Dirty Bomb

DAVE KOZICKI discovers that Dirty Bomb is about to blow the roof off this mother…

ow would we sum up Dirty Bomb in a word? Fast. OK, maybe one word isn’t enough. How about ve words? Unrelentingly fast, old school shooter. How unrelenting? Liam Neeson on your arse because you kidnapped his daughter unrelenting. How damned fast? It’s quicker than a newly single Ryan Gosling pulling at a bar. How Old School is it? About as Old School as Will Ferrell drunk streaking his way to KFC. Yep, it doesn’t get more Old School than that.

Dirty Bomb is setting itself up to be the game Splash Damage was destined to make. It takes the developer’s well known pedigree for creating hardcore multiplayer first-person shooters, such as Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, tosses in the loud character designs and personalities of Brink and dumps it all in a Free-to-Play model to maximise exposure and get it out to the masses. It’s a classic shooter designed for the modern gamer and is an amalgamation of everything Splash Damage has done successfully over the decades.

AS Rock Z97E-ITX/ac

The Z97E-ITX/ac is one of the cheapest boards on test, so it’s no surprise that its heatsinks are small and plain without a connecting heatpipe. There are no on-board buttons either, and the area around the CPU socket is sparse, although that also makes it easier to attach coolers to the board.

However, the 8-pin CPU power connector is awkwardly located next to a heatsink, while the four SATA 6Gbps connectors and SATA Express port are crammed between the memory slots and Wi-Fi chip. Meanwhile, the CPU fan connector is in the top-right corner, which is fairly sensible, but the other fan connector is in the bottom-left corner, beyond the memory slots, and there's no third fan header.

Gigabyte F2A88XN-WIFI

Gigabyte's F2A88XN-WIFI is one of a few FM2+ mini-ITX boards available, matching the low cost of AMD's APUs with a highly affordable price of £75, making it over £25 cheaper than the cheapest Intel-based boards on test.

That saving immediately makes this board a contender for cheaper builds based on AMD's integrated CPU for modest work and play, rather than small, powerful gaming machines. In some areas, though, the F2A88XN-WIFI's specification matches - or beats - its Intel-based rivals. Its 64GB maximum memory is four times the capacity offered by most mini-ITX boards (although you'll need 32CB DIMMs), and it also sports Gigabit Ethernet and dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, like most affordable Intel boards.

Unnatural selection

Rick Lane charts the rise of the survival game.

Survival games have proved a hardy breed. Their numbers have exploded recently, and they're evolving quickly. From the relatively simple systems explored in Minecraft, survival games have expanded into full-blown simulations, conquering almost every environment imaginable in the process.This month, we're exploring two ofthemostinteresting-lookingexamplesof the genre, which approach the survival idea in very different ways.

Endnight Games' The Forest sees players stranded in a verdant woodland after a plane crash, where they must forage for food and construct shelters while evading a highly aggressive tribe of blue-skinned natives. Ben Falcone, creative director on the project, says the game was inspired by Italian Cannibal Horror films from the 1970s. ‘We wanted to throw players into a world and let them survive. No missions, no real direction, just letting people be creative against a smart enemy threat.'

Corsair Gaming H1500

The H1500 is a rebrand of the Corsair Vengeance 1500 V2 under the new Corsair Gaming division, and it now comes with a yellow and black colour scheme. The colours won't be to everyone’s taste, although they're perhaps a good match for Corsair's 380T (see p46) this month, and the yellow is subtle, rather than overdone.

The headset has its own USB-powered DAC, which uses Dolby technology to provide virtual 7.1 surround sound through its 50mm drivers. The microphone and 3m cable are both non-detachable, so mobile use isn't an option - it's a gaming headset through and through.