Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2025 i PC Gamer

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Tomáš Malý PUBLISHER Tomáš Malý LINK s.team/a/2369780 Spinning the camera around a strange dumbbell-shaped world, more of an accretion of shapes than something that has achieved hydrostatic equilibrium, you can’t help but marvel. Scientists wouldn’t call this thing a planet, yet it has life on its surface, building structures and driving trucks, and it’s spoiling for a fight. The unnatural worlds of Unnatural Worlds are 3D objects with complex surfaces. Rather than the hex-pocked flat plains of many RTS games, here you’ve got uneven shapes floating in space. The graphics are simple, but there’s enough to tell you what’s going on, and when enemy units come crusading over a curve that blocks your view, blasting away at your buildings with weapons that leave…

RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Dreams Uncorporated PUBLISHER Dreams Uncorporated LINK s.team/a/2850910 This 2D, singleplayer, turn-based indie JRPG has a distinctive look, but it’s the way the game’s visuals tie into the way that it plays that’s the most interesting thing about it. The game’s protagonist is Alma, a photojournalist who finds something odd has happened to her camera. Instead of moaning about it online then taking it to be repaired, she decides to work with its newly discovered prism powers that allow her to shift perspectives and redirect attacks while on the battlefield. Her fisheye lens can send an attack around the back of a pack of enemies, potentially striking them in a weak spot, while a shattered lens (which sounds like an insurance claim to me) splits her attacks…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A systems-heavy RPG set around the actual historical conflict between King Wenceslas of Bohemia and his abductor and brother, Sigismund EXPECT TO PAY £50 DEVELOPER Warhorse Studios PUBLISHER Deep Silver REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 3700x, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 MULTIPLAYER No LINK kingdomcomerpg.com Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 might be the most specific RPG I’ve ever played. Everything from its location, to its era, to its combat, to its clothing feels hyper-tuned, dialled in with precision to suit oddball tastes. Looking for a sweeping fantasy romp? You won’t find one. Like its predecessor, this is a game whose story springs inevitably from the politics of its time and place: the Kingdom of Bohemia in 1403. Want to mow down your foes by the…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A third-person snipe-’em-up with tense combat and fun stealth EXPECT TO PAY£45 DEVELOPERRebellion PUBLISHERRebellion REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 7 5800X, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 MULTIPLAYERYes, co-op and PvP LINK store.steampowered.com/app/2169200/Sniper_Elite_ Resistance Nazis are pretty much the definitive bad guys. They’re perfect videogame fodder because you never have to feel bad about punching, shooting or exploding them. And for sad real-world reasons, it’s never felt more cathartic to do so. Sniper Elite: Resistance couldn’t have come along at a better time. Channelling the spirit of a classic World War II movie, there’s daring romps and blockbuster beats aplenty. Sniper Elite: Resistance is the first spin-off for the Sniper Elite series that doesn’t have you fighting zombies, and it’s clearly hoping to capture some of the…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Reflex-oriented downhill skiing that nevertheless manages to feel chill EXPECT TO PAY £22.50 DEVELOPER Megagon Industries PUBLISHER Megagon Industries REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 5 5600H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK store.steampowered.com/app/2545360/Lonely_Mountains_Snow_Riders/ For the first couple of hours spent playing Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders, I really wished I was playing its bike-centric predecessor, Lonely Mountains: Downhill, instead. Skis are clumsier than bikes and they don’t get fast quite as quickly. But I gradually learned the orthodoxies of going fast down technical hills on skis, and once I figured out how to go faster quicker, Snow Riders started to click gloriously into place, to the extent that now I think I love skis more than bikes. First I learned that to…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Nifflas LINK bit.ly/Xenosphere I’m going to spoil Xenosphere a little bit. But trust me, it will make you want to play it. Nifflas – the developer of Knytt Stories – has made a challenging 2D platformer which is an excellent game in its own right, but also a clever story about a streamer. The twist, soon established, is that a streamer named Neila is playing Xenosphere: evident in the camera window in the corner of the screen and the chat box filling up with messages from fans. Neila might be streaming the game, but you’re the one really controlling the ball as it careers between floating platforms in a minimalist void. In regards to the fundamentals, the ball’s physics and controls…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £5.80 DEVELOPERustwo games PUBLISHERustwo games Everything here has a place. Screws go in a little pot. Broken parts have a glowing space to store them. Even the pause screen is accessed via a steaming cup of coffee. It’s like an ASMR simulator without the distracting possibility that someone, somewhere is adding you to their secretly horny YouTube playlist. Assemble With Care would be an excellent reminder of how satisfying it is to perform tactile, manual work if I hadn’t previously spent two hours trying to fix a dripping tap. So I’ll be honest instead: the game’s crisp, functional representation of repairs is satisfying in a way that real DIY rarely is. There are no screws here with stripped heads; no ceramic disc tap cartridges…

