Dark Souls never let me stick my tongue out as a giant frog and slap my enemies around with it. It never let me create a posse of clones to punch an evil pile of rocks back into the ground either. If Dark Souls is a trial, Wukong is an adventure. Or if you want to be accurate about it, it's a Journey to the West, but the animals have health bars. Wukong imagines a version of the classic Chinese story where a fox upgrades your healing potion. If anything about it is truly like FromSoftware's games, it's how much it lets its rich world speak for itself.

Wukong doesn't waste time trying to establish why there's a forest of wolf men or why you're serenaded by a man without a head. It opens with hero Sun Wukong laughing in the face of a council of gods who immediately punish him so hard it takes hundreds of years for him to be reincarnated as a level 1 monkey. Journey to the West isn't required reading before playing Wukong, but doing so might make its world considerably less opaque. Even so, I had no troubles appreciating its eccentric cast of talking animals who are either so amusingly pathetic you pity them or so self-serious it's like you barged in on their third act.

Surprises like a gigantic frog leaping out of tall grass and a serpentine dragon clutching me in its teeth far above a frozen lake lured me forward—every level is a series of bizarre vignettes crash landing into a seemingly straightforward quest. Wukong is overflowing with boss fights, which isn't actually as intimidating as it sounds. The difficulty of these encounters is so uneven that you never know what to expect. You might stumble into an oversized rat and come out unscathed, but need to fully lock-in to defeat a raging bear. Many of the bosses celebrate the spectacle rather than demanding your sharpest reflexes.

A similar ethos applies to the sections between those big fights. Wukong's level design begins extremely linear, almost to the point of constricting its combat into one big highway of enemies, but it gradually opens up after the first few hours. You go from bonking wolves in a forest to tiptoeing past skeletal snake men. In its second chapter, every kind of rat shows up to snipe you from rooftops or set you on fire with clouds of gunpowder. Wukong gently pressures you to take side paths that lead to treasure or sidequests that will beef you up for what's ahead.

In a desert area, I cleared out some shield-bearing hedgehogs and jumped down a bridge to find a man who had been turned into a rock begging for help. When I returned with an item he asked for he laughed at me for being gullible enough to fall for his trick—a classic 16th century joke! Suddenly I could lock onto him, so I smacked him a few times and he gave up a spell that let me parry attacks by turning to stone.

Instead of dropping you into a meat grinder of tricky enemy placements between each boss like so many soulslikes, Wukong lets these open sections breathe so you can soak up its world before moving into the next big battle.

When the fights do get tough—and some of them definitely do—Wukong's flexible skill tree and upgrade systems keep most of them from feeling like brick walls. At any shrine, Wukong's version of Dark Souls' bonfire checkpoints that respawn nearby enemies, you can move your skill points around to invest in a number of powerful magical abilities. Investing in Immobilize gave me a tool to freeze enemies just before they landed a hit so I could heal or retaliate. Maxing out the duration of a spell that transformed me into a wolf with a flaming polearm was like having a second life for multi-phase bosses. While I wouldn't quite call them builds, Wukong has plenty of ways for you to almost nullify the nastiest parts of a fight so you can survive it. Its spells are so strong that I suspect some players will opt to fight without them, like all the Reddit ascetics who proudly refuse to use the mimic tear in Elden Ring.

But doing so will rob you of the most satisfying elements of Wukong's combat. Aside from some minor damage upgrades to your staff, you don't have an inventory of weapons to choose from. You do, however, have an inventory of creatures to choose from. Special enemies found throughout the levels drop their spirits which can be equipped for a passive buff and a devastating signature attack, like morphing your head into a giant hammer or turning into a swordsman for one clean slash attack. Combat is largely about creating openings in an enemy's attack patterns with your spells and buying time with dodges until they're back online.

Most fights are a dance of cartwheels, somersaults, and puffs of smoke as your monkey man assumes the form of various beasts that you collect like Pokémon. Once you find the rhythm, you go from playing as a warrior to a magician.

A rough start

Nothing is more frustrating when that flow is broken by something you can't improve with a little better timing or prediction. In the review build of the game, a stuttery frame rate and the occasional crash ended a few early battles prematurely for me. Wukong is yet another game plagued by the curse of graphics shaders tanking performance so badly that instead of swapping your skill points, you're swapping video settings to find a combination that'll get you through the next section, and no amount of raw GPU grunt can power through it.

Although Wukong has fairly linear environments, they're dense with beautiful detail, like a sunbaked desert with gnarled trees or a forest of glowing leaves. It's a shame that I had to muddy any of it by knocking down my settings to medium on a Nvidia RTX 4090. It fixed my issues without tarnishing too much of the gorgeous views, but there's a chance the experience could be even worse on launch day for people with way less extravagant graphics cards.

The handful of deaths from the game's poor performance couldn't sour how impressive Wukong is as an action game that isn't content with living in FromSoftware's shadow. It may have a lot of the signifiers of a soulslike, but it wields its difficulty in a more playful, approachable way. Wukong shirks a lot of the punishing difficulty synonymous with the soulslike genre, positioning it as one of the best games to recommend to anyone who has avoided them or for those who aren't fond of how grim they tend to be. Bosses that bookend each chapter are the closest mirrors to ones you'd find in Elden Ring, but you can skip usual moveset memorization and trial-and-error with patience, dodging around until you're comfortable with going in. Checkpoints are never more than 30 seconds away from the bosses too. The rewards at the end of each chapter are striking little animations—one of which is a stop-motion parable about a man who saves an injured wolf—that make your effort worth it.

Those scenes reinforce the exuberance with which the game's developers drew from such an iconic work of folklore. GameScience has imbued Wukong with a staggering amount of creativity. Aside from the performance issues, the biggest disappointment comes from outside the game itself: Last year, an IGN report described in detail a history of sexist remarks from GameScience's leaders. The studio has declined to acknowledge the allegations in recent interviews, and while I didn't find anything within the game that reflects an extremely regressive view of women (although there just aren't many in the game), the behavior tarnishes what would otherwise be an effortless recommendation..

Wukong is one of the most joyful action RPGs I've played simply for how lovingly it treats its world and characters and, by extension, how much it clearly wants me to love them too. It worked: Punchy combat aside, I wanted to keep working through each area to meet another weird little creature with a mysterious quest or to get jumped by another animal who learned MMA. In a pool of games about fallen kings and sad dragons, it's delightful to play an action game that isn't obsessed with being dour and where the best solution to the most grueling fights is to use as many fun abilities as you can. In a year with the tremendous Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, I never thought I'd play a game that veers in such a wildly different direction but manages to reach similar highs, even if it lacks the sheer scale and build complexity as FromSoftware's masterpiece.

Wukong is its own beast and if it has to be labeled a soulslike, then I think we're going to have to come up with a new definition. There's nothing else quite like it.

The thing is, LG's take on the high-refresh 4K OLED gaming monitor riff isn't on a totally different level to those QD-OLED panels. In fact, it's very similar. But it is undeniably and unambiguously—even if ultimately pretty marginally—better. Hold those thoughts.

On paper, the LG UltraGear 32GS95UE is very similar to the likes of, say, the Alienware 32 AW3225QF, Asus ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM, Samsung Odyssey G8 OLED G80SD, or MSI MPG 321URX. Whether it's the 32-inch panel size, 4K native resolution, 240 Hz refresh or 0.03 ms response performance, LG's OLED monitor looks like a dead ringer for that quartet of Samsung QD-OLED panels.

LG's 275 nit full-screen brightness rating is actually a little brighter. But that's a "typical" rating, with LG rating the panel at 250 nits "minimum". If it's a close run thing in theory, full-screen brightness is the one area where you might have come into this review with some doubts.

That's because this LG monitor inevitably uses the WOLED panel technology from sister company LG Display, the subsidiary of the sprawling LG empire that makes the actual OLED panels which go into everything from monitors like this to TVs, phones, watches, cars and the rest. And the one metric by which LG WOLED tech has fallen short previously, is full screen brightness.

If that's now at least on par with Samsung QD-OLED, this particular 32-inch 4K beauty has something none of the Samsung-powered competition currently offers, namely a Dual Mode functionality which uses pixel doubling to essentially run as a native 1080p panel but with an extremely quick 480 Hz refresh rate. 

The idea is to provide the best of both worlds. You get both full 4K capability for ultrasharp and detailed image quality in games and which also benefits things like font rendering day to day, plus the ability to run 1080p at sky-high frame rates and ultra-low latency, just without the need to interpolate a 1080p image over a 4K panel. Doing the latter always ends up looking soft and a little blurry compared to a native 1080p monitor of the same size. What's not to like?

