2017 GOTY AWARDS Alongside our team-selected 2017 Game of the Year awards, each member of the PC Gamer team gets to champion one favorite from the year. This is the year that the Necromancer returned to Diablo to show the other classes how it’s done. Fashionably dressed in the bones of his enemies, the Necromancer sneers his way through Diablo 3’s acts with style, killing hordes with bone spikes and blowing up their corpses for massive damage. There are ways to get more technical with the Necrom

But developer IllFonic is betting that players will want to muck around solo sometimes, and are adding a new offline game mode with bots tomorrow. You’ll only be able to control masked killer Jason Voorhees in the mode, and you can choose to go up against between one and seven camp counselors. You select exactly which counselors you want to face and the map you’re stalking them on, as well as the difficulty level: easy, medium, or hard. Still to come is a challenge mode that will plop players in

Weird Autumn is story-driven adventure game Night in the Wood’s version of a director’s cut: it’s a free update that adds new dialogue, extra activities and a couple of fresh faces to meet. It also ushers in two supplementary side stories, Longest Night and Lost Constellation, both standalone (if short) games in their own right. They were released on their own during Night in the Wood’s development, but now they’re integrated into the main game’s world. However, the new content might break the g

Galactic Civilizations 3, the sprawling 4X space strategy game, is more than two years old but it’s still getting regular updates. A new update out this week improves the AI, slashes load times, and fixes a host of annoying crashes during the end game and multiplayer matches. The AI changes are probably the most meaningful: computer-controlled opponents will now engage in what developer Stardock calls “procedural planet building”. Essentially, the AI will look at the state of the galaxy and its

Eidos Montreal, developer of the modern Deus Ex games, will focus more of its attention on online gaming from now on, it has announced. Well, we know that the Deus Ex series isn’t dead yet and that folk at Square Enix, which owns Eidos Montreal, are already exploring options for the next installment. But the next Deus Ex game won’t be out for a while: Square Enix CEO Yosuke Matsuda said last month that it wasn’t a top priority. Eidos Monteral is currently working on an Avengers title in partners

I never got round to playing Superhot, the stylish FPS in which time moves only when you do. But this weekend I finally will (it’s downloading as I type this) because it’s the latest game that’s free for Twitch and Amazon Prime subscribers. The development team just announced a standalone expansion with a roguelike twist, which sounds like it could be fun too. Twitch Prime isn’t worth the price of an Amazon Prime subscription alone in my opinion, but it certainly sweetens the deal. You get in-ga

A new update for the game aims to address that, but the camera itself isn’t changing. Instead, you can now see both your own silhouette and silhouettes of enemies through buildings and objects. Whether it fixes the problem entirely, I’m not sure, because Andy reckoned the camera just moved too slowly as well. It also explains why the camera is the way it is, and why changing the camera isn’t really an option because it’s built into the very fabric of the game. It is intrinsic to the game’s core.

The first DLC for Destiny 2 centres around an infamous Warlock, once thought lost in reality-simulating machine. To be clear, the DLC isn’t the cause of many of Destiny 2’s problems, though it did exacerbate some existing ones. Curse of Osiris is no Blood and Wine—but hey, what is? Much better is the new ghost, Sagira, who borrows our shell for most of the Curse of Osiris campaign. Which kind of sums up Curse of Osiris, and Destiny 2 so far.

Here’s the best deal you’ll see this weekend—PC Gamer’s 2017 expansion of the year XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is available for a lick over $24/£21 on Fanatical, equal with its historic low. What’s more, the base game is also at its lowest ever price, with more than 70% off. The expansion is packed with personality: it adds a new group of enemies, the Chosen, that taunt you at every turn. If you own a copy of XCOM 2 but haven’t picked up War of the Chosen, then now is the time. Update: As one comm

PC Gamer’s Best Strategy Game of 2017 is Total War: Warhammer 2, as chosen by our global editorial team. I find Total War: Warhammer 2’s campaign map to be more interesting, too. The factions are great, and they are so varied that this feels like four Total War games in one. The High Elves have great archers, shiny and a beautiful range of differently-flavoured dragons, and the prettiest homeland of any Total War faction. Want more Total War: Warhammer 2 words?

