PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
100 players enter, only one can claim the coveted chicken dinner. The battle royalepremise isn’t unique to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and as it continues to surge in popularity, more and more clones continue to crop up. What keeps millions coming back to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, though, is that it is the only game to offer a realistic vision of the Hunger Games scenario.
Unlike its competition, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds forgets all the survival gaming trimmings like crafting and traps, focusing instead on punchy, simulation-worthy gunplay, and tactics that wouldn’t go amiss in an SAS training school.
Complimenting that gameplay is an 8x8km map that is completely open for everyone to roam: firefights rage across tower blocks; humble shacks house hidden dangers; and don’t even think about trying to cross open ground. Add to that random weapons locations, spawn paths, and a constantly constricting safe zone and you have a multiplayer marvel – a game that can only be conquered by those with survival instincts that match their honed trigger finger.
Want more? Use our PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds guide to get the jump on your foes.
Total War: Warhammer 2
Total War has been a strategy institution for years now, and its most recent historical entries – Attila and even Rome II, after a bit of work – are really good. But there’s a reason Warhammer is the best-seller: it adds variety to campaign play, and sheer cinematic joy to battles. It has made the series more fun and replayable than ever.
With Warhammer II, Creative Assembly have taken this success as permission to go even bigger. It sees four powers crossing oceans to control a magical vortex – a global conflict, whereas Warhammer was a continental one. Its races and their armies are the most exotic yet: the Lizardmen are led by almighty wizard-toads on floating platforms and can field feral T-Rexes, for goodness’ sake. And yet, in all this gleeful bombast, CA haven’t lost sight of the little things.
The elegant but plain-flavoured High Elves are a dose of common sense amid the madness. The new Vortex victory condition may seem like fantastical indulgence, but it serves the game by keeping the pressure up right to the end, when you’d previously be cruising to an easy win. So don’t be fooled by the dragons and dinos – this is the best Total War has been by the old, analytical metrics, as well as the flashy new fun ones.
Want more? Learn the ropes of Total War: Warhammer II with our strategy guide.
Divinity: Original Sin 2
The word ‘simulation’ tends to come with an air of seriousness: the po-faced responsibility of landing a plane, or the anatomically-accurate stoicism of freezing half to death in the Canadian wastes.
Divinity: Original Sin II is definitely a simulation. It tracks body temperature, vision cones, and whether an NPC will like you based on your appearance and the general mood about town. But it’s also deeply silly – a breezy yet hardcore tactical RPG in which most battles tend to trigger a series of unintended explosions. It’s two parts Dragon Age and one part Monty Python, and features a campaign that tells a decent story while leaving enough space for you to be yelled at by a head on a stick as you trek across the map.
It gets even sillier in multiplayer, where a Game Master mode lets you convincingly recreate the unpredictable storytelling of tabletop role-playing.
Want more? Check out our glowing Divinity: Original Sin II review.
Rainbow Six Siege
Inversely to an average Rainbow Six Siege round, Ubisoft Montreal’s exacting shooter began life in a fraught manner before the run of relative stability it enjoys today. After more than a year of updates, the introduction of several new operators and maps, and a concerted deep clean dubbed Operation Health, Siege is now arguably the greatest competitive online FPS available.
It takes a little while to realise this – Siege’s learning curve is dauntingly steep – but the investment of time required is small change compared to the satisfaction you will feel when you win your first clutch or bag an ace in this tense 5v5 shooter. Sure, it is possible to draw broad comparisons to some other games – not least Counter-Strike: Global Offensive – but Siege stands apart from its peers for its remarkable depth and towering skill caps.
Given that Siege’s player base continues to swell – as word gets around, and Ubisoft’s mischievous tweaks to the meta keep everything feeling fresh – there has never been a better time to have your SAS handed to you over and over.
Want more? Check out the best Rainbow Six Siege operators to get you started.
Grand Theft Auto V
There is a reason GTA V still consistently tops the charts, years after its release – it is still the pinnacle of the sandbox genre. We have had a bunch of other open-world games release since, but none match the fidelity of GTA V’s fictional recreation of LA: its sprawling hillsides, the distant Mount Chiliad, its jutting metropolis, and the dusty trailer parks surrounding it all.