First they came for the tribal patterns, and I didn’t speak out because my gaming mouse didn’t feature a tribal pattern. Then they came for the RGB zones on headsets, and I didn’t speak out because you can’t see your headset while you’re wearing it. Eventually, all aspects of that well-established PC gaming aesthetic as we currently know it will become outmoded, and the desk setups we see on streams, subreddits and our own sacred nooks of virtual escapism will bear little to no resemblance to it. Question is, what will take its place? THE REST IS DIZZYING, MAGENTA AND BLUE HISTORY Perhaps taking a look back through history at how the current trends took root will give us a clue. The foundation of the gamer aesthetic, even more fundamental…

JESS KINGHORN THIS MONTHObsessed over even more lunar leitmotifs in The Silver Case. ALSO PLAYEDInfinity Nikki, Final Fantasy XIV Online Now, I know what you’re thinking, “A visual novel awarded a score of only 50%? Oof.” But I knew I was onto a winner from the very first word. I wasn’t the only one, either; my mum often falls asleep when I’m showing her a new game, but for Grasshopper Manufacture’s debut thriller, she stayed awake. Debuting on the original PlayStation as a Japan-exclusive in 1999, The Silver Case was remastered, re-released, and finally localised for English-speaking PC Gamers back in 2016. To be fair to the contemporaneous review, it has definitely not aged gracefully in a number of ways. The clunky movement is bad enough, but exploration also requires…

IAN EVENDEN THIS MONTHStood with his back to the moon over and over again ALSO PLAYEDCritter Cafe, Cyberpunk 2077 A priest opens a door and peers into the darkness. “Indy, is that you?” Now, this is a very good question, because despite appearances it’s not Indy, it’s someone wearing Indy like a suit. Throughout Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, MachineGames goes to great lengths to remind you of the identity of the character you’re puppeteering. This can be difficult in a first-person game, which doesn’t support the same kind of identification with a character that a third-person view offers. Playing as a known, named character is a different experience to embodying a character you’ve created yourself, there’s less self-insertion, and the desire to play in a style that matches…

1 month ASSASSIN’S CREED SHADOWS RELEASE March 20, 2025 | DEVELOPER Ubisoft After a series of delays the new action-adventure finally arrives. Play as Naoe the shinobi assassin and Yasuke the samurai warrior in a tale set in feudal Japan. ATOMFALL RELEASE March 27, 2025 | DEVELOPER Rebellion A western version of STALKER that is set in the British countryside, Atomfall is a survival-action game set in the aftermath of the apocalypse. Cricket bats guaranteed. INZOI RELEASE March 28, 2025 | DEVELOPER Krafton A graphically impressive new The Sims rival. Create, take control of, and observe the lives of Zois, with deep new customisation and construction options on offer. 2 months FATAL FURY: CITY OF THE WOLVES RELEASE April 24, 2025 | DEVELOPER SNK The legendary versus fighting series returns…

RELEASE March 11 DEVELOPER Ivy Road PUBLISHER Annapurna Interactive LINK s.team/a/1299460 Running a tea shop in a magical forest sounds like one of the very best things to do in a videogame, and this cosy narrative title from devs who worked on games such as The Stanley Parable and BioShock sees you learning the stories of the travellers who pass through your shop, before brewing a tea that’s perfect for them using what’s described as an ‘unusual contraption’. Intriguing.…

