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46 Articles

“NO GAME TO DATE HAS PRESENTED THE EPIC SCOPE OF WH40K BETTER”

As a teenager, I played the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game. Collecting and painting the warriors in my armies, which included Space Marines, T’au, and Imperial Guard, was great fun, as was imagining the galaxy-spanning wars they fought in. I pictured epic battles and incredible feats of heroism. Fast forward to today and Space Marine 2 is the first game that I feel actually delivers on the epic-scale galactic wars and heroic feats I once imagined. I’ve played it, and I feel that no game to date has presented the epic scope of WH40K better. For the Emperor! TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com ROBERT JONES Twitter @rnicholasj This month Knocked back a few brewskis with the Emperor of Mankind. He wasn’t very happy, though, when…

“NO GAME TO DATE HAS PRESENTED THE EPIC SCOPE OF WH40K BETTER”

The PC Gamer team

MORGAN PARK Twitter @MorganRPark This month Installed a series of portals in PC Gamer Towers and kept jumping through them butt naked. WES FENLON Twitter @wesleyfenlon This month Managed a team of weirdo Japanese mascots, including a porn-loving cat and a giant severed finger. TYLER WILDE Twitter @tyler_wilde This month Pondered if he was actually Arthur Dent. Made a reservation at a certain restaurant. JODY MACGREGOR Twitter @jodymacgregor This month Invited people to stay awhile and listen, as he explained why Diablo IV is actually good now.…

The PC Gamer team

MONITOR NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT

Ever wonder how many people it takes to make Steam? Barely any, it turns out. Documents from an antitrust suit against Valve show that the company consisted of 336 employees in 2021. That’s a fraction of the size of most big game publishers, even as Steam continues to shape PC gaming as a whole. The documents originate from Wolfire Games’ 2021 lawsuit arguing that Steam constitutes an unfair monopoly on PC digital distribution. The documents remain partially redacted, and were likely meant to have all the juicy details fully blacked out—a surprisingly common error in the US legal system that leads to sensitive data being made public. The Verge has a full chart of the year-by year number of employees and departmental payroll changes at Valve. The chart confirms prior…

MONITOR NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT

HIGHS Endless Sky No Man’s Sky update adds stuff fans had “almost given up hope on”. Videogames? Big deal The voice of Igon, Elden Ring’s angriest NPC, had no idea gaming was huge before he got the job. Cyrodiil in Russian? More than ten years after its creation, massive Russian Oblivion mod Citadel of Madness has been translated into English. LOWS What a heist Rockstar finally let you claim earnings via your phone in GTA Online. Then it paywalled the feature. You shall not Pass Microsoft suddenly jacked up prices on Game Pass. Solo Mode Obsidian says it thought about BGIII-style multiplayer for Avowed, but it didn’t have experience like Larian’s to pull it off.…

Unlike Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo is still holding out from porting its dragon’s hoard of exclusives to PC. And yet the PC still manages to be the best place to play Nintendo’s back catalog. Case in point: an unofficial PC port of sci-fi espionage shooter Perfect Dark, available to anyone able to (legally, of course) source an N64 ROM file for the game. Of all consoles past, the N64 holds the dubious honour of being the one with the most overly ambitious games for its hardware. Even Nintendo’s own in-house productions struggled to hit their 20-30 frame per second targets, a problem that only grew over time. While there’s still debate as to whether Perfect Dark dethroned GoldenEye (it did), Rare’s ambitious spy-fi FPS was unquestionably one of the most…

SUPER MARIO 64 The most full-featured decomp-port to date. More responsive controls and with a bevy of new features and mod support. ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME A recent debut thanks to the Ship Of Harkinian project. Looks and feels great, and even has a built-in randomizer mode. MARIO KART 64 Not playable yet, but making great progress. The decompilation is almost done, opening the door for a PC port. DUKE NUKEM: ZERO HOUR A good console spinoff, if you can get past the N64 jank. The near-complete decompilation aims to fix that.…