Other highlights include 98.5% coverage of the DCI-P3 digital cinema color space, Nvidia G-Sync compatibility, DisplayHDR True Black 400 certification, plus HDMI and DisplayPort connectivity along with a USB-A hub. In fact, really the only notable omission is a USB-C port.

Depending on your point of view, that may or may not be an issue. But at this extremely lofty price point, it hardly seems like an onerous expectation. Moreover, it's something of a pity given that the 4K resolution and pixel density, not to mention mostly excellent color accuracy, means this monitor does such a stellar job of bridging the void between gaming and productivity.

Put simply, it would be nice to able to have both a proper gaming rig hooked up via DisplayPort and a laptop running in single-cable mode and picking up a desktop keyboard and mouse, all courtesy of USB-C. Odds are, if you can afford this monitor and you're into gaming, you'll also have a laptop to hook up via USB-C.

With that USB-C themed pico-rant squared away, that's the pre-game considerations covered off. Oh, with the exception of design and ergonomics. In truth, that aspect of the LG UltraGear 32GS95UE is somewhat forgettable, which is why I almost did forget. The slim bezels on all four sides of the panel ensure a slick, contemporary look, while the broad stand adds a touch of individuality. And it's certainly well put together and offers plenty of adjustability including rotation into portrait mode, if that's your thing. But it's not quite up there with Samsung's Odyssey monitor for sheer physical desirability.

But what, then, of the actual image quality? I'll tease you no longer. Here's why this LG is better than those Samsung QD-OLEDs. First, it doesn't suffer from the slightly warm color balance of those 4K QD-OLED monitors. Second, the panel doesn't turn slightly grey in bright ambient light, again as QD-OLED panels do and thus marginally detracting from contrast performance and black levels. Third it does or doesn't do all that while absolutely matching if not bettering the QD-OLED competition for full-screen brightness.

Now, those factors may not immediately seem like an absolutely overwhelming roll call of advantages. But we're talking about very expensive displays, so even a small edge matters. More to the point, those wins come with no discernible downsides. In other regards, this monitor is at least as good.

The net result is a ridiculously enjoyable monitor to use for just about anything. The best bit is probably the HDR performance. There's a particular sequence in Cyberpunk 2077 that's a great test of peak brightness. It's an underground bar scene, mostly dark and moody. But the actual bar is surrounded by banks of neon lights. And they absolutely, positively sizzle on this monitor. It's the most impressive rendering I've yet seen.

HDR video looks stellar, too, and really delivers on the whole High Dynamic Range premise. The contrast, the bright highlights right next to inky darkness, these are things that LCD monitors with local dimming just can't compete with.

They can't compete with the speed, either. Pixel response is essentially a solved issue with these OLED monitors. It's questionable whether you'd be able to tell the difference were they any faster. Of course, the 240 Hz refresh ensures very low latency, provided you have a GPU powerful enough to drive this monitor at high frame rates. And you can improve can lower the latency yet further with the aforementioned 1080p mode.

Quick side note on that subject: The Dual Mode feature works slickly. There's a button on the bottom bezel you hit to jump between 4K@240 Hz and 1080p@480 Hz modes. The screen does blank out and the display will resync with your PC, but it happens fast enough. So, the big question is whether you'd mistake the 1080p mode for native 1080p on a 32-inch monitor.

The answer is no, you wouldn't. For sure, it looks a bit better than 1080p interpolated on a 4K 32-inch panel in the usual manner. And, in game, the experience looks closer to native than it does on the Windows desktop, the latter being really pretty fugly. But there's still a softness that belies any true pretence at native rendering. So, it's a welcome enough feature viewed as an extra. It just doesn't quite deliver on the dual-native premise.

Oh, and one last thing. Throughout all of this, we haven't touched on something that's typically fairly critical on an OLED gaming panel, the panel coating. Horror of horrors, the LG UltraGear 32GS95UE doesn't have a glossy anti-glare coating, something that normally I'd say was a substantial disadvantage on an OLED monitor.

But somehow, the matte coating is just fine. Is it a little "glossier" than a typical matte finish? Possibly. But either way, the sense of contrast and inky black levels, not to mention highlight dazzle is barely, if at all, compromised. Consider my glossy-panel prejudices largely, if not quite comprehensively, dismantled. Oh, okay, were this monitor glossy it would probably look even better. But as it is, it's still my new favorite OLED monitor.

A shout out, too, to both full-screen brightness and SDR content handling. Regarding the former, you can set the panel at either constant full-screen SDR brightness around 250 nits or allow it to vary according to how much of the screen is lit up. The latter has been a bit of a distraction on previous monitors with LG OLED panels.

However, this one is bright enough, full-screen, that it doesn't dim infuriatingly if you open up a large white app window, like a text doc or webpage. In fact, I think it works best in variable mode, which allows it to go that bit brighter most of the time. LG has also managed the calibration of SDR content in HDR mode very nicely. So, you can realistically run this thing in HDR mode all the time. Short of pro-level content creation, there's no need to jump between modes.

But wait, one definitely last thing. Font rendering is just fab on this panel. Again, it's down to the 4K native on a relatively small 32-inch panel. The pixel density is plenty to cover up the non-standard subpixel structure of these OLED panels compared to conventional RGB LCD monitor.

As for negatives, if you really must insist the panel color balance has the very slightest green tinge. It's very minor and not as apparent as the overly warm skew of those QD-OLED alternatives. But for the record, it is there.

All of which means this is one heck of a monitor. It's an HDR killer, the SDR handling and brightness is good, the pixel response is ridiculous and the Dual Mode is a nice little extra even if it isn't quite as advertised. The only thing missing is that USB-C interface, which I can forgive. What's harder to wish away, however, is the price.

This is definitely my favorite 4K OLED monitor. But does that justify the monstrous $1,400 price? After all, you can get a 32-inch 4K OLED for $900, fully $500 less. In the end, it's a personal call. If I could easily afford the extra money, I'd cough up. But if the added $500 was any kind of stretch, I'd be in quite the quandary. I really would.

Sins of a Solar Empire 2's journey to launch has been an extremely confusing one. It technically left early access on the Epic Games Store (very quietly) a while ago, but that 1.0 version was actually missing some big things, like the final faction, and in sore need of polish. Now it's finally arrived on Steam, though, and I have some good news: it's brilliant. 

The original Sins and its beefy expansions pretty much nailed the cosmic combination of RTS and 4X, impressively marrying the two disparate genres in a way that maintained the excitement of real-time space battles and the measured pace of the kind of empire-building typically relegated to turn-based games. With so little left on the table you could be forgiven for thinking that this is not especially fertile ground for a sequel, but Ironclad has found plenty of ways to justify Sins 2. 

Move heaven and earth 

The dynamism inherent in each map is the headline attraction this time. Sins 2's solar systems are not static maps. Planets and asteroids—collectively referred to as gravity wells, the territory in which all the game's action takes place—now move along predetermined paths. The impact of these celestial mechanics depends on the configuration and size of the map—but if you don't pay attention to the movement of the heavens, you're just inviting marauding aliens into your backyard. 

In my first game, the solar system started off as an orderly chain. Each faction began surrounded by its own lattice of gravity wells waiting to be colonised and exploited, and each lattice was connected to another by a single phase lane. This allowed us all to focus on our own local area, knowing that our rivals only had one route into our part of the solar system. And for a long time there was an uneasy and unofficial peace. We just ignored each other. 

This was ideal, because Sins 2 is full of complexities that need to be unpicked. It does really try to make this endeavour less Herculean, though. A robust tutorial breaks down every mechanic and UI element, and there's a welcome amount of automation. Scouts immediately start exploring the moment they are constructed; new ships can be created right from an individual fleet's menu, before automatically travelling towards said fleet; and if you try to build something that has a tech prerequisite, the game will start researching it for you. But there's still a lot to juggle. 

As I pored over menus, fiddled with fleets and built up my empire's infrastructure, an hour went by—an hour where I'd only blown up a few enemy scouts and some unaffiliated ships hanging out around the territory I had started claiming. In that time the solar system had changed shape. Dramatically. 

Now there wasn't just a single phase lane connecting me to the rest of the system—there were multitudes, and every single one of my rivals now had a clear path to my territory. And everyone else's. The peace was broken. At one point, all four of us converged upon a single planet, with lasers and projectiles and tiny strikecraft filling the screen in a glorious spectacle. After pottering around at a leisurely pace for an hour, this cataclysmic lightshow was like a shot of adrenaline right to the heart. 

