#Sissa

Game Information Initial Release Date: 28 Jan,2020 Developer: Loftur Studio Publisher: Loftur Studio Platform: Microsoft Windows The RTS genre has always been a po[CENSORED]r one, though it has been way less active in the past years. There have been games here and there attempting to bring the formula back, but none seem to have struck gold. Kofi Quest: Alpha Mod attempts to revitalize the formula and combine it with the RPG genre, to degrees of success. For good measure, it also adds into the mix some self-aware writing, ever so po[CENSORED]r in recent times. Kofi Quest: Alpha Mod is a tie-in game with the mini webseries Kofi, available on YouTube in Spanish. While those that have watched the series will know some of the characters better, there is no issue whatsoever, the game gives more than enough information to understand what’s going on. The story itself is centered on a fetch quest for a magical bottle. This bottle is a powerful item usually protected by the Wise Bearded Monks, but lost by Chai, a monk apprentice, after he and his master are attacked by a powerful warlock. During the game, the player plays as the titular hero, Kofi, a lazy mercebinary who spends his days playing videogames. After meeting the kid Pal, Kofi is dragged into being the captain of a rag-tag group of low level mercebinaries comprised of elf and human kids. After a skirmish with the orcs to rescue a captured member, the party finds Chai in some bushes and cons him into hiring them to retrieve the lost bottle. As it was expected from the writer, who has two finished and published webcomics, the writing is a highlight of the game, being both intelligent and funny, but is done a disservice by the gameplay. If the self-aware humor points out exactly the same things the player is cursing at, it only adds salt to the injury. The biggest example is how the game itself points out how stupid fetch and escort quests are, while putting the player through both. Moving on, Kofi Quest’s graphics are great, everything looks crisp with unique models for both characters and enemies. There is a pair of problems worth mentioning though, the zones look somewhat repetitive, with a lot of asset reusing and some of the cutscenes are lacklustre due to the pretty basic animations. The sound department is also well covered, with a pretty good soundtrack and voice acting for almost every character. There’s even a joke in one of the dialogues to explain why some don’t have it. The SFX are also good, everything is recognisable through sound without getting annoying. Finally onto the gameplay, Kofi Quest’s biggest flaw. As previously mentioned, Kofi Quest is an RTS combined with an RPG, what this means for the player is that besides managing an army they have an inventory and equipment for their units. The problem is this mechanic is not well implemented. Most of the units cannot change their equipment at all and on those that can, the difference is invisible. Another big issue with the gameplay is how the whole game plays as an escort mission, if Chai dies the whole mission restarts from the last save point, and believe me, Chai will die. Up until the last few levels Chai is completely useless, while ally units spawn at his position, or rather the position of his flag, he deals minuscule amounts of damage and can take as much. Later into the game, it is actually Kofi himself that becomes the escorted unit, basically removing one of the better units from the team. Now, the reader may wonder if Kofi is one of the better units, why would he be removed just because the game resets if he dies? Well, the answer for that is that the units in Kofi Quest don’t improve over time, after every boss a message appears saying they have improved, but this doesn’t prove true, there’s never a point where the player will think they’re strong. The game also has a kink for handicapping the player by completely removing the RTS element and leaving them with just a few of their units. For example, in the last dungeon the player has to face a boss with only Kofi and Chai. What ensues is a 15 minute battle where Kofi goes to deal some damage until he dies, and then Chai has to run like a headless chicken until Kofi revives and the cycle restarts. This is not the only time a situation like this exists; there are several areas where the roster is limited to Kofi and Chai, where due to some random reason, the rest of the troops can’t be summoned, or Kofi and Elfa, his high level friend (and the best unit the player can control in the whole game, though it’s not saying much). It’s worth pointing out the game has a lot of alternative paths to explore, but it feels pointless since most just lead to a chest, which become a nuisance soon enough. While items, especially potions are still useful, gold is worthless. The explanation for this is simple enough, the player’s wallet caps at 999 and gold can only be stored in the base camp, to which the player would have to fast travel or walk, but the inability to fast travel back from there makes it a complete waste of time. A lot of times I found myself running around with 999 gold for a whole level because I had nothing to do with it. The fast travel mechanic is another crime in itself. While it exists and can be useful, it only works on a select few save points for whatever genius decision. The maps are not exactly small, so backtracking is a complete drag, having to walk huge lengths of land just to go back to the point where the fast travel was used. To be more specific, there are around 5 teleport points, one per main area. There is no explanation for this either; some allow teleportation because they do. One of the biggest qualms I as a player had with the game is how characters can canonically revive and come back, but if the escorted unit dies a full reset happens. This makes no sense since the rest of the army can just go on fighting without them; while it sets some “stakes” it does so by annoying the player and adding a fun sucking gimmick to the game. Another huge problem was the impossibility to remap the controls; the camera for example is set to the arrow keys, while the abilities are set to Q W E and the movement to the mouse. While the camera can also be moved with the mouse, it is way less precise, so the swapping from one position to the other wastes a lot of time, making it hard to control, heal and manage the units smoothly. This next paragraph is just pure personal opinion; it is definitely not objective and probably won’t apply to everyone, so take it as you will. I really wanted to like this game; I’ve read the comics by the author before, met him and watched the webseries. At the start of the game I was having a lot of fun, but once Chai was introduced, it just felt like it was getting worse and worse, with me liking it less and less. During the last part of the game I just decided to give up and cheese it, it was really tiresome to repeat the same rooms because the high level enemies had no problem killing Chai, since the controls to select all but Chai are imprecise at best. To do so I proceeded to use the most broken ability in the game, with an almost 10 minute cooldown, go do something else and repeat. While this may seem absurd, it felt way more satisfying than putting myself through the absolute drag of those rooms over and over. As a disclaimer, I played the game on the hardest difficulty possible, an easier difficulty might provide a more fun experience, though I doubt it seeing as my problem was mostly with the mechanics of the game itself. Something worth mentioning is the level where Kofi becomes the insta-death unit, this part was even worse than with Chai, because it combined with not being able to summon the whole army. This implied not being able to use one of the better units due to how the enemy would almost always focus him, while also being made worse by the fact that Kofi straight up runs towards the enemies of his own volition, regardless of how many times the player moves him back. Overall, Kofi Quest: Alpha Mod is not a bad game, it definitely has the production value, but it would do way better with a lot of quality of life changes. While I myself wouldn’t go around recommending it, I don’t consider it’s a game with which nobody would have fun, playing it at a lower difficulty would certainly help. The art, music and writing also somewhat redeem the game, making it at least worth a shot. System Requirements MINIMUM: OS: Windows XP SP2 / Windows 8 / Windows 8.1 / Windows 10 Processor: 2.0 GHz Dual Core Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: DX9 (shader model 3.0) or DX11 with feature level 9.3 DirectX: Version 9.0c Storage: 2 GB available space Sound Card: Compatible device with DirectX 9.0c Additional Notes: Keyboard and mouse

Game Information Title:Awesome Pea 2 Initial release date: January 31, 2020 Developer: Pigeon Dev Games Publisher: Pigeon Dev Games Platform: Microsoft Windows Can you remember the wonderful green screen of Nintendo’s Gameboy? Every game had a delightful green tinge, and basic retro graphics. Keep focusing on that image, but fast forward to 2020. Now place that picture on your rather large TV screen. That is how your gaming future will look if you decide to take on Pigeon Dev Games’ sequel to Awesome Pea, Awesome Pea 2. A retro platform game which spans 24 stages. You must leap and run through dark dungeons, avoiding deadly traps and creatures, while aiming to collect all of the gold and make it safely to the end goal. A very simple game that follows a tried and tested gaming concept. Start at point A, miss all the obstacles, and finish at point B. You are given no lives to spawn back in, so death is all but assured. Accuracy, quick reflexes and planning are essential skills if you wish to complete the story. Each stage has a set amount of coins to gather, you can choose to ignore these all together if you wish, as they are not a requirement to finish the level. With a variety of traps to avoid; spikes, bullets, razor-like cogs and more. Enemies who fly through the air, crawl along the ground, and cling to the walls. There really is a lot of challenges to overcome to say you have mastered this one. The pea himself has only one power, and that is the ability to jump, and double jump. You will have to observe your foes, and find gaps in their movements to forge a path through the narrowest of spaces. With only one life to complete a run, existence as a dungeon crawling, treasure hunting pea can be difficult and frustrating. Death undoes all your hard work, all you can do is dust yourself down, and start again.. This title is strange, you are chucked immediately