Frostpunk is the best game I’ve played this year (my review is here), a blend of city-building, survival, and society simulation. After a recent chat with 11 Bit Studios, the developers of the tense survival sim, I was sent some lovely concept art for the game’s characters, buildings, and setting, which you can see below. Inside the factoryIn Frostpunk you get to construct all sorts of buildings—houses, factories, workshops, temples, and other facilities—but you never get to see inside them. A f

The Google Chrome update that broke the audio in a huge number of online games last week has been rolled back. “We’re doing this to give Web Audio API developers (e.g. gaming, audio applications, some RTC features) more time to update their code. “The policy will be re-applied to the Web Audio API in Chrome 70 (October). “Using is a standard way to stream audio tracks (MP3, OGG, etc) with WebAudio, so this rollback has only fixed a fraction of all sites using WebAudio.”

Dell has a number of its monitors on sale right now, but perhaps the best deal is on the ‘S2716DGR’ monitor (great name, I know). It’s a 27″ 1440p monitor, with 144Hz G-Sync compatibility. Right now, you can get it for $349.99 from Best Buy, a $250 drop from the MSRP. The only downside is that it uses a TN panel, but that’s to be expected at this price. You can buy the Dell S2716DGR from Best Buy here.

Join us in the celebration as we count down with TWO new skin reveals.Our FIRST reveal: VENOM SOLDIER: 76! (Epic) pic.twitter.com/w7BlRUYHiIMay 16, 2018Overwatch’s Anniversary event kicks off next week, and Blizzard has begun teasing out the new skins that will come with the event. We’ve already gotten a look at a pirate-themed outfit for Junkrat, and now we have glimpse of a new Epic skin for Soldier: 76. Take a look at the Venom skin in the teaser above. Blizzard also mentions a second skin te

There aren’t many reasons to use a mechanical hard drive as a primary storage device these days, not with all of the deals we have been seeing on solid state drives. The latest one is for a Silicon Power Slim S55 480GB SSD. Newegg has the drive on sale for $97.99. This is a SATA 6Gbps drive that uses TLC NAND flash memory with SLC cache. You can see the overall performance of the S55 in our Best SSDs guide.

As it pertains to the latter, the company’s GeForce GTX 1070 Ti Mini can be had today for $449.99 after a $30 mail-in-rebate. If you apply promo code EMCXPUEV3 at checkout, Newegg will shave $20 off the price, plus there’s the aforementioned rebate. There’s a caveat though—the promo code is only intended for Newegg’s newsletter subscribers, and may not work if you’re not one. You can sign up for Newegg’s newsletter here. As for the card itself, Zotac bills it as the world’s smallest GTX 1070 Ti,

Overwatch’s Hanzo had a rework recently, finally replacing his much-hated Scatter Arrow with a new ability: Storm Arrows. When Storm Arrows is activated, Hanzo’s next six arrows fire instantly, without having to be charged up, but at reduced damage than a regular fully-charged shot. Now that the new Hanzo has been in the wild for a bit, players are finding the new Storm Arrows to be just as frustrating as the old Scatter Arrow. The biggest complaint about Scatter Arrow is that it could one-shot

You can chart the progress of PC gaming in many ways: the force of a shotgun; the substance of dialogue; the scale of an RTS. Join me, then—a digital lumberjack, armed only with a Collins Gem copy of All You Need To Know About Trees and 11 synonyms for wood—as we learn to tell frond from bough in the history of trees in games. For more hot tree-based content, head over to James’s piece on where trees come from in games, this piece ranking chopping down trees in survival games, Tim’s ode to the t

Now that graphics card prices have finally fallen back to MSRP levels (or thereabouts), you might be tempted to pull the trigger on a GPU upgrade. If you do, and if you opt for one of three specific Asus GeForce GTX 1070 Ti models, EK has a full-coverage water block. However, these new water blocks are far from being the only ones in EK’s stable. As with many of EK’s other similar water blocks, these new ones sport a “central inlet split-cooling engine design” for better cooling. EK is currently

A Battlefield 1 Easter egg that was discovered last week pointed a very big finger toward a Battlefield announcement of some sort on May 23. Today, Daily Show host Trevor Noah confirmed the rumor and revealed that he will be hosting the event, for some reason. #ad The rumors are true (rumors that I started, but still…) I will be hosting the @Battlefield Live Reveal on Wed, May 23rd. pic.twitter.com/7B3fpTpQ6xMay 16, 2018Noah doesn’t actually say that it’s Battlefield 5, referring to the event

