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Each trial is like a puzzle — figure out the optimal way to beat it — then figure out how to pull it off. Gold times are set so someone moderately good at the game might have a chance with practice. Diamond times are even harder with most set to under a few seconds. Rogue Tower. It feels very satisfying when you pull it off. Each trial feels unique and like the game is trying to teach you something.

TowerFall is a beautiful game with an insane amount of visual polish. While its character and environment designs stand out, the details and animation are what puts it over the top.

Everything from how the character moves to the environment details such as dripping water or crumbling skeletons. The basics are rather, well, basic. TowerFall controls like your average platformer and structures itself after a standard arena fighter.

In its primary mode, up to four players go head-to-head, armed with bows and arrows that can shoot in a suitably retro eight directions.

One hit from an enemy arrow or a Mario-style aerial stomp. Versus is a player archery shoot-out where you spawn with three arrows and you go around running and gunning trying to hit your opponents. Co-op is player in the original game, and in the Dark World Expansion. It consists of playing a stage and trying to survive and kill the waves of enemies that appear with your bow and arrows.

Trials is the last game mode. It is single player and is a target practice mini-game. There are 36 levels in the original game and 12 more in the Dark World Expansion. All of these modes are well made and fun to play. This really is a bummer, but if you ever have friends over or use Steam Remote Play, you can work around it. In the span of a few seconds, you can snatch a volley of arrows out of the air, return them to sender, dash onto the head of another foe and fire a miracle shot across the stage to take out a third.

TowerFall has been favorably compared to Super Smash Bros. Power-ups can throw curveballs into the mix, changing your arrows into explosive darts, environment-piercing drills or bouncing lasers. There are dozens of variables you can apply before starting a match, letting you tailor and save! The game was. Read my review of. Delivered by FeedBurner. Telephone Your telephone number is opetional. Search for:.

Requires a bit processor and operating system OS: Snow Leopard Share this post Digg Tweet Stumbleupon delicious reddit Facebook. TowerFall Ascension is the definitive version of the hit archery combat game.

The core mechanics are simple and accessible, but hard to master and combat is fierce. Loot treasure chests for game-changing power-ups, master the art of catching arrows out of the air, or descend on your foes and stomp them into submission. TowerFall is best played competitively with friends, cross-legged on the floor within punching distance of each other. New in Ascension is the 1- or 2-player co-op Quest mode.

Players work together, fighting off a variety of monsters and enemy archers across the land of TowerFall. Skip to content.

TowerFall Ascension. New features in TowerFall Ascension include: Brand new 1- or 2-player co-op Quest mode 50 additional Versus arenas, for a total of unique maps More game-changing power-ups, such as Drill Arrows that burrow through walls 4 new unlockable, playable archers, for a total of 8 A huge list of variants to customize your matches — a total of 75 ways to mix things up Plenty of hidden secrets and surprises to discover with your friends.

System Requirements Windows. Minimum: OS: Snow Leopard

 
 

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Approximately 20 hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes. There are no single-player modes. I heard some occasional F-bombs, though a profanity filter is available in the options menu. Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls on PC. Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Home » Reviews. LOW The dialog and aesthetic are thoroughly forgettable. Author Recent Posts. Mike Suskie. Mike’s first exposure to video games was when his parents bought him a Game Boy and a copy of Kirby’s Dream Land. Completing it gave him the boost of confidence that launched a lifelong enthusiasm for the medium.

Later in his life, he went back and discovered that Kirby’s Dream Land is actually a laughably easy game that can be finished in about 20 minutes, but no matter. He was born and raised in Amish country and has yet to escape, despite a brief stint in Philadelphia, where he attended Temple University. He took a one-credit course there called “Career Opportunities for English Majors,” which painted a bleak picture for prospective writers.

Mike remains steadfast in his ongoing role as a video game critic, however, and has recently written for GamesRadar. Most of his work can be found on HonestGamers, where he has contributed over reviews to date. When not playing games or writing about them, Mike is a rabid indie music fan and ardent concertgoer.

He doesn’t read as much as he probably should, but his current favorite author is Alastair Reynolds. Latest posts by Mike Suskie see all. Notify of. Inline Feedbacks. Samuel: It turns out being the captain of your own spaceship is stressful as hell, but you’ll take part in some great stories along the way. FTL is a superior mix of roguelike and strategy. While Into The Breach is taking its place in my life, this is still one of the best space-set games around. Wes: It can make for a great party game, too.

Put someone in the driver’s seat and let the crowd make choices. Suddenly half your ship is on fire and you’ve accidentally vented one of your crew into space. Chris: This grim and unforgiving open world FPS never turns you into an invincible superhero.

No matter how much gear and weaponry you scrounge from the irradiated exclusion zone, you’re still mortal and fragile, alone in a terrifying world of mutants, monsters, and roaming factions of AI-controlled humans. This lends Stalker an unending tension and fills every encounter with dread. From start to finish, there’s a sense that at any moment you could meet your unceremonious end. Wes: People are making mods and maps for this game like it was released a year ago.

That’s awesome. But what really strikes me about Doom 2 is how fun it still is, and how different it feels from decades more advanced shooters.

There’s a purity in how it moves, how it sounds and the minimum frames of animation it takes to sell firing the super shotgun. Pip: Twenty years after its initial release it’s still a real pleasure to revisit the film noir world of Manny Calavera, travel agent of the afterlife.

Nowadays I play purely for the story so I keep online hints at hand for when progress stalls. Samuel: There’s a long tail to Vermintide 2 if you’re willing to stick with this four-player Left 4 Dead-alike set in the Warhammer universe. It looks prettier than the first game, offers more in-depth character progression, and has much better combat. Phil: It feels really good to stab up a rat, and if that’s not worth a spot on this list, I’d love to know what is.

