Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2025 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

What is a legacy? I’ve struggled with that question as I’ve tried to write about Virtua Fighter 5 REVO, the latest entry in the series that invented 3D fighting games before eventually fading from the public consciousness. REVO, a new version that hit Steam in late January, is a chance for one of the most beloved fighting games ever made to find a new worldwide audience. The first thing you have to understand about Virtua Fighter 5 is that it’s old. The original game released in Japanese arcades in 2006, a year after the Xbox 360 launched; Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare were still a year away, Street Fighter IV was two years out and Apple’s App Store didn’t yet exist. “It’s hard to describe the…

My favorite co-op game of the past decade is Sea of Thieves: I love sailing a galleon into dangerous territory with friends, engaging in ship-to-ship and person-to-person (or skeleton) combat, then scampering off with loot. A game like Sea of Thieves, but in space? I’ll definitely give it a try. Jump Ship is a mission-based co-op FPS from Keepsake Games where you and up to three other crew members pilot a spaceship, engage in ship-to-ship battles and first-person combat, and salvage gear and goodies you can use to upgrade your ship. I recently got to try a hands-on preview, joined by PC Gamer’s answer to Han Solo: Morgan Park. (I’m not sure if that makes me Luke or Chewbacca. Whoever has the worst aim, I guess.) To be clear, Jump…

My father has entirely too much confidence in me. He’s sending me out with a few denari in my pocket to establish a city, and expects to see me return as a successful official. It’s a lot of pressure, and it’s only made worse by the discovery my mother knows the local governor. I’ve already proven my utter incompetence by being unable to identify a robber who attacked me on the road, potentially landing us with a court case for kidnapping after the house slaves rounded up some likely suspects for an ID parade. I’ve only been playing the game for five minutes, have built just two small temples on my father’s orders, and now the governor wants a bribe. Pax Augusta is a city-builder set in ancient Rome, and…

This deckbuilding narrative RPG is set in a haunted house and has serious gothic novel vibes. There’s also a big hit of Cluedo in there too, as your characters move around the building, each with a task to perform, discovering secret tunnels and other mysterious things as they do. The deckbuilding comes from the way your team investigates the house. The Ackeron family has fallen into disrepute among rumors of dark pacts and shadowy rituals, and has disappeared. The mayor of the local town has sent a group in to investigate. There’s a secret organization of mystics known as the ‘Seekers Communion’ at work, pointing to exactly the sort of cosmic horror you might expect from a game with this much Lovecraft about it. It’s played on a board that…

It’s easy to take the revival of fast-moving, exploration-heavy ‘boomer shooters’ for granted in 2025, but nine years ago, Doom 2016 hit the industry like a bolt from the blue, with nary an iron sight or cover system to speak of. The entire genre leapt to crib off id’s notes. These days, id Software is far from the old man on the ropes trying to prove there’s an audience for this sort of game that it was in the early 2010s. A 2020 sequel, Doom Eternal, showed that id’s second wind wasn’t some fleeting thing, that the long John-less (that is, Romero and Carmack) FPS trailblazer has what it takes to go the distance. Alongside neo-Doom, there’s been an explosion of indie ‘boomer shooters’ imitating ’90s sensibilities and aesthetics, and…

Cataclismo’s been in Early Access since last year, and it’s a testament to how well-realized the concept was that this is the same game, just with extra bits on. The biggest bits are the additional campaign missions, which round out the story of Iris, the mystical overseer on a mission to save humanity from the Horrors. It’s not a huge campaign, but the environments, units and structures are beautiful and the world is dripping with atmosphere. The game’s hook is just as strong as it prepares to exit Early Access. You citybuild (and tower defend) by building your defenses brick by brick, as if you’re playing with the iconic Mega Bloks. The best part of the game is hearing the blocks slot together, and their anxious wobbling as you’re about…

