Best PC games 2021: great games to download right now

Best PC games 2021

Below you will find the list of the very best PC games we recommend you play at the moment. These’re games which are new, which are actually being freshly updated, or perhaps that are actually stone cold classics of the respective genres of theirs. This’s a living list, which means we will be updating it throughout 2020 as we fall in love with new games.

When you are looking for an extended selection of games that are classic, check out our list of probably the greatest games of all time. It’s seventy four games hand picked from the past thirty years of PC games. What this list offers is actually a more regularly updated document of what we would recommend right now, and a handier guide to what game which is new that you need to play right now.

List of Games:

• Valorant
• Gears Tactics
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Monster Hunter: World
• Disco Elysium
• Outer Wilds
• Apex Legends
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
• Age Of Empires 2: Definitive Edition
• Horizon’s Gate
• Phoenix Point
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
• Slay The Spire
• Forza Horizon 4
• Eliza

Hit the links to hop directly to a game, or read on for the full thing.

Valorant

Valorant’s announcement with some small amount of exhaustion. It’s a hero shooter from the makers of League Of Legends, and it looked like it was going to be their take on Overwatch. As it turned out, it’s much better than that: it’s their take on Counter-Strike.

The comparisons aren’t subtle. In Valorant, which is in closed beta at the time of writing, two teams of five fight to either plant a bomb or defend and defuse one, with your actions in one round earning you money to spend on equipment at the start of the next. There are direct equivalents to the Deagle, the AWP, the AK-47, which are similar enough that your muscle memory might carry across.

It’s a hero shooter though, and your named characters each have the own special abilities of theirs. These can likewise be bought with the beginning of each round, and they work in order to give you extra sensory info, to heal yourself and teammates, and to control space by blocking lines of sight or perhaps placing temporary walls. In certain senses even these feel similar to Counter-Strike’s flashbangs and smoke grenades, but they are a great deal more versatile and important in case you wish to be genuinely good at the game.

It’s easy to heap scorn on a game that’s taking such obvious influence from some of its extremely popular peers, but Valorant’s combination does add up to something that has its own flavour. Plus, it’s not 2005 anymore – it’s been a long time since many games tried to take on Counter-Strike, and a little competition is a good thing.

Gears Tactics

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The world was not calling out for a turn-based tactics game set in the Gears universe. The third-person action series’ broard-shouldered soldiers don’t tend to put you in a thinking mood. Yet here we are: Gears Tactics exists, and it’s excellent.

The formula will be familiar if you’ve played a turn-based tactics game before, as you command your men to hide behind low walls, place them into overwatch mode, and level them up through combat experience. What makes the game sing is the way in which it incorporates the pace and feel of Gears Of War. This is a tactics game where you’ll have to think your way across the battlefield, sure, but the culmination of every thought is a rush of ultra-violence.

Character abilities and execution moves compel you to play aggressively, leaping over cover to send soldiers into harms way, to strike a killing blow that’ll gift an action point to all the other soldiers of yours, letting you keep your turn going. It is probably the most propulsive turn based game around.

It is also aided by the things the game jettisons from the standard XCOM formula. There is no equivalent to the Geoscape here, no strategic meta layer in which you build a shoulderpad factory. There is killing and there is menus, and it is a much better game for it.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption two is actually a real epic: a world as big as they come, enough quests to keep you occupied for upwards of eighty hours, and obsessive amounts of detail in everything from the stunning American landscapes to its horse bollocks. It has become apparent that the amount of crunch its developers suffered through was similarly epic, but in case you are in a position to set that aside, there is very few things more impressive to do with your PC than boot up RDR2 and go exploring.

The game is set in 1899 – a prequel to the previous game, which was denied a home on PC – and stars Arthur Morgan as a down-on-his-luck cowboy. You’re living in exile alongside other member of Dutch van der Linde’s gang, after a job gone badly wrong, and set about riding your horsies to different parts of the world to shoot the stetsons off the baddies you find there.

If you’ve ever played a game from developers Rockstar before, including any of the Grand Theft Autos, you can guess the rest. There are rote missions filled with endless goons to headshot interspersed by dramatic set-pieces, motion captured character conversations, and a lot of time spent travelling between points on the map.