Samuel: This spooky adventure game has a group of young friends inadvertently unlock a supernatural force on a haunted island. The relationships and various tensions between all the characters feel very real, and the dialogue is funny and poignant. These characters feel like they could’ve been people I went to school with. Phil: The snappy, fun dialogue makes Oxenfree feel more theatrical than realistic, but that fits perfectly with the eerie mystery and interpersonal drama.

Pip: I added Grey Alien’s card-game-slash-Regency-romance to our Top discussion list, then reinstalled the game and spent three hours of the Top discussion playing this in the background.

I’m fighting the urge to play it again now instead of finishing this incredibly short paragraph about why it’s good. The solitaire aspect is really strong, it’s super easy to play just one more round, and the story is light but charming.

Are we done? Can I boot it up again? These ramshackle weapons carry you through a filthy, atmospheric corridor shooter set in the depths of the Moscow undercity. The tunnels hide mutant creatures and nests of horrible spidery things, but the most dangerous enemies are the human clans trying to scrape out a living in the post-apocalypse. The world building in Metro: Last Light is dazzling to me—the little snapshots of human civilisation that show how there are children in these underground settlements who never knew the world before it got into this bleak, decrepit state.

And the story features some unforgettable moments, such as an early flashback that shows—from the perspective of the pilots—how a passenger plane was destroyed in the nuclear blast. It commits to showing the horrors of what a nuclear war would do to the modern world, and I’d recommend it to absolutely anyone. Steven: Square Enix’s from-the-ashes MMO enjoyed another stellar year following the release of Stormblood, a revolution-themed expansion that whisks players across the sea to Eastern-inspired worlds that add much richness to an already great story.

Though its endgame has become a predictable grind at this point, Final Fantasy 14 is still able to keep things exciting thanks to the steady pace of new bosses, dungeons, and raids to clear. Each one is just as memorable as the last thanks to a stunning soundtrack and beautiful world design. Pip: Cosmo D’s first-person jazz hotel exploration has you poking around a converted mansion and uncovering the secrets of its former owner, celebrated pianist, Peter Norwood.

Musicality shapes the whole experience, warping the space and affecting the denizens. As you dig around you’ll also discover the game’s sense of humour via visual gags and surreal chats with guests and visitors. It’s sandbox in the truest sense, and the feeling of loosing an arrow into a line of galloping cavalry still holds up.

Phil: You start with nothing: left for dead in a town with few weapons, no supplies and barely any gold. From such inauspicious beginnings, you’re free to do just about anything.

Hunt bandits, befriend lords, rob pretty much anyone. Or, if you don’t fancy leading hundreds of soldiers, just go fight for prestige in the arena. New challenges are constantly being thrown at you, forcing you to try new units and tactics, and the story isn’t bad either.

When you’re done with all that, you can take your newfound skills online, which still has a huge and dedicated following. There’s a bottomless pit of tips, tutorials, and strategies online, meaning new players have a decent chance of catching up. Tom: Maybe a game like Stellaris will knock this classic spacebound 4X strategy game out of the Top , but not this year.

It’s hard to beat a game that’s so smart and complete, and that can generate so much strategic intrigue with every campaign. The AI is so cunning that former PC Gamer staffer-turned-developer Tom Francis once wrote an entire book about one of his attempts to thwart it.

Singleplayer games don’t get much deeper than this. Chris: There’s an engrossing amount of depth to the management simulation of Prison Architect, where building a workshop for inmates to make license plates doesn’t mean they’ll just walk in and begin working. First they’ll need training, which requires classrooms, which require instructors, who require work and class schedules and their own facilities.

Oh, and metal detectors to make sure the inmates don’t smuggle out tools to use as weapons against guards or other inmates, or to tunnel under the walls of your prison. It’s not easy building and managing a small city where most of the population is plotting escape.

Andy: I love it when things go to shit in management sims, and Prison Architect is enormously fun to watch and manage when disaster inevitably strikes. A streak of black comedy runs through the game, and there’s something darkly hilarious about a riot erupting—these cartoonish little characters shivving each other, starting fires and beating up guards.

Something as simple as a fight in the canteen can be the flashpoint for a full-scale riot, and trying to suppress it safely and quickly is a real test of skill. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun observing the chaos before rolling your sleeves up and stepping in to deal with it.

Pip: An adorable Ghibli-esque aesthetic—particularly the opening cutscene—gives way to a rock hard Metroidvania platformer. Your eyes are as likely to tear up with emotion as they are with absolute fury if you fail a boss one too many times.

Tom: It looks like sugar but tastes like salt. Ori is not the moonlit animal paradise it appears to be at first glance. The art is absolutely gorgeous. It’s a hazy, dreamlike world of artfully twisted overgrowth and spike pits. The movement is so quick, precise and responsive I just want to squeeze it, even as it stabs me repeatedly in the heart.

Approach with caution and keep some hankies and a swear jar within reach. Chris: A survival and crisis management sim about building and sustaining city in a frozen world. In addition to providing food, warmth, and shelter to your citizens, you have to provide them something much trickier: hope for the future. That’s immensely difficult when people are starving, freezing, and working themselves to death under your direction, and the choices you face are grim ones that never leave you feeling like a hero, even when things work out.

Frostpunk is a game that asks two questions: ‘How far are you willing to go to save lives? Tom: ‘Maybe I should start another Crusader run’: seven words that could take up 60 hours of my life. Diablo 3 is still a stellar action RPG that has only become more generous year on year after its unsteady and controversial launch. The necromancer is a fantastic addition that calls back to Diablo 2 without nostalgically retreading the same ground. If you want to smash up thousands of monsters for gold and loot, there aren’t many games that do it as well as Diablo 3.

