When I first started playing PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, I wrote about the mind games folk played with its seemingly innocuous doors. A year on, it seems increasing the area of effect of Molotov Cocktails makes this tactic void. PUBG's PC update #14 overhauls throwables.

Burn, baby, burn:

Named by developer PUBG Corp as "traditionally among the least popular items in the game", Molotovs now have a wider area of effect whereby fire can spread along walls and wooden surfaces. That's outlined above, as is the fact they now explode when shot mid-air. 

Stun grenades, on the other hand, now affect stunned players' vision, hearing and shot accuracy in the aftermath of an explosion. Moreover, frag grenades no longer have a knockback effect, but do have buffed range and damage. PUBG Corp details these changes with the following graphic:

PUBG's latest patch also rolls out new anti-cheat tech to its test servers. "We’ve added a new anti-cheat solution, developed in-house at PUBG Corp," says this Steam Community update post. "Before we implement this tech on live servers, we’d first like to see how it works out on the test server. For this, we’ll need your help."

The dev says that in order to help refine its new anti-cheat measures, players should select the new pre-match "Enable Anti-cheat" box. At present, this can be disabled—however this option will not be available once it's moved to live servers.  

In other PUBG news, its tropical Sanhok map enters its fourth round of testing—likely its last before going live—today/tomorrow. PUBG Corp provides detailed patch notes on what that entails in this direction.  

This feature was originally published in PC Gamer UK 318, published earlier in May. For more great features like this and tons more, subscribe and get PC Gamer magazine delivered to your door every month. 

In 2013, we met Crystal Dynamics’ rebooted Lara Croft—a young archaeologist who crash lands on a deadly island off the coast of Japan. Far from the confident adventurer of Tomb Raider games of old, this Lara was scared and unsure of herself—albeit in possession of a quiet, burning determination to survive and rescue her friends.

In the reboot’s follow-up, 2016’s Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara is more proactive. She travels to Siberia in order to follow up on her father’s research, and in doing so learns of the secretive and sinister Trinity organisation that killed him. This year’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider completes her origin story. Lara is now taking the fight to Trinity, and discovering how far she’s willing to go to get revenge.

My initial reaction to playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and talking to the new lead development team at Eidos Montreal, was surprise that this latest game is continuing—and concluding—this origin story. Rise finished with Lara ready to take on the mantle of 'Tomb Raider’. She’d come to terms with her family’s legacy, and even raided a bunch of tombs. What does that leave?

The answer, it seems, is another question: can Lara go too far? "We see her arrive in this game fully capable," says lead writer Jill Murray, "and now instead of learning new skills and how to survive, she has to realise how much power she has and decide what she’s going to do with it. A hero can also be a threat, so which one is she going to choose to be in the end? She is going to make a lot of mistakes and then have to confront her complicity."

I get a sense of this at the end of the demo. Lara is in Mexico, on the trail of Trinity, trying to beat them to a magical dagger. She arrives at the tomb first, and, despite finding hints that taking the artefact might not be the best idea, grabs it to prevent it from falling into Trinity’s hands. Chaos ensues, as the temple collapses and the streets flood. Lara’s choice serves as the catalyst for Shadow’s overarching threat, which ties in with the Mayan apocalypse. Trinity’s leader catches up to Lara, retrieves the dagger, and admonishes her for her actions—moving out to stop the prophecy that she’s set in motion.

"Normally it’s a race to get to the artefact, get it and slap on the back, good job, let’s move onto the next level," says narrative designer Jason Dozois. "Now we’re twisting that … The idea is that you’re going to get there and feel, 'Well, maybe it’s not the right thing, but I’m Lara, so I’m going to take it…’ And then from there you have this huge twist of things spiralling out of control, these catastrophes are coming. And Trinity, they seem to be going off to save the world, while I cause this apocalypse to happen—I think that’s a nice twist on the expectation people will have when they play."

Fright night

A key theme of Shadow—one that was hammered home during my visit to Montreal—is fear. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is not a horror game, but fear permeates its design. The realisation of that theme informs the look of Shadow’s tombs and the tension of the underwater sections, but it’s also a facet of the story and Lara herself—her ability to instil fear in her enemies, and her own fear about who she might become. "At a certain point in the story—I’m not going to spoil it—but Lara will go beyond her own morality," says game director Daniel Bisson. 

I’m interested in the idea of Lara causing fear in her enemies. Combat is my favourite part of the rebooted Tomb Raider series. Whether it’s using distraction and stealth to silently pick off enemies, or running guns blazing into the fray, the precise, efficient weapons lend themselves to a responsive combat style that favours movement, positioning and the use of an array of tools. While Eidos Montreal is vague about the specifics, I learn that the two aspects of combat—stealth and assault—will be more closely intertwined.

"I’m not sure if you noticed it, but one thing that didn’t work out in Rise: if you were playing stealth and you got spotted, you were spotted, you were being shot at," says lead level designer Arne Oehme. "In Shadow, you can disappear again ... giving the player the power to re-engage with stealth if he or she desires to do so." Guards will be more aware of their surroundings, too. They interact with one another more, meaning they’ll notice if a guard you’ve taken down doesn’t respond on the radio.

As enemies become more afraid of Lara, they’ll make mistakes. "They’re reacting," says gameplay director Vincent Monnier, "they’re talking to each other. And so these dynamics—being able to understand their fear and how their level of fear is evolving while you are actually manipulating them, that’s a pretty cool thing."

Another key part of Shadow is the jungle—it’s both an environment Lara will be fighting in, but also a manifestation of her state of mind. "There’s so many adjectives that people think of when they think of the jungle," says Dozois. "It’s alive but it’s also death. It’s dangerous but it’s also beautiful ... it’s all these things. Lara is being hyper-focused to the borderline of obsession in there … She’s becoming the environment, she’s becoming what the jungle can be in all its full array."