Although he began by teaching himself programming with books from the library that were “even at the time hilariously out of date”, Andrew Shouldice spent years learning before he was ready for a solo project, and to leave the game jams, and even the developer he’d eventually joined, behind. He reached the point where he decided, “I can do not all the things, but many of the things; enough to make a complete game. I will need help with audio and music, and maybe some business help, but I could do it.” That game was Tunic—though, when he first started work on it in 2015, it was initially called Secret Legend. The idea of a unique language was integral to development. “I’ve looked through old notes,” explains Shouldice, “and a…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER 1047 Games PUBLISHER 1047 Games LINK splitgate.com In a time when new multiplayer shooters regularly try and fail to escape the shadows of Call of Duty, Fortnite and Apex Legends, the story of Splitgate and its creators at 1047 Games defies all logic. There were several moments when the ‘Halo with portals’ arena shooter almost sank after failing to find a steady audience after its Steam launch in 2019. It was a minor miracle when Splitgate reemerged with console ports in 2021 and became the hottest free-to-play game of that summer, exploding to a peak of 200,000 concurrent players and briefly making a traditional arena shooter one of the most-played games in the world. But what’s most surprising to me is what happened after…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Q3 2024 DEVELOPER Proxy Studios PUBLISHER Proxy Studios LINK s.team/a/1481170 Proxy Studios made Warhammner 40,000: Gladius, a well-regarded and luxuriously expanded 4X with the heavy focus on combat you’d expect from the grim darkness of the far future. I mention this only because Zephon is a 4X, is also set in a futuristic dark grimness, and has a familiar combat system. Rather than the galaxy-spanning civilizations of 40K, brought together on the planet Gladius for a big fight, Zephon is more Earth-based and tells the story of the end of the planet’s civilization, and what comes after. A piece of artwork visible in the introduction shows apparently human figures in front of a tentacled beast, which is always a nice thing to see. Later, we’re told…

OTK EXPO PREVIEW

RELEASE September 2024 DEVELOPER BitCake Studio PUBLISHER Mad Mushroom LINK s.team/a/1903560 ATOMIC PICNIC Sandwiches and sausage rolls give way to bullets A co-op roguelike bullet-hell-inspired third-person shooter is a lot of description for a game to carry, but Atomic Picnic shoulders the burden gleefully. An arena shooter that can be played solo or with up to three friends, this is a fast-moving game with hints of Borderlands and Fortnite about it in the way numbers pop off your cel-shaded enemies as you do them damage. In motion, it’s a colorful blaster with environments that are filled with ledges to jump on and cover to get behind, while killing monsters gets you crystals that can activate power-ups. The idea is that, following a calamity that has left the planet filled with…

OTK EXPO PREVIEW

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE August 23, 2024 DEVELOPER Firewalk Studios PUBLISHER Sony Interactive Entertainment LINK playstation.com Concord’s reveal trailer was met with some boos from the balcony: great, another Overwatch. It is a sci-fi PvP hero shooter, but after playing it, I can confirm that Concord isn’t Sony’s Overwatch. And it’s fun. We may not be looking at a Helldivers 2-level phenomenon, but Concord could be the multiplayer hit of the summer. There are obvious similarities between Concord and Overwatch—both feature a bunch of characters with unique guns—but it’s also obvious that a bunch of ex-Bungie devs work at developer Firewalk Studios. Most characters have double jumps, one I played had a triple jump, and another could temporarily hover. They can also dodge, which briefly pulls the camera into third-person…

COURAGE AND HONOR

TITUS RENDS THE TYRANID HIVE TYRANT IN TWO WITH HIS CHAINSWORD. THEN THE CARNIFEX ARRIVES On the far edges of my vision, on a distant horizon littered with bursts of flame, crumbling Imperial structures, and the remnants of heavily armored vehicles, I see the Tyranid horde approaching. A mass of writhing carapace plates, talons, tails, and bile, the horde swarms across the pock-marked battlefield as bunches of entrenched Imperial Guard begin frantically firing from dugouts to the left and right of me. But be under no illusion, these small squads of Astra Militarum are massively outnumbered. Just as I am, Demetrian Titus, formerly one of the Ultramarines’ greatest heroes, dispatched to Avarax to help hold back the tide. As the Xeno mass scurries to and up the derelict, fractured walls…

