Zombie survival RTS They Are Billions’ latest update focuses on improving the late game by adding its most powerful structures yet. The Six Wonders, detailed in the video above, cost “tonnes of resources”, but may well keep your colony alive against the endless waves of enemies. Building one will massively boost your score, but you’ll only be able to choose one of each kind on the same map. You can find the full details of what each one does in the video above or in this blog post. If you’re loo

There have been a few great laptop sales lately, but if you can’t drop $900+ on a portable gaming machine, MSI has you covered. Right now, you can buy the MSI GL62M gaming laptop for $597 from Fry’s. The graphics card is a 2GB GTX 1050, so while you won’t be able to play modern AAA games at high graphics, it can handle older titles and indie games just fine. The laptop is currently priced at $729, but there’s a $100 rebate that drops the price to $629. After the rebate and promo code, the total

If you haven’t heard of Beat Saber before, then you’re not alone—I only caught wind of it earlier today. But this Early Access VR rhythm game, which is basically a lightsaber version of Guitar Hero, is now the highest rated game on Steam. The main Beat Saber Twitter account today tweeted that we’d find out more information on Friday, but then the game’s creator said that it might be ready before that. #StayTuned pic.twitter.com/pqaH04MbOtMay 6, 2018You can pick up Beat Saber for $19.99/£15.49 on

As Oculus’s latest VR headset, the Oculus Go, began flying off the shelves this week, the company was busy revealing the next prototype of the Rift, and it makes a number of significant changes. It’s a neat trick, and apparently doesn’t come with any noise or vibrations, nor does it require a larger headset. It’s not quite the 200-degree field of view headset that Tuan tried out in January, but that extra 40 degrees should make a big difference. You can see a comparison between the current Oculu

What is Service Host SuperFetch? What is Service Host SuperFetch? Windows SuperFetch was originally introduced with Windows Vista as a successor to PreFetch. Today DLL files are much more commonly used within Windows, but they require a shell to host them, hence the generic Service Host for SuperFetch. To find that process you’ll need to scroll through the exhaustive list of Service Host processes to find the one called “Service Host: Superfetch.”

Squad, the 50v50 multiplayer military FPS, has been in alpha for nearly three years. The 11th alpha version arrived this week, adding the British Armed Forces alongside a new map and a huge stash of weapons and vehicles. British infantry soldiers will rely on the L85A2, a bullpup rifle that can switch between semi-automatic and full auto fire modes. Alongside the L85A2 rifle, the game adds nine other weapons, most of them geared towards the new British forces. The update also brings lots of mech

After spending an hour with Smoke and Sacrifice in March, Samuel described it as like “Don’t Starve as a dark fantasy RPG”, which is something I can get on board with. I like the hand-painted art, as well as the idea of taking a survival game with crafting and making it more focused and narrative driven. The game now has a release date of May 31, so there’s not long to wait until we find out if it’s any good. You journey across the world, taking on quests, defeating beasts and crafting items to

A few teams have commented on how playing Boston feels different from playing any other team. According to Winston’s Lab , Neko scored 4.83 kills per ten minutes as Zenyatta against the Los Angeles Gladiators last night, and accounted for 14.65 percent of Boston’s kills. Kellex’ ability to dash between teammates in need while staying alive himself gives Boston’s pushes quite a bit of longevity. Good thing for the team, Nam-Ju “Striker” Gwon upped his game, and Stanislav “Mistakes” Danilov manage

The creators of the Rusty Lake games—think creepy, point-and-click escape rooms—took to Kickstarter this week to raise money for their next project, a new game and an accompanying short film. Rusty Lake Paradise, the most recent game, came out in March. The new project, called Paradox, will be both a short film and a two-chapter point-and-click game, with one chapter offered for free. “Both game and movie follow the story of a detective who finds himself trapped in two different universes and ne

A lot is happening in frenetic arena FPS Quake Champions, as id Software studio director Tim Willits told Evan in March when he sat down to talk about the future of the game. That includes an updated gore system, detailed in a video this week, that will make champions’ bodies burst into hundreds of tiny pieces when you blast them in the face with a rocket. The new system, which is “coming soon”, individually models tiny sections of each champion, which makes for some spectacular gibbing, as you

