bored?
64 JUNE 2015
REVIEW
On a piece of coffee-stained, doughnut-crumbed paper, LA Cops is great. It’s an
unashamed 3D clone of top-down shooter Hotline Miami, but its rich ’70s era Los Angeles vibe coats it with a much more lighthearted sense of humor. Where Dennaton’s game delves into a dark psyche, LA Cops just cracks a corny one-liner.
Cops’ aesthetic is the best thing it’s got going for it, even when the writing frequently falls short of the mark. This is a simple but colorful game, laced with a funky distorted guitar soundtrack that sounds like it’s never going to get old. It does—and disappointingly quickly—but the partners-in-crime-prevention banter during short cutscenes gives it a much needed rest.
The game’s unique shtick is its reliance on two playable characters for each level. Each cop is a classic ’70s stereotype with over the top
hair-dos, overdone accents, audacious sideburns and surnames like Kowalski. You can switch between them as you go, and the intention is clearly for you to invent interesting ways to double-team unsuspecting drug lords and low-level goons.
This is all well and good, but LA Cops feels shoddy, clunky and at times downright broken in your hands. The movement isn’t nearly as smooth as it should be, the controller settings are in need of tweaking before you can even use the right thumbstick to aim. On mouse and keyboard it’s just about fine, but running and strafing still doesn’t feel fluid. And who am I kidding? Fine is just not good enough for something that imitates one of the most precise twin-stick shooters of the last few years. While Hotline gives everything in its world a sense of solidity, LA Cops feels like it’s
floating. Oh, and the menu systems are absolutely terrible.
The rest is pretty familiar stuff. You burst into isolated levels to massacre a bunch of bad guys—hostage-takers, drug dealers and everything in between. You have a melee attack which doubles up as a way to arrest bad guys, making possible a non-lethal run where you sneak up behind foes and whack the cuffs on ’em. You’ll get a higher score, but lose the most satisfying method of interaction: guns.
The unique dual-character thing falls apart, too. I would often try to place one of my cops in interesting positions on the map, only to get bored and just brute force my way through because it was the most fun way to play. Why spend so much time slowly moving through the levels as a unit when you can more easily just use one cop?
The killing blow is that it never gets under your skin. It never becomes compulsive. In Hotline Miami, dying just means you try again with the adrenaline streaking through your veins. With LA Cops, I never had that ‘just one more try’ urge, and I think that’s the biggest criticism I can give a game like this.
Expect to pay $15 Release Out now Developer Modern Dream Publisher Team 17 Multiplayer None Link www.la-cops.com
50Some interesting ideas, but the frustratingly shoddy execution works completely against what the game is trying to do.
NOTLINE MIAMILA COPS evokes Hotline Miami (the good one) but doesn’t quite hit those standards. By Sam White
What is it?A 3D twin-stick tactical take
on Hotline Miami’s top-down shoot-’em-up.
Influenced byStarsky and Hutch, other ’70s
cop shows
Reviewed onIntel i5 CPU, GTX 970, 8GB
RAM
AlternativelyHotline Miami, 86%
Copy protectionSteam
Need to know
I left my buddy staring at a wall to cover me, in case it all goes tits up.
He’s the master chef.They shot at me
first, I swear!
66 JUNE 2015
REVIEW
Socrates, Descartes, Marx... what a bunch of chumps. If only they’d known that the
proper way to discuss philosophy wasn’t arguing over the nature of forms or building metaphors, but recording a couple of hours’ worth of voiceover and slapping it on the top of some pretty puzzle chambers. The Allegory of the Cave? Bah! Call us when it’s in the Unreal engine.
It’s an approach that can work, as in The Talos Principle, or not, as in most games that have tried it that are not The Talos Principle. Pneuma doesn’t shift the balance much in its couple of hours of running time. It’s the tale of an arrogant, mysterious entity who awakens in a new world and decides that since it all revolves around him, he must be its creator god. Whatever that actually means. “Can I create rocks I cannot lift?” he ponders. “Clearly I can create doors I cannot open!”
What starts out as amusing narration soon loses much of its charm, due to there being far, far too much of it and the tone never really changing. Omnipresent narration can be great when it’s funny, like The Stanley Parable, but here it’s just mildly amiable babble convinced that it’s more profound than it is.
Where Pneuma does score is in its setting, a gorgeous series of puzzle rooms with some pretty set-pieces early on and a generally high quality Greco-Roman palace of golds and greens and marble as far as the eye can see. Speaking of eyes, it also has a clever central gimmick. While there are levers and buttons, most of the puzzles revolve around perception. If you can see an eye on a pole, whether or not it can see you, it might open a door. Or, it might only open it if you look away and keep your back to it. In another case, an unsolvable floor puzzle turns out to
merely be half of the picture, the other up on the roof. At other points, puzzles become about playing with your perception in other ways, for instance setting two sets of terminals according to the other’s pattern of lights, with that pattern changing every time you look away.
For the most part, these puzzles work well. They’re very easy—even the three harder bonus ones are still no big problem—but they require enough discovery and produce enough clever ‘aha!’ moments to give them just that little bit extra. Pneuma is also a good virtual reality game, with support for the Oculus DK2 built in (although it was finicky on my device). Frustrations are rare, but the puzzles don’t tend to build on each other much, either.
The narration does its best to pretend that there’s some deeper element to it all, but there really isn’t. Pneuma certainly isn’t a bad game, but neither is it much more substantial than a leaf caught on the wind. Its two hours race by, and its god is pleasant enough company despite sounding like a first-year philosophy student down the pub. Once finished, however, there’s oddly little to look back on.
Expect to pay $20 Release Out now Developer Bevel Studios Publisher Deco Digital Multiplayer None Link www.penumabreathoflife.com
63A solid, if thin puzzle game, with not quite as much to say as it thinks it has. It’s very nice to look at, though.
A GOD’S LIFEPNEUMA: BREATH OF LIFE isn’t quite a Platonic ideal. By Richard Cobbett
What is it?A mix of puzzle-solving and
philosophy, wrapped in Unreal powered prettiness.
Influenced byPortal
Reviewed oni7 CPU, GeForce 970, 4GB RAM
AlternativelyThe Talos Principle, 84%
Copy protectionSteam
Need to know
There’s little sense of place after the first area, when the puzzles take over.
Ha, I’m doing II before I. Because I’m a rebel.
Yay, a rotatingrings puzzle. Yay.
68 JUNE 2015
REVIEW
Hotline Miami 2
simply doesn’t have
anything to add
THE COMEDOWNHOTLINE MIAMI 2: WRONG NUMBER is an unnecessary follow-up to a classic. By Chris Thursten
The original Hotline Miami was brutish, nasty, short. Its basic vocabulary was elegant enough to support a
score-attack videogame but loose enough, creative enough, to make you feel like that wasn’t entirely the point. It was a marriage of Robotron and Lynch, Pollock with a machete going through the comedown of a century. It was about turning ugly ugliness into beautiful ugliness. If you lacked the hyperacute reflexes necessary to score an A grade in every level, you could still chase that feeling. Despite the bad-trip aesthetic and the bloody cruelty of it all, it actually represented a kind of harmony: pop art enhancing a game, a game enhancing pop art. It’s a classic for that reason.
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is not a classic. Nor is it—and as somebody who loved the original, this is a tough admission—a particularly good game. This is despite it being, in many ways, more or less the same game. You slam through doors and send Russian
mobsters sprawling to the floor. You kick their heads in, grab their knives, shank the next guy, throw his pipe through a window, shotgun a dog, turn the wrong corner, die in a hail of gunfire, hammer ‘R’, do it again, hammer ‘R’, do it again.
Hotline Miami 2’s problems span the entire game, from its overall structure to its plot, the decisions that have been made regarding player characters, ability-modifying masks, and level design. It certainly amounts to more Hotline Miami—it is substantially longer than its predecessor, taking me eleven hours to reach the end—but it’s worse Hotline Miami. If the original game was the movie Drive—a seductive pop cultural moment, shallow but resonant, a crystallized mood—then this sequel is the poorly-received follow-up, Only God Forgives. More complex but less powerful.
Where the original focused on the experience of a single killer and treated the introduction of a second protagonist as a key plot beat, Hotline Miami 2 switches between characters and eras with every level.
The plot follows threads in 1985, 1989 and 1991, encompassing dream sequences, flashbacks, killing sprees that turn out to be movie scenes that turn out to be dream sequences that turn out to be flashbacks, and so on. Chapters are separated by non-combat vignettes, and it features far more talking than its predecessor.
Phoned inThe game offers substantially more plot detail, too, but this is tied to characters who don’t have character and events that don’t have meaning. Dialogue is stilted and relationships boil down to gestures. The constant shifts in time and perspective suggest an attempt to recapture the first game’s sense of strange, but it’s too convoluted to amount to a similarly seductive solipsism. Hotline Miami 2 simply doesn’t have anything to add. It’s an ambitious, Lynchian superstructure surrounding a not-particularly-interesting crime fable.
When it tries to be more than that, it stumbles. The first decision you face is whether or not to enable scenes of sexual violence: then, in the prologue, there’s a suggested rape by your character that turns out to be a scene from a video nasty (or does it, and so on). Sexual violence does not occur again, and its inclusion here adds nothing, says nothing, and plays no role in the overall plot. It’s artless and alienating, and giving the player the choice to switch it off suggests a lack of confidence in the entire idea. If it’s unnecessary enough that it can be removed without consequence, why include it?
The first casualty of this problematic structure is atmosphere, but the second and more serious is combat. Characters are differentiated with hard playstyle restrictions. Where masks previously added subtle perks that
What is it?Sequel to the brutally tough
2012 indie action classic.