COURAGE AND HONOR

ADEPTUS ASTARTES

ULTRAMARINES The most famous and revered of all the Space Marine chapters. This chapter also boasts the purest geneseed, genetic material from which all Space Marines are made. BLOOD ANGELS The Blood Angels are feared for both their characteristic blood lust and the cursed geneseed they carry in their veins. They are known for their prowess in battle and many heroic deeds. SPACE WOLVES Also known as the Wolves of Fenris, known for their anti-authoritarian ways and radical interpretation of the Codex Astartes, the doctrine Space Marine chapters work from. BLACK TEMPLARS A Space Marine chapter known for undertaking the longest Imperial Crusade in the Imperium of Man in order to prove their loyalty to the Emperor of Mankind.…

ADEPTUS ASTARTES

GRIMDARK GREATNESS

WARHAMMER 40,000: BOLTGUN Scoring a very tasty 85% in PC Gamer magazine, Boltgun is the retro WH40K boomer shooter we were all waiting for. Fast-paced and hyper violent. WARHAMMER 40,000: DARKTIDE A markedly better, more finished game than when it originally launched, Darktide captures the grimdark tone and atmosphere of WH40K perfectly. WARHAMMER 40,000: DAWN OF WAR The original Dawn of War remains the crown jewel in the RTS series, and boasts the neat base-building aspect later entries in the series sidelined. WARHAMMER 40,000: ROGUE TRADER This unique foray into the WH40K universe lodged a score of just 59% on review. However, an overhaul in February this year made over 1,800 changes.…

GRIMDARK GREATNESS

FOR THE EMPEROR

To get the inside scoop on how Saber Interactive has approached Tdeveloping Space Marine 2, we spoke to the game’s brand & creative manager, Yann François about Ultramarines, Tyranid hordes and a grimdark far future where there is only war. How did you approach building on the first Space Marine? Space Marine was a huge success in its time. So when Saber and Games Workshop met to decide what we can do right now together, the idea was to try to recreate the powerful fantasy behind Space Marine, which is the powerful fantasy of embodying a superhuman warrior fighting across the galaxy against all the horrors that are straight through the galaxy, and threatening mankind. The only thing that was missing [to do that], was the technology itself. That was…

FOR THE EMPEROR

Welcome There are 103,744 games on Steam. Of those, 14,499 were released in 2023 alone. And that’s to say nothing of the many, many PC games that haven’t made it to Valve’s digital storefront. All of which is to say: it never gets any easier. More games arrive every year, but now, as when we started our annual list of the best PC games, we only have 100 spaces available for them. Does that make the Top 100 pure folly? Maybe. But it’s our folly, one that we use to celebrate the vibrancy and creativity of the medium. And hey, at least the list was easier to make this year than it will be in 2025. OUR VOTING SYSTEM EXPLAINED Around 30 of PC Gamer’s editors, writers and other staff…

SAYONARA WILD HEARTS I’ve noticed a lack of rhythm games in this year’s Top 100, and yet it’s been a year when a truly fantastic rhythm game has left a lasting impression on me. Few games meld music, art style and good vibes as well as Sayonara Wild Hearts. I play it almost religiously every time I take a long-haul flight somewhere, and it never fails to bring a smile to my face. HADES 2 Is this cheating? Yes, but I put a very tasteful PowerPoint together to get votes for this and I’ll be damned if I let that go to waste. Hades 2 is already bigger than the first game, somehow, and its music is even better than the first, impossibly. I also adore Melinoë to death. She’s…