into the action with no explanation as to why a pea would want to hunt for gold, or even how it was able to obtain its jumping abilities. With no plot, no narrative to give the story meaning, you are just completing stages for the fun of it. It all felt rather; empty, hollow, and absurd. I would have liked a back story to support the rather good platform elements. The developers have focused too much on the retro concept, this style would have worked perfectly 25 years ago, but modern gamers want so much more. A game should take you on a journey. Awesome Pea 2 doesn’t do that, it provides you with the bones of the project, but absolutely no meat to get your teeth into. The game is presented with a very classic and retro approach; the pixelated models, simple platform management, 2D side scrolling reveals, and colour palette all scream old school console. The action doesn’t just take place on one fixed screen, this leads to leaps of faith, and death on a number of occasions. This could be the straw that breaks the camels back for a number of gamers. You safely traverse the rest of the area, just to be hit by an enemy, or skewered by a spike as you fall through the air. This almost luck before planning approach will certainly not be liked by all players, admittedly it left a bitter taste in my mouth on a number of occasions. Prior to joining a stage, you are presented with a world map. This is little more than a glorified scoreboard, it shows you which level is selected, the completion times, and treasure collected. The developers missed a golden opportunity to make this part of the journey of the game, as it is, it felt like “Oh I’m just selecting another task to complete.” A classic retro game should be matched up with an 8 bit sound track that sticks in your mind, but is annoying to listen to. Well Pigeon Dev Games have supplied audio that fills this criteria, and much, much more. Each level has its own unique piece of high tempo synthesised music. It really is that bad, that it’s good. The tempo makes you want to play faster, even though your mind is telling you to slow down and think. The sound effects are reminiscent of Super Mario jumping, or Link throwing an item. It’s simple, shrill, and effective. If you are aiming to collect all the treasure in each level, then you are going to find that repeating a stage will be the norm. At this point the music does become particularly obnoxious. So my advice is either mute the sound, or get good at the game. There is no avoiding the retro 8 bit sound when you are a pea adventurer. With only one action to complete, and moving around to concentrate on, this title could have been created for the simple controls of the Gameboy, NES, or Master System. Unlike other platform titles that I’ve played, I found this one to be extremely responsive, and accurate. With so many tight areas to squeeze through it was essential that it was designed this way, otherwise an already frustrating game would have been much harder. I was disappointed with the lack of camera panning. This lack of freedom reduced the ability to plan ahead, and caused unnecessary deaths, maybe it was just the developers way of amusing themselves at our expense. With such a simple gaming concept, no story, and no elements that make this title in depth, you’d be right in assuming that there is very little replay factor to be had. Luckily, the collection of all of the treasure really is a tough ask. For anyone wanting to obtain all of the achievements, then you will sadly discover that this can only be accomplished by gathering up all the collectables. Something that I did like was the time element for each stage. This opens up competitions for speed runs, and challenges with friends, and other players. It would have been nice to see this expanded to a global and local Leaderboard to see how you compare to others. Awesome Pea 2 is 100% a classic run of the mill 2D platform title. Frustration and anger are just 2 of the emotions that you are guaranteed to experience whilst playing this. Unfortunately, it misses a few details that would have added some in depth quality to the overall package. As a platform challenge it absolutely delivers, and has that “Just one more try” element. But as a game that allows you to follow a story, create empathy or loathing for the main protagonist, it unfortunately is truly lacking. If you are looking for a casual gaming experience, where leaving it for days at a time doesn’t affect your ability to play, then this could well be one for you. Would I recommend this? Yes, and no. As a platform game, it is very good. It has just the right level of difficulty, and is a challenge for the completionists out there. I however find that the lack of in depth qualities made me just shrug a bit when asked to start a new stage. Because of this I’m refraining from telling you to buy it now. If you decide to purchase it, may sure that you, unleash your inner pea, get greedy, and hunt for that treasure. System Requirements MINIMUM: OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8/8.1, 10 Processor: 1.7 Ghz Memory: 1 GB RAM Graphics: 512 MB VRAM DirectX: Version 9.0 Storage: 512 MB available space Sound Card: Something that can make chiptune noises

Game Information Initial release date: November 15, 2017 Developers: Snowhound Games, Snowhound Oy Platforms: Linux, Microsoft Windows, Macintosh operating systems Publishers: 1C Entertainment, 1C Company, 1C Publishing EU s.r.o. I’m really not one for deck building games. I think it’s primarily a matter of constantly feeling like I’m doing something wrong, always certain I should have a better selection of cards, that if I’d made a different choice I’d be having another experience… it’s an anxiety-inducing way to play anything. So clearly I was unsure starting Deep Sky Derelicts, despite liking the sound of the premise. But woohoo, this is deck building for me! You, that is your team of three mercenaries, are charged with exploring derelict spaceships on the outer boundaries of space, with the intention of gathering location data for a near-mythical ship said to be stuffed with valuable treasures. From the scavenger base you buy and sell loot, visit the medic, take on extra missions, and improve your gear, then launch off to abandoned starships to investigate Each ship is a unrevealed shape of square tiles, which you explore limited by a power resource. Movement costs power, as does combat, and indeed scanning to check if you’re about to stumble into nearby danger or treasure. You must make sure you’ve always enough power left to return to a ship’s exit points, while pushing your luck by exploring further, hoping to find valuable loot, strange characters with side quests, or the all important navigation data. And indeed to meet a large array of foes Combat is where your cards come in, with each character type able to choose from a range of weapons and tools, then mods (found or bought) for said items. Each comes with a card or seven that can be played by each character in the turn-based battles, perhaps letting you fire a volley of shots each a third of your weapon’s total power, or a 100% power shot that also concusses, or a card that refills your shields, or one that buffs your companions, or one that… you get the idea. Each character’s deck is randomly drawn from in battle, with various added abilities to change the chances of various draws along the way. And this, for me, works splendidly! To me, cards chosen not by arbitrarily picking from a larger pool, but rather being a consequence of the items and mods currently equipped, feels far more understandable and accessible. I was in! The corollary being, to those who adore the min-maxing horror of proper deck-building strategy games, I suspect DSD is going to be colossally frustrating It still finds a few ways to be frustrating. Despite a stint in Early Access, this complete version still really lacks a good introduction for new players. In fact, this is all too often the case for Early Access games, ever-more developed for the community already playing them, forgetting the newbs who’ll arrive for 1.0. It introduces a few of the concepts on the scavenger base, but there’s no introduction to how anything works once you’re exploring a ship. Now, that’s great when it comes to working out how exploration is done, what the consequences are, how you need to invest energy, and so on. Finding that stuff out on the fly feels rather the point. But it’s just rubbish when it comes to fights. Most of it is reasonably deduced, playing cards to see the effects, but when I clicked an unlabelled back arrow to get out of a screen of info, and it turns out it was the “retreat” button, I wasn’t enormously enamoured. Plus, with no first time tutorial for fights, it’s a touch demoralising that the first set of enemies I encountered were literally twice as powerful as me. It doesn’t help that messages pop up on screen and disappear before you can read them, sometimes containing vital information for a first-time player. I figured it all out, of course, but the lack of information up front feels too clumsy. Once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s great fun, never over-complicated (sorry again, min-maxers), and mani[CENSORED]ting your deck with the choices of mods and weapons starts to feel very deliberate, matching up skills between characters for effective battling. It’s always very satisfying to pick a Medic, and have them play in between your Leader and a Bruiser. Leader starts off with some debuffs against any foes with enough initiative to take a turn early in battle, then Medic sets up Bruiser with a two-turn adrenaline shot, then Bruiser unleashes two almighty attacks to make a proper dent in the enemy shields. Perhaps even take out one or two before the next round. And in that next round, now many some mind games from the Leader, have the Medic pacify one enemy to lower the volume of attack on their next turn, and have Bruiser bump his shields back up. And so on. At the start you pick your team’s skill types, but you can also buy in new mercenaries when you’ve enough cash, if you want to mix up your crew. One of the more intriguing elements when it comes to the juggling of numbers and stats as you play is health. You have health and shield points for each character, the latter automatically refilling after fight, the former never getting any better even if you return to base. Instead you have to spend your very hard-earned coins at the medic. The real advantage of this is it forces you to play far more cautiously when you can’t afford to improve matters – rather than just knowing you can always