Influenced byHotline Miami, Drive
Reviewed on2.8GHz CPU, 2GB RAM,
512MB GPU
AlternativelyHotline Miami, 86%
Copy protectionNone (from GOG)
Need to know
The man in the lion mask
How the fans pan out
CoreyZebras can do
forward rolls. This can save your life, but it’s also bound to the
same key as melee finishing moves—the cause of at least one unnecessary death.
TonyOverpowered in
the original game, Tony still has lethal
punches but now can’t use items at
all. Bait gun-toting enemies around
corners to progress.
Alex & AshTwo characters, one with a chainsaw, one with a gun. Using the gun to lure enemies around corners into the saw turns out to be a strikingly
effective strategy.
MarkComes with twin
machine-pistols that can be held out to
either side, but can’t be dropped until
you’ve used up all the ammo. Mandates a
loud approach.
JUNE 2015 69
After pulling this off,dying really hurts.
As are phones, cometo think of it.
In Miami, all humansare awful.
Compulsory dual SMGs:a double-edged sword.
“Oh thank god for that” isanother way to put it.
70 JUNE 2015
Walk into theclub like.
Corners: still overpowered.Those poor stupid guards.
Dream sequence? Movie?Bad trip? You decide.
Over-large levels emphasizefun-killing caution.
Alex and Ash do everythingtogether. Including this.
JUNE 2015 71
REVIEW
Dogs spinning on the spot, forever
encouraged experimentation, here they dictate much about how you approach a level. One character carries a gun that can be switched for a knife at any time. He can’t pick up dropped weapons at all, and if he runs out of ammo he has to restock at scarce ammo crates. This turns Hotline Miami 2 into an entirely different game—and a worse one. Imagine the frustration of facing down an enemy who can only be wounded with bullets while playing a character who is out of ammo but isn’t, for some reason, allowed to use the guns that are right there. That’s Hotline Miami 2.
One group of characters does use masks, but each mask represents a different character and, similarly, they each have a substantial effect on how you play. Another character earns mask-like upgrades but, disappointingly, several of these overlap with other characters in the game. One character fights non-lethally (mostly) and will discard bladed weapons or firearms that you try to pick up. The best characters, in this scenario, are the ones that use no gimmicks at all—because it’s only then that you get to play with all of the game’s systems, and it’s those systems that make Hotline Miami what it is. This is not simply a shooter or a stealth game or a brawler: it is at its best when it is a freeform combination of the three, and when that freedom is placed in the hands of the player.
When you do have that freedom, you run up against level design issues. There are sequences that capture the original’s grueling, rewarding sense of escalating power and violence, but far more that entirely frustrate. The use of guns is frequently mandated by the placement of melee-proof enemies, long sightlines and distant snipers. This is the case even when you’re not being forced to use particular weapons. You spend far more time edging around corners taking pot-shots at out-of-sight enemies than you should in a Hotline Miami game.
This more restrictive design means that twisting Hotline Miami’s basic systems is the most reliable way to progress, and this, in turn, draws the eye towards longstanding unresolved bugs, inconsistent AI,
and flat-out instability. I have encountered, reliably, mission-critical items falling outside of the play area; invisible walls forming behind certain open doors; dogs spinning on the spot, forever; guns firing through people. Enemy behavior is all over the place. You can fire a gun in one room and alert enemies half a level away but not the guy next door. Dogs can’t be hurt while turning corners. Gunmen won’t see you through an open door if the door is open just so. One tough five-stage midgame mission crashed three times on the final section, forcing me to play the entire thing over from scratch every time. I have never been more relieved to see the words ‘Level Clear’.
There is still, however, power in those words, and I pressed on through the campaign partly because I had to and partly because I was so angry and disappointed with the game that I wanted to see it through to the bloody end. The feeling of utter frustration brought about by the new character mechanics and level layouts is, in some ways, a kind of double-edged victory for Hotline Miami. I certainly felt like an actual masochist.
Trying to connectThere is also a sequence, right at the end, so inventive and powerfully presented that it suggests what really building on the original’s ideas might look like. It’s not particularly interesting mechanically, but you’ve never seen anything like it. It lasts about three minutes.
There is another, powerful thing the game gets right, and that’s the soundtrack. It comes with almost 50 lossless tracks by artists like Jasper Byrne, Carpenter Brut, M.O.O.N, Perturbator. The experience is enormously enhanced by their work. That crash-prone five-stage mission is accompanied by Carpenter Brut’s Roller Mobster, and despite listening to it on the way to work for the last couple of months and having now listened to it over and over during two unnecessary additional attempts at that mission, it’s still fucking rad.
It’s also a better looking game—a familiar style rendered with a little more detail in the pixel art, more and more nuanced animations, and nice little touches like heads rolling away from decapitated corpses and pixelated blood softening as it touches water. If it wasn’t for the narrative and the structure, the art and music would make Hotline Miami 2 a stylistic improvement.
The big picture, though, is one of entirely-dispelled mystique. Did anybody need to know more about the circumstances leading up to the events of the original game? Did Hotline Miami ever need lore? Did you ever wish that you had less freedom to determine your course through a level? I didn’t, and I don’t. This is not the follow-up that Hotline Miami deserves. Then again, perhaps it didn’t need a sequel at all.
Expect to pay $15 Release Out now Developer Dennaton Publisher Devolver Digital Multiplayer None Link www.hotlinemiami.com
57Restrictive design decisions sap the energy from a series that revels in it, and technical issues deal the killing blow.
Swear jar
Hotline Miami 2’s worst bits, rated against the language they provoke
Lang
uage
sev
erit
y
Situation
Mission-critical key
falls outside the level for the second
time.
Gun-centric level strips
away all the fun.
Long stage
crashes for the third
time.
Dog is invulnerable to melee attacks while turning corner.
Appalling boss battle. A bit right
at the end suggests
what a good sequel might
look like.
72 JUNE 2015
REVIEW
No matter what your
interest, there’s a lot
here to like
METROPOLIS NOWFrom the ground up, CITIES: SKYLINES is a fun and satisfying city-building sim. By Christopher Livingston
Cities: Skylines didn’t have to stretch far to trump 2013’s SimCity: it just had to be a good city-builder with an
expansive area to build in, support for custom content, and no always-on DRM. Skylines offers all this. It’s also fun and addictive.
The biggest challenges involve roads and traffic, which is not unexpected given that this comes from the same developer/publisher duo as Cities in Motion. Laying down roads is easy. Laying down roads that make sense, not so much.
It’s not just traffic congestion you have to worry about, it’s logical traffic routes. Figuring out the best roads and intersections takes time, experimentation, and close scrutiny, something I think many players will enjoy. If you’d rather build unbroken tree-lined avenues and long, winding roads you certainly can, but be prepared for your city to lose a good deal of functionality.
The ability to create separate districts is a great feature, allowing you to tinker with laws and
regulations without having to unleash them citywide, such as those for recycling, free public transport, and legal drug use. You can tax your districts differently, and even ban industrial traffic in congested areas (just be sure to provide heavy trucks with an alternate route). You can create industrial districts to focus on oil and mining, logging, farming, or general industry.
Friendly skiesIn addition to managing the physical aspects of your city, you’ll have to keep an eye on your bank account and supplement it with loans, decide what to budget for utilities and services, tweak taxes for residents and business, and play with various policies. Nothing about the simulation feels terribly deep, at least economically, and apart from focusing on specific types of industries, or choosing office towers over factories, none of my cities have felt particularly specialized. That suits me fine, though players looking for a deeply complex city simulation might be a little disappointed.
At times, Skylines is intensely satisfying, such as when solving a troublesome traffic snarl or when all the buildings in a district begin leveling up because you’ve provided the right combination of services and amenities. At times it’s soothing, like when flying the free camera around or peering down at the tiny NPCs living in your creation. It can also be terrifically tense: the citizens of Skylines are pretty tolerant, but let them suffer power outages or other discomforts too long and they’ll abandon you in droves.
Unique buildings such as stadiums and opera houses become available as your city grows, even a space elevator and a large hadron collider. Transportation options include metro tubes, airports, and trains and ships for both passengers and industrial use. Your available building space, initially just a single square of land, grows as well. There’s a healthy five-by-five grid of which you can officially purchase nine tiles of 2x2 km each, but there’s already a mod in the workshop that lets you buy and build on all 25 tiles.
Plumbing feels like busywork, demand for new buildings can stall, and driver AI is a little off-kilter, but these issues haven’t done much to dampen my enjoyment. Due to the map and asset editor, I suspect the Steam Workshop will quickly fill with custom creations. Top it off with smooth performance and a reasonable price, and I suspect no matter what your interest in city building, casual or intense, there’s a lot here to like.
What is it?A city-building and management sim.
Influenced bySimCity
Reviewed onIntel i7 3.33GHz, 6GB RAM,
Nvidia GeForce GTX 960
AlternativelyA career in town planning
Copy protectionSteam
Need to know
Unnatural disasters
The high cost of livingThere are no tornadoes or earthquakes in Skylines, but you can still experience disasters. Here they are on the Richter scale of severity.
Expect to pay $30 Release Out now Developer Colossal Order Publisher Paradox Interactive Multiplayer None Link www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines
86It comes with a handful of flaws, but this fun and addictive sim scratches that city-building itch that other sims can’t.
Bad waterFrom pollution to misplaced sewer pipes, a lot can poison your city’s water supply. Don’t make your citizens drink their own poop.
CorpsesUncollected dead bodies stack up in buildings fast. Still, the tenants are pretty nonchalant about it.
Abandoned buildingsSince no one likes living next to an abandoned building, just one of them can become many very quickly.
FloodingFlooding is rare, but do be very careful where you build your hydroelectric dams. Sorry about that, suburbs.
Power outagesIf the grid goes down, people notice. Especially if it shuts down the sewage plant. See poop drinking.
