Let’s just get this straight: you don’t have to play Monday Night Combat on a Monday. You can play it on any day of the week. You can play it at 4.38 on a Wednesday morning if you want to. You can play it on Easter Day, if you’ve nothing better to do. There’s no dictum with the game – other than the title – that requires you to play on the fi rst working day of the week. Now, have we got that clear? Good. [Ed - Just to be annoying PCF are playing it on a few of Mondays in February. Sorry.]

Monday Night Combat nabs not only Team Fortress 2′s chunky character design and blue versus red (or dark orange, in this case) colour scheme, but its character classes. In game you’ll fi nd six classes, among them slow heavy gunners, speedy assassins and the indispensable support class, who can heal his team mates or suck the life force out of the opposition. Again, it’s all rather TF2-esque, but developer Uber Entertainment has added an interesting twist on top of the slightly over-familiar shooter mechanics.

Despite their neon, capitalism-drenched aesthetics, Monday Night Combat’s arenas owe a lot to classic Warcraft III mod Defence of the Ancients, which has recently inspired Chris Taylor’s epic real-time strategy, Demigod, as well as the upcoming Valve-developed DOTA 2. It’s all there: the ‘Ancients’ are replaced by towering balls of money, there are numerous nubs where turrets can be erected, and the maps are designed around the inevitable violent choke-point encounters. It elevates the game above its campy shooter mechanics and into the realms of an (almost) fully fledged real-time strategy, albeit one played from an over-the-shoulder perspective.

Prepare to swarm
As with TF2, you get 30 seconds to set up, with a small amount of in-game currency to spend either on upgrading your player, or on building turrets. Next, waves of robots are unleashed from each side, and it’s up to you to escort them to the opposition’s MoneyBall. They’re fundamentally quite weak, and you have no control over their direction or attack, or even which type are released. It does make you wonder why one of your team can’t be given a god-like proper real-time strategy role and direct the swarms, but it could become a mega bone of contention if they do the wrong thing.

There’s also the added threat of other players on the opposing team. As with Team Fortress 2, working together and balancing your team is essential, although the latter doesn’t seem quite as intricate as TF2′s fine-tuned mechanics. One match I played simply consisted of assassins stabbing each other in the back while the robot march continued unabated. The problem could well be down to the six versus six dynamic – at the time of writing, enter a half-full server and you’ll note that most players instinctively choose the stealthiest characters available.

Matches end when a MoneyBall is taken, which can take some time, or when the time’s up. Randomly, Bullseye, Monday Night Combat’s mascot, is introduced. Pepper this hyperactive smiley loon with bullets and he spews money, which is equally disturbing and funny, like being able to shoot that bloke from Pineapple Dance Studios. It’s a nice touch in a game obsessed with ludicrous levels of capitalism – one level is set near the Egyptian pyramids, which have been torn down and replaced with giant corporate effigies.

Strategic run and gun
It’s fun and funny, but it’s also too easy to think that Monday Night Combat is trying too hard to please everyone at once. And to a certain degree it is. It treads an oh-so-fi ne-line between shooter and real time strategy, but does it successfully enough. It still hasn’t quite shaken its Xbox 360 roots, though, and it’s probably the first PC online shooter I’ve ever played that feels like you could score kills with a 360 pad as well as keyboard and mouse. There are still some issues with the game and it does need a little more balancing to feel like a complete game. This is the key to Monday Night Combat being a success: the devs have to make sure they keep it updated and keep adding new stuff.

Even if it’s not a runaway success, it deserves to garner a cult following, and it certainly deserves respect for its inventive blend of blasting and strategy. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite feel like it’s right up there with Valve’s best efforts just yet.

Price: £9
Web www.mondaynightcombat.com

A break from tradition, in a bad way

The easiest way to assess ArcaniA: Gothic 4 is to think of all the stereotypical things about Germanic RPGs and see if they apply. First of all, difficulty. In a break from tradition, Gothic 4 is incredibly easy. If you plump for Normal, don’t expect to die very often, if at all. Stories of people completing the game without once spending any of their skill points upon levelling up aren’t exaggerated. Gothic 3 was very hard, but this takes the accessibility trend too far.

It doesn’t stop there. Every element of the previous game seems to have been either removed completely or simplified to an almost farcical point. There’s no point in using alchemy or any of the skills in the game, because you just don’t need them. Even on Gothic difficulty, it’s perfectly possible to progress with relative ease just by hacking and slashing, and only rarely swigging a healing potion if you happen to get clipped by an enemy while dodging out of the way.

She’s one of the lookers in the game too.

