Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2025 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

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…

Supermassive Games has made a name for itself with narrative horror games such as Until Dawn and The Quarry that are driven by player choices, but aspire to look like the movies. With Directive 8020, though, Supermassive is thinking about the breadth of its scares and is finding ways to iterate on how it does horror. The story of Directive 8020 is centered on a team of astronauts, undertaking a mission to Tau Ceti f, a last hope for a dying human race, 12 light years from home. The crew of the colony ship Cassiopeia depart with optimism, but soon find themselves embroiled in something much more dangerous than they could have imagined: a flowchart. OK, no, the flowchart—key to Directive 8020’s new approach to branching storylines—is actually helpful. The…

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 privatized 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 achieved via a Two Point-like building and management game, with…

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 and fat from ruling source-rich planets…

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There’s a confidence in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. You can see it in the world design, feel it in the colorful 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. It’s not without blemishes, though. For every moment worth celebrating there’s also a frustrating enemy encounter or a confusing UI feature to endure. The resulting game can be summed up in one word: inconsistent. Tainted Grail is a dark fantasy take on Arthurian legend set in the same world as the popular…

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, offering a well-curated suite of changes and upgrades. One thing you can’t get in any mod is the remaster’s redone cutscenes. Even with the NewDark engine upgrade and high-res panels, we’ve…

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—not the paving stones or mud we’re thoughtlessly squelching underfoot. However, by not…

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 is weird and aloof, and Winston is underwritten. It’s exactly what anyone…

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 one airstrip and dropping them off at another. After a few basic jobs, I slowly…

The Japanese language dub came out shortly before this column’s main event, but as a series first, it’s worth a few spotlighting sentences… though I’m calling attention to it simply to highlight the fact voice actress Saki Fujita performs the dry tannoy announcements. That’s right: in Japanese, quips about bones and crowbars are delivered by none other than the human voice of Miku Hatsune—and I, for one, can’t wait to see what the Steam Workshop tinkerers do with that nugget of knowledge. Moving on to the headline act, Two Point Museum is finally unearthing its chunky 2.0 update. Momentous for more reasons than the name alone, this update introduces a number of changes to how curators manage their museum’s staff, security, and decor. After all, what’s the point of perfecting…

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 grocery stores in two-meter 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 quiz (aka arguing with our families about the names of American 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…

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.…

There are no big surprises here: Borderlands 4 is more you’re all Borderlands. But if extraction-shootered-out and a classic co-op campaign is what you’re looking for (a sentiment I can sympathize with!), then I think you’ve got something to look forward to in Borderlands 4. Specifically, a bigger world, some fun new movement abilities, a cool hover bike, and possibly fewer memes. (Thank God.) The bulk of my preview time was spent in Borderlands 4’s uncharacteristically colorful opening environment on the planet Kairos, which had been hidden from the universe until series protagonist Lilith teleported a moon into its orbit. That cosmic disaster disrupted the rule of an order-obsessed dictator called The Timekeeper, and the latest crew of vault hunters have now arrived on a planet in revolt. FIRST CONTACT I…

Isat down to play Crimson Desert at my hands-on session armed with false I confidence. I’d already played a combat demo at an event in 2024, so I charged protagonist Kliff into a battle with dozens of enemy soldiers with the foolhardy impression that remembering the button to swing my sword was good enough. I was instantly kerb-stomped. Pearl Abyss has provided the press with lots of opportunities to play Crimson Desert ahead of its still-unspecified 2025 release, and in that time I’ve seen it described a number of ways: a game for fighting game sickos, a darker Breath of the Wild, The Witcher 3 with a grab button. All fair comparisons, but one thing my demo copilot insisted I shouldn’t call it is an RPG. An “open-world action game”…

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 OF THE HEAP You’re not the only one at the top…

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. RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Failbetter Games PUBLISHER Failbetter Games LINK s.team/a/3710210…

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 succinct. Deus…

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 the ease with which I fell back into old, tenth-prestige habits, deftly comboing my Splitgater’s tastefully limited arsenal of grenades, abilities, and melee attacks, and racking up multi-kills, but its flagship feature falls flat, and the maps and…