I see just a sliver of this mindset in the demo. For the most part, combat feels similar to the previous games. It’s been a couple of years since I played Rise of the Tomb Raider, but I quickly fall into old habits—throwing bottles to attract a guard’s attention, or running in to bring down more heavily armoured enemies with the shotgun. But I also discover a new hiding spot. As I quietly pick off an arena full of Trinity soldiers, I run up to a wall covered in vines. Lara merges into them—disappearing entirely. It’s a neat, Predator-esque animation that indicates a more guerilla-inspired fighting style.

While a new type of cover is hardly a transformative experience, Eidos Montreal hints at a more fully-fledged take on the theme. "The combat is way different," assures Bisson, who references Shadow’s CGI trailer, in which Lara uses mud as a form of camouflage. "In this game we’re pushing the stealth further, and we’ve all these tools and features to reinforce that aspect of becoming the jungle."

Liquid Courage

Structurally, Shadow of the Tomb Raider sticks closely to its predecessors, with players embarking on an adventure that will contain aspects of survival, crafting, exploration, platforming, puzzles and combat. "Usually the game gets broken down into something we call a blueprint," says Oehme, when I ask about how these disparate elements are put together. "You take the story and you place it out and ask, 'Okay, each story beat, each story moment—what is the emotional message? What does that need in terms of gameplay? Is this a combat moment? Is this a traversal moment?’ Traversal is also like swimming, for example."

Yes, continuing with the theme of fear, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is bringing back underwater exploration. "We did a post-mortem of Rise and we were looking at what people were reacting to, what they loved," says Bisson. "The underwater was something that people were constantly coming back to. They wanted more of that, even though there’s a challenge to doing underwater." Fans of the original Tomb Raider games (or any ’90s platformer) will remember the terror of navigating an underwater maze, searching for a way up to the surface before you drown. In the demo I play, the underwater sections are little more than a cutscene—atmospheric vignettes where I hold down 'W’ to progress through scripted peril. 

"The underwater works very similar to the other gameplay types in the way that there are experiential sections," explains Oehme, "some of which are linear and revolve around the introduction of a certain experience." The experience being introduced to me here was that of nearly drowning; of just reaching an air pocket at the very last second. Oehme suggests that this tension will be a key part of the more open underwater exploration. "Where do I find my next air bubble? Will there be one? If you squeeze through a tight gap, you don’t know if you’re going to get back, you don’t know what’s going to be on the other side."

As with the previous games, Shadow’s story will utilise a series of hub areas that Lara can return to. "We are going to have a few hubs," says Murray, "including the biggest hub that we’ve had so far. So people will get a more up close and personal look at the culture, not from the perspective of the artefacts necessarily, but meeting people and having to live alongside them."

This 'biggest ever hub’ is something teased but not detailed by every developer I speak to. Monnier, for instance, claims that, "underwater is definitely part" of it, while Oehme hints that this area might change in response to your actions. "The hub has a different aspect to it because of the living world," he says, referring to the jungle setting. "There is much more we can work with, with how the player plays and what the player has achieved during the game."

A big, secretive hub is nice and all, but fortunately Eidos Montreal are more open about one of the most important parts of a Tomb Raider game: the tombs. As in Rise, tombs feature both during the story and in exploration, and each acts almost like a puzzle. Fear again plays an important role. Where Rise featured grand tombs, Shadow is deadlier and more spiky. "Yeah, just thinking about them now, there’s certainly a lot of spikes!" confirms Oehme.

"It’s an ancient and dangerous location," Oehme continues, "perilous and claustrophobic in parts, and this leads to what we call the terrifying vista, which is when you get the first view of the tomb itself. This is very, very important, like you’re seeing your adversary. That’s the character of the space, the character of the puzzle that you’re looking at, and it’s looking back at you. And then you dive into the puzzle itself which is made in a way that has much more deadly content than before. There are many more traps that can kill you inside the puzzles."

Tomb with a view

I play through one such tomb in the demo, and, after making my way through some traps, get a view of its 'terrifying vista’. The room itself is huge and ominous. The camera pulls my attention to the centre, where a shaft of light illuminates the dais on top of an underground pyramid. That’s my goal—an ever-present beacon as I traverse around the edge of the space, enjoying the snappy, streamlined platforming.

The main puzzle of this area—what Oehme calls the "puzzle avatar", as it expresses the personality of that tomb—is a series of carts and pulleys. This is classic Tomb Raider puzzling, complete with a section where I have to use Lara’s bow to tie a rope from a pulley system to one of the carts—using its weight to hold some suspended boxes in place. This is just an early example, though. Many later puzzles will be more deadly in their design. "Some of them are designed to kill you by the Mayans and the people who created those tombs," explains Monnier.

I ask whether such deadly puzzles will lead to trial and error solutions, but Monnier quickly shoots that down. "We avoid trial and error, where you’d have to die to understand what’s happening," he says. "What we use, from the beginning of this trilogy, is tinkering. This tinkering is really about manipulating, usually the physics object and pulling things and making you go, 'Oh, okay, so if I put that there and do that it’s going to work, but if I do that I’m going to die.’ That’s why players usually don’t feel cheated by the game, because you always have a way to anticipate any kind of danger."

