Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2025 i PC Gamer

1 month 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! DUNE: AWAKENING RELEASE May 20, 2025 | DEVELOPER Funcom A massive-scale multiplayer survival game with crafting, ornithopters and, naturally, giant sandworms. Can you survive Arrakis, the most hostile of planets? ELDEN RING: NIGHTREIGN RELEASE May 30, 2025 | DEVELOPER FromSoftware The out of left-field Elden Ring spin-off sees the action RPG transformed into a wild new co-op roguelike RPG. Expect fast runs and the series’ typically epic bosses. 2 months STELLAR BLADE RELEASE June 2025 | DEVELOPER Shift Up Corporation The stunning action-RPG that was a smash…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Q3 2025 DEVELOPER Concept Games PUBLISHER Concept Games LINK s.team/a/2128430 T here are loads of people out there pining for the golden age of Sid Meier’s Pirates!, I’m certain of it. In the absence of another remake, we dig for treasure instead in open-world piratical games that take MicroProse’s work as an inspiration, such as Concept Games’ crowdfunded effort. The main issue with Pirates!, 21 years after its last release, is its repetitive nature. Seven Seas: Adventures attempts to rectify this with 37 different ports to visit, a set of unique starting conditions for your custom character that will affect the way they are received by society, and no dancing minigame. Total War is also on the devs’ list of inspirations, and with nine factions…

RELEASE Out now (Early Access) DEVELOPER VoxRay Games, Inc. PUBLISHER VoxRay Games, Inc. LINK s.team/a/2283580 Voxels were once supposed to be the future of PC games, and yet somehow polygons still endure. Voxile combines voxels and ray-tracing in a way that sounds like it could melt your graphics card if turned up to high enough settings, and as a result looks very much like a copy of Minecraft that fell through a time portal from the year of our lord 2050. Comparisons to Mojang’s somewhat popular title are inevitable, as the world of Voxile is made of blocks and it’s a survival game, but there’s a lot more shooting going on among the beautifully lit cubes here. Voxile is more of an exploration and combat game, with damage numbers…

Quasadron IX A free-runner’s nirvana chasms… PLANET STATS CLASSIFICATION Ringed planet SIZE/MASS Super-Earth ATMOSPHERE Tense ’GRAM-WORTHY? Yes, but snap from a safe footing HOSPITABLE RATING 2/10 Welcome, travellers. Sorry to hear about that whole being made redundant and dumped out in the furthest reaches of space thing. But look on the bright side – your former employer Kindred Aerospace probably isn’t even as good as the ‘Fourth best space exploration company’ status it likes to brag about. And now you’re free of its corporate clutches, you’ve got some time on your hands for a heck of a gap year. It’s the perfect opportunity to enjoy the picturesque tundra, distinctive floating rock formation and plentiful fatal drops of Quasadron IX. After exploring its many floating islands, where they can find a…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A semi open-world sci-fi mystery based on a real nuclear disaster from the ’50s EXPECT TO PAY£45 DEVELOPERRebellion PUBLISHERRebellion REVIEWED ONIntel Core i9-13900k, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK atomfall.com I’ve spent years wandering many an inhospitable wasteland, so Atomfall’s pleasant post-apocalypse is pretty inviting. They’ve got tea here. And bakeries. And it’s extremely green – not because of radiation storms, but because it’s all pastures and woods and verdant hills as far as the eye can see. It’d be a nice place for a ramble, if it weren’t for the fire-spewing robots, lethal flora, bandits, cultists and conspiracies. With its ’50s-inspired retro-futuristic setting, Atomfall has needed to contend with the spectre of Fallout since it was first unveiled, but the similarities are…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£25 DEVELOPERIvy Road LINK ivyroad.fun Go to therapy. That’s the message I received in Wanderstop, a narrative adventure about a warrior running a tea shop. I think it’s great advice, especially since it comes with an important and honest caveat: therapy, helpful as it may be, won’t fix you. It’s just a starting point. In Wanderstop you play as Alta, a fierce warrior who hasn’t known a single defeat in years, but who one day finds herself so weak she can’t even lift her sword. She collapses and awakens in a forest clearing where a cosy teashop owner named Boro suggests she recover her strength while learning how to make tea. What follows is part tea shop management sim and part story-driven adventure as Alta…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERDaFluffyPotato LINK bit.ly/GravBoots People need their gravity boots, particularly people floating in mid-air, and it’s your job to supply them in this lovely platform game, which has you selling as fast as you can. You have your own pair, which certainly helps as you invert gravity to help all the folks floating off the ceiling. An obvious touchstone for Gravity Boots Salesman is Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV, but this is a looser, friendlier game with no fail conditions and only your high score to beat. You get a point for every person you help, and you do this by mixing crafting components and taking the resulting boots to one of the customers floating on this planet. That’s one way to play the game, but let…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£9 DEVELOPERBethesda Game Studios PUBLISHERBethesda Softworks Rounding off our collection of reinvented games is Fallout 3, foremost in a series that has seen more conceptual overhauls than dearly-missed human phantasmagoria David Bowie. Going back to Fallout 3 is like trying to recall a specific Christmas from your childhood. Memories merge with a hazier, collective sense of how it all felt. The tactile feel of tearing thin paper off a new toy is replaced by the joy of punching off a super mutant’s head with a mechanical fist. Crisp winter mornings become leaden skies above a taupe wasteland. And, if I’m honest, my memories are more generous than the reality, especially since they merge with the superior New Vegas. Much of Fallout 3 is shaky. The…

