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Dune: Awakening review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin June 17, 2025

Dune: Awakening review

The world of Dune is well-realised in multiplayer survival game format, offering a harsh planet of unintentional comedy, braindead NPCs, and plenty of grindy crafting.

Developer: Funcom
Publisher: Funcom
Release: June 10th, 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam
Price: £42/$50/€50
Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7-11700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10

A survival game lives or dies on the personality of its world. Subnautica is a wonder because its world is a wonder. Abiotic Factor is a cracking farce because its world is a lab staffed by idiots. Dune: Awakening, meanwhile, has the fortune of coming with a pre-packaged world, already built by scores of sci-fi novels and movies full of beautiful scowlers. Developers Funcom therefore have existing rules to play with, a culture and geography which is basically ready-made for a video game. It’s almost cheating. Sandstorms rage, forcing you indoors. Sandworms give chase, prompting you to run or bike faster across the desert. Military ships scan the dunes at night with spotlights, and launch tough enemy patrols if you get caught. Everything here already lends itself to the kind of adventurous fantasy any hardy video gameser would like.

Yet introduce to this the long-established survival tropes of online multiplayer crafting games, and you walk away with something that is somehow both fitting to Frank Herbert’s world and comically incongruous. A very hot Valheim. You scrounge endlessly not for spice but for rocks and twigs. You slap little devices down not to attract worms, but as spawn points. You drive your sandbike across the desert, then take out a magical Ghostbusters device that slurps the vehicle inside so you can carry it around safely in your pocket. For every line of dialogue delivered with the seriousness of a 19th century naval captain, there is a moment when you catapult yourself 50 feet into the sky with a grappling hook and tumble to earth in front of a robotic NPC who doesn’t see you. There are comedy radio stations and they are playing chiptune. This is Dune, yes, but it is also Dunc.

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Awakening is set in an alternate universe of Dune in which Timothee Chalamet forgot to be born. The conflict over the desert planet remains a slow-burning stand-off between two factions: the honour-obsessed Atreides and the aggressively pale-faced Harkonnen. You’ll get to pick a side in this kerfuffle in later missions. But first, you land as a love survivor, told to seek out the native people of the planet, the Fremen, who have supposedly been wiped out. Thus the grand space opera is magnified down a powerful microscope to become a survival and crafting game with shooty dart guns and griddy base-building. We can perhaps call it a very sandy Animal Crossing. Perhaps.

The various survival systems reinforce all the childlike fantasies of living on Arrakis. A heat meter rises whenever you stay in direct sunlight. “Better stick to the shade,” you chuckle. Another little waveform meter appears when you cross open tracts of desert sand, a measurement of how likely you are to attract a huge sandworm. “Better get across this gap fast,” you snicker. Your thirst meter goes into its last quadrant, threatening health loss. “Better drink 300 millilitres of my own recycled piss,” you think to yourself with a chortle. Press the F key to slurp on the straw of your urinal tuxedo.

Press F to drink your own piss. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

I played as a Trooper, a character class that is all about mobility and ranged firepower. They get a handy skill that throws out a bubble which slows time and prevents fall damage. Even handier, they get a grappling hook, as well as a bunch of grenades and buffs to gun damage. Other types of sand tourist are available. You can be a Bene Gesserit (a space nun), and learn to convince enemies that you’re invisible, or become immune to poison. As a Swordmaster you can deflect enemy projectiles and learn to recuperate stamina faster.

You’re forced to pick only one class as a starting option, but you soon find special characters who open up the other skill trees. For example, you can discover a Planetologist hiding in the earliest zone who will unlock the skills of that class, provided you complete a short fetch quest. It was worth this detour for the passive benefits of the Planetologist: a longer battery life for techy tools and a buff to stamina while climbing. Ah, very important in an open world that has embraced the “climb any surface” philosophy of Breath Of The Wild. I basically did everything possible to turn my character into a kind of bloodthirsty Link. He has a shotgun and he ascends rocks very well.

Combat is serviceable, but the enemies aren’t particularly clever. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

Putting that firearm to use is mostly an expressionless and dead-brained exercise in finding a baddie and shooting them like a harmless lamb. Combat can be as simple as spitting your machine gun or pistol at these barrelfish, along with a rare moment when you have to switch to a dagger to puncture the shield of some close-combat warjerk charging toward you. True to the source material, the best way to break enemy shields is with a strongly held stabbing attack, though unweildy parrying and cumbersome target tracking led me to avoiding melee combat wherever possible.

Dune: Awakening is also labelled an MMO, but there are rarely more than a handful of people exploring or operating in the same canyons. You see evidence of others mostly in the form of player hideouts, or the sound of distant gunshots. There are PvP zones which are, in theory, more populated, and hubzones let you sell items to other players. But overall it still feels closer to Rust than World Of Warcraft. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

Usually you only face a handful of scumbags at once, and you can use your abilities to supplement these brawls. As a Trooper I could lob little seeker missiles, or stun enemies with my grappling wire. But for the most part, you can put a few bullets into any belly and your foes will eventually fall flat. They are barely sentient rodents, seemingly easy to kill by design. After all, to earn the water needed to survive you must farm the blood of your felled enemies and pass it through an extraction machine in your home base. Making baddies easy to kill perhaps lightens the load for players who just want water fast.

This, along with some very plain level design, makes the combat feel functional yet never truly slick or smooth. If you compare Duwakening’s action to, say, other MMO-ish shooters, you’ll feel a big difference. There’s no additional layer of combat nuance like the sticky cover of the Division games, no dancelike fluidity as in Warframe. And the dungeons are formulaic corridor-room-corridor affairs without much flair.

As is often a complaint in MMOs, these roomy holes feel like mere wells for ratty enemies, rather than having any of their own meaning or identity. They have audio logs and holograms littered about in an attempt to give each dungeon some sense of place, but this too is subject to formula – the same scientist type gives the same kind of speech as the last scientist type about the same environment with the same voice. Injecting variety to MMO environments which exist only to be looted on repeat is a task of narrative triage I do not envy. The dialogue elsewhere does manage to bring some colour to the dodgy water merchants and haughty space nobles of the game, even if the overwhelming amount of lore terminology makes some lines unreadable to a Dune agnostic.

All video games too, mate. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

You can – if you prefer an opponent who might actually hurt you – get into PvP scrapes by visiting ship crash sites, or by flying off the edge of the map and entering a much bigger PvP zone called the Deep Desert, which can house hundreds of players at once. This is a high-risk, high-reward expedition that’ll entice a certain kind of adrenaline fiend while repelling anyone who prefers their survival stories to play out as solitary conquests against nature. Years ago, in my Dark Zone liking days, I would have belonged to the former camp. But I find myself enjoying the survivalist trials of Arrakis most when done in isolation.

You might have friends for co-op though, folks who can help gather granite for the walls of your home base. This base building is another classic survival game affair of modular blocky wall placement. You place down foundations and ceilings and windowed walls on a strict grid. The resultant player homes are not very “Dune” when compared to the striking architecture of the movies. Where Denis Villeneuve can hire artists to design awe-inspiring brutalist ziggurats, you will create a boxy abode that is the sci-fi equivalent of a Croydon apartment block. You might unlock new structural blueprints as you go, and the natural creativity of players can still sometimes produce an interesting looking home. Largely, though, I found the building process dry and basic.

