Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 i PC Gamer

1 month TONY HAWK’S PRO SKATER 3 + 4 RELEASE July 11, 2025 | DEVELOPER Iron Galaxy Studios The now legendary skating sims return with more skaters, new skate parks, gnarlier tricks, fresh beats, cross-platform multiplayer and upgraded graphics. 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…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Windflower PUBLISHER Windflower LINK s.team/a/2477600 Have you ever played that Mario game on the Switch where the plumber starts in 3D then plays 2D levels set into the walls of the buildings he explores? Offscreen inverts that, starting as a 2D game with 3D sections you can access after your robot gets a chip upgrade. First, it needs to be said that the Steam demo of Offscreen installed with its language set to Russian. This caused it to be less than easy to play until I worked out how to set it to English with the aid of Google Translate on my phone. Even then, some parts used the Cyrillic alphabet, but this is a demo version of the game and we can…

RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Half Sword Games PUBLISHER Game Seer Publishing LINK s.team/a/2397300 Start up the Half Sword demo on Steam – which, it’s important to note, calls itself a tech demo rather than a gameplay demo – and you’ll be able to stab your own avatar in the face on what appears to be a character creation screen. From there he’s dumped into the Abyss, a foggy (or dark) void in which crates of clothing and weapons sit marked by candles waiting to be pillaged, and given very little in the way of guidance. Alternatively, you can take part in fights against one or more opponents, in which your avatar’s ability to move his arms independently leads to all kinds of awkward flailing about until blood is spilt. Half…

The rendezvous is a motel room. The heist has gone badly and, as the sole survivor, I’m limping in with the goods. The fixer is frightened. Long before Dexter DeShawn is having me gunned down coming out of the bathroom, I knew that I was getting double-crossed. I wanted to get my shot in first. I had another buyer for the chip in my head. That would have been thematically and contextually appropriate, but I was explicitly unable to do any of that. I’ve had a degree of dissonance playing Cyberpunk 2077. I’m visiting Night City years after everyone else, yes, but this is 2.2 – the definitive version. However, my efforts to play it my way, as opposed to how the developers want me to, makes a mockery of…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The latest FPS from the makers of Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein EXPECT TO PAY £60 DEVELOPERid Software PUBLISHER Microsoft REVIEWED ON Intel Core i9 9900KS, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super MULTIPLAYER No LINK tinyurl.com/nhhpbp68 In a time when the FPS campaign is so vanishingly rare that the only helping of big-budget shooting we can rely on each year is from Call of Duty, it’d be easy for id Software to kick up its feet and decide “more Doom” is good enough. It’d be good enough for me. But that’d be dereliction of id’s duty to the genre it created. To id, a new Doom is an opportunity to demolish a perfectly good sand castle and start fresh. Doom: The Dark Ages…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An open-world racer with drifty physics and life sim elements EXPECT TO PAY £29 DEVELOPER Gaming Factory PUBLISHER Gaming Factory, 4Divinity REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7 9700K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti MULTIPLAYER No LINK store.steampowered.com/app/1153410/ JDM_Japanese_Drift_ Master/ You’ll remember the drift events in classic Need for Speed. During that era when the games were soundtracked by crunk songs, told quasi-Fast and Furious tales and reached Christmas number one in the charts, NFS introduced drifting as a sort of side-show. There was a totally different physics model underpinning it, one that made ordinary driving nigh-impossible but allowed for some outrageous skidding about in search of a high score. JDM understands the nostalgic appetite for that era of NFS game – you…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £6 DEVELOPER Lente LINK shorturl.at/fo7u6 Cleaning the house is never on my list of things I want to do, but somehow in games it’s always one of my favourite things. Be that clearing objectives off of a map or organising inventory, tidying is better in game form. Tiny boat game Spilled scratches that itch by having you clean up polluted water to improve the ecosystem. There’s not much to it. You control a small boat that’s tasked with clearing away slicks of oil, rescuing animals and tidying rubbish. As you bring rubbish back to recycling centres you’ll earn coins to spend on upgrades for your vessel. There’s a touch of Powerwash Simulator about it – it’s incredibly satisfying cutting through swathes of black…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Snoring Dog Games LINK bit.ly/FlayedMan In this damned good adventure game, you play as a man enduring torment in Hell. A man who has had his skin flayed off, so every step he takes in the course of puzzle-solving is an exquisite agony. Er, sorry about that, The Flayed Man, but I’m generally quite slow at solving puzzles. Another way this skinless chap differs from most adventure game protagonists is that he can’t think or speak, at least at first. While it’s not long before a demon grants him the ability to comment on the items you examine, it’s a little while longer before the flayed man regains his tongue, something that gives this point-and-click a very different flavour from its…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £16 DEVELOPER Gamious PUBLISHER Whitethorn Games Imagine a job that’s so full on that a two-week break doing an entirely different job feels like a holiday. That’s the premise of Lake, a delivery game that’s so sedate compared to Death Stranding that it feels like Sam Porter Bridges’ version of heaven. You play as Meredith Weiss, a high-flying computer person who returns to her parochial lakeside hometown after 22 years away. And that’s literally all I need to write about Lake for you to extrapolate almost every element of the story. You just drive around in your little post van, chat to the locals, reconnect with estranged friends. The closest you come to conflict is a spiky old shopkeeper pointing out your grey hairs;…