Lindsay Riehl was director of production on Civs VI and VII, and has also worked at Zynga and Kalypso Media. We spoke to her about her experiences with Civilization through the ages. How did you come to work on the Civilization series? I joined MicroProse in 1987 to work on a newly formed sports label. MicroProse’s bread and butter at the time were flight and military simulations and they were interested in diversifying their portfolio and exploring other genres of games. After great success with F-15 Strike Eagle and F-19 Stealth Fighter, Sid [Meier] began focusing on strategy games and topics that he was passionate about and had always interested him – Pirates! and Railroad Tycoon were born! Fortunately for me, I was moved to the adventure/strategy label because our…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A heartfelt sci-fi RPG where you manage resources, go on missions, and get to know your android body EXPECT TO PAY£21 DEVELOPERJump Over the Age PUBLISHERFellow Traveller REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 7 5800, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK fellowtraveller.games/citizen-sleeper-2-starward-vector I don’t think about my body much, if I can help it. The idea that my mind is just a rider in something that can wear, tear and break down isn’t a comforting thought. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector reminds me of this fact twofold: It’s a game about the slow degradation of the body, sure, but it’s also a sequel: an attempt to show growth, to do more. But in trying to grow, it’s become fractured, bumpy, and nicked in places – even…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A top-down action roguelike where you play as a walking, walloping inkwell EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Team Digital Toilet PUBLISHER Jungle Game Lab REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYER No LINK bit.ly/InKing The ink must flow in top-down action game InKing, where you play as an inkwell with an attitude and a deadly fountain pen. By attacking, you leave loads of ink on the floor, but this is the fuel for your special moves. Slather the stuff around each boxy arena, then hoover it up to pull off ink-based attacks. If Splatoon ever gets a Hades-style spinoff, it will look a lot like this. But that central gimmick does make InKing feel fresh. As well as…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The game that saved Resi and ruined the Spanish tourism industry EXPECT TO PAY £15 DEVELOPER Capcom PUBLISHER Capcom REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER No LINK store.steampowered.com/app/254700/Resident_Evil_4_2005/ It’s perhaps unreasonable to have Resi 4 on pages called They’re Back, given that it’s been rereleased so many times it doesn’t feel like it’s ever been away. As both the fundamental laws of physics and the soundtrack of Frozen 2 teach us, some things never change. The iterations will continue until we turn to dust. This month’s theme is organisation, or, more specifically, the act of mindfully putting things in other places. Where else would it be sensible, and indeed encouraged, to store an egg next to…

Motherboards aren’t super exciting. They’re not the component that we see posted on social media alongside the words, “I can’t believe I got one!!!” Nope, a motherboard is just a slab of PCB and some copper wires. A slab of PCB that connects up your CPU and RAM and ensures both are fed with clean power to run at their best. That is the difference between a high-speed or sluggish SSD. That decides whether you have enough USB ports, fast Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth. That ensures your audio sounds crystal clear. You can see where I’m going with this: a motherboard is pretty important, actually. With the arrival of two new generations of CPU from both AMD and Intel at the tail-end of 2024, we’ve been flooded with motherboards to test…

ROBERT JONES THIS MONTHLearned to hate Queen’s Blood ALSO PLAYEDBaldur’s Gate III, Remember Me Being stuck between two beautiful women is not something that most people would find troublesome. However, when there’s previous and potential romantic baggage circling, too, things become a little bit more complicated. You see, there’s undoubted chemistry between hero of the hour, Cloud Strife, and Aerith Gainsborough, the frequently flirtatious flower seller turned magic-wielding resistance fighter. They’ve been good friends, fought side-by-side against the Shinra Electric Power Company, and have shared plenty of emotional moments during their escape from Midgar to here, the expansive wild countryside that encircles around the great city. So Cloud and Aerith make sense. There have been awkward moments of silence, gazes that rested on each other for slightly too long, as…

Bloomberg reports that, following EA’s layoffs and restructuring at BioWare, the studio now has fewer than 100 employees, down from more than 200 during the development of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Meanwhile, at its peak, BioWare consisted of three studios and, conservatively, over 400 employees. Interestingly, Bloomberg’s sources say that the plan to “loan” BioWare developers to other EA studios while the next Mass Effect was in preproduction was put in place shortly after Veilguard launched, but before its sales failure came to light. Solid numbers are hard to come by, but even conservatively, I think we can estimate that peak BioWare was around 400-500 employees strong for much of the last decade, based on reporting from across that period. Even with BioWare’s reported internal struggles with a slapdash crunch…

The PC gaming icon that is Half-Life 2 turned 20 last November, and Valve pulled out all the stops to celebrate: a major new update, a commentary track and a documentary absolutely crammed with digressions about the challenge the studio set itself. And one of them was lighting. The development of Half-Life 2 was rooted in what multiple staff describe as “the tech wishlist,” which would take six years to fully realise and was absolutely foundational to what Valve wanted to achieve with the game. “[It] was a main feature that the light felt very, very realistic and intuitive because of the Source engine and the work, the collaboration between artists and engineers,” says Half-Life 2’s lead artist Viktor Antonov, before introducing our hero. “Ken Birdwell, he was a fan…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE March 31 DEVELOPER Madness Studio PUBLISHER Madness Studio LINK s.team/a/2204910 Marine. Sci-fi base. Portals. Demons. Shotgun. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Slipgate even goes as far as to show its player character in a green suit of armour, and it’s a classic retro shooter that’s not afraid to show its influences. One of its melee weapons is even a crowbar. There’s no id Tech or GoldSrc on show here, however. The game is made in the 15-year-old FPS Creator engine, which gives it a fully 3D mouselook that’s reminiscent of Quake or Half-Life. It feels more modern than either, as the lighting and texturing is like a brighter Doom 3 in feel (and there’s even a flashlight for the darker places), though…

