Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Gordon sea man Gabe Newell says he spends most of his time scuba diving. Walking into Mordor Lord of the Rings Online’s Great Hobbit Run' succeeds as players get lost inside Mount Doom. Classic clips EA finally proves it’s listening to fans, and will let Battlefield 6 beta players have classic weapons. LOWS Doomed Romero Games reportedly met with Microsoft just a day before it pulled funding. Keep Killing Games European game publisher group responds to Stop Killing Games, claims the proposal “would curtail developer choice”. Executive dysfunction Xbox exec suggests folks laid off by Microsoft use AI to “reduce the emotional and cognitive load”.…

1 month METAL GEAR SOLID DELTA: SNAKE EATER RELEASE August 28, 2025 | DEVELOPER Konami Snake returns in, arguably, his most memorable mission to date. And this time he looks better than ever thanks to a UE5 glow-up. Tense espionage action awaits. HELL IS US RELEASE September 4, 2025 | DEVELOPER Nacon A stylish sci-fi third-person action-adventure game set in a future dystopia where the world has descended into civil war and strife following a mysterious calamity. BORDERLANDS 4 RELEASE September 12, 2025 | DEVELOPER Gearbox The mayhem-fueled looter-shooter returns with promises of billions of weapons, outrageous enemies, and intense co-op action. Here’s hoping it’s better than the movie! 2 months THE OUTER WORLDS 2 RELEASE October 29, 2025 | DEVELOPER Obsidian Entertainment Further interplanetary action and adventure from Obsidian,…

An acclaimed—albeit struggling—RTS studio developing a cute turn-based tactics game full of retro sci-fi Martians and animal soldiers sounds like one of those terrible April Fools’ not-jokes that inundate my beleaguered inbox every April 1. But Relic’s Earth Vs Mars is very real. Relic takes big swings. Homeworld still feels like a groundbreaking RTS more than 25 years after it launched. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes pushed the troubled RTS genre forward at a time when most 3D strategy games were falling on their faces. Even when it misses, I still find myself a captive general, eagerly diving into battle after battle. Company of Heroes 3’s dynamic campaign was a mess at launch, but it had so much promise and still held within it a seemingly infinite number of genuinely…

I am but a simple creature, my idea of a good gaming time with friends is yapping about how our days have been while blowing monsters to smithereens, it’s a good way to take the frustration out. So in that respect, Killing Floor 3 does a great job. It places you and some friends into the heart of a horde of zeds with various weapons and says, “Have at it”. Killing Floor 3 is exactly what you would expect. It’s you and a bunch of guns against hordes of bioengineered monsters. The matches are made up of five waves, with a boss fight at the end. Regardless of whether it’s just you playing solo or with a team in multiplayer, things can get quite hairy in the later stages. Luckily,…

It might be a game set at an intersection, but The New Flesh ably demonstrates how to keep a small space feeling exciting, even as you trudge round its streets for the third or fourth time. In this first-person exploration game, you’ve arrived in a weird parallel city looking for videotapes to cram into a flasher’s abdominal cavity. This creepy fella is your first quest-giver, though to be fair the tapes aren’t hard to find, as you explore a chunk of an empty city and get teleported to several fantastical locations. It’s like someone lopped off a wing of Cosmo D’s surreal exploration game Off-Peak, then made it a licensed tie-in for the band Red Vox. So yes, that last bit: this game is sort of a promotional thing, containing…

This is the second intro I need to rethink. I was going to talk about how it’s nice when a game’s systems are so sharp it doesn’t matter that they’re nonsensical. But I spent minutes searching for my daughter after she hid in a bamboo thicket. Apparently, bushes do make you invisible. Unlike in Desperados III, it didn’t end with a dagger being thrown at my throat. And the fact remains that the game’s system of cones, shrubs, and booby-trapped doctor’s bags is ridiculous. It shouldn’t work. But it does. And it does such a fine job of teaching you this stuff that I become proud of my stilted semi-competence far too early. I’m feeling good about myself because I managed to do two things at once, then I see…

25% QUAKE II FEEL Driven by the QII engine, the ambient lightmapping is distinctive throughout. 35% GTA 2 MISSION SYSTEMS Imagine playing GTA 2 in first person without the cars. The crazy errands and retro-future vibe reside in both of these games. 25% REDNECK RAMPAGE PROFANITY Baddies unnecessarily swearing at you as they shoot you feels familiar here. 15% SOLDIER OF FORTUNE GORE Turning someone’s head into flying red blocks with a shotgun is a very Raven move.…