Even with all the skill trainers, the pointless alchemy and the other omissions, Gothic 4 is still relatively compelling, even if it’s in a perverse fetch quest fashion. Every single quest is ‘go here, get this, come back’, making it seem more like an MMO than a proper offline RPG. What keeps you going is exploring the land and admiring the wonderful visuals (if you have the hardware to back them up, of course). With lighting settings whacked up to full, some of the scenery is glorious: realistic light shines through the trees, casting real-time shadows across the forest floor.

Plot-wise, it’s your standard cod-medieval generic shite. Man seeks revenge for injustice, finds out things aren’t quite as simple as he believes. As you progress, you realise just how linear the game is, a sad state of affairs considering how free form the previous Gothic game was in comparison. You get to an area, the road forward is blocked and you need to do X number of fetch quests to get it unblocked. Rinse and repeat for every area. It doesn’t help when these quests are delivered to you by the most utterly nauseating and horrific voice acting ever to grace a computer game. Simply awful.

Like an MMO, there’s an undefinable something that keeps you playing, probably far beyond what your sanity can properly stand. But it’s not an MMO, far from it (obviously), so any slack you can cut games from that genre can’t be granted to Gothic 4. It’s got none of the depth of the previous Gothic games and is effectively just a relatively compelling hack-and-slash game. Hardcore fans will be disgusted, while casual slasher players probably won’t even know it exists. Even if they did, it won’t be offering them much they haven’t seen before.

The first thing you can do in the game is beat a flock of sheep to death.

The scenery can be breathtaking at times and you can enjoy it since it’s hard to die.

Dead Space’s gratuitously gory space battles were its key selling point, and the ability to dismember various pustular space monsters never, ever got boring. One thing sorely missed in its vacuous setting was multiplayer, though. This time Developer Visceral Games has added a team-based multiplayer element to Dead Space 2 and despite some reservations it’s actually okay.

The multiplayer definitely, and somewhat inevitably, takes its cues from Singularity’s overlooked multiplayer campaign. In true Left 4 Dead style, you get to play as humans or hideous necromorphs.

The humans have weapons, the monsters have unique attacks. Play as The Pack, for example, and you’re a hideous baby thing able to pounce on humans and chomp away. The necromorphs also have a unique x-ray sight system, whereby they can see the human’s nerves and eyeballs as they panic.

The biggest problem is that Dead Space’s slightly clunky, slow controls remain; particularly when you’re playing as a human. The controls were fine in the claustrophobic confines of the USG Ishimura, where a slow turning speed meant you couldn’t quickly respond to an enemy attack. But in multiplayer, which is pervaded by twitch controls, it feels awkward and clumsy. Admittedly, we played the PS3 build; hopefully mouse and keyboard will make Dead Space 2′s multiplayer a must-play rather than a tacked-on addition.

Dead Space 2 is out on 28 January 2011.

Football for the hardcore. And the RPG fan…

Many has been the early morning I’ve blundered into the office, shielding my tired, bloodshot eyes from the glare of the harsh fluorescent lighting, all because of a Football Manager session that I haven’t been able to tear myself away from til half three in the morning. And it’s all set to start again now Sports Interactive has released the latest iteration of my addiction.

The FM series has been the most successful football management game ever; to the point where its sophisticated and unfathomably huge player database is actually used by professional football clubs without the resources to fund their own large-scale scouting operation.

I know what to expect when I boot up a new version for the first time, and I dare say so you do too. So if it ain’t broke, as they say…

As ever then, with a game set to a rigid yearly development cycle, it’s less revolution and more evolution.

The 3D match engine was the last major revamp a couple of iterations ago, so don’t expect anything radically different in this. The presentation is shinier and the graphics more realistic, but the real work has been done under the hood.

The match engine’s mathematical wheels and cogs are what makes or breaks a management game and FM2011 represents the best I’ve seen.

Starting to wean yourself off FM addiction? Then look away now.

Sure there are still the rare occasions players do something strange, but even after the many hours I’ve clocked up over the preview and review codes I’m happy to say they are very rare.

For the most part it’s a startlingly accurate account of real football; representing the differing skill levels of the many leagues on offer better than ever. Comparing Conference matches with Serie A games and the difference is clear. Something that will please us lower league managers no end…

There is another change though which bodes well, more for future versions than necessarily this game, and that’s the real-time character interaction. Essentially you still have all the same interaction options, such as pre-match zingers aimed at your opposing manager, berating your failing players or harassing your chairman, only now you’ll get an immediate response.

These conversations are set out like a smartphone text screen, with different bubbles from each member of the conversation. It also means that contract negotiations are now real time, which is a far more believable mechanic.

Think the chairman needs to grow a pair?  Now you can get an instant response.

Right now though, it’s not a major change. As I said, you’re not getting any extra ‘powers’ than you had in the previous turn-based interactions, but this is definitely the way forward. When a more believable AI is answering your questions and you have more than five stock answers at any point then FM will become the most in depth RPG ever.