While these things might be familiar, they’re also better than they’ve ever been. Headshotting goons feels satisfying each time, because you can slip into slow-motion and paint targets for Arthur to hit when time resumes. Getting to know your gang mates is mostly enjoyable, and there are none of the awkward performances or outright hateful humans that blemished previous games. And the travelling! Getting from A to B has never been better than with a world this beautiful, a cinematic camera to frame it for you, and a lovely horse to carry you.

Monster Hunter: World

Monster Hunter has always been about discovering and tracking glorious creatures in an alluring fantasy world, and then in typical fashion, basting those creatures about the head with different weapon types. This much is apparent from a screenshot.

What could be less obvious is actually that the game is actually great also for the preparation for those monster fights. It is the time you spend in the hub beforehand sorting the items of yours out, and shopping for new armour. It is the time spent eating stat boosting soup at a restaurant, or perhaps cooking it yourself. It is the 3 friends you do all this with you, who’re likewise sharpening the own tools of theirs and bodies. And it’s your Palico, your little cat pal, who you dress up and who helps you out in battles as well as provides you with cuddles after.

Monster Hunter is like a fishing trip with mates, basically, only instead of catching fish you’re fighting big dragony, lizardy, monsters, who pick up trees and throw them at you. To defeat them, you have to master not just a measly fishing rod, but some of PC gaming’s most interesting weapons. These include the Insect Glaive, a double-bladed staff that allows you to launch into the air at will, alongside guns, bows, big swords and more. There are different weapons for all preferred playstyles, and they make fights into a whole different game depending on which you choose.

If you’ve already played Monster Hunter: World for hours and hours, of course, then now is still a good time to go back to it. The Iceborne expansion has just arrived on PC, with a new island to explore, new monsters to fight, and new frosty temperatures to contend with.

Disco Elysium

Slowly you begin to learn who you are. You’re a cop. There’s been a murder. As you talk to people about the case, your skills will pipe up with dialogue of their own. At its most basic, your Perception skill will tell you about something you’ve spotted nearby that you can then bring up in conversation with other characters. But there’s also stats like Inland Empire, which will goad you into attempting to sing karaoke at the mere sight of a microphone on a stage. Ask it what you should sing and it’ll tell you, “No-no, don’t sing the happy song, it’s stupid. Sing the sad song, it’s profound.”

This would be novel and funny even if it went no further, but the game gives the different aspects of yourself voices so it can explore deeper questions. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be good, or to want to do better? Disco Elysium resists easy answers and binary moral choices, and creates a game that’s a true spiritual successor to the likes of Planescape: Torment.

Outer Wilds

Every twenty two minutes, the sun goes supernova and swallows everything in the solar system – you included. When you start over, all you’ve from the last run of yours is actually the info you gained, but that is enough. You get back in the ship of yours and head out to find more answers.

Outer Wilds is actually a science fiction detective game in which you are trying to puzzle out what exactly happened to trap everything in this destructive time loop. Doing this requires you to pilot the spaceship of yours between half a dozen planets, each one of which is actually an ingenious and hand-crafted science fiction concept. In order to name one example: 2 binary planets where gravity is gradually drawing all of the sand from one planet to another, like a cosmic hourglass.

There are umpteen mysteries to unravel before you’ll fully understand how this solar system works, a couple of which will likely re-write your assumptions entirely. In this way, despite being about piloting spaceships and chatting with aliens, it’s one of the best detective games ever made.

Apex Legends

The initial pitch didn’t sound particularly enticing: a first-person shooter set in the Titanfall universe, but minus that series’ defining mechs and in their place a free-to-play game chasing the battle royale bandwagon. To our surprise and delight, it used grappling hooks to board that bandwagon and wrest control of it. A year on from release, Apex Legends is still the best battle royale game in town.

It’s the last game standing for us for the smart ways in polishes up the genre’s core tenets. You can designate a leader to control the descent of everyone in your party during the initial drop, ensuring you stick together. The ping system is a masterclass in easy contextual communication with teammates. Survivors can bring their fallen teammates back to life if they’re bold or sneaky enough. Also, yes, there’s a robot with a grappling hook that’s more fun to play than almost any other character in any other character-based online shooter.

