The best PC games ever Best PC games of 2018 Best graphics card 2019 Best free games Dota Underlords builds Teamfight Tactics guide [9.20]
Feature: King of Dragon Surpassed
The war chief is dead. Aminai, our wisest herder, took her place but was struck with a deadly illness. Crop after crop failed as the world became darker and colder. Our herds are pitiful, barely half of our people have a horse. Our neighbours, once toasting our clan, raid us without mercy, burning defences and stealing precious cattle. Storm worshippers from the south sense weakness…
Feature: In honour of His Souliness
Sorry, definition nerds. “Soulslike” is a word now. Disgusting, I know, but this is how genres are made. Along comes a giant like Dark Souls that everybody won’t stop bleating about and soon it has copycats. Before you know it, a swarm of like-minded games with sparse checkpoints and lethal attacks are scuttling around, leaving slime trails and biting your ankles for surprisingly massive damage.…
Feature: We hate the technology
Eliza is a visual novel about Evelyn, a woman starting work as a 'proxy' for the eponymous service. The service is counselling by algorithm. The proxies sit and listen, while clients say whatever they have to say, and the system takes measurements of things like heart rate, vocal stress and such, before analysing keywords used and delivering a reply. You read the script it generates,…
Feature: This is your brain on Wilmot
For the first three and a half billion years of its history, life on earth was fairly dull. It was, essentially, a load of little blobs mucking around in a great big sea. But then, five hundred million years ago, the Cambrian Explosion happened. Despite its name, it was not a sick wrestling move, but a sudden evolutionary riot, in which life diversified into a…
Feature: Put your wallet away
Read this article about the very best free PC games and watch as capitalism collapses around you. There are enough that there's no reason you should ever spend money again.
Feature: Apes out
The streets are in chaos. There is a police officer beating a slum dweller. A red-shirted gangster has started an ill-advised stabbing match with three members of a rival blue gang. And an ape, recently escaped from captivity, is calmly watching it all, unable to speak the language of these terrible people. Amid such bedlam, what do you do as a player of Streets Of…
Feature: Our favourites thus far
Summer. The heat age. Scorch season. Spring's hangover. It's the mid-point of the year and you know what that means. No, not "mojito time", Geoff, put those away. It's time we told you what the best games of the year are so far. There are quite a lot of them. Just look how many videogames have escaped from their developers in the past six months…
Feature: Katana Zero, My Friend Pedro nil
Katana Zero has the juiciest text boxes I've ever seen. During dialogue, words can imply the pace of speech by appearing letter-by-letter or thumping on screen one word at a time. Words and phrases can be highlighted in different colours, and can further suggest intonation by animating wavily or by each letter shaking as if terrified. When in conversation, there's a timer during every player…
Feature: With a little help from Ghoastus the Roman ghost
For me, one of the perennial pleasures in PC gaming is clicking ‘new game’ on a fresh Paradox grand strategy game, and having that big ol’ map unrolled before me, freighted with promise and overwhelming complexity. If you’ve not played one of these before - and for all its glories, Imperator: Rome is very much an iteration of the formula established by Europa Universalis in…
Feature: Supra hella alchemistic exceptionally creative
I had already decided Supraland was my favourite game of 2019 so far before I noticed it was almost entirely made by one man. If you'd asked me to guess, as I played this 20-hour vast, ingenious, hugely entertaining first-person puzzle game, I'd have said it needed to be a team of at least twenty. The art alone is a squad's job, before you get…
Feature: Can he do it? Shuriken
Sekiro hurts. It is a painful, graceful game about being a sword-swinging barbarian who must learn how to dance. Even more than its Dark Souls predecessors, it forces you to play on its terms: learn the steps or die. Fools sometimes say suffering leads to wisdom or insight. Well, you won’t gain enlightenment through the hundred deaths of this ninja follow-up. But you will learn…
Feature: RPS IS YAY
I first saw Baba Is You a year ago during the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC, and was -- like everyone else in the crowd -- absolutely blown away. But, of course, with these big novel ideas always comes the fear that it might not translate into a coherent game. Some of the stars of the EGW have gone on to be somewhat flat, their…
Feature: Y2K Hun?
Hypnospace Outlaw, if it can be described at all, is a game about policing an alternate-world dream-based internet browsing system in 1999. Oh yes. Accessed by wearing a brain-scanning headband, users can create their own Geocities-like web spaces, interact via a chat app, and share music and images with one another, all via the HypnOS operating system. Think Compuserve, but you're asleep. And, because it's…
Feature: Current trends say apes are in, actually
Once I went to the zoo in San Diego, and a load of people were banging on the glass at an orangutan and its baby instead of just being appropriately (quietly) awed. One man in particular was hollering at what was a very sad looking ape, and honestly if there was justice in the world the orangutan would have smashed free and liquified that man’s…
Feature: Top dog
Apex Legends is a dumb name. There. There goes the hat of criticism, back into its box. On goes the hat of unreserved praise. That name is just about the only foot the Titanfall devs have set wrong here, and I expect to be stretching my Apelegs every evening for the foreseeable future. This is the best battle royale game we’re going to see for…
Feature: A miracle of design
It’s not often I get to play a game for 187 hours before reviewing it. Hell, it's not often I play a game for 187 hours. Deck-building, singleplayer roguelite Slay The Spire, which gets a full release today after just over a year in early access, has me on its hook. Traditionally, I look at a number like that and hate myself – so much…
Feature: Armless fun
Do you remember those jelly-like toy octopuses you had when you were a kid, which you throw at a window or wall? They'd half-stick/half-walk their way down the surface, their legs glooping on and off as they rolled in a semi-controlled fall. That's what the character in the ridiculously delightful Pikuniku most immediately reminds me of. It's just the way he walks. It's the most…
Feature: For it is in gibbing that we receive
DUSK rather undersells itself when it declares it's "straight outta the '90s". While absolutely going for that Doom/Hexen vibe, with outstandingly fast movement, gorgeous chunky pixel enemies, and big meaty guns that pack a punch, it also has a really quite fantastic amount of good sense where not to be faithful to those mid-90s gibby times. If anything, DUSK feels like the FPS that id,…
Feature: Everything and nothing
I could, I suspect, dash myself against Kenshi's wind-bleached rocks for a full year and still feel ill-qualified to pass judgement upon it. You might as well ask me to review atmospheric pressure, or continental drift. Kenshi is everything. Kenshi is nothing. Kenshi just is.
Feature: Turn-based Stalker, with ducks
There are at least 99 ways this could have gone horribly wrong. XCOM-ish turn-based action in an apparently shameless borrow from STALKER’s setting, but starring a talking pig and duck? An overwhelmingly nihilistic tone, but also endless use of the ‘duck sounds a bit like another, naughtier word’ gag? Even the name, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, has that algorithmically-generated SEO jank vibe to…
Page 1 of 3
Older posts