Features archive

March 2025

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113 articles

March 31
- Schedule 1 is great because it knows crafting sucks unless you turn everything into a fun minigame
- Doom: The Dark Ages' melee-heavy, parry-focused gameplay was nothing like I expected, and now I'm more eager to play the full thing than ever
- Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 31, 2025)
March 30
- I wish Darktide's progression mechanics were as straightforward as the miniatures game
March 29
- Obsidian snuck goodies and secrets around every corner to make exploring Avowed feel worthwhile: 'If you have a lot of dead ends that lead nowhere, you learn the lesson as a player: This game doesn't have much to offer me'
- I've finally seen gameplay from ZA/UM's follow-up to Disco Elyisum, and it looks a lot like Disco Elysium. It will have to be spectacular to win back a hostile fanbase
- I played the 21 worst Thief missions in existence and had a far better time than I expected
- It still makes me uneasy that my hundreds of Steam games can't be passed on when I die, at least not without violating the EULA
March 28
- There's barely more than a demo in Wreckfest 2's early access debut, but I can't stop playing it
- The focus on GPU efficiency over fps means this year's gaming laptops are capable of something they've never been good at
- I laughed, I fell, I ragequit: Baby Steps is a hilarious walking simulator I can't wait to watch speedrunners try to defeat
- As a Warhammer fan of over 20 years, I've worked out the 3 rules Amazon needs to follow to make a great Warhammer TV show
- Inzoi lets you customize your entire house down to the last thread, which is great in theory but doesn't feel good in practice
March 27
- Chinese action game Phantom Blade Zero didn't click for me until I realized its deep commitment to wuxia film authenticity meant I had to relearn how swords work
- Final Fantasy 14's latest raids have me fully convinced that Square Enix can still cook, even as job design lags behind
- Nvidia RTX 5090 mobile tested: The needle hasn't moved on performance but this is the first time I'd consider ditching my desktop for a gaming laptop
March 26
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's masterful quest design can be summed up by one wonderfully weird search for a magic stone
- What will we do at the end of the world? If MMOs are any indication: mostly what we already do, plus a lot of dancing
- New Game of Thrones action-adventure RPG takes you back to Westeros
- Age of Mythology Retold's new Chinese pantheon expansion takes a bold stance on updating an old game: Just make good new stuff
- Five Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Counter-Strike 2 Inventory
- MSI Claw 8 AI+ A2VM: the greatest gaming machine you can take anywhere
- Become Dragonforged, achieve dominance
- I'm not yelling 'we're so back!' yet, but Final Fantasy 14's patch 7.2 story could be the first sign the MMO is returning to what made it so critically-acclaimed
March 25
- One year later, City of Heroes' officially recognized fan server has me praying it's the future of dead MMOs
- After punishing my graphics card with Monster Hunter Wilds, I've returned to the rock-solid frame rates of my old hunting grounds: Windows XP
- I'm convinced being a ghoul in Fallout 76 is the best way to vibe in West Virginia, thanks to these powerful perk cards and my new true love: Radiation
- Playing a few hours of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has put a lot of my worries to rest
- Steel Hunters is like a more tactical Titanfall, but as an extraction shooter it's undermined by boring loot
- With Nvidia Ace taking up 1 GB of VRAM in Inzoi, Team Green will need to up its memory game if AI NPCs take off in PC gaming
- While Waiting is a game all about chugging through life's most mundane tasks with a heaping side order of whimsy
