Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2025 i PC Gamer

Thanks to Oblivion Remastered, a whole new generation of RPG players has recently begun meeting Cyrodiil’s oddest NPCs for the first time. For Oblivion vets, the full makeover released in April offers a chance to reconnect with some old pals, even if they do now look like they’ve had the mother of all facelifts. There was so much to love about Bethesda’s gargantuan RPG back in 2006, but the vast array of eccentric characters wandering around and doing their own thing really set it apart from the previous Elder Scrolls games. Indeed, I think it fair to say that Oblivion’s numerous nutjobs (I’m looking at you, Glarthir), wierdos, and total tools, as well as how they interact with each other, that makes it as memorable and impactful as it is.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASETBA DEVELOPERThe Outer Zone PUBLISHER11 bit studios LINK s.team/a/2825880 When I heard the words ‘Soulslike deckbuilder’ I thought nah, surely not, but after going hands-on with Death Howl I’m happy to report that, yeah, surely yes. Death Howl doesn’t just work, it’s extraordinarily clever in the way it captures a Soulslike loop within the frame of a deckbuilder. Here’s the setup: you, a shaman named Ro, are plunged into a deadly spirit world in a quest to pull your late son back from the jaws of death. You start out flinging pebbles and bits of bark, but as soon as you’ve cleared the first area, deadly synergies start to unfurl themselves. Half of this power boost comes from knowledge. Death Howl has block cards, but your best…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEJuly 17 DEVELOPERPowerhoof, Dave Lloyd PUBLISHERPowerhoof LINK s.team/a/1170570 With its Australian accents, pixelated style and dark themes, there’s a hint of Beneath a Steel Sky about The Drifter, but this point-and-click game, which begins with a violent death on a train and heads into some mature territory, such as homelessness and broken relationships, is all its own. Mick is the drifter of the title, returning to a city he left five years ago for his mother’s funeral. As he’s hitching rides on freight trains, and talks about visiting a shelter, it’s tempting to call him unhoused, but he claims not to be, telling one character that he has places to stay. He has a lot of experience with that world, however, and carries a phone and charger…

Since the original Dying Light launched in 2015, Techland’s rise has been meteoric – reflected in its impressive HQ on the outskirts of Wrocław, Poland. But numbers aren’t everything for Dying Light’s franchise director Tymon Smektała. He knows that Dying Light 2, for all its commercial success, didn’t quite satiate series fans, and is determined for Dying Light: The Beast to set the series’ course for the future. Founded in 1999, Techland spent years slowly building its reputation with well regarded but largely unknown games mainly for the European market (to this day, the studio’s in-house engine is named after its 2003 sci-fi shooter Chrome). Larger-scale success came with Call of Juarez – a trilogy of Wild West shooters released in the early 2010s – and then Dead Island, but…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?F2P multiplayer FPS with portals EXPECT TO PAYFree (+ cosmetic bundles, battle pass) DEVELOPER1047 games PUBLISHER1047 games REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 7 5700G, 32GB RAM, AMD Radeon RX 6600 STEAM DECKPlayable LINK splitgate.com Splitgate 2’s plan to “make FPS great again,” as 1047 Games co-founder Ian Proulx’s really cool hat put it, is undermined by gunplay that feels nearly identical to that of Halo 5: Guardians (hardly one of the greats) and movement that mimics Apex Legends ( just OK). There is something comforting in Splitgate 2’s familiarity, though, and I easily fell back into old habits as I racked up multi-kills with the tastefully limited arsenal of grenades, abilities and melee attacks. There is something comforting in Splitgate 2’s familiarity, and I was surprised by…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A game about saving people from a mysterious plague. But who to save? EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPER5’Digital PUBLISHERChamplain College REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK bit.ly/TriageGame The town of Stagmarch is subject to a horrifying plague. Most of the townsfolk are dead, but three of the infected have ended up in your clinic, each bearing different symptoms of an illness that, if left unchecked, may cause them to transform into monsters. Never mind that there is no permanent cure, and forget about the fact that the previous doctor died in mysterious circumstances. It’s time to save some lives. Or to delay some deaths for a bit, anyway. Like any doctor, you can only do so much, and your method…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?First-person pest control in the grimiest version of Warhammer’s Old World EXPECT TO PAY£24 DEVELOPERFatshark PUBLISHERFatshark REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-7700, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYERYes LINK store.steampowered. com/app/552500/ Warhammer_ Vermintide_2/ The best thing about skaven isn’t that they’re scheming, disgusting, or numberless; it’s that they’re annoying. In a fantasy world of dragon-riding elves, floating toad wizards, and actual gods, it’s amazing to think that the chittering rats are the biggest threat to order. The first Vermintide game shows them at their chittering, countless best; the challenge with the sequel, then, is keeping them compelling. The sequel does the most sensible thing possible, and adds another faction to the mix. In the Old World of Warhammer, skaven are like the nasty, capering kids…