As far as Sims competitors go, inZOI is doing something few others are managing to achieve: actually release. Krafton’s take on the life simulator genre is the closest we’ve come to anything on the size and scope of EA’s series, and the first game that could very well give The Sims a run for its money. Despite that, inZOI director Hyungjun ‘Kjun’ Kim doesn’t view his game as competition. “We see inZOI not as a competitor to The Sims, but rather as another option that fans of this genre can enjoy,” he tells me. “We have great respect for the legacy The Sims has built over the years, since we know that reaching that much depth in such a short period of time is no easy task.” It’s a noble…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A co-op roguelite tower defence/third-person shooter hybrid EXPECT TO PAY £25 DEVELOPER Robot Entertainment PUBLISHER Robot Entertainment REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-12700F, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK store.steampowered.com/app/2273980/Orcs_Must_Die_Deathtrap If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That mantra could apply to horde shooters in general – demonstrating through games like Helldivers 2 and Deep Rock Galactic that mowing down thousands of something will always be cool – as easily as it could apply to Orcs Must Die!, a series which spent the last decade content to reprise its novel blend of tower defence and third-person shooting with steely consistency. Trends come and go, industries shift and change, but orcs? Orcs must die, and that’s just not the sort…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?An expansive reimagining of an RPG classic EXPECT TO PAY£65 DEVELOPERSquare Enix PUBLISHERSquare Enix REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-13700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Ti MULTIPLAYERNo LINK ffVII.square-enix-games.com/en-us/games/rebirth Final Fantasy VII Rebirth gave me the world’s most luxurious vacation. From cruises, to resorts, to the world’s greatest amusement park, I was shuffled like a hurried tourist from one dazzling experience to the next, showered with endless shiny new things to admire. But the indoor kid in me must be too strong, because it didn’t take long before I was tired of all the sights and sounds and just wanted to go home. The middle entry in Square Enix’s ambitious planned trilogy remaking one of the most iconic games of all time, Rebirth sees the cast…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Nth Brnd LINK bit.ly/DesCastle How long can you hold your breath? I just managed a paltry 20 seconds, and I wasn’t even swinging a sword or solving a puzzle while I was doing it. This is the talent of the knight protagonist in the Zelda-esque Desmond’s Castle: to hold one’s breath while doing combat and exploring a castle. He’s holding his breath because the air is toxic in there. The knight can hold it for exactly ten minutes. Is that enough time to fight through a series of procedurally jumbled rooms containing zombies and simple puzzles? Let’s hope so, as that’s your mission after you volunteer to free a village from a vampire’s curse. I’ll get the bad stuff out of…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £15.50 DEVELOPER Witch Beam PUBLISHER Humble Games “Play the zen puzzle game”, the deceivers cried through forked tongues. “Just take the things from the boxes and put them on the shelves. What could be stressful about that?” I’ll tell you what: literally everything. Hell is discovering a single boot and wondering if the other has been irrevocably lost. A more charitable way of looking at it is that you’ll never know the true joy of reunited footwear if you don’t, at first, suspect one is gone, in much the same way that a free evening to play games feels amazing if it’s preceded by an extended period of business. I’d say that I’m perhaps overthinking this, but this might be exactly why Unpacking isn’t…

After all those months of waiting, of slightly mistranslated speculative reports and questionable photos of graphics cards in unnamed factory floors, the 5-series family had gone public. Hooray! And in several cases, the speculation was bang on: Nvidia’s new flagship gaming card, the RTX 5090, cost a shade under £2,000, featured 32GB of memory as many pre-launch reports suggested, and would you believe it, it offered a significant performance advantage over the RTX 4090. At least, that was the inference behind all the bar charts and the split-screen videos Nvidia released to accompany the 5090’s launch at CES. But upon slightly closer inspection, the quadrupled performance in games like Alan Wake 2 and the longstanding benchmark for neon signs reflecting in puddles that is Cyberpunk 2077 are the result not…

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 RSASRock £112 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400FIntel £170 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 7600AMD £250…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASENov 16, 2004 PUBLISHERValve DEVELOPERValve LINK half-life.com Sure, Gordon Freeman taking on the Combine in City 17 is pretty cool. But what about a hard-boiled private detective taking on the Combine in 1920s Chicago? Throw in some Tommy guns, trenchcoats, and a gritty voiceover, and you’ve got The Burton Equation, a mod that turns Half-Life 2 into a noir shooter. Don’t worry, it’s not all gunning-down gangsters: there’s plenty of sci-fi in the mod as well. Did I mention there’s time travel? There’s time travel. You may start out in gangland Chicago, but you won’t stay there for long. You can sit this fight out, Dr Freeman: Zachary Burton is on the case. In the world of The Burton Equation, the Combine aren’t quite the extradimensional alien…