Build a decent abode and you’ll be “watersealed”, which means your thirst meter won’t deplete while inside. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

The visual language of Dune is grand. It is of a scale that dwarfs a lonely sand tourist. Some of that translates to Awakening, as with the hovering Sardaukar ships that scan the environment, or the palacial corridors in ruined substructures. But in other places, that visual design falters into a lacklustre genericism. Much of the beveled machinery you create in your base looks vaguely the same. The power generators, chemical refineries, fabricators, ore refineries, blood enwaternators – they all appear as homogenous tubegizmos. And mechanistically, they all adhere to well-worn survival game principles: you need stuff to make more stuff to make more stuff to make more stuff.

In hubzones, the geometric griddiness of that same visual design sometimes suits the otherworldly feeling of MMO levels – disjointed right angled corridors and military symmetry – but in other places, the grand scale actually works against the standard principles of MMO task-completing. Vast concrete lobbies and spaces can take a relatively long time to cross, just to speak to a random character about the 100 do-hickeys they wanted. The city of Arrakeen is a stony warren of rooms that all feel much bigger than they really need to be, which is both fitting for the overbearing nature of Dune’s palaces and vexing to the average player concerned with resource gathering, XP-scrounging, and other ideals of efficiency.

Some environments replicate a sense of grandeur, while others replicate a sense of “modular MMO dungeon”. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

My point, again, is that Duwakening is a game where a desire for strong atmosphere becomes messily entwined with a traditional type of MMO design centred on gettin’ more stuff. Not in a bad way, per se, but in a noticeably gamey way. Gargantuan worms threaten you during long treks across dunes; let’s stop to harvest 20 floursand! Heatstroke and duststorms will force you to take shelter in the shade of a downed ship; let’s cut it up for salvaged metal! A camp of scavengers stands between you and the safety of home; mmmm, BLOOD!

As a game it is funny, enjoyable, jarring, and safe. There is a large amount of stabbing corpses unintentionally in their groin for blood. As with many a craft ’em up, the opening is enough of a stroll to ease you into the world, its rules and quirks. This intro demurely suggests the game will be more merciful with your time than others of its ilk. Sand dweller, this is not true. There are still crafting bottlenecks – gizmos and trinkets you need to farm from particular sites. And you will eventually hit a plateau, when the research menu opens up into a larger array of improved items (power packs, shields, dew scythes) and you are suddenly overcome with a great greed for different coloured rocks.

Get killed by a sandworm and lose all the gear you are carrying. | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Funcom

At this point gathering material becomes the second job most MMOs are wont to be (at least, this is how it felt as a solo player). I would have sobbed at the hefty crafting costs of an ornithopter were I not concerned about wasting the water from my eyes. That’s not to mention the ongoing needs of maintaining your base, your mining equipment, and your other vehicles. As both an MMO and a survival game, much of this is to be expected. The genre is a playful reproduction of that most gagsome economic reality: the cost of living. We play these games, sometimes, despite ourselves.

As survival games go, however, I cannot call it “bad”. Fair warning: there are weird glitches and choppiness (one bug saw me backdashing every time I exited the inventory screen). And I had to abandon playing on a controller because of the obnoxious virtual cursor in menus. But this wasn’t enough to interrupt my bloodsucking. Awakening is dense with lore, and loyal to the childlike “sand is lava” flavours of Dune. I’ve enjoyed it for the strength of its world, and I admire how straightforwardly Funcom have adapted the memorable features of Herbert’s fiction in exactly the most sensible way. If you walked out of the cinema after the Dune movies of recent years only to have your thoughts and dreams peppered with imagery from those films, then this is probably one of the best ways to visit and inhabit that distant desert. Just so long as you acknowledge, going in, that you’ll be doing a lot more rock mining, water farming, and unexpected laughing than Timothee ever did.

This review is based on retail code provided by the publisher.

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June 17, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Promise Mascot Agency review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin June 17, 2025

Promise Mascot Agency review

Funny, charming, and mired in churn and checklists, Promise Mascot Agency is a beautiful slog.

Developer: Kaizen Game Works
Publisher: Kaizen Game Works
Release: Out now
On: Windows
From: Steam/Epic Games Store
Price: £21/€25/$25
Reviewed on: Intel Core i5-12600K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti, Windows 11

I really like the world of Promise Mascot Agency as a place, not so much the things this open world collect ’em up management sim makes me do to see more of it. I feel like I went through much trouble stealing the sticker-coated notebook of the uber-talented eccentric artist kid in class, only to find it filled with page after page of shopping lists for monstrous quantities of canned goods, each item heavier and blander than the last.

Funny. Charming. And, hot dancing dog blossoms, that soundtrack. But it ultimately feels so graspy and nagging and pointlessly numerical to actually engage with. Like being hounded by push notifications, insistent as unscratched scabs.

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Which is all to say that Promise Mascot Agency either makes it very hard to like something I feel I should, or very easy to dislike something I feel I shouldn’t. Each time I find myself stewing on this, something like a distraught bat with a mining headlamp turns up and cries about how his torch is annoying all the other bats, and I start grinning again. Delight-to-irritation whiplash. A bucket of stealth Legos sprinkled on an absurdly comfy carpet.

Never has a man repeated the specifics of tutorial concept with as much quizzical charisma as Takaya Kuroda (Yakuza’s Kiryu Kazuma), although this hasn’t stopped his character, Michi, getting caught up in some darn underworld mishaps. He ends up exiled to Kaso-Machi, a one-Poppo town with a Yakuza-killing curse, and soon finds himself the boss of the titular agency, recruiting and hiring out the local Yokai-like Mascots for things like store openings and restaurant promotions.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Kaizen Game Works

Kaso-Machi feels like a water-logged VHS recording of a once-real place; a phantom’s collection of aspirations and hopes summoned to inhabit neglected brickwork and tin slat rooftops. Its supernatural urban legends cloak real decay and corruption. Haunted mines. Closed train stations. Spooky stories for working class children about the ghosts of their own futures. Neither its residents or Michi’s severed-digit sidekick Pinky let their fierce and clumsy spirits be doused by this, making them easy to champion.

The mayor spunks the waste collection budget on endless aggrandising billboards. You’ll gain fans for each billboard you smash and garbage pile you drive through with the truck that acts as your avatar throughout. Later you’ll get a circus cannon that blasts Pinky at them. Traversal is then on defined by thoughtlessly shooting at automatic target boxes, watching your fan and cash counters creep up, minor rewards for baseline attentiveness.