We all know it’s important to keep your processor chilly while gaming. That’s a given, and liquid coolers have become the de facto standard for doing just that. Available in a range of sizes and from a hundred or more different brands, we’re not short of options, either. So, how does a liquid cooling company stand out from the competition these days? Stick a screen on it, that’s how. Curved screens, round screens, big screens, small screens – you can find a liquid cooler to suit any build, so long as you want a screen on it. I didn’t necessarily set out to review more liquid coolers with screens on than not for this group test, it just sorta came to be when I surveyed the market for the latest…

RORY NORRIS THIS MONTHCreated abominations of aviation. ALSO PLAYEDDoom: The Dark Ages, Elden Ring: Nightreign. Aviassembly is a slightly more casual version of Euro Truck Simulator or SnowRunner, but instead of sitting behind the wheel of a truck, you’re piloting a plane. It’s currently in Early Access on Steam, so it’s admittedly a bit barebones right now, yet it’s perfectly tuned progression system scratches that ‘one more go’ itch. My career in aviation didn’t begin at flight school, but with a blank canvas. I was immediately thrown into the construction menu and given a few basic parts to play around with: a cockpit, wooden propeller, fuselage block, basic wings and a tail wing. It’s just enough to make something that will get in the air to start collecting items at…

As the opener to an annual tech event, it’s pretty hard to beat showing off how The Witcher 4 will look and run in actual gameplay, but that’s exactly what Epic and CD Projekt Red did for the former’s keynote speech at The State of Unreal 2025. We all knew it was coming, of course, but sitting in a crowd of developers, creators, and journalists in Orlando, eardrums being blasted by surround-sound Ciri, it was clear that everyone wanted to be absolutely wowed by what The Witcher 4’s developers had in store for us. There was one standout technological improvement Epic will eventually be bringing out with Unreal Engine 5.7, and one thing that looks to be making The Witcher 4’s environment so dense, lush and detailed, and it’s Nanite Foliage.…

1 month KILLING FLOOR 3 RELEASE July 24, 2025 | DEVELOPER Tripwire Interactive The co-op action-horror FPS series returns and tasks you and your squad with battling megacorp Horzine’s inhuman army of monstrous zeds. Can you survive? WUCHANG: FALLEN FEATHERS RELEASE July 24, 2025 | DEVELOPER Leenzee Set in the land of Shu during the dark and tumultuous late Ming Dynasty, this stylish new Soulslike sees you fight as Wuchang, a skilled pirate warrior struck by amnesia. MAFIA: THE OLD COUNTRY RELEASE August 8, 2025 | DEVELOPER Hangar 13 Prove your worth to the Cosa Nostra in the brutal underworld of 1900s Sicily. Violent third-person action adventure dripping with period detail and authenticity. 2 months METAL GEAR SOLID DELTA: SNAKE EATER RELEASE August 28, 2025 | DEVELOPER Konami Snake returns…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEJuly 29, 2025 DEVELOPERWeta Workshop PUBLISHERPrivate Division LINK tinyurl.com/a32nwwk2 After a few minutes of opening cutscenes and questing during my time playing a demo of Tales of the Shire I asked Wētā Workshop if I could spend the rest of my Tales of the Shire demo time just… moving furniture around back at my hobbit hole. Thankfully I was met with enthusiastic approval. Apparently rearranging all day is a perfectly acceptable way to approach life in Bywater. And that’s how I spent a majority of it – obsessively picking up everything from one room and bringing it into another to make piles of decorative clutter. My closest in-universe relative is probably Smaug, though instead of gold, I’m sitting on a pile of colourful bottles, fraying pillows, and…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASESeptember 4 DEVELOPERPiraknights Games PUBLISHERTeam17 LINK s.team/a/2213700 For an art form largely based on turning killing into pleasure, videogames have always been oddly comfortable with the concept of Hell. The infernal regions in Sintopia are merely a stopover in a cycle of reincarnation, and they’re fully privatised too, run by a detached and uninterested management team. That’s where you come in. As Hell’s new administrator, appointed despite having no relevant experience or even a fully filled-in CV, you’re expected to keep on top of the Humus as they live, accumulate sins, die and are taken to Hell in a bus in order to endure punishment to have those sins removed before they’re sent back up to the overworld to have another go at it all. This is…