go back and get better, you instead have to venture out onto derelicts in the desperate hope of finding something valuable, then scarpering home, just to pay for a smidgen more health points for one of your character. During Early Access this all fell apart due to the woeful lack of cash available, but in the final version that appeared last night, this is seeming much improved. Items found can be sold, but you will absolutely always need to spend a hefty chunk of it on resupplying your energy, and buying further energy canisters to be able to sensibly explore anywhere. Then you want to have enough left to spend on improving equipment. With four items per each of the three characters, plus two mods per item, that’s 36 different items that need improving as you explore more difficult ships, and again if you played the early version, you’ll be very relieved to learn it’s now far more generous when it comes to drops. Buying weapons or mods new is now, as it should be, only necessary when you’re after something very specific, rather than a necessity due to scarcity in the loot. There are also now many more missions available from the mercenary Lair on the base, which means there are more money making opportunities, and importantly, more things to do than you might have previously found. And if you’re brand new, then just be delighted we’re running this version of this review, rather than the one I wrote yesterday! It still feels like it needs a good deal more tweaking. Another oddity of combat is the complete lack of fanfare when you, or your enemy, gets a kill. It shows the pop-up static image for the attack, the points you’ve taken from them, but if defeated, when that image is gone, they’re just not there. Not slumped to the floor, or melodramatically clutching chests and falling – just gone like they never were. It feels peculiar, wanting. The same is true for most elements, like cashing in a finished mission, or using an item in the inventory – there’s no “moment” to it, no audio sting, no graphical representation. This is just aesthetics, of course, but they’re noticeably lacking. I’m really enjoying this. It’s worth noting that I’ve not played as much of the final version as I’d like to, and it could still go wrong later on – I’ll certainly be updating regarding that. But as it is, this is all rather fun. A tactical tile-based exploration game, with deck-based combat, and strategic elements, and yet for some reason all those terms that might normally put me off a game are winning me over here! It’s certainly light, lacking the crazy depths of the genres from which it draws – in fact it feels like a game that would also work especially well on a phone. It turns out this is just what I wanted, and there’s a good chance you might too. System Requirements MINIMUM: OS: Windows 7 / 8 / 10, 64-bit only Processor: Intel Core i3 or equivalent Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4400 DirectX: Version 9.0c Storage: 4 GB available space Sound Card: Yes Additional Notes: Minimum system requirements will allow you to play the game in FullHD / 30 fps

Game Information Initial release date: November 20, 2012 Engine: Forgelight Engine Genre: Massively multiplayer online first-person shooter game Developers: Daybreak Game Company, Rogue Planet Games, Sony Interactive Entertainment Platforms: PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows Publishers: Daybreak Game Company, Sony Interactive Entertainment When it's dark – properly dark – you can look up at the night sky and see a multitude of stars. Stop and consider those stars. Each one is a ball of superheated gas, floating out there in space with its own history. It's a staggering realisation. Stop for a second in PlanetSide 2 and you'll see a similar thing, except instead of stars, you're seeing people. Real people, just as out of reach in their homes to you as those stars. Stand and stare up at the sky and you might see a Belgian kid hurtle overhead, chased by a Spanish man in a fighter jet. As the Spanish man's rockets connect with his fuselage, the Belgian kid will wink out of existence like a star going out. Every light in the sky, every light on the ground, is another person. PlanetSide 2 is a massively multiplayer first-person shooter, and although it's identical in concept to the original PlanetSide: three factions wage eternal war on the ground and in the air over a handful of continents, it feels like the future of games. PlanetSide was crippled by 2003's technology; PlanetSide 2 has the benefit of nine years of human advancement. Hundreds of players fight across three continents. Indar is red and dusty, Mars with a few scrubby trees. Amerish is green, verdant, and liberally coated in dense jungle. Esamir is icy and beautiful, lit by northern lights at night and reflected sun glare during the day. Each continent is studded with bases of varying size that one of three sides - the militaristic Terran Republic, the self-righteous New Conglomerate and the alien-humping Vanu Sovereignty - can capture. Capturing bases bestows resource bonuses that pay out every few minutes. Those resources can then be used to buy vehicles and infantry supplies from designated terminals found around the huge map, all facilitating PlanetSide 2's central tenet: a vast, unfurling war between hundreds of players at once, the largest scale of battle yet seen in games outside of EVE Online's wild space. I never thought it'd work. PlanetSide 2 is an MMO, it has hundreds of players living on a small amount of global servers – but it also has twitchy combat, bullets based on real physics, and the kind of vehicle fights that demand split second reactions. Few games have combined the two concepts well. The original game used behind-the-scenes number-magic that left weapons feeling toothless and combat floaty. PlanetSide 2's weapons feel neither toothless nor floaty. They feel like weapons, guns that fire projectiles where you aim them. As a heavy assault class soldier, your bullets will slice through the shield and skin of an enemy at close range. As a sniper toting a powerful enough rifle, a bullet aimed slightly above the head of a long-range target will arc down into their visor to score you a one shot kill. PlanetSide 2 has five classes, including the snipey Infiltrator, the chunky Heavy Assault, with Light Assault, Medic, and Engineer rounding out the group. Spawn as one of these and head to a re-arm station and you'll be able to play in the clothes of the sixth class: the MAX suit. These lumbering beauties pack a heavy weapon glued to each arm, and act like walking tanks - softer targets than their angry house friends, but able to dish out exponentially more punishment than regular armour-clad types. Infantry combat isn't perfect. Some intangible element – either developer SOE's inexperience with modern shooters or the sheer size of the game – means that PlanetSide 2's guns lack the raw punch of a smaller scale FPS. Call of Duty has this down to an exact science. There, I can almost feel the bullets piercing the organs of my enemies. Here, it's closer to Battlefield 3, and not quite as powerful in sensation. Also like Battlefield 3, death is accompanied by pre-canned animation. Snuff it and your avatar flops to the floor, arm out like a bad movie death. Somehow, it makes you feel powerless and frustrated, your own star winking out of existence. But these are tradeoffs I'll happily make for the game's scale. I've fought shotgun duels in four-foot wide corridors, but I've also lanced someone in the head from five hundred metres away, ending the digital life of a far off francophone. Infantry combat is wild and crazy and freeform in an intoxicating way, taking place at all distances and in all settings. I find vehicle combat even more exhilarating. No game has ever made my heart beat faster than PlanetSide 2 has. I've spent much of my time in the air, in the exposed bubble cockpit of the Terran Republic Mosquito. The Mosquito - my Mozzy - is a speedy, one-person fighter that I've outfitted as an air superiority craft, dedicated to hunting and killing enemy fliers. I've hurled my red-and-silver steed around crags, and settled in, nose-cannon blazing, behind vast enemy dropships, then escaped under base stanchions to throw off chasing air-to-air missiles. In a mere five hours in PlanetSide 2's air (the game's stat-tracking is exhaustive) I've lived out a lifetime of Top Gun fantasies without having to take my top off and play volleyball. And this is but one element of the mechanised game. I've flown a lot, settling in with a wingman on my plane's shoulder - Chris, on Skype, calling out targets and bogeys on my six - but I've also been at the spearhead of armour columns. I've participated in tank battles to rival Kursk, and driven a clanking fun-bus through the jungle to sneak spawning troops behind enemy lines. I spend time in the air, but my friends can't fly. I invite them to a squad and fly cover for them as they move across the ground. There's something for them - for everyone - to do, to specialise in, to enjoy in PlanetSide 2. But when I don't have those friends on tap, PlanetSide 2 becomes a different game. A quieter game. It's still astounding to look at, but it's also a more aimless, frustrating experience. Stand and stare up at the game's lights again. It's a lot less lonely when you can call out some of the lights' names. Play PlanetSide 2 alone and you're a tiny cog in one of three war machines, easily killed and rudderless: a feeling hammered in when the area of map you fought and died over yesterday to turn to your empire's side has fallen back into enemy hands while you were tucked up in bed. War moves quickly, and it'll move without you. Whole command structures exist within the game: outfits are guilds, housing hundreds of players. Down from there, platoons encompass a set of squads - squads themselves have up to twelve players. This structure allows for some ludicrous levels of strategic group motion, especially when an external program like Teamspeak is involved. Eschew this structure and there's almost no overt guidance about what to actually do in this eternal war. The only concession to the baffled is a quick-deploy option found on the main map that puts you in a drop pod and launches you into recently contested territory. It would, I found, just as often plonk me in the middle of an enemy-held base, no friendlies around for miles. PlanetSide 2 is sorely lacking in new player guidance. Joining a squad is easy, but public groups are usually scattered, short term marriages of convenience rather than love or necessity. The game's three continents provide