I leave Montreal with a question: has Lara gone far enough? I’m intrigued by what I’ve heard—particularly the hints about a more stealth-based combat system created by a studio that’s renowned for stealth combat. But for all of Eidos Montreal’s hints about what lies deeper in the game, nothing that I’ve played suggests anything markedly different from its predecessors.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider looks bigger and more detailed, and with more atmosphere to its setting, but I’m yet to be convinced that becoming "one with the jungle" is anything more than a tagline hanging off a similar experience. Luckily, I’m not too afraid: at the very least, Shadow of the Tomb Raider should, like the previous two games, be an entertaining adventure romp. If we’re lucky, it will be even more besides. 

To be a cool police officer, you need Composure, the ability to walk into any situation and not betray your inner fears (and also dance really well). But maybe you want to be a different kind of cop. A cold Logic-driven one, perhaps? One filled with Empathy? Or how about Authority? 

That’s all for you to choose as you begin Disco Elysium as a pot-bellied blowout lying on the floor of a trashed hotel room in an unknown city. Waking from an unholy binge that has wiped your memory, you’ve no idea that you’re a detective, or that you’re meant to be investigating a putrefying body hanging from a tree nearby.

Yes, Disco Elysium hinges on an amnesia-powered plot, but don’t let that put you off, because it’s the freshest and most fascinating RPG I’ve experienced in years, perhaps ever; one which plays right into the best aspects of pen-and-paper roleplaying. The first whisper of its promise came even before my character opened his eyes as several of my skills started discussing the nature of oblivion and my impending consciousness. These skills, you see, are Disco Elysium’s equivalent of agility, strength and charisma ratings, and they are wild. There are 24 of the things, arranged into four key types: Intellect skills affect my capacity to reason, Psyche skills allows me to influence NPCs and also myself, Fysique skills are body skills, and Motorics are about how well I move. 

Here’s the thing: skills are characters in themselves, speaking up during dialogue and offering insights on the world as I explore, if I’ve invested enough points in them and the behind the scenes dice rolls go my way. So Perception will tell me it’s noticed footprints beneath the hanging corpse while Visual Calculus will allow me to examine them closely. 

Electrochemistry, which just wants to smoke, drink and have sex, constantly pipes up with new conversational options for chatting up NPCs and cadging drinks (it even opens a quest called Find Smokes). Interfacing, meanwhile, manages my ability to work with machines, opening opportunities to use radios and another paraphernalia.

Skills, therefore, guide you around the world, and they affect everything you do. But the revolutionary thing is that they also provide a stream of consciousness from deep within your character as his impulses try to push him one way or another. As you put more points into skills they’ll become more dominant, and most come with negative effects. Authority, for example, gets off on having power over others, which is handy when you’re getting intel out of suspects. But find yourself in a situation where you’re begging an old woman for money, it might get enraged that you’re looking so desperate and make you say something you’ll regret. 

And if that wasn’t enough, many skills, such as Encyclopaedia and Empathy, explain details of the world, from the subtleties of an NPC’s reaction to the rich history behind the setting. Disco Elysium takes place in a fantasy ’70s, a world separate from ours but at the same kind of level of technological, social and political development, plus with a dose of magic and weirdness. Getting to explore its mix of the familiar and fantastical is a pleasure, especially when it’s drawn in such a striking art style, which blends a traditional isometric viewpoint with 3D lighting and shadow effects. 

If ZA/UM can sustain the promise of Disco Elysium’s opening across the finished game, we could have a new RPG classic on our hands.

Last year, I spoke to Christopher Obritsch—the indie developer whose boss is his seven-year-old daughter. Battle Princess Madelyn is a retro sidescrolling Ghouls 'N Ghosts throwback that features fantastical worlds, towering boss battles, and young Maddi Obritsch in its star role. 

It's now got an extended gameplay trailer with an animated intro sequence, undead armies, a barrage of throwing knives, a cute dog ghost companion, and level one's end-of-stage nemesis. That is one big skeleton. Observe:

"Battle Princess Madelyn is a game that follows the journey of a young knight in training, Madelyn, and her ghostly pet dog, Fritzy," says developer Causal Bit Games. "They set out on a journey to save her kingdom and her family from the clutches of an evil wizard. 

"Set in the vein of classic Ghouls N' Ghosts and Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon's Trap, the instantly classic and familiar gameplay will transport old-school gamers back to their heyday, and the self-adjusting difficulty will allow for even the most novice of gamer to pick up and play!"

Battle Princess Madelyn is without a hard launch date, but is "coming soon", as per its Steam page. Check out our previous coverage over here, and have a gander at these new screens:

In my insignificant opinion, Sumo Digital's Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is the best modern kart racer, and Mario Kart 7 can get lost. So it's great news that the same studio is developing a brand new Sonic racer in the form of Team Sonic Racing. As the name suggests, players will race in teams, and these races will support up to 12 players. 

The game will also support online and local co-operative modes, ranging Grand Prix, Exhibition mode, Time-Trial and "Team Adventure".  According to the game's Steam description, teams will win by not only finishing first, but also demolishing the opposition with the use of on-track collectibles. It's a kart racer, you see. These collectibles will comprise 14 offensive and defensive items.

What else do we know? There are 15 playable characters, a story-driven Adventure Mode, and plenty of performance and skin customisation. It'll release this Winter, which is Summer in Australia.

Here's the reveal trailer:

Pixel art doesn't always mean 'retro.' Sometimes it's more a matter of budget, or just a look the developers happen to love. I say this so that when I tell you Fox N Forests is a retro game you know I'm not just using it as a synonym for "it has old-fashioned graphics." This is a 16-bit platformer that deliberately harks back to a specific era. If it wasn't for the one character who makes jokes about a hedgehog getting arrested for going too fast or ET games buried in the desert—a character named Retro the Badger—you'd think this was a genuine lost Super Nintendo game somehow released on Steam in 2018.