You’ll meet the residents and they’ll give you jobs to assign your mascots to. Assign the right mascot and give them a vending machine item, and they’ll hopefully avoid a minigame where you’ll use the hero cards you collect to knock the health off amusingly minor hazards like badly-stacked boxes or malfunctioning vending machine. It’s the game’s most involved and wide-reaching minigame and it’s framed as a punishment for not preparing correctly or getting unlucky. After about five times I was forced to agree that, yes, punishment is correct.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Kaizen Game Works

You hire out mascots for money to spend on town renovations and agency upgrades for more passive income and buffs measured in the region of 2.5% chances to do things like refresh your mascot’s stamina after jobs. You send some home to your Yakuza family’s matriarch and buy more expensive renovations to make more money. The money arrives at the end of each day, and your mascots eventually get fatigued or go on holiday, so you’re compelled to throw yourself back in the collectathon while you wait to progress.

You find gifts for the residents, clean up shrines, shoot more billboards with your cannon. Pinky makes a bid for mayor at one point, prompting multiple choice rallies you’ll need to have collected the right answers for previously. There’s also a claw machine minigame. You have to collect the prizes elsewhere first. The reward is more money and more stickers in another checklist.

My favourite thing to do in Promise Mascot Agency’s open world is to drive up the highest hill I can find then boost my truck off, flying comical distances even without the wings you’ll eventually find as an upgrade. You come crashing down into a fence to excellently chaotic crashing sound effects, and a dazed Pinky gets cartoon stars swimming around their horrible head.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Kaizen Game Works

It’s this sort of care put into the small things that made me love the demo, but that demo’s hour time limit ended up disguising a lot of promising ideas that just don’t end up going anywhere interesting. Even my favourite thing from that demo, the ‘Ask Pinky’ button that felt like such a clever solution to drowning the player in map markers, ends up reliant on tiered reputation progression tied to…I can’t even call it bloat, because it’s the skeleton of the game here.

And I feel like a graceless butcher flensing such enjoyable writing and art down to that skeleton, but truthfully it’s not all that laborious of a hatchet job; it pokes through so noticeably, takes so little paring to get there. It’s probably best described as an exoskeleton, honesty. It’s the first thing you notice, encasing the heart of the game in a shell at once so tiresomely heavy and so brittle in substance.

So, yeah. Not for me. Which is a shame, because I’m certain that if I kept playing, I’d keep finding more things that made me laugh or smile or spark more curiosity about the town’s mysteries, but I’m not willing to push through any more of this cold and oddly soulless churn to see them right now. As a functional open map, it’s a treat-sprinkled diorama. Static and mundane. As a management sim, the busywork is simultaneously so insistent and so lacking in complexity or choice that I ended up on a sort of trudging, mildly annoyed autopilot, like an underpaid shopping centre security guard on a deflated Segway. Deflating to say the least.

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June 17, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

The Alters review: getting to know yourself has never been this fun

by admin June 17, 2025

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I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from The Alters, the latest game from developer and publisher 11 Bit Studios. From the trailers I’d watched, it seemed almost like parts of several different games were grabbed and hastily cobbled together into something that shouldn’t work – and yet, much like my hastily-cobbled-together base in-game, it does.

Review information

Platform reviewed: PC
Available on: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Release date: June 13, 2025

Following Jan Dolski, a construction specialist on a space mission to find the ultra-rare element Unobtaini- sorry, ‘Rapidium’, The Alters meshes together survival, management sim, third-person action adventure, and decision-based narrative elements with apparent grace and ease. There’s a well-struck balance here, never tipping too far in any one direction, keeping you constantly engaged and on your toes. Less than two hours in, I was already having a blast.

Predictably, things go wrong almost immediately for poor Jan, and despite finding an abundance of Rapidium, he’s left stranded on a hostile planet with an approaching sunrise that will scorch him and his base to an irradiated crisp. Alone, desperate, and running out of options, he follows the highly questionable directions of a crackly voice on the base comms to utilize Rapidium’s mysterious qualities and create a duplicate of himself: an ‘alter’. After all, many hands make light work – and the rest of the original crew are too dead to help out.

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Seeing double

Needless to say, this planet is not exactly hospitable. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

The thing is, Jan’s duplicates aren’t exactly that. The core premise of The Alters is right there in the name, with each alternate Jan Dolski having a distinct – though familiar – personality and memories of a life that went a different direction at one pivotal moment or another. It’s an excellent central conceit for both a story and a game. Need a miner to help gather the resources required to survive on this desolate planet? Good news: in another life, Jan chose to pursue his father’s mining career. Bad news: Miner Jan has a substance abuse problem and crippling self-esteem issues, and you’re going to have to deal with that now.

This is where the narrative segment of the game comes in, with a wide variety of both one-on-one chats and group interactions to be had with Jan’s parallel selves. It’s reminiscent of chatting to your crew aboard the Normandy between missions in the Mass Effect series; although instead of a sleek spaceship, your base of operations in The Alters is a thin, blocky structure housed on a gyro inside a gigantic tire. It gives the story a sort of twisted road trip vibe, which I loved – check out Overland and Get In The Car, Loser! If you’re interested in some other very weird virtual road trips.

Best bit

(Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Jan’s rolling base is certainly unique – just don’t question the physical logistics of how such a vehicle would remain upright.

The ‘mobile base’ is just one part of the fantastic and occasionally goofy world-building on display here. True to 11 Bit Studios’ Polish heritage, the life Jan left behind to join this mission is a corporate sci-fi dystopia with a distinctly Eastern European flavor. Janky Europop plays from a jukebox in the social room you can build for the Alters to relax in; Jan’s childhood home is a nondescript mining town with brutalist concrete architecture; two Jan Dolskis bond over their shared love of pierogi. While the planetary backdrop of Jan’s current predicament might be a bit more par for the course, the injection of a little cultural identity helps massively in creating a more unique, interesting setting. The soundtrack is pretty good too, an appropriate blend of synthy overtures and foreboding background music.

I won’t delve too much into the plot to avoid spoilers (this is a story best experienced as blind as possible), but I will say as a lifelong sci-fi lover that the story is solid. The writing and voice acting are both excellent, with some interesting supporting characters and plenty of dialogue that serves to flesh out the characters and move the story along. Particular props go to Alex Jordan, who voices not just Jan but also all of his titular alters – and make no mistake, despite sharing the same origins, this is a greatly varied group of characters who don’t always get along. Listen up, Geoff Keighley, because I fully expect to see him nominated for Best Performance at the next Game Awards.

Too many cooks

See that weird glowing stuff? That’s Rapidium – and Jan’s going to need a lot of it to make more alters. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Speaking of not getting along, though: we’re all going to need to get along, or we’re all going to die.

Befriending Jan’s alters isn’t enough to survive with the radioactive sunrise mere days away. You need to put them to work, whether that’s producing food or equipment aboard the mobile base or gathering resources in the dangerous environment outside.

This is mostly done through a series of menu screens, which have clean, well-designed UIs, and managing your alters takes up a decent portion of your time in-game. They’re quite proactive; for example, if an alter in the workshop finishes building all the tools you’ve queued up for manufacturing, they’ll suggest moving to a different assignment, prioritizing stations aboard the base with unfinished workflows and no assigned staff.