Celestial mechanics bless Sins 2's wars with incredible texture, giving each map a unique rhythm and lively pace. Lively, but not always fast. As the phase lanes shift you can become unmoored from your opponents, getting some breathing room before everything links up again and the map becomes engulfed in explosions and ship debris. So you switch focus, maybe start expanding in a new direction, shore up your defences, or explore the new gravity wells that have appeared. And since you can see how much the map will shift within the next hour, you can plan accordingly, preparing your fleets for a big assault when the planets align once more. 

Going full Ferengi 

As a broke-ass videogame critic I have a penchant for playing economic superpowers whenever I dive into a 4X, so I've always been fond of Sins' Trader Emergency Coalition. This faction, which is split into the TEC Enclave and TEC Primacy, boasts a bunch of wealth-building features, like trade ports that send out automated trading vessels—accompanied by armed ships once you unlock the appropriate tech—and bolster your passive income. It's an incredibly strong feature, and by the mid-game I had a relentless economy that ensured my military might was only limited by my fleet cap. 

Each of the three factions' subfactions can broadly be divided into aggressive and defensive playstyles. So the Primacy nets you a powerful long-range titan—ships of such scale and power that each faction can only field one at a time—and an orbital cannon that can devastate entire worlds, as well as the ability to pal around with pirates and use propaganda to buff ships fighting around other gravity wells. The Enclave, meanwhile, is the only subfaction that can plonk down two starbases in a single location, which makes slapping them with an eviction notice a tall order.  

So the TEC is rad, but I'm hard-pressed to pick a favourite faction. The cyber-spiritualists of the Advent Wrath enjoy one of the smoothest early games thanks to their ability to immediately colonise gravity wells adjacent to a location where they've constructed a Greater Temple of Pilgrimage after the gravity well has been cleared of hostiles. Their psionic abilities can also convert enemy ships, improve production and buff their own vessels. The ravenous aliens of the Vasari Exodus, meanwhile, use labour camps and their unique ability to strip worlds of all their natural resources to feed their apocalyptic warmachine. Instead of focusing on expansion and construction, they consume, giving playthroughs with this lot a very different flavour. 

One thing each faction shares, however, is that they are all built for violence. Even the Vasari Alliance, with features designed to encourage cooperation, is ultimately trying to win a war. Sins 2 leaves concepts like science victories and galactic councils to the other 4Xs, while its other half, the RTS layer, demands blood, ravaged worlds and ruined ships.

This does leave the diplomatic side of things—especially in singleplayer—feeling a bit perfunctory. I found the AI largely disinterested in engaging with the barebones system, even when I offered stupid amounts of cash and resources. The treaties you're able to offer are limited to cease fires, sharing vision, or a full alliance, as well as the secret fourth option: constant rejection. It would help a lot if I had some idea of what my opponents actually wanted, but nope, I just had to wing it. Want some credits? A planet? Why won't someone be my pal?

With human players, the system is a bit more impactful thanks to the ability to actually communicate and tailor deals to your rival's needs. Meatbags are untrustworthy, of course, but that's why the alliance lock timer is such a welcome addition. When you're making a deal, you set a specific duration, during which neither side can break the treaty. So you don't need to trust the opposition's intentions. Of course, nothing is stopping them from building up a massive fleet to attack you the moment the timer hits zero—but that blesses these treaties with some lovely, sweat-inducing tension.

Minor factions can be handled with a different system: influence. You spend influence to unlock four reputation levels, each offering handy rewards, at the cost of more influence. These can be ship or planet items (traits or buildings that let you customise your fleet and empire), temporary alliances, or exotic resources that are necessary for constructing capital ships. 

Working with these minor factions absolutely needs to be part of your strategy, and their name belies their substantial impact. They run resource markets (which vanish if they're destroyed) and auctions, placing them at the heart of the economic side of the game. They can also serve as both a shield and a sword in your war with the other factions. But the way you engage with them, it's all very mechanical. They don't have agendas or personalities—there isn't even a hint of flavour. This goes for all the factions, major or minor. They all exist in service of this—admittedly very grand—war. 

Star destroyer 

Stellaris has been my go-to 4X for years because even as a sandbox with no campaign, it can't help but generate intricate, flavorful stories. This is true of less narrative-driven 4Xs, too: Mention Montezuma or Gandhi to a Civ player and you're bound to get an emotional response. There's absolutely none of this in Sins 2, despite boasting a setting and factions that could absolutely facilitate it. Ultimately, Sins 2 really just wants you to blow up loads of spaceships. But that's OK. Better than OK, really. Because it makes blowing up spaceships an extremely good time.  

Sins has never been about the micro, but it would be a mistake to ignore the details. Every vessel in your huge fleet is a complex machine where size, speed, weapons and defensive capabilities define its role and determine what you need to do to keep it alive. Or at least alive for long enough to mess up your adversary a wee bit. The greater the class of ship, the more complex they become. So while you can just let your tiny strikecraft burst out of their hangars and swarm enemy ships, when you're dealing with your cruisers and capital ships—and especially your precious and costly titan—you need to be more hands-on. 

The ship AI is reliable enough that composition and big picture strategies can get you far, so you don't have to pick every target and keep repositioning them—unless you notice a bunch of ships randomly trying to blow up a trade port instead of the wall of unescorted drone-spewing support craft. You want some punchy front-liners, some long-range bad boys spitting out missiles from the edge of the gravity well, and some ships with point-defence capabilities to shoot enemy projectiles out of the sky. With just those bases covered, you'll get some wins under your belt—at least on the default difficulty.  

Pick a fight with some more challenging adversaries, however, or some human opponents, and you'll need to stop watching Netflix on the other screen, sit up straight and perform the Picard manueover. Between their shields, hulls and special abilities, most ships can take a bit of a beating, but that just lulls you into a false sense of security—look away for a second and you could lose the fight. I almost lost my homeworld in one game because my dog started loudly grunting (he got stuck trying to get under the sofa), distracting me just long enough for a bunch of missile boats to sneak through a new phase lane and start blasting my extremely surprised fleet from the rear. Pro tip: If you need to investigate some grunting, at the very least you should pause the game. 

The range of role-specific ships, tech upgrades and ship items means there's an abundance of fleet customisation, without the need for a ship designer. And honestly, that's ideal. Ship designers used to get me salivating, but they rarely justify the faffing around, and the benefits they do provide can be created with much simpler systems, as evidenced here. Select the right things and you can create unstoppable juggernauts with nigh-impenetrable hulls that constantly repair themselves; mobile, planet-killing warhead factories; and absolute beasts that murder everything that enters their vicinity. 

Sins 2 also approaches space combat as this more tangible, physical event, simulating individual projectiles and actually taking into account what's sitting between them and their target. This means you can use your big lads, like your titan, as a literal shield, blocking enemy salvo. Obviously you don't want to sacrifice your titan, though, so you won't be wanting to use it as a shield all the time, but that's why you should field things like flak frigates, which use their turrets to knock out projectiles and strikecraft. 

This is great stuff, though Ironclad makes some boasts about how the tracking speed and pitch of turrets is taken into account, and while that sounds cool, this information is not presented in-game and honestly it's hard to tell what impact it has. All I know is that more point defence = fewer shipwrecks. 

Despite the absence of a campaign or discrete objectives, the individual fights and larger wars still spit out their fair share of novelties. A game on a small, resource-scarce map where every agile ship is precious is a uniquely different proposition to one with multiple solar systems, where each faction begins safely nestled away in its own corner, able to slowly expand and build massive armadas before finally saying "howdy" with a wall of warheads. And then human opponents throw in another wrinkle. 

Join the fleet 

When it comes to 4Xs, I'm more of a singleplayer guy, but Sins 2's RTS DNA makes human-on-human violence more attractive, buoyed by features like AI hotseat and AI takeover, which lets players dip in and out; time-locked alliances; optional infinite pauses; and replays that immortalise your greatest victories and most embarrassing failures. All the boxes have been ticked, so I'm hopeful that it's going to be able to secure a long-term future and spit out infinite multiplayer wars. 

It would be a sin to end this review without mentioning how much eye candy these cosmic conflicts provide. Sins 2 is a kaleidoscope of deadly lasers and colourful space hulks, elevated by absurdly minuscule details and appropriately dramatic lighting. And while it's not the first game to play with scale like this, it's still so impressive to seamlessly switch from looking at a map of one or more solar systems to being able to pick out individual lights on a ship, rust on a hull or a missile zeroing in on its unfortunate target. 