With Windows 10’s imminent discontinuation on October 14, many of us have suffered a very peculiar indignity lately: being told by Windows that our puny, pathetic top-spec gaming PCs don’t meet the requirements for Windows 11. Sure, it can run Assassin’s Creed Shadows or Avowed in 4K with the softest of soft shadows enabled, and still hit 120fps. On a good day, it can even load an article from a local news website without Chrome crashing to desktop. But run Windows’ latest operating system? Forget it. In reality, for most users with high-spec hardware who are coming up against a compatibility wall for Windows 11, the problem is likely as simple as turning on TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot, rather than a fundamental lack of componentry. But while we contend…

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 RS ASRock £112 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400F Intel £130 Intels’ budget chip is still fantastic value and a solid all-rounder GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX 7600 AMD £300 AMD delivers what we need for a…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEAugust 2, 1991 PUBLISHERSega DEVELOPERSega LINK streets4rage.com It doesn’t take much time to pick your average beat-’em-up clean – even Streets of Rage, inarguably among the best games in the genre, is about an hour long regardless of which entry you pick up. The fun is in replaying it over and over, getting through with fewer and fewer continues, and roping your friends in for some co-op button mashing; but even so, every well runs dry eventually. Until rogue fans step in, of course. Streets of Rage X is an OpenBOR recreation of the 16-bit Streets of Rage games by developer Kratus which makes those originals feel minuscule. Each game from the Mega Drive trilogy is a mere ‘route’ on offer here, with each character previously…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Wombat Brawler PUBLISHER Wombat Brawler LINK s.team/a/3686530 Anyone who’s played the Stardew Valley fishing minigame will know the stress of trying to reel in one of the slippery blighters. Thankfully, Cast n Chill isn’t about stress – the clue is in the name – but about sinking your hook in the right place and getting enjoyment from the process. Of course, you can deliberately sink your hook in the wrong place if you want – there’s something supremely relaxing about sitting in a boat with your best friend by your side and not actually catching anything. Catch n Chill is designed as an idle game, a way to waste time when you’ve got nothing to do and aren’t in the mood to exercise…

RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER SUPER AC PUBLISHER SUPER AC LINK s.team/a/3503790 Chicago, the 1930s. Meat is on the menu, but it’s also illegal, so smuggling gangs are bringing shipments of chops, steak and sausages into the city any way they can to feed the ruthless black market. Enter Eliot Ness, who’s a dog but also a cop, and his specialist team of Untouchables who will chew up crime and corruption using stealth and tactics. And make a nice casserole for dinner, presumably.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A comedy co-op Metroidvania with an impressive ecosystem EXPECT TO PAY £31.50 DEVELOPER Raccoon Logic PUBLISHER Raccoon Logic REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7 9700K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK tinyurl.com/j9n3p89v The first thing that hits you is the way your character walks. There you are, excreted out into the furthest reaches of the universe by an uncaring colonisation corporation, made redundant by said corporation immediately upon hitting terra firma and left to scrabble around for scattered survival packages that will allow you to just barely continue existing. And yet you’re swaggering around your new home planet like you’re the luckiest space pioneer ever to be laid off. That bouncy walk cycle is a great marker of Revenge of…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Harsh survival expertly coupled with an intriguing sci-fi story EXPECT TO PAY £35 DEVELOPER 11 bit studios PUBLISHER 11 bit studios REVIEWED ON Intel Core i9-13900HX, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 MULTIPLAYER No LINK 11bitstudios.com Jan’s the only survivor of an intergalactic mining operation that’s gone horribly wrong, and he’s the last person anyone would hope was the last person standing in an ‘all alone on an alien planet so hostile just standing around outside could kill someone’ scenario. He’s also going to be burned into a cosmic crisp in a matter of days unless I get on top of this mess right now. So my first few in-game days in The Alters are spent running around in a blind panic, trying…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A choices-filled narrative adventure through ’90s girlhood nostalgia EXPECT TO PAY £40 DEVELOPER Don’t Nod Montréal PUBLISHER Don’t Nod REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-10700F, 32GB RAM, Nvidie GeForce RTX 3060 Ti MULTIPLAYER No STEAM DECK Verified TAPE 1 REVIEW tinyurl.com/49hm5dee When I sat down to finish Lost Records, I realised how deeply the quartet of punk girls finding themselves through riot grrrl had already sunk into my heart. How could they not when I saw so much of myself – who I was, who I wanted to be – in them. It was obvious this would be everyone’s last summer together, though with many questions left unanswered, I hoped I could somehow rewind to change things. Instead, Bloom & Rage Tape 2 leaves…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A grim first-person dungeon crawler heavily inspired by King’s Field and early survival horror EXPECT TO PAY £17 DEVELOPER JR Hudepohl PUBLISHER Top Hat Studios REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 5 5600H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 MULTIPLAYER No LINK tophat.studio/games_ labyrinthOf TheDemonKing.html Labyrinth of the Demon King is a cruel, miserable dungeon crawler set in a collapsing feudal Japan. I’m a lowly foot soldier, or ashigaru, seeking to avenge the murder of my lord and his army at the hands of the demon king. As you can imagine, the odds are stacked against me. My katana is broken and the labyrinth I’m forced to navigate is the most depressing and confusing entanglement of halls and rooms I’ve visited since the PS1 era.…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPERplasmastarfish LINK bit.ly/PackThings The mirror image of Unpacking, Pack is a little game about cramming your possessions into a suitcase, focusing purely on the puzzle aspect of making sure everything fits, and there is no overflow. It’s a bit like Resident Evil 4’s inventory Tetris, only without the grid that would make the process a whole lot easier. Actually, a better point of reference might be Ultima VII, with its inventory system comprised of physical bags, stuffed with little items you had to constantly move to find other little items. Pack improves upon the physical inventory concept by not allowing items to overlap. As you drag them into the suitcase one by one, they have to occupy their own little space in…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £17 DEVELOPER SCS Software PUBLISHER SCS Software I was recently stuck in traffic and I noticed the cars with caravans and wondered if, one day, I’d also like to own my own. Then I remembered how hard it is to reverse park a trailer in Euro Truck Simulator 2 and I decided to never consider it again. This is the great paradox of Euro Truck Simulator 2. Part of it is amazingly zen, as you calmly maintain the speed limit and ponder life’s great mysteries without ever driving dangerously. The other part is parking. This is stressful and difficult and probably not worth the faff, which probably explains why only 2% of players have the associated Steam achievement. Aside from that, the only things…

You’ve read the words above and you’re already dismissing the idea as utter, utter piffle. That’s understandable, because clearly the appeal of remastered games is that they let you experience the stories, places, characters and systems of classic games in a visually appealing and mechanically refined environment. How the heck would that work for a processor chip? No one wants to go back to lesser performance levels for the sake of nostalgia. IS THE IDEA OF PC HARDWARE REMAKES SO OUTLANDISH? IT’S ALREADY BEGUN Sentiment for the past is a powerful consumer motivator that extends well beyond our whirring hardware and heaving Steam libraries. Ironically, the retro trend’s been around for so long, you could start to get nostalgic for its first notable breakthroughs into pop culture. Stranger Things season…