I’d love more of the unexpected in games, and that’s what Stories Untold did for me this year. Each episode, framed as part of a TV anthology within the game, showed me something I didn’t see coming. In The House Abandon, you play a text adventure inside the game where you explore a house. Stories Untold makes you perform repetitive tasks, tuning a radio frequency, or working out which text commands will help you progress. As the format’s popularity is spiking again in TV, Stories Untold shows h

This week: which game were you the best at? But when I do love a game, it’s a swift, dedicated, blinding attachment, usually the product of horrible depression or anxiety. When you see that game for the first time, it’s almost not easy to parse what’s going on. So when we happened upon another cute tower defense game on Steam with online co-op, we decided to give it a shot. Austin Wood: HearthstoneMost of my best games aren’t on PC, so I was having a hard time choosing—until Tim answered Hearths

It’s as if Daniel Steger, the designer of Mount Your Friends, saw those overly snug underpants in PUBG and said, “Hold my beer.” Mount Your Friends, released in 2014, was a gleefully silly multiplayer game about muscular pinheads clambering over each other in speedos with their physics-enabled wangs wobbling about. It’s just had a sequel announced, called Mount Your Friends 3D: A Hard Man is Good to Climb. It looks every bit as ridiculous and, yes, it still has huge flappy wiggling dongs in it.

Max-Q systems split the difference, offering powerful gaming internals crammed in a thin-and-light form factor. No matter how thin your laptop is, 15 inches is a lot of length to carry around in a normal backpack. It’s a 15-inch laptop with a GTX 1070 Max-Q GPU crammed in a 14-inch shell, thanks to a near-bezeless screen. A single machine that functions as a truly portable workstation in addition to a capable gaming rig is everything I’ve been looking for in a gaming laptop. It’s a bit pricer th

Bomber Crew, the FTL-esque take on the air war over Europe, got a new DLC pack today called Secret Weapons that includes a new “mini-campaign,” with new bomber upgrades, enemy aces, and dangerous enemy fighters. The campaign will take players through missions based on Big Week, a real-world operation that took place in early 1944 in which the US Air Force undertook an aggressive campaign to force the Luftwaffe to engage in direct, decisive combat. New airbase upgrades include liveries, advanced

The Gollop Chamber Julian Gollop has been in the games industry for more than 30 years. I know this from experience, since my last game, Chaos Reborn, reveled and delighted in the liberal use of RNGs (it wasn’t called ‘Chaos’ for nothing). In Chaos Reborn you play a wizard, and the casting of spells and combat were subject to binary outcome randomness. Unfortunately, a significant group of players loathed the RNG aspect of Chaos Reborn with a vengeance, and they wrote about it copiously. Long-te

Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves was among the earliest games to make it through Steam Greenlight. If you haven’t guessed, they’re protecting her from wolves, werewolves and other canine aberrations, which serves to illustrate Sang-Froid’s greatest strength. Sang-Froid is a better werewolf movie than every actual werewolf movie—even the amazingly campy Dog Soldiers—because it taps into the nightmares of 19th century settlers. To survive, you must not only place traps beforehand, but leave the saf

The old-but-still-great Okami came out too—a gorgeous, interactive gallery of living paintings that I can spoil with my own brush marks. Tyler Wilde: Taking initiativeI thought I was too cool for D&D in high school, which was stupid. I do play with a local group, but it’s hard to get in more than a few hours a week. Austin Wood: Pinpoint paintingI never thought I’d actually get to play Okami on PC. Okami feels new again on PC, and I cannot wait to play it through to the end for the umpteenth tim

The subreddit noticed yesterday that a number of Pepe emoticons had gone missing from the Steam community market. Louis Tompros, an IP lawyer who represented Furie in a successful effort to have the copyright-infringing alt-children’s book The Adventures of Pepe and Pede removed from sale earlier this year, confirmed with Kotaku that Furie had initiated the action to have the emoticons removed. “A Steam user let us know that there were Pepe images being sold on the site, and that they were being

The 1914 Christmas Truce is once again returning to the First World War multiplayer Verdun in the form of time-limited DLC that will raise funds for War Child’s Armistice, “an annual event that encourages peaceful gameplay to support children affected by conflict across the world.” The Verdun Christmas Truce will include the famous soccer matches, plus snowball fights, a bonfire for the troops, a burial scene ceremony, a record player playing old Christmas carols, a handshaking soldier animation