Early in 2023, rumors began to circulate that Apple had plans to introduce a subscription service for iPhone hardware. Users would pay a monthly fee, and in return they’d get access to, but crucially not ownership of, the latest available iPhone model, whenever it was released. This was different to buying an iPhone in instalments, or a ‘buy now, pay later’ credit plan. There was no end point. No final payment, after which the hardware became yours. Like the software on Xbox Game Pass, users would simply have been paying monthly to use it and when the monthly fees stopped, the access dried up. By late 2024 those—rumored—plans had been scrapped by Apple, said analysts. They cited regulatory concerns and software considerations. For anyone with a dedicated gaming PC, that…

I fear Grow a Garden’s entire premise was ruined for me less than 30 minutes in, when another player handed me a gigantic watermelon. The monstermel turned out to be worth 800,000 sheckles—I was still barely scraping 1,000 at a time from my handful of strawberry and blueberry bushes, and in a flash, the joy of ‘number go bigger’ had been felled at the hands of a kind stranger. Even before a gigantic fruit squashed my sense of accomplishment, I couldn’t quite understand what it is about Videogame that’s caused it to become one of the most popular experiences on Roblox right now. When I was playing it during an early weekday afternoon, the Roblox app claimed to have 3.2 million people growing and cultivating their own non-denominational toy brick…

Jacek Zięba reaches for his temple as he recalls the moment he realized Bloober’s sci-fi horror game, set in alt-history Poland after a deadly outbreak, was about Covid. “We didn’t want to make a game about the pandemic,” the game director says. “When we started the story, it just worked for us. And at some point in the production, it was like, damn… we made something about the pandemic.” It was subconscious, Zięba says. Cronos: The New Dawn is rooted in the troubled history of post-WWII Kraków and the toll that life in the Soviet Union took on its people during the Cold War, a consistent theme in Bloober Team’s games prior to last year’s celebrated Silent Hill 2 remake. The sci-fi twist is that some sort of plague struck…

Sometimes in this job, my decisions are easy. I see a game called Cop Bastard has released a demo, of course I download and play that demo. Simple. The question is, is there anything to it beyond a very good name? The answer: sort of? Set in ’90s Japan, but seemingly taking most of its cues from Hong Kong action movies, Cop Bastard casts you as… well, a cop who’s kind of a bastard, having decided to just murder his way through an entire building full of criminals. That makes for some retro shooter action—not quite boomer shooter, but in an older realm of fast-paced, uncomplicated blasting. You enter a room, you shoot whoever’s in it, you hoover up ammo, and then you sprint into the next room. Gunplay feels…

100 UNAVOWED RELEASED 2018 | TOP 100 SCORE 210.6 | PROMOTED BY Robin Valentine Quality 8.75 Importance 5.75 Freshness 7.00 Fraser Brown: I’m relieved that Unavowed managed to slip in at the end—though it deserves to be much higher. This is Wadjet Eye’s best adventure game, and thus simply one of the best adventure game’s ever made. A smart, pleasingly tangled supernatural story, a fascinating roster of supernatural investigators—from a hardboiled fire mage to a spirit medium with a tiny BFF—waiting to help you on your cases, clever puzzles that don’t outstay their welcome—I love it. If you’ve got an appetite for urban supernatural affairs like Dresden Files or Constantine, you’re gonna have a great time. I’d be remiss not to mention Wadjet Eye’s newest adventure game, though. Old Skies didn’t…

We meet Mick Carter as a homeless drifter. Due to some unspecified past trauma, he’s abandoned his settled domestic life in a nameless Australian city for a self-flagellating transient existence. He’s en route to home, where he’s been beckoned to attend his mother’s funeral. He does so reluctantly, because it draws him closer to a past he’s deliberately abandoned. It hits the fan almost immediately. Not only is Mick forcibly ejected from his train carriage by a mysterious, possibly supernatural presence, but he’s then framed for the murder of a homeless man in the seedy railway underpass he finds himself in. At first, The Drifter promises to be a dark character study wrapped in a mystery, but it proves to be more—to its detriment. The Drifter bills itself as a…