Samuel: A superb hack-and-slash game that rewards mastery with feeling like a badass. It’s pretty much the first place I’d send anyone new to this genre of game that has its modern roots in Capcom’s Devil May Cry series. This, from that game’s creator, is funny, stylish and satisfying to learn. Its sequel, which Nintendo published, doesn’t come close to matching the original.

The range of weapons here fits together perfectly. Phil: The fast-paced combat is yet to be bettered, and the world and story are equal parts stylish and absurd. Pip: The rhythm combat in this game is so polished that I love it even when it’s at its most stressful. You have to move on every beat or risk losing your cash multiplier, which means there’s no downtime to plan your next move. Is a multiplier all that important, you ask?

Wes: This would be a great roguelike in its own right, but it’s almost unfair how cleverly the musical element is threaded through exploration and combat. Try dungeon dancing to your own music for a new challenge. Pip: I bounced off Sunless Sea so hard when it first came out—I remember clunky combat and irritating resource grind as core objections. Returning to the game with the Zubmariner DLC I found myself well and truly suckered in—devoting hours to pottering away in the Unterzee, drinking in Failbetter’s expert prose and luxuriating in the art style.

Sunless Skies is shaping up to be another step forward so I’m singing Sunless Sea’s praises now, lest seas be eclipsed by skies in the near future! Tom: Baldur’s Gate 2 is still a magnificent achievement. Few RPGs since have been as broad, deep or fully featured as this sprawling classic. It’s a great party RPG too. Few modern games would be brave enough to implement a morality system that causes party members to fall out with you and leave the party—the closest you might get is Wrex’s rebellion in Mass Effect.

Phil: After the slightly too long tutorial dungeon, Baldur’s Gate II hits the ground running, setting you loose in the massive city of Athkatla to earn money to fund the next leg of your journey. Phil: A vast, beautiful mystery that’s equal parts intriguing and relaxing, Fez is a puzzle-platformer that forgoes enemies and peril, instead offering a pleasant adventure about a strange world full of questions to answer.

At its most basic, you rotate between four 2D planes, shifting the world in order to create a path to the next door. But over the course of the game, you’ll solve riddles, uncover secrets, and even decode languages.

Fez is a tantalising puzzle box just waiting to be unlocked. Samuel: Take a journey around a steampunk-infused world as Passepartout, Phileas Fogg’s indispensable assistant. Then, whether you succeed or fail, take the journey again and again, and see all the places and stories you missed the first time around. While it feels made for mobile, you should definitely pick it up on desktop if you’ve never played it. Like the rest of the games in the series, it’s a beautiful big RPG with a cast of characters that span from annoying Vaan to awesome Balthier.

This entry is the only one with the excellent gambit tactics system, which lets you program your party’s AI to blitz dungeons and bosses with satisfying efficiency. Samuel: You can fast-forward this version of the game, too, giving the combat the pace and catharsis it desperately needed back when it came out on PS2. Pip: This is the third game in Matthew Brown’s hex-grid logic puzzler series, and it’s the best of the bunch. The ‘infinite’ part of the title refers to the fact that it can generate infinite puzzles if you want to keep playing.

But the real joy, and the reason I keep replaying it, is the set which Brown has hand-crafted. Absolute puzzle bliss. Tom: The saddest spaceships in games must travel the galaxy looking for a new home in Relic’s classic RTS. If you love brain-scrambling 3D battles then this is the only strategy game that really delivers. Deserts of Kharak is excellent too, but I’d sooner play a game bold enough to deploy Adagio for Strings in a scrap. Pip: I have spent north of 2, hours in this game.

You do not need to know how much money I have spent in this game. But that investment, both temporal and financial, was because this MOBA continued to reward me. There’s a rich esports scene, a daft and creative community, the ability for friendships to blossom and for groups of players to cross pollinate as friends of friends move in and out of your teammate invite list.

I only stop by occasionally now, but Valve continues to offer interesting updates. Turbo mode is my favourite addition in recent times, not least because it affords newbies a space where they can try characters out without as much pressure as a normal match. Samuel: It’s a phenomenon I’d recommend trying to anyone who plays on PC, even if they bounce off it. That tension of landing in this world and seeing what plays out is an experience everyone should have. Evan put it best last year, so allow me to repeat it here: “it compresses the time and space that survival games like DayZ give you, forcing you into contact with other players and out of your comfort zone.

Andy: I play PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds as a stealth game, moving carefully between cover, keeping out of sight, biding my time. But the thrill here is that the ‘guards’ are real people, which makes sneaking under their noses even more exhilarating.

Tom: This one has slipped down the list this year, largely because in recent times we’ve seen developers pick up the immersive sim baton and run with it—see entry number two in this list for the results. Deus Ex is still a classic, though. Even though the visuals, UI, dialogue and sound design seem more creaky each year, the scope for experimentation and emergent player-authored action is still impressive.

Phil: It’s creaky for sure, but Deus Ex’s freedom still feels remarkable, as does its level of respect for the player. But Deus Ex thrusts you into a paranoid world where everyone has an agenda and every command should be questioned. New Vegas is the best for reactive storytelling, Fallout 3 has my favourite side quests, and Fallout 4 feels the most refined when it comes to combat, presentation and world design.

Even if the choices towards the end didn’t produce outcomes I was happy with, I loved journeying around that world with Nick Valentine and Piper. And taking on the role of pulp-style hero The Silver Shroud represents my favourite superhero experience in any game. Evan: There’s nothing quite like Fallout’s setting. Its cynical, post-apocalyptic, Atomic Age sci-fi is dripping with black humour and absurdity. I’m grateful that something so esoteric continues to get the big-budget treatment.

