TOP 10 GAMES TO BUY FOR PC

1. Forza Horizon 3

Forza Horizon 3 is the third in a series of attempts to humanise Turn 10’s excellent, if cold, driving simulators, and the first to successfully complete the windy and treacherous route from Xbox to personal computers.

Set in an alternate-world Australia, in which everyone and their mums is obsessed with motorsports, Forza Horizon 3’s open world exists to satisfy you. As in Pokémon’s Kanto, every citizen in the country pours their energies into one shared passion, becoming either opponent or cheerleader of your efforts to become the leading racecar driver and part-time festival organiser down under. 

It can be patronising, showering you with currency and swooning before your coolness and ability, but none of that matters. The party atmosphere is infectious, and the engine beneath is quite simply the finest available in the genre. Drift sideways through the outback. Drive to the beach and perform stunt jumps through an elephant’s graveyard of cargo ships. Build a festival site that takes up 25% of Byron Bay. Just pick a road and goooo.

2.Titanfall 2

What a lovely twist in the tail end of a delightful year for games. Titanfall 2 is not only a good sequel to a multiplayer game deserted too soon by its community – it’s also a fantastic single-player shooter. The kind you used to tell people about in 2004 and 2007 – a Half-Life 2 or a BioShock.

As the campaign progresses, with hulking metal companion BT at your side, developers Respawn fire and forget: tossing away brilliant ideas as if they were empty clips, before reaching for another. All the while, Titanfall 2 offers a first-class showcase in visual and audio feedback – nothing underwhelms.

How could we have forgotten, in the year of Modern Warfare Remastered, that this team of former Infinity Ward staffers were capable of such great feats in single-player FPS design? Forgive us, Zampella and co., for our forgetfulness.

3.Planet Coaster

You’d be hard-pushed to find a game that exudes as much happiness, joy, and enthusiasm as Planet Coaster does with every guest’s beaming face. Yes, on the surface, it’s all about creating and managing a theme park, but the compelling element is how even donkey work like raising the price of slushies by a couple of pennies feeds back to improving the general happiness of your guests. Everything you do in Planet Coaster is in the name of making others happy. It’s a feedback loop that has its roots in Rollercoaster Tycoon, but one that Frontier Developments have perfected and built upon in Planet Coaster.

Creation is key to that feedback loop: it’s one thing to design a park and please your guests, while creating a park that makes you happy and proud is another thing entirely. Thankfully, Planet Coaster boasts some of the most flexible and freeing creation tools outside of a dev kit. There are hundreds of objects and shapes – all fully customisable, of course – that can be bolted onto boring toilet blocks in order to theme them to your tastes. Just look at all the mad and beautiful Planet Coaster creations the community have put together since the game’s launch if you’re still not sold on its quality.

4.Civilization VI

In the year 2217, when your ‘mouse hand’ is a bionic replacement designed specifically for PC gaming, there will still be a new Civ – overseen by Sid Meier from his life-support throne, designed by a plucky new designer straight from MIT. It’ll be reassuringly familiar but shrewdly different.

So it is with Civ VI. Although it can’t currently compete with the bundled editions of its predecessors for sheer wealth of content, it’s the perfect celebration of the defining 4X on its 25th anniversary. Music, palette, pacing: all conspire to make you fall for the series all over again, providing a warmth where Civ V was sometimes too stern.

This entry takes a new branch in the Civ series tech tree, too, planting bold new mechanics and laying strong foundations for diplomacy, religion, war, and espionage which will surely be built up into proud cities in the inevitable expansions.

5.Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

It was in between stacking the fourth and fifth dumpster in an impossible staircase up to a Prague apartment window that we realised – at no point have Eidos Montreal forgotten Deus Ex’s roots. For all its modern shooter trappings, the series has lost none of its essential magic in silly simulation and player problem-solving.

It perhaps hasn’t gained quite enough in Mankind Divided, Montreal’s second Deus Ex sequel to date – certainly not in overall length. But the studio maintained their focus on improvisational combat and avoidance while venerating player ownership above all else, allowing parts of their knotty plot of prejudice and class struggle to slip into the background if we so desired.

Speaking of which: although it might call itself a shooter, Mankind Divided does quests better than practically any mainstream RPG outside of The Witcher. And nowhere else in the game industry will you see the form of fake email writing carried so far. To top it off, Mankind Divided's PC port isn't too shabby either.

6.Inside

Playdead’s long-awaited Limbo follow-up begins with a boy in the woods, minus a backstory, and with no other option but to stumble towards the right-hand side of the screen. This overfamiliar fake-out soon gives way to a game with its own mysteries, however – a game so accomplished that these Danish indies couldn’t possibly have made it on their first time out.

Like its predecessor, Inside offers body horror, and the prospect of pulling and pushing boxes about so that you can clamber to out-of-reach areas. But it’s also about control, and brings uneasy new mechanics to match its new themes.

There’s a more nuanced aesthetic, too – while Limbo is unmistakeable in its gloom, Inside’s gently stylised approach manages a remarkable and terrifying verisimilitude. When a masked man chases down your young charge and drowns him in a puddle, the fear hits you somewhere central. In the space between its impeccably choreographed animation and sound design, Inside starts to feel horribly, horribly real.

7.Doom

With Quake Champions on the horizon and this exceptional shooter in the rear-view mirror, id are tearing down the highway at the front of the pack again after a decade in neutral. Where Doom 3 spun the horror of monster closets off into a realm of dark rooms and sudden scares, new Doom takes a different tack: embracing the forward aggression of the original and coating everything in gibs rather than shadows.

Brilliantly, the gore feeds into the game – ultraviolent glory kills are not only a visual and aural reward in Doom for getting up close and impersonal, but serve a tactical purpose, offering health pickups and a valuable few seconds to decide on your next attack or weapon switch. That rhythmic flow soon becomes second nature thanks to level design that funnels you between murderous, vertiginous arenas. A masterclass in FPS design that never feels anything less than contemporary.

8. Overwatch

Blending elements from Team Fortress 2, MOBAs, and Blizzard’s own extended universe, Overwatch cemented itself as the multiplayer PC game of 2016 – not even the likes of Battlefield and COD could topple it.

It’s the sort of game that would once have been called ‘class-based’ but now goes under the ‘character shooter’ moniker, offering a focused selection of modes that riff on TF2’s payload maps and capture point objectives. Really, though, it’s the interplay between Overwatch’s heroes that make it special. It really is a feat of balance on Blizzard’s part – you think Bastion’s OPed until you realise it takes 200% damage from behind when it's in turret configuration. You suspect Genji is too good until you watch someone’s Play of the Game and realise, nope, that player is just incredibly skilled. You think Zenyatta’s useless and then he spends an entire round killing you.

Best of all: in typical Blizzard fashion, support and development continues in earnest.

9.Dark Souls III

Never really a series about difficulty but, rather, camaraderie – banding struggling solo players together via scrawled messages and occasional co-op – Dark Souls is incredibly self-assured in its third iteration. An entire industry might have failed to follow them, but FromSoftware now know exactly how to go about their strange, knotted level design – littering the sequel’s hard road with diversions, shortcuts, secrets, and optional bosses. They’ve named the result Lothric: a mostly-dead world that recalls the 19th-century German fantasy of The Nutcracker and exists in perpetual twilight.

After a break to hone his skills on Bloodborne, director Hidetaka Miyazaki returns with a masterclass. There are odd moments where encounters feel unfair, and you’ll fall to the occasional cheap, untelegraphed boss attack. But at its hollowed heart, Dark Souls III on PC is a near-perfect ramble over peaks and troughs of frustration, building to a godlike crescendo that feels like nothing else in games because you’ve earned every step.

10.The Banner Saga 2

The Banner Saga games are uniquely gruelling in an RPG genre where the numbers tend only to go up. Here your warriors get weaker, not stronger, as they’re chipped away at in turn-based combat, swinging weakly at the encroaching Dredge. And as your exhausted caravan trundles on, tying events together, you’ll inevitably fail to save every desperate soldier and their family. 

Even victories in The Banner Saga 2 can feel pyrrhic, coming at a great cost. The cruelty is leavened only by a gorgeously-animated art style which evokes Disney’s Beauty and the Beast but also has a stark nobility of its own.

Fittingly-named studio Stoic have addressed complaints about samey-ness this time around, introducing obstacles, special objectives, and centaur-ish enemies with horrifying, cheek-crushing hooves to the battle. The emotional engagement the series started with might have been lessened by an overlarge cast of characters, but The Banner Saga 2 can’t be bettered for bleak tactics and management.