The RTS has been making a comeback over these last few years, but there have been far more stumbles than successes. My time with Sins of a Solar Empire 2, though, has been plain sailing, from the performance—which I never noticed dipping below 70 fps with everything cranked up—to the new features like celestial mechanics. I'd love to see more meat added to the 4X layer, with deeper diplomatic systems and some narrative colour, but when it comes to pure war, nobody does it better. 

However, there's a new model in town, and it's the AndaSeat Kaiser 4 XL. Designed for those who need a lot of room, this substantial chair has serious dimensions. The backrest measures 86.5 cm tall, with a shoulder width of 57 cm, while the bottom cushion is 54 cm across and 51 cm deep. The shoulder wings are larger than the previous model, and it's now got fancy 5D armrests and a pop out lumbar support with 4-level adjustment. 

All chairs are delivered in substantial boxes, but my delivery driver laughed when they saw the doorframe we'd have to slide this particular package through. It fits, just, but even by chair packaging standards it's obvious what you're getting here is larger than most. Construction is a fairly standard affair with the tools and instructions provided, but if you want an easier time of it I'd highly suggest calling in a friend to help. Chairs are never particularly easy to put together, but the extra dimensions here make for more of a workout than most.

Once constructed, what you're left with is a large but not ridiculously huge chair. Seeing the XL on the box and the individual pieces did make me worry I'd be left with something cartoonishly big, but the dimensions here are well-judged, and leaves you with a seating space that'll fit most people without being too big to fit in with your average desk setup. It's a bit of a looker too, with bridge-of-the-Enterprise vibes, set off by those wide, swooping shoulder wings and plush side-supports.

Sitting in the Kaiser 4 XL for the first time is a bit like getting on a plane and realising you've accidentally been upgraded—there's much more room here than you expect, and it's a pleasant surprise.

I am not the tallest, nor largest of human beings. Still, while this XL model is made for those who need more space than most, it doesn't feel like I'm surrounded by too much chair when I sit down. My 5' 11" frame fits nicely, while my 5' 4" partner doesn't look too out of place, either.

I've had all sorts of differently-sized visitors sit in the Kaiser 4 XL for testing purposes, the largest of which being 6' 5" and built like the proverbial brick outhouse—by which I mean, bodybuilder-sized. There's been no complaints from any as to sizing, which speaks well for this chair's ability to fit the vast majority of people.

Nor have there been any complaints in regards to comfort. There's a ton of adjustability settings here, all of which work well. There's 135° of recline, accessible through a sizeable right-mounted handle (top marks for not putting this crucial control underneath the chair, so you can actually adjust it while leaning), and a pop-out integrated lumbar cushion, which can be adjusted by a dial on the side of the backrest and popped in and out with a lever on the side of the seat.

I'd go as far as to say the lumbar support here is actually the best I've used to date. It's easy to dial in exactly as much or as little as you need, and the pop-out cushion treads the line between being soft enough for comfort, and firm enough to provide proper, meaningful back support.

Like the previous model, there's also a magnetic head cushion with some seriously powerful magnets. It's good fun to chuck it at the chair and watch it attach with a pleasing thunk, and it actually requires some genuine effort to move it around once attached. Once you've got it in position, it's not going anywhere easily, so it'll support your neck exactly where you place it without sliding about.

Then there's the armrests, which are 5D. For the uninitiated, that means they adjust up and down, forwards and backwards, left and right, and rotate. Oh, and they split in the middle to fold upwards, too.

On that last point: I'm not exactly sure why. You can, if you so wish, raise your arms like you're performing a T-Rex impression—which doesn't seem particularly useful unless you had the overall height of the chair down at its bottom setting and a very high desk. I suppose you could tilt them inwards and use the upright position to hold a controller in front of you, but it feels a little awkward in practice.

Still, keep them flat and they are very large, slightly soft and squishy, and extremely comfortable. If you're an arm-leaner this is excellent news, as testing the Kaiser 4 XL has made me wish all chairs had armrests of this size. They do wobble on their axis a little more than most between rotational settings, however. It does seem like an intentional amount of play in the mechanism, but it could do with a little tuning for a more high-quality feel.

If I was ordering my own model I would have picked the fabric version, as I find PVC leather chairs uncomfortably sticky in summer, and cold in winter. I'm not quite sure how AndaSeat has managed it, but the faux-leather model I received suffers from neither. On hot days it's been cool and refreshing, without causing excess sweat, whereas on cold nights it's not frozen solid like the rest of my house. 

The inner chair material seems pretty tough, too, and despite receiving a white model (insert rant about touchable white objects being a bad idea here) it's been easy to wipe clean. Just be prepared for every little spec and stray hair to bother you—if you're anything like me—but there's a whole range of colour options here that should be less prone to showing the odd bit of dirt.

What isn't so tough, however, is the textured soft-touch backing on the rear of the chair. It's pleasingly squishy, and looks great. However, my review unit does have a nick taken out of the material. I'll give AndaSeat the benefit of the doubt here and say this may have happened during construction, despite best efforts to be careful.

However, it does suggest that if you've got a space where you expect the back of the chair to touch things, it's likely to get damaged if it encounters a sharp edge or corner.

There's also the branding to consider. The rear very loudly displays both "AndaSeat" and "Kaiser" in large, embroidered lettering, which is mirrored on the inside of the seat itself. It doesn't look bad, necessarily, but it's a little gamer-y in a way that lets everyone know you bought a gaming chair and not a super-serious office seat.

That's a shame, as I reckon with some smaller text and less overt branding this would be a good candidate for a chair to use at work without advertising your hobbies. It's a handsome object overall, so a more subtle, smaller text design would have tied in better with the overall vibe.

For downsides though, that's pretty much it. It's even well-priced at $539, given our top gaming chair recommendation, the Secretlab Titan Evo, is actually $10 more expensive. You're getting a whole lot more chair (in terms of size, at least) for the cash here, and that makes it a good value proposition.

Which puts me in a bit of a quandary. Does that make the AndaSeat Kaiser 4 XL the best gaming chair of them all? Well, for most people, I'd say not quite. The Titan Evo seems more resilient to damage and perhaps a little more robust in general, as we've had one knocking around the office forever and it's held up remarkably well. I also think the more subtle design is slightly better looking, and if you don't need the extra room you might find the SecretLab is more cosseting to your particular frame.

But if what you need is a really big, very comfortable chair with great back support, the Kaiser 4 XL is the one to pick. It's large and in charge, but still quite refined, and a comfortable daily driver with relatively few drawbacks. A big seat it may be, but the value for money here is nearly as huge.

Everything else about it is great, from the new higher resolution, higher refresh rate screen, to the improved cooling, but—and I hate to kick a guy while he's down—that Intel Core Ultra 7 155H chip at its heart is doing nothing good for it as a device.

This may be a more recent mainboard inside the Framework 13 Intel Core Ultra Series 1 device, but it feels like it's lagging behind the excellent Framework 13 AMD Ryzen series it launched last year, pretty much on all fronts. It's got better raw processing chops, more reliable gaming performance, and the AMD version is now cheaper, to the tune of $150. It's also a little lacking in terms of computational grunt compared with the even older Intel 13th Gen mainboard.

None of that takes away from the feeling you get, as a dyed-in-the-wool PC nerd, when you open up the Framework 13 DIY box. This is the first time I've experienced the DIY package; previously I've either had the pre-built machine arrive in one piece, ready to go out of the box, or had mainboards shipped over for me to upgrade my existing machine.

And it's a really pleasing experience. Everything's snugly boxed up, with the main unit already made up with the mainboard, screen, and associated Wi-Fi and webcam modules, and you're left to install the RAM, SSD, I/O modules, bezel, and keyboard. 

It's simple stuff and just requires the supplied hex screwdriver you use for any Framework upgrades. But it's that level of getting intimately involved with the device that I love, and it's what has engendered such affection in the unit I've been using as my go-to work laptop ever since I first laid mitts on the Framework 13.

That's an experience, however, you can have with any Framework laptop and not one restricted to this Intel Core Ultra Series 1 version. So, what do you get with this Meteor Lake-based setup? You get better cooling, and better battery life, and... that's kinda it.

To be fair, cooling has been an issue with the Framework 13 machines. They're relatively thin devices and the need for their mainboards to be removable and upgradeable means they can't be too tightly interwoven with the insides of the chassis. And that means the fans are pretty small and have to work hard to keep things cool. With the Framework 13, that means they can get real loud, real quick.