RELEASEAugust 27 DEVELOPERSavySoda PUBLISHERSavySoda LINK s.team/a/2154270 This MMO spaceship management and strategy game is also being developed for Android, but that makes it a shoo-in for low-spec PCs. Looking somewhat like the integrated graphics version of EVE Online, the game has you building characters then starships part by part, before taking them out to build alliances and take over the galaxy. There’s diplomacy, research and resources to manage, as well as glorious combat with sci-fi weapons. Staying online to carry out raids and battles in MMOs has kept many players up all night, so it’s good to see that Pixel Starships 2 integrates programmable AI so that your fleet can continue to operate while you’re catching some downtime. A market driven in-game economy should make it possible to grow rich…

Even for those who haven’t played Deus Ex (charlatans), the name carries weight, echoing 25 years on from its launch through the halls of gaming history like that of a half-forgotten Hellenic deity; its pioneering commitment to systems and experimentation as a form of player expression mixed into the foundations of so many games that came after – from Dishonored to Cyberpunk 2077, from Oblivion to Far Cry. A genre mashup, an ‘immersive simulation’, a conspiracy thriller that offers wide, webbing paths through each mission (which might come down to creating a stairway of crates of increasing size, bribing junkies with drugs or kids with candy, or carving straight through with a cybersword). There were many ways to pitch Deus Ex back in the day, but none of them particularly…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A survival MMO set in the Dune universe EXPECT TO PAY£42 DEVELOPERFuncom PUBLISHERFuncom REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7 9700K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti MULTIPLAYERYes LINK duneawakening.com I’m collecting the most valuable substance in the universe, spice, when a sandworm explodes out of the dunes a few meters in front of me. I knew it was coming – it always does – but I didn’t expect it to pop up so close to me. I yell a bad word and leap into the cockpit of my ornithopter as my entire screen fills with a gaping mouth the size of a subway tunnel. I know I’m just sitting at my desk holding down my space bar, but in my head I’m pulling up on the…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A salacious Soulslike about saving humanity and reclaiming a war-torn Earth EXPECT TO PAY£60 DEVELOPERShift Up Corporation PUBLISHERPlayStation Publishing REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 9 3900XT, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK stellar-blade.com Stellar Blade’s opening hours are so mired by atrocious level design that I can only assume people are willingly ploughing through for the sake of seeing protagonist Eve’s bum jiggle around in a skin-tight suit for a bit longer. Do I blame them? No, but it’s a tough start before things start getting good. Even after 30 hours I still can’t shake the feeling that it was trying a little too hard to be Nier: Automata on horny steroids. Its plot is almost identical: a war-torn Earth, now populated by monstrous alien…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A prettied up version of the 1999 sci-fi immersive sim EXPECT TO PAY£30 DEVELOPERNightdive Studios PUBLISHERNightdive Studios REVIEWED ONSteam Deck MULTIPLAYERFour-player co-op LINK nightdivestudios.com There’s a hubris to reviewing a unanimous classic decades after the fact – this mostly applies to guys on YouTube not named Mandalore. Yeah buddy, sure, you’ve got something to say about Earthbound that nobody cottoned on to before. Thank God, then, that I’m not charged with reviewing the 1999 classic System Shock 2. I’m only reviewing System Shock 2’s long-awaited remaster from the specialists at Nightdive. This is the way you should play System Shock 2 now. You could approximate the remaster with a constellation of mods and quality of life fixes, but Nightdive’s System Shock 2 removes the headache,…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERHarper Shen LINK bit.ly/SpiritAnts As someone who spends a lot of time looking down at their feet, dodging our dog-shit-filled pavements, I finally have a game that lets me do that, minus the dog shit. And what a wonderful world it is, full of life and noise and rather a lot of chatty ants. The Spirit of the Ants is a walking sim, in that it simulates the experience of walking around. By holding down the mouse button, you will slowly shuffle down the street, staring at your feet and the detritus around them. The game is exciting simply because it’s a view we’re not normally given in games, which understandably want to show us that impressive vista or that photorealistic NPC –…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£20 DEVELOPERSaber Interactive PUBLISHERMad Dog Games, LLC One thing that always surprises me about the original Ghostbusters, apart from the scene in which Ray Stanz randomly and unnecessarily receives spectral fellatio, is how mercenary it is. We cheer as they charge thousands for removing malign presences and flout environmental protection laws. It’s libertarian propaganda with Twinkie jokes. The videogame continuation of the story has you as the new recruit in an organisation that would probably try and stiff you out of your medical insurance when a positron collider burns off your face. And this is part of what makes the game such a potent piece of nostalgia: the original Ghostbusters treat you exactly how you’d expect. Ray is delighted with you, Peter gently bullying, Egon…

