I need 1,300 gold immediately. The latest bit of military research I’ve unlocked lets me make teams of things, and one of the things I can make teams of is my killer hell dogs from hell. This gives the resulting unit six times their enormous health, six times their enormous damage, and for reasons that aren’t really clear to me, six times their enormous armour rating. So even though it’s just six hell dogs from hell standing next to each other, they take 36 times as long to kill. 1,300 is a lot of gold – or Gildar as it’s pointlessly renamed in Elemental – but for 36 hell dogs from hell, it’s a steal.
As I mentioned last week, Elemental: War of Magic is now stable. But the advertised multiplayer, which is listed as a feature on the game’s box, still isn’t working. At launch, Stardock said it would be ’switched on’ this week. Now, staffer Neil Banfield says on their forums that it’s been delayed again, to next week. He says their priority is to resolve performance problems and other issues with the game at large first, and they’ve posted a 5,000 word list of bugs, problems and improvements they plan to work on. Multiplayer is not mentioned.
In Space, no-one can hear you scream. Unless you scream over Teamspeak. That’s the good news. The better news is that PC Gamer is now active in Eve Online, and we have a small, but growing corps. We’re recruiting new and experienced players, via the PC Gamer forum. The corp is called PCG Enterprises, and we’re mostly about building up a small force and learning the ropes. If you’d like to get in on the ground floor, now is the time to join.
Before StarCraft came along, we all played Supreme Commander 2 at lunch. It’s a great game with a dedicated development team who are committed to firing out updates and improvements months after release, even as their company at large is working on a new title. I returned to it yesterday after the recent patch, and I got to thinking – StarCraft 2 and Supreme Commander 2 are hugely entertaining RTS experiences with wildly different approaches to the genre. As you know, I hate diversity almost as much as I hate joy, so I started compiling a list of things that each game could learn from the other. Here are five things I reckon StarCraft 2 could learn from Supreme Commander 2.
It can’t be an easy job, building on what could happily be called the biggest gaming franchise currently in existence. But the team at Treyarch do have one big idea they’re adding to the Call of Duty formula. It’s simple, it’s time-tested, and it’s so obvious that you’ve got to wonder why it wasn’t in the last one. It’s gambling.
“The control of a large force is the same principle as the control of a few men: it is merely a question of click-and-dragging a box around them to select them all.” Sun Tzu said that. If only we’d known his views on the proper use of Attack-move, we’d all be better real time strategy gamers. He also said, “To know Shogun 2, one must become Shogun 2.” If you’re not sure how to do that, though, you can just look at this gallery of new Shogun 2: Total War screens.
Yesterday, three New Zealanders came to our office with a dungeon-crawler. This doesn’t usually happen. They let me play it. I liked it. Peer inside for impressions, screenshots and an exclusive classes and combat trailer that no one else on the internet has.
Those of us in the United States have a three-day weekend coming up, and this isn’t one of those “family” holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving. This is boring ol’ Labor Day, which, for gamers, means that we’re looking at a solid 72 hours of prime gaming time. But what about the gamer whose gaming collection has run low? How will they possibly fill the long weekend without new games to play? Don’t worry, as always, PC Gamer’s got your back. Here’s our roundup of games with free-to-play weekends, open betas, or recently launched free-to-play games to keep you interested. And if that’s not enough, we’re giving away five retail games to keep you gaming all weekend long and beyond!
A whole city is yours to explore in Need for Speed World, a game that claims to be a freeto- play racing MMO. Though, really, it’s only free up to level ten, and it’s not an MMO. For the first ten levels, it’s an open world arcade racer with a great sense of speed and amazing police chases – but travel past that point and things start to slip.
A new SupCom 2 patch just dropped on Steam. Some users are having issues with it (which we’ve addressed in a separate post), but for those of you who aren’t running into trouble, here’s what they’ve changed:
