Ed Smith

1 month ago | pcgamesn.com | Ed Smith

Whether it’s Battlefield or EFT, Rainbow Six Siege or CoD, guns on their own are never enough. The world of the modern multiplayer FPS is frighteningly competitive – despite plenty of experience with 1.6 and CSGO, I still get obliterated in Counter-Strike 2, and I daren’t even try The Finals. You need more than just good aim these days. It’s about reflexes, knowledge, and mixing your rifle with the right equipment.

1 month ago | pcgamesn.com | Ed Smith

Age of Empires 2 is eternal. Like Half-Life, Fallout, Doom, and Deus Ex, it remains one of the foundational pillars that holds PC gaming aloft. Originally released in 1999, the best AoE game in history – and one of the greatest RTS games of all time – is still going strong a quarter of a century later. It always looked great, but the Definitive Edition makes it shine even brighter.

1 month ago | pcgamesn.com | Ed Smith

Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us – you can keep ‘em. For me, videogame aesthetics peaked in the ‘90s; instead of photorealism and verisimilitude, games had a visual style that was completely their own. I’m thinking of Wolfenstein 3D, the original Half-Life, and Rise of the Triad; games that looked like games. Originally released in 1993 by Duke Nukem and RoTT maker Apogee, Biomenace leapt off the screen.

1 month ago | pcgamesn.com | Ed Smith

After 32 years, you might think that Doom, the greatest FPS game in history (fact), could no longer present a challenge. One of the most comprehensively excavated PC games of all time, we know how the enemies work, the damage values of all the weapons, even where the linedef triggers are placed on every level – both Doom and Doom 2 have been picked clean. And yet, the fires of Hell rage on. Sigil 2, created by John Romero himself, is one of the most punishing Doom map packs ever built.

1 month ago | pcgamesn.com | Ed Smith

For the first few months after it was released, galactic co-op shooter Helldivers 2 could do wrong – and then came the PSN account linking. Sony mandated that players would have to connect their Steam accounts to a Playstation account, and though the publisher eventually u-turned, by that time, a sustained campaign of review bombing had already significantly crushed down Helldivers 2’s all-important user score. It seems that Bungie wants to avoid any similar controversy.