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A flintlock is a firearm from ye olden days which uses flint-striking ignition to fire. It’s fallen out of fashion lately, mainly because it takes about 400 years to reload. The idea of trying to use one to kill several gods is pretty daunting. But I’d certainly rather take on that challenge than the far more terrifying one of being a Soulslike releasing less than a month after Shadow of the Erdtree. Maybe this game deserves a 90 just for bravery? You play as Nor, an ax-wielding warrior trapped in a seemingly endless war with the living dead, because someone’s unfortunately left the door to the afterlife open. After one of those classic attempts at fixing everything that actually makes it all much worse, Nor gets a nice big pile…

Endwalker was the conclusion of ten years’ worth of world-building and story that culminated in a universe-ending threat. It was a moment for the MMO ages that saw the Warrior of Light pushed to their limits and brought a close to the Hydaelyn and Zodiark saga. Now the next expansion for Final Fantasy XIV is here. Can it live up to fans’ expectations? No. No it can’t. But frankly, what could have? There’s no following up saving the world and fighting the physical embodiment of universal despair. Instead, Dawntrail bravely walks its own path of fresh beginnings and new adventures. There’s the occasional stumble along the way through the new continents of Tural, but it (mostly) sticks the landing. The first thing you’ll notice in Dawntrail, before you’ve even made…

Lmuisa is a young lawyer from Vienna, and she’s burned out. Dungeons of Hinterberg leans into millennial malaise and twists it: she’s going to take a little break to find herself in a picturesque Austrian mountain town that’s recently been rocked by the arrival of magic. Instead of ski slopes, Hinterberg has dungeons. Surely slaying monsters will help Luisa solve the fear of being in your 20s and not knowing what to do with your life? The bulk of Luisa’s days are spent in dungeons in four different regions, each of which grants Luisa two different magic powers she can use in combat or to solve puzzles. Combat is simple, which works in its favor: there are enough mobs that they could have become aggravating if I were not confident…

To be honest, I didn’t expect to get into a NetEase survival MMO that’s coming to phones as well as PC, shrugging it off at first as another mobile-first game that would keep me engaged for about as long as it took for my fast food order to arrive. I could not have been more wrong. Once Human is far from perfect, but it is good. For a free-to-play game, it is stunningly good. Does it break new ground? Not one bit. It’s like a less cartoony, more fully-fleshed out version of creature collector Palworld, in that it throws everything people like from other games into one giant bucket. Am I here for that? Absolutely. Once you’re done with the detailed character creation, you’ll jump into the game as a…

The idea of giving Bloodborne its own karting spin-off is so ridiculous that, of course, it had to happen. But all the joke needed was a couple of mocked-up screenshots before we could all sit back and watch the social media engagement roll in. No one would devote any serious time to making Bloodborne Kart an actual thing, right? Er, yes—and who better to undertake it than the developer of Bloodborne’s PS1 demake. Like Bloodborne PSX, Nightmare Kart is kind of a joke game. But what an exquisite and painstakingly delivered gag. The name may have clued you in that The Lawyers have pecked off the Bloodborne affiliation, but even with the serial numbers removed it’s still clearly devoted to From Software’s classic. There’s a hunt on in the gothic…

The whole deckbuilding roguelike thing can be traced back to Dream Quest, and now it’s come full circle with the unrelated but similarly nap-tastic Pillow Fight, which plays out as you’re trying to get to sleep. Knowledge of the genre will not necessarily help you here, however, as Pillow Fight makes big changes to the formula that was set down in pencil with Dream Quest, and in stone with Slay the Spire. Rather than your hand being dealt randomly every turn, you get a persistent set of cards that have cooldowns before they can be used again. You’re mainly playing with a set of white and black sheep tokens, which will earn you—or your opponent—points as each turn comes to an end, when the remaining tokens are weighed on a…