It’s not the deepest management sim system I’ve ever seen – 11 Bit Studios previously developed Frostpunk and Frostpunk 2, which offers great complexity for hardcore fans of the genre – but it works well as one component of a broader story-driven survival game and keeps the focus on the micro rather than the macro. You can only have a maximum of six alters out of a possible nine (although two of them, Technician Jan and Scientist Jan, are mandatory for the plot – so it’s more like picking four out of seven).

Laying out your base smartly (as I have very much not done in this screenshot) is key to making the most of your limited resources. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

You’re also responsible for the base itself, meaning that you’ll need an alter – or yourself – on hand to carry out repair work when needed, and you’ll need to modify and expand the base to match the evolving demands of your journey across the planet’s surface to a promised rescue rendezvous. Thanks to the two-dimensional nature of your base-in-a-giant-tire, rooms are laid out in a grid and can be moved and slotted together Tetris-style to make the most of your available space.

This is another balancing act; everything needs to be correctly connected to function, and every new room added increases the total weight of your base and thus the amount of resources you’ll need to travel to the next area. There’s always a tradeoff; should you build the alters private cabins to help improve their mood, or make them bunk together in a far more space-efficient dorm room? Do you really need that greenhouse for manually producing proper food, when you could all survive perfectly well on processed organic mush?

Venturing forth

Scanning for mining deposits as you explore each new area is a vital task if you want to stay alive. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Of course, even with your alters hard at work, this is a team effort. Real boy Jan doesn’t get to sit on his hands while his clones do all the heavy lifting, no, sir. You need to make use of every precious hour before sunrise comes, because every single job your alters can do is also something you could also be doing yourself.

This is where the third-person exploration and action elements of the game come into play – though I use the word ‘action’ quite generously here, since The Alters doesn’t really have traditional combat. When I said ‘hostile planet’ earlier on, I wasn’t talking about angry local megafauna or marauding aliens. The areas outside the base are populated by strange, pulsating anomalies, which can deliver a potentially lethal dose of radiation on contact. Luckily, you can research and build the Luminator: a magic UV flashlight that can be used to target the floating cores of the anomalies and shrink them into a stable ball of useful resources with an admittedly rather satisfying vwoosh.

It’s perhaps the weakest component in The Alters’ otherwise flawless assembly of disparate parts, but it’s far from a deal-breaker. The anomalies just aren’t a particularly engaging threat, although later on, some more interesting variants do show up. One variety has two cores and rhythmically grows and shrinks in size; another warps spacetime in close proximity, causing you to lose hours in seconds while you remain within its radius.

I like the design of the Ally Corp spacesuits Jan and his alters wear – and even their standard-issue on-base clothes have little variations to help keep the alters distinct. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

The rest of the off-base gameplay is a bit more appealing; you explore, gather resources, and map out locations for fixed mining stations, which must then be connected to the base by setting up pylons before being operated by yourself or one of the alters. Your rolling base only makes pit stops at a handful of locations throughout the game, and the maps aren’t that large, but they do feel densely populated and hand-crafted – no sprawling procedurally-generated wilderness here. Sometimes, you’ll stumble across wreckage from your original crashed ship, and can recover personal effects that certain alters might appreciate, improving their mood.

Brothers in arms

Keeping those alters happy is no laughing matter, however. They can go hungry or become depressed, get injured on the job, or fall sick from radiation poisoning if you force them to work outside for too long. Sometimes you’ll find two or more of them in disagreement, at which point you’ll need to find a solution – and it’s not always possible to stay on everyone’s good side.

Some of these disputes are key to the overarching plot, while others are merely for character development and establishing personal conflicts – but I really appreciate how The Alters makes you stand on your decisions, even the smaller ones. A lesser game would have you pick a side and mete out judgment, with corresponding mood shifts based on your choice, but here you have to back up your words with actions or deal with the consequences. When one alter argues that we need more protection from radiation, while another insists that we should stop gathering irradiated metals altogether, you’re expected to follow through on your decision. Fail to build that radiation shield quickly enough after choosing to support that plan? Tough, now both alters have lost some respect for you.

I probably spent more time playing the beer pong minigame than I needed to. But I needed Jan’s alters to understand that he’s the king, and there’s no beating him. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to boost your alters’ mental states. Assigning them to work that fits their specialism is a good start, but you can also prepare better food, play beer pong (which has its own minigame), build a gym or a therapy room, or even settle in for a movie night with all of your alternate selves. Hilariously, the ‘movies’ you can uncover from the ship’s scattered wreckage are all live-action shorts made by YouTube comedy duo Chris & Jack, which can be viewed in their entirety while the Jans provide occasional commentary. It’s weird, but great. Hell, the only thing you can’t do is exactly what I would do in this situation, which is a sloppy make-out session with my clones.

Whatever your methods, ensuring that your self-made crew is healthy in body and mind is of paramount importance. An unhappy or rebellious alter will work fewer hours; an injured one can’t work at all. It all plays into the core idea that Jan – perhaps every version of him, in fact – simply wasn’t cut out for this job, and you’re constantly flying from one near-catastrophe to another. I opted to pick Doctor Jan as my final alter quite late in the game, and I’m glad I did: Miner Jan decided to overwork himself not long after, and kept coming back to base with increasingly severe radiation sickness.

The human touch

It’s nice to find your alters gathered to relax in their off-time during the (rare) periods when everyone seems to be getting along. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

In short, The Alters is nothing short of an artistic triumph. It’s a cheerfully strange game with a lot of heart, using its premise to ask genuine philosophical questions about the nature of memories and identity, but also managing to remain grounded in a story about people just trying to survive a terrible situation. At one point, Jan leads the alters in a (shockingly good) impromptu musical number. It’s silly, but it’s hard not to like how downright earnest it all is. It feels like something that was created with genuine love and care, an increasing rarity in today’s game industry landscape.

I wouldn’t call it an extremely challenging game overall, so if you’re expecting a gritty, difficult survival experience, you might be disappointed – although I’ve been a fan of management sims for a while, so players less familiar with the genre may find it a bit tougher to stay on top of each new crisis. There are separate difficulty settings for the anomaly combat and the resource economy, which is a nice touch.

Lastly, as a PC game, I found it ran well both on my RTX 4080 gaming PC and an older RTX 3060 gaming laptop, at 1440p and 1080p, respectively.

The game isn’t particularly long, either – my first playthrough clocked in at just shy of 20 hours, and I felt was taking my time with it – but there’s certainly some room for replayability based on the different available alters and multiple endings. After getting what I’d like to call a ‘good’ ending, I’m already itching to start over and say all the mean things I avoided saying the first time around. Watch out, space: here comes Asshole Jan.

Should I buy The Alters?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

Accessibility

There are a small number of accessibility features available in The Alters, primarily focused on reducing some intrusive visual effects (like those caused by certain anomalies, or when Jan is drunk after too much beer pong). There’s also the option to adjust the font size of the subtitles and change the entire HUD scale – potentially useful for anyone who struggles to read small text.

A notable omission is a colorblind mode, although this might be a game where it wouldn’t actually make much difference; most of the management menu screens are fairly monochrome, and the game broadly manages to avoid overlapping UI elements.