That's not such a problem with the Core Ultra Series 1 mainboard, which manages to be relatively unobtrusive even when on max performance and pushing the CPU and iGPU to their limits. Even just running Football Manager on the Ryzen series board, by comparison, proves too much for me to be able to game in polite company.

But, as you can see from the benchmark numbers, the Ryzen chip is still the king of gaming and productivity performance. And, honestly, I'll take the louder fans for the extra performance. It's not really even about extra frame rates, or faster rendering, either, it's about the consistency of performance. I've found it rare in my long experience for an Intel device to be more flaky than a comparative AMD one, but that's where we are here.

Gaming performance, as we know from experience with Intel's GPU architecture, is up and down, and the 22-thread Core Ultra 155H in this mainboard isn't capable of beating the 16 Zen 4 threads in the Ryzen 7 7840U on a regular basis, either.

It's also rather damning that, gaming aside, the Core Ultra seems like a definite backward step from the Intel 13th Gen mainboard when it comes to performance. Unless you really want to play some games on your Framework, then there doesn't seem to be any reason to move from the 13th Gen to the Core Ultra Series, and if you did want to play some games you're better off getting the cheaper AMD mainboard anyway.

Still, the battery life and fan noise are moderately better, eh?

Frustratingly, you still have no control over how the system is set up in terms of anything more granular than Windows' own three power levels, and there is no hint of fan control on offer for any Framework owners. I ache for a bit of controller software like Ayaneo's AyaSpace app, which gives you almost endless control over its mini PCs and gaming handhelds.

That would allow you to squeeze a bit more gaming battery life out of your device, as you can do on modern handheld PCs. But, to be fair to the Meteor Lake mainboard, it does have a better battery life using the same capacity power brick as the AMD version. In gaming terms that only translates to some 12 minutes of extra playtime, but in standard office work that would stretch out to be a relatively significant extra bit of usable life.

The only other complaint I have from that otherwise stellar AMD-based Framework 13 is the screen. The 2256 x 1504 panel is only a 60 Hz display, and it does have some pretty rough ghosting issues when you're playing games on it. The new screen shipped with this DIY laptop, however, is the 2880 x 1920 version, which sports a 120 Hz refresh rate and a higher peak luminance, too. 

It's definitely a superior panel to the original and a very welcome potential upgrade for anyone who has already bought a Framework 13. For some reason, the company's CEO has felt duty-bound to overshare about the rounded corners of the panel, and kudos for a commitment to transparency, but it's absolutely not an issue that I've paid any attention to in my time using the device.

What I will say, however, is that the ghosting is not gone. There is still a certain amount of it present with this panel, and that can lead to a slightly smeary effect when things are moving around the screen at speed, with you losing some detail in the image. It's better than the previous panel, for sure, but not night and day.

One oddity, however, is that the new screen seems to only be available to the DIY community. If you buy the prebuilt version of the Framework 13, in any form, your only option is the previous lower-res display, while you can choose to spend another $130 and get the better display if you go down the DIY route. It's worth noting here that you can also pick up the panel on the excellent Framework marketplace as a standalone component for $269. And it's an upgrade I would urge anyone with an existing device to make.

And it literally takes less than five minutes to stick into your laptop, too. Believe me, we've timed it.

I actually had quite high hopes for the Core Ultra Series 1 version of the Framework 13. In the plus column, we have both better battery life and quieter fans, but on the negative side, it's more expensive and slower than the AMD option.

And just feels a lot more unreliable in terms of what level of performance you're going to get out of it on a per-app, per-game basis. The Ryzen 7 7840U is utterly consistent, and you really know what you're going to get—namely top gaming performance and an eminently powerful eight-core Zen 4 processor.

In the end, that's the version of the Framework I'm going to go back to. I might take the higher resolution panel with me—I'm a damned sucker for high refresh rates, after all—but I'm not sold on the latest Intel mainboard itself at all.

To understand why, you need to delve into the guts of the two CCDs (Core Complex Dies) that nestle next to the IOD (Input/Output Die) underneath the heatspreader. 

The architectural changes are too many and too complicated to go through in detail right here—you can always check out our deep dive on the Zen 5 architecture if you want the low-down—but it suffices to say that everything AMD has changed results in notably better performance, depending on the application.

As we saw with the Ryzen 5 9600X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 9 9900X, the Zen 5 architecture can offer some substantial gains, especially in productivity and content creation tasks, though the outright improvement in gaming is somewhat understated.

However, in those chips, differences in clocks and power limits mask the true potential of Zen 5. As you'll soon see, when it comes to pitching the Ryzen 9 7950X against the Ryzen 9 9950X, the benchmark results are almost entirely down to the architectural differences between Zen 4 and Zen 5.

Unlike the lower tier models, AMD hasn't reduced the power limit for the 9950X and, like its predecessor, it's configured to have a TDP of 170 W and a peak package limit (PPT) of 230 W. That's a far cry from the 105 W TDP for the Ryzen 9 3950X, AMD's first 16-core processor for the desktop market, and at face value, seems to be just as power hungry as Intel's Core i9 14900K (which is nominally rated at 125 W TDP, 253 W).

Paper numbers never tell the full story, though.

To performance test the Ryzen 9 9950X, I used our CPU benchmark suite updated for 2024, with the CPU housed in an Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard and an AMD-supplied 2201 BIOS.

Cooling was another Asus product, a ROG Strix LC III 360 mm AIO, and in line with AMD's recommendation that DDR5-6000 is still the sweet spot for Ryzen chips, a dual channel 32 GB CL32 kit was employed. Lastly, we've gone from using an RTX 3080 to an RTX 4070, to provide a more real-world overview of the chips.

Let's start with what the Ryzen 9 9950X is best at and that's productivity, content creation, rendering, video editing, and so on. As you can see, it's not just good at it, it's the best CPU for these tasks full stop. Only a mega-expensive AMD Threadripper or Intel Xeon would likely achieve better results.

That said, it's only notably better in certain applications than the Ryzen 9 7950X. In the multithreaded Cinebench test, the 9950X is 15% faster than the 7950X and 16% better in Blender. However, the 9950X's lead over its predecessor is 8% in Handbrake and just 5% in the photo editing benchmark.

This is all pretty much in line with AMD's performance claims when it announced the Ryzen 9000-series with the launch of the Zen 5 architecture, so I'm not criticising the 9950X for having varied results in our tests—that's just the nature of how it all works.

The same is true of the chip's gaming performance. As with all of the Zen 5 chips I've tested, there's nothing wrong with how the Ryzen 9 9950X runs gaming workloads—compared to the Core i9 14900K, it generates 3% lower average frame rates, although the 1% lows are further behind, being 5% and 8% down respectively. 

That's close enough to not really be noticeable in real-time gaming, and our other game tests put the Ryzen 9 9950X on par or slightly ahead of the Core i9 14900K. Naturally, this is how it will be across the myriad of other games out there, where some will favour AMD, and others will work better with Intel chips. 

One aspect of all of this that strongly leans in AMD's favour is power consumption. Recording the average CPU package usage in Baldur's Gate 3 and the multicore test in Cinebench provides clear evidence for this: where the Ryzen 9 9950X consumed 129 W and 196 W in those two tests, the Core i9 14900K demanded 177 W and 271 W—that's 37% and 38% more power.

I was eager to test the 105 W Eco mode with the 9950X as the previous generation of high-tier Ryzen chips still worked really well with a reduced power limit and one of my favourite all-round processors, the Ryzen 9 7900, gets by with just 65 W. However, using Eco mode with the Ryzen 9 9900X, the 12-core variant of AMD's Zen 5 lineup, produced disappointing results, especially in gaming.

That last aspect was also a bit of an issue with the Ryzen 9 9950X, where Metro Exodus Enhanced and Total War: Warhammer 3 both took large hits to the 1% low figures when the chip was limited to 105 W. Fortunately, the other games worked absolutely fine and the 9950X still outperformed all of the other tested processors in content creation applications with this power limit.

So, taking all of the above into consideration, it's clear that the Ryzen 9 9950X is the best desktop CPU you can buy—it's not the outright fastest when it comes to gaming, but it's more than good enough in this respect, and it's multithreaded performance is second to none. It also doesn't use huge amounts of power and it's very easy to cool.

But none of this comes cheap. At $699, the 9950X has a $50 lower MSRP launch price than the previous model, the Ryzen 9 7950X, but one can pick up that chip for $523 on Amazon at the moment. That makes the new Zen 5 chip 34% more expensive than the Zen 4 one but as you've seen, it's not 34% faster in any of our tests.