Matt wrote in his review that Apelegs was “the best battle royale game we’re going to see for a long, long time,” and after a year of new characters, maps and modes, that’s still true.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

From Software make third person action games, but no one calls them that: they’re simply FromSoft games. Or perhaps maybe Soulslikes. Or perhaps Soulsbornes. Maybe no Sekisoulsborne? At any rate, Sekiro features the precise and demanding combat, the carefully paced and neat world design, and the visually fantastic enemies that have made each of their modern games so distinct.

Additionally, it twists plenty on that formula, however. First of all, you are a samurai as well as your sword is the primary weapon of yours, and the main weapon of many of the adversaries of yours. Combat is actually about perfectly timing blocks, and diminishing the stamina of your opponent till you are in a position to beat them with a single killing blow.

Second, the game was published by Activision. They initially seemed an odd fit, but FromSoft said they made the choice because Activision are masters of player analytics. They wanted someone to help them make Sekiro more polished and welcoming to new players than any of their previous games – and the relationship paid off. Sekiro is in some ways more demanding of players than Dark Souls or Bloodborne (still sadly not on PC), but it does a much better job of gradually teaching itself to players than those games. It’s as difficult and rewarding as ever to master, but easier than ever to start. So start.

Age Of Empires 2 Definitive Edition

There isn’t much around these days by way of new real-time strategy games, so here you go. Age Of Empires 2 is one of the best strategy games ever made, and the Definitive Edition is an absurdly bulky modern release.

If you never played it, Age Of Empires 2 is a historical real-time strategy game in which you control factions from across four eras of history – Dark Age, Feudal Age, High Middle and the Imperial Age. You build up your base of buildings in order to gather food, wood, gold and stone, and start pumping out units with which to go and politely kebab your enemies. Best of all, this is an RTS from the ’90s. While you can master your multiplayer opponents via careful micro and frighteningly high clicks-per-minute, you can also select the AI from the original games and defeat them by building a larger swarm of horsey men than they do.

In case you love the sound of that, then think about that there are actually 136 singleplayer missions of it to play, and thirty five civilizations and twenty four different campaigns to select from. On top of that, there are actually timed skirmish modes, multiplayer, and challenges, along with a dizzying array of some other game modes and map types. And as of this Definitive Edition release, it is all in 4K, with bigger maps than ever, better AI, and modern everything.

This’s like if someone took your battered old childhood teddy Mr Bangles and made him somehow, magically, brand new again. Tiny males doing big wars as fluffy and soft as the day you first cuddled them.

Horizon’s Gate

Horizon’s Gate is a vast and rich seafaring RPG about putting together an armada and becoming famous in the process. You start out with a single ship and a small crew, but as you raise money through acts of trade and piracy, you hire more people and purchase more ships from the port towns you visit.

If all goes well on the adventures of yours, word of the deeds of yours will travel, opening new options and new potential crew to hire. If it goes poorly, nonetheless, you will be at sea with a starving crew, hoping you are able to win this next battle against some sea monsters simply so you are able to eat their grotesque meat.

Separate from all of the time spent on the boat of yours, you will also go on land, and there is a genuine sensation of exploration to discovering new parts of the planet. That is partly since of the game’s unusual fantasy creatures, partly due to the variety in its retro pixel art tilesets, and partially because you are able to monetise the discoveries of yours by selling info to cartographers at each port. In either case, there is a compelling loop at Horizon’s core, as you push onward, expanding in power, getting to know the crew of yours, and finding stranger beasts to slay.

Phoenix Point

Julian Gollop created X COM, aka UFO: Enemy Unknown, the turn based tactics series which would be revived by Firaxis so successfully in XCOM and XCOM two. Phoenix Point is his personal return to the formula, and the result mixes the old design, streamlining borrowed from the reboot, and new ideas all its own.

The basics are actually the same: you are defending earth from an invading force, in this case angry crab males, with a squad of humans you will grow to cherish, who each has a fetish for hiding behind a habit along with low walls of dying forever.

The twists it introduces change things fundamentally. Your soldier’s turns aren’t split into distinct moving and shooting actions, for one, but instead every shot and saunter draws from that soldier’s pool of action points. You can also take direct control of the shooting, aiming your soldier’s weapons to the enemy body part you want to hit as per a third-person action game. More and more complexity is layered on top, through character stats, wounding systems, all the way up to the strategic layer or recruitment, base building and its Geoscape-style world simulation.