a tremendous amount of real estate to fight over, and it's too easy to pledge your life to a lost cause: either a base long-overrun, or one miles from the real action. The only way past this stumbling block is dedication, and the block is big and positioned near your figurative feet. Many won't make it past. They should, because the experience on the other side is unlike anything else in gaming, but also because it's free to play. PlanetSide 2's payment model is microtransaction-based, but all players can use all vehicles and fight on all continents without needing to cough up cash. They can also use all weapons: everything bar cosmetic options - skull masks, daisy decals, giraffe-print camouflage at the sillier end of the spectrum - is unlockable with certification points. These are earned through play: kills, assists, base captures, and so on, as well as passively over time. But cert point prices are high. An averagely successful hour of intensive play might net you 50. A new weapon usually costs around 1,000, necessitating grind for your gun. The real money option will set you back, at a rough average, around four pounds for a rifle. It feels closer to the pricier end of acceptable in the free to play market, but there's a half-hour preview option that lets you play with your potential pickup before purchase that salves the sting to your wallet. Fortunately, few weapons feel like stone-cold necessities. SOE use the word 'sidegrade' to explain their purchasable arsenal, and the concept translates well to the game. I dropped fifteen of my own pounds on the game and bought myself a hefty sniper rifle. It was three times as powerful as the Terran Republic Infiltrator's standard weapon, but unlike that quickfire semi-auto gun, my new toy needed to be cocked between every shot. Reloading, too, was glacially slow, meaning a target miss would put me at the mercy of any nearby enemy. Not an empirically better choice, then, but a different one. I adapted my play style accordingly. Before, I'd use the ten-shot standard rifle to send weakened enemies packing from mid range; now I'd enable the infiltrator's cloak - which comes as standard with a press of F - get behind enemy battle lines, and pick off players with carefully considered headshots. I used a pool of certification points to unlock a longer-range scope, and took the same approach, but from further away. Cert points can also be used to unlock skills and attachments for your vehicles, guns, and classes. It's these points that provide the strongest draw to the game. Bases come and go under allied control, continents are captured and recaptured by different sides, but as in other more traditional MMOs, your character will always progress. Certs can be plugged into an array of things: from increasing the speed a repair tool will repair vehicles, to attaching a heat-sensing scope to a light machine gun. Cert prices run the gamut: it costs a mere one point to increase your health by 10 percent with an armour boost, but you're looking at 500 - and the many hours that entails - to unlock an ejection system for your aircraft. SOE have space to wiggle these prices, and I'd suggest they do with a few of them. The Sunderer's spawn attachment, particularly, should be cheaper than the 50 cert points it currently costs: the battle-bus vehicle lets other players spawn on the frontline when tactically deployed, and is vital to successful pushes or defences. Just as vital to those pushes is game stability. PlanetSide 2's servers have been acceptably steady in the weeks since launch, but too often I've found myself at the tip of a concerted advance only for the server to unceremoniously boot me out. On reconnection, I'm back at a spawn point miles from my previous location and the platoon I was rolling with has thrown their hands up and logged off for the night. For now, I'm willing to forgive the interruption, especially as the majority of these reboots are apparently to fix specific server problems. Less forgivable are lag issues. Some sectors of gaming society have had specific problems with game-breaking delays that make PlanetSide 2's FPS combat untenable. I didn't experience these issues personally across three different PCs, playing on high, medium and low settings on both wired and wireless connections, but the reports are too widespread to discount. To their credit, SOE are hammering these faults down quickly: my first day with the game, I'd spot friendlies and foes flitting in and out of buildings. The next day, people stayed where they were meant to. A quick straw poll of the PC Gamer outfit found the fix's effects were fairly universal. Hardware's a more permanent issue: PlanetSide 2 is a big, pretty game set to stick around for years. As a result, it hoovers up CPU power like few recent games, and I'd be wary about approaching it with a processor more than a few years old. But for those with the machine to handle it, PlanetSide 2 is never anything less than staggering. On your own, it's a spectacle. Stand far enough back and you can almost take it all in, but there's just too much there to focus on. With teammates, the picture comes into glorious focus. Dogfights in the frigid air, gunfights among the trees of a dense jungle, tanks duelling across the plains of a red desert: like stars in the night sky, PlanetSide 2 is beautiful. System Requirements MINIMUM: OS: 64-bit Windows 7 or later CPU: Core i5-760 or better / AMD Phenom II X4 or better [Quad-core CPU] Memory: 6 GB RAM (64-bit) Hard Drive: 20 GB free Video Card: nVidia GeForce GTX 260 or better / Radeon HD 4850 or better DirectX®: 11.0 RECOMMENDED: OS:64-bit Windows 7 or later Processor:Intel i7 processor or higher / AMD Phenom II X6 or higher Memory:6 GB RAM Graphics:nVidia GeForce 560 or higher / AMD HD 6870 or higher DirectX®:11.0 Hard Drive:20 GB HD space Sound:DirectX compatible Sound Card Other Requirements:Broadband Internet connection

Game information Initial release date: February 7, 2019 Publisher: Other Ocean Group Platform: Microsoft Windows Developers: Other Ocean Group, Other Ocean Interactive You've got to suspend friendships to play certain games. Street Fighter can generate lasting resentments when players fail to temporarily turn off friend-mode, fume about whatever cheap-ass bullshit their momentary non-friend has put up, and then reactivate friendly relations once their scrub rage has passed. As a teenager, I stormed out of a friend's house over such a case of Street Fighter 2 bullshit. Project Winter is much more insidious. It isn't cheesy move spamming that hurts you, it's the lies. Among your group of eight survivors—and I highly recommend playing with people you know—two are traitors. As a survivor, not only do you have to avoid being killed or set back by the traitors, you have to survive a frigid, moose and bear-infested wilderness, which is hard enough without liars among you. It's another attempt at bringing the basic concept of party game Werewolf—you may know it by its Mafia variant—into a multiplayer videogame. It's a tough thing to do. For one, everyone has to play along. It's no fun if the secret traitors just say "haha, I'm a traitor" at the start. And two, the full experience of sitting in a circle trying to suss out liars among your friends can't be replicated in a game, at least until mainstream VR accurately reproduces facial expressions and body language. Project Winter's adaption succeeds by replacing face-to-face communication with lots of subtle ways for the traitors to hinder the survivors, which also gives the survivors lots of subtle hints as to who the traitors are. The top-down view means that, if you can't see someone on your screen, they can't see you, giving traitors privacy when they want to open special, traitor-only crates that contain weapons, traps, and poisons. But if a survivor stumbles upon an open traitor crate, they may remember who it was that wandered up that way "looking for berries." Or not. There's a lot to keep track of outside of sussing out rats. The survivors have to first get a power station up and running, which means looting or crafting materials to drop into it. The traitors usually help during this stage to avoid being found out. Meanwhile, hunger and cold are eating at everybody, and there's not much time to dedicate to interrogating your temporary non-friends about their whereabouts and intentions. And when players are cut off from each other—the area voice chat only carries so far—stories begin to conflict. In one game, as a traitor, I was called out by a survivor who noticed that I'd left valuable resources sitting in a crate instead of shepherding them to the power station. Rather than protest, I simply walked away and found two other survivors who'd gone on an expedition to find the next objective. When I returned with the two of them, who'd seen or heard none of this, this nosy survivor was still on about how I was probably a traitor. I claimed not to have any idea what he was talking about, and accused him of being a traitor, since clearly I'd been helping these other two while he threw accusations around. To my surprise, my party backed me up. It worked for a little bit, but I tend to crack under pressure given long enough I'd make a terrible spy. More often than not I'm the one being fooled. In one game, while warming up inside the starting cabin with two other players, we heard an argument outside. Two players were shouting toward the cabin that the other was the traitor. One had tried to kill the other. No, it was actually an accident. One had said he was the traitor. No, he was joking. Naturally, the three of us in the cabin figured we were witnessing two traitors trying to throw us off by feigning discord. We banished them, and let them kill each other in the cold. Of course, I'd been warming up with the two real traitors the whole time. Traitors can sabotage access panels to loot bunkers, drop traps, play sneaky games with walkie-talkies—the only way to communicate over distances—encourage risky treks and then run back to the cabin claiming to have gotten 'lost,' and all sorts of other devious things. The best games see a combination of tricks. The worst see the traitors play it too safe at first, so that they have no choice but to pull out guns late in the game and chase the survivors around. That's still fun, though. Project Winter is one of the few games where I don't mind spectating if I die early. As a ghost, I can teleport around the map to watch everyone else struggle—sometimes overhearing them wonder if I'm still out there, or if I died, or if I was a traitor. Sometimes I know who one of the traitors is—because she killed me—but can't tell them directly. I can only provide ghostly healing, heat, or damage according to what I think I know, and hope they observe my indirect communication. Watching the remaining survivors struggle while having more information than them makes for excellent drama. I'm sure there's fun to be had with the right group of strangers, but so far I've only played Project Winter with people I know. The post-game chats ("Oh, that's what happened to you!") are one of the best parts of it—just so long as you're able to reinstate friendship-mode after being poisoned to death by a liar. System Requirements MINIMUM: OS: Windows 7 Processor: AMD FX-6300 / 3rd or 4th gen i3 Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: GTX 660 Ti / HD 7870 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 3 GB available space RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows 10 Processor: i5 6600 + Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: GTX 970 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 3 GB available space