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 of tower defense. Structurally, this sequel is near-identical. You still occupy a fancy four-floor train, with a fragile pyre you need to protect occupying the top floor. Every turn several enemies rudely break into your train via…

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 whole thing collapses, grinning, under the weight of its own stupidity.…

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 other rather than devouring you. In this sense, it captures that…

In true Elder Scrolls style, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon plonks you into prison and a suitably gruff, mysterious man comes to your rescue. Sort of. He stabs your interrogator and leaves you to fend for yourself with zero guidance in a labyrinthine plague-addled asylum. The atmosphere is palpably thick with disease and intrigue, and after some sneaky-ish hijinks, I catch-up with my ‘savior’, Caradoc. He says he’ll meet me outside at the beach—presumably not for a Mr Whippy. Once again, I’m left fumbling around in the dark and end up unwittingly perusing an erotic novel featuring a fair maiden’s ‘love apples’. BLOOD PACT A towering skeletal statue known as a Menhir teleports me to a fractured plane of existence where I embark on a walking tour of the…

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 and greatest…

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.…

The wiseguys came for me just after I woke up. I just had time to answer the phone—a warning that I was going to get whacked—and read a pamphlet on boxing left on the counter before they kicked in the door. Then I beat them with a bat. That was the first time. It didn’t end well. I left my apartment and got into the elevator, heading down to the lobby door like the guy on the phone said. But there were goons everywhere. Some didn’t see me, so I could take ’em out quiet like, but others were hunting for me. I could hear them coming. So I crouched down, so they couldn’t see me. Didn’t work all the time though, sometimes I got in a rumble. Just like…

The most disappointing thing about my demonstration of Onimusha: Way of the Sword is that I didn’t play it: Capcom shuffled press into a room to watch a theatre demo of Onimusha. However, Onimusha was played live, and that point was the difference maker in my hype levels for this Samurai slasher. Without the game being played live, I would have been nowhere near as impressed with the perfectly coordinated fights I witnessed, with a Capcom dev showcasing the swordplay of Miyamoto Musashi, Way of the Sword’s protagonist, whose face was modeled after legendary Japanese cinema icon Toshiro Mifune. Musashi’s animations stood out immediately. His swings were measured, playing out much slower than most katana-wielding game heroes while blending smoothly from one slice to the next. His movements were dancelike,…

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 with him to keep in touch with family and loved ones…

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 the studio really took flight with Dying…

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 control stick of my ornithopter with all my strength as bad words continue to pour out of me. If this worm swallows me I’ll lose everything: my thopter, the spice in my pockets, everything else in my…

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 butt 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 lifeforms. A woman fighting to reclaim the planet and save humanity alongside a drone companion, soundtracked by eerie female vocals. Do the world or its characters ever acknowledge this? No. It’s a bizarre juxtaposition in a game that…

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 of helping people in triage is to jumble up some herbs. Handily, there are loads of herbs in your garden. Unhandily, you can only prepare one vial of treatment a day, so you have to choose which…

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 who aren’t big enough to be in the proper Chaos gang. The events in the Vermintide games are almost like their initiation ceremony—‘You can’t be one of the ruinous powers unless you help us destroy this planet’. So…

I feel like clowns are one of the things everyone jumps to saying they’re scared of when they’re younger. There’s just something about them which is off-putting when you’re so small, and a lot of the time that carries into adulthood resulting in a grimace whenever you see something clown-adjacent. Luckily I was never plagued with the fear of clowns, so Poco, the story of the world’s smallest clown, quickly piqued my interest when it popped up on Steam. After being outcast by the circus, Poco is sent down to a forgotten world littered with random junk and a handful of strange creatures needing help. These creatures, or homunculi as they’re referred to in the game, will help you get back to the circus if you complete tasks for them…

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 mech. And it takes advantage of the latest in rendering technology, just as Doom 3 did with id Tech…

TECH REPORT 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…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick the parts 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 MID-RANGE BUILD Our recommended build for playing the latest games ADVANCED BUILD Go above and beyond with a PC powerful enough to end worlds…