Expectation and opinion are two different things that some gamers can't seem to separate. They have incredibly high expectations for a game and when it doesn't deliver their opinion of the game changes which leads to negative reviews. Pretty much what I said before, I try to not let reviews influence me unless it's from a source I put some authority into, but it's hard to ignore when most of the discourse around a game is overwhelmingly negative in a more nitpicky sense, not a constructive criticism sense.
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PCG Article Discussion for April 2026
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Zed Clampet
Community Contributor
I'm not going to tell people they can't have their opinions, but some of the negative reviews are really pretty poor. For instance, I was reading a review for a game I've already played yesterday, and the first negative review I came across was about the game intro. which is nothing like the rest of the game. They followed that with a really dumb suggestion that they had communicated to the developer on Discord and said that the developer wasn't listening to the community. This particular game isn't being hurt by negative reviews. It is at 96 percent positive. But it's still annoying.
Battlefield 6 enters its 'we've heard your feedback' era: 7 more maps are coming in 2026, including fan-favorite Wake Island
EA is going big on maps.
As a long time BF fan (BF 1942 was one of the very first PC games I played as a kid), I'm glad I sat this one out. They were doing all the right things... until they weren't. The playtest gave us a taste of what's to come, but it blindsided players. We all thought that the small map was for the beta only, but turns out every map in the game is pretty small. I get they wanted to scale it back a bit from BF2042 but they scaled it too far back, down to COD levels small. I would still love to get into the game, but I'll wait another year or two until some major changes come.
It annoys me when I see negative reviews with like 0.2 hours played saying something along the lines of "This game wouldn't even START for me. Refunded!" while the remaining 2000 reviews are generally positive. Like c'mon, you couldn't have tried a few more times? Maybe there is something wrong with your PC? Reinstall or verify file integrity? It really chaps my hide y'know.
It's only April but the most bitable mouse of 2026 may be the Asus ZenMouse MD202
I'm not giving up my Razer Deathadder V3 Hyperspeed for it.
Wish I could sample one before buying. The ceramic finish sounds very interesting. Everything we use peripheral wise is mostly plastic, I think it's about time we moved onto something new.
7 years on, Metro 2039 brings a voiced protagonist and 'a much darker tone'
The latest game in the Metro series will directly channel its Ukrainian devs' experiences in Russia's invasion.
I've never been the biggest fans of the Metro games, but I'm excited to see how this game pushes the envelope graphically. When Metro Exodus came out, it was amongst the most graphically intense games you could buy at that time. I hope this new one does the same, really pushing the graphics as hard as they can.
This looks fantastic. I don't play many city builder games, but I like the freeform building, allowing you to scale cliffs with your settlement. I wonder how the combat will work. You've got to build or repair the pirate ships then once that's done they get sent out on expeditions. I'm curious if that will be hands off, you just send a crew of NPC pirates to do the work, or if the player will be able to engage with the combat and exploration. The graphics look very nice as well, look how blue that water is!
Edit: Need to be cautiously optimistic about this one. The developer doesn't have the greatest track record, but they do seem to bring great ideas with somewhat poor execution. They made Park Beyond which was a very unique yet flawed theme park builder, it had great features but was marred by tons of bugs and other questionable design choices.
Zed Clampet
Community Contributor
Valve's Proton 11 beta has a quietly hidden Arm64 version
And you can thank the Steam Frame for that.
$10 says Linux will be better for playing ARM software than Windows.
wishlisted
I just noticed the news overview page on desktop has a little sidebar halfway through with two tabs: Hardware Buying Guides and Latest Game Reviews, each with 5 links to recent articles. However, the Latest Game Reviews one has, at the time of writing this post, 4 links to hardware reviews and only 1 link to an actual game review.
Zed Clampet
Community Contributor
Mine has 2 game reviews. Anyone want to read my 5000 word speculation called "What went wrong? Speculations on the cause of the PC Gamer titling disaster"? No? Bite me.