Game Information Initial release date: October 31, 2017 Developer: Saber Interactive Series: Spintires Engine: Havok Modes: Single-player video game, Cooperative gameplay Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows One of the great things about cars is going fast. Zipping down the road at top speed to prove nobody’s a better, speedier, more skilled driver is an incredible rush. Need for Speed, Burnout, Forza, Dirt Rally and an endless parade of other racing titles have the “fast” thing covered, but the thing about speed is that it’s only one of the great things about driving a vehicle. Not everything revolves around getting places when the road has already been cleared, and for that you don’t need top-gear white knuckle driving, but rather power and careful judgement of the terrain. Spintires: MudRunner sets you in the barely-settled wilderness with a collection of vehicles designed to deal with the harshest conditions, but all the heavy engineering in the world doesn’t help when the mud is deep, bridges are chunks of unfinished wood held together by wishful thinking and the necessary resources to get out of the current mess are back at the garage on the other side of the map. Spintires: MudRunner isn’t a game about taming the wilderness, but rather surviving it in a fleet of trucks, cars, and other specialized equipment. It’s also not a sequel to the original Spintires, but rather the continuation of the game after relations with the original publisher fell through. The original version went from tech demo to Kickstarter to Early Access and then full release, but even after release it kept getting updated with new content. Development never stopped, but the updates eventually did, and now Spintires: MudRunner picks up where the first version left off with new vehicles, updated graphics, tweaked physics, more maps and gameplay modes, and the same wild outdoors that isn’t so much hostile as it is completely indifferent to your existence. Water flows where it wants, trees grow on the land that isn’t submerged, hills poke up wherever they like and you get to work around all this using roads that are little more than a couple of ruts cleared out of the forest when there’s any road at all. The point of every map is to deliver logs to the mill, which doesn’t sound particularly exciting on the face of it. The problem is that there’s one of you and a good number of jobs to be completed before you can start hauling lumber, plus maintenance along the way. You start at a garage with a few trucks to choose from, and the map has several locked points of interest scattered around it. There are other trucks kicking around waiting to be accessed, blacked off sections of the map with watchtowers that reveal the terrain when reached, other garages to unlock, and plenty of natural hazards to make getting from point to point a proper challenge. The trick is to realize this is going to take a while, and then settle into the map’s rhythm while enjoying the ride. There are a couple of ways to attack a map, depending on experience. If it’s your first time in then exploration may be best, and whether you grab a muscular truck or a perky jeep it makes sense to learn the map before getting down to business. The other option is to bull your way to the goal, acting on the assumption that you’ll find what you need on the way, but Spintires isn’t a game about rushing so that can be counterproductive unless you know the terrain already. Starting at the garage that acts as home base you can survey the available map, then load up your vehicle with a number of add-ons depending on where you want to go first. Repair items let you fix up any broken vehicles you come across, enabling them to be work without stalling, or a couple of garage attachments to unlock another base, a cistern to transport gas, or various types of log holders. Different kinds of truck bed let you carry various lengths of logs, with the longer ones being the heaviest and therefore the hardest to transport. They pay off nicely at the lumber mill, but there’s an unhelpful landscape of rocks, trees, standing water, and squishy earth between goal and the log supply, and that doesn’t even take into account how tricky it can be to load the logs onto the truck. And then things start going wrong. Maybe the log loader, found at a point far away from any place it would actually load logs, fell off a bridge on the way to its workplace. Maybe you decided the jeep really needed to climb a mountain and rolled it. Maybe a truck got stuck in a river with nothing close enough to pull it out. It might even be something as simple as running out of gas. The point is, plans go wrong, but there are multiple ways to fix things. You can usually switch vehicles and ride to your own rescue, bringing a repair kit or gas along or just using the winch each vehicle comes equipped with to drag the broken truck to safety. The winch is the most useful tool in the game, and its use quickly becomes second nature. There are multiple spots on each truck for it to attach to, and it can hook on to any vehicle or tree in range. Whether you’re pulling a flipped truck up an embankment, linking vehicles together to create a convoy, or just using it for a boost up a steep, muddy hill by latching on to a tree near the summit, the winch is your friend and trusted companion. In most driving games you can get by with four wheels and an engine but Spintires doesn’t work that way. The trick to Spintires is to learn how it thinks, because otherwise it will come across as slow and unnecessarily brutal. The game seems user-hostile on the surface but with a bit of play its quirks become tolerable and some even make sense. Menus and the in-game user interface are awkward at best, but the camera is its own special kind of unusual. At first the camera seems utterly insane, swooping around and twisting at ridiculous angles that rarely leave the truck in the center of the screen, and then with a bit of play it becomes obvious why that is. Spintires needs a camera that can go almost anywhere, showing you the front, back, or side of the truck at any point so you can see what the tires are doing, and while it’s a beast to come to grips with it gives exactly the right view once you learn that controlling it is an important part of the game. It’s also nice to just look around now and then, because most of the time you’re traveling slowly enough that a few seconds of sightseeing won’t put you in danger. There’s no question, though, that Spintires: MudRunner takes a bit of learning to figure out. A forced tutorial the first time you fire up the game gives the basics, and a series of nine Challenges provide the rest of the instructions necessary to get the most out of the experience. Whether that’s loading logs onto a truck, using the winch to create a convoy that combines the power of multiple vehicles to power through the wilderness, going on a hill climb, or fording a river without getting swept away, there’s a good amount of technique to driving the muddy tracks that pass for roads far away from civilization. Whether you go for the Challenges or dive right in, however, the bulk of the game is spent in Spintires‘ various sandbox maps, and it can take a couple of hours to beat just one of them. It’s a slow, steady progression towards a goal that shouldn’t be anywhere near as entertaining as it turns out to be, but there’s a surprising amount of satisfaction to be had in wrestling trucks across terrain that no vehicle should be subjected to. Spintires: MudRunner doesn’t make a lot of sense on the surface. “Drive slow, deliver logs” isn’t the usual recipe for a good time. It works amazingly well once you get used to it, though, and while there’s a learning curve, it’s one that takes place in untamed nature where you’re driving giant trucks through the mud. The terrain ranges from unfriendly to downright brutal, with rocky ground, standing water, muddy roads, and tire-grabbing ruts absolutely everywhere. Navigating this is a slow, deliberate affair, but each stretch of road (if there’s one to drive on) has its own new difficulty that makes pushing on through a good challenge rather than an exercise in extended patience. At times the overwhelming Russian-ness gets a bit much, with the grey landscapes only getting good colors during sunrise and sunset, but then a short drive by the rushing waters of a turbulent river makes it all better. Spintires: MudRunner is a giant game of trucks played in as close to a literal sandbox as possible, and while they don’t have Тонка stamped on the back, the spirit of playing with the big toys shines through. System Requirements MINIMUM: OS: Windows Vista/7/8/10 Processor: Intel® Pentium Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent Memory: 2 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT or equivalent Storage: 1 GB available space Additional Notes: INTERNET CONNECTION REQUIRED FOR GAME ACTIVATION AND ONLINE GAME. Gamepad Microsoft Xbox Controller for Windows. Confirmed Steering Wheel support for Logitech G25/G27 - Other models have not been tested. This game is a 32-bit application. RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows Vista/7/8/10 Processor: Intel® Core 2 Duo 2.5GHz or equivalent Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 or equivalent Storage: 1 GB available space Additional Notes: INTERNET CONNECTION REQUIRED FOR GAME ACTIVATION AND ONLINE GAME. Gamepad Microsoft Xbox Controller for Windows. Confirmed Steering Wheel support for Logitech G25/G27 - Other models have not been tested. This game is a 32-bit application.