Talking about the inspirations for its art style, game director Rupert Ochsner namechecks the likes of Super Ghouls N Ghosts, Mega Man X, and Disney's Magical Quest. "What strikes your eyes is that all these cartoony games, they have dark, very thick black outlines," he says.

Trying to recreate that look was easier said than done. "If you do the outlines 100% black then it doesn't really look high quality and it doesn't look like the sprites fit onto the backgrounds. First we had those black outlines and then we reduced them and made them almost nonexistent and then the game started to feel like more of a western Super Nintendo game, it was really interesting. And then at the end we managed to have a mix between really thick black outlines on one side but on the other side we had not so strict outlines and then you really get this Capcom Super Nintendo feel."

That wasn't the only artistic challenge they faced. The hook of Fox N Forests is a mechanic that lets you, as a crossbow-wielding fox named Rick, manipulate the seasons. Each level can be flipped between two seasons so you might go from summer to winter to put bees to sleep and freeze a lake, or from spring to fall so leaves tumble down revealing hidden platforms in a tree.

"For the artists it was a lot of work," Ochsner says, "because they had to pixel-create every tileset twice in two different seasons, because you can switch between two predefined seasons per level, and of course this is also why the levels in Fox N Forests are pretty long."

Having longer levels but less of them meant there wasn't as much need for varied tilesets, and also played into the specific kind of platformer experience they wanted to create—levels with multiple paths through them, hidden collectibles, and areas that can only be unlocked by returning with new gear.

"Something the whole team really loves about the old school 16-bit games [is] that you have to try stuff yourself, that you have to find stuff yourself," says Ochsner. That extended to new moves. "We have this cool double-jump spin attack but we do not give it to the player from the beginning. It's something you can get in the shop. It's pretty cheap so we've designed it that way, you can buy it already when you finish the first level, but once you find that yourself you go, 'Oh wow, it's such a great attack! And now it makes the whole game easier and more fun.' This is the design we had in our minds, like when you were a child, when you were playing 16-bit games, and you were really finding out stuff yourself and exploring the game your own way."

It reminded me of Hollow Knight, which doesn't even give you a double jump until a fair way in, although Fox N Forests isn't quite so stingy. "I respect game designers that do this. It is a risk. Now that our game is out we sometimes see people playing it and they play half of the game without getting the double-jump spin attack. Complaining, 'Why can't you attack when you double jump?' It was a risk but what I also like is that when people are willing to engage with the game, then they are usually really happy with this design choice and they know it's really rewarding once you get it. The core community definitely likes it this way."

A similarly old school idea is that checkpoints cost coins to unlock. They're not expensive, but money spent on them could be going toward upgrading your bayonet-crossbow. In-game, the explanation is that the checkpoints are run by Retro the Badger who needs the money to fund his game-collecting habit.

"It's not a lot you have to pay Retro the Badger," Ochsner explains, "but if you take more risk you have more money at the end. We wanted to anticipate this, that if the player wants to he can take more risk, the game gets more difficult and he gets rewarded for it." 

The woodland animal theme of Fox N Forests wasn't there from the start. Initially it was about a thief who was inspired by Locke from Final Fantasy 6, then a knight like Arthur from Ghosts 'n Goblins, "but knights are overdone," as Ochsner says.

"Then I was very close to making a wolf the main character and calling the game Wolf Warrior." Finally they settled on a fox, accidentally joining a string of indie games with fox protagonists like Tunic, Vulpine, and The First Tree. 

"I think they're popular on one hand because of the Japanese culture and mythology where foxes are really big," says Ochsner, "and of course for gamers the Japanese culture's always a very big thing. On the other hand I think foxes are one of the few wild animals you also get to see if you live in an urban area, especially in Europe. They have this wild magic around them but you actually get to see them. They are really smart, they're very cool animals, and have adapted into urban living quite well. I think all these things come into play. Everyone has some feelings towards the fox."

Fox N Forests is available now on Steam.

Unworthy is a Metroidvania-style 2D action game whose grayscale world is dripping with death, decay and other wholesome things like that. Its surprisingly detailed levels and deceptively simple combat caught my eye last year, and now after a total of three years of work, solo developer Alekz Kuzmanovic has finally released it on Steam and GOG.

I was able to dip my toes in Unworthy's early levels, and it quickly became clear that it's not a normal Metroidvania. You can't jump, for starters, and while that might sound like "a shooter where you can't shoot," Unworthy's cleverly placed ladders, elevators and platforms turn this seemingly deal-breaking limitation into an interesting challenge. Fall damage is punishing and enemies can knock you off ladders, so you have to plan your routes carefully. 

The combat also takes some getting used to, but it feels good once you feel it out. Enemies hit hard, so fights are about dodging, blocking, managing your stamina and sneaking in attacks when you can. You start off with nothing but a sword and shield, but as you earn experience and beat bosses, you unlock new ways to fight. I haven't unlocked any new weapons yet, but Unworthy's trailer features a halberd, fire gauntlets, a hammer and a massive bow. I especially like the look of the bow since it has an ability that lets you teleport to an arrow after firing it. 

I've grown fond of the leaping sword attack you get shortly after beating the first boss. It costs a lot of stamina, but it does enough damage that I can finish off most enemies with a quick follow-up, provided I don't mess it up. But boy is it awkward when I do mess it up. It feels like leaping off a building in Assassin's Creed and rolling right into a crowd of guards, and has roughly the same result. 

We originally reviewed League of Legends in 2009, when it first released. It has changed significantly since then, so much so that we decided to review it again. For more about why we've chosen to re-review certain games, head here. 