Fallout 4 lets you be a silent stealth killer who wears a giant suit of power armour—not because it makes sense within the world, but because it makes sense within the underlying systems. It’s an anti-immersive sim, offering satisfying freedom in how you build your wasteland wanderer.

Andy: A miserable office worker inherits a farm and starts a new life in the idyllic Stardew Valley. This Harvest Moon-inspired farming sim is pleasantly freeform and lets you live the way you want to, whether that’s just lazily growing a few crops here and there, or starting a ruthlessly efficient mayonnaise empire.

Bo: Stardew Valley is everything I ever wanted out of Harvest Moon, but unchained from Nintendo’s puritanical approach to content. Tom: It’s obtuse, and it takes a lot of time and effort to become properly mixed up in the corporations that drive EVE Online’s greatest dramas, but I have taken a lot of pleasure in hopping into a vessel and mining for a few hours, quietly turning in a small profit and enjoying the vibe of EVE’s cosmos. It looks beautiful stretched across two monitors, and if I do find myself yearning for the grand stories of war and betrayal, I can always read about them later in PC Gamer.

Samuel: While as a shooter it’s far from best-in-class these days, exploring the different parts of this underwater world and learning its story is an experience no other game has matched for me.

Andy: Rapture is still one of the most atmospheric settings on PC, letting you explore a bizarre, broken society in a state of fascinating decay. Steven: Digital Extremes’ cooperative loot shooter quietly became one of the best free-to-play games and people are only just now catching on. In the years since its rocky release, Warframe has grown into a deeply satisfying and complex online game with thousands of hours worth of quests to complete and gear to farm. It’s an intimidating game for all the right reasons: difficulty, uncertainty, risk and reward.

The audio and combat camera effects deserve an award for how they make fights between illustrated paper characters feel like Eldritch kung fu.

Tyler: Solving an Opus Magnum puzzle isn’t satisfying the first time. You build an alchemy machine with tracks, rotating arms and flowchart instructions—producing gold from lead, for instance. Your sloppy contraption may look beautiful in motion, but how could you move on to the next challenge when your friend solved the same problem more elegantly? That quest for perfection is deviously engrossing. Few puzzle games feel so good to finally master. You play as an immortal being with amnesia, trying to piece his past together.

Think of any RPG convention and Torment will subvert or twist it in some fascinating way, and the characters who join your party along the way are truly strange. Tyler: I vacillate between them, but even though I like Civ 6’s city districts, Civilization 5 with all the expansions is still the evening destroyer I’d recommend. I wish the series would reexamine its assumptions about the world and make more radical changes in the future, but for now, Civ 5 is still the standard bearer for turn-based empire building: complex enough not to become too rote, but accessible enough for just about anyone who enjoys rewriting history.

Evan: I prefer Civ 6—it’s shallow, but I need my p boardgames to look as pretty as possible, and the expressive, animated leaders of Civ 6 add a lot. But the fact that there’s still a debate between the two is an endorsement of Firaxis’ approach to putting meaningful new spins on one of PC gaming’s longest-standing, most celebrated genres. Andy: In all the time I’ve played Civ 5, I’ve never actually won a game.

And so it’s a testament to just how compelling and accessible its strategy is that I keep coming back, trying new tactics and shaping my civilisation in new and interesting ways. It’s the journey—taking my people from humble beginnings to advanced empires—that I really enjoy. The destination ultimately isn’t that important. Tom: This turn-based tactics game has you controlling a squad of superspies in missions to knock out guards and steal data before the alarms detect you.

I love Klei’s angular art, and it’s miraculous that the team were able to build such a tight and nuanced tactics game with procedurally generated offices. As with Into the Breach, Invisible, Inc. You can see their sight lines clearly and judge their intentions. Your main decisions come down to your use of power points to hack systems. You can disable alarms or unlock doors to access tantalisingly placed upgrade terminals.

Do you grab your objective and flee before security arrives, or take a gamble for an upgrade that might make future missions a lot easier? Evan: Pure co-op calamity with a deceptively cheerful art style. You will never yell “I need lettuce! Samuel: So enjoyable to pick up, then appallingly difficult to master as you chase those three star ratings. If only I could take it less seriously—me and my partner had to stop playing because I was treating it like a part-time kitchen job.

It’s the definition of easy to learn and bloody impossible to master. I used to think hexagons were fine. Perfectly respectable shapes.

Maybe not as fun as parallelograms, which are basically drunk rectangles, but pretty good overall. Now I’ve played Super Hexagon I hate them.

They give me a rash. Terrible shapes. To hell with hexagons. Phil: Before writing this paragraph I fired up Super Hexagon for the first time in five years, and after only a few tries I was already pushing up near my best times.

This is the kind of game that sears itself into your subconscious; burrowing deep down into your muscle memory just waiting for you to return. As a shortform arcade game it’s practically perfect—a pulsating, rotating, constantly shifting assault of shapes and sounds with an instant restart that has you back in the action before the voiceover can finish saying “game over”.

Samuel: The facial animations really date BioWare games, but Mass Effect 2 is still the best at showing darker, more interesting sides to its dense sci-fi universe. Maybe it’s time for another trilogy replay. Andy: The greatest ensemble cast in RPG history. The idea of recruiting the galaxy’s most notorious warriors and criminals is a brilliant excuse to gather up a motley crew of weird, flawed, interesting people, and I cared about all of them.