The Tower of Babel has been reinterpreted as an enormous server tower in Babel.exe. Different communities have been brought together, with a program translating what they are saying to each other in real-time As a helpful person in a hat, it’s your job to fuel the big tower by collecting logs from the nearby woods, but also to help folks with their problems. Someone wants you to collect flowers, another some of those colorful berries. However, the woods are home to vicious snakes, spiders, frogs and, for some reason, big pits of spikes. Of course, you need instant death pits for a game to feel like a proper 8bit computer title. Babel.exe’s retro-style pixel art is my favorite thing about it. It’s so economical, clean and instantly readable, with a…

Matthew couldn’t help but consider writing this review in the voice of the narrator from The Stanley Parable. Perhaps that would be an astute way of referencing the unique nature of the game. Or, perhaps, it would just be annoying. In the end, Matthew decided to write normally. The Stanley Parable is like a waking nightmare for someone like me: a man who has lost valuable moments of the only life I have deliberating which type of topping to have in bubble tea. So, during the first run, in a very Stanley way, I just do as the narrator tells me: a very meta way of playing a game about a man telling you to control a man who’s deciding to take control of his life. Even when coming back…

One of the things I’d somehow overlooked with Avowed is that it is set in the same universe as Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity series. I was aware of this information at least on some level, with an echo rattling around in the back of my skull, but I think I’d relegated it to my mind’s forgotten realms due to the fact that, really, Avowed’s marketing had not leaned into it in any major way. And I felt that lack of push pointed to a game that, while technically based in the same universe, would move away from it and its deep lore in order to chase a more mass-market audience. So, when I finally jumped into Avowed to see how Obisidan’s not-Skyrim new Skyrim game actually played, and found that…

Top three worst feelings in PC gaming? Third place is opening Steam after a week away and having to download 3.9 petabytes of updates. Second is obviously RGB radiation sickness. Top, spot, though? It has to be a hardware upgrade gone awry. For starters, the stakes are so high. Particularly in this preposterous 2025 reality we find ourselves in, when one graphics card alone costs five times more than a console. Damaging a RTX 5090 is almost akin to writing off your car now, except worse, because you don’t need your car to play Cyberpunk 2077. But then there’s the sheer amount of work involved in rectifying the mistake. Generally, the extent of your knowledge is ‘it doesn’t turn on’ or ‘it doesn’t boot to Windows’. The number of variables…

It’s been a truth for ages: console manufacturers have been missing out by not releasing their games on PC. Microsoft long ago gave up on pure Xbox exclusives, and is even releasing games on PlayStation now. Sony, meanwhile, has tacitly acknowledged the fact for years, steadily releasing its PS4 and PS5 back catalog onto Steam, and then last year, releasing Helldivers 2 on both PS5 and PC to enormous success. Now, former Sony executive Shuhei Yoshida has come out and said it explicitly: releasing its games on PC is a license for Sony to print money. Speaking to Sacred Symbols+ about his time as head of PlayStation Studios, Yoshida explained he wanted to bring Sony games to PC far earlier than when it eventually happened, but it just wasn’t the way Sony thought…

1 month CLAIR OBSCUR: EXPEDITION 33 RELEASE April 24, 2025 | DEVELOPER Sandfall Interactive Lead the members of Expedition 33 on their quest to destroy the Paintress so that she can never paint death again. Turn-based RPG with lush UE5 graphics. FATAL FURY: CITY OF THE WOLVES RELEASE April 24, 2025 | DEVELOPER SNK A legendary versus fighting series returns with a sequel to the 1999 classic, Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Fight in the iconic world of South Town with a day one PC release. DOOM: THE DARK AGES RELEASE May 15, 2025 | DEVELOPER id Software Doom goes historical, with the player stepping into the shoes of a living super-weapon who fights in a hyper-violent medieval war against hell. There’s a throwable Shield Saw! 2 months ELDEN RING:…

Fellowship offers a tantalizing opportunity to MMO fans who don’t want to grind: Just bang out some fun dungeons instead. After roughly seven years of development, the game is finally nearing its early access release, and had a popular public playtest during Steam Next Fest. Fellowship combines a MOBA-like selection of characters that earn abilities and gear and a near-clone of World of Warcraft-style dungeon gameplay and aesthetics. If you’ve ever done Mythic Plus difficulty dungeons in WoW and didn’t really want to quest or grind out those character levels, or watched in horror as your favorite class became an outcast in the latest season’s meta groups, Fellowship was made for you. Its dungeons are endlessly scaling, with new features and gear launching in seasons. The higher you go, the…