If Dredge has left you terrified of the ocean, get your sea legs wet again with Mourning Tide, which offers a lovely bit of fishing, no monsters allowed. Hmm, that’s a funny way of spelling ‘morning’. And that’s an alarming-looking fish. Oh no. Lovecraft has got his tentacles in this one too. To be fair: no actual tentacles. Just several increasingly unsettling fish. But despite the descent into horror, the fishing in Mourning Tide remains a delight. Unusually, it doesn’t follow the usual mechanics in fishing games, which have you hammering a button and pulling back an analog stick to simulate the rod. Instead, after throwing the line into the ocean, you just have to move the mouse to keep it within a plain black circle. Keep the struggling fishing…

At the risk of sounding like I have terrible hand hygiene, I’m writing this with Citadel Trollslayer Orange on my thumbnail. This is relevant because I was highlighting Cthonian Beserks from Warhammer 40,000, which are as close as you can get to the dwarven heroes of Deep Rock Galactic. Every element of my life, apparently, needs to feature diminutive intergalactic miners. Space dwarves are difficult to get right, which is partly why an entire range of Citadel miniatures, the Squats, were retconned and eventually replaced by the sleeker, more imaginative Leagues of Votann. With this thought in mind, I approach Deep Rock Galactic with some trepidation. But any anxiety is jettisoned when I accidentally press the taunt button in the first five seconds of the tutorial, and my dwarf holds…

It’s strange going into The Dig with zero knowledge of what it actually is. I assumed, for some reason, it would be a cheerful archaeology romp; Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis without the whips and hats. The actual game is far weirder. The point-and-click equivalent of that kombucha gif. The story centers around an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. A team of experts are sent into space to divert its course, leaving it in a stable orbit around the planet, essentially making a naff sequel to the moon. I had absolutely no idea about this, and I spend the first five minutes wondering why more people don’t berate Michael Bay’s gormless cosmic action film, Arnageddon, for nicking the idea. But instead of miners, the team sent…

I love the idea that in the future, aliens will analyse toilet graffiti to glean information about the human race. Cue a team of celestial beings, stroking their stardust beards as they unpick masterpieces such as “The naked man fears no pickpocket” and “Yer ma likes scotch eggs and she’s vegan”. Heaven’s Vault is predicated on a similar, if not identical premise. But instead of scrying filthy limericks on cubicle walls, archaeologist Aliya Elasra travels between planets, accompanied by her unsettling ghost-robot, Six, uncovering ancient script and piecing together fragments of lost civilizations. It’s a legitimately challenging, unusually satisfying puzzle that will please anyone with an interest in language or analytical thinking, but it’s an acquired taste. The pace is sedate to the point that it sometimes feels like it’s…

“I’ve been reminded of why it took me so long to come back in the first place”

Back when I first played Elden Ring in that halcyon year of 2022, I made it my personal mission to slay the Tree Sentinel. He’s the first big bad you see when you enter into the Lands Between proper for the first time, so I thought it was my charge to knock him over. This was a mission I did not finish. This golden prick flattened my tarnished hiney so many times that I just gave up until I had more vigor to play with. So imagine my surprise when, after thoroughly enjoying my playthrough of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, I rolled up a new character and killed him in three tries. I felt like Quicksilver in Days of Future Past, plugged into a frequency of time which…

“I’ve been reminded of why it took me so long to come back in the first place”

“I’m now actually having fun”

I tried to like Starfield when it first launched, I really did. I’d Ienjoyed all of Bethesda’s past RPGs in some form or other but, as our Starfield review indicated could happen, I found myself cold, held at arm’s length from the developer’s biggest-ever virtual creation. But then, out of the blue, Starfield got the game’s new Creations center, and it’s been the game-changer I’ve been waiting for. Creations is essentially a way to find and enable mods in your game, but where it differs from, say, just downloading Starfield mods from Nexus Mods, Creations is built in to the game and, crucially, tracks across your account no matter where you play. This has allowed me to install a number of great mods easily, and have the same experience across…

“I’m now actually having fun”