Tim: Hearthstone is in a funny spot. The arrival of a tournament mode later this year may do that, but despite an atypically diverse meta, I’ve felt my desire to grind the ladder wane.

Regardless, for now Hearthstone remains peerless in terms of the quality and polish of the experience. Andy: GTA 5 is one of the most lavish singleplayer experiences you can have on PC, with impeccable production values, superb mission variety, and a wonderfully vibrant city.

It’s massive, but I’ve finished it three times—that’s how much I love being in Los Santos. Samuel: I change my mind about GTA Online every few months, but the fidelity of the world is unbeaten. I adore the original heists, and I’ve had a lot of fun playing the game with other people. I’ve seen those streets so many times now, though, and am desperate to play whatever comes next in the series.

Or, you know, they could bring Red Dead to PC. Phil: Whatever you think about GTA Online relationship status: it’s complicated , that first set of multiplayer heists are among the best co-op experiences you can have on PC.

The way they divide your team of four into smaller groups, each performing a specific task that slowly draws everyone together for a single, action packed finale is—when you successfully pull it off—tense, exciting and memorable. Joe: GTA Online is a shop window, and few games let you observe other players’ wares with such impact. Seeing that new car, aircraft or chopper hurtling towards you makes you want it—which makes grinding to get it less of a chore.

Tom: It’s Relic’s best game and frankly still one of the best real-time strategy games ever made. Jumping into a skirmish against the AI, it holds up today as well as it did at launch, which is a testament to the quality of the art and sound direction, and the success of Relic’s squad-based take on unit control.

The expansions are decent, but I still relish the purity of Company of Heroes’ asymmetrical core matchup. The US has a slight numbers advantage in the early infantry stages of a battle but the Axis forces can bring halftracks to the mid-game and elite tanks into the endgame. A few games have tried to imitate Company of Heroes over the years, but none have really come close.

Andy: Gordon Freeman awakes from stasis to find Earth transformed into a dystopian hellscape by an invading alien force. Valve’s influential FPS is still fantastic, particularly its eerie, understated atmosphere. The Combine are genuinely unnerving antagonists, but they didn’t anticipate going up against a mute physicist who can yank radiators off the wall and launch them at high speeds.

Chris: A linear FPS but one that makes you feel as if you’re finding your own path through it, rather than being shoved along rails by the developers. And the gravity gun is still the most enjoyable multitool in games: perfect for solving physics puzzles, playing catch with Dog, using a metal door as a shield, or flinging a toilet into a Metrocop’s head. Jody: FPS design often copies the Halo idea of a single, repeatable loop of fun, but Devil Daggers really boils it down. Here the loop is backpedalling in an arc while shooting daggers at nearby enemies, clearing enough room to aim at the weak spot of a distant, tougher enemy, then spinning around to take out the skull-face jerk sneaking up behind you.

It’s just you and infinite bastards to shoot. Evan: If you die and don’t go to heaven or hell, you play Devil Daggers until you win. Phil: A gloriously silly arcade playground that takes the Forza Motorsport series’ deep love of cars and customisation and transports it into a vibrant, luscious world full of ridiculous races and entertaining off-road mayhem. Forza Horizon 3’s best feature is the skill chain system, which transforms an otherwise basic drive between events into a challenge to string together stunts without crashing.

Andy: Driving pretend cars doesn’t get any better than the Forza series, and Horizon brilliantly softens the simulation while still maintaining a feeling of weight and realism. Andy: Skyrim remains one of the most evocative settings on PC. It’s not as big as some game worlds, but the varied biomes—from the bubbling hot springs of Eastmarch to the snow-battered coastline of Winterhold—make it feel much bigger than it is.

The role-playing is shallow and the writing isn’t great, but the sense of place and feeling of freedom make up for it. Picking a direction, going for a wander, and seeing what you’ll find out there among the snow and ice is The Elder Scrolls at its most captivating. Chris: You can finish or completely ignore the main story and still have a couple hundred hours of self-guided fun—especially by adding mods to the mix. Skyrim gives you a special kind of freedom seen in few RPGs.

Pip: If this was Pip’s Top Proteus would be in the number one spot. It’s a contemplative experience where you wander a procedurally generated island, delighting in what you find. I often find myself drifting back to it in moments of stress, treating myself to a short digital holiday.

One time I forgot I’d tweaked the game files and accidentally turned everything red, so that was a surprise. Seas of blood. Phil: Crusader Kings 2 isn’t just a grand strategy about medieval kingdoms. It’s a grand strategy about the people in charge of those kingdoms.

You’re not the abstract concept of the country of France; you’re the King of France, a year-old man who, after a protracted battle against the rebellious Duke of Burgundy, is now on his deathbed, about to leave the fate of his dynasty to an idiot son. You’re not the ever-expanding territory of the Holy Roman Empire; you’re an increasingly deranged emperor who people think has been possessed by the devil.

By generating stories about people, Crusader Kings II is an endlessly fascinating soap opera that’s different every time. In my last campaign, I didn’t even play. I used the command console to simply observe the action, watching as an epic period drama played out across the map. Chris: What’s most interesting is how your relationships change when you die and continue playing as your heir. Those three children you had don’t seem so wonderful once you’ve assumed the role of the eldest.

The other two, while devoted to their father, now hate you and may plot against you. Your entire view of the world changes regularly, not just because the players change but because you yourself do, by dying and playing as someone new. Chris: It should have been impossible to top the near-perfect Portal in comedy, storytelling, and physics-bending first-person puzzles, but Portal 2 somehow manages it, and even throws in some fantastic multiplayer on top.

Andy: Portal 2 brings a funny and sometimes disarmingly poignant story to its mind-bending puzzles, and the results are exceptional. Your journey through the various eras of Aperture Science make the game a constant delight.