The mouse and keyboard will always be PC gaming’s mitre and sceptre. There’s nothing more indicative of our platform’s culture than using peripherals designed for typing and clicking on desktop icons for 360 noscopes, and as such they’ll be on desktops forevermore. But for the last 20 years, they’ve had some company there. It wasn’t a sudden shift, like 1080p monitors, or AI-laden graphics cards. Instead, the Xbox controller’s invasion was slower and sneakier. It crept up behind enemy lines, tip-toeing across from the console downstairs, arranged itself enticingly on our desk and just waited until the next time we wanted to play a racing game or a platformer. It seemed to happen almost by accident. Indeed, when Big Billy Gates and his team decided a Microsoft home console might…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick these parts if you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price. Mid-range build You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through. Advanced build You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart. BUDGET BUILD Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank MOTHERBOARD B660M Pro RS ASRock £102 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 £130 Intels’ budget chip is still fantastic value and a solid all-rounder. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX 9060 XT 8 GB AMD £300 AMD delivers what we…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASETBA DEVELOPERL4S Games PUBLISHERL4S Games LINK s.team/a/3309290 A sufficiently striking coat of paint can get me interested in a game before I know anything else about it. So it was with the demo for Black Raven, a “2.5D action-adventure rooted in Slavic Folklore”, whose screenshots are such a vibe that I downloaded it sight-unseen. Which, gosh, might have been a mistake, because some very unpleasant things happen to you in the first 45 seconds or so of Black Raven. Have you seen Gladiator? It’s like Gladiator. Your fella, Ivan – a man made entirely of jaw – runs off into the woods thinking he’s spied a friend, only to return to find his home burnt, wife murdered, and child… abducted? Probably abducted, since I don’t think we…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEQ3 2025 DEVELOPERJG Games PUBLISHERJG Games LINK s.team/a/1830290 Do game devs ever stop thinking about the Roman Empire? Probably not, considering the number of their creations that use it as a setting. Fall of an Empire tries to do something different from the classic 4X structure that sees you conquer the world from a village. It runs it in reverse. Well, sort of. The idea here is that you start with a fully fledged empire, and having taken power in a military coup, you manage (or even halt) its decline. With 12 provinces, almost 150 settlements and four million citizens living under your benevolent rule, the job of emperor is not an easy one, and barbarians, Huns and other raiders start to nibble around the edges. TOP…