“Fashion is the real endgame in most MMOs, let’s be honest”

I’ve been away from the MMOs of my past – taking a bit of a rest from sinking thousands of hours into Guild Wars 2 or The Elder Scrolls online—and to fill their place I’ve been playing, well, another MMO. But a cosy one. Sky: Children of the Light is a beautiful and casual MMO from the developer of Journey, which somehow managed to take the same flying and sand surfing that made their two-hour PlayStation game a hit and turn it into a multiplatform live service phenomenon. I turned to Sky occasionally on my Nintendo Switch for a few years but after it finally launched on PC this spring I’ve been back into it pretty aggressively. Sky’s primary activities are exploration and platforming challenges, collecting currency (candles) out in…

“Fashion is the real endgame in most MMOs, let’s be honest”

“In later episodes he wants to raise slugs, and even buy a solar system”

I was reminded of Crystal Caves this month when looking Iat old PC Format magazine cover discs, because a man’s got to have a hobby, and noticed that a demo of it was given away with the first issue I remember buying. PC Format is long gone, of course, and sadly missed, but Crystal Caves endures—it’s on Steam and GOG in remastered form. This is an Apogee game, the company founded in 1987 that changed to 3D Realms, made Duke Nukem 3D, and got into a complicated licensing arrangement with another company called Apogee. But this is the Apogee that published Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, and Crystal Caves was released under the shareware model, where a demo was freely distributed, and you paid for the rest of the game…

“In later episodes he wants to raise slugs, and even buy a solar system”

The number of currencies you’re expected to collect in modern games seems absurd, but never more so than when Diablo IV gives them names like anguished goth poetry. To open your Tortured Gifts you need Aberrant Cinders, and you should be looking out for Baneful Hearts, which can be used at Accursed Nests to summon a boss who can be killed to farm Exquisite Blood. I made fun of this in a tweet where I invented a bunch of currencies in the same style, suggesting “future patches will let you foment Pain Shards by transmorphing Wound Imps into Malfeasance Tokens, instead of having to distress your own Affliction Coins”. I thought Pain Shards was a bit on the nose, then a subsequent update added a currency called Shards of Agony…

THE BLACK PARADE

Thief: The Black Parade is far more than just a level pack for Looking Glass’ landmark stealth game. It’s a fully-fledged, story driven campaign that acts as both a companion to and an elevation of the ideas explored in the original. Set across ten huge, palpably strange levels, it offers everything stealth fans could possibly want from such a project. Everything, that is, except Garrett. The Black Parade’s story runs alongside the events of The Dark Project, and as such you play as a new protagonist. Hume is a rougher, gruffer larcenist than Garrett, lacking the master thief’s near-supernatural skills. Indeed, The Black Parade starts with Hume returning from an eight-year sentence of hard labor, seeking a way back into The City’s criminal underworld. And it doesn’t take long before…

THE BLACK PARADE

TOP SECRETS IN SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE

GREATJAR 1 One of the first secrets you can encounter in Shadow of the Erdtree is a gigantic jar helmet hidden in Belurat Gaol dungeon. Before you descend down to the final boss, look for a hanging pot lift you can drop onto and ride up to find the altar with the Greatjar. WELL DEPTHS KEY 2 While exploring Belurat, Tower Settlement you’ll find this locked gate at the bottom of a well. Grab the key by dropping through a broken roof during the gravebird rooftop section. Unlocking the gate leads to a secret poison area with a mini-boss and a powerful talisman. BELURAT CROSS 3 There’s also a secret Miquella Cross inside Belurat, Tower Settlement. From the Stagefront site of grace, descend the staircase and drop down by the hanging Spider-Scorpion.…

