Features archive
August 2024
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118 articles
- August 30
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- The PC game releases we're most excited about in September
- Obsidian seems scared people will compare Avowed to Skyrim, but it shouldn't be—the similarities are obvious, but the differences make it compelling
- It's not the display's fault but 16:10 laptop gaming isn't perfect. Yet nobody wants to hear it, not even my friends and colleagues
- How finished is Deadlock?
- I thought Farewell North was going to be a cute game about a dog in Scotland, but I've come away from it with lessons to learn about handling loss
- Deadlock's lanes are utterly fascinating when it comes to MOBA design, and it's because of its shooter elements—not in spite of them
- Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap proves slaughtering orcs is like riding a bike, but way more fun
- There's a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles roguelike on its way to Steam that's basically Hades with co-op, and it's surprisingly bodacious, dudes
- I spent an hour swearing, fleeing and dying in the machine-infested battlefields of The Forever Winter and cannot wait to do it again
- August 29
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- Deadlock has guns, but that doesn't make it a shooter
- Smite 2 already has fans of the first on lock, but it needs to do a better job of winning new ones to grow its pantheon
- I've become the Pied Piper for keyboard nerds—luring colleagues to come over to gawk at this gaming keyboard with simply the sweet sound of typing on it
- Infinity Nikki is literally dress-up Genshin Impact and just like that all my money is mysteriously gone from my bank account
- Real-time strategy almost came back from the brink of death and then fell flat on its face
- Life is Strange: Double Exposure is a little deja vu in places but its changes have me excited in a big way
- I desperately want a 'cheap' OLED upgrade but there's no way I'm ditching a 32-inch monitor to do it
- Monster Hunter Wilds and its 10-hour Gamescom queue was the star of the show, proving the series has truly entered the mainstream
- August 28
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- With a mix of RTS and deckbuilding, Warcana is truly one of the strangest genre patchworks I've ever seen
- Bakeru is nostalgic 3D platforming comfort food from one of Nintendo’s go-to developers
- Your bad choices literally haunt you in fantasy western RPG Arco, which has quickly and quietly become one of the most interesting games I've played this year
- Star Wars Outlaws is the most Star Wars a Star Wars game has been since Star Wars Galaxies
- After 4 hours with Metaphor: ReFantazio, it's the surprising ways it diverges from Persona that I'm most excited about
- I'm glad WoW: The War Within players are having a ball with their hero talents, but I had to cobble together an ugly custom UI just to feel something on my Rogue
- The War Within murdered one of WoW's most important characters almost immediately, but I ain't writing him off until Blizzard shows me the body
- August 27
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- The eagerness to grave dance on unpopular games has become a bad habit
- Deadlock's occult New York setting already has such excellent vibes that I might become a MOBA guy just to see where Valve takes it
- World of Warcraft: The War Within has so fully embraced the Death Knight class fantasy that I think I might finally be cured of my alt obsession
- August 26
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- The Olympics may be over, but I'm still going for 40-year-old gold in the first licensed Olympic games
- In Dustborn, the quiet moments speak loudest
- Star Wars Outlaws performance analysis: Ray traced galaxies far, far away really, really demand upscaling and frame generation
- Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is exactly what fans want—a fanatically faithful remake that doesn't leave a hair out of place
- Five new Steam games you probably missed (August 26, 2024)
- August 25
- August 24
- August 23
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- Black Myth: Wukong developer GameScience had to grow into a AAA powerhouse to bring its vision of Journey to the West to life
- Delta Force is an awkward marriage of Battlefield and Call of Duty, but every once in awhile it all clicks
- How Black Myth: Wukong rose to the top of Steam's wishlist
- Redmagic Titan 16 Pro: A legend awakens
- Peter Molyneux says he's 'coming home' to PC, but should we welcome him back after everything that's happened?
- August 22
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- 11 Monster Hunter Wilds features from the Gamescom dev streams that have me hooting and hollering like an inbound Bazelgeuse
- The rise of the Chinese action RPG
- The gacha Eye of Sauron has suddenly turned its gaze upon cozy gaming
- Black Myth: Wukong has the most bombastic action game opening since 2010s greats God of War 3 and Asura's Wrath
- August 21
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- Let's all just pretend that the Borderlands 4 reveal came at a better time
- Black Myth: Wukong should be your first soulslike if Elden Ring scared you away
- Warhammer: Vermintide Versus is more like a Dark Souls invasion than a multiplayer mode, but that can be fun too
- The Slay the Spire board game might be a little too faithful to the videogame, but its co-op mode offers a whole new perspective on the iconic roguelike
- Crimson Desert, the first single-player game from the Black Desert devs, is shaping up to be an absolute riot to play so far
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a strange mixture of historical drama and The Hangover
- August 20
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- Civilization 7's new features: a revamped three-age structure, towns, navigable rivers, and more
- Civilization 7 hands-on: Huge changes are coming to the classic strategy series
- With Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, MachineGames is taking inspiration less from Uncharted and more from The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay: 'We've been going back a little bit into the history of our own'
- Amazon's next game is a co-op dungeon crawler that desperately wants to be Roblox
- Leximan taught me that I could be the best wizard in the world as long as I could get over one thing—basic spelling
- Clash with legends of yore in Black Myth: Wukong
- No other laptop maker would let me cannibalise the best bit of its new machine the way Framework does and that's a damned shame
- Best mini PCs in 2024: The compact computers I love the most
- A laptop built for all your dimensions
- August 19
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- Warhammer 40K: Speed Freeks is nearly the orky Mad Max of my dreams, but more variety and fewer bots might get it to the finish line
- Mystery mansion puzzle game Blue Prince is my GOTY, even if it doesn't come out this year
- Black Myth: Wukong—Here are the best settings to use with Arc, GeForce, and Radeon graphics cards
- The Silent Hill 2 remake feels like the PS2 classic in a Resident Evil 2 remake wrapper, and you know what? That's not bad
- Great moments in PC gaming: Painting the map your color in a strategy game
- Five new Steam games you probably missed (August 19, 2024)
- August 16
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- Arena Breakout: Infinite is a snack-sized Tarkov I can't stop playing, but has some awful monetisation
- Adorable and reality-bending action-puzzle game The Plucky Squire lets you make friends with a Magic: The Gathering card
- SteamWorld Heist 2's new job system lets you experiment with building your own custom classes—and you're not allowed to judge me for making a completely unfair sniper that can scrap a whole squad with one shot
- To hell with resale value, Magic: The Gathering is better when you bust out a permanent marker and draw on the cards
- August 15
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- 2024 is the best year we've ever had for factory games
- The Crush House wanted me to make a steamy reality show, but I got tired of being told to film butts and made a nature documentary instead
- 'I want Hunt to last for another decade, if not more': Crytek goes deep on Hunt: Showdown's new name, upgraded engine, and future map plans
- Best 14-inch gaming laptop: The top compact gaming laptops I've held in these hands
- Rue Valley is a gorgeous time loop mystery, and one of the most interesting RPG prospects since Disco Elysium
- 17 years on, Persona 3 Reload: Episode Aigis is a faithful remake that does little to save the expansion from its black sheep reputation
- August 14
- August 13
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- My biggest question about Dragon Age: The Veilguard is actually 'Which of these mages is going to lie right to my face and stab me in the back after 80 hours?'
- Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster achieves exactly what it set out to do—but maybe that's not enough
- The companions of Baldur's Gate 3 have become the new mascots of D&D. Should we be worried about their future now that it's entirely in the hands of Wizards of the Coast?
- Who needs 87 keys to have a good time when ONE BTN BOSSES squeezes hours of fun out of the humble spacebar
- Guild Wars 2's 5th expansion launches next week, and once again a mount is the star of the show
- Promise Mascot Agency, the 'world's first open world mascot management crime drama,' is all that and somehow more
- August 12
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- Doom 2's first true expansion since the '90s showcases just how much modding has improved in 30 years
- Everything you need to know about Black Myth: Wukong
- Poker star Justin Bonomo, who's won over $60 million, made his first bankroll by selling his EverQuest druid: 'It was over AIM and he offered me $500'
- Intel instability fix: I've seen no notable impact on game performance with 0x129 patch on the Core i9 14900K
- Five new Steam games you probably missed (August 12, 2024)
- August 9
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- A month on, Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail's endgame outshines its story
- This new roguelike crosses Balatro with mahjong, and even just the demo is proving a grave threat to my free time
- Crush House is a parody of reality TV with nothing real to say about its subject
- 'We have 2,500,000 GB of aerial data, so we stream that'—why the cloud is the future of Microsoft Flight Simulator and likely many more games to come
- The Borderlands movie is such an irredeemable mess it had me longing for 1993's Super Mario Bros
- August 8
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- Flight Simulator 2024's huge ambition means 'you can now exit the plane, walk around… you can land on every ship, and it looks like a first person shooter environment'
- Alien: Isolation under the microscope: an excerpt from new companion book Perfect Organism
- Creatures of Ava sugarcoats an emotional story with cutesy cartoon critters and it's convinced me that I need to save the planet
- The CrowdStrike bug showed the world that one weak link in the chain can lead to chaos in a heartbeat
- August 7
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- This new soulslike has the best twist on the genre I've seen, but it sadly flubs the landing
- Oh no, I can't possibly decide who to date in anime-inspired farm sim Fields of Mistria when I'm already in love with all of them
- Space Marine 2 feels even more explosively, grimly, and hilariously authentic to the Warhammer 40,000 universe than the first game
- August 6
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- Fields of Mistria's town full of well-written characters and charming Game Boy Advance aesthetic immediately make it stand out from other cozy farm sims
- MSI is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its first laptop in London
- Terraforming one ugly world in survival game The Planet Crafter is infinitely more satisfying than trudging across a billion beautiful planets in No Man's Sky
- August 5
- August 3
- August 2
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- The PC game releases we're most excited about in August
- Maybe I shouldn't say this in a PC gaming outlet, but I had a great time after installing Malware
- Anger Foot found its secret sauce in creative, sometimes 'impossible' challenge objectives, but the devs admit the one where you have to go on a lizard-licking psychedelic trip and destroy a toilet came from the 'running out of ideas phase'
- I chose the worst four years to take a hiatus from gaming hardware because now I feel like I'm being handed alien tech when confronted with a Steam Deck
- Intel CPU crashes: what you need to know—Intel explains the root cause and plans a final microcode fix for 13th and 14th Gen CPUs
- For the first anniversary of Baldur's Gate 3, we talk to Larian about how it reinvented itself, why it scrapped its plans for Baldur's Gate 4, and what the future holds
- This $10 Gunpla building game has saved me from spending all my money and filling my house with plastic models that take hours to build
- August 1
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- Thank Goodness You're Here is one of the most charming games I have ever played, but I can't really explain why
- Fellowship recreates the thrill of MMO dungeons without the MMO and I'm scared of what it will do to my free time
- Spectre Divide is Counter-Strike for the aim-down-sights generation, and it's so fun I can't stop thinking about it: 'We hope our game becomes your next 10,000-hour obsession'
- FSR 3.1 vs DLSS showdown: How does AMD's latest upscaler version compare to Nvidia's finest for performance and image quality?