Game Information Initial release date: December 16, 2013 Publisher: Bohemia Interactive Developers: Bohemia Interactive, Dean Hall Designers: Dean Hall, Peter Nespesny Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows Genres: Survival horror, Third-person shooter December, 2013. Barack Obama is in the White House. ‘Wrecking Ball’ by Miley Cyrus is topping the charts. The Harlem Shake is taking the internet by storm. And DayZ, a zombie survival game, hits Steam Early Access. Part survival sandbox, part social experiment, the game throws 64 players into a bleak zombie apocalypse, sits back, and lets them make their own fun. Five years later and DayZ, having gone through an extended Early Access period, is finally out. And, well, nothing much has changed. There’s something comforting about the fact that DayZ is still DayZ, with its clunky controls, buggy zombies, and commitment to making surviving as hard as possible. It’s kinda absurd that, in a 1.0 release, there are still problems that have been stubbornly lingering since the alpha days. But honestly, I wasn’t expecting much else. For better or worse, it’s the game I remember. You still have to run for miles to meet up with friends. The zombies still get stuck in walls or just completely fail to notice you at all. You can scour an entire town for supplies only to find one dirty jacket, a tin opener, and no tins. And the chances that you’ll be killed by some unseen sniper, usually seconds after you finally find something good, is always high. At least those damn ladders have finally been sorted out. Veteran players will remember the agony of climbing a ladder and ending up inexplicably dead at the bottom of it. If this all sounds a bit miserable, it is. Minute to minute, this is about as gruelling as survival games get. You have an ever-dwindling parade of meters to manage—thirst, hunger, temperature, and so on—and the general scarcity of items can make staying alive an ordeal. There’s nothing more disheartening in DayZ than trekking for miles to a town, only to see all the doors lying open: a surefire sign that someone has already been and no doubt thoroughly looted the place. But this does complement the hopeless, melancholy atmosphere of the game. The map, Chernarus, is a former Soviet republic, and dripping in misery. You get the feeling that even before the zombies arrived, this would’ve been an unpleasant place to get lost in. But there’s a quiet beauty to be found out there too, particularly in the rolling farmland, dense forests, and sleepy rural towns. It’s a fantastic setting, and a welcome change from the more familiar Western post-apocalypses that usually feature in these games. The largest concentration of players tends to be around around cities and military bases—where the best loot is often found—meaning you can travel in the wilds pretty much undisturbed. When I play DayZ, I’m constantly on the move, travelling between towns, landmarks, and other points of interest, grabbing whatever I can find, avoiding trouble if I can. But that means a lot of uneventful running. There are vehicles, but they’re often missing parts or fuel, and locating them can be a real chore for a solo player. The sandbox nature of the game means that getting ‘geared up’ will be most players’ main goal: finding a gun, ammo, bandages, food, drink, and maybe a nice helmet or something. But the more you hoard, the more nerve-racking the game becomes, because you know that you’re just one trigger-happy survivor or mischievous troll away from losing it all. I actually love this, because it makes death mean something. When you die you’re unceremoniously dumped back to a random starting location with no gear, and knowing this makes every decision, especially with other players around, loaded with danger. The real thrill of DayZ, and the reason I’ve played both the mod and the standalone version for hundreds of hours each, is in the feeling you get when you inevitably bump into another survivor. Even now my heart pounds when I’m exploring a town or wandering in the wilderness and I see another player ahead. Sometimes, but not that often these days, they might wave you down for a friendly chat and some beans. Or they might helpfully warn you about a group of bandits (DayZ slang for players who kill other players) in the next town down the road. But they’ll probably just shoot you on sight. There are a lot of reasons for this. They might just enjoy killing people. They might want your loot. Or, and this happened to me, the game has turned them into a horrible person. See, I used to be friendly. I’d approach people, wave, say hello. I’d give them advice or ask if they needed a hand. But after several instances of people pretending to be friendly then stabbing me in the back (literally), or luring me into an ambush, I’ve become wary of other survivors to the point of fearful paranoia. That’s brilliant, though. It’s what makes DayZ such a fascinating, compelling multiplayer game, and far more interesting to me than something like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. In games like that, your only interaction with people is, ultimately, shooting them. But in DayZ, every encounter with another player is an opportunity for a story. Even if you get robbed or handcuffed or humiliated, it’ll be something you remember. Incidentally, make sure you play with a mic. Not responding vocally when someone says hello, or orders you to do something at gunpoint, will likely just get you killed. I haven’t really talked about the zombies yet, because they’re the least exciting thing in the game. Which is, perhaps, a little odd in a game about a zombie apocalypse. When they aren’t stuck in the scenery they run dumbly at you, and sometimes they phase in and out of existence like your internet connection can’t keep up with them. Then when it comes to actually shooting or smacking one with a melee weapon, there’s no sense of physicality at all. Fighting a zombie feels like swatting at a hologram. The combat really is abysmal, and there’s no sense of challenge or satisfaction attached to it. They’re better than they were in the early days of the standalone, but only just. The result of this is that, rather than something to be feared, the undead are just annoying. There was a point in the mod when the zombies didn’t work at all, and I enjoyed that a more because there was nothing getting in the way of the real heart of the game: the interactions between players. DayZ is a difficult game to review, because a lot of the time it’s pretty boring. There are long stretches of nothing; of rambling across seemingly endless fields, not finding anything in towns, never encountering another soul. But what keeps you going is knowing that, around the next corner, something incredibly exciting might happen. A firefight with a rival group of survivors in a ruined city. A knife-edge stand-off with a gun-toting rival. Someone who hasn’t seen you, meaning you might be able to sneak up, stick an axe in their back, and steal that nice jacket they’re wearing. Hey, don't judge me. It's dog eat dog out there. These snatches of drama are fleeting, but in the right moment there are few games as exciting as DayZ. And, similar to EVE Online, knowing that everything (except the zombies) is player-driven makes it feel extra special. If you get tricked and robbed by a group of bandits, it wasn’t some event scripted by a developer: it was dreamed up by a real, thinking human, and that really adds to the experience. In one combat encounter—my backpack stuffed with hard-earned supplies, my friend lying bleeding in the corner, two assailants hidden in the distance—the exhilaration was incredible. These were intelligent humans I was facing, not AI drones I could easily outsmart. But then it was back to running around the fields, scavenging for supplies, failing to find any, then dying and restarting—again and again. DayZ comes into its own when you get a foothold, managing to locate enough supplies and weapons to defend yourself and stay alive. But getting to that point is absolutely gruelling sometimes, and that’s where a lot of people will bounce off it. It’s a game where you have to work hard to achieve anything, and even then it can be immediately snatched away from you if you make one stupid mistake, or a player decides they want to shoot you for no particular reason. Occasionally, in small doses, DayZ is one of the best multiplayer games on PC. But a lot of the time it’s a slow, dull, frustrating, and meandering mess of bugs, broken zombie AI, and weightless combat. So I don’t know what to think, really. Some of the stories this game has created will stick with me forever, and that’s something to be celebrated. But it’s also unforgiving, messy, and doesn’t have much respect for your time. If you want a social survival experience that doesn’t pull any punches, set in an evocative and atmospheric world, then DayZ might be worth investigating. But if you’re after a solid, polished game that always does what it’s supposed to, you’re going to be disappointed System Requirements MINIMUM: OS: Windows 7/8.1 64-bit Processor: Intel Core i5-4430 Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 or AMD R9 270X DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 16 GB available space Sound Card: DirectX®-compatible Additional Notes: Internet connection RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows 10 64-bit Processor: Intel Core i5-6600K or AMD R5 1600X Memory: 12 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD RX 580 DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 25 GB available space Sound Card: DirectX®-compatible Additional Notes: Internet connection

An alligator who survived World War Two in Berlin and was rumoured - wrongly - to have belonged to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler has died in Moscow Zoo. "Yesterday morning, our Mississippi alligator Saturn died of old age. He was about 84 years old - an extremely respectable age," the zoo said. Saturn was gifted to Berlin Zoo in 1936 soon after he was born in the US. He escaped the zoo being bombed in 1943. British soldiers found him three years later and gave him to the Soviet Union. How he spent the intervening years always remained a mystery, but since July 1946 the alligato r has been a hit with visitors in Moscow. "Moscow Zoo has had the honour of keeping Saturn for 74 years," the zoo said in a statement. "For us Saturn was an entire era, and that's without the slightest exaggeration... He saw many of us when we were children. We hope that we did not disappoint him." Saturn may even have been the world's oldest alligator - it's impossible to say. Another male alligator, Muja who is at Belgrade Zoo in Serbia, is also in his 80s and still alive. But it's doubtful any alligator could compete with Saturn if it came to selling their memoirs. The most headline grabbing detail is the rumour that Saturn had belonged to Hitler, which is untrue. "Almost immediately after the arrival of the animal, the myth appeared that it was supposedly in Hitler's collectio n, and not in the Berlin zoo," Interfax news agency reports. It is unclear how the rumour started Saturn's death-defying escape in 1943 is unlikely ever to be explained. Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany, was subjected to intense Allied bombing before the war ended in 1945. The so-called Battle of Berlin began in November 1943 and the night of 22-23 November saw extensive damage to areas west of the centre, including the Tiergarten district where the city's zoo is located. Thousands of people were killed or injured and many of the zoo's animals perished too. The zoo's aquarium building took a direct hit. One report said passers-by had seen the corpses of four crocodiles in the street outside, tossed there by the force of the blast. Saturn somehow survived and then lived for three years in a city ravaged by war, and a climate unsuited to alligators.