OH THE HUMANITY! OH MY PHONE BATTERY!
JUNE 2015 73
People are dying to live here.
Just a guess, but I think I just made everyone happy.
Red means traffic jams. Gonna be a long night.
Happily for these guys, light pollution isn’t an issue.
You can follow NPCs around, and it’s not even creepy.
There are a few futuristic buildings to unlock.
74 JUNE 2015
REVIEW
You’ve a shipful of
sailors ready to die for you and you own
New York
WEATHEREDASSASSIN’S CREED ROGUE sails the stormy waters of iterative design, but it’s a worthwhile voyage. By Phil Iwaniuk
A cynic could have a field day here. It’s the second swashbuckling Assassin’s Creed since 2013, developed by a
gaggle of Ubisoft’s international studios while its prizefighter Montreal team was busy strapping hidden blades to the cast of Les Mis for Unity. More of the same, then—what else would you expect of a series that invites you to give feedback via a star rating after every mission, as if you just had a parcel delivered?
There’s no denying that Assassin’s Creed Rogue is fundamentally a redeployment of Black Flag’s winning formula in a new location, and it’s also true that it bears the crow’s feet and laugh lines of a graphics engine epitomized for aging last-gen consoles. But here’s the kicker: none of that gets in the way of your enjoyment. Not if you’re prepared to exercise a little patience in the opening hour or two.
Since you ask, that winning formula is as follows: you’re plonked on a beach with nothing but a colloquial British Isles accent and exceptional parkour skills to your name. Oh, and a fully-crewed ship. Quite important, that, because your
freedom to roam the seas, dock at any number of alluring locales or hurl cannon balls at other vessels still creates an irrepressible sense of adventure. You’re Irishman Shay Cormac this time, fledgling assassin hoping to foil a Templar expedition for ancient artifacts.
It’s while manning the wheel of the Morrigan that you’ll find Rogue’s most addictive feedback loop: attacking ships to plunder them for crew members and resources, to spend on ship upgrades. To attack bigger ships, obviously. Or, you can go about it the old-school way and stripmine each onshore location of its treasure chests, shanties, Animus fragments, naval Animus fragments, Templar maps, native pillars, Viking swords... Oh, and there’s a city management layer later on too.
The great outdoorsHowever you feel about sweeping environments clean of glimmering detritus, the scenery of Rogue’s three game maps—New York, River Valley and the North Atlantic—provides a powerful incentive in itself to hop from ledge to branch to clifftop in pursuit of whatever knick-knack you’ve set your sights on. The northern lights cast a ghostly shimmer across the North Atlantic and its ice sheets, soothing your soul after a hard day’s stabbing, and River Valley’s craggy archipelagos and quaint lighthouses put a spring back in your step after your last whaling misadventure. The visuals are far from bleeding-edge, but Rogue manages a kind of rugged handsomeness through thoughtful large-scale environmental design. Of the game’s successes, its breezy and atmospheric setting might be the one it can actually call its own.
If, on the other hand, you got sick of that overlong ‘trade cannon balls then board’ naval combat sequence the first time around, you’ll be bored before you even begin Rogue. And if the combat was starting to feel outmoded in 2013, it feels positively arthritic now. If you’ve clocked in some hours with Batman or Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor since guiding Kenway’s blade, the adjustment to a slower pace and less precision is tough and unflattering.
Then there are the other longstanding AssCreed problems. The frustratingly imprecise parkour control; the lukewarm stealth; the uninspired and repetitive mission templates; the ten-hour tutorial.
So Assassin’s Creed Rogue is not without problems, or particularly fresh within the context of the series. Critically though, it puts you in a mindset in which you’re inclined to let a lot slide, because it’s one hell of a power fantasy. You begin as ‘unknown assassin/pirate’ and quite quickly become the single most important man who ever lived. I’m not even referring to the main narrative—even outside of that, you’ve a shipful of sailors ready to die for you, all kinds of friends in high places, and you basically own New York. That’s an addictive feeling. Rogue understands how to create and nurture a sense of adventure from its combination of longstanding game mechanics and newfound locales, and as such remains very playable despite the series-long problems AssCreed endures in combat, mission design and narrative.
What is it?Effectively Black Flag 1.5,
eschewing the Caribbean for chillier climes.
Influenced bySid Meier’s Pirates! Moby Dick,
all that money ACIV made.
Reviewed on3.4GHz Core i7 2600K CPU,
Nvidia GTX 680 4GB, 16GB RAM
AlternativelyMiddle-earth: Shadow of
Mordor, 85%
Copy protectionUPlay, Steam
Need to know
No good Creed goes unpunished
A seafaring assassin’s code of conduct
Expect to pay $50 Release Out now Developer Ubisoft Sofia Publisher Ubisoft Multiplayer None Link www. assassinscreed.ubi.com
74The desire to cash-in on Black Flag is transparent, but the location swap is great for rebooting the freebooter in you.
1 As with action heroes and explosions, it’s considered
uncouth for a pirate to look back at the ship they just sank.
2 A good captain
never steps off his ship without accidentally climbing up and down some nearby rigging a few times.
3 It’s considered
rude to return from a visit to land and not come back with a new color scheme for the sails of one’s ship.
JUNE 2015 75
Squint, and it could be a Sid Meier’s Pirates! reboot.
Naval combat’s a good way to earn a lot of resources quickly.
No one ever liked them, yet the Abstergo sequences will outlive us all.
Though it doesn’t demand much from your system, Rogue’s a comely game.
18th century ships—the ultimate anti-aliasing stress test.
Though it amounts to simply running forwards, the Lisbon level’s a blast.
76 JUNE 2015
REVIEW
FOR THE TREESORI AND THE BLIND FOREST is a stunning sight, and no stroll in the park. By Tyler Wilde
This is one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played. It’s also fun, and difficult. The curiously calming (and
fantastic) music seems more suited for a city builder, but smartly so: piano, winds and strings relieve the stress of playing Ori and the Blind Forest and lull me into a cool-headed space, where I can routinely die by spike pit and keep going. I died and died, but I never wanted to stop.
Ori can easily be compared to Metroid: it’s an intricate, winding network of passages, each with hidden areas, treacherous platforming puzzles, and projectile-spewing enemies. It comes with the ‘metroidvania’ genre’s captivating exploration, but also the minor flaw that such openness can lead to pointless excursions into places you’re not supposed to be yet.
Yet Ori is hardly retro. Just as the gorgeous art doesn’t emulate Metroid’s pixels, the game focuses far more on interesting movement than shooting. The basic attack is a fairly ineffectual barrage of homing
projectiles, and can only be made faster and stronger. With no aiming to speak of, Ori can focus on fun stuff like jumping, wall jumping, double jumping, super jumping, smashing into the ground, swimming, climbing, floating, and dashing—phew.
The dash move is by far the best. Trigger it near an enemy or projectile, and you get a moment to orient an arrow. Ori will be flung in the direction of the arrow, and whatever you’re dashing through will be launched in the opposite direction. It slows things down for a brief moment, then speeds it all up with a satisfying burst of sound and art—it’s the best part of the energetic rhythm that makes playing Ori feel so great. By the end, I was chaining all the moves, bouncing around like a violent pinball, dying a lot and rarely feeling bad about it.
Save the forestOthers I’ve spoken to are not fond of Ori’s save system, but I like it. Using the energy resource, which is fairly plentiful, I can save in any
safe place. The system is a nice modern bit of design that acts as counter-balance to Ori’s difficulty. There are a few places, however, where you can’t save at all. The game’s three dungeons (for lack of a better word) each have timed chase segments which must be completed in one go. They come fast and must be repeated again and again and memorized. They’re frustrating, and I love them. Mastery is intrinsically enjoyable—it’s the entire premise of Super Meat Boy, which I also love—so long as it’s not too cruel. It wasn’t.
One important note: I played through Ori using an Xbox 360 controller, and I don’t recommend using a keyboard. I attempted one of the more difficult sequences with mouse and keyboard, and I could do it, but it took a lot more effort. Sometimes my mouse-controlled dashes fizzled out, plummeting me to my death, and I couldn’t figure out why. Ori is definitely designed for a controller. There are two key configurations, but the keys are otherwise not rebindable, which is an instant demerit.
So go and grab a controller, because it’s worth it. I clocked about eight hours with Ori, and that’s without hundred-percenting it (if that’s something you’re into, copy your save before you beat it, because you can’t go back after entering the final dungeon). I loved nearly all of it. It’s beautiful, it’s hard, and while it takes some of its greatness from console classics, it shines with its own identity.
What is it?A metroidvania with
challenging platforming and a few puzzles.
Influenced byMetroid, Super Meat Boy
Reviewed onWindows 7, Core i5-3570, 8GB
RAM, GeForce GTX Titan
AlternativelyCave Story+, 88%
Copy protectionSteam
Need to know
Expect to pay $20 Release Out now Developer Moon Studios GmbH Publisher Microsoft Studios Multiplayer None Link www.oriblindforest.com
87Challenging and gorgeous, Ori is a classic platforming genre modernized and done strikingly well. Use a controller and save often.
Up the Ginso Tree
Escaping one of Ori’s dungeons
1 Having no idea what to
do, you drown. Eventually, you use the dash skill to climb up these lanterns. Now it begins.
2 Dash through this
leaping weirdo to get higher. Don’t forget the XP orb or you’ll never 100% it. Die a few times trying.
3 Bounce off of
jump pads just before they’re consumed by water. Die eight more times. Never mind.
4 Chain a series of
dashes off of projectiles. Die when you press the button too late and get hit by one.
5 Dash past this spider’s
shots (die when they go a little too far above or below you), up a few more lanterns, and...
6 ...made it! But you
missed an orb. Go to a different save file to get it. You don’t want to 90% this thing, right?