Wuchang: Fallen Feathers has almost nothing to add to the Soulslike genre. For all of its 40-something hours of monster battles and weirdo NPCs, all it does is poorly imitate the best moments in FromSoftware’s list of much better action games. Skimpy outfits, dull combat and an empty world cheapen the entire experience and bury the few things it actually does well. In Wuchang, the people of China aren’t turning into werewolves like in Bloodborne; they’re turning into birds. First they go blind and lose their memories, and then they turn into tortured avian creatures with boss health bars. Your character, Wuchang, has it too, but most of her symptoms give her combat techniques. The only thing she actually suffers from is gradually losing her mind and memory as you…

Games about grim survival usually invite us to make hard choices by killing or betraying other people, but what if the person you have to betray is yourself? That’s the question One’s Own Exile grapples with, as you try to escape a society where difference is feared, and ultimately eliminated. After your bazaar is ransacked, you decide to flee from tyranny and to the safety of the Northern kingdom. However, to do that you’ll need to pass through a heavily guarded checkpoint. Go as you are and the guards will kill you on the spot. But to pass as one of the regular townsfolk, you will need to strip away everything you are. Sybil, the protagonist, outlines it neatly at the start, saying that she will need to cut her…

It almost feels illegal including a Total War: Warhammer game in They’re Back, because the title implies that it ever went away. In my case, that simply isn’t true. I’ve played it for hundreds of hours. But it feels similarly unlawful to exclude it from a list of interesting threequels. So in it goes. It’s so good that I want to stand on an oathstone and lecture you about how every single faction is potentially a game in itself; more, in fact, given the variation between legendary lords. But I need to be honest. I still basically only play as dwarfs. And when I’m not playing as classic dwarfs, I’m playing as their cursed, magic-using brethren instead. This is honestly the best metric I have for how good Warhammer III…

ANALOGUE: A HATE STORY Chiller about an abandoned ship, and two onboard AI assistants to help you unravel the mystery. NOT FOR BROADCAST Rather than poring over archival material and scrubbing through clips, you’re doing it all live. HOME SAFETY HOTLINE Is it mice? Is it bed bugs? No, it sounds like a supernatural entity you’ve inadvertently pissed off. ALAN WAKE 2 Though I was left wanting more from its gameplay, this mystery remains a real page turner.…

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS CARMEN SANDI EGO? A sneaky 1985 point-and-click that got us learning geography by accident. For shame, Carmen. THE OREGON TRAIL Pictured here in its modern form, this timeless dysentery sim has been teaching us that frontier life was hard for decades. DEMOCRACY Straight-faced strategy series less interested in you having fun than understanding the accountability of legislatures. THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS That’s more like it. A dangerously potent injection of primary colors and cheeriness, under the guise of learning.…

It’s Mastercard’s world, we just live in it. That’s my understanding based on a recent communiqué from Valve to PC Gamer, which confirmed that, yup, the company really did recently remove a spate of adult games because they upset payment processors. “We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks,” Valve’s missive reads. “As a result, we are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store.” Valve is reaching out to devs affected by the change “and issuing app credits should they have another game they’d like to distribute on Steam in the future”. Just, you know, so long as those games get the seal of approval from Valve’s…

HARVEST MOON 1996 This farm sim set the template still in use today: a young character inheriting a family farm and befriending the locals. FARMVILLE 2009 A breakout hit in the early F2P era, players could pay money for certain resources or to grow crops more quickly. STARDEW VALLEY 2016 Harvest Moon’s indie successor made the cute life sim so popular, it’s now one of PC gaming’s most crowded genres. FARMING SIMULATOR 2008 This 3D series focuses on industrial-scale farming, putting you behind the wheel of giant tractors and combines.…

There’s a hell of a lot to like about side-scrolling and gallery shooter Neon Inferno. It’s violent, stylish, and dripping with character. It’s also got a demo available right now ahead of its full release in October so, you know, if you like the sound of it from this write-up, then go download it. It’s only like 440MB, so you’ll have it on your rig faster than you can blink. You play as one of two assassins, Angelo Morano or Mariana Vitti, who are employed by a notorious crime syndicate in a future dystopian New York City to take out its enemies. Angelo looks like he’s walked straight out of a ’90s sci-fi anime like Ghost in the Shell, while Mariana looks like she’s walked out of a ’90s sci-fi…