But for now FM2011 is another step in the evolution process. The presentation has been improved, the matches more realistic, the animations of the players and the, unfortunately still 2D, crowd have been given more frames and importantly it still feels like the FM we know and love.

Football Manager 2011 isn’t likely to draw in any new players, but it’s also not going to lose any either. There are other new features, but essentially it’s still that footie RPG with the addictiveness only FM and free-base cocaine can offer.

My bullet only has eyes for you…

This is one of new game modes in Call of Duty Black Ops called One in the Chamber (OIC). One bullet one kill. Miss and you’re down to your knife to get the job done and get another bullet. Simple. And why aren’t you playing it? This should really be called ‘One in the Chamber or One Blade in You’, but that’d be OIC/OBY and a bit long – regardless we are liking it’s tense feel.

This is PCF Black Op clan‘s Boomsling being annoyingly good at OIC.

If you want to play the PCF clan guys, head over to their site. They’re always looking for people to practice on and they tend to be quite chatty whilst blowing people’s heads off, which is nice.

Since the PM’s communications man can’t seem to stay out of the news, maybe David Cameron should try smoozing Valve’s Master of Media Intercourse, Doug Lombardi as a replacement? This is a man that knows how to spin bad news and make it feel good somehow. This arrived in the email post this morn:

Valve today announced that Portal 2 – the sequel to the ground-breaking title that won over 30 game of the year awards, despite missing its original ship date – will now be available the week of April 18th, 2011.

This two month slip not only marks the shortest delay in Valve’s proud tradition of delays, it represents the approaching convergence of Valve Time and Real Time. Though this convergence spells doom for humanity, it will not affect the new Portal 2 release date.

When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you…

Revisiting old games has long been a tricky affair. The process has been made easier by the devotion of fans running Abandonware sites for games without owners (or absent owners) and the genius of the DosBox game emulator.

But times are changing thanks be to GoG! It still surprises us how many people don’t know about GoG.com. This is a site devoted to getting the best retro games running smoothly on contemporary PCs and selling them legally, DRM-free and at a reasonable price.

Recently we weren’t that impressed when GoG.com faked it’s own death when going from beta to full release, but then it teased us with the promise of Planescape Torment and the Baldur’s Gate franchise and they’ve since delivered.

Today, it’s the turn of Baldur’s Gate 2: Complete for a mere 10 American bucks.

You meet dragons – and kill them. That’s okay though they are pretty arrogant.

The complete edition has the original game (obviously) Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn plus the tightly sculpted expansion Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal.

We tried to dig out the original review of the game, but the archive librarian wouldn’t spit it out for us to read, but we liked Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal a lot. In fact we gave it 92%!

Here’s what we said, words by David Bradley (who is now the editor of SFX):

We could be cynical and say that Baldur’s Gate II is the last game to need expanding: at 200-plus hours it’s already massive. But the truth is that we love Baldur’s Gate II, and so do you.

Character building
If you haven’t rumbled with the kobolds and golems yet, this is the perfect excuse to get yourself a copy. Throne of Bhaal extends the story of the BG series – bringing it to an end, in fact and adds masses more possibilities. But beware because this expansion extends the story, you either need saved games at the end of Baldur’s Gate II or the desire to skip ahead and start from where Throne of Bhaal picks up.

The Watcher’s Keep is a massive and tricky dungeon, and here we are, preparing to descend.

You can, however, play through the Watcher’s Keep adventure at any time, although, like the rest of the expansion’s content, it’s furiously tough. Good job, then, that you can now take your characters up to seriously high levels: we had level 30 characters well before the end, although priest magic ends at level seven and mage spells at level nine.

Now, though, characters can also gain special abilities when they level-up, such as whirlwind attacks for fighters and super-powerful spells for clerics and wizards. There’s also the new wild mage character, plus a new NPC to join your party – and a familiar face at that. The trouble is that experience points come thick and fast: while it might have taken nearly 200 hours to gather three million in Baldur’s Gate II, you’ll double that in the 40 or so hours it takes to play Throne of Bhaal.

Combat plays a heavy part, and there are plenty of new monsters to take on (or old, as this was the original caption. This looks more like a high fantasy foam party to us).

Destiny’s imp
The story is convincingly driven forward through your own discoveries and in-engine cut-scenes. Again, you’re being manipulated, but your destiny looms ever closer, and the tension and urgency is excellently portrayed. Surprisingly, there’s more humour to Throne of Bhaal than before: interactions within your party are better acted than ever, and you’ll laugh out loud when you encounter Cespenar the imp, your butler and weaponsmith.

The simple formula which won us over with previous Baldur’s Gate games is stronger than ever, honed to a razor edge in this satisfying conclusion to the series … Anyone with the slightest interest in adventures and role-playing would do well to get this and a BGII, and buy into the finest PC storytelling experience around.

