Feature archive

August 2025

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116 articles

August 31
- Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar is a good farming simulator, but it's made great by its sense of community and willingness to get you involved
- Metaphor: ReFantazio's distinct musical blend of traditional JRPG vibes and contemporary flow continues to live in my head rent-free nearly a year later
August 30
- The PC game releases we're most excited about in September
- I tried to save the USSR in 1985 with a hip Gen Z leader and all I got for my trouble was a drunk population and total national bankruptcy
August 29
- Hollow Knight's creators didn't want to be constrained by the 'metroidvania' label, but they accidentally set a standard that every game since—even Silksong—has to reckon with
- Under Microsoft, Double Fine has made its weirdest game yet—and this is only the beginning: 'We can take more risks'
- Supermassive Games is adding a new tool to its next horror game Directive 8020 that'll give players a 'second chance' to save their favourite characters
- Silent Hill f is actually really fun when there's not a little worm in your ear telling you to compare every scene against Silent Hill 2
- Battlefield 6 may have removed its iconic 'Doritos,' but it's not escaping a decade-old complaint: Spotting is once again too strong
- Dinolords blends action RPG combat and RTS battles in a medieval England overrun with dinosaurs, and surprisingly it's even cooler than that sounds
August 28
- You don't need to wait for SteamOS to ditch Windows: I've been running Linux for the past 2 months and the revolution is already here
- Almost 1,700 days—or 4.6 years—of daily Silksong news later, its brave watchman is finally ready to 'play Silksong in peace, however I want' and rest
- I used my 967 hours in Borderlands to predict Borderlands 4's most busted builds
- Forget trying to cram in Hollow Knight before Silksong launches—it's too good to rush
August 27
- The new John Carpenter game will absolutely stuff your screen with zombies
- The Outer Worlds 2 feels like a much more ambitious RPG than its predecessor: I played its prologue three times with different builds, and each run felt unique
August 26
- Gears of War: Reloaded PC performance: The updated graphics are easy work for any desktop GPU from the past six years but they're still enough to give handhelds grief
- This September, the battle for the belt begins in The PC Gamer Streamer Showdown
August 25
- The best way to wait for Battlefield 6 is to finally play Battlefield 5, an underappreciated gem
- Inside the Chinese PC gaming industry as it gets ready to dominate the next decade: 'We have to work harder, we have to make the games even better'
- Five new Steam games you probably missed (August 25, 2025)
August 23
- All MMO quest journals are a massive waste of potential, except for FF14's, which was good for exactly one storyline
- Speculatively plotting GTA 6's map is a painstaking, exhausting, and heroic effort: 'We had 10 people search every street in StreetView, this took weeks—and failed'
August 22
- By surrendering to an 'open weapons' default, Battlefield 6 is giving up the most special thing about Battlefield
- I've played Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2's DLC clans, Lasombra and Toreador, and they absolutely should have been in the base game
- Amid sweeping changes, it's refreshing to see that the Battlefield 6 beta was an actual playtest, and not a glorified demo
- Best Hall effect keyboards in 2026: the fastest, most customizable keyboards for competitive gaming
- Photography puzzler Opus: Prism Peak might be the rare game to actually pull its Studio Ghibli vibes off
August 21
- Diablo 4's next season acknowledges its greatest weakness as an action RPG and offers a solution on how to fix it
- Whisper of the House takes the cosy isometric decorating of Unpacking and unleashes it upon an entire town like an ultra-relaxing endless mode
- After 20 hours with the Battlefield 6 beta, I believe EA has a ticking time bomb on its hands, though it's not too late to defuse it
August 20