RELEASETBA DEVELOPERFailbetter Games PUBLISHERFailbetter Games LINK s.team/a/3710210 Failbetter Games does Stardew Valley is an irresistible pitch. The Fallen London dev has revealed a new game in which you plant seeds and harvest the results, explore the world, befriend a river, and take tea with a god. There are mines in which there’s sometimes stone, villagers with important skills, a home to decorate, and lots of other life-sim staples with a mythological twist. Don’t go out after dark.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?An open-world first-person RPG that puts a unique spin on the legend of King Arthur EXPECT TO PAY£38 DEVELOPERQuestline PUBLISHERAwaken Realms STEAM DECKVerified REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 5 7600, 32 GB RAM, AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT MULTIPLAYERNo LINK taintedgrail.com There’s a confidence in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. You can see it in the world design, feel it in the colourful cast of characters. ‘Skyrim but you’re also haunted by the ghost of King Arthur’ is a concept that demands ambition. But developer Questline is an untested studio, and fumbling the ball was always going to be a strong possibility. I’m happy to report that we have a fascinating open-world first-person RPG experience on our hands. Some more variety in enemy design would have…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?Devilish deckbuilder with an inspired injection of tower defence. EXPECT TO PAY£21 DEVELOPERShiny Shoe PUBLISHERBig Fan Games REVIEWED ONAMD Z1 Extreme, 16GB RAM, AMD Radeon Graphics STEAM DECKVerified LINK store.steampowered. com/app/2742830/ Monster_Train_2 I’ve been more hyped for this sequel than I am for the return of Christ. And if you didn’t care for that bit of blasphemy, then Monster Train, a game about helping the demons of Hell defeat the goody two-shoes of Heaven, is likely not for you. Everyone else, though, should get ready to play a roguelike deckbuilder that’s every bit the equal to Slay the Spire and Balatro. Hyperbole? Hardly. Monster Train was a great game that shamelessly ripped off and smartly built on Slay the Spire’s structure with a welcome layer…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERComputerJames LINK bit.ly/StealthCross There are a couple of ways you could go when making a game from a preposterous concept. You could really commit to it, finding the kind of game that results when you mash things together – and you take every element seriously. Or, well, you could turn it into one giant joke. I would have said that the first approach obviously results in a better game, and is probably the way to go if you’re more interested in game design. However, there’s ample room in this world for big, stupid gags. While Stealth Crossword isn’t a particularly good stealth or crossword game, it does commit to the comedic ridiculousness of its premise, piling on punchlines and over-the-top set pieces until the…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£17 DEVELOPERObsidian Entertainment PUBLISHERXbox Game Studios We’re rounding up the pest control theme with Grounded, a game that captures the same feeling as exploring the garden with a net and magnifying glass, except here there’s always a chance of having your internal organs slowly digested by spider venom. It’s the sort of game that smells like freshly cut grass. That might make it sound quite sedate and cosy, and there is an element of that, but it’s also a survival game. There are moments where you, a literal shrunken child, are being hunted by spiders the size of cars, relatively speaking. It’s about learning the patterns and reactions of the inhabitants that surround you, and using that as a weapon, encouraging creatures to fight each…

The new normal. Remember how often we heard and repeated that phrase during 2020? Gosh, these face coverings get itchy, don’t they? Still, we’ll have to get used to it, because wearing them is the new normal. It was a platitude we used when queuing outside supermarkets in two-metre intervals as the tape on the floor dictated; when observing our overgrown hair in the mirror; when walking past a baking ingredients aisle stripped bare, and when spending our Friday nights doing a ‘pub quiz’ (aka arguing with our families about the names of British rivers) over Zoom. Never did we dare to countenance that the new normal might one day seem like merely a temporary suspension of the old normal, and that the old normal would one day return in…

IAN EVENDEN THIS MONTHGazed at ray-traced lighting on demon guts. ALSO PLAYEDIndiana Jones and the Great Circle, Fallen Aces Do you remember Doom 3? When it came out, all jagged, inky black shadows and mutterings from players about being a survival horror game rather than a straight shooter, it took Doom and slowed it down. Rather than just blowing things away with weapons you started to worry about imps lunging at you from the darkness, and the Cyberdemon was huge. Doom: The Dark Ages reminds me of Doom 3 in a way. It’s come after two fast-paced shooters but slows things down a bit. It pits you against enormous foes surprisingly early in its storyline even before you’ve reached the strange dodging and punching game that is using the Atlan…