- Magic: The Gathering's Tarkir: Dragonstorm set isn't just about dragons
March 24
- Drain your stress meter with this cozy game-inspired stretch and recovery routine
- Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 24, 2025)
March 22
- I downloaded this bear-obsessed comedy FPS to kill time before Doom: The Dark Ages and discovered the most underrated shooter on Steam
- I played the lost videogame sequel to 1984, and came away more nostalgic than ever for gaming's awkward adolescence in 1999
March 21
- Somebody finally figured out casual Counter-Strike
- Outer space inspired DayZ's Dean Hall to become a modder and game developer, and now he's making a Kerbal successor called Kitten Space Agency
- Getting to level 50 in Fallout 76 to become a ghoul actually isn't as daunting as it seems, which is why I created a new character
- Look Outside is a survival horror RPG where you absolutely should not look outside
March 20
- Electrified sticky notes and spontaneous combustion: Remedy's new co-op shooter FBC: Firebreak is built for chaos and 'joyful discoveries'
- Assassin's Creed Shadows has convinced me that Ubisoft will never make a good RPG
- Inzoi's attempt to do everything has left it a shallow imitation of The Sims, and I'm not sure it understands what makes those games so special in the first place
March 19
- People expecting Inzoi to be some sort of Sims killer are going to be very disappointed
March 18
- Assassin's Creed: Shadows PC performance analysis: Ray tracing, upscaling, and frame generation are all optional, but only two of them are worth using, though not the ones you might think
- Don't expect to unlock Yasuke for a while in Assassin's Creed Shadows
March 17
- Help, I can't move forward in this chill crafting RPG because I'm too wrapped up in building bases and making sick tools
- Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 17, 2025)
March 16
- Wyrdsong, the RPG from ex-Bethesda talent, isn't dead—but it's no longer an open world: 'We're down to a skeleton crew'
- 2011 was an amazing comeback year for PC gaming
- My new most anticipated RPG let me be a kleptomaniac gourmand set loose in a noir city on a quest to make 'the perfect sandwich'
March 15
- I played the notoriously ratings-board-ravaged Manhunt 2 and was quite glad for the censorship actually
March 14
- Monster Hunter Wilds' new gyro controls are a fantastic option for disabled and able-bodied players alike
- The Bazaar could be the future of autobattlers, if it stops strangling itself to death with its own microtransactions
- Marvel Rivals' growing roster of heroes scares me, but the game's director seems sure that all is under control: 'Everything is progressing smoothly'
March 13
- The best deals in the 2025 Steam Spring Sale
- 'Siege 2 was never on the table': Rainbow Six Siege X director explains why the 10-year-old FPS doesn't need a sequel
- The best Monster Hunter Wilds mods
- Monster Hunter Wilds weapon tier list
- Winning $2.6 billion in this poker videogame has completely ruined fake poker for me
- Monster Hunter Wilds' best change is to its layered armor, letting me finally run amok with dressup the way I should have always been able to
- Ranking AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards by their visual design, cuz, you know, I can't buy one for MSRP so have to kill my time somehow
- As a real life museum employee, I'm a bit confused by the amount of pirate ghosts in Two Point Museum—but it's not going to stop me trying to make the most realistic exhibits I can
- This gaming PC build smashes together the very latest components but if I did it again, I'd do it differently
- I just played Half-Life 2 RTX, a fully ray-traced overhaul of the original, and its meaty headcrabs have me hankering for more
- In a world of WoW Classics and Old School RuneScapes… could Final Fantasy 14 ever do the same?
March 12
- The state of Final Fantasy 14 in 2025: It's in a weird spot, huh?