How I reviewed Mario Kart World

I played through the majority of The Alters on a gaming PC equipped with an RTX 4080 GPU and Ryzen 9 5950X CPU, at 1440p resolution, and got a consistent 60+ fps at max settings. I also played a short segment of the game on my laptop, which has an RTX 3060, and found similarly reliable performance at 1080p once I’d tweaked the graphical settings a little.

It took me about 20 hours to complete a full playthrough of the game, which I spread out over the course of a week. I played with a mouse and keyboard, but you can use a controller too if that’s your preference. The game is also available on PS5 and Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

First reviewed June 2025

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June 17, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

MindsEye review – calling it outdated is an insult to old action games

by admin June 17, 2025

Although it shows some early promise, MindsEye is sunk by a ridiculous story, inconsistent writing, poorly designed mission scenarios, and utterly atrocious combat.

You might not believe it based on the score, but I was fully in MindsEye’s corner during the runup to launch. There was a time when cover shooters and city-sized driving games were wearyingly common, but at a time when every action game is a soulslike, a roguelite, a live-service multiplayer shooter, or Doom, the good old fashioned GTA clone is a rare treat indeed.

MindsEye review

Developer: Build a Rocket Boy
Publisher: IO Interactive Partners
Platform: Played on PC
Availability: Out now on PC (Steam, Epic), PS5, Xbox Series X/S

So there’s room in my life for a bit of cars wot gun fast, and I was hoping Build A Rocket Boy’s debut game would defy all the pre-release doubters, revealing itself as a thrilling tribute to a bygone era. Sadly, if anything the sceptics were too charitable. MindsEye is an unmitigated disaster, with flaws that run so much deeper than the technical hitches and deformed digital faces doing the rounds online that you’d need some sort of pressure-resistant submersible to pull them out.

Yet as I polish the size 12 steel toecaps for the booting that is to come, I would like to highlight some things I like about MindsEye. For all it does wrong, there are fragments of talent and artistry here, glimmers of the game it might have been had it been given more time.

One such thing is how it starts. MindsEye’s story revolves around Jacob Diaz, a military drone pilot who we meet in the desert on a mission to explore an ancient underground structure (the game has a running joke over whether this is a pyramid or a ziggurat, which isn’t remotely funny and a detail most of its characters would not believably care about in the slightest, but I’m supposed to be being nice right now, so let’s leave that be). Diaz’s drone, which he can control mentally via the ‘MindsEye’ implant in his neck, descends into the structure and encounters a bunch of strange glowing symbols on a door. The drone is zapped by a mysterious energy, Diaz collapses, cut to black.

Here’s a spot of MindsEye gameplay for you.Watch on YouTube

It’s a tight, tantalising prologue that lightly subverts your expectations at seeing dusty military men on screen. It’s also directed with the kind of cinematic flair you’d expect from a studio descended from Rockstar North. That flair continues through the prologue, and indeed, through much of the game. Discharged from the military and disconnected from his MindsEye drone, Diaz arrives in futuristic Las Vegas analogue Redrock city, moving in with a friend who has nabbed him a job as a security guard at Silva Industries. But Diaz has an ulterior motive. Silva Industries, owned and operated by tech mogul Marco Silva, manufactured Diaz’s MindsEye chip, and Diaz wants to fill the gaping holes in his memory left by the operation that separated him from his drone.

It may seem like damning with faint praise to point to the cutscenes as one of the best parts of a video game, but I always enjoyed watching MindsEye, even in its stupidest, most baffling moments. They aren’t quite the highlight, though. That would be MindsEye’s vehicles. Its electric array of sports cars, SUVs and offroad 4x4s are all sleekly designed, fit well with the near-future setting, and are generally fun to scoot around in. The driving model leans slightly more arcadey than modern Grand Theft Auto, but there’s still enough simulated weight to convince you that you’re dragging two tonnes of metal around every street corner.

1. Give us a kiss or the girl gets it. 2. There are some interesting mission concepts in MindsEye, but few of them are well executed. 3. Forget bungee jumping, Humvee jumping is where it’s at. 4. The symbolism of a minigame in which you dig your own grave feels a bit too on the nose.
| Image credit: Eurogamer / IO Interactive Partners

MindsEye occasionally puts its cars to good use too. An early sequence throws you into a car chase in the middle of a sandstorm, one which recalls the centrepiece action scene of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. The long, winding route through the city is carefully orchestrated so you can barrel through backstreets and building yards to cut down the distance between you and your quarry. Perhaps it’s desperation talking, but there’s the tiniest hint of Uncharted 4’s jeep sequence here, and I briefly hoped MindsEye might be an entire game of similarly adaptive pursuits.

Unfortunately, car chases comprise only a small portion of MindsEye’s running time, and none of the others are as good as this one. Instead, vehicles are mainly used to travel between a handful of key locations in Redrock. This in itself could be entertaining in a more leisurely fashion, were it not for the fact that MindsEye seems reluctant to let you spend any time absorbing its atmosphere. When travelling to the next set-piece, characters constantly call you and aggressively demand you hurry up, get a move on, stop dawdling. It’s a bizarre reversal of Grand Theft Auto IV’s phone calls. Instead of friendly cousin Roman asking you to go bowling, you get verbally abused by your computer.

I can’t tell whether this is a poor attempt at maintaining tension, or if such urging exists because MindsEye doesn’t want you to stop and look at its world for any length of time. At first glance, Redrock is an impressive space, particularly its glittering downtown area complete with a Las Vegas-ish sphere displaying colourful, fictional advertisements. But its artifice becomes clearer the longer you spend in it. Viewed from above, you can see the tile-based manner in which its pieces are laid out, and the divisions between downtown and suburbia, suburbia and desert are all too clean. You also don’t spend a vast amount of time inside the city itself, primarily driving between locations on its fringes, like Silva’s factory and an abandoned mine.

1. Redrock certainly looks nice, but it’s more of a set than a simulated city. 2. Jacob discovers a new atmospheric layer, the cat-o-sphere. | Image credit: Eurogamer / IO Interactive Partners

This isn’t necessarily a fatal flaw – Redrock wasn’t built to sustain a simulated life in the way Los Santos or Night City was. It is a set for a specific story BARB wants to tell, and it serves that function well enough. Problem is, the story Redrock has been built for is simply not very good.

It starts out promisingly, setting itself up as a politically charged techno-thriller. Soon after joining Silva Industries, Diaz becomes directly involved with Marco Silva himself, acting as a blend of fixer and personal bodyguard. There’s a mildly intriguing tension here, as Diaz forms an uneasy friendship with Silva while searching for clues to his past. For a moment – and this may have been another bout of culturally-starved mania – I wondered if it might go the way of The Night Manager, replacing Hugh Laurie’s arms dealer with an Elon Musk archetype to explore the unchecked influence tech billionaires have over social and government policy.