The most recent, ‘s Legion, brought in a swathe of quality-of-life improvements and some of the best questing in World of Warcraft’s nearly year history, making it worth playing all over again. It’s still pretty grindy, especially compared to the more streamlined Guild Wars 2, but there are few online worlds this rich and storied to spend time in.

Tyler: Undertale subverts RPG cliches with constant self-reference, but unlike many ‘parody games’, it’s not cynical or derivative. Undertale is a great RPG even if you don’t get every reference. James: Fortnite’s battle royale mode started as a weak PUBG imitation, but an unprecedented update cycle has made it not just the best battle royale game, but one of the most fascinating games in development today.

With map changes, new items, and one-off world events almost every week, Fortnite is endlessly entertaining to live in. Wes: Regular changes to the meta have kept League alive and on top for years. Pip: I favour ARAM—a five-vs-five battle where randomly assigned characters let spells and punches fly across a single lane.

Andy: While the most recent SimCity did everything it could to stifle creativity, Cities: Skylines gave players the power to make anything they want—in part thanks to the deep mod support. The result is the best city-builder around. Samuel: The best game of its kind in a genre that people have enjoyed and will play forever, well supported by compelling expansions. Plus, you can destroy your city with meteors if you’re having a dark day—like I did when I was mayor of Pipville several months ago.

Evan: Arma 3 stands alone as the highest-fidelity FPS, the best multiplayer story generator, and a bottomless trough of community missions and mods. It’s no coincidence that Arma was the fertile terrain that produced the last two biggest trends in PC gaming: battle royale and survival games. In one, the woman being interviewed says, “I didn’t murder Simon. More video clips—more hints at a tantalising mystery that twists and changes as you unlock more of its parts.

Samuel: Probably the best mystery game ever made, because Her Story is over when you feel you’ve found the answer or when you’ve discovered all the clips, depending on the type of player you are. It truly puts the drama of uncovering the truth in your hands, which is so hard for a game to do in any meaningful way. One of those games I would recommend to someone who has never played games.

Andy: A narrative game that really makes use of the medium. The mystery unfolds differently for everyone who plays it, which is a wonderfully original way of telling a story.

Tom: Total War is a complex grand strategy series that fuses turn-based 4X-style empire-building with vast real-time battles. So far we’ve mostly seen the format used to explore historical scenarios, but it turns out the Warhammer universe is a perfect fit.

For fans of the setting it’s a joy to see each faction rendered so vividly, but I would recommend Total War: Warhammer 2 to any strategy fan regardless of your Warhammer knowledge. If you want to command a traditional army, the Empire is there for you. If you want something more adventurous, you don’t need to know much about the undead Tomb Kings to enjoy sending hordes of skeletons after magical relics. The sequel’s campaign is brilliant. Four factions fight for control of a big magic vortex in the middle of the map, which keeps the campaign interesting all the way into the endgame.

Jody: Replay that campaign and eventually you’ll see behind the curtain, but what makes it worth replaying is the factions. Warhammer 2 gets its factions right in ways that should please all but the fussiest fans, even though they’re a diverse collection of uptight magic elves, dinosaur-riding lizards, sneaky rat bastards, and “we’re really into leather” sex dungeon kink elves. That’s no easy feat. Pip: The latest instalment of the long-running life sim has absorbed many hours of my life as I generate idiotic stories starring my beloved cast of citizens.

Four years after release it’s at the point where features missing at launch have been patched in toddlers! I’d like to see the pricing model better support people who dip in and out, but overall there’s still no other game like it.

Every round is a joust of plays, counters, and outmaneuvering, where a smart flash or reflex AWP pick shifts the balance. It’ll never be enough. Each gun is a wild animal with its own unique spray pattern and tendencies that can take dozens of hours to learn. Tyler: I’ve hit a skill plateau in the best and only rocket car soccer game I play the hockey variant , but I just have to find the next slope. I don’t think one can ever stop getting better at Rocket League.

There’s always a better position I could’ve been in, an aerial I shouldn’t have botched. It hasn’t changed much over the years, but I feel like I could play it forever. Phil: This stealth sandbox about a bald assassin features six huge, absurdly detailed maps, each filled with interesting ways to bump off your targets. Hitman’s social stealth systems—where disguises are more important than not being seen—gives you the time to plan, experiment and refine your approach.

It’s now the best game in the series. Phil: Build a rocket, launch a rocket, fly a rocket, crash a rocket. And then do it all again—tweaking and experimenting until your design is bona fide spacefaring craft, able to maintain orbit or visit nearby celestial bodies. Kerbal Space Program is a sublime mix of physics and slapstick that makes for the perfect playground for space exploration. Wes: No one’s topped the way Spelunky’s pieces play off one another to make its world feel deeply knowable and random at the same time.

It’s a game you play for hundreds of hours, until getting the key to unlock the chest to find the Udjat Eye to reach the black market to buy the ankh to die and come back to life to fight Anubis to take his sceptre to unlock the City of Gold to find the Book of the Dead to journey through Hell to fight King Yama just feels like another day playing Spelunky.

Andy: The best horror game on PC, because the thing chasing you has a mind of its own. There’s no pattern to predict, no patrol route you can exploit.

The alien is intelligent. It will learn your habits and it will fuck with you, and that is terrifying. Samuel: I replayed it this year, and it’s amazing how much mileage they get out of the same two repeated enemies by making clever use of set pieces and different types of environments.

Probably the best horror game ever. Andy: I love Overwatch because, as someone lacking the skill to play most other online shooters competently, I can still make a difference in a match.

