Microsoft Flight Simulator is the closest thing we've had to a near-perfect recreation of the real world in the virtual space. Using real-time Bing data to allow you to fly to and from any place on the entire planet has raised the bar for simulations to heights never seen before. Accessible to anyone, or as realistic as you want, this is open-world at its most literal. Free-flying around the globe, participating in landing challenges at some of the world's most famously difficult airports, or just sightseeing, Microsoft Flight Simulator is an unparalleled achievement.
Don't forget to grab one of the best PC joysticks to make this flight-sim experience that more immersive. Microsoft Flight Simulator: Game of the Year Edition, a free update that adds new aircrafts, airports, and more, is now available.
The marvelous PC port overhauled and further enhanced the gorgeous wild western atmosphere of Rockstar's most recent open-world adventure and added even more activities, unlockables, and impossibly fine details to its expansive map. It's possibly one of the biggest and best single-player PC games ever and it has an extensive multiplayer mode too.
RDR2 on PC is handily a must-play for anyone with a rig beefy enough to run it. Through its relaunch and subsequent three expansions FFXIV has slowly morphed from a relatively generic good-versus-evil plot into a sprawling, political, and fantastical thriller. Story missions are intended to be tackled solo, and even instanced dungeons now have an option for you to enter with computer-controlled party members instead of forcing you into a group with strangers.
As well as transplanting the dice-rolls and deep dialogue options from Dungeons and Dragons into a lesser-seen noir-detective setting, it offers entirely original ways to play, such as such as debating against 24 different sections of your own brain, each representative of a different skill or trait. Your down-and-out detective is thrust into circumstances where you must solve a murder, but with all great stories its not the conclusion that is solely gratifying, but the journey you took to get there as its ludicrously detailed world and cast of characters drive it along, supported by some of the best writing seen in a game.
Nier: Automata is, by all accounts, a game that shouldn't exist. Director Yoko Taro's original Nier flopped back in , but it nevertheless developed a ravenous fanbase — and for good reason. To put it simply: Nier: Automata does what the original sought to do, learning from its failures and building on its successes to create a blend of hardcore and fluid combat, bullet-hell shoot 'em up segments, and visual novel stylings.
It all coalesces into something entirely new. Despite a frustrating PC port that the fanbase had to fix themselves with the all-but-mandatory FAR mod, Nier: Automata's staying power is etched somewhere within its philosophical musings of humanity, pain of existence, and ability to find the humor in between.
Each of its big story moments is punctuated with a haunting soundtrack courtesy of composer Keiichi Okabe. All of that makes Nier: Automata a game that needs to be experienced from beginning to end — and not just ending A, but endings B, C, D, and E as well. Those multiple endings build to something no other game has ever dared to attempt with apologies to the original Nier. But this one just hits a little different, you know?
It has the same tension of going from a technologically inferior underdog to powerful war machine, with the constant threat of the permanent death of your customized soldiers looming over every decision.
However, it turns the formula of defending Earth from alien invaders on its head by boldly recasting XCOM as a guerrilla force attempting to liberate the planet from alien occupation, making the situation feel even more desperate than ever. This bigger, deeper sequel adds not just complexity in the form of new and more powerful soldier classes, equipment, and aliens, but also a huge focus on replayability.
Procedurally generated maps keep you from falling into a repeatable pattern in tactical missions, frequent random events on the strategic map shake up your build and research orders, and of course mods galore. Next up for Firaxis is Marvel's Midnight Suns, which will be released in the second half of Dre composed new music for the game and will be featured as a character. It masterfully mixes pieces of classic cRPGs with more modern mechanics and designs, feeling old and new at the same time.
The sequel has improved upon its predecessor's already incredible combat by deepening its systems while simultaneously simplifying and smoothing out its clunkier bits - not to mention it introduced some brutally smart new AI. There's also an overwhelming amount of game here to play.
With six different origin characters, custom tags to make your own, and over 74, lines of fully voiced dialogue, this massive RPG has more than enough to keep you coming back to it.
In a roguelike, variety is king: Slay The Spire's constantly changing decks of ability cards, powerful relics, and the three drastically different playable characters keeps these turn-based battles fresh and engaging for far longer than they have any right to.
Watching your character's attacks, defenses, skills, and powers evolve across its three chapters is a journey, and throwing your hand in at the end of a run knowing you may never see its like again can be like saying goodbye to a friend you were only just getting to know. Of course, the possibility of getting an even better combination the next time through makes it tough to resist hitting the New Game button, and the randomized Daily Climb runs give even veterans a new and interesting way to play every day.
Just as the first Half-Life proved you could tell a story in a first-person game without taking control of the camera away, and Half-Life 2 pioneered physics-based puzzles and combat, Half-Life: Alyx has set a new standard for polish in virtual reality shooters and is a truly unique experience for VR headset owners.