Nope! Instead, MindsEye basically handwaves Silva’s billionaire status. It acknowledges he’s a selfish arsehole, but clearly doesn’t want to portray him as a villain, and as such ends up not really knowing what to do with him. Instead, the main antagonist is Diaz’ scenery chewing former commanding officer, who leads a military coup of Redrock aided by a cyborg Elias Toufexis. At this point, any thematic substance the story had evaporates. And it isn’t even the silliest turn the plot takes. The latter third of the story takes MindsEye from a vaguely plausible depiction of the near-future to weapons-grade sci-fi shlock.

The driving is great, shame the game seems to so often hate you doing it. | Image credit: Eurogamer / IO Interactive Partners

Any writer would struggle to mesh these elements together, so it isn’t surprising that the script’s tone is wildly inconsistent. Notionally, MindsEye is supposed to be a more serious affair than Grand Theft Auto, shorn of its misanthropic satire and abrasive caricatures. But once it introduces Charlie, Diaz’s quirky female hacker pal, it increasingly shifts to the kind glib, quippy dialogue that fell out of vogue circa Avengers: Endgame. “Is that gunfire I’m hearing?” one character asks Diaz over the radio during a firefight, to which he responds “Well, it ain’t popcorn!”.

None of this, though, is what ultimately sinks MindsEye. The biggest problem is the combat, which is the worst I’ve encountered in a big-budget game in at least a decade. Let’s start with the fact that Diaz, in himself, is one of the least capable action heroes I have ever played as. His four combat skills are sprinting, crouching, taking cover, and shooting. He can’t dodge. He can’t throw grenades. He can’t use his weapons while driving. He doesn’t have a melee attack. Hell, he can’t even get into a car through the passenger door, instead running around the vehicle to the driver’s seat in a way that got me killed more than once.

The only thing that distinguishes Diaz in any way is his drone, which is unlocked a short way into the campaign. In combat, the drone is mainly used to stun enemies and hack robots, which are useful abilities, but not especially fun or interesting. Oh and toward the end of the game, the drone unlocks the ability to launch grenades. This spices up combat slightly, in the same way that a sandwich is “spiced up” by adding bread.

Enemy pathfinding is, well, see for yourself. | Image credit: Eurogamer / IO Interactive Partners

Yet even with these abilities, combat has zero sense of style or inherent satisfaction. The weapon selection is fairly broad, and among them are some half-decent guns like the sniper rifle and a late-game laser cannon. But the damage feedback couldn’t be limper if you kicked it in the groin. Incoming fire is designated by a tracer effect so sluggish it sucks all the lethality out of the bullets it’s supposed to highlight. Shooting a human enemy, meanwhile, triggers a pathetic ketchup-bottle squirt of blood, whereupon they flop to the ground like an NPC in Goat Simulator. And humans are the most fun adversaries to fight. The copbots are so slow to move and react, Diaz could probably stop to eat his dinner off them, while the various types of airborne drone you encounter are all prime examples of floating nuisance enemies.

The AI, meanwhile, is haphazard at best. Sometimes it makes a decent stab at flanking you. Other times enemies will stand out in the open waiting to be shot, or run right past you as they home blindly in on some cover. In fairness, their pathfinding is not helped by the sloppy set-piece design. Enemies seem to be sprinkled around combat zones almost at random. Sometimes they’re dispersed over areas that are far too large to make for an exciting fight. Other times they’re clumped together so closely their models begin to overlap.

This sloppiness spoils numerous mission concepts which, designed differently, could be quite memorable. Two missions involve escorting Silva’s rockets to their launchpad, and while one would frankly do, the enormous, caterpillar-tracked rocket carrier is a superb setting for a firefight. But the first of these sequences has no combat on the rocket carrier itself (instead, you fly your drone around to look at the vehicle’s treads – one of numerous missions where the primary mode of interaction is “looking at things”) while the second puts you in a combat VTOL aircraft where you can just wipe the floor with enemy vehicles as they approach.

The best of MindsEye is contained in this screenshot. | Image credit: Eurogamer / IO Interactive Partners

And a lot of the missions are even worse. The most egregious examples of MindsEye’s shoddy game design are its side-missions. These are accessed through portals in the game world, and are ostensibly intended to showcase the power of MindsEye’s building tools, which let you use the game’s assets to create your own activities like races, gunfights and so forth. The toolkit itself is pretty powerful, albeit complex for a layman to do much more than drag and drop a few items without investing some serious time to understand it.

But the first side-mission you come to, which flashes back to a hostage rescue during Diaz’ military days, is shockingly bad, an insipid run and gun affair where you stumble through haphazardly placed enemies in sludgy, unsatisfying combat. There’s no pacing to it, no craft, minimal context, and the whole thing lasts about two minutes.

Other examples see you play as a member of the “Back Niners” gang, who starts the mission immediately surrounded by cops – cops who, it should be noted, don’t appear anywhere else in the game, and a mission where you play as some kind of mercenary clearing out an apartment complex of gangsters by, uh, blowing up all their cars. This mission might even be fun if you had some sort of, oh I dunno, throwable explosive to destroy them with.

1. Normally Jacob can’t use weapons in a vehicle. But there are a few sequences where he rides shotgun. 2. I suppose it’s patriotic to get Limmy to design one of your characters. | Image credit: Eurogamer / IO Interactive Partners

And here we get to why MindsEye’s failure is cataclysmic, because you can’t make an action game with crap action in 2025. You just can’t. If gaming has perfected anything, it’s shooting dudes with a gun, and there are innumerable examples to draw from that show how to get it right. Indeed, there are action games ten, even twenty years older than MindsEye that are infinitely better to play. Max Payne 3, which is thirteen years old and the weakest Max Payne game, is a masterpiece compared to this.

MindsEye accessibility options

Camera shake toggle. Look sensitivity sliders. Separate audio sliders. Subtitles toggle.

More than that, though, if this is the best BARB’s own designers can come up with to showcase the creative potential of MindsEye’s construction tools, why on Earth should players ever want to use them? It’d be like buying bricks off a builder while watching his house fall down. Even assuming the game was great, I’d query where the overlap lies between fans of old-school linear cover shooters and fans of Roblox-style construction platforms. But the game BARB has made doesn’t encourage me to engage with the creative side of things at all.

The reasons for MindsEye’s sorry state will, I’m sure, emerge in due course. But there’s a line from the game, perhaps the sharpest in its messy, wayward script, that has been playing in my head since I heard it. Speaking about Silva’s lifestyle, one character tells Diaz “That’s what corporate billions gets you these days – immunity from reality”.

As I wandered around MindsEye’s empty ‘Free Roam’ mode after the campaign ended – in the shoes of a completely different character dressed like he suffered a parachute failure and landed in the warehouse where Call of Duty stores all its loot-boxes – I could only wonder whether MindsEye struggled with more than a little immunity from reality itself.

A copy of MindsEye was indepentently purchased for review by Eurogamer.