Like No Man’s Sky if it had been doodled into an exercise book, Formless Star is a game about visiting an alien planet and recording all the weird animals that live there. And there are some really fascinatingly strange creatures here: like a sentient die, and a big pane of glass that insists on recklessly dashing everywhere, and an ‘animal’ that is actually the coolest pixel art mech I’ve ever seen. But Formless Star isn’t a game about photographing these animals from a distance—it’s a game where you discover the creatures by sidling up and interacting with them. Every one of the 61 creatures (well, maybe not the last one, which is a special case), rewards your curiosity with a funny factoid, and more importantly with unique functions and animations.…

Sometimes, before you play a game, you think you have an intro already written. I was going to talk about how hard it is to make slow zombies scary in a post-28 Days Later world. But honestly, that’s rubbish: they’re dead people who moan and try to bite you. They walk funny. It’s absolutely terrifying. And somehow, Resident Evil 3 manages to elevate that. Perhaps it’s the setting, but the opening moments make everything feel so urgent I start sprinting everywhere. And this turns out to be risky, since the zombies keep getting back up. There’s a special kind of fear that comes from stumbling into a room you thought was safe, only to run straight into the rotting arms of an enemy you thought was dead. It’s honestly amazing…

My name is Agent Michael Thorton, and every dialogue is a minefield: two thirds of the options will turn me into The Most Cancelled Man Who Ever Lived. The Mass Effect-y archetypes I’m provided with correspond to the spy guy holy trinity: Borne (Professional), Bond (Suave), and Bauer (Aggressive). Aggressive Mike is a Renegade psycho, greeting an information broker by slamming his face into a bar. Suave Mike is a pervert. I want to strap him to the Clockwork Orange chair just to make him watch corporate anti-harassment training videos. Professional Mike? Nice guy. A little slow. I like the cut of his jib. And by god are this Unreal Engine 3 potato man and all his deep state pals rubbing off on me? I was worried mission control stalwart…

A recent study from the Survey Center on American Life reported that 15% of US men said they didn’t have close friends in 2021, compared with 3% in 1990. In the same period, the number of men with 10 or more close friends decreased from 33% to 13%. It’s become known as a ‘friendship recession’—the sad, once-removed cousin of the male loneliness epidemic. And, without wishing to sound flippant, I think I have the solution. Play Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, a game that teaches the value of drinking cup sake with middle-aged men who really want you to be happy. There’s something inspiring about Infinite Wealth’s celebration of sincerity. The cast skews older than in most games, and it’s refreshing to see a group of post-40 guys supporting each…

GLOBO-WAKAZASHI ENGINEERING A logo straight out of the Deus Ex school of subtlety. What could it possibly mean? TROIKA GAMES In these postmodern times I’m all for developers appearing in their own games, but is that really the slogan you want? FU SYNDICATE The font, the lighting, the fact it’s emblazoned on the greyest chunk of concrete in Chinatown. Not friendly. STATUES How could an organization with these outside its HQ be anything other than humanitarian and benign?…

You’d be forgiven for thinking that buying a GPU on a budget was a near-impossible task these days. But while retailer prices are still higher than we’d like, it’s possible to pick up a brand new 1080p and 1440p graphics-cruncher from the likes of Nvidia, AMD, and Intel for sensible cash. From the surprisingly affordable Intel Arc B580 to the mid-range-munching AMD Radeon RX 9070, there’s some serious competition in the reasonably-priced GPU market right now. So, if cash is king, these are your current options for keeping your bank balance frosty and your gaming PC bang up-to-date. 1 GeForce RTX 5060 NVIDIA $299 Budget, but at what cost? Nvidia’s budget GPU has, on paper at least, a fair bit going for it. With a $299 MSRP, it slots in…

If you want to find out how good a graphics card is, you fire up the benchmark mode in a nice graphically demanding game. Same goes for a CPU, only you use a more CPU-bound title like Total War: Warhammer. You watch the automated sequence, you note down the numbers that the benchmark spits back out at you, and you use those numbers to rank one component against another. But when you want to find out how good a peripheral is, Night City can’t help you and the efficacy of that Hitman: World of Assassination benchmark with the stately home getting shot to bits is limited at best. It’s not that you’re going on vibes, exactly, since there are still reasonably empirical aspects like tech specs to compare alongside your…