Initial release date: April 16, 2019 Developer: VIVA GAMES Platforms: PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows Publishers: ViVa It's time for my VR first-person shooter fix again. It's the genre that seems to make the most sense in VR, after all. There's something about shooting people in VR that is just fun. I've been keeping an eye on Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher for quite a while now. Originally known as Kill X, and one of the games involved in Sony's China Hero Project, it always seemed like an interesting game. Was it a cipher worth solving, or is the only legacy here a letdown? You play as Tyre, a special forces agent who's mom had some kind of supernatural secret, but recently died in a bombing. Wanting to learn more about her life and death, he takes an assignment that takes him to Yingzhou Island, where apparently dragons live. Along the way, he meets an overly cheery streamer named Cherry Pie and a woman who leads a group of mercenaries digging around to find some sort of artifact. An interesting set-up doesn't really go far, as the story seems to drop out of the game after the first couple of hours. It doesn't help either that it doesn't really feel finished, with the game ending on an awkward cliffhanger without any major plot strings being finished. Tyre even literally says "I left with more questions than answers" as the final line of the game. Before you can fight any enemies, you have to fight Immortal Legacy's controls. You can only play the game with a pair of Move controllers, which is already kind of tough because movement with them isn't great. Turning is awkward, as the button it's mapped to is too hard to reach while also moving forward. It also doesn't help that, even when running as fast as possible, Tyre moves at the pace of a snail. It feels like it takes way too long to get anywhere, especially since I spent a lot of that time bumping into objects and slowly turning away from them. There's a simple inventory system as well, yet you can only scroll through items one at a time and at several points, I was forced to keep key items taking space in my inventory despite them not having any use for hours. The first two or so hours of Immortal Legacy is perhaps best compared to the Uncharted series. You'll have firefights against mercenaries on a mysterious island while looking for treasure. The first few encounters really don't sell the game. Enemies can take six or more shots to die if you don't hit their heads, and there's not enough ammo for anyone besides the most accurate sharpshooters. Thankfully, once I found the first assault rifle, things began to click into place. Ammo became more plentiful, enemies no longer took obscene amounts of hits to kill, and I began having fun. It's not perfect, though. Occasionally, enemies with insane amounts of armor would show up and eat bullets like they're candy on Easter, but I never felt it was unfair or too annoying. Immortal Legacy keeps going until you hit a rather impressive turret segment where you fight off giant worms. At this moment Immortal Legacy really clicked, hitting a high that I'd been waiting for. Finally, I was in a dramatic fight with a cool weapon. I had a blast shooting flying objects out of the air and hurting the worm before it could hit me. Then, with that done, Immortal Legacy falls down a pit. Literally. Tyre falls into caves and the entire game ditches the action-adventure feel of the Uncharted games and instead replaces it with the slower paced action-horror you'd see in the Resident Evil series. Instead of gunning down mercenaries you'll be conserving ammo against strange zombie-like enemies. As far as a change in style goes, it actually is pretty neat. The dark caves mean you'll often be relying on a flashlight for light sources, and the enemies don't feel nearly as bullet spongy as the first segment. Not that there aren't threats. You'll spend a good chunk of time stalked by a mysterious humanoid man made of flies and impossible to kill. It's always creepy when he shows up, as it means you often have to solve simple environmental puzzles while avoiding his attacks. It's a neat idea, even if the control system isn't really up to par for the style of "dodge and puzzle" gameplay featured here. Sadly, while the moment to moment gameplay of this change is fun, there are some specific moments that just fail. Most notably are the boss fights. Many of the late game bosses do not make it clear when you're hurting them. For example, one fight sees you pit against a trio of snake-like creatures in a slowly flooding room. The idea is that you need to shoot their mouths as they bite you. This only plays the stagger animation about half of the time. I was never sure if this was actually damaging the snakes or not, and being on a time limit wasn't making the fight any better. After several deaths, I finally won the fight, and I'm still not sure what I did differently. Other fights see similar issues, usually making it really hard to tell if you're doing damage to enemies or not. When you're not fighting enemies you solve some simple puzzles. One has you turning a cube around so that a lit segment always matches up. Another has you pulling chains so you can try to align symbols on platforms. Often you'll find locked boxes that open after you solve a tiny maze with tilting controls. There's nothing wrong with any of these puzzles. However, none of them really stand out as unique, memorable, or even that much fun. Puzzle or not, the game always looked surprisingly good. It's safe to say that, while it may not be the most stylistic or best-looking game, Immortal Legacy still manages to look fantastic. At least, with the exception of facial animations, most of which just look stiff and unemotive. There's a fantastic soundtrack, kicking in with epic choirs for boss fights. On the flip side, it also knows when to keep it quiet and spooky. Sadly, the voice acting doesn't quite have the same charm. The main character, voiced by Doug Cockle, sounds like the most generic gruff military man to ever exist. Everyone else mostly just sounds confused or bored. If Resident Evil 7: Biohazard wasn't already "Resident Evil in VR", then I would say Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cipher is the closest we've gotten yet. However, due to clunky controls, I'd say it leans a little more classic Resident Evil. Maybe with a dash of Uncharted, but certainly nothing close to what we have now. It's not going to be a game for everyone, and it certainly may take a little to like it. Give Immortal Legacy some times, and you may just discover one of VR's weird hidden gems. System Requirements MINIMUM: OS: Windows 7 SP1 64bit, Windows 8.1 64bit, Windows 10 64bit Processor: Intel Core i5-4460 or equivalent Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 11 GB available space RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows 7 SP1 64bit, Windows 8.1 64bit, Windows 10 64bit Processor: Intel Core i7-7700K or equivalent Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 DirectX: Version 12 Storage: 11 GB available space

China's National People's Congress is a key date in Beijing's choreography of politics and power. It takes place this year as the country emerges from the virus crisis - and seeks to bolster its authority both on the domestic and the global stage. It also follows months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong that have angered China's leaders. The congress has proposed a new national security law that looks set to limit freedoms in the territory. The annual meeting is usually scheduled for early March but was postponed because of the pandemic. And, as much as that delay highlighted the severity of the crisis, its rescheduling is a show of strength and confidence - a sign, Beijing hopes, that things are under control. China is where the pandemic started but it's also the country that brought a large outbreak under control - with lockdown measures emulated by many other countries hit by the virus. The economic fallout, though, remains dramatic - in the first quarter, China's GDP contracted for the first time in decades. Added to those domestic challenges, Beijing is facing increasing scrutiny and criticism from abroad over what it did - and didn't do - when the virus emerged. What is the National People's Congress? The NPC is China's parliament, the top legislative body, and it usually meets once a year in early March. Although in theory the country's most powerful institution, it is seen as largely a rubber-stamp assembly in Beijing's theatrics of democracy. It usually approves whatever has been decided beforehand by the top echelon of the Communist Party. Why is the Hong Kong proposal controversial? Usually, the NPC is about unveiling the country's key economic targets, approving budgets, and passing legislation. This year will also see the discussion of a proposal for a new security law in Hong Kong that could ban sedition, secession and treason. The proposal is highly controversial - when the Hong Kong government tried to pass similar legislation in 2003, about 500,000 people took part in street protests against it, and the legislation was eventually shelved. A spokesman for the NPC said on Thursday that that legislation was "highly necessary" and would "safeguard national security in Hong Kong". However, pro-democracy activists believe that Beijing is slowly eroding Hong Kong's judicial independence and other freedoms not enjoyed in mainland China. The proposal is also controversial because it is expected to circumvent Hong Kong's own law-making processes - leading to criticism that Beijing is undermining Hong Kong's autonomy. The draft motion is seen as response to months of pro-democracy street protests, that often ended in violent clashes, in Hong Kong. What else is on the agenda? According to state media, topping the agenda will also be: epidemic control, economic growth targets, poverty alleviation, employment policy, and drafting China's first civil code. Premier