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June 17, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Phison E28 2TB SSD Review: A return for vengeance

by admin June 17, 2025

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The Sandisk WD Black SN8100 recently sent shockwaves through the enthusiast SSD space with its exceptional performance and power efficiency, cementing SMI’s platform as a serious competitor for the coveted Best SSD crown. Phison is not one to rest on its prior laurels, though, and has worked diligently to one-up the competition with a class-defining storage solution of its own. Today we see the results with the E26’s proper successor, the E28 SSD reference design.

If there is one thing that’s held back adoption of high-end PCIe 5.0 SSDs, it has been lackluster power efficiency. The first wave of these SSDs required a heatsink for proper operation and had a power draw that made things tricky on any platform, considering idle power consumption was also high. The SMI SM2508 and Phison E31T brought the first signs last year that this would eventually be solved, but it was the Micron 4600 and, finally, the WD Black SN8100, that really took this message home. Now you could have your cake and eat it, too.

The E28 takes lessons learned from the E26 and improves on that controller in almost every way. Better performance and higher power efficiency combine to make a fantastic drive that will help lead the way for the next generation of SSDs. Faster and denser flash is needed for less-expensive, more-capacious drives, but the E28 delivers the best solution on the market for the technology available today. Even the flash – which is also found on the WD Black SN8100 – brings improvements for random 4K performance, making for an all-around stellar package. This is an exciting product that brings welcome competition to an evolving market segment.

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Phison E28 specifications

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Product

1TB

2TB

4TB

8TB

Pricing

N/A

Row 0 – Cell 4

Form Factor

M.2 2280

N/A

Interface / Protocol

NVMe 2.0

M.2 2280

Controller

Phison E28

NVMe 2.0

DRAM

LPDDR4X

Phison E28

Flash Memory

Kioxia/Sandisk 218-Layer TLC (BiCS8)

LPDDR4X

Sequential Read

Up to 14.9 GB/s

Kioxia/Sandisk 218-Layer TLC (BiCS8)

Sequential Write

Up to 14.0 GB/s

Up to 14.9 GB/s

Random Read

Up to 2.6M

Up to 14.0 GB/s

Random Write

Up to 3.0M

Up to 2.6M

Security

TCG Opal 2.01 (opt)

Up to 3.0M

Endurance (TBW)

N/A

TCG Opal 2.01 (opt)

Part Number

N/A

Warranty

N/A

The Phison E28 is destined to come to the market for all capacities between 1TB and 8TB. Smaller capacities – even 1TB – don’t make sense at this level of performance, given how dense NAND flash is getting. 2TB probably remains the sweet spot with some creep into 4TB. 8TB remains elusive and tough to hit, but for many enthusiasts, that is the bare minimum expected for a flagship SSD platform. We’ll have to wait and see on that one. The sample we tested has no pricing, but we would expect something comparable to the Sandisk WD Black SN8100 MSRPs.

The Phison E28 can hit up to 14.9 GB/s or more for sequential reads and up to 14.0 GB/s for sequential writes. For random reads and writes, up to 2,600K / 3,000K IOPS are attainable. Actual performance will depend on your platform. Out of the box, the controller supports TCG Pyrite, which is software encryption, but TCG Opal support with hardware encryption should be an available feature.

Phison E28: a closer look

Image 1 of 3

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

Aside from the presence of two debugging connectors, the first thing that should catch your attention is the fact that this is a single-sided drive. That’s nothing new for 2TB, but this configuration should hold for 4TB as well. 8TB will have to be double-sided due to the amount of 1Tb dies that are needed. Otherwise, this looks like a pretty normal drive with an SSD controller, a package of DRAM for metadata caching, and two NAND flash packages.

The controller is the most interesting part, as we’ve seen this flash before. The Phison E28 is the successor to the Phison E26 – which at the time of its release (in early 2024) was the first real PCIe 5.0 SSD platform available, and one that would be the first to really push the interface in terms of bandwidth. The E28 follows in the footsteps of Phison’s E31T, a more budget-oriented controller that brought very good power efficiency due to its 7nm design. However, Phison was soon upstaged by Silicon Motion with its SM2508, a 6nm design that has had great results first with the Micron 4600 and later with the WD Black SN8100. The latter is paired with the same flash as our E28 engineering sample today, and it achieved fantastic power efficiency – but perhaps Phison can do better with its own 6nm platform.

Usually, we go into some depth about the controller technology, but we might leave some of that for retail reviews. We will say that the Phison E28 is very similar to the E26, but has a lot more headroom thanks to the process node shrink from 12nm to 6nm. This allows for potentially more performance with significantly better power efficiency. This is aided by the use of BiCS8 flash, and there are differences between Micron’s 276-Layer TLC in the 4600 and BiCS8 in the SN8100. Generally, the SN8100 has lower latency and better power efficiency. We’ll see how that works out for Phison, noting that variations of this platform will also be used for enterprise and AI, which would require careful balancing.

Image 1 of 3

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

The E28 is using LPDDR4X for metadata caching, a good choice to reduce power consumption a little bit. We noted that the WD Black SN8100 was using DDR4, instead, in its review. This isn’t a huge difference, but is still noteworthy. As for the flash, we’ve already mentioned this is using 218-Layer BiCS8 TLC. This flash is made by both Kioxia (once known as Toshiba) and Sandisk, which was recently spun off from its parent, Western Digital. We only mention this because this is an engineering sample and the E28’s performance characteristics should be improved by the time of retail launch, through firmware optimization for the flash if nothing else.

MORE: Best SSDs

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MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

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June 17, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour Review — The Pack-In That Wasn’t

by admin June 16, 2025

More than anything, Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is an odd part of the Switch 2 launch lineup because it’s defined more by what it isn’t than what it is. It isn’t really a video game. It isn’t part of a franchise. And most centrally, it isn’t a free pack-in game.

That last one feels instinctually unfair as a game reviewer who makes a point to ignore price in most cases. Games are worth what you’re willing to pay for them, prices fluctuate, and I try to evaluate quality on its own merits. But Welcome Tour makes its price impossible to ignore because every bit of its identity feels so ideally crafted to be a pack-in game to introduce the Switch 2 to new users, and then it just … isn’t.

The name is very pointed in this regard. This is built to be a primer for the Switch 2, explaining all of its new features in clear layman’s terms. Informed Switch 2 players are bound to know what they’re getting for their investment, but the non-gamers Nintendo likes to eye as part of its wide net “Blue Ocean” strategy may not understand the intricate alphabet soup of VRR and HDR. The in-game tutorials break down these complex topics with simple explanations that anyone can grasp, along with videos and demonstrations when necessary to let you experience the difference for yourself. It’s genuinely neat! I could see handing this to my parents and having them walk away with, if not a complete understanding of next-gen gaming technology, at least a better grasp of it.

A speed putting challenge with the mouse controls in Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour

But that also highlights another contradiction of Welcome Tour. The Switch 2 itself is an expensive piece of technology made for enthusiasts. The people investing in it now, at least, are probably not casual gamers who are unfamiliar with these advanced terms and concepts. So Welcome Tour feels like a pitch made for people who are high-tech enthusiasts and also casual fans, or at least households that have both under the same roof. And for those who do already understand the new technology, the explanations feel slow and dull. It can be interesting seeing how Nintendo has broken down its core concepts into simple terms, but it’s hard to sustain that interest for every part. Plus these informational kiosks are written to feel very safe and corporate. Each tutorial segment is followed by a short quiz to see if you paid attention, and in a smart feature, it will highlight which section contains the info you got wrong.