It’s a world that calls to you, begging for you to speed across it on a motorbike, weaving between traffic as you go. Plenty of games lure us to the peaks of their mountains, but very few let us then base jump from the mountain’s peak while riding a dirtbike.
Rockstar’s crime series generally attracts headlines because of its violence, but it is not the shooting that keeps players exploring its world – it is the feeling that anything can happen, the Rage engine’s slapstick physics system providing endless entertainment as you barrel down hills or take a clout to the head with the wing of a plane. The fact that you can experience all of this online with friends makes it all the more sweet.
Want more? Mess around in the best way possible with the best sandbox games on PC.
Hitman
If you thought Hitman: Absolution was a misstep, put those worries aside – everyone’s favourite barcode-headed baldie is back on fine form in Hitman.
The Hitman series is full of incredible, tense, and sometimes hilarious missions, and the latest entry houses some of the best. Sapienza is an instant classic, asking you to take out a mob boss in a picturesque Italian town. In it, you can eliminate your target by popping an explosive golf ball into their caddy sack and watching them take a swing at it. Never has golf been more exciting than this.
Whether you are drowning folk in a toilet or carefully lining up a sniper shot in time to some fireworks, Hitman is full of inventive ways to deal death. Each mission is designed to be played over and over again, begging for you to approach it in myriad different ways. You can spend days mastering each, there’s that much to do. If you want murder in your games to be more meaningful, stretch out your fiber wire and grab Hitman by the throat.
Want more? Take a gander at our Hitman review.
Minecraft
It is nearly a decade old, but it is still nigh impossible to recommend another sandbox crafting game. Minecraft is the ultimate game for creators, something so simple it has become a bona fide phenomenon among kids and families, and yet one that boasts sufficient depth and complexity to sustain massive communities of modders, architects, warriors, role-players, survival experts, game designers, and storytellers.
It is easy to forget that below all of the headline-grabbing mods and builds, Minecraftis still a remarkably humble game about building yourself a shack in order to survive the myriad monsters that come out at night. The beauty is that it works on both levels, so if you fall in love with it there are infinite possibilities as to where the player-made add-ons can take you.
Want more? Discover new worlds with the best Minecraft seeds.
Duskers: PC games have a control set that’s simply not found on consoles, namely the keyboard. Duskers uses this tool to full effect, making it the only method of input for the entire game. Players take on the role of a deep space scavenger set adrift after a mysterious, galaxy-wide catastrophe. You have to scrounge fuel and supplies from other derelict ships, and the only way to explore them is with a small fleet of drones. Using keyboard commands, you’ll make a roguelike journey through scenes straight out of Alienand Event Horizon. Grab your favorite mechanical keyboard, turn the lights down low and get to work.
Hitman: Lots of people slept on Hitman, a reboot of the venerable assassin simulator, when it came out in March of 2016, and not because it was a bad game. We gave it a score of 8.5, and many other outlets showered it with praise as well. The base game is excellent, but the real treat about Hitman is how developer Io Interactive has spent the year drip-feeding the community wacky new missions. Case in point, a recent holiday-themed update added Home Alone’s Wet Bandits as a target.
Titanfall 2: If multiplayer is your goal, Titanfall 2 may well be your prize. It’s a study in how to reinvent the classic FPS battlespace by granting the player new and powerful skills. Pilots run up walls and leap from building to building while dishing out punishment with small arms that feel both weighty and destructive. Add to that the fascinating mech-based combat and it’s a title simply not to be missed on the PC. There’s even a single-player campaign that some are calling the year’s best.
Inside: Playdead’s Limbo took our breath away in 2010, and this year the team came back with something even more spectacular. With Inside, players take control of a small child on the run from shadowy forces. Over the course of the game you uncover evidence of a vast conspiracy, and fight for your life using the environment and strange technologies as their weapon. It’s a masterclass in environmental storytelling, and the animation is second to none.
References : pcgamesn.com
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