I'm a friendly, murderous fish-boy and I'm in danger. I've been bullied out of position by Caitlyn, a sniper in tacky steampunk attire, and forced to skulk in some nearby brush. She knows I’m there. She simply can’t see me without entering the shrubbery as well—nullifying her range advantage and allowing me to close in with my Aquaman-esque trident. So instead, the Caitlyn player takes a potshot into the area with a skill that damages in a straight line; no targeting required.

It's enough to kill my weakened champion Fizz in one hit. It's also just what I've been waiting for. Fizz can pogo hop onto his trident, making him immune to such directed attacks, and leap forward in a damaging slam. I use the momentum to dodge Caitlyn’s blast and close the distance she wanted to maintain. One lunging strike later, the bully is dead in the dirt, and a bounty of gold and experience points only prepares me further for the next fight.

These kinds of tense one-on-one, do-or-die battles happen in every League of Legends match, but the adrenaline in these moments makes each of them memorable. League is a lens that amplifies every emotion on the spectrum. 

Desperate struggles

Every match is like an entire multiplayer action-RPG condensed into 20-to-50 minutes. Each player starts with nothing but command of a single unit and one special skill. They're split into two opposing teams of five and let loose against each other over a top-down battlefield. Smiting enemy units in real time earns gold and experience, which grant access to increasingly powerful skills and a choice of better gear. The team that wins is the team that best leverages its units’ particular strengths. 

Your ultimate objective is to destroy the opposing team's headquarters. The fighting mostly occurs across three roads leading to each “Nexus.” Each path is defended by AI sentinels and human players desperate to justify their use of free time. 

I don’t blame them. I also want my in-game announcer to shout “victory” and justify the stress and precious life span I spent demolishing virtual towers and warriors. I want to feel like getting flanked and killed five times in the first half hour was worth it for the last-minute push into enemy territory that cinches the win—all because I had the foresight to pick a late-game champion designed to come back from behind. The emotional investment in those strategic gambles is heightened by the length of the matches, elevating the high of victory, while making every low feel that much lower. It’s a recipe for friends and perfect strangers to turn their frustration on each other, adding a personal layer to every vexing loss.

Every match you re-dedicate yourself to playing an important role on a team, like tank or support, trying to accrue experience, money and lucrative player kills faster than the other team. But the real investment in League of Legends extends far beyond that. There are 140 playable characters and rising. Each has multiple skills that work in tandem or counter another. That's not even including passives from mix-and-match runes, or spells that can be equipped before a match begins.Between the sheer scale of variables at play, and League's well-documented toxicity (even the game's own developers aren't immune to it), it's one of the most daunting games in history. 

League does little to relieve any of that pressure. Encouraging millions of players to be civil is a tough, likely Sisyphean task, but easing players into League's complexity should be more attainable eight years after release. Like other similar games, League of Legends does an alright job of explaining the most basic of basics. This is how you select a champion. This is how you buy them a nice pair of shoes. That sort of thing. Where it flounders, or hardly even tries to help at all, is in explaining when and why you should apply those basics to a given situation.

League of Legends' pay-per-character business model pushes against mastering the game and understanding how its champions play. It'll take you several years of grinding, the better part of a thousand dollars, or a mix of the two to unlock the whole roster permanently. There’s a weekly rotation of free characters, too, but none of these options compare to on-the-job training. If I get crushed by Ryze, for instance, I can pore over his kit outside the game, but nothing is a true stand-in for knowing how he handles under my own index finger.

This free-to-play model is still a major impediment to LoL's accessibility—not to mention its 'purity' as an esports phenomenon—and some odd UI choices don't help, either. You can't examine a champion’s abilities from the select screen, for instance. That means you either need to learn on the fly or already know what a character is capable of. Likewise, you can't peruse an opposing player's skills mid-match.

Floors and ceilings

But if you work past the aggressive team chat and devote an entire lobe of your brain to memorizing movement speed and cooldown timers, League's high highs take back quite a lot of lost ground. I've developed the patience to only launch Brand's fiery, bouncing death-ball when it's guaranteed to ricochet off every enemy champion. I know to sneak behind enemies before they retreat, sandwiching them in flanking maneuvers on pure instinct.

At its best, League of Legends is competitive, high-speed math. Keeping your attack damage carry, the team member tasked with pumping out consistent damage in big team fights, in one of three lanes to soak up gold and experience points might just give you the greater sum. Then again, maybe moving them around to land the lucrative killing blow on squishy, defenseless supports is the way to go. 

It's an addictive game of cat and mouse that makes me feel like a criminal mastermind. Success isn't just a prefabricated plan coming together. The knowledge that live human beings are behind the monitor, devising their own schemes to stop me, means that I've well and truly outplayed people of ostensibly similar skill. 

And thanks to League's comparatively quick action—just slightly twitchier than Dota 2's yawning chess matches and a hair longer than Heroes of the Storm’s intentionally accessible skirmishes—there's a sense of physical mastery, too. One of the strongest stuns in Dota, for example, lasts for a maximum of five seconds. An extremely similar skill in League of Legends tops out at about two-thirds of that. So when I’m too panicked to step out of the way of Ashe’s knockout strike in League (every single time), I'm back to exchanging magic missiles that much faster. If I live.

As matches progress, items bought with hard-won gold make player-versus-player fights even more common and ferocious. The Black Cleaver, a vital in-game item for Illaoi, one of my favorite champions, provides a nice cushion of health and some attack power. Perhaps more vitally, the chopper also cools down its wielder's abilities  significantly faster. So do many other items. 

The resulting shorter time between spell casting increases the pace of battle without removing the focus from predetermined character skills. I know Illaoi summons ghostly tentacles with her passive ability. Her four active skills order them to pancake my enemies. Items like the Black Cleaver just call the tendrils to my aid faster, and let Illaoi hit harder in between. They rarely ask me to remember more than her basic spells.