JUNE 2015 77
The dash maneuver can be used on projectiles.
The light effects canbe overwhelming.
Each dungeon introduces anew platforming element.
More OTT lighting, but the gravity-swapping here is great. So many spikes.
The antagonist is a giantterrifying owl.
Exploding lava projectiles are a pain in the ass.
Enemies don’t vary much, but agility trumps combat here.
Ori borrows a lot from otherplatformers – but brilliantly.
The use of color is spectacular.
T he first time I played the monster in Evolve was a story worth sharing. I chose the Goliath, because I had to
(thanks, restrictive unlock system) and sneaked my way through the jungle, only feeding when the four players hunting me were nowhere to be seen. I reached tier two without encountering them at all, but shortly after evolving heard the first sound of gunfire—the hunters, killing creatures that might be food for me. I crouched in a cave entrance and waited.
Shortly, one of the hunters jetpacked down from the clifftop above. I was a 20ft godzilla-ape; remaining concealed seemed unlikely. I struck first with a boulder, then charged, smashing one
hunter to the ground as the others jetted in. With all four engaged I wasn’t confident of winning, so I knocked a few down and fled into the undergrowth.
They couldn’t keep up, and I hunted in peace for a few more minutes. They seemed content to hole up in the reactor plant that I’d have to attack as soon as I hit tier three. At least, most of them did. One wandered off from the group, and I could see him picking his way to where I’d been feeding. I waited in the bushes. Would a stealth attack work on a player?
It would, and it did. I pounced and killed him before his team could respond. A man down, they stayed in their reactor. Now at tier three, I made my play from above, diving into the depths of the facility and flattening one hunter with my impact. After that, flame breath, then a boulder, then a charge, then another leap. Two hunters dead, the other in flight. I held down a key to tear into the reactor. The reactor exploded.
Victory! A miniature sci-fi horror movie with a bad ending for the heroes.
I had that experience about half an hour into my time with Evolve. I’ve played a further ten hours since, and never had it again. The heartbreaking thing is that I only had that experience because the other players were inexperienced—they made mistakes, like splitting up, that other players simply won’t do. The game gives them no reason to. They also failed to use some of Evolve’s more artificial means of forcing combat, like the arena-dome that can be cast over an area to effectively force a teamfight.
When people know what they’re doing, Evolve is an awkward game—trapped between wanting to be an immersive experience and wanting to be a form of sport. I’d had the former, but only because my opponents had been so uninterested
in the latter. It’s a huge disappointment. Most of the time, the game feels like it’s balanced against itself: monster movement
EXTRACTING EXACTLY ONE MEMORABLE EXPERIENCE FROM EVOLVE
Balanced mush, perhaps, but mush that I’ve given up on
READ MERELEASED February 2015OUR REVIEW May 2015, 83%BUY IT $60MORE www.evolvegame.com
THE PC GAMER TEAM
SAM
TOM
ANDY
BEN
Hide your electronics whereyour pets can’t get at them.
This month Chased a monster in circles. Chased some hunters in circles. For ten hours.Also Played Hotline Miami 2, Dota 2
CHRIS
CHRIS THURSTEN
78 JUNE 2015
NOW PLAYING
GET MORE FROM YOUR GAMING
calibrated to keep you just ahead of the hunters, hunter movement calibrated so that they’re always pushing just against the limit of their fuel tanks. When players are playing effectively, nobody feels particularly powerful—and what is an asymmetrical multiplayer game ultimately about, if not power?
The problem with offering two divergent types of experience is that one only really works if the other breaks. In Evolve’s case, their combination is a kind of mush—balanced mush, perhaps, but mush that I’ve finally given up extracting further nutritional value from.
My experience of Evolve is of a game that works on paper but not at all in practice. So many of its systems fight one another, from combat to the structure of the campaign to simple traversal. I played it and played it and played it in the hope of recapturing anything like that initial thrill, and I simply haven’t. The core ideas it experiments with are still very attractive to me, but I’m afraid this isn’t the form I wanted them in.
E ver have that moment in a game that murders your interest in the entire medium for days or weeks?
It’s a rarity for me, given my job. First-person mystery The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was the culprit.
I have full respect for the game’s art and tech teams. I don’t know how to make gorgeous green trees that look that good. But one moment in the second half razzed me off so much that I stopped playing games for six weeks. I’m not saying it was a rational decision, or that the designers were at fault, but it properly
wiped out the month of February for me, forcing me to do awful stuff like going outside and smiling politely.
Ethan Carter has little signposting, leaving you to your own devices to solve one larger mystery broken down into smaller pieces. It’s presented like a first-person point-and-click game: you collect evidence, then piece together the crime. It starts in a gorgeous forest, but soon leads to a less scenic mine. After wandering aimlessly for ten minutes in this pitch-black place, I walked down some stairs and an unexplained zombie man killed me and that was it. Restart.
I calmly closed the game and deleted it from my hard drive, then didn’t play games for a month. I don’t blame the game or the devs or myself. Just, no.
Here’s how the hiatus ended: Dragon Age: Inquisition, and a failed attempt to romance a gay member of my party. Videogames are good again.
This month Walked around in the dark, bored and annoyed. And in a game.Also Played GTA IV, Wolfenstein: TNO
LOSING FAITH IN THE VANISHING OF ETHAN CARTER
It properly wiped out the month of February for me
Only an awful bastard coulddislike this, surely?
Does Ethan Carter take place in theHinterlands from Dragon Age?
How did this make me stopplaying games for weeks?
READ MERELEASED September 2014OUR REVIEW PCGamer.com, 82%BUY IT $20MORE www.ethancartergame.com
Remember kids: look left,look right, look up.
Whittle the healthbarfaster, men! Faster!
There’s something arbitraryabout the dome skill.
SAM ROBERTS
JUNE 2015 79
V elvet Sundown is a social RPG set aboard a luxury yacht. It casts players in one of 11 random roles—
celebrity journalist, Irish bartender, bodyguard who looks like Eddie Izzard— each with their agenda. Lamely, no one is here just to get drunk and have fun.
I’m blank-faced Texan businessman Jack Gold, and the scenario is ‘Murder!’, 30 minutes long and designed for five players. Rather than using voice chat, your character converts what you type into stilted dialogue. “I’ll take a martini, shaken not stirred because I am sad,” I tell the man behind the bar. The
voice that emerges is flat and empty with a thick southern twang, like a sad Willie Nelson talking through a fan.
A lady butts in. It’s the lovely Linda, and she’s trying to seduce me with banter. “Heeeey handsome, you’re soooo sexy,” she says, her vocal chords snagging on the repetitive sounds like a stuttering robot. I don’t know how to feel about this flirting as I’ve got things to do, and also she’s probably being controlled by a dude.
I stall for time by looking in my inventory. I have a passport and some weed—Jack Gold always comes prepared. Suddenly, a guy called Ingmar tasers me in the back. “Dude, what the hell?” I say in a strangely calm tone. “Oh, my bad,” comes the Hawkingesque reply before he shocks me again. “Dude! Quit it.” I yell, again emotionlessly. “No,” he replies, “I’m Ingmar.” Screw this, I think, and wander
off to look at the ocean. “Yo,” says Malik,
meeting me at the bow, “Can’t believe he did that lol... a/s/l?” This
THE RISKY ROLEPLAYING OF VELVET SUNDOWN
I sound like Willie Nelson talking through a fan
READ MERELEASED July 2014OUR REVIEW N/ABUY IT $5MORE www.velvetsundown.com
reformed black market trader is treating our vessel like a floating MSN chat room.
This has gone downhill. The novelty of making my powerful company man sound like Archer is wearing Siri-thin. Velvet Sundown feels like a smart concept scuppered by vagueness, and this leads to people being, well, people. Near the end of our half hour I pass the bar and see Malik desperately trying to hit on Linda. Hmm. How do I verbalize a face palm?
The passing of time, and all of its crimes, are making me sad again.
This month Ruined a yacht-based high class social event by getting tasered.Also Played Dying Light, Speedrunners
The art of conversation.
BEN GRIFFIN
80 JUNE 2015
NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE, RIGHT NOW
T he windmill is perched on a rock. High enough that my death-tank, to which I’ve attached a pair of
spinning death-blades, can’t actually reach it. The blades spin stupidly in the air as I drive up the side of the rock, flip over, and land on my back. I need to try something else. That windmill must be destroyed. Why? I don’t know, and I don’t care. It must die.
I go back to the medieval drawing board. I decide that simply making a taller death-tank would be the cheap way out, and I decide to try something more elaborate. I create a flimsy wooden frame, brace it to keep it stable, then attach helicopter rotors on all four corners. The frame’s small enough that they’ll lift it into the air. I do a test flight and it works.
Back in the editor, I stick a couple of metal holders on top of my aircraft, then I pop two bombs into them. The idea is that I’ll hover over the windmill in my death-copter, tilt forward, then gently drop the bombs on top of the windmill, blowing it up. I add two more helicopter blades to make up for the added weight, then I start the level.
I t’s good to be the Huns, the horsiest of the Steppe nomads in an era when horses were overpowered. I like to
march right up to the next settlement I plan to raze, and set up camp outside their gates, daring their garrisons to
come out onto the open field to try their luck. They always do, the fools.
Then I have them. I disrupt some blocks of infantry with cavalry charges, and let others through. Once their line is a mess I disengage most of my speedy mounted force and redeploy, picking off isolated units until enemy morale is shattered.
This is the best thing about horses, apart from their lovely big faces: they can leave a fight whenever they like, then run back really fast, again and again, until
everyone is dead. One day people will invent guns and horses will no longer rule the world, but not this day.