Here are three things that recently happened to me: Until Dawn released in remastered form for PC. NBA 2K25 happened. Nvidia launched its new generation of GPUs but then forgot to manufacture any. To the untrained eye these might appear to be unrelated, but I see them for what they are, a triumvirate of conspirators hellbent on forcing me to come to terms with playing things at 40fps and/or some graphics options turned down to medium. Supermassive’s interactive teen slasher flick was never exactly esports-grade optimised over on PlayStation, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that my RTX 2080 Ti would have its work cut out to render all those snowy footprints and blood smears at max settings. This alone would not have been a significant event. For NBA 2K’s…

PHIL SAVAGE THIS MONTH Returned to the scene of the grind. ALSO PLAYED Kingdom Come: Deliverance II What a difference a spot of nostalgia can make. Back in January it felt like Bungie could do nothing right – a weak, overly grindy season compounding more longstanding complaints to create some truly rancid vibes among the Destiny 2 community. The playerbase dwindled. The subreddit revolted. The future looked bleak. And then Bungie released a new episode, Heresy, and suddenly Destiny 2 was good again. I could be glib and chalk this down to Bungie pressing the emergency ‘deploy fan-favourite location’ button, but it’s deeper than that. The return of Destiny 1’s Dreadnaught is a welcome chance to revisit a beloved slice of the game’s history. And the reemergence of Oryx has…

IAN EVENDEN THIS MONTH Destroyed things with wanton abandon. And in the game… ALSO PLAYED Crysis, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines As someone who’s been playing games since he was six, I’ve committed a lot of crimes. Some of them have been the kind you’d think were cute if a dog did them, such as petty pilfering for comedy purposes and graffiti. Though if your dog can do graffiti you might want to get that on TV rather than sitting there reading a magazine. Obviously, all this crime is cancelled out by the sheer number of times I’ve saved the universe, in recognition of which I should have been left immune from taxation for the rest of my life and the recipient of free lattes every time I go into…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE April 30, 2025 DEVELOPER Blendo Games PUBLISHER Annapurna Interactive LINK s.team/a/301280 M ore pirates, this time in space. Skin Deep comes from Blendo Games, the studio behind Quadrilateral Cowboy and the Flotilla games, and is a first-person shooter sort of immersive thing with cats and sneezing. More sneezing, now that I come to think of it, than I’ve ever seen in a game before. The sneezing doesn’t come from the cats, not from a cat allergy that would turn out to be a serious problem in this spacefaring culture. Despite the fact that the player character is clearly a human – we can see this from her reflection – and the space pirates seem to be too, as their very human-like heads come off when…

RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Lunar Division PUBLISHER Bithell Games LINK s.team/a/3350750 Science fantasy city-building sounds like a good time, and Amberspire has you managing populations and dealing with factional rivalries on an alien moon, but with the addition of dice. These add a degree of uncertainty to proceedings, meaning you won’t know exactly how much of a resource a building will produce, what the conditions will be, or how these events will play out.…

There comes a time in everyone’s life when you can’t just shake off aches and pains anymore. It’s around the same time you start needing to say ‘hnnnggggh’ every time you stand up. I came across this point last year when my doctor’s eyebrows furrowed with concern rather than a quick dismissal. A few tests and scans later and I’m on a waiting list for surgery. Luckily for me it’s nothing too worrying, but needing to go to hospital and go under the knife is always going to be scary. “Don’t worry,” my specialist told me. “It’s a simple surgery…” But of course I am worrying and have stew in it for months while I wait. So, to help take my mind off of things I turned to videogames and…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A PC port of Team Ninja’s Edo-era action RPG that landed on PS5 last year EXPECT TO PAY£40 DEVELOPERTeam Ninja PUBLISHERKoei Tecmo REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-10875H, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK tinyurl.com/ymm3cwap Rise of the Ronin on PC has kept me guessing for all the wrong reasons. Don’t get me wrong, I love a rambling systems-heavy open-world action RPG romp as much as the next guy. I’m fond of being led on countless wild goose chases across fantastical lands with ambiguous historical grounding. And I’m partial to layered combat systems, brutal melee combinations and enemies who scale in difficulty as I become increasingly adept at waving a pretend wooden stick around while clicking my real-life mouse at the exact right moment.…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£25 DEVELOPERTwo Point Studios LINK tinyurl.com/44zvrxca Two Point Studios has successfully cornered the niche market of contorting straight-laced concepts into zany shenanigans all wrapped up in a stellar management sim, and Two Point Museum very well be the developer’s best iteration to date. With five museums to manage Two Point Museum’s campaign had me bouncing between each one to progress and unlock new items or mechanics. Memento Mile is your bog-standard fossil exhibition, while Passwater Cove sports an aquarium vibe, and Pebberley Heights puts you on a platform in the clouds where exhibits fall from the sky. Responsibilities start at little more than sending staff out on expeditions to retrieve new goods to display and decorate. Eventually I’m spinning multiple plates: watching out for…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A game about struggling to do anything when you’re suffering from burnout EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERDeconstructeam PUBLISHERDeconstructeam REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK bit.ly/Vendran Vendrán las aves (‘The birds will come’, according to the internet) is a game about dealing with work-induced burnout – or not dealing, as the case may be. In this narrative time management game from the developer of The Red Strings Club, you’ve taken a year off from your job and bought a new electric guitar, which is surely the perfect recipe for a year of joyful musical expression from the comfort of your flat. Er, about that. Turns out humans rely on (checks notes) energy, which is in short supply after work has drained…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?Dragon Quest but it’s sad old men drinking tinned sake EXPECT TO PAY£16 DEVELOPERRyu Ga Gotoku Studio PUBLISHERSEGA REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-7700, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK store.steampowered.com/app/1235140/Yakuza_Like_a_ Dragon/ There’s a zaniness to the Yakuza series that suggests a total disregard for normalcy and structure. It features men in their mid-50s who are capable of defeating hundreds of assailants. It’s a series that finds excuses to feature dangerous predators with the express purpose of making you eventually batter them. At one point, in Like a Dragon, you fist fight a digger. It’s hopefully a measure of the game’s ambition, then, when I say that the very structure of Like a Dragon represents the most absurdist move the series has ever pulled.…

The first analogue gaming keyboard was released nearly ten years ago. The Wooting One. It promised a paradigm shift in keyboard movement, using specialised switches. These aren’t your average mechanical numbers, they use optical sensors to monitor the entire range of a key’s travel, top to bottom. But it’s no longer just Wooting in the game. It has spawned many alternatives, some of which I’m testing here today. Gone are the optical switches, replaced by Hall effect, and with so many options, I’m here to help you make the right choice. 80 HE WOOTING £184 The original 1 One of the best examples of a modern Hall effect keyboard is the Wooting 80HE. It’s a little extravagant for its see-through chassis and light bar, but it really stands out for…