So while getting into League requires a ton of memorization, mastering it is more about finesse. Every player starts every match with limited tools. The wiggle room for outdoing opponents is mostly found in reaction time and precision. Or maybe you are playing just as well as your opponents, but losing anyway. Maybe you just so happened to draft someone who is numerically weaker than your counterpart on the opposite team. That's where 'game sense' and reflexes end, and the meta begins.

The cool kids club

You might wonder how even a company as well-staffed and buried in cosmetic skin money as Riot Games can keep 140 champions (and counting) balanced. The answer is it doesn't. There's usually a fairly tight list of the cream of the crop amid a sea of unloved nobodies. It's just not always the same clique of popular kids month to month.

That shifting assortment of S-tier picks, bans, and character builds is called the meta, and I've always understood League's to be just a little bit narrow. When a given strategy works, it tends to work extremely well, and the upper echelons of competitive play cling to it for dear life.

In 2017, it was the insufferable tank meta. Immortal abominations like Dr. Mundo and Maokai spent this era whomping each other with all the intensity of a Nerf war while dragging every game out to twice its natural length. More recently, long-range, crit-focused marksmen were the juiciest picks.

Another super-powered tactic might have already taken root by the time you're reading this. Twice monthly patches make small but meaningful changes to the math behind the mayhem. Each such adjustment nudges optimal champion choices in one direction or another, but there's basically never a completely level playing field.

It's a roll of the dice in more ways than one. There's always a chance the numbers will tell you to pick a particular support or tank that just doesn’t strike your fancy. That's a fact of life in any competitive game. But League's often slim circle of top-tier champions limits those options even further. And since you don’t have access to every given champ at any given time, you could be stuck with the lemons of the meta until grinding out enough funny money to rejoin the competition.

That shouldn't matter much in casual game buffoonery. Teamwork and skill are the greater factors here. There's even an all-random champions mode for those who prefer silly fun with spell slinging. But personally, if I'm already dedicating myself to League's learning curve, I want the promised payoff of a properly strategic brawl. And the 'rules' of the meta that start at professional play eventually trickle down to even my level. It's absolute candy for every armchair analyst looking to blame their loss on anyone but themselves.

I've been told not to play my favorite wizards for that very reason. I've been told my win didn't count because I was being “cheap.” I've seen new players abandon matches because a noxious teammate constantly blamed their inexperience for a destroyed turret. Nevermind that everybody started somewhere. The meta can be a fun excuse to test new champions. Just as often, it's another crack for that infamous rot to seep in.

A certain kind of variety

Thankfully, League of Legends has a wonderful assortment of fantastical weirdos to choose from. Illaoi is my current go-to: a brawny, squid-worshipping priestess who siphons enemy souls with a big, brass skull. She eschews pretty much all the trappings of both generic “priestess” and appropriative shaman archetypes found in other fantasy.

Not all of the character design is that cool. While most of the female characters are at least recognizably different at a glance, it's a cavalcade of boob armor, boob windows, and basically just boobs up close. This design ethos culminates in the piratical Miss Fortune, a buccaneer garbed in a sort of lace and leather push-up bra, who has an ability called “Strut.” 

There's nothing inherently wrong with sexy characters, but League's dedication to women with a thin and busty body type feels on par with those pop-up ads for horny Clash of Clans clones. It's a disappointing status quo for champions that typically play in interesting ways. The musically inclined Sona, for instance, sports a wonderfully challenging mix of support skills that change depending on the order she uses them.

It's that variety of play that makes LoL so fascinating. Sure, not every champion or spell works as well as the others on paper. But there’s a seemingly never-ending stream of them to try. Say Fizz had failed me against Caitlyn. I could always try blocking the shot with Poppy's shield next time. Perhaps I could teleport out of the way as Ezreal, or stop the attack from ever happening by stunning Caitlyn with Brand (Correction: an earlier version of this review misstated one of Jinx's abilities). League's robust roster is one of the biggest strategic toyboxes available today. Odds are you'll never stop being amazed by the miraculous ways your human foes use them to slip past and sneak up on you. You’ll surprise yourself, too. I sure have. 

Perhaps League of Legends has gotten just a bit complacent in the years since it launched. The sexed-up costumes and barriers to entry feel like the products of a very big game that hasn't had to grow its audience in some time. But breaking past those problems eventually rewards new players with expansive, astonishing complexity. Every clever shortcut between lanes, or tap of the key a nanosecond faster than your opponent feels like a win. League makes these moments downright common, but hardly less special for it. And its constantly changing roster means there's always another trick just waiting to slide up your sleeve.

Fractured Lands looks like a cross between Fallout, Mad Max and PUBG: A battle royale set in a broken world of derelict buildings, mile-high sandstorms, and banged-up machines driven by leather-clad scavengers with nothing to lose. It's being developed by Unbroken Studios, an outfit made up of developers who previously worked on games from the Battlefield, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and God of War series, and it's set to begin closed beta testing in June. 

"Rise from the ashes of a post-apocalyptic world gone mad and become a deadly road warrior," the very on-the-nose announcement says. "Out-drive and out-gun a myriad of survivors in high-octane multiplayer manhunts where vehicular warfare injects a breakneck sense of speed and strategy into the Battle Royale landscape." 

Guns are obviously an important part of surviving in this brutal world, but the car is what it's all about. Scavenged upgrades will make it tougher and more dangerous, it carries the supplies that will keep you alive, and it can turn opposing players into greasy smears faster than any bullet. On the downside, they're noisy as all get-out (the last of the V8s is not made for sneaking), they guzzle gasoline, and should you let your guard down, they can be stolen, too.   