This is a problem that all new processors have to contend with, of course, but in the case of the Ryzen 9 9950X it does mean it's not particularly good value for money. I'm certain that some applications will really favour the new architecture but unless one is specifically looking for a CPU for such specific workloads, then you might as well save yourself over $170 and get the last-gen Ryzen 9 7950X.

And if all you care about is PC gaming, then avoid the Ryzen 9 9950X altogether, as there are better and cheaper options, such as the Ryzen 7 9700X and still the mighty Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Let me begin by confessing my bias for AMD's 12-core processors, as I really rate the Ryzen 9 7900X and 7900. The latter has been a solid workhorse of a chip, powering my primary AM5 test PC, running games and content creation apps with ease. Sure, the full-fat 16-core models top the charts when it comes to multithreaded performance and you can't beat the X3D chips, with their extra L3 cache, for gaming but the Ryzen 9 7900 really is a fantastic all-round CPU.

I was keen on seeing what the Zen 5 update of one of my favourite chips was going to be like but after reviewing the 9600X and 9700X, I realised that I would need to temper my expectations somewhat. What I didn't realise at the time was just how much I'd need to lower my hopes.

The Ryzen 9 9900X comprises three chiplets underneath the heatspreader—two CCDs (Core Complex Dies), each with six cores and 12 threads, and a single IOD (Input/Output Die). That's exactly the same as the previous Ryzen 9 7900X model but there are some further revisions, other than the obvious AMD Zen 5 architecture advances.

Where the 7900X has a base clock of 4.7 GHz and a TDP of 170 W, the new 9900X has a base clock of 4.4 GHz and a much lower TDP, just 120 W. The boost clocks are the same for both chips (5.6 GHz) so the new model has a smaller power budget with which to maintain boost clocks when under heavy load.

Upon installing the chip, the first thing I checked out was the idle behaviour, as this was something that I'd noticed with the 9600X and 9700X as being unusual, compared to AMD's figures. Once again, my configuration of Windows and an Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard, using an AMD-supplied 2201 BIOS, resulted in an elevated idle power consumption, typically around the 40 W mark.

For cooling, I used an Asus ROG Strix LC III 360 mm AIO liquid cooler, and it had no problem dealing with this—in fact, it idled a good 10 °C cooler than the 9600X, so the high-ish idle power consumption wasn't a problem. I suspect that this will all be resolved in time, although AMD did suggest that one should be using the Balanced power profile in Windows. I tried all of them and it didn't make a jot of difference.

Anyway, you're here for the benchmarks, so let's start with the good news. The Ryzen 9 9900X is great in tests that mimic the CPU workloads experienced in content creation and other professional applications, such as rendering, file compression and decompression, and video editing.

If your PC is used primarily for productivity tasks, then the fast performance and relatively low power consumption of the Ryzen 9 9900X clearly make it an ideal choice for anyone considering Zen 5 for a prosumer workstation. Well, there is a big Eco-mode caveat to all that, however, which I'll come to shortly.

On the other hand, if you do more gaming on a PC than professional work, then the 9900X isn't ideal at all. Yes, it does outperform the 7900X in all our gaming tests, but the margin is very small—the exception being Metro Exodus Enhanced, which is very twitchy about what platform it's being run on.

Compared to my much-beloved 65 W Ryzen 9 7900, the Ryzen 9 9900X is quite underwhelming, as it's really not that much faster at all. Only the Factorio benchmark showed an appreciable difference in processing.

The somewhat muted gaming performance isn't such bad news, though, as the raw figures themselves are fine—it's certainly not slow in any of our gaming tests.

No, the real bad news is the Eco mode. The one thing we in the PC Gamer hardware team all liked about the Ryzen 7900X and its bigger sibling, the Ryzen 9 7950X, was that you could enable Eco mode in the BIOS, slice a healthy chunk off the TDP, but still have a great CPU. Here, setting the 9900X to 65 W resulted in a not-great CPU.

In this mode, the Ryzen 9 9900X performed slower than the 7900 in games and in applications that loaded up all the chip's cores, such as Blender or Handbrake. That's despite all of the Zen 5 architecture changes.

On face value, one would think that it can't be the power limits, as the Ryzen 9 7900X and 7900 are 170 W and 65 W chips, respectively, so there should be no obvious reason as to why the 9900X should struggle with going from 120 to 65 W. 

However, the 9900X does have quite high clocks and I suspect that all of the changes within the Zen 5 CCDs mean that they need more power than their predecessors when it comes to maintaining performance in heavy workloads.

AMD could perhaps remedy this by offering an additional Eco mode, as it does with its 170 W chips. With those, one can choose 105 or 65 W, but since the Ryzen 9 9900X is a 120 W chip, you only get a 65 W Eco option. With an 80 or 90 W option, things might be fine, but it does make me a little concerned about what the inevitable non-X version of the 9900 will be like.

If you're an Intel user, seeing a fast multithreaded chip use no more than 162 W in Cinebench—over 100 W less power than the Core i7 14700K—might just tempt you to switch platform and pick up the Ryzen 9 9900X. But here comes a caveat of more tangible import than the Eco mode issue, and it comes in the shape of the Ryzen 9 7900X. The new Zen 5 chip has an MSRP of $499, a pleasing $50 lower than the 7900X's launch price, but you can pick up the latter for $359 on Amazon right now.

That makes the 9900X roughly 40% more expensive than the 7900X but it's certainly not 40% faster. The new chips will certainly drop in price over time, and given the rather mixed reception of the Ryzen 9000-series, it could happen sooner than you think. But as things stand at the moment, I can't recommend the Ryzen 9 9900X—it's not a bad CPU by any means, just a disappointing one for the money.

Natsu-Mon is the latest spiritual follow-up from Natsuyasumi creator Kaz Ayabe, who's been returning to spearhead new version for other publishers—you may recall 2022's Shin chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation—but unlike the Sony games, they finally get English localizations. Natsu-Mon was originally released on Nintendo Switch last year, and besides now being in a language we can understand, also has an adequately powered-up PC port.

Given its heritage, Natsu-Mon sticks close to the structure Boku no Natsuyasumi hit on 24 years ago: play as a little boy in Japan in a bygone decade, and spend all 31 days of August (a brief but typical summer break for Japanese schoolkids) in the remote countryside. The big difference is that while previous games featured static painted backgrounds and glorious tank controls, Natsu-Mon shifts to a fully 3D open map. Home base is the tiny town of Yomogi, surrounded by a neighboring town, mountain, and all manner of hills and grassland. Said little boy Satoru is the son of managers of a traveling circus troupe, and inevitably helps put on regular shows for the town.

By day two, Satoru's parents have a proverbial fire to put out, so his caretakers are the circus performers and, indirectly, the rest of the town. Like any good RPG, a regular cast of characters is milling around town at all times of day: the neighbor kids with their "detective agency," the café owner and twin brother who runs the lighthouse, the nosy journalist, the men in black. Many just reliably hang around, but some give little magic moments, like when you go see who's hanging out for drinks at night, or when the café and toy store owners practice playing folk songs under a tree. Still, repetition is naturally high as you make a daily routine of talking to a character just to suss out another plot point. Characters aren't totally the focus in Natsu-Mon, but they offer necessary depth to complement the rest of the time exploring the scenery.

Out of breath in the wild

On Switch people wasted no time comparing Natsu-Mon to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and its sequel. But it's not a full-on clone, it just borrows a few good ideas: an upgradable stamina ("stickers") meter for staying active longer; a cape to glide across longer distances; and Satoru's ability to grab and climb nearly any vertical surface.

Where Natsu-Mon adds a welcome tweak to the open world routine is the absence of player punishment. Satoru has no health meter and thus no way to be hurt. You can be slowed down by running out of stamina or falling from a tall enough height, but you'll never lose. So go ahead: run in front of a moving train and watch it come to an immediate stop. (In the game, kids! Only in the game!) All that limits you is the stamina meter and an encroaching dinnertime.

But gee, that stamina meter is a powerful vice. I'm secure in being the kind of open world player who usually tries to get superpowered as early as possible, but I've played the Natsuyasumi games for a long time and love them for their art and story direction—they're about consciously soaking in life's tiny pleasure. So when the action-gamer part of my brain takes over in Natsu-Mon and I just want to get more stamina stickers to climb the Yomogi lighthouse, it feels like I'm avoiding the more pleasant bits I could be slowing down to enjoy. There are side activities like fishing and fossil collecting, and a regular supply of quests ("adventures") that keeps you busy uncovering more story and learning about characters. To be sure it's a relative slowing down: Natsu-Mon has the look of a cozy life sim, but I was always running around even if it wasn't aimless, making the experience feel more like a cross between Zelda and A Short Hike.