Colif
On a Journey
the material a mouse is made of has never really been a reason for me to pick one. There are more important things to think about. The silver covering on my Sensei wore off but mouse died before that was really a problem. It was 8 years old at the time.It's only April but the most bitable mouse of 2026 may be the Asus ZenMouse MD202
I'm not giving up my Razer Deathadder V3 Hyperspeed for it.www.pcgamer.com
Wish I could sample one before buying. The ceramic finish sounds very interesting. Everything we use peripheral wise is mostly plastic, I think it's about time we moved onto something new.
Since writer of the article intentionally inflicts Synapse on their PC, I don't really feel the need to listen.
where?
Decides its best he doesn't comment on this topic 🙂
The first Vampire Survivors spin-off struggles to capture the same magic
Roguelike deckbuilder Vampire Crawlers is a simplistic and repetitive grind.
I tried out the demo for Vampire Crawlers and I really liked it, it felt just like Vampire Survivors to me but better.
Abbie says in her review:
In my experience replaying earlier levels wasn't much fun outside of trying new weapon combinations, because they did not require any skill. In fact, most of Vampire Survivors required very little skill beyond choosing your build. Trying different builds was basically the only draw in Vampire Survivors for me.
And Vampire Crawlers is exactly the same, the main draw is in trying out different builds. I just happen to really enjoy deckbuilding games, so I like Vampire Crawlers better than Vampire Survivors.
Honestly, since it was announced, I was expecting about $70-$75 and have been budgeting for that price. $99 is a bit of an ask for me, especially given I was planning to buy it as soon as I can.
I feel like I'll probably still pick one up, as I love my Deck controller and I do use my original Steam controllers on occasion still, but a second stick would make them significantly better and this was supposed to be the answer for me.
I doubt Valve would just pull a game just because the developer is arrested, before they're even convicted of anything.
Zed Clampet
Community Contributor
Agreed, but there's a chance it could be out of ethical or PR reasons. We have this somewhat complicated law known as "Son of Sam" preventing people from earning money off of committing crimes. It only applies in certain situations and it doesn't apply here, but if I were a publisher, I might enforce my own version of "Son of Sam" for PR purposes if a person's guilt wasn't in doubt, as in this case. Regardless of who the assassination attempt was against, allowing that person to earn money off of my storefront would seem like a potential PR disaster. If there were a few people who actually endorsed the attempt, as in this case, they have no ethical footing, and I wouldn't consider it important to pander to them.
Zed Clampet
Community Contributor
Also, Valve might have been tired of moderating. I think if a game is removed from sale that it's a lot harder to find.
I think this was kind of unavoidable when developers streamlined roguelikes by removing all of the "boring" and slow parts, like inventory management and dungeon navigation. Pretty much the only thing you're left with is the RNG aspect, which means your game almost necessarily becomes more like gambling.
However, just because a game has a big RNG component doesn't mean it doesn't also require skill. Even in something as simple as poker skill will still make a big difference. There are people who struggle on the lowest difficulties of Slay the Spire or Balatro and people who (claim to) clear the highest difficulties about 50% of the time.
So I don't think modern roguelikes are more popular because they're more like gambling, I think roguelikes that have short runs and are easy to pick up and play are just more popular. You see the exact same thing in board games, where games that are complex and take a long time to complete are just less popular than games that are easy to learn and quick to play, regardless of how much they rely on chance.
I've been a huge proponent for this game but I fear that I agree with most of what the article is saying. It really is just Roblox on Source 2 and cost $20. That $20 gets your access to the game engine which probably 90% of people will never touch (I haven't).
However the silver lining is that this is just the beginning. There are lots of AI slop and vibe-coded games on there, but as Garry himself said, eventually the slop will fall to the bottom and the quality will rise to the top. Errr... lets hope so.
This line has made me rethink the whole game from a new perspective:
I've always known this wasn't "Gmod 2", but it does feel too far spiritually to really be a spiritual successor. I'm still having fun with it, still recommend it especially to those who are interested in using the game making tools, but to everyone else I'd say give it a year or two and see where it's at. Either it will be better with high-quality and fun games, or worse with more slop (AI or not) made purely for the intention to boost engagement and profit, no in-between.
As someone who has never played Gmod: what is the difference between Roblox and Gmod?
I do think incentivising developers by the amount of time players spent in their game makes for a lot of terrible games.