All the changes and twists and re-inventions make this feel a little like an alternate world XCOM, in other words. If you’re new the genre, you’re better off starting with Firaxis’s take, but if you’ve tired of those games and you’re looking for something new, Phoenix Point will scratch the same itches in a new way.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Not just a’ recommend right now’ game, but a’ recommend for all time’ game. The Witcher three is actually a sprawling RPG about a monster hunter, Geralt, who uses supernatural abilities to track and kill folkloric abominations for townsfolk who fear and despise him. Your time is actually spent either stabbing horrible things in the woods, bearing witness to various interpersonal tragedies in the role of yours as ultimate outsider, uh, or, playing the in world card game Gwent in various taverns.

it is Skyrim with much more direction and less jank; it is the game you may have once imagined BioWare 1 day making; it is sword-and-sorcery fantasy with Slavic rather compared to Middle Earth inspirations; it’s that Netflix TV show you may have read about, except Geralt is actually older and has more scars. He still takes baths.

On top of all of that, there’s also a real warmth to the game and its characters. The Witcher 3’s characters are fond of each other in ways we rarely get to see expressed by videogame protagonists – and we’re not referring to the nudey bits, here. Despite how he looks, Geralt is pleasant company, and it’s this that makes people fall in love with the games, the original books, and anything else that comes along.

Slay The Spire

Pick a class, and take on the spire: a tower filled with progressively tougher enemies as you ascend its many floors. The tools of yours in the fight are the cards of yours, with which you are able to concoct a fabulous damage dealing machine. Every choice is important because every card is able to have value if used in the proper way – and because death sends you right back to the start.

While the roguelike element might sound frustrating, it is what saves Slay The Spire from the progression systems and marketplace (money that is real or perhaps not) of other CCGs. Here, you build your deck through play, but all of the cards from a category are actually available to find on any life, and dying throws them all away once again anyway.

The other thing being roguelike affords the game is ridiculously powerful cards. Cards which do damage to every enemy on screen, cards which do damage umpteen times, cards which stack into fabulous maths explosions. These sorts of cards would imbalance another game; here, it makes the run on which you find it an exciting delight, and then it’s gone. The silver lining? You’ll find a different and equally powerful and exciting set of cards during every life.

Forza Horizon 4

probably the best racing game in years. Forza Horizon four plops you right into a bucolic montage of British countryside and towns during a nation consuming racing festival. You careen up hills, past wind turbines, and smash through stone walls while driving between hundreds of events, including off road races and road, stunt challenges, drifting challenges, and one off cinematic races in which you compete against a hovercraft or perhaps a jet or a train. Horizon four is not, varied, and vast afraid to be ridiculous.

New in this fourth entry in the series are seasons. The events available to you at any given moment are determined by the in-game weather, which advances simultaneously for all players worldwide. In winter, the roads will be icy and the fields snowy, encouraging you to try different cars in your garage than in the heat of summer. That’s a good thing, given that there are hundreds of classic cars to stuff inside your garage.

It also – and this might sound like strange praise – has one of the best opening 15 minutes of any game. While so many of its rivals frontload a cumbersome tutorial, Horizon 4 throws you instantly into a race and then, via a series of match cuts, seamlessly shifts you through different events in different seasons with different vehicles. It’s a taster menu of everything great to come, and it’ll leave you breathless and desperate for more.

Eliza

This visual novel is actually about Eliza, a digital counselling service. Clients come to speak to it about the worries of theirs, while the machine monitors the heart rate of theirs, stress levels and monitors keywords, before generating advice in response. The protagonist is actually Evelyn, and it is the duty of her to read the script it creates. That is it.

From there, the story touches upon every quandary you might hope would arise from a digital counsellor, including the ethics, privacy concerns, and labor issues around its creation. It also engages deeply with the ideas of therapy, the issue of isolation in contemporary society, and the difficult path of recovery.

You will find out in time that Evelyn’s involvement stretches beyond reading out the script: she has one of the developers responsible for creating Eliza. Through continuing to play, you will talk to the others who worked on it, those working on it today, and the males that are profiting from it. You will find decisions to make along the way, but they are more about just how you think about any given situation than they’re radically altering the direction of the story. But this’s a game with enough going on its story and themes that you will be puzzling over those choices months after you have finished playing.

That is our list of the very best PC games to play as of… right now. But we are going to be updating it throughout 2021, so check our house Markert 4 Games  to discover what new games have been added – and what we have removed.