The sheer variety of brilliantly-designed characters and their wildly varied toolsets means there’s something for every kind of player, even if they can’t pull off a decent headshot. It’s also impressively accessible, cleverly explaining the intricacies of its heroes’ abilities without overloading you with information. Bo: A year ago, Blizzard told me they had “barely scratched the surface” of abilities and character archetypes they’d like to explore in Overwatch.

With the newest hero being a giant hamster ball mech with a Spider-Man-style grappling hook piloted by a literal hamster, I’m finally inclined to believe them. Overwatch continues to be one of the most unique and accessible shooters. And on the esports front, the Overwatch League’s adoption of a city-based team model has ignited local enthusiasm in a way that no other game, tournament, or organization has been able to thus far.

Phil: We decided this list’s order before Wrecking Ball was announced. I’ll leave you to speculate whether he would have raised or lowered Overwatch’s position. Pip: Dontnod’s episodic, time-rewinding teen drama develops Look! A photography pun! Because the lead character is into photography!

It’s not perfect—some puzzle segments outstay their welcome and the plot often throws subtlety out of the window—but OH MY! The cast of characters and the strength of their relationships elevate the whole thing, and the Instagrammy aesthetic bolsters the teenage intensity. Phil: It also features probably the best use of mid-’00s indie boys playing sad acoustic songs about relationships and feelings in all of gaming.

Wes: The best Metroidvania since Super Metroid. Hollow Knight is open-ended almost to a fault, giving you a massive, decaying, interconnected bug kingdom to explore and frequently find yourself lost in.

It can be overwhelming at first, but the feeling of discovery ends up being immensely rewarding as a result. The super responsive platforming and combat keep backtracking from ever feeling like a chore, something similar games have struggled with. Tom: A modernisation of Doom that puts the focus firmly on speed and sweet guns. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of experimentation, but it’s so refreshing to boot this game up and blow gooey chunks out of the forces of hell.

Bring on the next one, id. Samuel: The best single-player FPS there is in A clever update of Doom that turns fights into melee-heavy duels, with a not-overly-serious tone that hits just the right spot. Wes: And the levels are actually intricate mazes full of secrets, just like classic Doom! I expected good shooting in bland corridors, but this is so much more. Tom: I loaded back into my MGS5 save a month ago to find Snake decked out head-to-toe in a leopard skin combat suit.

Samuel: My favourite stealth action game ever, that sits somewhere between immersive sim and Metal Gear of old. Tom: Have you met Gravelord Nito? He’s a roiling mass of skeletons shrouded in a cape of souls.

He lives deep in Dark Souls nightmarish catacombs, and he’s just one example of the game’s extraordinary art direction, and powerful sense of dark fantasy horror. People go on about Dark Souls’ bottomless lore with good reason, but underneath the theatrics it’s actually a very simple game.

You raid dungeons, chop up monsters, loot chests and level up. Without strong, enduring combat fundamentals I wouldn’t have kept playing long enough to uncover the gods’ tragic stories. Pip: Subnautica is my game of so far. I usually tap out pretty fast when it comes to survival games but this one takes place in a gorgeous underwater world, involves a compelling plot, AND I adore tinkering with my little underwater base. It also lets me choose how much survival-ing I care to have as part of the game experience, meaning I can switch off thirst.

Andy: Exploring is genuinely rewarding, both in terms of finding resources to build cooler submarines and environmental detail. It’s a world with a story to tell, and it tells it brilliantly. Tom: Strategy games are good at making me care about numbers and systems, but XCOM 2 is one of the few I can name that translate the numberwang into emotional investment.

Losing a squad member can feel devastating. You nurture them between fights, gradually upgrading their gear and unlocking sweet new skills, only for an alien to cruelly blast them in a routine mission. When things go wrong in XCOM, they go very wrong indeed, which is all part of the drama in a game that casts humanity as the underdog.

Evan: XCOM’s art direction is ridiculously underrated. Its maps are believable, colorful dioramas that shatter into pieces under the heat and intensity of your insurgent combat. Evan: Sure, you can play Siege as if it’s Counter-Strike, pre-firing and out-angling your opponents with snap marksmanship. But the real joy is in outsmarting the other team by poking clever holes in the maps, placing your gadgets in unexpected positions, and careful drone scouting.

I also love Siege’s tempo: this is a shooter that gives you time and a canvas of breakable space to stop, strategize, and execute a dumb plan with absurd gadgets like an eyeball turret that shoots lasers, invisible poison mines, and a drone that shoots concussions. Ubisoft remains devoted to supporting Siege with meaningful systems renovations and with four annual updates that add new characters and maps. Samuel: This first-person narrative game is constantly inventive. Edith Finch ventures into the home where her family used to live, before they all died in various tragic circumstances and their rooms were sealed up.

You uncover each of their stories. It’s the high point of this genre. Andy: Exploring the abandoned home of the eccentric Finch family and uncovering their history is one of the most satisfying storytelling experiences a game has ever given me. But it’s a game I’ll never play again, simply because one scene in particular was so emotionally-charged that I can’t face it.

Any piece of media that holds that kind of power has to be special. Tom: Into the Breach is a game about quick turn-based battles between mechs and kaiju-sized bugs, and it’s almost perfect. Unlike many turn-based strategy games, Into the Breach doesn’t use chance to inject battles with tension—the UI tells you pretty much everything that’s going to happen next turn. The pleasure comes from solving the next turn state as efficiently as you can.