ROBERT JONES THIS MONTH Rode the Black Mesa Transit System to Nando’s. ALSO PLAYED Final Doom, Pandemonium! The Half-Life RTX demo is now out, so I thought I’d give this fully retraced remake of the classic FPS a whirl. And, while there are currently only the Ravenholm and Nova Prospect levels available to play through, rather than the full game, what we’ve got here sure is damn impressive. Well, it’s damn impressive providing you have the graphics card to run it, with my GeForce RTX 3090 Ti system puffing to run the game at a high framerate on Ultra settings at 4K resolution. So, why is that? Half-Life 2 RTX is an unofficial, modder-led remaster of Half-Life 2 that is built using Nvidia’s RTX Remix modding platform, and that means…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEJune 18, 2002 PUBLISHERInfogrames DEVELOPERBioWare LINK store.steampowered.com Kingdom Come: Deliverance II: it ain’t Skyrim. That’s not a criticism, mind you, just a hard truth. They’re both RPGs, but KCDII is aiming for a more authentic experience when it comes to combat, travel, alchemy, and many of its other systems – heck, even wearing a helmet and putting the visor down isn’t all that straightforward in KCDII. The deliberate and meticulous nature of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II’s systems are a big part of what makes it such a great and immersive experience, but that doesn’t mean everything about these systems is universally beloved. Tweaking a few systems to make them less labour intensive isn’t unthinkable, which is why the mods that sprung up so quickly for the RPG…

G ood news, GTA fans: a dedicated modder has gone to great lengths to create a playable version of GTA VI’s map in GTA V. Bad news, GTA fans: Take-Two has already decided it’s not having any of that, and dispatched a battalion of lawyers to obliterate videos of it from the internet. As a result, our modder has also put the kibosh on people downloading it. “In case you don’t know, I basically created a playable GTA V map based on the leaks and the trailer shots of GTA VI,” explains map creator Dark Space in a recent YouTube video. Dark Space based his project on a GTA VI community mapping project, one that’s attempting to model the upcoming game’s world based on trailers and leaks. It didn’t come…

While every game should be preserved, not even a masterful team can turn fool’s gold into true buried treasure. That seems a fair takeaway from the second Tomb Raider Remastered trilogy, released in February and featuring the less-loved latter three of Core Design’s Tomb Raider games, including Angel Of Darkness. I asked Jordan Reese, product manager at Aspyr, whether remastering all six games was the initial plan, especially considering how Lara’s reputation began to crumble a bit after her third outing. He confirmed that they were in for the long-haul from the start. “Remastering the entire collection of classic Tomb Raider games was our goal from the start, so we’re really happy with where we’ve gone with Tomb Raider I-VI Remastered,” he said. It’s a fine plan on paper, but…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Relic Entertainment PUBLISHER Relic Entertainment LINK s.team/a/3269230 C ompany of Heroes dev Relic unveiled this species-blurring tactics game back in February to some consternation. How could the studio behind CoH3 have made something so cartoony? Setting aside that one of the game’s influences is Advance Wars, not noted for its gritty realism. In 2003 Relic released Impossible Creatures via Microsoft. It’s a strategy game with a strong Island of Doctor Moreau seam running through it, as to create your armies you blend animals together to combine their traits. So creating a tiger with lobster parts gives you an armoured killing machine, while an electric eel and camel would produce something that can go for long periods without water and zap bad guys with electricity.…