The expanded 3D freedom comes at a slight cost to the scenery. I mentioned that the Natsuyasumi games were known for painted backgrounds with cartoony-looking characters set against the beautiful realistic scenes, but here the whole world is on the cartoony side. While the characters are nicely stylized with flat colors, parts of the map have mushy-looking terrain that unfortunately doesn't cohere much better from afar.

But it's not all iffy: I appreciate lower-poly art and found some genuinely nice fields, hillsides and vistas that appropriately feel like something out of a storybook. And with Natsu-Mon's 20-year pedigree and nostalgic underpinnings, you might as well pretend it's a PlayStation 2 game—in the best way, of course.

A breezy time

As a cartoony game coming from Switch with an install size under 3GB, Natsu-Mon ought to run smoothly on anything with graphics hardware from the past several years. For reference, the Switch version struggles maintaining 30 FPS, but on PC the game effortlessly hits a stable 60. That includes the Steam Deck, which by virtue of also being Switch-like simply leaves the Nintendo version in the dust. That can get a passing grade, but diving deeper, the graphics settings are serviceable at best: FPS is limited to two toggles (30 or 60) and one generic "image quality" setting that seems to only affect the rendering resolution.

You do get a full range of screen resolution options, yet no true ultrawide support. Sort of a bummer, but all things considered, it's fine for a chill all-ages adventure that's not trying to astound you to begin with.

The main reason Natsu-Mon is on PC a year later is Broadcast Over Sunset, a new simultaneously-released DLC pack that adds the distant Sunset Island for Satoru to explore. It's a textbook DLC map: a little over a third of the main one in size, with new creatures to collect and a couple of new characters and mysteries that come with it. Again, I enjoy running around this game's world, and getting a new area wrapped in a dusting of story works for me, but Sunset Island doesn't look that much different from the rest of the game, and it feels bolted-on rather than a more unique adventure. Considering that finishing the main story gives you a New Game+ mode keeping everything you accomplished, it's best to save Broadcast Over Sunset for later.

That said, the DLC does provide more of what makes Natsu-Mon enjoyable: the little thrills of exploring somewhere new with nary a care. The open-worlding of the Natsuyasumi formula is exciting after all these years, though it has to leave some things behind: we don't get the perfectly composed idyllic scenes of its predecessors, and it doesn't feel quite as special as them when I spend most of the time dashing around the map. But Natsu-Mon's strengths are in its modest size, nice setpieces and plenty of quirky characters. Who knows, maybe this could be a harbinger of smaller open world games that are more like a vacation than a job. In the meantime, I have a lighthouse to climb. 

What this translates to is 16 cores, 32 execution-threads and a max turbo clock speed of 5.4GHz. AMD rates this little hellion to run at 45-75 W, but apparently, that isn't quite enough for Minisforum. Set to Performance Mode, the AtomMan G7 PT shovels a hefty 85 W into the 7945HX. 

Does that make sense in a mini-PC? Those sorts of figures would send any self-respecting laptop manufacturer running for the hills, wailing "kill the TDP! Kill it or WE'RE ALL DOOOOMED!" But the AtomMan G7 PT is a desktop machine, so mobility isn't a factor. It has its own 300 W external PSU, there's no battery to run down, and the chip gets Minisforum's proprietary, NASA-grade cooling to keep it in line. So why the hell not, I guess? 

Running in tandem is AMD's Radeon RX 7600M XT, a discrete RDNA3 mobile GPU most commonly found improving frame rates in notebooks and portable eGPU boxes such as the OneXGPU. It features 2048 shader units, 32 CUs, an aggregated memory bus of 128-bit, clocks up to 2600 MHz and comes with 8 GB of dedicated GDDR6 VRAM. It's a solid step-up from its predecessor, the RX 6600M, and a major leap from the Radeon 780M iGPU, which many APU-driven micro-machines lean on for gaming. However, it can't quite match the wellie of the mobile RTX 4070, which we see powering other offerings in this discrete-GPU-packing branch of the mini-PC family tree.

From the outside, the AtomMan G7 PT is roughly the length and volume of a couple of Steam Decks smooshed face-to-face. It ships with a vertical stand, which you should definitely use as the cooling fans sit beneath each of the side-panels—laying it flat will almost certainly leave it gasping for breath. The stand itself is strongly magnetised, and the machine connects to it with a snug and physically satisfying snap. In its natural tower orientation, the G7 PT's desktop footprint is very modest.

Attached to the underside of the right-hand case panel you'll find a shine-through sheet, which is positioned above a pair of large square LEDs mounted in the main body. This arrangement serves to illuminate the logo for Legend of Asaku, a popular Taiwanese entertainment IP, when the machine is powered on. Being unfamiliar with the series—and if I'm honest, becoming somewhat distracted by the constant colour-switching—I was happy to find an LED toggle in the BIOS. 

It's on or off though, there are no other LED customisation options which is a shame. The logo sheet is removable, and I imagine you could supply its dimensions, plus an image of your choice, to an online etching service and have your own panel-art made up if you're so inclined.

The rest of the spec sheet is great. It supports two M.2 drives (one PCIe 5 and one PCIe 4), is Wi-Fi7 and Bluetooth 5.3 compliant, and can take up to 96 GB of DDR5-5200 in the SODIMM format. For video output at the rear, you get HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.0, and a USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C socket, which can also be used for charging and data transfer. Below this are three USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A sockets, a 2.5G LAN port, and separate 3.5mm audio and mic jacks. Up front, you get another USB-C, another USB 3.2 Type-A, a 3.5mm combo jack for audio, and a performance mode button, which toggles the 7945HX and its attendant cooling solution between two TDP presets.

In the default Balanced mode, the machine runs the CPU at a TDP of 65 W. Tapping the button instantly bumps this to the 85 W Performance mode, no restart required. Naturally this comes with a rise in heat generation and fan activity. It basically goes from near-silent at 65 W to a bit windy—though with no coil-whine—at 85 W. Like the AtomMan X7 Ti, Minisforum's Cold Wave phase-change cooling tech once again proves its worth by keeping fan noise to a minimum, while completely taming the heat generation of a high-TDP mobile chip. During our Cinebench multicore test, 65 W saw the 16-core 7945HX chilling at 69 °C. Hiking the TDP to 85 W nudged the temperature up to just 83 °C. 

But what does that extra 20 W get you performance-wise? Actually very little in gaming terms, as our benchmarks show. More CPU-dependent titles will see a rise in frame rates—remarkably so in Homeworld 3's case—but for the vast majority of games, there's no difference at all between the two modes. With so much CPU power on tap even at 65 W, gaming frame rates are almost exclusively GPU-bound. So our advice is to leave it in Balanced mode for gaming. It's so quiet you'll forget it's even there. 

CPU-intensive productivity workloads are where you'll see benefits at 85 W. In the likes of Cinebench and Blender, the 7945HX beats all the other APU-driven mini-PCs we've tested—even those armed with the likes of the Ryzen 9 8945HS and the Intel Core ultra 9 185H—into a cocked hat. It even outperforms my desktop Ryzen 9 7900, for Pete's sake. This makes it a great machine for video rendering and other similarly intensive tasks.

Gaming, then, is largely contingent on the RX 7600M XT—a tiny GPU that excels at 1080p and can hold its own at 1440p, provided you're willing to compromise on a few detail settings. The benchmarks you see in the tables here don't really tell the full story however. To provide a solid comparison with other mini-PCs we've tested, our standard 1440p tests are all run at each game's Ultra preset, and that's not the G7 PT's strongest suit.

Let's take A Plague Tale: Requiem as a test-case. At 1440p and Ultra settings, the G7 PT manages an average of 51 fps, with 1% lows of 40 fps. Not awful of course, but if you drop the preset to high, it averages the golden 60 fps. Drop the resolution to 1080P at ultra settings, and you'll see a much healthier 76 fps average with a 1% low of 59 fps. It's a similar story in other titles, and there is definitely hay to be made from tuning individual settings around a 1440p baseline.

Where the RX 7600M XT really struggles is ray tracing. Doom Eternal, set to 1440p, with details set to Ultra Nightmare and RT on, garners 46 fps with 1% lows of 23 fps, which is not a great experience. Kill ray tracing and retain all the other settings however, and you're sitting pretty at 103 fps, with the worst dip at 66 fps. Drop the resolution to 1080, stay at Ultra Nightmare settings and keep RT off, and you're enjoying 172 fps with 1% lows of 73 fps.