HARVEY RANDALL THIS MONTHI broke all my TTRPG taboos in the privacy of Baldur’s Gate III. ALSO PLAYEDClair Obscur: Expedition 33, Guilty Gear: Strive It’s about that time of year again, gang – with Patch 8 of Baldur’s Gate III dropping, I’m all-in on another Honour Mode run. In case you’ve not heard the great news, Larian’s final patch added 12 new subclasses to the game alongside a whole bunch of new spells. And if you’re familiar with 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons at all, you know the doom that’s coming for the dread three: the Sorcadin. Here’s the concept: Paladins have access to an ability called Divine Smite, which lets them turn spell slots – magical power – into holy damage. The Sorcerer, a full-caster class, gets more of…

MATT ELLIOTT THIS MONTHSnapped shots of men in iridescent pants. ALSO PLAYEDDeath Stranding, Old Skies, Split Fiction It’s quite the challenge stepping away from a Yakuza game, even for a short time. When you’re in the full flow of it, it’s magnificent, distracting, all consuming. All that matters in the next fight, substory, or absurd story beat. You can’t remember a time when you weren’t battering goons with bikes and replenishing your health with ramen. Stop playing for even a week, however, and coming back to it is bewildering. You find yourself smoking on an oil rig repurposed as a coliseum frequented by sociopathic proto-Musks, dressed in a gold suit, with only the most basic concepts of who betrayed who, when, and why. It’s all part of the process though.…

Nintendo has changed its online user agreement in multiple consumer-unfriendly ways just before the launch of the Switch 2. Chief among them: Nintendo asserts the right to render your console “permanently unusable” if it determines you’re in violation of the agreement. No game or hardware modding, no extracting ROMs – something Nintendo asserts we cannot do, even though it is a legally protected consumer right in some countries – and no dual booting to another OS. I’m getting a clear message: you spent £400 on this hardware, but Nintendo does not think you own it. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to jailbreak or modify a console, or extract a ROM from a game you own: many original Switch games run better via PC emulation than on the original console,…

You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? You try to scroll on a website and the ads crowd out the text so thoroughly you have to reload. You want a short guide for collectibles in a new RPG, but beneath Google’s flat-out wrong AI summary there’s only a parade of bloated videos. Pressures to survive in the attention economy have turned countless websites into labyrinths of engagement and monetisation tactics. This spectre of quality decay – this ‘enshittification’ as it was dubbed by journalist Cory Doctorow – extends to just about any service that exists in proximity to capital. Perhaps that’s why Stephen ‘Blue’ Heaslip’s site Blue’s News is such a stable time capsule of the quaint, uncynical frontier the early internet is remembered as. Created to platform Heaslip’s hobby…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Prospector PUBLISHER Prospector LINK s.team/a/3719880 Ah, mining. It’s a strange thing, perhaps, that digging things out of the soil by sheer hard work has become so popular among those of us who would rather be facing a monitor than monitoring a cliff face, but here we are once again, tunnelling into the earth. Except it’s not Earth, but L 98-59 b, a future colony world that has more going on than it might at first appear. It’s the work of a solo dev known as Prospector, and you certainly do spend a lot of time in the game looking down a hole with a shovel in your hands. Your new pre-fabricated outpost has been placed on top of a relic of an earlier,…