This point-and-click time-travel adventure from the studio behind The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow has been sitting on Steam waiting for a release date since 2022. It still doesn’t have that release date, though the ‘coming soon’ banner gives some hope. It does, however, have a new demo. And that demo begins with some dialog that’s sure to be foreshadowing in some way—two time travelers talking about someone getting ‘paradoxed out of existence’. The player character is Fia Quinn, who works for the ChronoZen agency and carries a currency unit that can print out money from any era. She has a multitool and a weapon too, in an inventory that descends from the top of the screen in classic point and click fashion, and can change her clothes at will to…

An expedition to a distant planet uncovers a mysterious monolith in this action-RPG from an indie studio based in Newcastle Upon Tyne. But unlike in that hub of UK game development, the civilization in Empyreal is a lost one, the planet unexplored but teeming with dangerous automata. The trailers and screens released so far show a game in which weapons can be absolutely massive, with huge glowing blades and enormous guns brought to bear on robotic opponents who tower over the player character while the ruins of an ancient civilization collapse around them. Combat looks to be acrobatic, with plenty of flips and rolls to get you out of enemy clutches, with shield blocks and ranged attacks used to keep them at bay. Luckily, you’re an elite mercenary. And while…

My pirate ship is sailing through the Hawaiian seas, pursuing a speedboat. I successfully chase it into a Bond-villain style base, whereupon I continue the pursuit on foot, jumping over laser traps, fleeing a giant cannonball that rolls towards me Indiana Jones-style, and then finish up with a sword fight against a giant robot. How can I possibly give a game that contains all that any less than PC Gamer’s first ever 100% score? Well… the ‘boat chase’ is just a cutscene, the lasers have to be jumped over with sticky platforming controls, that cannonball sequence is a quick-time event, and that giant robot also requires that crap jumping to reach its weak point. You play as series favorite Goro Majima, suffering from gaming’s billionth case of amnesia. Majima has…

I grew up in a town with nearly no public transportation, so true freedom was only gained as a teenager when I got my first car. It was a hand-me-down from my grandfather, so it wasn’t cool, but it was the only real escape from the drudgery of school, the oppression (real or imagined) of parents, and the growing panic that adulthood, which meant a job, the military, or more damn school, was waiting at the end of the summer. Keep Driving is a turn-based road trip RPG that perfectly captures the freedom and possibilities of being young and having a beat-up old car, just enough money to fill it with gas and snacks, and only the vaguest of destinations in mind. Just like in real life, road trips in…

This deckbuilding roguelike peers into the guts of the genre and makes some big changes on a mechanical level. It’s still a case of playing your cards to defeat or delay enemies before they can hurt you, but you only have four cards to play with—and each card is actually a character. These characters adhere to basic archetypes in Lowland Keepers. One deals direct damage, one sets enemies alight, another steals enemy mana so you can buy a few extra goes during your turn. It’s difficult to decide who to play during a turn, as the resources you use to play them are all shared between them. Sure, mana regenerates every turn, but you can also get more of it if you can kill enemies to snaffle their mana. More…

Here’s a metaphor for you: what if, instead of being an octopus pretending to be a man, Octodad was actually a quite ordinary game pretending to be a decent one? Because coming back to it after some time away, I’m amazed as many people enjoyed the game’s single repeated joke as consistently as they seemed to. The sinister world of cephalopod conspiracy rounds off our office-adjacent list this month, within which Ocotodad is included primarily because he a) wears a suit and b) has a job. And, as mentioned above, it’s an interesting one to come back to. The setting is either smart and sweet or deeply sinister, depending on your perspective; however much I love my daughter, I like to think I’d tell her if I was secretly an…