IT’S GOOD TO BE A HORSE LORD IN ATTILA
One day horses will no longer rule the world
ACCIDENTAL DESTRUCTION IN BESIEGE
That windmill must be destroyed
READ MERELEASED Jan 28, 2015OUR REVIEW N/A (alpha)BUY IT $7MORE www.bit.ly/1Eh2MUV
My amateurish creation wobbles slightly, then heaves itself into the air. With the bombs rattling around on top, unsecured in their holders, it’s almost impossible to control. Then the frame buckles and the craft starts spinning
wildly. It crashes to the ground in a fireball, but the bombs just hit the windmill, bringing it crashing down.
READ MERELEASED February 2015OUR REVIEW PCGamer.com, 83%BUY IT $45MORE www.bit.ly/1wK0okp
No one can withstand being taunted by Huns.
Horses can’t punch throughwalls, but they have other uses.
Look at this smug, wind-poweredbastard. It has to go down.
This month Gained an appreciation for horses that has evaded him for 29 years. Also Played One Finger Death Punch
This month Destroyed things with medieval war machines. Also destroyed medieval war machines.Also Played Hotline Miami 2
TOM SENIOR
ANDY KELLY
JUNE 2015 81
CRYPT OF THE NECRODANCER MODS TINY DANCERS
Bopping heroine Cadence needs a break from the roguelike rhythm
action, so swap in one of these. TS
2
I t’s all been leading to this moment. InstaDoom combines two of modern society’s favorite activities: sticking
old-timey filters on digital photographs, and taking 300 pictures of your own face every single day. It’s a mod for the original Doom that adds a bunch of real Instagram filters to id’s first-person demon-’em-up, some of which look a bit lovely and nostalgic, while others just whack the brightness up (or indeed the contrast down).
However, I’m here to talk about the selfie stick. The other, and best, part of InstaDoom is the added camera-on-a-pipe, which replaces the traditional BFG (the weapon, not the giant, obviously). You can pick it up in-game, but you’ll probably just cheat for it, it being the whole reason you’re replaying Doom anyway. When activated, the selfie stick spins the camera around to face the grizzled chops of Doomguy, who suddenly ditches his glum/quizzical/ow-I’m-bleeding demeanor to pull a series of YOLO-style expressions.
This is a great reason to replay a seminal game. Crucially, Doomguy is still vulnerable to baddies when he’s busy titting about with his mobile, so there’s an element of risk/reward to taking the perfect photo. The greater the potential snap, the more danger you’ll have to put our grizzled hero in—it’s like war
photography, but with cacodemons.I challenge you, yes you reading this, Barbara, to
take the most difficult (or interesting) snap you possibly can, whether it’s a selfie of Doomguy getting battered by the
final boss, or a pic of him out of bounds in a secret
location, with a look of fake shock all over his face. Use any
combination of mods you like to achieve the perfect picture—except infinite health, obviously. I’ll know.
InstaDoom was recently updated with 17 extra filters taken from Instagram competitor VSCO Cam, meaning it’s now the premier Doom photography app on the market. TSwww.bit.ly/Instablam
MOD A FISTFUL OF SELFIE STICK
INSTADOOM1Someone’s probably already
working on TinderDoom.
TOM SAYS...“Now this is a
Photo Mode I can get behind.”
PHOENIX WRIGHTWho could find any OBJECTION to this well-drawn little mod, which
gives Capcom’s famous lawyer a chance to strut his stuff? www.bit.ly/Necrodancer1
MERRY CRYPTMASThis official mod gives Cadence a festive Christmas hat, and swaps dragons for
murderous undead Santas, and skeletons for cute little elves. www.bit.ly/Necrodancer2
TOASTERYep, a toaster, with different bread illustrating your equipment. Hey, it’s not so
weird being a toaster—Battlestar Galactica was full of them. www.bit.ly/Necrodancer3
LEGEND OF ZELDAA full overhaul mod that replaces the default sprites with those from the original
Legend of Zelda. It’s dangerous to go alone, etc, etc. www.bit.ly/Necrodancer4
82 JUNE 2015
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10
Promise me you’ll make a more interesting map than this one.
Doom 3’s level editor can be a wonderful thing, but it’s not exactly the most user-friendly. Doom 3 Automatic Map Builder
helps with the struggle of blocking out homemade levels, providing a simple grid tool that handles a lot of that automatically.
If you want to make a really good map, you might need to dive into Doom3Edit later on to give your levels a bit of character, but AMB is the perfect thing for quickly sketching them out, as it can place walls, lights, doors and even enemies automatically along the way. TSwww.bit.ly/DoomBuilder
UTILITY FEAR THE MAPODEMON
DOOM 3 MAP BUILDER
3
OFF-PEAK FREEWARE SOUL TRAIN
Welcome to the weirdest train station you’ve ever been
stranded on: a church-like structure home to pizza salesmen, giants, exquisite jazz and reams of abstract art. When you arrive you’re asked to retrieve a ripped up ticket—a search for glowing scraps that leads you to hilarious, odd and thoughtful conversations, to secrets, to shrines, and to an ending determined by your actions along the way.
There’s a great dollop of the unsettling Pathologic in here. It’s not a creepy setting, exactly, but it is a place you feel is watching you at all times, as you unlock shortcuts, as you steal pizza and vinyl, and as you restore that scattered ticket to its former glory. There’s some great visual art in Off-Peak’s interactive installation, but it’s the soundtrack that impresses most, all fractured jazz and moody ambiance. It’s not a game you’ll unravel in its entirety, but I very much enjoyed picking it apart. TS www.bit.ly/OffPeakGame
5
WEBGAME ANTI-ROOM ESCAPE
T his clever adventure game turns the room escape genre on its head, asking you to barricade yourself
inside a safe house before nightfall—
when the zombies come. Your survival depends on how many defenses you’ve put up, survivors saved, etc. TSwww.bit.ly/DontEscapeAgain
B
A
DON’T ESCAPE 24
C
A B CINVENTORY Ammo, as you might expect, is scarce. Do you
shoot your bitten friend, or save it for a potential zombie attack?
SURVIVOR Your chum won’t be much help until his pain’s
relieved—and even then, he’ll turn feral at some point.
OUTSIDE You can restore your rundown base with materials
from the surrounding area. However, you only have so long to prepare.
JUNE 2015 83
The filenames come from the contents of your PC.
T he original Portal didn’t really get going until its later chapters, and I look back on Chamber 17 with
particular fondness. There were a few good switch and energy ball puzzles in there, many of which necessitated the Weighted Companion Cube, who you’ll remember from all the memes of 2007-8.
Test Chamber 17 recreates that famous level in Portal 2. As Valve’s sequel takes place in the far, far future, it’s seen better days, and true to the setting of Portal 2 it’s now a rundown, rusty area partially reclaimed by
smothering vines, stubborn shrubs and persistent trees.
Not everything from the original level has been included, but it’s
surprisingly affecting to see an iconic Portal level treated
with such disdain by nature. Although the geometry and puzzles are largely the same, they’ve been made
slightly harder to navigate due to the outside world
rudely poking its way in. It would be fun to see the rest of
Portal (there’s not all that much of it) remade in this decrepit house style. TSwww.bit.ly/Chamber17
TOM SAYS...“Something
something I’m Still Alive.”
PIONEERS DEMO A WHOLE NEW WORLD
E igen Lenk’s 16th century turn-based survival RPG has a brand
new alpha demo—and it’s a doozy. If you’ve not had the pleasure, Pioneers is a game about setting sail for the new world. Once there, you’ll make camp, pick berries, chop wood, hunt animals, drink rainwater and generally try to not die in a heap. The goal of all this outdoorsmanship is to make a name for yourself, and—if there’s any name left—for the other explorers you bring along.
This huge new demo contains the start of the game’s Story mode, in addition to a more open, Civ-style offering that lets you tweak various generative settings before you begin. You start in a handsome boat in the middle of the ocean, with just enough supplies to make land. There’s—whisper it—a hint of the roguelike to Pioneers’ procedurally generated forests and plains, though the colonial-era setting gives it a character all of its own. Lenk’s sketchy pixel art and stunning use of color palettes helps a lot with that.
With its focus on history, sailing, colonization and survival, Pioneers often feels like a smaller-scale Civilization, and it can be equally relaxing to play. TSwww.bit.ly/PioneersGame
T here’s a great bit in Jurassic Park where Lex infiltrates the park’s security system, using what looks
like another ridiculous Hollywood perversion of a computer interface. Well, it turns out this ‘File System Navigator’ was actually a real thing: a cool, and probably wildly impractical, way to
explore a 3D representation of your PC. Because we deserve it, a bunch of indie developers decided to turn this into a real hacking game. The results are robust, tense, and a little bit gorgeous—hard drives seem so much bigger when their contents stretch out to the horizon. TSwww.bit.ly/IKnowThis
FREEWARE MOVIE-INSPIRED HACKING
I KNOW THIS6
LEVEL RIP COMPANION CUBE. AGAIN
A GREENER CHAMBER 17
8
7
Is it weird to feel nostalgic for a place you were imprisoned in?
84 JUNE 2015
DOWNLOADSTOP
10 FREE GAMES STUFF FROM THE WEB
T his old-timey physics sandbox is all about building your own medieval structures and machines, but if you can’t be bothered to do that, there are already some impressive
things in the Steam Workshop. As with Minecraft, they’re things you’ll stand and appreciate for a few minutes—before the urge to destroy kicks in. TS
MEDIEVAL ENGINEERS MODS THEY BUILD, YOU SMASH
9TO THE MOON MINISODE 2 FREEWARE DOCTOR DOCTOR
To the Moon’s second free ‘minisode’ is a perfectly paced,
well-written jewel that will only take around half an hour of your time. Like the first—released just over a year ago—it’s set at Christmas in the headquarters of the dubious Sigmund corporation, AKA the memory-altering people that went to town on old man Johnny in the original game.
