The Month Ahead For PC Games – November

The Month Ahead For PC Games – November

Over the past month some massive games have been released, Medal of Honour, New Vegas and Garden Simulator. What can we expect in November? The big dog returns to rule the roost with the upcoming release of Call of Duty Black Ops and our favourite football game comes back for another year with Football Manager 2011. Read on for the month ahead in PC gaming.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

The latest Call of Duty comes out on the 9th of November and will undoubtedly be one of the biggest game launches this year, all thanks to carrying the name Call of Duty, a title people associate with games like Modern Warfare. Things may be a bit different this time around though as Black Ops is coming from Treyarch, the team who made World at War, a game which I was decidedly unimpressed with two years ago. The consensus is that it was Infinity Ward who made the better Call of Duty games, and based on my experiences with World at War, I’m not holding my breath for Black Ops being a world beater.

Of course I could well be wrong and Black Ops could be one of the best games to come out this year, and it certainly seems like they are willing to make an effort with the PC version, Steamworks is being used which always gets a thumbs up from me and Treyarch have made promising noises about dedicated servers and modding tools. I’m going to have to play this just to see if Treyarch have managed to stamp their own identity on the game rather than copying what Infinity Ward did.

Football Manager 2011

I was fortunate enough to get some hands on time with Footy Manager 2011 recently and I must say I was very impressed with some of the changes and tweaks SI have made to the game. The Football Manager games are always exceptionally popular and with good reason, they are extremely addictive, more so than Civilization games. The only complaint people can have is that not enough is changed in each edition of the game; fortunately I don’t think this year’s version will suffer the same fate with the inclusion of conversations and long-term reputation changes making a big difference to how people will play the game. My goal will be to take a lowly Welsh Premier club to the top of Europe and sign some of the best players in the world.

The Rest

With those two games dominating November there are a few other games that are worth keeping an eye out for, namely Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and HAWX 2. Hot Pursuit takes Need for Speed back to its roots with a Cops vs Racers theme, it is being developed by Criterion, masters of the Burnout series so there is some potential there. I just get the feeling it will fade into the background like so many racing games do, Blur being just one example. HAWX 2 meanwhile is getting a slightly delayed PC release, but after the disappointment I had with the original, I am not quite sure how good this one will be. I don’t know how much longer the Tom Clancy name can be used to sell a game. Looking beyond the new Bond game from Activision and Farming Simulator 2011 we have Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga, a title which bundles Ego Draconis and the expansion Flames of Vengeance together with new quests and overhauled graphics. I enjoyed Ego Draconis, but there was just too much grinding involved to get much beyond the opening two areas of the game.

That is a brief selection of what we can expect in the month ahead, I can’t wait for Football Manager, what are you all looking forward to?

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