GOG.com are also chucking in some nice RPG loot, including the original soundtrack, artwork, wallpapers and a map.

Also on PC Format: re-release and replay review of classic RPG Planescape Torment

Rant initiated… includes spoiler. You have been warned.

This game cost me £30 and that has really got my panties in a bunch for a number of reasons.

First, what the heck!? Why did they make a six-hour cut-scene? Does each level need an intro, exit and inter-videos, plus cut scenes, plus artificial player-on-the-rails sections dotted liberally throughout? It definitely says ‘Windows game” on the box, so where is all the gameplay?

Spoiler coming up…

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I mean the damn game-play ends with you kicking in a door, after a jog up a hill. Then in the cut scene, your character dies. I mean, WTF?!

Spoiler ends.

Second, Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 were pretty damn fantastic and I can totally understand why EA and Dice would want in on that action, but the trick to cloning someone else’s hard work is to not do it so much worse than the original that it immediately makes you run back to the original to get the foetid stench of crappage out of your nostrils. Same is fine, better is, well, better and you can even sneak out a game that rides the general ‘killing people with modern weapons’ wave AND steals a march on the game you are cribbing from. Obviously though, this is NOT that kind of game.

Third, AI. Oh my God! How many gunfights would a thick person have to be in to realise that rushing in front of a compatriot wielding a 10Kg 1000rpm fully-automatic deathnasium while they were happily obliterating some random village, was a terrifically awful idea? I’m guessing it would just be the once. In Medal of Honor, however, this usually happens at any of the fleeting moments that EA deign to give you direct control. The sound track to the game is peppered with your ‘team’ squealing; “Blue…blue! BLOOOOO MOTHER F**KER” rather than moving a foot to either side to avoid the hail of bullets.

Finally, American superhuman soldiers again? Really? Two guys are tasked with taking out over 500 heavily armed Chechens (Why is everyone in Afghanistan a Chechen anyway?) in their chosen terrain and at night because the Americans are so damned short of soldiers, munitions and time that these guys are all they can spare. Why would Uncle Sam even have a bajillion soldiers, and a quadrillion aircraft if they were just going to use the same four guys – with occasional air support – to conquer an entire country and subjugate the population?

The whole thing seemed to me very much like some badly thought out psycho’s wet dream about killing foreigners. But perhaps I’m just bitter about that £30 and the wasted 6 hours.

You may now mock me for my lack of composure.

Call of Duty: Black Ops looks set to be another massive hit for Activision, even allowing for the company’s slightly reduced expectations for sales. Even so, on release the multiplayer performance has been less than stunning.

Many report poor frame rates and keyboard-pummelling lag. We’ve experienced similar frustrations ourselves, so here’s the PC Format quick guide for getting smoother frame rates out of your machine.

First, take your graphics settings out of the equation by setting everything to fugly. You’ll be able to dial all those settings up again later, but when it comes to trying to sort out your connection and general performance settings, it’s worth easing back on the ol’ GPU first.

• Turn ANTI_ALIASING OFF.
• Set SYNC EVERY FRAME is set to NO.
• Set TEXTURE FILTERING to BILINEAR.
• TEXTURE QUALITY to LOW.
• Turn SHADOWS OFF.
• Turn BULLET IMPACTS OFF.

Well done, you’ve just made Call of Duty: Black Ops looks ten years old. It should, however, now spin along at silly frame rates. Give it a go, and see if it runs any smoother.

The next stage is to get your hands dirty and throw yourself, hands flailing, at the configuration file, where you’ll find far more juicy sounding settings. The jury is still out on which settings actually have any real effect on your performance, but try the following and cross your fingers.

You’ll find the config file in your Steam folder (by default “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam”) inside the “steamapps\common\call of duty black ops\players” folder.

Open the config_mp.cfg up in Wordpad and scroll down until you find the line:

• seta r_multiGpu “1”

Change the “1” to “0”.

IF, and only if you only have one video card. If you have multiple video cards (SLI mode), setting it to 0 will reduce performance.

Directly underneath it you’ll find:

• seta r_multithreaded_device “0”

Change the “0” to “1”.

Again, this is if, and only if you have a multi-core CPU.

There are plenty of other settings in here worth messing around with, including the all-important net code parameters – although with a rumoured overhaul in the netcode in the works, it’s not worth losing too much sleep over this.

The main value you need to mess around with is cl_maxpackets, which you should try setting to “100” to see if it makes any difference.

Also on PC Format:
Poll – Are you happy with Black Op’s multiplayer performance at launch?
QuickFix: Split screen Left 4 Dead 2
The Good, the Bad and the Plain Ugly of Black Ops Multiplayer by the PCF Clan

Call of Duty: Black Ops game tweak guides elsewhere: FragWorld