Critical Hit(Image credit: Future)Welcome to Critical Hit, where I (or someone else on the PC Gamer team) celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle.Videogame music is ridiculously good, a behemoth that encompasses just about every damn genre out there. Orchestral, rock, metal, pop, hip-hop—you name it, there's absolutely a composer out there who has penned something absolutely fire...

I've long held that no RPG is quite as spectacular as Kingdom Hearts, and I'm careful to specifically use the word "spectacular." For every ounce it is great, it's specifically great to gawk at, ideally with a mixture of awe and bewilderment. This is a game series where, if you die at a climactic moment, Mickey Mouse can emerge from your Christian soul and start killing people with a giant...

Who knew that all I needed to be interested in maths was the command of a five-thousand-tonne artillery battery? If only my secondary school teacher had known. Turns out that the ticking clock of exam pressure is a hell of a lot less motivating than the boom of artillery shells growing ever closer, as enemy gunners zero in on your position, trying to blast your colossal cannon to kingdom come...

The humble combo trial is a time-honoured tradition in fighting games. It's a quick and relatively easy way of trying out a new character, feeling out their general flow and kit in a low-pressure environment.They are, also, fundamentally useless. The combos in question are rarely optimal, and often devolve into simply playing Simon Says a dozen times before throwing yourself to the wolves of online matchmaking and hoping for the...

They called me mad. They called me a fool. They said it would never work—my plan to build a business empire on the back of a single department store that sold three products and a silica mine. 'You'll bankrupt us!' yelled red-faced advisors. They saw no wisdom in my schemes at all.And, frankly, they were correct. Fair play to those guys. We are very bankrupt now.(Image credit: Enlight Softwaer)In 1995,...

On an August 13 episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, actor Matthew McConaughey spoke about almost playing Joel in HBO's The Last of Us TV series, and why he ultimately turned down the role.McConaughey said he was in contact with showrunner Craig Mazin about playing the part, and that he seriously considered taking it up. "I wasn't really acting at that point," McConaughey explained. "I was doing more writing...

First reported by Empire on X, "The Everything App," Simpsons creator Matt Groening may have let slip the existence of some upcoming return for The Simpsons: Hit & Run⁠—though this was immediately disputed by another grandee of the Simpsons Industrial Complex."I think the original game is coming back in some form," Groening said in response to a question about the series at a Simpsons panel discussion, part of the ongoing...

It might seem silly to ask in our post-Red Dead horse testicles world, but how much exacting detail is too much? How much is not enough? Gamedev can go on forever if you don't prioritize the things that players actually notice, but if you're making an immersive fantasy RPG, it's critical that the intended illusions—bustling towns, lively taverns, festering dungeons, and so on—not shatter. This tightrope walk is something CDPR...

When I first played Half-Life at the tender age of 11, I found it a terrifying experience. Admittedly, I was scared of pretty much everything at 11. Wasps, heights, loud noises, football (or more specifically, everyone finding out how bad I was at football). I was an anxious child all around. Hence, playing an interactive disaster movie filled with weird aliens was an intense experience and lashings of violence was...

I don't know if Stars Wars: The Old Republic is the best MMO around—or even the best Star Wars MMO around—but there's something to be said for keeping the party alive for nearly 15 years at this point, even as developer Broadsword took the reins from BioWare in 2023. If you miss those halcyon days when the game had just dropped, well, you might want to give the imminent 8.0...