Rick Lane
Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.
Latest articles by Rick Lane

SnowRunner dev's latest vehicle sim lets you channel your inner Frank Sobotka by managing a struggling port
By Rick Lane published
News Docked will soon be sailing to a harbour near you.

Starship Troopers: Extermination implements a 'total overhaul' to its spawning system, adding a Left 4 Dead style AI director: 'We realized that our original spawning system, while functional, was starting to show its limit'
By Rick Lane published
News "The Director is a system that constantly evaluates the battlefield's state."

Sea of Thieves' latest update slips The Smugglers' League in through the back door, offering high-risk, high-reward voyages for the most daring pirates
By Rick Lane published
News Season 17 kicks off in deliberately understated fashion.

Get $170 worth of RPG books for $15 with the Witcher's TTRPG bundle
By Rick Lane published
News The package nets you the core rulebook, several expansions and an easy mode.

The sequel to Half-Life modding classic Pirates, Vikings & Knights quietly hit 1.0 after nearly 18 years of development: 'It's been over 6,500 days since PVK2 was unleashed'
By Rick Lane published
News 1.0 release adds a new class and a ship's hold's worth of balance changes.

As the legal debate between Subnautica 2's publisher and former studio execs rages, the original game and its spinoff quietly receive small patches and big discounts
By Rick Lane published
News 1.0 release adds a new class and a ship's hold's worth of balance changes.

Doom: The Dark Ages latest update adds a 'Ripatorium' that lets you build your own wave shooter from its demonic menagerie
By Rick Lane published
News Id's FPS prequel also gets a massive combat update.

'The prejudice against turn-based RPGs isn’t completely gone': despite Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's massive success, its director reckons real-time action games still have an easier time
By Rick Lane published
News But this isn't why Clair Obscur has a parry system, honest.

Valve's superfans are back to break the player concurrent record for Portal, but the challenge may be steeper than anyone has realised
By Rick Lane published
News #RememberPortal hopes to give Valve's puzzler a big player boost.

'You'll now be at the mercy of what loot you can find': Rust's latest update brings back hardcore mode tougher than ever, removing the ability to craft guns entirely
By Rick Lane published
News The hardcore update also brings a menu revamp and fancier clouds.

Absurd Japan-themed delivery sim Promise Mascot Agency just added a whole bunch of grinding, but don't worry, it's the good, Tony Hawk kind of grinding
By Rick Lane published
News The Prepare to Grind update also adds time trial challenges and difficulty modes.

I finally played Duke Nukem Forever's unfinished 2001 build, and while it probably would have been better than Gearbox's fiasco, it still wouldn't hold up today
By Rick Lane published
Kick ass and chew burrito The vending machines are excellent though.

The follow-up to one of the decade's best detective games will have you selling cursed antiques to Victorian weirdos next month
By Rick Lane published
News Strange Antiquities launches in September.

The iconic look of BioShock's Big Daddy has its roots in System Shock 2's low polygon counts: 'If you embraced your designing limitations on that stuff, you'd end up with a better model'
By Rick Lane published
News "BioShock was really the last time we talked about polygon counts."

Portal sicko beats the game with 'switched' wall textures so no surface is where it's meant to be, creating a whole new puzzling challenge in the process
By Rick Lane published
News 'This is the entirety of Portal with a twist'.

I embarked on a mission to answer the most important question in PC gaming: How tall is Garrett from Thief?
By Rick Lane published
Tall boy Pinned size at last.

An 'Overwhelmingly Positive' idle game about plastic ducks floating in a pool has a collectible card-game successor, and there's a demo you can play now
By Rick Lane published
News Placid Plastic Deck – A Quiet Quest is a card-battling adventure.

Crytek says the most important difference between Far Cry and Crysis had nothing to do with technology: 'In Crysis, we mimicked nature as closely as possible'
By Rick Lane published
News "If you want to build a real place, the best you can do is go to this place."

Stormgate is leaving early access before it's technically finished: 'We believe that our campaign and 1v1 are ready for a broader audience'
By Rick Lane published
News Both the co-op mode and terrain editor are still in active development.

These fanmade reload animations for Abiotic Factor are so good the game's own art director praises them: 'You absolutely nailed the vibe I was going for'
By Rick Lane published
News (Re)active reload.

The Elder Scrolls' weird relationship with expansions began a full decade before the horse armour DLC, in the form of a 16-quest addon to Daggerfall exclusive to one US retailer
By Rick Lane published
Secrets of the ancients Investigating the history of the Daggerfall CompUSA special edition.

Total War: Warhammer 3's siege rework beta is live now and runs into August, letting you have your say on pocket ladder prohibition, battle AI improvements, and more
By Rick Lane published
News "This is your chance to get hands-on with the changes."

Crash Bandicoot's original lead programmer reckons the overhauled N. Sane Trilogy 'got almost everything right' except for one tiny detail: 'they completely botched how jumping works'
By Rick Lane published
News "Every jump on the remake is huge and floaty."

After a forgettable launch, Ubisoft's Avatar game is getting a huge new update later this year, introducing new game plus and a third-person mode
By Rick Lane published
News But you'll have to wait until December.

'The age of gameplay mechanics has already passed' says Shadow of The Colossus director as he praises Katamari Damacy creator's new game for not being systems-driven
By Rick Lane published
News "Even if there’s nothing novel about the mechanics, you can push the game further with a certain vibe or artwork."
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