How many whips can a single videogame contain? We might need to hold an intervention for Vampire Survivors developer poncle, because the Ode to Castlevania DLC contains, by my count, at least eight whips—and that’s on top of the ones already kicking around the base game! It’s the best kind of excessive. Vampire Survivors’ theming was already Legally Distinct Castlevania, so it makes sense that its approach to becoming Legally Castlevania was to stuff a truly ludicrous amount of vampire-killing paraphernalia into a $5 package. I’ve played more than ten hours of the DLC and am still unlocking Belmonts, their descendants, and their whips, tomes, spears, and swords of choice. Before exploring the new Castlevania stage I assumed it would just be a simple backdrop for the usual mostly aimless…

They might not be as flashy as graphics cards or gaming keyboards, but like a samurai’s katana, a good, reliable external SSD can become an extension of yourself. And there are more uses for one than you might initially think. The most obvious use for an external drive is to take your big files around with you. But they’re also great to use as portable game library storage for handhelds and laptops. And even if you rarely travel, they can be useful for the occasional system backup or pre-Windows reinstall file backup. They’re not all similarly square, unassuming, no-nonsense external SSDs these days, either. In this group test we’re looking at everything from such options to extravagant press-to-expand glass cannons and dinky keychain drives. And as you’ll see from my…

HIGHS A literal high Steam cracked 40 million concurrent users for the first time. Cold, hard cash A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build has adopted a new pricing strategy: whatever the current temperature in London, that’s its price in US dollars. Hell house freezes Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake sold enough to make execs happy. LOWS At the last hurdle After 14 years of operation, indie developer Studio Fizbin is closing. Pilfered Horror game The Backrooms 1998 had a good launch on Steam. So good that someone stole the entire game and uploaded it to the Nintendo eShop without permission. Cookie clicker A 2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs are “a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service”.…

Steel yourselves, MercurySteam is back and looking to forge its own fantasy Soulslike with a molten twist. Every weapon you use to clobber enemies with will be crafted by your own hands—you’ll need to master blacksmithing and battle. I got hands on with this curious fantasy adventure as well as a chance to chat to the studio’s CEO and Blades of Fire game director Enric Alvarez at a recent press event about all things fighting and forging. Set in a world where a curse turns all steel to stone, Queen Neera rules all with her metal might. With an army of abominations that are the only ones able to wield decent weapons at her side, she stands unopposed. Step in Aaran De Lira—our hero and protagonist who has been gifted…

The free-to-play monetisation is already rankling eager mech pilots in the beta, but the actual combat in Mecha Break should have Pacific Rim fans salivating. Its dazzling multiplayer mecha combat is mechanically sound, and putting loot box concerns aside, it’s loaded with customization options for both my mech and pilot. Choosing a Break Striker, Mecha Break’s name for its robots, is as difficult as choosing a favorite hero in Overwatch. The classes—attackers, snipers, supporters, brawlers and defenders—and their weapons, drone deployments, shields and secondary abilities each come with different playstyles. Maneuverability—which Amazing Seasun believes to be the core of what makes a mech game work—is phenomenal in Mecha Break. Whether it be brawler or sniper, Welkin or Narukami, moving around open space is fun, hectic, and easy to manage after…

Saving the world from collapse by riding your bicycle really fast is a bold proposition even for a videogame. As a cyclist in an open world filled with races and other two-wheeled things to do, your main task is to collect legendary bike parts that have been stolen, and use them to perform some sort of destiny-fulfilling ritual, which sounds just vague enough that it might just work out in the end. RELEASE 2025 DEVELOPER Messhof PUBLISHER Annapurna Interactive LINK s.team/a/1497460…

For over a decade, Atomfall has been Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley’s “dream game”, one he was dropping coy, detail-free allusions to in chats with PCG all the way back in 2018. Set in the heart of the British county of Cumbria in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster, it feels like someone armed a bread advert, and it’s part of a proud lineage of pain-in-the-ass games that includes beloved classics like STALKER and Morrowind. No quest markers here, sir. You’ll find your own way or die in the attempt. Perhaps both. But Atomfall also feels like a statement about Rebellion itself: the position it’s obtained and the opportunities it’s opened up for itself after years and years of quietly putting out Sniper Elites, Zombie Armies and the odd Evil Genius.…