It's the same deal in Forza Motorsport, but in this case, demands are compounded by Forza's thirst for VRAM. Set the game to 1440p ultra with RT on, and you get a 'VRAM out of budget' warning, which results in a 38 fpsaverage with 1% lows of 26. Oof. Even on Ultra without RT, you're still over-budget. However, stay at 1440p, drop the settings to medium and kill ray tracing, and the warning evaporates, leaping you to 80 fps with the worst-offending dip at 68 fps, which is dead smooth and still looks great.

This puts the AtomMan G7 PT in a sort of mid-level class of its own. It's massively more performant than smaller mini-PCs which rely on an iGPU for gaming, but it doesn't quite match the 1440p performance of mini-PCs which carry the RTX 4070 mobile, namely the Zotac Zbox Magnus and the ASUS ROG NUC. The RTX 4070 is a better tracer of rays, opens the door to Nvidia's Frame Gen feature, and generally delivers faster frame rates across the board. It's better-geared towards 1440p and requires you to make fewer detail-sacrifices at that resolution.

Such machines are consequently much more expensive, however, and this is where the G7 PT carves a niche for itself. Barebones, it comes in at just under a grand—nearly half the price of the ASUS ROG NUC—and that's highly attractive. Although you should also factor in an extra $150 or so for 32GB of 5200MHz DDR5, a 1TB M.2 drive, and a Windows 11 key.

So, where does this all leave us? In summary, the AtomMan G7 PT eats CPU-heavy tasks for breakfast and offers smashing 1080p gaming performance. Gaming at 1440p is not out of the question by any means, but you'll have to find the sweet spot by tweaking individual game-settings.

It earns bonus brownie points for running cool and whisper-quiet even under heavy loads, and at an appropriate price-point to boot. There are mini-PCs out there which charge a similar price for less CPU performance, and rely on an iGPU using shared system-memory rather than a discrete GPU with 8GB of dedicated VRAM. Placed in that context, it's easy to recommend the AtomMan G7 PT.

The lineup features a few gaming-focused units with somewhat spicier designs, but the Venus UM790 Pro isn't necessarily one of these. Housed in a clean, purple-tinged aluminium chassis, it's attractive in a minimalist way, but we're interested in its gaming potential as it represents an affordable way to access the Ryzen 9 7940HS and Radeon 780M CPU/iGPU double-act. Like the Ryzen 7 7840HS, which is a much more common sight in mini-PCs and gaming laptops, this SoC APU is built on the same 4nm Zen 4 architecture as AMD's desktop 7000-series CPUs. It's also the chip of choice for recent Razer Blade 14s laptops, among other premium-price crotch-cookers, and its inclusion in such machines tells us something of its capabilities.

It's worth pausing a moment to note the difference between the Ryzen 7 7840HS and the Ryzen 9 7940HS. In desktop terms, jumping from a Ryzen 7 to a Ryzen 9 bags you more CPU cores and higher clock speeds. The Ryzen 7 7700X has eight cores running at 4.5 GHz - 5.4 GHz for instance, while the Ryzen 9 7900X has 12 cores at 4.7 GHz - 5.6 GHz. 

The Ryzen 7 7840HS and Ryzen 9 7940HS APUs, however, have the same eight multithreading cores, but the 7940HS gets a 200 MHz bump in base speed, a 100 MHz bump in turbo, and a 100 MHz bump to its Radeon 780M turbo speed. That's it! No bonus cores. On the spec-sheets and in practice then, they're virtually identical. Which begs the question, why are they named as they are?

Regardless of such noodling, and before I reach for the tinfoil hat, the fact remains that the 7940HS is a great little chip. It sups a frugal 35-54 W, and still merrily drives eight cores/16 threads at a 4 GHz base clock speed, boosting to 5.2 GHz when the chips are down. AMD states a TJMax of 100 °C before it throttles which, at this kind of power draw, actually leaves plenty of headroom for cooling solutions to work with. Cooling is often proprietary in mini PCs such as this, and another important point of pre-purchase consideration, which we'll come to.

The Radeon 780M iGPU is a 12CU, pint-sized powerhouse running at 2.8 GHz, which can ringfence up to 4 GB of system memory as VRAM. Powerhouse is a relative term here of course—you won't be tracing any rays at 4K on this dinky chip at anything near playable frame rates. But in the gamut of iGPUs it's a top-shelfer, thoroughly schooling Intel's Iris and newer Arc-branded iGPUs, and snapping at the heels of older budget graphics cards such as the GTX 1650. It'll be superseded by the Radeon 890M, but until then, it's still pretty spicy for something that isn't a discrete GPU. 

The supporting cast of components is similarly solid: 4x USB 3.2 ports, a 3.5 mm audio jack, Intel Killer wireless 6E with Bluetooth 5.3, a pair of SODIMM RAM slots which take up to 64GB of DDR5 5600MHz, and PCIe 4.0 support for the dual M.2 NVMe slots. We're using the barebones version here, so we've slapped in our own M.2 PCIe 4.0 drive and 32 GB of DDR5 5600 RAM.

Opening the UM790 Pro to install your RAM and storage could be a little more elegant. You need to pull off the four glued-on rubber feet to access the screws which enable you open the case. It's fairly plain sailing after that, and the M.2 and SODIMM slots are very easy to access, but that weakened bond leaves me thinking the feet will probably drop off at some point.

For a higher upfront cost, you can opt to preload the UM790 Pro with different configurations of RAM and storage at the point of purchase. If you want to do it on a budget though, we recommend going barebones and sourcing your own low-priced DDR5 and M.2 storage. Shop around and you can find a 1 TB M.2 drive plus 16 GB of laptop DDR5 for little more than 100 notes. 

About the only I/O consideration it's missing is DisplayPort. That may be a dealbreaker for some, but between twin HDMI 2.1 ports and a pair of full-fat 40 Gbps Thunderbolt-capable USB4 slots up front, you're pretty much covered for high refresh-rate monitors, and even a Thunderbolt-powered eGPU if that's the way you swing.

So how does the whole package fair under gaming loads? Based on our benchmarks, it's quite capable at 1080p, providing you're not too ambitious with settings. For simplicity's sake, we ran each game at it's out-of-the-box medium settings, using FSR where available, and achieved 30-48 fps depending on the title. The only title in our suite that we can't recommend on this hardware is Homeworld 3 which, despite its 40 fps average, suffers staccato 1% lows. 

Some per-game experimentation with advanced graphics settings can of course pay dividends in terms of higher frame rates—or higher fidelity with bang-for-buck settings at the cost of more expensive ones. But in short, mission accomplished: if you can face living life below a constant 60 fps, nearly all the games we tested here were eminently playable on the Radeon 780M.

It's all good news for indie and older titles as well. Subnautica runs dead smooth at 50-60 fps at medium settings, and the same goes for Stray, which netted 45-60 fps, while Soulstone Survivors ranged from 45-90 fps, Doom Eternal saw 75-95 fps, and Bioshock Remastered ranged from around 140 right up to 200+ fps. It's safe to say there are thousands of great games out there that the UM790 Pro will run like a champ.

Being inquisitive types, I plugged a Razer Chroma X packing an RTX 4070 Ti into one of the UM790 Pro's Thunderbolt port for a look-see, and inevitably saw frame rates skyrocket. Cyberpunk at the same settings jumped from 48 to 98 fps, Warhammer 3 went from 42 to 190 fps, and the 3DMark Time Spy 1440p score enjoyed a near six-fold boost, from 3376 to 18226. Clearly the 7940HS plays very well indeed with a discrete GPU, if it can get its little robot hands on one.

The UM790 Pro has two performance modes which are toggled via the BIOS. Balanced mode runs the CPU up to its full rated power draw of 54 W, and I have to say, the cooling solution in this tiny unit is seriously impressive. It's Minisforum's own 'Cold Wave 2.0' design, comprising a liquid-metal heat exchange with extra active cooling dedicated to the RAM and M.2 drives, and it really does work. 

Maxing out all cores in Cinebench 2024's multicore rendering test, the CPU never pushes past 80 °C, and you can barely hear the CPU fan. Switching to Performance mode, we measured a modest consumption-bump to 56 W, a max core-temperature of 82 °C, a minor but distinct increase in fan volume, though still blissfully free of coil-whine, and a slight improvement in synthetic benchmark results. 82 °C is still a comfortable 18 °C below the point where the chip hits its TJMax and starts throttling. There was no detectable increase in game performance however—well okay, Forza, got an intangible 2 fps increase—so our recommendation would be to leave it in balanced mode, bask in the silence and enjoy your games.