ARC Raiders looks fantastic when everything is running properly. The problem is that “properly” can be surprisingly difficult to achieve on PC. After spending time with a lot of Unreal Engine games, from polished competitive shooters to notoriously stuttery UE5 releases, I’ve learned that raw GPU power is rarely the whole story. You can have…
There are few things more irritating in PC gaming than spending the evening ready to drop into a match, only for the game to greet you with a beautiful, completely useless black screen. That is exactly what some PC players are running into with ARC Raiders. Embark Studios’ extraction shooter looks fantastic when everything is…
There is nothing more annoying than finally sitting down to play Gears of War: E-Day, hitting the Play button, and watching the game disappear before you even get to the main menu. No Locust. No chainsaw. No glorious Unreal Engine 5 spectacle. Just Windows desktop. That is exactly what some PC players have been running…
There is a moment in every new PC game when you open the graphics menu, push everything to Ultra, admire the pretty screenshot, and then realize your graphics card is quietly begging for mercy. Gears of War: E-Day takes that familiar ritual and turns it into something much more brutal. The Coalition has built a…
Gears of War: E-Day is the kind of PC game that makes you look at your graphics card, check its price online, and quietly wonder whether your hardware has betrayed you. The Coalition has built E-Day as a huge Unreal Engine 5 showcase, throwing Nanite, Lumen, detailed destruction, dense environments, advanced lighting, and enormous amounts…
Aion 2 can look absolutely ridiculous when everything is running properly. The open world is huge, aerial movement is fast, battles can throw a ridiculous number of effects onto the screen, and Unreal Engine 5 is doing a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes. The problem is that all this visual ambition can make…
There is a particular kind of PC crash that instantly ruins an MMORPG session: everything is running perfectly, you enter a crowded city or a huge PvP event, the game freezes for a second, and suddenly you are staring at the Windows desktop. Aion 2 has plenty of moments where this can happen. The game…
There are few things more annoying in an MMORPG than finally reaching the good part of a raid, watching the battlefield explode with skills, effects and dozens of players — and then hearing your headset turn into a broken radio. That is exactly what some Aion 2 players have been dealing with during large-scale encounters….
Aion 2 has the kind of presentation that makes you want to crank every setting to maximum the moment you launch it. The world is huge, the environments are packed with detail, lighting can look fantastic, and large-scale faction battles are exactly the sort of spectacle an MMORPG should deliver. Then 100 players show up….
There is something uniquely annoying about a horror game running badly. A scary game needs rhythm. You walk through an empty street, hear something moving behind you, stop for half a second, and then the fog starts closing in. When the game suddenly drops from 60 FPS to 35, freezes for a moment, or throws…