These ‘minisodes’ explore the backstories of Dr Neil Watts and Dr Eva Rosalene, the two scientists you mostly play in To The Moon. Their frustrated working relationship continues to be a highlight, but this chapter—in particular the final scene—introduces further questions that threaten to turn the series on its head. To the Moon has a reputation for being a weepy adventure game, but there’s more to it than that. The upcoming sequel, Finding Paradise, can’t come soon enough. TS www.bit.ly/Sigmund2
CASTLE MAZE
This is an impressive piece of work that must have taken ages to build. It’s a fully
planned-out explorable labyrinth, complete with watchtowers so you can work out your route before you begin. But let’s face it, after 30 seconds you’re just going to batter your way straight through to the middle.www.bit.ly/Medieval3
VALENGARDE
This handsome castle town isn’t affiliated with any particular fantasy setting, but it’s
an impressively lavish environment that would look right at home in Game of Thrones. There’s even surrounding farmland. Better yet, the Structural Integrity setting is supported, so you can wreck it according to the laws of physics.www.bit.ly/Medieval2
HELM’S DEEP
Recreate that big battle from The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers with this detailed
representation of Helm’s Deep. I mean, there aren’t any Orcs, and Gandalf won’t pop up halfway through to do some magic at you, but you could quite happily build a catapult and then attempt to smash the place to bits.www.bit.ly/Medieval1
This might not look like machinima at
first, but you’ll be left in no doubt halfway through this cute short film about an annoying headcrab. It’s a nice bit of physical comedy that takes what we know about headcrabs and pushes it to its logical conclusion. TSwww.bit.ly/JerkHeadcrab
1 Loading upGordon gets ready to
board a hovercraft with one of the nameless survivors from Half-Life 2. I’m going to call her... Jane Doe, considering how close she comes to an ignoble death in the next few seconds.
2 Heads upSuddenly a headcrab
appears from behind a stack of crates, and You Won’t Believe What Happens Next. Sorry, went all internet there for a second. Actually, you will—it attempts to chow down on Jane’s noggin.
3 Stick ’em upThis definitely never
happened in Half-Life 2, but rather than dining on delicious brains, the jumpy headcrab tussles with Gordon for his carelessly dropped pistol, before holding the two humans up.
4 Balls upAnd we’re done here. All
that’s left for the plucky headcrab is to the flee the scene of the crime as fast as he can. If only there was some kind of fast-moving vehicle around the place that he could use.
MACHINIMA JERK HEADCRAB ACTS LIKE A JERK IN HALF-LIFE 2
JUNE 2015 85
READ MEFIRST REVIEWED
Sept 2003, 55%DEVELOPER
CCP GamesPUBLISHERIn-houseREQUIRES
1GB GPU, 2GHz CPU, 4GB RAM
LINKwww.eveonline.com
COMMUNITYforums.eveonline.com
EVE ONLINE IS IMPROVING AT A RAPID RATE. By Andy Kelly
L ast year at EVE’s yearly Fanfest in Reykjavik, CCP Seagull (also known as Andie Nordgren, executive
producer) announced a major change in the way expansions would be released. Rather than two big releases a year, we’re getting smaller updates, more frequently.
The first of these was Kronos, released on June 3, 2014. It was meant to be a massive overhaul of the industry interface, but this was held back. Instead we got three new ships for pirate faction Mordu’s Legion. The Garmur, a fast-moving attack frigate that gets a 25% bonus to missile damage; the Orthrus, a cruiser with an impressive 200% bonus to missile velocity; and the Barghest, a fast battleship with high-speed missiles.
Kronos also introduced a new mining ship: the Prospect. This ‘expedition frigate’ has significantly more HP and cargo space than the Venture, with space for a specialized cloaking device. This has obvious benefits when harvesting in dangerous areas.
The next update, released on July 22, was Crius: the industry update originally scheduled for Kronos. The interface for manufacturing is now a lot simpler to use, and a lot less daunting for newcomers. Crius also introduced a new starbase extension called a compression array, which lets you store large amounts of ore and ice in player-owned stations.
Released August 26, the Hyperion update focused on wormholes. Additional information is now shown on the ‘show info’ menu, including the size of ships able to pass through, and the W-systems themselves were tweaked to make them feel more mysterious and unpredictable. Hyperion also, at long last, included the ability to share overview profiles.
Rhea was released on December 9. A massive new ORE ship, the Bowhead, was added, designed for transporting fitted ships. It boasts a 90% jump fatigue reduction and a whopping 1,300,000m³ capacity maintenance bay. A new Amarr tactical destroyer was added too: the Confessor. This sleek ship has good bonuses for small energy turrets, and has become a popular solo ship in nullsec.
Rhea also added a new wormhole system called Thera. It’s a giant shared
system with four NPC stations and loads of wormhole connections. These lead to multiple locations in highsec, lowsec, and nullsec space, making it the most connected in the game. Thera is the largest system in EVE, with great distances between stations. This makes controlling the entire system a challenge, even for seasoned conquerors.
But perhaps Rhea’s most dramatic addition was the ditching of clone grades. You no longer have to keep your clone upgraded to match your skill points, and better yet, skill points won’t be lost on death. Because you pay to subscribe to the game, it’s a bit too much like losing money. It will also remove frustration for new players who forget to upgrade their clone and lose days of skill points.
Proteus dropped on Feb 10, bringing new visual effects for asteroid belts and new anomalies for new players, offering small scale mining opportunities that won’t dry up so fast in high activity areas.
The most recent update as I write was Tiamat, released on March 3. This released the Minmatar equivalent of the Amarr Confessor from drydock, the latest tactical destroyer to join EVE’s growing fleet. A bonus to small turrets has made it a popular PvP ship.
Despite the pressure of releasing multiple expansions a year, CCP shows no signs of slowing down.
Wormholes received further tweaks in September 30’s Oceanus, with new visual effects that let players know, at a glance, which ships can squeeze through them. Cloaking also received a fancy new activation effect. A more practical new feature was the ability to name your jump clones, making it easier to manage them. You can also paste ship fittings in text form from sites like BattleClinic.
Following Oceanus was Phoebe, released on November 4. This brought
changes to jumping, reducing the range to five light years, and adding a ‘jump fatigue’ that triggers a cooldown on ships making multiple jumps.
Capital ships are for the first time able to use stargates. The CCP team think the sense of New Eden as a physical space has been diminished by long range jumps, and this is an attempt to combat that. They also want to make space feel busier, and encourage small, local engagements without masses of people turning up.
The ability to sell multiple items was also added, and the 24-hour time limit on skill training was finally removed. This means you can plan your skill tree in advance for days, months, or even years. And as if that wasn’t enough, the overlay was redone, with bookmarks (both personal and corporate) visible on-screen, and easily navigated to thanks to a new ‘compass’ on the HUD.
EDEN BETTER
MEET THE BOWHEAD EVE’s monster new space-truck
Capacitor 3,900 GJMax velocity 65 m/secWarp speed 1.37 AU/sStructure hitpoints 39,500 HPShield capacity 21,000 HPMass 640,000,000 kgMaintenance bay capacity 1,300,000m³Cargo capacity 4,000m³
Released on August 26, the Hyperion update focused on wormholes
86 JUNE 2015
UPDATE WHAT’S NEW IN THE BIGGEST GAMES
EVE is the deepest, most complex MMO on PC today.
You don’t need a mega PC to run it, either.
Light from planets now reflects on your ship.
Ah, the golden glow of Amarr space.
Explosions in the sky.
New Eden is a gorgeous place to explore.
Asteroid belts have had a dramatic makeover.
JUNE 2015 87
T he mean streets of Liberty City aren’t quite as mean as I remember them. Where once I saw a brilliantly
realized, detailed replica of New York City, I now see blocky polygons and muddy textures. Time has not been kind to Rockstar’s influential open-world crime simulator, but it was the flashpoint for a series that became a phenomenon.
Now that Grand Theft Auto V is finally coming to PC, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the game that started it all: Grand Theft Auto III. This was the series’ first foray into three dimensions. The original top-down game had been a commercial success, but GTA III was on a whole other level, shifting a dizzying 14.5 million copies. It’s the game that put Rockstar on the minimap.
It starts with a jailbreak. Your character, who never speaks, escapes from a prison convoy with a little help from some Colombians, and makes his way to a safehouse in the Portland borough of Liberty City: a mishmash of Brooklyn and Queens. From here you get a job with a
person. But there are sparks of imagination, like the early mission in which you steal a guy’s car while he’s eating in a restaurant, fit it with a bomb, then park it back where you found it. He gets in, twists the key, and boom. But compare this to the elaborate, multi-
layered missions of the newer games and you realize how far
the series has come.Yet in many ways, it
hasn’t advanced at all. Despite improvements in technology, bigger worlds, and vastly
increased production values, Rockstar has stuck
pretty closely to the formula laid out in GTA III. You spend half
your time doing jobs for a variety of crime bosses to advance the story, and the other half exploring, causing trouble, collecting stuff, and picking up side missions. There’s a lot more to do between missions in GTA V, and there’s more to the story than just running
local mafia boss, Luigi Goterelli, and your climb to the top of the criminal ladder begins. It is, like most other Grand Theft Auto games, a rags to riches story, charting your rise from hired goon to trusted associate.
Portland is your home in the game’s first hours. The bridge to the next island is under construction, penning you in for now. This gated progression was a staple of the series until GTA V, which lets you travel to every corner of the map from the off. While staggering the locations like this limits your freedom, it does give you a chance to learn every corner of an island before you move onto the next. I could draw you a detailed map of Portland entirely from memory.