My favourite part of the new Painkiller was also the last thing I tested – the submachine-gun. In a series famous for its enemy-impaling Stakegun and eponymous fan-bladed melee weapon, I dismissed the SMG outright, certain it would be the reboot’s least interesting firearm. Boy, was I wrong. This unassuming death-spitter, the bane of self-respecting Call of Duty players worldwide, might be nu-Painkiller’s secret MVP. Partly, this is because the SMG excels at clearing the larger, co-op attuned hordes of the sequel. Mainly though, it’s due to the fact the SMG comes with a wicked alt-fire option that shoots an enemy-bursting electronic beam. Moreover, this can be upgraded so that explosions radiate outward to nearby foes, splat-splat-splatting them in a cascading wave of gibs. It was this moment, watching a…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A sneaky immersive sim from the makers of Quadrilateral Cowboy EXPECT TO PAY £20 DEVELOPER Blendo Games PUBLISHER Annapurna Interactive REVIEWED ON Intel Core i9 9900KS, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super MULTIPLAYER No STEAM DECK Verified LINK blendogames.com/skindeep Skin Deep lays bare a truth about the immersive sims we anoint to holiness: beneath a veneer of grizzled assassins and sunglassed corpo agents, beyond the virtues of player choice and non-linear level design, is a genre by and for goofballs. The allure of a hackable computer or pickable pockets is catnip for troublemakers – a licence to orchestrate pranks on NPCs who can’t send you to the principal’s office, and laugh in their faces. Immersive sims are the sacred virtualisation of shenanigans,…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £9 DEVELOPER DeadToast Ent LINK devolverdigital.com Shotgun Cop Man is a throwback to an earlier age of indie games, when 2D puzzle-platformers with a single mechanical hook were all the rage. “In this one you can reverse gravity.” “In this one you can rewind time.” Well, in this one you jump by shooting at Hell. The plot is wafer-thin: you are a brick-shaped cop man who has descended into Hell to arrest Satan. Satan wears a string vest and each of the game’s nine worlds begins with him telling you to fuck off before buzzing demons lift him away. Do not go into Shotgun Cop Man expecting any more story than that. It’s a game about momentum. Shoot down with your shotgun and…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A horror adventure among the car people EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Mike Klubnika & Wriks PUBLISHER Mike Klubnika & Wriks REVIEWED ONntel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYER No LINK bit.ly/Fused240 The power of the jump cut is still largely underutilised in games. Was nothing learnt from Thirty Flights of Loving? But at long last, here’s another narrative-focused adventure that utilises jump cuts to devastating effect. The difference is that, this time, the effect is to induce horror – oh so much horror. Fused 240 is an impressive work of body horror that imagines a world in which humans have been merged with automobiles. It all begins with a column of white light, which smacks into you at the beginning…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The place bad Evri drivers go when they die EXPECT TO PAY £35 DEVELOPER Kojima Productions PUBLISHER 505 Games REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER No LINK store.steampowered.com/app/1850570/ DEATH_STRANDING_ DIRECTORS_CUT Part of me thinks Death Stranding is a social experiment cooked up by Hideo Kojima to see what players will endure if the surrounding fluff is interesting enough. Stealth sections. Cutscenes. Wobbling. It’s as if he’s collected all the gaming elements he knows will hurt us just to see if we keep playing, like rats gnawing electrified cheese in a lab. This would already be challenging enough. But the framework that surrounds it is relentlessly, defiantly odd. The Metal Gear series gets away with loads because…

It’s important to stay cool while gaming, and that applies to you and your processor. Though I only care for one of those things and you won’t be getting any grief from me about shouting at your mates on Discord. No, I only care for keeping your CPU running smoothly, and to that end, I’ve tested six of the latest air coolers to find out how they stack up. Why go for air cooling over liquid cooling? Those I’ve tested here are great for two reasons. The first is they’re often quieter than a chunky liquid cooler, on account of lacking a pump. You probably won’t hear an air cooler over your case fans plus they have fewer fans than many of today’s top liquid coolers, which makes for less…

ROBERT JONES THIS MONTHBickered with Kreia, and it was glorious. ALSO PLAYEDOblivion Remastered, Doom: The Dark Ages What’s the height of Star Wars storytelling? The original trilogy? Ha, simplistic space cowboy nonsense that rips off Kurosawa shamelessly. The prequels? Surprisingly ambitious storytelling, if not particularly well executed. The sequel trilogy? A horrible car crash where all subtlety has been slain. No, the truth is, and always has been, the Knights of the Old Republic series of games. Why? Mature storytelling partnered with uncompromising ideological challenge. Enter KOTOR 2, the weaker game of the pair but the one where the series’ mastery of continuously presenting the player with ideological challenges is most piquant. Here is a game that presents you with constant decisions to be made, continuous moral and ethical dilemmas…