TOP SECRETS IN SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE

FALLOUT 4: LUCKIEST MAN ALIVE PART 1

THE RULES 1. Survival mode: that means no quicksaves 2. Luck build: perks for more crits and items 3. ‘Evil’ choices: bad guys have more fun Phil Icitous is a terrible person. An average-looking, mid-30s white male, Phil is ill-tempered, weak, stupid, lazy, myopic, Pchronically sarcastic and has as much talent as your average root vegetable. Yet he lives in a lovely house, is married to a lovelier wife, and has a robot butler who serves him breakfast. This is because Phil is the luckiest man alive. While his SPECIAL traits all rank at an evenly underwhelming 3, that final L rings in at a dazzlingly fortuitous 10. He’s the kind of man the who’d win the lottery, blow it all on bad crypto investments, then win the lottery again;…

FALLOUT 4: LUCKIEST MAN ALIVE PART 1

BEING THE WHEELMAN IN MULTIPLAYER SHOOTERS

Years of bouncing between multiplayer shooters has taught me something important about myself: there’s nothing better than playing the support role. This crystallized for me after years of maining healers in Overwatch, though I submit that there exists a higher tier of FPS support players. These elite, uncelebrated helpers can’t directly heal you, nor do they meaningfully add to the kill count, but they will save your life every chance they get while their largest contributions go uncredited. They are, of course, the drivers. I wasn’t always a driver. In Halo 3, I’d hop straight into the Warthog turret and wait for some other poor sap to take the wheel. I’d stand idly by an empty Battlefield Humvee until I could be the second person to mount up, ensuring I…

BEING THE WHEELMAN IN MULTIPLAYER SHOOTERS

HELLBLADE: SENUA’S SACRIFICE

The decision to revisit the 2017 action-adventure became a no-brainer Senua is unlike any other character I’ve come across in videogames. This remains to this day, seven years after Ninja Theory introduced the world to Hellblade. It’s a story of grief, trauma, love, revenge, anger and acceptance all wrapped up in a solid six-to-eight-hour experience that offers more substance than many do in hundreds. And all this from a team of approximately 20 people. Set in the 8th century, we begin with the titular Pict warrior making her way to the secret entrance of Hellheim in hopes of saving the soul of her dead lover, Dillion. It’s atmospheric, creepy and undeniably cinematic. It’s hard not to think of an indie arthouse movie as Senua rows through the murky waters and…

HELLBLADE: SENUA’S SACRIFICE

METAL GEAR SOLID 3: SNAKE EATER konami.com → Who needs remakes? Certainly not Big Boss. It’s a lackluster port, but the best game in the Metal Gear series still shines, especially on Steam Deck. The tale of a young Snake on a mission to assassinate his mentor, it’s the simplest story Kojima’s ever told, and the strongest. ELDEN RING eldenring.com → I’ve beaten every Soulslike FromSoft has ever put out, but I never got around to Elden Ring. With Erdtree’s release, I’ve decided to rectify it. And what do you know? The game is amazing, and features the studio’s lushest, most mournful and most hostile world yet. GREY HACK greyhackgame.com → I’ve spent my whole life trying to find a game that one-ups Uplink, Introversion’s peerless hacking sim. Grey Hack,…

Summer is nearly over and that means it’s time to think about how to keep your PC cool. You thought I was going to talk about going to the beach? Get a grip, you’re reading PC Gamer. I’m on the lookout for the most efficient case fans able to offer the best performance and least noise. Most PC fans may look alike but it only takes a small, seemingly inconsequential change for a night and day variation in performance. The gap between the fan blade and the frame, for example, seems like a tiny detail but this often separates the very best PC fans from the very worst. There are also differences imperceptible from the exterior. The choice of bearing will decide the performance, noise and lifetime of any fan,…

Four hundred s a large number in almost any context: 400 shiny American dollars, though, seems a smaller number. Particularly when you consider that it’s become the de-facto price point for modern consoles. Then you browse PC component retailers wondering if you could build a PC for the same money, rubbing your eyes theatrically at the number of extra digits that appear to have been mistakenly added to the price of—well, everything. In these uncertain financial times, an experiment is in order. Is it possible to build a gaming PC for $400 or less, during an era when the latest Nvidia GPUs cost seven Bitcoins each? In this accursed age it seems basically impossible to pop to the shop for a pack of noodles and some Kleenex without walking out…