It’s a small game—battles only last a few turns on an eight-by-eight grid—but the varied mech teams and increasingly nefarious bug types create a huge amount of tactical variation. Wes: There’s so little randomness that random moments have immense impact. In one run, I had two buildings resist damage at a pivotal point. I’ve never done a more exaggerated fist pump. Tyler: Divinity: Original Sin 2 feels less stodgy than other classic RPG revivals while heightening their best qualities: turn-based combat I hate real-time, sorry with physics-based spells and exploding barrels necessary , great characters, and a commitment to letting players do what they want, even if it breaks everything.

Wes: It offers you an intricate RPG sandbox to play in, and it invites you to break the rules in as many ways as you can imagine. The first game did that, too, but this one marries that freedom with across-the-board great writing and genuinely thoughtful roleplaying.

It walks the walk and talks the talk. Samuel: This is the best stealth game there has ever been. While the high-concept levels like A Crack in the Slab and Clockwork Mansion get a lot of attention for their clever one-off twists, more traditional stages like Royal Conservatory and Dust District are so detailed and fun to explore.

There’s no sense of repetition, and each level feels like a huge event. It’s the precision of Dishonored 2 I love. Every successful takedown or evasion feels like something you’ve earned. Andy: Dishonored 2 has some of the best level design on PC, both in terms of the architecture and aesthetic, and in how the environments are rich playgrounds that let you really flex your creativity.

Every location has something interesting about it, whether it’s the time-hopping of A Crack in the Slab or the intricate house-sized puzzle box that is the magnificent Clockwork Mansion. And the sheer volume of ways to navigate the levels and complete your objectives really captures the spirit of PC gaming.

Tom: I want to savour every moment in Karnaca, because those levels are so dense and fun to explore. Immersive sims have always been good at creating broad levels like these, full of sandbox opportunity, but I really value that simple acts of moving, shooting and fighting feel great in Dishonored 2.

The introduction of Emily just broadens your toolset further. Domino, which lets you chain NPCs fates together so that one attack affects them all, is an inspired ability, and it’s emblematic of the way Dishonored 2 builds on the tenets of immersive sims like Deus Ex, and spins them out in spectacular new ways. Augmented special forces dudes are cool, but warlock assassins are even cooler. Phil: For me it’s the reactivity of the world. Yes, the combat is fluid and satisfying, the level design is intricate and beautifully balanced, and the abilities perfectly tailored for absurd displays of skill and problem solving.

But what ties it all together is the lengths Arkane has gone to make it all feel believable and real. I believe in Dishonored 2’s world because throughout I encountered ways Arkane had anticipated player behaviour. Arkane knew someone would try, and so made a response. That’s amazing dedication to the craft. Tom: It’s a great execution of the ronin fantasy set in one of the most beautiful worlds on PC.

The craggy Skellige isle might be one of my favourite places in games, or is it Novigrad, or the sunlit vineyards of Toussaint? Even the dripping bogs in the early areas are pretty, in their own miserable way. Within these gorgeous places you meet people with interesting problems. Maybe their local well is haunted.

Maybe their spouse is haunted. Usually something is haunted, or cursed, or being pursued by a hideous mythical beast. I treated the sidequests as the main quest, to be honest, roleplaying a mutant outcast on a mission to make the world a slightly better place. Jody: The fact you play a character with his own place in the world, including allies, enemies, and ex-girlfriends, is a definite strength of The Witcher 3.

But it wasn’t always this way. In the first Witcher game Geralt was an amnesiac sleazebag and honestly a bit of a tool. He wasn’t a fun person to be around, let alone to be.

But by The Witcher 3, Geralt’s a caring father figure with a heart of gold beneath layers of beard and gruff, and more than that he feels like someone you personalise. The Witcher 3’s version of Geralt is the perfect videogame protagonist not because he’s more integrated into his world than a character you make from scratch, but because he’s a solid outline with room to manoeuvre inside that.

He contains multitudes—but not too many. He has well-defined areas of doubt and uncertainty. Wes: “Place” really is what makes The Witcher 3 so spectacular, and like no other game I’ve played.

It’s not just that the world is gorgeous and detailed, though it is both of those things. The Witcher 3 has this unparalleled combination of artistry and technology that makes its locations and characters feel authentic. Accents and architecture differ between the mainland and Skellige. The characters you encounter out in the world have quests that involve their families or monsters native to their region, and the more of these quests you take, the more you appreciate how natural and human they seem.

No one’s asking you to go out and slay five wolves because that’s a good way to spend ten minutes in an RPG. Depending on how you play Geralt, you can be a mercenary in search of coin, or calmly talk someone out of a decision you know they’ll regret.

Those touches, along with the motion capture, the voice acting and the wind on a blustery night in Velen, make the whole thing come alive. What a world. Phil: A thing I hate about most RPG writing is that something as simple as asking to be rewarded for your time and effort is treated as the most evil thing a protagonist can do.

But in The Witcher 3, Geralt is a professional doing his job. His haggling with clients over money isn’t a deviance or a crime, but the expected cost of hiring a man who is good at what he does for a living. When you pick up a quest, it isn’t just some thinly-written excuse to get you to go kill a monster.

There’s a backstory, a motivation, and often a twist. Quests can spiral, turning an encounter with a peasant in a tavern into a sprawling epic that ends with you fighting some great, mythical beast atop a crumbling tower in a raging storm. The game is heaving with interesting characters and worthwhile things to do, and Geralt is the foundation of it all: a complex lead who makes other videogame characters look like cardboard cutouts.

We love many more games than we can fit onto one list, so here the PC Gamer team has spotlighted a few of their favorites that didn’t make the cut.

Cradle, like Deadly Premonition, is wonky but fascinating and stays with you for years. It’s a transhumanist puzzler where you try to repair a mechanical girl who is also a vase in a yurt on the Mongolian steppe next to an abandoned theme park which dispenses block-based minigames.