Monster Hunter Wilds is a return to meat-and-potatoes monster combat and a dramatic revision of the hunting format. It’s a more approachable lizard-slaying sandbox, and it’s a tangle of multiplayer quirks that still feels like something out of 2007. It’s the cleanest Monster Hunter has ever played, and it’s a temperamental piece of software that might crash if you tab back in at the wrong time. If there’s a word for Wilds, it’s streamlined. A more straightforward, cinematic story, gives way to a seamless wilderness of rotating seasons and roaming beasts, where any hunting prep can be done in the moment and on the fly. It can feel like a wonder, but it’s not a wonder without cost. In providing as much monster hunting as possible, Wilds has carved away…

Like its inspiration, Minesweeper, Dragonsweeper is a game about intently staring at a big grid of numbers and making calculated gambles. Unlike Minesweeper, this is also an RPG. The mines are still here, of course—and clicking on one is still an instant game over—but they’re joined by rats, slimes and, yes, a big dragon, who you’re ultimately trying to defeat. Turns out that’s pretty tough—even tougher than Minesweeper. Dragonsweeper is tough because it’s more cagey with its information. The numbers on the floor, as you would expect, tell you how many mines are hidden in the eight grid spaces surrounding them, but they also inform you how many (and which) of the D&D-style monsters are lurking in there as well. Each monster or mine is assigned a number, and by comparing…

One of my most hated games writing tropes is when reviewers take delight in pointing out that the setting of a game is more interesting than the main character. “But as everyone knows, Spencer Mansion,” *takes a sip of G Fuel martini*, “is the real hero here.” Control is perhaps the one instance where that assertion is entirely justified. This is partially because Jesse Faden fades into the background when compared to the shifting, unsettling specificity of the game’s setting. It’s not that she’s poorly performed or clumsily written, more that she feels standardized. She does all the things she’s meant to—shoot guns, act confused, bury her familial trauma—but there’s little here to set her apart. In some respects it’s nice to have a character who doesn’t quip her way…

When I originally got into Baldur’s Gate in high school, the first game was a dragon I never managed to slay. All those massive early game wilderness areas bored me to tears, impenetrable Advanced Dungeons & Dragons jargon wore down my spirit, and I was always worried that I was playing wrong or maybe committing to a character that’d fall apart when brought forward to Shadows of Amn. Now I’ve got the opposite problem: I’m fresh off my third completion of Baldur’s Gate in the past few years without ever having rolled credits on its sequel or Beamdog’s 2016 interquel expansion Siege of Dragonspear. I’ve got high hopes for this latest run though: I love my character, I’m still feeling the magic, and I think I’ve got the juice to commit…

A few months ago I got together with some friends in FFXIV and went hunting for treasure. It was silly and chaotic with surprise enemies, golden llamas and bad luck barring our paths, but it made for one hell of an evening. Raiding is fun, but there’s nothing quite like the unpredictable nature of hunting down treasure maps and praying for magic portals. I wanted to recreate that night, but with none of my friends around I decided to wing it with some strangers, what could go wrong? Treasure maps are one of FFXIV’s many pieces of side content with new versions added every expansion for parties of up to eight players, though you can usually get through them with four or five of you. You’ll need to find a…

There are two ways to look at hardware, really. One is to scan the horizon for consumer products that best suit our needs and aesthetic sensibilities, and then assemble them, swapping parts in and out as your tastes change and product specs move on. That consumer behavior profile is the bedrock that the industry built itself on, but culturally, there’s perhaps an even deeper foundation: making it all yourself. The origins of PC modding, whether you’re talking about cases, peripherals or aesthetic adornments like modern RGB lighting strips, harks back to a time when computing hardware was made with productivity in mind. A time before there was a gaming sector, before marketers realized they could sell us dedicated gaming versions of everything we used to interact with games. It’s inherent…