PCGamesN's Reviews
Life is Strange 2's first episode goes in a bold new direction that points the series towards current political issues as much as it does human drama. It's promising but a little slow to get going after a thrilling opening scene.
With a beautiful Blighty and an innovative season-based online endgame, Horizon 4 is a wonderfully polished, thoroughly modern racer. Sadly, it doesn't feel quite as progressive or impactful as its Aussie predecessor, and there's a sense the sandbox series is ever so slightly coasting on its laurels.
Battle for Azeroth is a solid follow-up to Legion that'll keep fans happy - if only for the new continents, War mode, and dungeons. Time will tell if the rest of the features will give the expansion the shelf life it needs.
Eidos Montreal applies its signature gameplay touches to Tomb Raider, making for the series's most satisfying balance of combat, exploration, and puzzle solving. Unfortunately these mechanical successes are let down by a journey that fails to deliver a compelling study of Lara's personal shadows.
With a darker, more nuanced story, loads of activities, and clever tweaks to its core systems, Forsaken vastly improves the quality, quantity, and structure of content in Destiny 2. It could still peter out if the raid is bad or the DLC is as poor as last year's, but as of now, Destiny is fun again.
After years of waiting for a game to capture the same joy of Theme Hospital, Two Point Hospital arrives as an able successor. Although, two decades on we'd hoped it wouldn't share the same flaws.
Total War: Rome 2 is five years old but Rise of the Republic acts as an anti-ageing cream, bolstering it with a new campaign and features that means it can keep up with Total War: Warhammer 2.
You might well find the evocative, smoke-damaged backdrop of ‘80s espionage fresh enough to carry you through a satisfying playthrough. But even with the plates changed and the serial number filed off, there's no mistaking XCOM 2.
There's a brilliant game that mixes peril with colourful exploration inside We Happy Few, but it's buried under flawed systems and bugs
Monster Hunter: World is one of the finest action-RPGs ever made and a rich co-op title that's only made better with the PC version's technical improvements.
Everything about the dinosaurs is a joy, as it should be in a Jurassic World game, but it makes the weakness of the park management layer plain. The disparity between managing the dinosaurs and managing your guests is all the more apparent because Frontier made the excellent Planet Coaster.
What's struck me most about my time with Vampyr is that it manages to turn you into a predator through its mechanics as much as it does with its storytelling. It does collapse under its own weight by the end, but the fact that it so effectively seduces you, almost trance-like, into roleplaying a villain makes it worth biting into.
It's an extraordinary game. One that you'll feel faintly lost in at first, while its many systems permeate your grey matter. But all the while its story unfolds and reveals new wrinkles, the sense of place growing deeper.
This is where BattleTech shines, it's not about completing missions on your best day, it's about playing as best you can on your worst.
The various factions really give a different feel to each playthrough, so there's huge scope for replayability here.
Its failures prevent Far Cry 5 from being a classic, but its successes mean it has plenty to keep you embroiled in its reactive world.
11 Bit Studios have done marvellous work on evoking the symbolism of the engine giving life.
Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is still lumbered with some of the quirks of its '90s origins. This is understandable - it is a remaster, not a remake - but those quirks do cause some friction. Beneath them, though, the underlying gameplay remains as solid as a fully upgraded phalanx.
Although the series naturally lends itself to scale, it has often been observed that Total War is at its worst when bloat sets in. So perhaps it should have been no surprise that Arena finds victory in focus, accentuating just a handful of tactical elements so that they become the totality of the game. Then again, that is exactly what makes Arena so much fun: surprise.
This is an ambitious game, polished to perfection when it comes to atmosphere, but rough and cumbersome in many of its moment-to-moment interactions.