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, from my double helping of the game’s prologue, is very keen to let you embrace the power fantasy of being a supernatural predator, but it equally focuses on solving mysteries and crimes. Imagine splicing Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles with Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and you’re close. But let’s jump back a bit to the first question you might be asking yourself: who am I? Unlike Redemption or the first Bloodlines, which kicked you into the World of Darkness as a vampire, this time we play as the Nomad, who picks the nom de guerre Phyre – a vampire celebrity who’s not been forgotten despite these years of sleeping. WAKEY WAKEY Playing a character with so much power – even though you’ve lost much…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A cel-shaded Soulslike set in the world of Dungeon Fighter Online EXPECT TO PAY£50 DEVELOPERNeople PUBLISHERNexon REVIEWED ONIntel Core i5 12400F, 32GB RAM, AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT MULTIPLAYERNo LINK tinyurl.com/2p8wj2aa Do you remember the moment that Sekiro forced you to start playing by its rules? For me, I was trundling through the game like I was playing Dark Souls when I hit the Lady Butterfly boss, and suddenly there was no room for doubt: if I didn’t properly learn these new combat mechanics, I wasn’t going any further. It’s something I’ve always admired about Sekiro – how it pits you against bosses that force you to engage with its systems. As with many Soulslikes in recent years, Khazan apes quite a few of Sekiro’s…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A competitive CS:GO and Valorant style shooter that introduces gameplay-changing buffs and debuffs called Shard Cards EXPECT TO PAYFree to Play DEVELOPERBad Guitar Studio PUBLISHERBad Guitar Studio/ NetEase REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-13650HX, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 MULTIPLAYERYes LINK fragpunk.com What if, while playing a competitive shooter, you could force your opponents to fire their weapon every five seconds? What if you could instantly teleport them back to their spawn when they take damage? What if you could toss aside a weapon to turn it into a mini-turret? Every match, Fragpunk tosses out half a dozen gimmicks that could anchor entire videogames with its incredible Shard Card system. These act like cheat codes that break the rules of traditional shooters. While Fragpunk takes the…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A real-time mech tactics roguelite set in dieselpunk World War II EXPECT TO PAY£17 DEVELOPERMilky Tea Studios PUBLISHERMegabit Publishing REVIEWED ONIntel Core i9-13900K, 64GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 STEAM DECKVerified MULTIPLAYERNone LINK megabit-publishing.com/games/grit-and-valor-1949 Some of my favourite moments in roguelikes (and -lites) are when I beat the odds and clawed my way to victory on my very first run. Grit and Valor – 1949 didn’t give me the opportunity. It wanted me to die first, and it tied one of my hands behind my back to get its wish. I had to fight, grind and unlock the privilege of not being doomed. This isn’t to say that Grit and Valor is a drag. Combat is snappy and engaging, boss fights are multi-phase slobberknockers and…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERjfrisby LINK bit.ly/SphinxTime It’s the rare adventure game these days that prioritises puzzles, so it was a delight to fire up The Sphinx of Time and be presented with puzzles that would fit in nicely in the genre’s golden age. Time has stopped, and you’ve flown to a space museum to start it. In your mission to summon the Sphinx of Time, who has the power to repair the universe, you have to switch on and operate an alien machine, although this is easier said than done. It’s a puzzle that will have you travelling back and forth through the museum, making notes as you switch between two characters. I cheated a bit to get me on the right track, like I do in…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£6 DEVELOPERWestwood Studios PUBLISHERElectronic Arts The low hum of mild conversation at the ambassadorial reception. I take another Ferrero Rocher from the gilded tray and continue my anecdote. “And, in 2002, they released a Command & Conquer shooter, in which you could shift perspectives and play as a commando named Havoc!” Delighted titters from my rapt, handsome audience. As you might gather, Renegade is a strange beast. The characterisation is hilariously broad. Havoc is like the evolution of Snake Plissken: a furious, angular wheelie bin of a man who has zero respect for his superiors. His superior is just a wall of medals with a head, who insists on being called sir then does nothing when it doesn’t happen. One character’s personality type is just…

Since the Earth’s tectonic plates first cooled sufficiently to sustain living organisms, primitive life forms have been measuring their PCs’ performance in games against one metric. That metric is framerate, and it’s been utterly sacrosanct in PC gaming, an unmovable pillar around which the whole culture has been built. And then AI frame gen came along, scrunched all that received wisdom up into a ball and blew a raspberry while tossing it nonchalantly over its shoulder into a bin. We’re in a strange moment at the start of this RTX 5-series age, one in which framerate is no longer a precise enough metric to describe your experience of how smoothly you enjoy the game being delivered to your monitor, and just before anybody comes up with a better methodology. But…

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 £150 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…