The mission design is, by today’s standards, pretty primitive. There’s a lot of driving from place to place, often with a time limit. Deliver this thing, kill this
WHY GRAND THEFT AUTO III WAS A TRUE GAME CHANGER. By Andy Kelly
Compared to GTA V’s Los Santos, it’s laughable
READ MEFIRST REVIEWED
July 2002, 92% DEVELOPER
Rockstar NorthPUBLISHER
Rockstar GamesRELEASE
2002
ANDY SAYS...“Best station? Head Radio, obviously.”
Three wanted stars? Pfft. Try harder.
88 JUNE 2015
REINSTALL
errands for criminals, but the general structure of the game is almost identical.
After Portland, our mute antihero heads to Staunton, Liberty City’s equivalent of Manhattan. It’s a dramatic change of scenery, skyscrapers and wide roads replacing Portland’s tight, industrial sprawl. You find work with, among others, a Yakuza boss, a corrupt businessman, and a bent cop. The voice cast is impressive, featuring a host of genuinely great actors including Kyle MacLachlan as Donald Love, Robert Loggia as Ray Machowski, and Joe Pantoliano as Luigi Goterelli. Legendary rapper Guru, of Gang Starr fame, even makes an appearance as bomb expert 8-Ball.
One of GTA III’s greatest strengths is the different personalities of the three islands. We see the seeds of Rockstar’s peerless world-building being planted
fun. Everything that was great about it back then has been infinitely bettered, leaving it feeling like a rough prototype for the game it would eventually become. It runs fine on modern PCs, however, so if you really do feel like a trip down memory lane, it might be worth the money.
The impact GTA III had on the culture and landscape of videogames is almost impossible to measure. Masses of open-world games that shamelessly riffed on it were released in its wake. It defined the language and design staples of the genre, and they’re still in use to this day. Everything from Assassin’s Creed to Far Cry owes a debt to Rockstar. Should you play it today? Probably not. But, like watching the early audition tapes of an A-list Hollywood actor, it’s a fascinating glimpse of the first steps of a game that would go on to take over the world.
here, and there’s a distinct look and feel to each area. Portland is grimy, poor and crime-ridden; Staunton is bustling and vibrant; Shoreside Vale is a leafy suburban hideaway for the city’s wealthiest citizens. Compared to GTA V’s Los Santos it’s laughable, but at the time it was probably the most convincing 3D world I’d ever seen.
Returning 13 years later, GTA III isn’t that much fun to play. Twitchy combat, overly strict time limits, and a brutal difficulty spike towards the end make it an exercise in frustration. The series has done much in recent sequels to make life more enjoyable, such as checkpoints, and taxis to take you back to the mission start. I just can’t go back to the dark days before this stuff was implemented. GTA III is more of a historical artifact than something I’d recommend going back and playing for
GRAND THEFT TIMELINE The series so far
I think the dude with the gun’s going to win.
You can work as an EMT on the side.
The combat isintolerably bad.
These views were stunning at the time.
BI deto the
p
Grand Theft Auto
GTA: London, 1969
Grand Theft Auto 2
Grand Theft Auto III
GTA: Liberty City Stories
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
GTA: Vice City Stories
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Grand Theft Auto IV
The Lost and Damned
The Ballad of Gay Tony
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
Grand Theft Auto V
1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
JUNE 2015 89
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JUNE 2015 91
GROUP TEST
Now that motherboard components are increasingly being incorporated into the CPU itself, we no
longer require the motherboards themselves to be so large. That means you can now make a miniature gaming PC that can go toe-to-toe with a rig twice its size.
What counts as a ‘small form factor’ PC?There are two standards when referring to small form factor (SFF) machines: micro-ATX and mini-ITX. Technically, these are sizes of motherboard, but the term is used to categorize the PC itself.
What’s the difference between the two sizes?The micro-ATX (or mATX) board is the oldest SFF design and is, at its most basic, just a squared-off version of the slightly larger standard ATX specification of motherboard. That means it’s not that small, but also means you can fit almost everything onto it you could fit onto a full-size board. This is why you can get X99 motherboards—the very pinnacle of performance for desktop
Micro cases can make mighty gaming rigs. By Dave James
SMALL CASES
DICTIONARY Micro-ATX >
Mini-ITX >
platforms—in an mATX size, still with multiple PCIe slots and quad-channel DDR4.
Mini-ITX (or just plain ITX) is a more recent phenomenon and the size used for the smallest gaming PC designs. They’re limited in terms of expansion to just a single PCIe graphics slot and only two memory connections. But they can be just as speedy—and just as overclockable—as the larger standards.
So, to build a small PC I need a micro chassis and a special motherboard. Anything else?That’s the real beauty of the current state of small form factor cases: the motherboard is the only other thing that has to be a special size.
Some cases are limited in the length of graphics card they can house—and some manufacturers, such as Asus and Sapphire, have released short versions of their graphics cards specifically for such
cases. But increasingly we’re seeing SFF cases being designed so that you can fit in even something like a Radeon R9 295X2 if you want to.
And most will even have space for the water-cooling radiator that multi-GPU cards come with, which also means if you’ve got a standard air-cooled card you can get your processor water-cooled instead.
If SFF machines are so great, why do we still have full-sized motherboards and cases?There are still some instances where size is important, and that’s when you’re talking about the sheer volume of added components. Small form factor cases aren’t going to have huge racks of storage bays, or enough expansion ports to fit multiple graphics cards.
But if you’re just building a single-GPU gaming PC with only a couple of storage drives, an SFF build can be an excellent choice.
92 JUNE 2015
GROUP TEST
Corsair’s Carbide Air 240 is my absolute favorite small form factor case, and going back to check it this month has only
reinforced my high opinion of it. No other case gives me the same urge to delve in and get building.
It’s partly thanks to smart segregation of components and attention to detail. But what’s even
more impressive is the way the Corsair engineers have taken the hefty Carbide Air 540 and shrunk it down perfectly to fit the demands of the smaller PC.
The Air 240 still has to cope with full-sized graphics cards, storage drives and power supplies. The fact that it remains roomy and delivers such excellent airflow, despite being so shrunken down compared with the Air 540, is testament to the success of the Corsair design team. Impressively this case can cope with both mini-ITX and mATX boards.
SPEC Form factor mATX, mini-ITX Dimensions 260 x 320 x 397mm (WxHxD) Fans 2x 120mm front, 1x 120mm roof Drive bays 3x 3.5”, 3x 2.5” Expansion slots 4 Max. graphics card length 290mm
You can build a hugely powerful PC into this diminutive cube
Carbide Air 240$90 Corsair
Seven compact cases reviewed. By Dave James
SMALL CASES
It’s business as usual regarding the rest of the componentry: full-sized GPUs, PSUs and 240mm water-cooling radiators are all happily accommodated. You will struggle with the longest of AMD’s graphics cards, but that is the only restriction imposed here.
On the side of the case with the almost floor-to-ceiling perspex panel are the sexy PC components—graphics card, motherboard, processor. Hidden behind them, in the dark half of the case, go the storage drives, PSU, and the Medusa-like PC cabling. This design makes it simple to keep your build as clean as possible, and because of this two-tier design you have lots of space in which to work when building.
Some people aren’t going to like the Borg Cube aesthetic—though one UK PC builder does sell a machine covered in Borgy vinyl decals. But I love the server-chic styling of its larger sibling and shrunk down it still looks like it means business. And it does: you can build a hugely powerful PC into this diminutive cube, especially with the latest mATX X99 boards. That thought really does make me want to ditch the ATX under my desk.
92An outstanding micro machine that you can’t help but want to build a PC into. Plenty of room and smart planning.
HOW WE TESTED Freedom to build > These are cases you’re going to be building your own PC into, so it helps if the experience is as stress-free as possible. Each case was tested by building components into it. Aesthetics > If you’re building a compact PC it’s probably for your living room. The look of each case was taken into consideration.
JUNE 2015 93
GET THE PC YOUR GAMES DESERVE
The Hadron Air is getting on for 18 months old now, but this mini-ITX case isn’t
entirely out of date yet. It’s the absolute smallest case in this test and that brings its own complications and compromises, but it’s also the only one to ship with a 500W PSU included in the price.
It has to: you couldn’t fit a full-scale ATX power supply inside the confines of the Hadron Air. But the solution EVGA has used makes sense: modern components, graphics cards included, are getting less and less power hungry, so a 500W PSU won’t cause you problems down the line. And it’s no budget option either, the EVGA power supply is rated with a high-end 80 Plus Gold efficiency rating.
You will have to forego water-cooling though: shorter, active air
coolers are the order of the day with such a little case. I had thought you could squeeze a 240mm radiator in the roof, but you’d have to get the angle grinder out to perform such an installation. Still, there are a pair of 120mm fans installed up their to boost airflow in any case.
In terms of graphics, once again it’s good news for the Nvidia faithful, but unfortunately something of the length of an R9 290X isn’t going to fit inside.
When building a PC, things do get a little fiddly inside the Hadron Air. The mass of cabling is impossible to hide and the only access is from the side with the perspex panel on it. But I still love the look of the thing. It’s small, but could house a quality little gaming rig if you can contort enough reach inside to plug in the cables.
SPEC Form factor Mini-ITX Dimensions 169 x 305 x 308mm Fans 2x 120mm roof Drive bays 1x 5.25” slimline, 2x 3.5”/2.5” Expansion slots 2 Max graphics card length 367mm
80A lovely and incredibly small gaming case that’s just a little tricky to build into. Comes with its own power supply, too.
Hadron Air$130 EVGA
My first thought when I unpacked the new Core X2 from Thermaltake was
‘they’ve sent me the wrong case’. I didn’t think something this size
could be classed as small form factor, but because of its horizontal motherboard tray it can only accommodate mATX or mini-ITX boards. Also it’s a little smaller than a standard ATX, case so I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt.
