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Subscribe to the world's #1 PC gaming mag Try a single issue or save on a subscription Issues delivered straight to your door or device From£35.99Subscribe now PC Gaming Show Tokyo Essential Hardware Battlefield 6 Don't miss these Borderlands 4 review: A slice of looter-shooter heaven trapped in UI hell Ananta says hey, we can do a Spider-Man/Yakuza/Sifu/Batman: Arkham/GTA—but we'll put an anime bunny girl in our one After flying around the world to play my most anticipated action RPG, I'm convinced Black Myth Wukong was just an opening salvo for big budget Chinese games Despite all appearances, upcoming F2P open-world RPG Ananta isn't a gacha game—only charging for cosmetics and furniture One of Roblox's biggest experiences right now is a bizarre Italian Brainrot character-stealing simulator and, lord help me, I now understand why it's so popular After nailing a quirky PS2 throwback with Kunitsu-gami, Capcom's Pragmata has the charming energy of an Xbox 360-era shooter like The Darkness or Syndicate Wuchang: Fallen Feathers review - A soulslike without a soul Ninja Gaiden 4 plays more like a Platinum action game than classic Ninja Gaiden, and I'm really not sure how to feel about it This tactics RPG set on a floating New York City could be the next great noir videogame Upcoming shooter Reaper Actual throws up some big red flags, but its creators are MMO and FPS heavyweights who can't easily be dismissed Kung fu action game Phantom Blade Zero has my new favorite take on hard mode balance: Beating it 'in a very beautiful manner' is the true challenge As the Chinese game industry flocks from mobile to AAA blockbusters, Phantom Blade Zero's director says the quiet part out loud: 'Good games are good. It's not 'big games are good.'' Apparently someone decided it was a good idea to make a Let It Die sequel in the year 2025, and God bless them Disco Elysium successor XXX Nightshift is sick of your jokes about its name, announces it's called Tangerine Antarctic and it's a 3rd-person RPG now Not quite girl, not quite horse: The latest gacha craze sweeping Steam is a bizarre idol management game for anime highschool horse girls I played China's 'anime GTA' Ananta and I wasn't surprised to find Spider-Man swinging and Batman punching, but I wasn't quite ready for the vampire who vomits rainbows Wes Fenlon 27 September 2025 This may be the most maximalist videogame of all time. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: NetEase) I may be outing myself as a dullard, but I don't think I have a mind that could combine a bunny girl doing odd delivery jobs for cash, a cute Japanese kei truck, and a sick vampire who barfs streams of rainbows into a single scene. Perhaps no single mind could, but that was the moment in Ananta, which has made headlines as "anime GTA" since its re-reveal this week, that really won me over. Ananta is borrowing—or brazenly copying—a lot, but it might have some wild-ass ideas of its own, too. The main impression I got from playing about half-an-hour of Ananta at this year's Tokyo Game Show was: Wow it must have taken a lot of people to make this game! China is on the path to dominate the next decade of triple-A games, and there's no flashier way to do it than to make (or at least appear to be making) the ur-game. Every mechanic from the top 10 or 20 or 50 most popular games in the world, combined, is surely better than any of those games individually, right? Related Articles Ananta says hey, we can do a Spider-Man/Yakuza/Sifu/Batman: Arkham/GTA—but we'll put an anime bunny girl in our one After flying around the world to play my most anticipated action RPG, I'm convinced Black Myth Wukong was just an opening salvo for big budget Chinese games Despite all appearances, upcoming F2P open-world RPG Ananta isn't a gacha game—only charging for cosmetics and furniture This maximalist approach to big budget game design has never really been great in practice, and a few minutes into Ananta reveal it is indeed doing things that you have done many times in a game before and probably are not foaming at the mouth to do again: Punching guys with timing-based combos and counters reminiscent of the Batman Arkham games or Sleeping Dogs Scripted quick-time events that feel right out of an Uncharted or other 2010s action game On-rails car chases that give you unlimited ammo to shoot out the tires of your pursuers Web-swinging around a giant city as Spide—er, the anime version of that guy from Prototype Ananta | Gameplay Video - YouTube But then there's the weird stuff—like hopping into the boots of Lykaia, a purple-haired getaway driver slash cop who has a totally different set of play mechanics to the intro protagonist, whose arms get all weird and stretchy to let him swing around. In its free roam mode, Ananta let me pull up a phone interface to swap between characters, triggering a straight-outta-GTA-5 camera swoop up into the sky and back down into the part of the city where they're currently hanging out. I only played as Lykaia for a couple minutes before my demo was up, but as a police officer she can scan NPCs against a database, frisk them for weapons, issue citations, and handcuff them, triggering reactions and dialogue you wouldn't otherwise see. Will this be fun? Will it produce any actually interesting systemic interactions or are these all paper thin mechanics that you'll use three times and never see fit to use again? I have no idea, but it sure does seem like a hell of a lot of work if it's the latter. The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsBy submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. You know the saying about Chekhov's coffin: it better have a vampire in it who's violently ill and leans over the side of the truck bed to puke a stream of rainbow sick into the night air. I spent most of the game as Taffy, a bunny girl whose eagerness to make money sees her blindly accepting an odd job from a rando who texts her to meet at a sketchy warehouse. Turns out the warehouse is full of gang members who try to bludgeon her to death with baseball