Its full-length campaign pulls out all the stops for an amazing and horrifying battle against alien soldiers, zombies, headcrabs, and three-dimensional puzzles, and it even turns the simple act of reloading your weapon into a desperate life-or-death struggle. It caps it all off with a fantastic ending that made the wait almost feel worth it.
On the hardware front, Valve's handheld PC gaming device Steam Deck will being shipping in February, following its recently announced two-month delay. A 'visually and technically enhanced' version of The Witcher 3 is coming to PC in Q2 and will include new content inspired by Netflix's The Witcher series — the second season of which debuts on December Portal 2 claims the top spot because, in the past decade, nothing else has struck so many chords so perfectly.
No game accomplishes so much so well. Its impeccable level design, charming personality, and exceptional and varied puzzle systems make us feel smarter just for getting through it.
Plus, its co-op campaign requires a different sort of smarts that remains one of the best multiplayer experiences with pals around. Valve is a developer that, presumably because of the time it takes to make its incredible games, creates a feeling of timelessness in its design. Portal 2 — which iterated on and added to the brilliant puzzle design and world-building of its predecessor — feels just as clever and unique as it did in After its multiplayer component surprise launched in November, Halo Infinite's campaign is now available on PC.
Still to come before the end of the year are two notable games on December The Gunk, a third-person sci-fi adventure from the creator of SteamWorld, and the new FIve Nights at Freddy's. Those are our picks for the 25 best modern PC games! Let us know in the comments what's on your list that didn't make ours, and be sure to check out our other best games lists — we update them whenever new, great games are made:.
PC gaming has never been in a better place than it is today. Not only can you effectively play games spanning the entire history of PC gaming on modern machines, you can also get games at incredibly low prices. With bundle deals, Steam sales and other extreme savings, most PC gamers have more games in their collection than they can ever hope to play.
PCs can even play games from other platforms. Games that are F2P are marked as such in the list below, so this is not a ranked list. So, in no particular order, here are ten games you can go play right after reading this article. The Warframe of today is almost an entirely different game from the Warframe that originally launched. The visuals have been refined, the game plays more sharply and oodles of narrative have been added to this weird space ninja transhumanist world. Different warframes have different strengths, lending themselves to different roles and play styles.
If you like games such as Destiny, which provides a sort-of MMO experience, but with plenty of single-player RPG loot-em-up flavor, then Warframe is going to be right in your wheelhouse. The big difference here is on how the game plays. You can traverse levels like a ninja bat out of hell and playing next to a seasoned warframe pilot can be jaw-dropping. You can decide what you want to achieve or which aspects are the most fun, and simply focus on those.
One downside of Warframe is just how many little systems and stats there are. There are so many Star Trek games, but there are very few good Star Trek games.
Added to this are the Romulans, Dominion and Borg, who all have their own goals and machinations. In this game every player is the captain of their own ship, which you can control directly. One of the many benefits of PC gaming is the ability to get under the hood and tinker with the games that you already own.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim serves as an excellent introduction to game modding, thanks to its integration with the Steam Workshop. For those who want to dig a little deeper, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind provides a much more hands-on modding experience.
The sequel to the original Elite , a PC game that dates all the way back to , Elite: Dangerous and its Horizons expansion are a borderline spiritual spacefaring experience. At the core of this game is a realistic simulation of all billion star systems in the Milky Way galaxy. The secret is the so-called Stellar Forge, a procedural system that developer Frontier Developments used to realistically simulate the formation of our galaxy.
Using the best available astronomical data, the studio sort of threw all of creation into a digital rock tumbler and then continued to polish what fell out as an MMO. A recent effort to put new Fleet Carriers in every corner of the galaxy has contributed to a massive uptick in players, including all-time high player counts on Steam.
Get it here: Frontier Steam. It warrants new words. Imagine someone using tracing paper to re-create a favorite painting, adding their own flourishes and revisions. Once again, you begin in a cave full of spiders, skeletons, bats, and golden idols that egg you on to set to set off their lethal traps. Except now, things are ever so different. Yellow lizards roll across the room like that big ball chasing Indy, and agitated moles cut through the ground like the graboids in Tremors.
Your muscle memory is weaponized against you —Chris Plante. Listen: When the original version of Fortnite launched, I hated it. There were zombies in it. You collected characters in the form of trading cards, and unlocked abilities from a skill tree. There was so much mindless clicking in the original version that my wrist would hurt after every each session.
