My Top 5 best PC games of 2014
ACTION
Big-budget behemoths often dominate the action category, and so it proves in 2014. The surely-headed-to-PC Grand Theft Auto 5 rubs shoulders with intriguing multiplayer survival games like The Division. The spectres of distant games like Star Wars: Battlefront, Mirror's Edge 2, Deus Ex Universe and Beyond Good and Evil 2 offer haunting glimpses of a time beyond 2014, but all may fall before the return of the space flight sim. Star Citizen is coming. If its team can effectively utilise that vast crowd-sourced budget, we could be in for something a bit special.
Tom Clancy’s The Division
A disease spread on Black Friday decimates the US in five days. As part of the Division, you are tasked with saving what remains. Go up against both AI and other players in Ubisoft’s hugely ambitious third-person shooter MMO. Expect meticulously designed environments courtesy of the promising new Snowdrop engine; expect ludicrous attention to detail (car windshields finally shatter like they should); just don’t expect it to come out any time soon. The Division will be done when it’s done, as Ubisoft’s recently delayed Rainbow Six: Patriots demonstrates.
Watch Dogs
Developer Ubisoft
Publisher: In-house
Release date: Spring 2014
Link:Watch Dogs site
Though in recent years, Ubisoft has been happy to milk the Assassin’s Creed licence until its ruddy teats squeaked, let us not forget that the space-wizards-thru-history mega-franchise was born of huge creative risk: a new IP that cost so much develop that, rumour has it, sales didn’t cover the cost of development until its sequels were on shelves. Now, the same gigantic studio, Ubisoft Montreal, has unveiled Watch Dogs - a game with no smaller a scope than Assassin’s Creed, combining the complex sedition of information warfare with brutish third-person action and, it is suspected, with some sort of clever multiplayer/singleplayer crossover. It’s not only a showcase for the kind of polygon-crunching power the cutting edge PC can generate (finally loosed from the shackles of last-gen cross platform releases) but it also establishes a fiction that Ubisoft hopes will see it through the next decade.
Grand Theft Auto 5
Developer: Rockstar
Publisher: In-house
Release: TBC
Link:GTA 5 site
There’s been no confirmation of Rockstar’s next blockbuster for PC, but it would be a world gone topsy-turvy if Grand Theft Auto 5 was marooned on consoles for ever. This isn’t Red Dead Redemption, a game developed by a studio with around three PC credits to its name – this is GTA, a series whose every main instalment has appeared on PC. And it’s developed by Rockstar North, a team that (even including its legacy as DMA Design) has brought all bar seven of its games to PC. And where are the internet petitions to port
Walker over from the Amiga, I might ask?
One of the biggest releases of 2013, GTA 5 sees the player take on the role of three different characters trying to make a crust amid the tinseltown glamour and sunbaked squalor of Los Santos. And it’s an ill-gotten crust at that, given the series’ heritage of exuberant criminality: heists, hits and high-speed chases are the order of the day, interspersed with all the leisure activities a high-rolling hoodlum might desire. The game’s online component, GTA Online, lets you do all that but...online, expanding Red Dead Redemption’s brilliant multiplayer to envelop the entirety of Los Santos.
Mirror’s Edge 2
Mirror’s Edge 2 will be an open-world action adventure according to EA Labels president Frank Gibeau, who apparently used the term in the publisher’s E3 analyst call last June. It’ll be a prequel, too, telling the origin story of tattooed heroine Faith, pre-tattoo. The extent of the sandbox is currently unknown - all we’ve seen of the game a short trailer featuring a pair of gloved hands and lots of punching. But the change of direction has the chance to make a cult classic look like a practice run. Not least because Mirror’s Edge 2 runs on Frostbite 2, Battlefield 4’s engine. It particularly excels at physics, so you’ll get your money’s worth in shattering glass and billowing fabric.
"[Producer Sara Jansson] pitched an idea that frankly could only be built on gen four. It’s a stunning concept, and when she came to us we knew we had it. And yes, we've been testing ideas and we've been prototyping stuff, and I'm glad that we waited to get the right idea,” says Patrick Söderlund, executive vice president of the EA Games Label. “I was frankly blown away,” he says.
Deus Ex Universe
Developer: Eidos Montreal
Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: TBA
Link:Deus Ex Universe
“Most of the team behind Deus Ex: Human Revolution is already working hard on this new game,” said Eidos Montreal head David Anfossi back in October, confirming that Deus Ex Universe’s series of interlocking Facebook/iOS games will include a proper big-budget game that we can play on our PCs. It will be part of a larger network of spin-off titles that’ll all play their part in an “ongoing, expanding and connected game world built across a generation of core games” which will include “additional Deus Ex games and experiences available in other media such as tablets, smartphones, books, graphic novels.” etc. A smattering of suspicious snorts accompanied that last particular snippet at PC Gamer towers, for who wants to hunt down a story through a disparate collection of formats? We’ll comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the team behind the excellent Deus Ex: Human Revolution is returning, and with the intriguing suggestion that “trans-humanism segregation” will be an important element of the new game.