The basic battle royale formula sounds very much intact—a "radioactive storm" will surround and slowly constrict the game world, forcing players into conflict over the "winner-winner 'I've got a recipe for snake' dinner"—but the introduction of cars and the "mobile enough to scavenge" ethos gets my interest up a little bit. Give me a videogame version of this and yes, I will sign up.   

Speaking of which, you can sign up for the closed beta at fractured-lands.com. The first three rounds of testing are scheduled to take place on the weekends of June 8, June 22, and June 29,  and the Steam listing says it will go into Early Access release in July. 

It’s uncommon these days to see an RTS released that doesn’t have competitive intentions. From larger titles like Halo Wars 2 or Dawn of War III to smaller ones like Empires Apart, a lot of work in real-time strategy games typically goes into the multiplayer experience. However recently, with games like They Are Billions or Frostpunk, we are seeing some leanings back toward a singleplayer focus.

Let's celebrate the qualities of a great singleplayer real-time strategy campaigns by picking out some of the best ever made. In so doing, it’s very difficult to avoid a retread some of the common giants in this space: Relic, Blizzard, and Westwood’s games have all taken world-building and storytelling very seriously and that shows in the quality of their campaigns. Alongside these, I’m going to place some titles that perhaps haven’t gotten quite as much attention before, or that might’ve slipped by unnoticed by some people. 

This isn’t an ordered list; I started out trying to put them in a countdown, but these games are often good for such different reasons it seems silly to rank them. Let’s get cracking. Note, there are a few spoilers for the older games in the list.

Battle Realms

Often when we discuss advanced combat systems in RTS, games like Dawn of War, Men of War, Company of Heroes, or WarCraft 3 come up. Liquid Entertainment’s 2001 RTS Battle Realms deserves a prominent seat at this table. Released about a year before WarCraft 3, Battle Realms features a number of fun systemic twists. You could level up peasants to any combat unit, spend one resource (water) to replenish another (rice), dynamically switch units between ranged and melee combat, and upgrade systems using a novel Yin/Yang system.

The campaign itself isn’t as polished as some of the others in this list: all cutscenes are rendered in-game, which looks pretty dated these days. But the core formula still feels fresh in 2018. Taking the mantle of either the Serpent Clan, or the stalwart Dragons, you must shadow the exiled hero Kenji as he strives to re-establish the dominance of his chosen clan. I put a lot of weight on choice in campaigns, and Battle Realms does a good job of this, giving you choice over the territory and scenario you take on next. Winning battles can provide bonuses in future missions, which adds a note of persistence across missions.

Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault

Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault tells the story of the Battle of the Bulge through the eyes of four commanders (three of which are playable). Each has their own backstory and personality, which you see reflected in the forces of the three playable leaders. The armies are interesting, but it's the surprising depth and uncompromising difficulty of the Ardennes Assault meta-layer map that really sets it apart. 

One thing I kind of like about several of the RTS on this list is that they don’t try to emulate the political layer of Total War games and instead let battles take front and center. Ardennes Assault does this by using reinforcements to create rewards and consequences. defeated enemies can retreat to reinforce territory you haven’t taken yet, making subsequent missions harder than they otherwise would have been. You can cut off these retreating enemies by maneuvering your companies on the map, but doing so means you might miss out on time-critical missions. There’s a lot of nuance in the system, and honestly this campaign style is one I’d love to see ripped off time and again. 

Mission design is relatively varied, from holding a defensive line to standard Control Point capture, and the finale is memorable without being over-the-top ridiculous like some final missions can be (It’s coming up next, but Battle for Dune could fit here) easily.

Emperor: Battle for Dune

Some titles on this list are here because of the presentation of their story, and how memorable their characters are. Some titles are on this list due to the replayability and depth of their systems. Emperor: Battle for Dune is here because of all of these things.

Westwood adapted the Command & Conquer formula and dressed it in the campiness of the 1984 Dune movie. The campaign gives you a Risk-style territory map where you must battle two AI Houses for control of the planet Arrakis.  

The game throws in story-progression missions every couple of levels to give you a break from the unrelenting desert—some missions take place on Spacing Guild Heighlighers or other planets like Caladan. You can also ally with (or fight) the Minor Houses, which creates some variation across playthroughs. Along with Ardennes Assault, Emperor: Battle for Dune remains the gold standard for an enjoyable meta-campaign. And, along with Red Alert 2, Emperor stands strong as one of the best examples of enjoyable campiness in real-time strategy gaming.

Dawn of War: Dark Crusade

Dark Crusade introduced two of the most interesting and fun factions in all of RTS gaming: the Necrons and the Tau. These factions are interesting in and of themselves as members of the Warhammer 40,000 lineup, but in the context of RTS, they’re quite a pair.

Other games in this list, like Ardennes Assault and Emperor: Battle for Dune, have meta-layer strategic campaigns, and darn good ones. Dark Crusade’s iteration stands out amongst them for a number of reasons. Territories give you access to unique customizations that can change how you approach the game. Given the start locations of each faction, you can acquire these customizations in different orders. Also, as you progress you’re able to apply wargear to your chosen leader, further customizing them and giving you a fun sense of progression and growth even without much of a story to go on beyond Warhammer-generic Endless War.

There are other nice touches too. The campaign preserves a your base after you have won a province (something I really would like to see happen more in RTS—it feels right to come back to somewhere you’ve already battled and see your progress in that area preserved). The Honor Guard for faction leaders are another neat persistent element.