On Thursday evening, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds launched its time-limited Desert Knights mode, a 50-player deathmatch pitting ten five-person teams against each other in a small corner of Miramar. PC Players: The emergency maintenance is now complete.Unfortunately, we’ve had to prematurely end this week’s event mode, as it was found to be the cause of recent server instability. Players had less than 24 hours to try out the mode, and it didn’t make it through to the weekend, which would have b

City of Brass puts me in mind of a 3D, Arabian Nights-themed version of Spelunky. As you sprint through its shiny, procedurally-generated metropolis you’ll grab treasure, buy items, lay traps, whip enemies and slash your scimitar, avoiding permadeath at all costs. It’s been in Early Access for just under a year and now it’s out on Steam, with the 1.0 update adding the final boss fight. Unlike Spelunky, however, you won’t have a lot of time to think in City of Brass. You’ll be facing lots of enem

Great moments in PC gaming are short, bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories. What made it great: The first time I saw the glorious FMV ending of Command & Conquer, it was at a friend’s house, played out on the Sega Saturn rather than a PC. Naturally, for a kid in America, the White House was the obvious choice. Watching it now, the destruction of the CG White House is too fast, too perfunctory, not dramatic enough. In the Youtube age, seeing the end of Command & Conquer

If you’re short on games to play today, or just fancy something new, then here’s an idea: try out XCOM 2 for free. The famously tough, tactical alien murder sim remains one of the best strategy games on PC, and developer Firaxis has made it free-to-play until tomorrow at 1pm PT/4pm ET, with 67% off for anybody that wants to carry on playing. There are a million reasons why you should play it if you haven’t already: Tom gave it a whopping 94% in his review, and we later named it the best strategy

The second of those patches arrived this week, bringing with it a new gadget, improved character customisation, and BMXs that won’t flip out every time you so much as bump over a curb. The new gadget is a scanner that temporarily shows the location of enemies within a “large” radius on your minimap. The update also adds bike ramps for you to fling your BMX off, and complements that with changes to the way the bikes handle. Customisation has all been moved to one place, the Prize Room, to make it

In today’s PCG Q&A, then: What are games doing in 2018 that you thought they would have stopped by now? Burying reams of information in letters and books that you feel obligated to read but resent every second doing so. Adding stealth and/or vehicle sections to games that they have no business whatsoever being in. Basically a lot of the go-to storytelling devices that are still driving games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider in 2018. I hate it when games stop and try to be a film for a while, becau

THE HIGHSJames Davenport: GoodniteLess than a week into Fortnite Season 4 and I’ve already finished the first set of challenges. While I’m no Fortnite pro, I can feel myself getting better all the time. As long as my building or aim or harvest speed is a touch better than before, I’m cool with going out early. You’ve still got a sizeable chunk of last month’s wage in the bank, but have another three weeks before your next cheque. Unfortunately, the PC Gamer staff suck at baseball, though that’s

A surprising resurgence in the popularity of Windows 7, and a marked drop in Windows 10, was reflected in the November 2017 Steam Hardware and Software Survey. It wasn’t just an influx of Chinese users that caused the sudden surge, however, but an “over-counting” of people accessing Steam via “cyber cafes” in Asia. All of these coincided with an increase in Steam usage in cyber cafes in Asia, whose customers were being over counted in the survey.” And it appears to be working: The March 2018 sur

But one new feature, called the Prismatic Matrix, stands out as particularly interesting. The Prismatic Matrix is a new feature coming in season 3 that’s aimed at improving the experience with the Eververse Trading Company, the in-game store that sells cosmetic items for real money. The Prismatic Matrix is meant to alleviate that hassle somewhat by providing a more direct and predictable path to specific items, and reducing the number of duplicate item drops. It obviously won’t lead to a sudden

Bill Loguidice, who has written for PC Gamer about PC gaming history and his massive gaming collection in the past, is selling his hoard of vintage computers and games later this month. The auction is being run by Bodnar’s Auction, and will happen on May 31 at the The New Jersey Convention & Expo Center. Other items will be on sale, but I’d expect the gaming auction to take up a good part of the venue. You can see the listing at the auction website, along with tons more photos. We have to admit