- A boundless excitement for Battlefield 6 loomed large over Call of Duty's deflating Black Ops 7 reveal
- If you've ever craved the perfect combination of vibes from Puyo Puyo Tetris and Rhythm Heaven, do I have the game for you
- Even if you're as tired of parrying in action games as I am, pay attention to Onimusha
- After nailing a quirky PS2 throwback with Kunitsu-gami, Capcom's Pragmata has the charming energy of an Xbox 360-era shooter like The Darkness or Syndicate
- After 30 minutes with Hollow Knight: Silksong, I'm desperate to play another 100 hours of its refined, needle-sharp action
- I've played a few hours of Dawn of War 4, and it might just be the true sequel to the original game that we've been waiting for
August 19
- Why we're still playing Metal Gear Solid after nearly 30 years
- Is the Samsung Galaxy S25 a good choice for gaming? Your FAQs answered
- 15 attempts in, I actually love that Elden Ring Nightreign's Everdark Libra is the first FromSoftware boss who's harder to beat in co-op than solo
August 18
- We can't keep making videogame stories for players who aren't paying attention to them
- I've been humbled by a surprisingly robust roguelite action RPG where you control two characters at once
- 4 hidden features that turn your Samsung Galaxy S25 into the dream gaming sidekick
- Five new Steam games you probably missed (August 18, 2025)
August 16
- Clockwork Revolution dev InXile worked on a Wasteland VR survival game with DayZ's former director—until Xbox cancelled it
- A roguelike RPG companion betrayed me so badly that I manipulated cloud saves across two PCs to cheat death and throw him down a well
- Upcoming shooter Reaper Actual throws up some big red flags, but its creators are MMO and FPS heavyweights who can't easily be dismissed
August 15
- Capcom's Monster Hunter Wilds updates have backed it into a corner
- Battlefield 6's 'Netflix UI' has already been rejected and redesigned by players, and I'm on board
- Overwatch 2's Wuyang is a DPS in disguise, and that could quickly become a problem
August 14
- My new bedtime Steam Deck go-to is a cozy bookshop sim where everyone loves hearing my opinion
- Gamescom 2025 preview: The 6 games we're most excited to see
- Dawn of War: Definitive Edition may be a sparing remaster, but it's still the best way to revisit one of the greatest RTS series ever created
- The MMOs we grew up with are gone, and it's all our fault because we loved them to death
August 13
- Alien: Earth is the best thing to happen to the Alien universe since Isolation
- I've been on a quest to find a gaming keyboard media key replacement, and like an incredibly nerdy anti-Goldilocks, I've found none of them are just right
- Why it’s time to stop underestimating the Samsung Galaxy S25 for gaming
August 12
- Battlefield 6 players are crying out for a 'real' server browser, and it's about time we demanded the basic FPS feature that Call of Duty killed
- PlayerUnknown's new survival game makes building a simple campfire feel like a real accomplishment, and that's something a lot of survival games are lacking
- My best friend recently taught me an important lesson about AI pessimism: Don't remain silent and accept no substitutes
- After all these years, Heretic plays better than it ever has—and thanks to Nightdive, even Hexen sucks far less
August 11
- Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion's explosive anime mech battles are surprisingly improved by an open world with nothing in it but odd jobs and vibes
- Let's take a moment to appreciate the true GOAT of the Battlefield 6 open beta: the drag revive
- The biggest thing that needs balancing in Battlefield 6 isn't the weapons—it's the attachments
- Five new Steam games you probably missed (August 11, 2025)
August 10
- D&D is quintessentially American and Warhammer is quintessentially British
August 9
- As the bots take over Verdansk, Warzone and Stalker are beginning to meld in my brain
- 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
- I don't want to hear a another peep about the 'AI future' until they make multi monitor support not suck
- Why is logging into anything such a pain in the ass?
