Ones To Watch In 2016: PC

Amidst all the pomp and fanfare that surrounds each console manufacturer’s press conference, it’s sometimes easy to forget that they don’t have a hegemony over exclusive titles. Not only can those who build a high-spec PC enjoy almost all of the cross-platform titles at higher resolution and higher frame rate, as well as some of the ‘console exclusives’, but there’s some games which just work better with a keyboard and mouse, or plan to have a scope that far exceeds almost anything on console.

Set twenty years after XCOM, humankind lost the war for Earth and a select few are fighting a grim guerrilla war against the occupying alien forces. It turns the original scenario on its head, as you now have to go on the offensive, acting out hit-and-run missions against clearly superior forces.

Considering the near universal praise that the 2012 XCOM reboot received across both critics and fans, that XCOM 2 would be a coming to PC and PC alone was both a surprise and a crushing disappointment. Certainly, nobody complained about playing with a controller or how the game looked on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but Firaxis and 2K decided focussing on the PC allows for a better game overall.

Certainly, there’s nothing stopping them from still bringing XCOM 2 to PS4 and Xbox One in future, but on February 6th 2016, you’ll be playing it on Windows, OS X, Linux or not at all.

It’s practically a match made in heaven, for Creative Assembly and Games Workshop to be joining forces and at long last combining the grand strategy of the Total War series with the fantasy warfare of the Warhammer universe.

The year since its announcement has seen a very steady drip feed of information about the game, and it’s fascinating to see how Total War is adapting to allow for the fictional world, hero characters on the battlefield, flying units, battles underground and more. Of course, the vast majority of your time will be spent in the turn-based campaign map, with the usual array of city-building, diplomacy and so on, which will make Total War fans feel right at home, but this is a game that’s undeniably Warhammer at the same time.

It’s currently penned in for release on Windows, OS X and Linux on April 28th.

The first Divinity: Original Sin was one of the darlings of the early Kickstarter rush, eventually releasing last year to waves of critical acclaim for its classic-style RPG gameplay which centred around playing with two heroes, and a deep and involving world to explore.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 looks the tread the same path, having had another successful Kickstarter campaign and, but ups the ante with a very open and expansive form of four player co-op, in which you can head of on divergent paths that might eventually come to pit hero against hero.

That requires another grand and nuanced world for you to be able to explore, but by hitting all of their Kickstarter goals, Larian will also be attempting to create a Game Master mode which, if they can get it right, will bring computer RPGs one step closer to the genre’s table top origins.

As with XCOM 2, the first Original Sin actually released on console as well, albeit a year after the original PC release. Larian are concentrating on a PC version of Original Sin 2 to start with, but you never know if the future might hold another console translation…

The main reason to keep an eye on LawBreakers comes from who’s making it. This is Cliff Bleszinksi’s return to the games industry, having left Epic Games and gone on a break back in 2012.

It promises to stick to modern trends of high speed gameplay that wants to keep you off the ground as much as possible. To that end, there’s gravity manipulation, jet packs, grappling hooks and all the good stuff that you could expect from its frankly barmy backstory.

It also follows that other trend in videogames of being a free to play game, with Nexon publishing the shooter.

With a quite insanely successful crowdfunding campaign which passed the $100 million funding mark last week, Star Citizen is already a huge success for Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games.

Alongside the likes of Elite: Dangerous and No Man’s Sky, it’s one of several games to jump straight into space and allow you to explore the vast emptiness for yourself. Star Citizen itself is slowly emerging from development piece by piece, with Alpha 2.0 bringing new flight modes, with first and third person EVA exploration in zero-G environments.

There’s plenty more to look forward to, beyond what’s currently there as well, with an all-star cast of actors featuring in the Squadron 42 solo and co-op campaign, which will no doubt bring back fond memories from the Wing Commander series. Fingers crossed they can manage to get the finished product out of the door in 2016.