- One of the biggest victories of Monster Hunter Wilds' streamlining is I don't have to deal with those awful gimmick fights anymore
March 11
- We need to decide on a genre name for Vampire Survivors-like games before a really terrible one sticks
- I wish Monster Hunter Wilds wasn't so afraid of letting me play Monster Hunter
- The SteelSeries QcK Performance series has reignited my excitement over the simple pleasure of a quality mouse pad… and trying to click skulls with pinpoint accuracy
- Assassin's Creed: Shadows is just around the corner, so come and see the last 17 years of the series' PC graphics at max 4K settings
March 10
- I’m not sure what’s weirder: that someone made a sequel to a completely forgettable 37-year-old game I played as a kid, or that it was actually worth the wait
- I never thought a handheld PC bloated with Windows could replace my Steam Deck, but after gaming on an old OneXPlayer 2 Pro I can see now I judged it too harshly
March 9
- Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 10, 2025)
March 8
- Silent Hill gets a soccer league in FEAR FA 98, and you can play the demo now
- This brutalist life sim gave me a free tenement block to renovate, but my mushroom addiction kept getting in the way
- Blood Typers is a budget-priced fusion of Typing of the Dead and co-op survival horror
- The best part of The Sims 4 Businesses & Hobbies expansion is just coming up with fun small business ideas
March 7
- We all deserve better than this
- Hearthstone card reveal: If it's wrong to love a magic blue owl, I don't want to be right
- REPO is my new favourite co-op horror game, which combines Lethal Company's looting loop with Content Warning's zany monsters
- Capcom cooked up some extremely cursed Palico outfits in Monster Hunter Wilds
- Grand Theft Auto 5 Enhanced is a bitter-sweet return to Rockstar's money-making machine
- GTA 5 Enhanced performance analysis: Forget max settings, my advice is to enable Very High RT and enjoy the show
- As a Stalker sicko, the 2 hours I just spent with Atomfall have made it one of my most-anticipated games this year
March 6
- Monster Hunter Wilds' true difficulty isn't the battles: it's navigating the horrible menus
- Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and BioWare have to offer
- Capcom is punishing me for wanting to play Monster Hunter Wilds with my friends
- I don't care about being able to kill everybody and steal the Mayor's pants in an RPG like Avowed, and I'm tired of pretending it's mandatory
March 5
- Why did Monster Hunter Wilds dedicate so much effort to its environments, only to completely drop the actual 'hunting' from Monster Hunter?
- After a run of RTX 50-series launches with seemingly little availability and mega price tags, I'm left wondering 'is that it?'
- D&D's new virtual tabletop is a glossy and cool idea that's already struggling with its identity in a world where jpegs and imagination are free
- When PC RPGs were at their crunchiest and most hardcore in the 1990s, Farland Story set itself apart by… being cute?
- The unofficial Civilization 7 manual: everything Civ 7 doesn't tell you about its rules and systems
March 4
- Monster Hunter Wilds feels easy at launch—but after a decade of fighting post-release elder dragons and Master Rank monsters, I'm not worried about the light warmup
- Civilization 7 needs some big expansions to feel complete, and I'd start with one that adds the years after 1950
- Kingdom Come 2 and Avowed have revealed to me the grand unified theory of game design: A good game is when you can steal back the money you just spent at a shop, a bad game is when you can't
- This mash-up of side-scrolling beat-'em-up and fantasy roguelike feels like it could be the future of a classic genre
- We need a better name for AI, or we risk talking past each other until actually intelligent AGI comes home mooing
- This Yu-Gi-Oh! retro collection transported me to a simpler time in TCGs, before Pot of Greed was banned and the Avengers were in Magic: The Gathering
March 3
- The PC game releases we're most excited about in March
- I'm as excited as the next guy for AMD's 9070-series launch but the lack of reference cards has me worried about how real its MSRP will be
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 feels like a French Persona, with an impressive combat system that I should love, but which I actually hate
- After AMD's RX 9070 XT presentation, I can safely say even this Nvidia die-hard believes the hype
March 2
- Five new Steam games you probably missed (March 3, 2025)
- Monster Hunter Wilds finally makes sense to my Dark Souls-pilled brain thanks to the Dual Blades
March 1
- I wrote one-sentence reviews of over 70 Steam demos to help you decide which to try before Next Fest ends
- What's the biggest game on your computer, and is it really worth the space?
- Monster Hunter Wilds' Seikret makes travelling easier than ever, but I had a much better time when I dared to explore the old fashioned way: On foot
- There's one reason I come back to this one rapid trigger gaming keyboard over the rest, and that's great software
- I'm so desperate to play Grand Theft Auto 6 that I downloaded this unfinished open-world game set in 1990s Slovakia
- Nvidia RTX 5070 hands-on preview: a sneak peek at my unreleased RTX Blackwell card hitting triple digit frame rates in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p and Avowed at 4K