Li Keqiang - the number two in Chinese politics - is scheduled to speak on Friday, with his address possibly including the economic target for the year as well as fresh measures to stimulate the economy. But after the depressing data from the first quarter, there's doubt over whether there will a clear-cut growth target for 2020. It's also set to be a large affair. Nearly 3,000 delegates from around the country will gather in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing for 10 days. They represent China's provinces, autonomous regions, centrally-administered municipalities, the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, as well as the armed forces. There will also be a meeting of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the most powerful political advisory body in the country - which does not have any legislative power. While the NPC will meet on Friday, the CPPCC already kicked off on Thursday. The importance of projecting power and strength Failure to handle the economic fallout from the pandemic could undermine Beijing's domestic legitimacy - a real problem for a regime that promises growing prosperity in exchange for authoritarian rule. At least as important as the actual policy, will therefore be the desire to project power and control. State media have already touted the event as being of "historic significance" and an "opportunity to gather national strength". To the outside world, China will seek to project itself as a transparent and responsible power - a model for the rest of the world. Despite being accused of suppressing early warnings, China insists it alerted the world of the severity of the virus in time. Beijing says other countries simply neglected to heed those warnings. The importance of projecting power and strength Despite being accused of suppressing early warnings, China insists it alerted the world of the severity of the virus in time. Beijing s ays other countries simply neglected to heed those warnings. What is the virus situation in China? The novel coronavirus broke out in late 2019 in Wuhan in China's Hubei province. The country was the epicentre of the virus before it spread around the world. But wide-ranging lockdown and quarantine measures eventually slowed the number of new infections to a single-digit trickle. Out of about 84,000 confirmed infections, almost 80,000 have recovered while more than 4,500 have died. There are currently only a handful of active cases. Concern over a second wave though remains. New clusters near the Russian border have brought home the dangers of re-importing the virus. Overall though, the lockdowns are being lifted, schools are gradually reopening and economic activity is resuming. What about the economic fallout? The coronavirus pandemic is expected to have a profound impact on economies around the globe. For China, we already have a shocking data point: in the first three months of the year, the economy contracted by 6.8%, the first contraction in decades. In the last two decades, China has seen average economic growth of around 9% a year - although experts have regularly questioned the accuracy of its economic data. But when the virus struck and Beijing introduced large-scale shutdowns and quarantines in late January, the economy in many parts of China ground to a halt. Although factory work is resuming, the economic and social consequences of a slowing economy will continue. China has already unveiled a range of support measures to cushion the impact - though not on the same scale of some other major economies. The NPC might give us more clues as to how Beijing plans to put its economy back on track. But with an export-dependant economy, much of the recovery will depend not just on China but on how the rest of the world recovers.

Initial release date: April 24, 2017 Developer: Red Barrels Engine: Unreal Engine Genre: Survival horror Writer: J. T. Petty Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows What if the most deranged, doom-saying cultists are right? Outlast 2 prods this question with a pointy stick until it bleeds, festers, and wails in agony. While it plays very similarly to the original, Outlast 2 takes its Christian themes into extremely uncomfortable and surprising territory, avoiding what could have been a familiar trek through cultish cliches. Structurally, it’s a conventional first-person horror game, a string of tense stealth scenarios where you hide from monsters before they chase you through dense forests and flooded mines. The story is too opaque and a maddening amount of trial-and-error is needed to figure out most of the stealth sequences, but through it all, Outlast 2 is a train of depravity steered by a good old-fashioned fear of God. As a freelance journalist, you’re investigating the disappearance of a Jane Doe. Your wife is quickly kidnapped by a cult, the genesis of which is fascinating, mostly told through discarded letters and environmental cues. But the details are hard to process when an entire village is actively hunting for you. Outlast 2 maintains such a relentless pace that there’s almost no time to figure out what’s really going on. Besides the vague story and some directed flashback sequences that feel like a detour, the slow progression through rural Arizona is layered with enough apocalyptic Christian imagery to be a complete journey. Expect to witness the best of the worst of the bible through some of the most shocking first-person scenes in games, period. Your vision flashes red with hard clank of a hammer coming down on metal, the sky is a dark shade of purple, and a man piggybacking on another man blathers on about how happy he is to see you. On that journey, you’ll need to sneak past roving packs of rural folks gone mad. Your camcorder is your only tool, used to see in the dark with its night vision mode and a microphone that detects sound wherever it’s pointed. Both functions drain your batteries and like healing bandages, they’re limited, but never so much that you’re left without enough supplies to outwit any pursuers. Even without wit, persistence does the trick, as frustrating as it can be. Early on, I wandered the same cornfield for 30 minutes, crawling the perimeter and making several suicide runs to scope out the buildings for an exit. The way out was a short sprint not far from where the sequence begins, a quick hop over a pile of wood pallets piled next to the fence. The area was a wild goose chase killbox, built only to confuse. It’s not an isolated issue either. While the original Outlast could depend on the hospital’s architectural pathways to direct the player, pulling off subtle signposting in an outdoor setting can’t be as obvious without compromising the feeling of being lost and helpless. Red Barrels’ commitment to building such a disorienting horror simulation is as admirable as it is annoying. Such dedication can be worth it. Subtle lighting casts trees and figures like paper silhouettes against muted backdrops, and convincing effects like the camera’s depth of field and visual noise make the world look real at a glance. It’s stunning artistic and graphical work. And when you’re dashing through it, nearly out of battery while a ‘man’ screams biblical verse and shoots fiery crossbow bolts past your head it’s both thrilling and nauseating, all propped up by an incredible soundtrack. But it’s a tower that topples often, leading to repeated attempts at trying to find a tiny hole in a huge fence, to figure out if the enemy can see me or not, or if I can grab a particular ledge to scramble away in time. There are even a few instances where enemies are set up to ambush and instantly kill you, totally deflating a close getaway. Without clear rules the illusion fades quickly, exposing the simple AI and restricted level design. The few times I happened to stumble the right way through a level, Outlast 2 felt like an audiovisual horror masterpiece. The motion capture, textures, and animation are never quite up to par with Resident Evil 7, but when everything meshes together, it hardly matters. Just don’t expect a smooth experience the whole way through. When it clicks though—those moments stick. Long after the final minutes of Outlast 2, I felt queasy, uncertain that what I saw had actually happened. It’s one of the most bizarre ending sequences I’ve witnessed, tapping into a fear I’ve known since my first week at Sunday school. It's not a fear about being hunted, artistic viscera spills, or neatly arranged corpses on spikes (though there’s plenty of that stuff). It’s fear of the drastic measures people will take to ensure their salvation, the burden of guilt, and whether or not the big guy up top exists and gives a damn. What I like most about Outlast 2 is that it doesn't just use its themes as set-dressing. The first Outlast had the same intense stealth sequences and chase scenes, but in the spooky asylum every Early Access game goes for. Outlast 2 takes you through dilapidating farms and flooded mines and old townships that all say something about the history of the people who lived there. It rains blood and spews locusts and sends twisted cultists after you through it all, just regular people wearing overalls and carrying bloody steak knives, moaning in apocalyptic overtones. There are monsters, sure, but Outlast 2's scariest moments come from its most familiar faces. System Requirements MINIMUM: OS: Windows Vista / 7 / 8 / 10, 64-bits Processor: Intel Core i3-530 Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: 1GB VRAM, NVIDIA Geforce GTX 260 / ATI Radeon HD 4870 DirectX: Version 10 Storage: 30 GB available space Sound Card: DirectX Compatible Additional Notes: Targetting 720p @ 30 fps RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows Vista / 7 / 8 / 10, 64-bits Processor: Intel Core i5 Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: 1.5GB VRAM, NVIDIA Geforce GTX 660 / ATI Radeon HD 7850 DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 30 GB available space Sound Card: DirectX Compatible Additional Notes: Targetting 1080p @ 60 fps