On the plus side this is the only one of this month’s cases that could possibly house one of Thermaltake’s 360mm water-cooling radiators. In fact, it has a pair of mounting rails in the roof that could take two of them.
And speaking of cooling, this thing has vents all over, apart from the huge perspex peep-hole on the side. Behind the rest of the panels are magnetically attached dust filters to keep your components unclogged.
Nothing is set in stone here, most of the parts are held in place by thumbscrews, allowing you to easily change the internal layout. The size of the case, however, remains both a major plus and its biggest downfall. The ample space makes building a PC inside it a breeze and allows you to max out your mATX build, but if you’re going to end up with a big machine anyway, why not go for a versatile ATX setup instead?
SPEC Form factor mATX, Mini-ITX Dimensions 465 x 320 x 541mm Fans 2x 120mm front and rear Drive bays 3x 5.25”, 4x 3.5”/2.5”, 3x 2.5” Expansion slots 5 Max graphics card length 330mm (480mm w/out 5.25” bay)
83It’s a contradiction in terms: a massive small form factor case. And it’s brilliant and absurd all at once.
Core X2 $130 Thermaltake
GROUP TEST
94 JUNE 2015
Cooler Master’s HAF range is a PC classic. Its High Air Flow acronym has long been associated with gaming PCs and
overclocked machines, and its industrial, aggressive look has inspired a great many budget knock-offs. The Stacker is the latest iteration and the SFF version comes in two flavors: the 915F has the PSU mounting at the front and the 915R has it at the rear.
If you want to spread things out you can buy both and slot them one on top of the other, like some chunky Gobot built out of lots of little bots. Stacked, you can feed cabling and connections through the little partially sealed rubber sphincters in the bases, allowing you to separate the PSU from motherboard, for example.
That would be relatively expensive and quite sizeable (although not Core X2 big), so how does it fare as a single case? With the 915R, having the PSU at the rear puts it directly above the motherboard, meaning there’s very little clearance for a CPU cooler. You do however end up with a standard three tier drive caddy at the front. The 915F is a better bet for a solo case, as it gives your CPU space to breathe and allows for larger coolers, although you need to be a little more creative with your drive placement.
It still feels incredibly cramped when routing cables and fitting it together, because it’s so long and thin. Making a modular case that you can stack on another is a neat idea, but it’s of niche interest at best and makes for a pair of individual cases that both feel compromised.
SPEC Form factor Mini-ITX Dimensions 228 x 248 x 578mm Fans 1x 120mm rear Drive bays 1x 5.25”, 3x 3.5”/2.5” Expansion slots 2 Max graphics card length 360mm
76A neat idea, but doesn’t quite succeed. A little extra width would have made all the difference during building.
HAF Stacker 915F$65 Cooler Master
Fractal’s Node 304 is one of my favorite mini-ITX cases. I just don’t want to build a machine in there myself. I’ve tested lots of
pre-built gaming PCs from different manufacturers and the 304 makes for a great mini rig when it’s been built by the pros. Doing it yourself can be a bit of a pain.
That’s because it really is quite tiny, making it a trial to get all the necessary components inside in a tidy fashion. Thankfully the roof and sides slide off in one piece, giving you decent access. Fractal Design has had to be a bit creative with other design choices, too. The
most obvious is the dangling white storage bays that hang down from the crossbars at the top of the case.
There are three separate bays, each capable of housing two drives (2.5” or 3.5”), and you can have all or none of them. If you’re looking to fit a proper graphics card you will need to ditch at least two to make room. The PSU also needs to be under 160mm long or it too will start to interfere with your card. And believe me, a mass of modular cabling is going to be all sorts of awkward.
When it’s all built up the Node 304 makes a fine looking PC. If you can cope with a slightly awkward build the rewards are definitely there.
SPEC Form factor Mini-ITX Dimensions 250 x 210 x 374mm Fans 2x 92mm front, 1x 140mm rear Drive bays 6x 3.5”/2.5” Expansion slots 2 Max graphics card length 310mm
84A quality mini case, but it requires patience, experience and dexterity to build a gaming PC inside its confines.
Node 304$90 Fractal Design
GET THE PC YOUR GAMES DESERVE
JUNE 2015 95
The Aquila is another diminutive case I didn’t expect to have enough space
to be able to fit an mATX motherboard inside, especially given the horizontal mounting of the mainboard. And, as with the Strike-X, I’m quite taken by its cuboid styling—I also like the slight tilt to the mountings inside, giving it a little angular aesthetic to cut through the otherwise staid look.
It’s actually very similar to the Aerocool in a lot of respects, although a little more restrained in design. There’s a wide-boy 200mm fan at the front, lazily pushing a good volume of air through the case with minimal effort, and a few removable drive bays so you can mess with the layout. The problem is that the 3.5” cage can’t be removed, because part of it supports the motherboard
mounting tray, and that means you need to opt for a shorter PSU (less than 160mm) to avoid the cabling being crushed by the drive bays.
However, there is a huge amount of space for your GPU of choice, whether or not you switch out any of the storage cages. But that doesn’t stop this surprisingly pricey case feeling a little awkward to build into, and that puts it at the bottom of my list this time around.
SPEC Form factor mATX, Mini-ITX Dimensions 265 x 403 x 390mm Fans 1x 200mm front, 1x 120mm rear Drive bays 1x 5.25”, 2x 3.5”, 2x 3.5” Expansion slots 4 Max. graphics card length 330mm
Aquila$130 Xigmatek
The squat shape means this is capable of housing both mini-ITX and mATX
motherboards. It also means there’s a good amount of space inside.
That extends to the cooling, with space for mounting a 120mm radiator at various points and a 240mm one in the roof. The Cube also comes with a 200mm LED-lit fan at the front—and I love those massive spinners. They shift a lot of air with a few languid revolutions and their low speed makes them practically silent. There’s an exhaust fan at the rear too.
Sadly the inset carry handles on the top feel sharp to the touch, and
the meshed ‘X’ on the roof has jagged edges too. The moulded shell also feels a little plasticky.
Overall Aerocool’s case is good-looking covering for your mini components, and it makes building them as simple as possible too.
SPEC Form factor mATX, Mini-ITX Size 280 x 380 x 350mm Fans 1x 200mm front, 1x 140mm rear Drive bays 1x 5.25”, 3x 3.5”, 5 x 2.5” Exp slots 4 Max. graphics card 320mm (345mm without front fan)
Strike-X Cube$109 Aerocool
77
75
BENCHMARKSTHE KEY SPECIFICATIONS AT A GLANCE.
Max graphics card length (mm) Expansion slots Installed fans
CORSAIR CARBIDE AIR 240290
4
3
THERMALTAKE CORE X2480
5
2
EVGA HADRON AIR367
2
2
FRACTAL DESIGN NODE 304310
2
3
COOLER MASTER HAF STACKER 915F360
2
1
AEROCOOL STRIKE-X CUBE345
4
2
XIGMATEK AQUILA330
4
2
96 JUNE 2015
Devices such as MSI’s Gaming Dock are blurring the lines between gaming PCs and gaming laptops,
while powerful portables like the Asus G751JY are breaking down the performance differences. What isn’t changing is the fact that you get a lot more bang for your buck with a custom desktop build.
The PC Gamer RigStill better value than a laptop
CPUIntel Core i5 4690K
The Devil’s Canyon i5 is in the PCG Rig. Overclocking fun ahoy!
FITTED October 2014
MOTHERBOARDAsus Z97-P
Some fantastic value Z97 motherboards have arrived on the scene.
FITTED February 2015
RAMCrucial Ballistix Sport
Eight gigs of fast 1600MHz DDR3, and the price has dropped a little.
FITTED November 2011
CASECorsair Carbide 200R
It’s not glamorous, but you won’t find a better case for the money.
FITTED December 2013
STORAGESeagate Barracuda
To save money, storage has been restricted to a single terabyte of HDD.
FITTED September 2013
CPU COOLERZalman LQ310
Zalman’s water cooler is an excellent choice for near-silent cooling.
FITTED August 2013
GRAPHICS CARD AMD Radeon R9 290
The recent price cuts have made AMD’s R9 290 a great card for a strict budget.
FITTED Holiday 2014
POWER SUPPLYSilverStone Strider Essential 500W
SilverStone is a reliable name, and that’s what you need in a PSU.
FITTED April 2014
MONITORViewsonic VX2263Smhl
This smallish panel is still IPS, and a good entry-level monitor.
FITTED February 2015
HEADSETKingston HyperX Cloud Pro
Incredible sound, great build quality and all at a fantastic price.
FITTED June 2015
$67$51$63$61$119$239
$80$46$130$156$62$300
POSSIBLE UPGRADESOCZ ARC 100 240GB > If you can’t stretch to a 500GB SSD then OCZ’s excellent ARC 100 is your best bet around the lower capacities. The combination of price and consistency is key.Corsair H100i > Find an extra couple of 120mm fans to build a four-fan cooling array around the 240mm radiator, and control it via LINK, for serious CPU cooling.Nvidia GTX 970 > The perfect graphics card if you definitely never want to go over 3.5GB video RAM. Still great value, and gives AMD’s Hawaii a run for its money. $1,374TOTAL
PRICE
Dave James
Hardware Editor
The PCG Rig will give you a PC that’s capable of playing any modern game, and it won’t even cost you $1,400. Why pay more for the illusion of portability?
WHAT’S IN THE BOX The components that make up the PCG Rig
NEW!
KEYBOARDCorsair Vengeance K70
My favorite mechanical key keyboard, and I’m very happy to get it in the Rig at last.
FITTED February 2015
MOUSELogitech G402 Hyperion Fury
Forget the ridiculous name, this is a quality, accurate gaming rodent.
FITTED May 2015
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