We've seen this already when actual video game developers wanted to be able to boast about the number of hours you'd need to beat their games, resulting in a ton of crappy filler. Similarly when they wanted to boast about the size of their game world, resulting in giant, empty worlds.
Zed Clampet
Community Contributor
and @neogunhero the worst example I can think of regarding time-based payments is, or was, Facebook's rule that a video had to be 3 minutes long to qualify for payment. This created what will forever be the worst collection of videos ever created by human kind. People with no talent whatsoever doing 3 minutes of nothing (picture your wife spending 3 minutes pretending she's going to tickle you but pulling her hand back at the last moment) building up to a 2 second punchline that made you want to dig your brain out with a trowel.
What no one seems to understand, even most of the people selling AI, is that, by my understanding, it can't really be programmed not to do this. All you can really do is remove its access to things. AI is basically an alarmingly human-like random number machine, picking one token after another. As long as it has access to a delete button, there's a chance it will use it. Maybe you use your safety rails and it doesn't delete anything 10 million times in a row, and then it does. This is why CoPilot can't fix your Windows problems, only tell you how to fix them. Microsoft isn't stupid enough (yet) to give CoPilot that kind of access.
@Pifanjr You've seen Roblox. In that video they are showing with 4 different pictures, what the player would see prior to this update is the one on the top left?
If I had read the article, which I stopped reading because it was written like a reactionary 3-year-old, I might know these things, but if this is actually left up to the creators as to whether it's available for their games, then no problem.
Zed Clampet
Community Contributor
Uh, Hideo? Would you mind editing that quote to say, "This is how powerfully I--or everyone but Zed--yearn for the cosmos"? Personally, I wouldn't walk across the street to get in a tin can sitting on an explosion, much less give up my family. Now if the USS Enterprise crashes through my neighbor's house (killing her yappy dog), I'd very much like a ride on that, though not to the point of throwing away my family.
You have to ask yourself, why hasn't Elon gone to space? Probably because he stood there and watched 100 rockets explode before they finally got one to work.
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Yes, that's correct.
I personally like this quote from the article:
Considering Roblox games already only vaguely look and play like videogames and are mostly just low effort trash anyway, I don't see any particular reason not to throw an AI filter over it. I very highly doubt many of the Roblox developers would care about how it affects their vision for the design of the game.
I just don't see how they're going to make this work on the crappy phones or tablets which I assume most kids use to play Roblox.
I think the biggest differentiator is the intent when creating content for either game. With Roblox, people are getting paid, they have an incentive to make the game as profitable for them as possible. Stuff it full of microtransactions, subscriptions, timer/energy-based gameplay, things like that.
With Garry's Mod, the community made stuff for the game just for the hell of it. The only money these people were making is if players decided they wanted to donate directly to them. No one is getting paid to make game modes, maps, player models, advanced building tools, anything, they were all made for the love of the game and the community. This then spawned lots of other creations using the game, such as machinima videos, comics made with screenshots of the games, memes, so much more. It was all very organic.
S&box took that pure innocence of creating just for the fun of it and monetized it. Now the only reason to make something for S&box is the hope that you'll get paid for your creations. This could be a very slippery slope, as we don't know if the heavily monetized slop games will rise to the top or the actual quality games that Facepunch hopes to see will. Of course I hope for the latter, but only time will tell.
When it comes to stuff like that, or in S&box's case low-quality cash grab games, my hope is that people will be smart enough not to engage with such content. If I were to see a video like that, I'm confident enough that I wouldn't engage with it any longer once I realize what it was trying to do. I hope that is the same with this game, as people start playing user made games, they'll downvote the low quality slop and support the high quality games.
That seems to be the case generally, as the couple of really low-quality games I've played have the worst rating in game. There was one game that was the absolute most bog-standard FPS you can make that promised real cosmetics you can sell on the Market for real money to use on Steam. However the reality is, you have to spend 10 hours in game for 7 days straight to get one cosmetic. It's an AFK idle game. It had some of the worst ratings I saw on the platform yet.
I have hopes it will all work out in the end but how it is now, things aren't looking too good.
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