August 8
- After flying around the world to play my most anticipated action RPG, I'm convinced Black Myth Wukong was just an opening salvo for big budget Chinese games
- My new laptop chip has an 'AI' processor in it, and it's a complete waste of space
- It's 2025 and saving in absolutely every game still sucks
- Sekiro-likes are in a golden age, Batman games are in a drought, which makes the ground fertile for the Dark Knight soulslike I've always dreamed about
- It's 2025 and we still can't decide on a universal input for crouching
- It's PC Gamer's Gripes Week and you know what Windows 11 is… mostly fine. But it sure ain't perfect
- Every game is a roguelike deckbuilder now, but I've finally found a few that have stopped me being a hater
- Battlefield 6 requires Secure Boot to run and it's coming to more games soon, including Call of Duty Black Ops 7: here's what it is, why Linux gamers are mad about it, and how to enable it
August 7
- Battlefield 6 is making an excellent case to skip Call of Duty this year
- Somebody spilled some Minecraft in this hardcore first-person RPG, and I love the result way more than I ever thought possible
- Ninja Gaiden 4 plays more like a Platinum action game than classic Ninja Gaiden, and I'm really not sure how to feel about it
- I'm sick of the survival crafting 'Cube' and calling the gamer HOA on all of you
- I'm so tired of being advertised at, man
- The Fortnitification of every videogame is really starting to grate on me
- The dialogue wheel was the worst thing to happen to RPGs, it's robbed us all for years, and I'm glad it's dying out
- Out and About is exactly what I want from a foraging game and has convinced me that I could easily make a meal out of what I find in my back garden
- 'We simply can't do subpar': Behind the scenes with GTA 1991, the ambitious San Andreas prequel whose creators are on the cusp of something special
- I love a cosy game, but I don't love the fact every second game is branded as one just because it's trendy right now
August 6
- I hate boss fights and you'll never convince me they're good (because they're not)
- Games that try to sneak bots into multiplayer matches are automatically trash
- Finally, a game that makes Marvel superheroes exciting again
- I'm sick to death of PC gaming's endless launchers
- I build a PC every month: these are my 5 worst PC building gripes
- You probably have like $100 in Steam trading cards on all those games you've never played, and you can get it without ever actually launching them
- PowerWash Simulator 2 doesn't seem like much of a sequel, but it does clean up nicely with more tools, maps, and level types
August 5
- One of the most infuriating little things about playing games in 2025: When the quality-of-life update fixes that one problem right after you finish a game
- My speakers automatically go into standby mode and it's driving me mad
- When we need it most, search sucks
- Battlefield 6 will introduce classic maps 'based on fan or player requests', and I can already see where this is going: 'we want to choose the best possible one to bring back the good old days of playing Battlefield'
- Need to clone your boot drive for your next PC upgrade? I've discovered my new favorite tool
- EVO's ultimate gamer crashout wasn't a panic attack or a moment that lost him the tournament—it was a 10-year-old joke finally coming full circle
- Graphics card prices are totally ridiculous and it's creating a barrier to entry that makes me fear for the future of PC gaming
- Cutting-edge gaming with MSI
August 4
- The 'Compiling Shaders' screen is the worst screen in gaming: here's how to make it suck less
- It's 2025 and my PC still has no idea what audio devices are connected to it
- We deserve better than the boring carry capacity systems 90% of RPGs give us, but games like Death Stranding 2 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show the way forward
- Blade is Marvel Rivals' answer to an intentionally broken meta, though he may usher in a whole new issue
- Everything that grinds our gears about PC gaming in 2025
- I thought audio driver troubleshooting hell was a thing of the '90s until I tried using Bluetooth headphones with my laptop
- Five new Steam games you probably missed (August 4, 2025)
August 3
- Rhythm games use a lot of classical music, huh?
August 2
- Sorry haters, Elden Ring Nightreign's much maligned new Everdark boss is its best yet
- I embarked on a mission to answer the most important question in PC gaming: How tall is Garrett from Thief?
- I fought a bear with an umbrella in this new soulslike MMO that plays like Genshin Impact with way better combat
- The PC game releases we're most excited about in August
August 1
- Titan Quest 2 is a chill Greek holiday compared to the live service complexity of ARPGs like Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2