bats. Good thing she has telekinetic powers! I punched out most of the guys before I realized I could psychically rip a bat out of someone's hands and thonk it into his skull. Then a delivery driver crashed his truck into the warehouse and told me I needed to get the cargo across town ASAP. Soon-to-be Gen Z icon Taffy cheerily says "Gotta get that bag" as she takes on the job. It took me a few seconds into the drive to notice that the cargo in the back of the truck was, in fact, a coffin, and you know the saying about Chekhov's coffin: it better have a vampire in it who's violently ill and leans over the side of the truck bed to puke a stream of rainbow sick into the night air. Related Articles Ananta says hey, we can do a Spider-Man/Yakuza/Sifu/Batman: Arkham/GTA—but we'll put an anime bunny girl in our one After flying around the world to play my most anticipated action RPG, I'm convinced Black Myth Wukong was just an opening salvo for big budget Chinese games Despite all appearances, upcoming F2P open-world RPG Ananta isn't a gacha game—only charging for cosmetics and furniture (Image credit: NetEase) Taffy is less surprised by this than I am. Not in a "she's used to vampires who throw up rainbows" kind of way, as Ananta does not use this mission to reveal some sort of in-universe lore about a race of vampires suffering some sort of sci-fi gut-melting virus. The vibe I get from Ananta is that none of these characters are going to be very surprised or upset or unduly threatened by anything: they're all seemingly different strains of jovial bouncy superhero. Anyway, I'm pretty sure my driving wasn't the problem: I delivered the vampire to some sort of cult who played him up as a fearsome warrior as a gag before he continued puking into a rusty barrel. It was just one baffling sidequest out of a game that promises unfathomable scope. I can't say Ananta's driving or punching or swinging felt exemplary—but none of them really felt that bad, either! This may be a game that does dozens of things acceptably well. And it made me laugh. Maybe Ananta's developers didn't start from the cynical position of copying the most high-profile games in the world. Maybe they were just brainstorming and someone said yes to every single idea they came up with, even vampires barfing ROYGBIV? It's done, love it, it's in the game. Next? Steam sale dates: When's the next event? Epic Store free games: What's free right now? Free PC games: The best freebies you can grab 2025 games: This year's upcoming releases Free Steam games: No purchase necessary Social Links Navigation Senior Editor Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games. When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific). You must confirm your public display name before commenting Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name. Ananta says hey, we can do a Spider-Man/Yakuza/Sifu/Batman: Arkham/GTA—but we'll put an anime bunny girl in our one After flying around the world to play my most anticipated action RPG, I'm convinced Black Myth Wukong was just an opening salvo for big budget Chinese games Despite all appearances, upcoming F2P open-world RPG Ananta isn't a gacha game—only charging for cosmetics and furniture One of Roblox's biggest experiences right now is a bizarre Italian Brainrot character-stealing simulator and, lord help me, I now understand why it's so popular After nailing a quirky PS2 throwback with Kunitsu-gami, Capcom's Pragmata has the charming energy of an Xbox 360-era shooter like The Darkness or Syndicate Wuchang: Fallen Feathers review - A soulslike without a soul Latest in Action Silksong player uses every speedrunning trick in the book to lock poor Hornet in bug jail forever: 'I don't know why anyone would want to do this, but I have done it anyway' Silksong's Any% speedrun is already below 1 hour, in case you were worried this game would be too hard to clown on Silksong's criminal lack of 'Shaw!' fixed by heroic modder Baby Steps is funny, but it's also a depressing, confrontational horror game about thwarted modern masculinity Crimson Desert's release date trailer bravely makes it through 1 minute of serious fantasy exposition before showing you its cool clockwork dragon and mech, and I love it for that Wolverine claws more people in the head in the new Marvel's Wolverine trailer than I think he did in all the comics I read as a kid Latest in Features I played China's 'anime GTA' Ananta and I wasn't surprised to find Spider-Man swinging and Batman punching, but I wasn't quite ready for the vampire who vomits rainbows The more book tracking apps I try, the more I think we as gamers don't realize just how good we've got it with Steam Silent Hill f's finicky combat doesn't actually have to be an issue if you follow these cardinal rules Tiny Metal 2 is the third game in the turn-based strategy series, and it just so happens to be taking after my favorite Advance Wars An obscure RPG's moral dilemma about the 'ethical' human meat alternative propping up a zombie society is one of the best side quests I've ever played, and Steam achievements show only 13% of its players have even seen it So far, the Battlefield 6 campaign is satisfied being a Call of Duty cover band HARDWARE BUYING GUIDES LATEST GAME REVIEWS Best gaming laptop in 2025: I've had my hands on the best laptops for gaming of this generation and these are the ones I recommend Best SSD for gaming in 2025: the fastest and the best value solid state drives to perk up your PC Best Hall effect keyboards in 2025: the fastest, most customizable keyboards for competitive gaming Best PCIe 5.0 SSD for gaming in 2025: the only Gen 5 drives I will allow in my PC Best graphics cards in 2025: I've tested pretty much every AMD and Nvidia GPU of the past 20 years and these are today's top cards Corsair Sabre V2 Pro Ultralight Wireless gaming mouse review Glorious Model O3 Wireless review Hades 2 review Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles review Baby Steps review PC Gamer is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. 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