If you liked Proteus, then you’ll probably enjoy Shape of the World, a procedurally-generated exploration game full of colour and relaxing music. It squeaked over its Kickstarter goal back in 2015, and now it finally has a definitive release date: June 5. Its world is very pretty indeed, and the art style is a lot more detailed and stylised than Proteus’. Developer Hollow Tree Games, a new indie outfit, says it will take between one and three hours to complete depending on just how much of the w

Asus has gone and quietly refreshed its ZenBook Pro 15 laptop with an even thinner profile, a still lightweight design, and more powerful components culminating in an 8th generation Intel Core i9-8950HK processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 graphics. Along with the rest of the options, Asus has managed to pack an impressive collection of hardware into a svelte package. The ZenBook Pro 15’s waistline measures just 0.74 inches and weighs 4.1 pounds. The ZenBook Pro 15 has a 15.6-inch display avail

WHY I LOVE In Why I Love, PC Gamer writers pick an aspect of PC gaming that they love and write about why it’s brilliant. Paradise kept the series’ impactful racing, but added diversions that made it feel like a brand-new experience—perfect for PC players coming to Burnout for the first time. Despite not being a petrolhead, it was astonishingly easy for me to fall in love with, because the freedom to faff about in games makes my heart sing. The sense of freedom the game hands out as you settle i

EA has been quietly packing its paid subscription service, Origin Access, with a long list of excellent games over the past few months. This month, it’s the turn of relaxing underwater explorer Abzû and old-school RPG Tyranny, as well as seven others. Origin Access is a bit like Netflix for PC gaming: you pay $5/£4 a month, or $30/£20 for the whole year, and get unlimited access to the 100 or so games inside the “vault”. Out of the nine new ones, I’m most looking forward to Tyranny, which has be

My favorite thing to do in The Crew 2 is turning into a boat at 5,000 feet. The reason you’re racing is even more cloying: the whole game is built around gaining “followers” to get famous. The Crew 2’s physics are forgivingly arcadey, though harder if you’re driving a motorsport car than a street racer. If all you care about is the driving, though, there is a lot to love in The Crew 2. Those who find endless driving meditative, though, may never leave the world of The Crew 2.

Every major sports league has a Cleveland Browns—a team that’s looked at as a complete pushover. For Overwatch League, that’s the Shanghai Dragons. She has added quite a bit of longevity to Shanghai’s team fights by playing an economical off-tank that’s often difficult to deal with. Former professional Overwatch tank and current Overwatch League commentator, Jonathan “Reinforce” Larsson, has said that Fearless’ rapid pacing comes from his pre-Overwatch League days with Element Mystic. Despite Ad

League of Legends’ weekly three-day online tournament mode, called Clash, will begin on May 25, Riot Games has announced. Before games, you’ll be able to see your opponents’ stats and top picks, and all champions will be unlocked. If you have one platinum player, for example, you’ll be bumped up for a much tougher test. Provided you can get four other players to commit to a three-day tournament, it sounds like fun. You’ll be able to create your team on May 21.

So we ask you, reader: what was the last game you bought a physical copy of? Steven Messner: Battlefield 4I’m actually quite proud of my last physical PC game purchase because it demonstrates how clever 23-year-old-and-very-poor me was. We’ll call this discounted game Game A. The last physical game I bought for PC was only because I found a stupid loophole to exploit. Looking at the remains of my once proud collection, my last physical game box is from Empire: Total War, which came out in March

Omensight, which came out yesterday, is how I imagine the film Groundhog Day would’ve turned out if it was written by a fantasy author. It all started, it turns out, with a murder mystery, and solving that is the key to saving the world. You get to choose how to spend each day, so presumably you’ll be changing events incrementally until all the pieces fall into place. Moment-to-moment, it’ll play like a hack-and-slasher with a skill tree and upgradable weapons, and developer Spearhead Games—of A

Yesterday, Sea of Thieves added one of its most requested features: private crews. 12 hours later, the feature was disabled because it was causing server instability, and it still isn’t back online. The previously added features have been turned off temporarily and we will continue to monitor game performance and develop a plan to reinstate the features soon. pic.twitter.com/t8feB9hAcuMay 16, 2018Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have fixed the server instability, and this morning developer Rare