Homeworld

Relic’s Homeworld remains one of the most compelling real time strategy games ever made. It's rare for a real-time strategy game to create a universe of such scale and poignancy. Karan S’Jet and the Mothership have become iconic characters, and the game has an emotional weight I haven't experienced in another RTS game.

I tend to view campaigns that offer some choice to be superior to linear ones, partially because I value replayability in singleplayer, but also partly because such choices can provide powerful feelings of agency to the player. Homeworld's linear campaign is an exception, however. Your forces carry over from mission to mission, which creates consequences and captures the tone of a fleet scrabbling to survive.

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

I was skeptical of Deserts of Kharak. I didn’t think that a game based on Homeworld’s DNA could work properly on the surface of a planet, but it does this surprisingly well, and terrain encourages a lot of play over features like the ridges of dunes. It also has a decent linear campaign that borrows the right elements from the original Homeworld games.

On the default campaign setting you bring units across from mission to mission, and the missions are well paced to allow you a breather after finishing a particularly tough battle. You can turn this off at any time, to swap out a broken force for a pre-set loadout for the mission—This saved me a couple of times later in the campaign when I suffered massive losses at a critical moment. 

Like the core Homeworld games, the game is deeply atmospheric, and there were times when the desert around my little fleet of vehicles felt vast in a way that, for instance, I never felt in a game like Battle for Dune. The tone is sometimes interrupted by vehicles doing awkward dances trying to navigate lumpy deserts, but Blackbird did a phenomenal job of giving the world a sense of scale. Also in the spirit of its predecessors, the cadence of the story ratchets up at just the right times, increasing the stakes and providing twists that elevate the game far above standard RTS fare. 

The Gaalsien and their leader, the K’had Sajuuk, are wonderful villains, almost akin to the Brotherhood of Nod from Command and Conquer. Or perhaps like the fremen from Dune. While the story differs from previous Homeworld canon, the overall quality of Deserts of Kharak’s storytelling make it one of the very best RTS campaigns released in the modern era.

Red Alert 2

I praised Emperor: Battle for Dune for its campiness, and Westwood always did this well. But nowhere did it strike the perfect tone, in unit design and cutscenes, as in Red Alert 2. Like most of Westwood’s campaigns, Red Alert 2 features separate stories for both the Allies and the Soviets—for my money, both are pretty darn good, but the Soviet campaign is more enjoyable overall. You really just play through the pre-defined story with no real choices or branching in the plot, but everything is so over-the-top it’s really hard to mind.

Nuclear Missiles, Psychic Beacons, Yuri’s thousand-yard-stare, Einstein and the Chronosphere, turning the Eiffel Tower into a giant Tesla weapon, the Soviet Premier being apprehended in his underwear—there are so many hilarious moments in the game, accented by suitably ridiculous FMV. Like WarCraft 3, this is linear storytelling done right: original, entertaining, and memorable.  Also, I need to give them props for the detailed environments: Westwood typically does a good job of giving you a sense of place: making cities actually kind of look like, well, cities. It’s all too common in RTS to be fighting in anonymous hinterlands, and Red Alert 2, especially for its time, went a step above.

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty

This one might have to come with some caveats. StarCraft and its expansion, Brood War, are iconic games in their own right. But from an execution perspective, StarCraft 2 is simply more enjoyable. Blizzard has had a long time to hone its craft, and while the game may not have done proper justice to the story set up in the series’ first installment, there’s no doubt that the actual mission design and entire between-mission interface ranks among the very best the genre has to offer.

Every mission has a twist. In one mission you visit corpse of the Overmind, in another you have to flee from a huge wall wall of fire. Side missions matter, helping you to specialize your units and tech outside of combat, and you have some choice in how to proceed between missions. You can talk to and interact with the cast of characters growing around you, and the cantina even has a phenomenal little arcade game.

There’s a bit of persistence to your choices, though not to the point where (as in Homeworld or Ardennes Assault) it can actively interfere with your ability to complete the game. Unconstrained by the need for multiplayer balance, the campaign lets you upgrade units into powerful variants and customise your overall force. The standalone expansions, Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void, also offer splendid campaigns that thoroughly explore the Zerg and Protoss factions.

WarCraft 3

WarCraft 3 might be the pinnacle of Blizzard's storytelling. The quaternate storyline of Medivh, Thrall, Arthas, Kel’Thuzad Jaina Proudmoore, Tyrande, Illidan, Mannoroth and the battle against Archimonde is cinematic, epic, and tied together with some of the best cutscenes in the genre (still). Mission design is varied, and each faction is given its time in the sun.

The turning of Arthas is perhaps my favorite moment in all of RTS gaming. Seeing his rising despair and frustration with the limitations of being good, committing genocide at Stratholm, killing plagued villagers, accepting a demonic weapon in order to defeat the Dreadlord Mal’Ganis, killing his father, and then starring again in the Undead campaign: it’s wonderful.

World in Conflict

In the list above, I’ve gushed over story presentation, mission design, choice and flexibility in how to proceed through the game, replay value, and frivolous campiness. I’ve also lauded making the player feel a part of a larger world (something too many RTS are incredibly bad at). This last is where World in Conflict shines.

In this campaign the onus is on you to assist your AI-controlled team, trying to complete their objectives in coordination with the larger war effort. This is reinforced by stunning narration (I could listen to Alec Baldwin read the phone book, to be fair) and a well-written story that ends up being surprisingly powerful.

Technically, I’d consider World in Conflict to be a real-time tactics game rather than an RTS: there’s no real base building or economic progression, and the entire emphasis in the game is on controlling ground and using your units effectively. While some RTTs can feel like an RTS with half of the game stripped out, World in Conflict is prominent among the RTT that stand strong on their own merits. The campaign is a great showcase of WiC's particular take on the genre.