Buying a graphics card feels increasingly like closing on a house or starting a small business. It was once as simple as saving up about 400 bucks, triple-checking which slots your mobo supported, and then buying the big box with the fanciest-looking fantasy character on it. The more fireballs and face paint, the better the graphics card within. However, crypto farmers, lockdowns and egregious manufacturer price-hiking have made that purchase considerably more complex in the last five years. At least, that’s the excuse I’m giving people if they ask why I’m still using an RTX 2080 Ti. Once Nvidia’s pride and joy, the card they’d use on comparison slides with massive green bar charts showing all the extra frames it could produce, it’s now chugging along a bit. It doesn’t…

MOTHERBOARD B660M Pro RS ASRock $95 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400F Intel $186 With ten cores, six of them the Performance kind, this Raptor Lake Core i5 is fantastic value and a great all-rounder. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX 7600 AMD $255 AMD delivers what we need for 1080p gaming at a solid price. AMD claims it’ll do over 350fps in Rocket League, which is a lot. COOLER Laminar RM1 (included with CPU) Intel Free There’s room for an upgrade here, but on a budget the included CPU cooler will work just fine. MEMORY T-Force Vulkan Z 16GB Teamgroup $34 Goodbye 8GB, hello 16GB of speedy DDR4-3200. This is the sweet spot…

MID-RANGE BUILD

MOTHERBOARD NEW ENTRY TUF Gaming B650-E Asus $170 A reliable motherboard with plenty of frills, including Wi-Fi 6E, 2.5Gb Ethernet, PCIe 5.0 for the SSD and USB-C on the back. PROCESSOR NEW ENTRY Ryzen 7 7700X AMD $251 For the longevity offered by the AM5 socket, we’re going for AMD’s excellent eight-core Ryzen 7. GRAPHICS CARD RX 7700 XT AMD $380 If you can spare the extra cash, the RX 7800 XT is a tantalising upgrade. Nevertheless, we’ll opt for AMD’s cheaper card here. COOLER NEW ENTRY Freezer 36 Arctic $37 It’s cheap yet effective – you can’t ask for more than that. With two fans and four heatpipes, it’ll go at up to 1,800 rpm MEMORY NEW ENTRY Vengeance 16GB DDR5-5200 Corsair $70 This unembellished but reliable memory has…

MID-RANGE BUILD

MOTHERBOARD MEG X670E Ace MSI $680 There are cheaper X670 boards than this, but we’re going extreme and this is one of the most fully featured around. PROCESSOR Ryzen 9 7950X3D AMD $499 AMD’s 3D stacked chips are awesome for gaming, thanks to heaps of cache. This Ryzen 9 is the best of the bunch. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 4090 Nvidia $1,780 The RTX 4090 is immense, in every way. The performance it offers is unmatched by any GPU out there. COOLER Galahad II Trinity 360 Lian Li $159 Lian Li’s Galahad II is all about pure liquid cooling performance and it delivers this flawlessly. MEMORY Trident Z5 RGB (2x16GB) G.Skill $125 This is a new memory standard for a new era of memory speed. DDR5 is blisteringly and fantastically…

THE PCG INVESTIGATOR

When I finally caught up with Peter Molyneux, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Dogulus Rift in a ramshackle bar just outside of Santa Rosa, CA, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. Molyneux hadn't been seen in the PC gaming community for years and, finally, I'd been approached by the PC Gamer Council to track the guy down. Molyneux, like Dogulus, wasn't in a great shape: "Come on, Peter," I said, carrying him slumped on my shoulder toward the door, "it’s time to get back in the saddle, you've been missed". I stashed Molyneux in the back of my station wagon. He was rambling about AI and Kinect, so I took a moment and lit a cigarette. It was then, though, the bar’s…

THE PCG INVESTIGATOR

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