That original mode, called Save the World, is still in the game. It even has a small, but devoted, ongoing fan base. Fortnite is arguably the biggest game in the world thanks to Battle Royale. Get it here: Epic Games Store. The original Half-Life tells the story of the MIT-educated theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman and a transdimensional rift that may someday kill us all. As far as PC shooters go, Half-Life represents an inflection point for the entire genre, threading a nearly uninterrupted narrative through a seamless and carefully paced action spectacle.
While the gameplay itself more than holds up, the look and feel of the original leaves something to be desired. Thankfully, the team at Crowbar Collective — themselves a bunch of modders — have created Black Mesa. Whether you want to play the classic version or the updated Black Mesa is up to you, but every PC enthusiast should at least try one or the other at least once. Get Half-Life here: Steam. Get Black Mesa here: Steam. Half-Life: Alyx gave VR something it desperately needed: a brand-new entry into a huge series, long-awaited by fans, and designed specifically for VR.
If you want to know what happens next in the story of Half-Life, you have to buy or borrow a VR headset and play through one of the most polished games ever released for virtual reality. Get Half-Life: Alyx here: Steam. Kentucky Route Zero is one of the most fascinating narrative experiments in all of video games. The brainchild of the small team of artists at Cardboard Computer, it uses magical realism to tell a bizarre tale set in rural America.
The game, which began as a Kickstarter campaign, has been released episodically over the past seven years. Cardboard Computer has also released a series of experiences it calls interludes , which are freely available online. The game offers a less traditional leveling-up system, in which players need to use items to increase their affinity with a particular stat.
If you want to increase your blocking stat, then you will have to block attacks, or even punches from friends, in order to increase the efficiency of your shield blocking. Players can also increase their health and stamina stats using food items or potions.
I mostly spent time cooking and foraging for food, not interested in engaging in combat unless absolutely necessary. If anything, Valheim managed to scratch the itch for me that titles like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley could otherwise no longer reach.
While my friends fought packs of wolves and found krakens swimming between vast expanses of ocean, I practiced animal husbandry and farming. Oceans and rivers look lovely, while even the dreariest of environments somehow stand out. Particle effects bloom and blossom in snowy locales, with dense fog sometimes permeating endless meadows of yellowing grass.
It made me stop and appreciate the environmental design and procedurally generated scenery. This approach also allows for those even with fairly low-end machines to run the game. Outside of the world actively fighting back against your intrusion and destruction, you can see the environment begin to change due to your work.
This is in itself a depiction of colonialism and environmental degradation as you pillage a continent unknown to you for valuable materials to move elsewhere and do the exact same thing over and over again, until there is nothing left. Before Minecraft was the cultural force it is today, it was a survival game. Minecraft drops players on a procedurally generated map eight times larger than the surface of the Earth.
Get it here: Microsoft Mojang Amazon. Why this is happening, and what the player must do to set things right, make up one of the most intriguing mysteries in all of gaming. Just like an old-fashioned murder story, Return of the Obra Dinn poses a complex mystery, layered with personalities, motives, secrets, and lies. Well, Steam uses an in-house DRM that forces you to launch a game in online mode before you can play it offline, and allows third-party DRM from publishers who sell their games on Steam that may require an always-on connection.
Steam also takes a 30 percent cut of all sales. Every game you buy on Steam has an associated, one-time-use key that unlocks it for play. Steam gives out batches of keys directly to publishers and developers who can then sell them to you. Key resellers, like G2A and Kinguin, are a bit different in that they operate almost like a flea market. If it is found that the key you bought was obtained illegally, a chargeback on a stolen card could lead to your key being revoked and the developer taking a financial hit.
The important thing to note here is the difference between a retailer and a reseller. The former, such as Fanatical, gets their keys directly from publishers, so there is usually no question that they are legitimate.
A reseller works with third-party keyholders and often has limited ability to determine where the keys come from. Their claim to fame is that everything on their storefront is DRM-free. Most also include PDFs of the original manuals and box art, and often the original soundtrack in a DRM-free file format, which can be even harder to find than the games themselves.
Like Steam, GOG takes a 30 percent cut on sales of games not made by one of its studios. It rose to cult acclaim as a place where underground devs could post their small, experimental projects free or very cheap in a place where players looking for something new and weird could stumble upon them.
Many are free or available with a 'name your own price' download, and the developer can decide what percentage of sales goes to Itch. More recently, Itch. Humble is a storefront owned by IGN Entertainment where the author of this article sometimes writes on a freelance basis , but grew out of the Humble Bundle, a rotating grab bag of games that can be purchased together for a discounted price. Purchasers of these bundles can also customize how much of their money goes to the developers, how much goes to Humble, and how much is donated to a few selected charities.
The difference here is that 10 percent of the sale is always donated to charity, while Humble takes 15 percent. This leaves 75 percent for the developer, which is slightly more than if you bought from Steam directly.
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