The much cooler aspect, for casual newcomers and power users alike, are the minigames and demonstrations. These put the features front and center by letting you experience them, like a few HD Rumble demos that emphasize the fine detail of different objects that feel as if they’re either inside the controllers or the screen itself. A 4K demo lets you see Mario run from one side of World 1-1 to the other, all contained in tiny pixels unfurling across your entire TV. One demonstration shows how the HD Rumble can be used to generate recognizable (if rough) sound effects. There are games to show off the precision movement of the mouse by navigating around electric trap walls, scraping paint off a wall, or a simple putting challenge game, and one that challenges you to spot the difference between frame rates. These are inventive practical demonstrations that explain the features much better than a block of text could manage.

As a matter of presentation, Welcome Tour has you pick a tiny little mannequin-like figure and physically walk atop and even inside of different Switch 2 parts and accessories. Progression is divided into two categories. The first is Stamps, which you collect by finding all the parts of a particular section–and I do mean all the parts. One Joy-Con section requires you to find hidden kiosks near the analog stick and all the face buttons, and then the other Joy-Con section requires you to find the analog stick and all of its face buttons too, even though they’re essentially mirror images. Everything from the audio jack to imprinted logos are stamps to find, and new sections of the console will only open once you’ve found all of the stamps in the current one. Particularly once you delve into the system, it can be tedious to find every little bit and bob hiding among a circuit board or on the face of a controller, especially once the walkable paths become harder to discern. Nintendo apparently wants you to be extremely familiar with the Switch 2 parts diagram.

The second layer of progression is medals, which you collect by taking the aforementioned quizzes, completing minigames, and watching interactive demonstrations. Collecting a requisite number of medals will unlock new challenge levels to older minigames, giving you some reason to backtrack if you’re looking for 100% completion.

An information kiosk in Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour.

Gallery

That level of precision in highlighting the hardware does mean that the game introduces some more complex industrial-design concepts that are genuinely interesting, even if you’re more familiar with some of the next-gen upgrades. I particularly liked the segments devoted to explaining the small gaps and U-shaped internal structure in the new magnetic Joy-Cons that make them snap tightly onto the Switch 2, while still having enough give to keep from being too prone to breaking, and the visual explanation of how the HD Rumble in the new controllers differs from the old ones. Those extremely specific details aren’t going to be useful in my day-to-day with the Switch 2, but it feels like I’ve gained a more complete understanding of the work that went into it.

Then there is one strange game-like aspect that feels out of place in Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. As you explore, you’ll find various lost items, like a baseball cap, scattered around, and there’s a meta-goal of returning all those items to a lost and found booth. But you can’t pick up more than one item at a time. If you try, the game warns you not to overexert yourself by carrying, I suppose, two baseball caps. So while you explore the console, you have to constantly run back to the Information desk in the very first area, on one of the Joy-Con controllers, to turn items in before fetching another. It seemed as if Nintendo wanted to give you one more thing to do, but this fetch quest is just no fun due to its own arbitrary limitations.

When you finish finding all the stamps in Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, your reward is a greeting from the curator, and that’s very much the approach Nintendo has taken here. Welcome Tour is an interactive virtual museum exhibit, all centered around showcasing Nintendo’s latest piece of hardware. It carries the calm sensibility of a museum, which makes it feel very approachable and good-natured. And like any good museum, it’s a decent way to spend an afternoon to marvel at the exhibits and learn a few things along the way. But I sense Nintendo’s self-consciousness coming through in the decision to charge for it–the mindset that imagines if it’s free, people will conclude that it’s worthless. Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour certainly isn’t worthless. It’s a well-made, often informative, sometimes-frustrating introduction to the new hardware. It’s just too bad Nintendo didn’t model it after many great museums: with no fee, so the work inside could speak for itself.

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June 16, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

MindsEye Review – Not Like This

by admin June 16, 2025

One of the earliest missions in MindsEye tasks you with tailing a car. Get too close and the person driving will spot you; fall too far behind and you’ll lose sight of the vehicle. It’s the exact kind of mission structure we all decided was tired and needed to go away over a decade ago. The only difference in MindsEye is that you’re piloting a drone instead of driving a car, so even the relatively small stakes are diminished by the fact that you can just fly really high to avoid being seen. It’s not a positive first impression, especially when you factor in the confluence of concerning events surrounding the game and developer Build a Rocket Boy–from the studio’s co-CEO stating that anyone sharing negative feedback about the game was being funded by an ubiquitous source, to the chief legal officer and CFO both leaving the company a few weeks before launch.

Neither is a great look, yet I still went into MindsEye with an open mind. There’s some pedigree behind the scenes, after all, with former Rockstar North lead Leslie Benzies handling directing duties. Benzies was a producer on Grand Theft Auto III through V before leaving to found Build a Rocket Boy, and you can clearly see elements of GTA’s DNA in MindsEye. Unfortunately, the comparisons end there.

MindsEye is not good. That early tailing mission is sadly indicative of the rest of the game as you slog through roughly 10 hours of dull and creatively bankrupt third-person action, combining driving and cover-based shooting within a linear framework. The story isn’t completely terrible, at least, with a few entertaining moments sprinkled into what is otherwise a mostly forgettable tale. You play as Jacob Diaz, a former soldier with selective amnesia caused by a neural implant in his neck: the titular MindsEye. What initially begins as a personal quest to uncover his past gradually becomes a mission for humanity’s survival, as familiar sci-fi tropes come to the fore.

MindsEye

Gallery

Set in a near-future that’s easy to imagine becoming reality, MindsEye touches on some potentially interesting topics, with an algorithm in charge of public safety and unchecked military power among them. However, each of these concepts is quickly disregarded as a minor background detail, never explored beyond the surface level. We already live in a world where the concerning use of AI extends to tackling crime, and the foibles of robotic cops aren’t any more frightening than what human police are already doing, so electing to bring up these subjects without having anything to say is disappointing and blunts the story’s impact.

Jacob is also one of the most generic protagonists you could ask for, with no memorable characteristics beyond a frustrating naivety that never comes back to bite him. This is because most of the other characters are exactly who they say they are. There’s no intrigue, and characters lack emotional depth and development, so it’s hard to empathize with or care about what happens to any of them. They’re not likable or interesting, and even the antagonists are unceremoniously killed in cutscenes just when it looks like you might get thrown into a boss fight.

It’s a shame because, visually, the world and character models are impressive. The actors do a decent-enough job with the material they’re given, too, although there are still a few moments when their line deliveries feel chopped up and mashed together, preventing scenes from flowing like an actual conversation would. The game’s ending is also so abrupt, anti-climactic, and unsatisfying that I couldn’t help but laugh at how ridiculous it is.

MindsEye

The fictional city of Redrock does at least have some semblance of style. MindsEye’s setting is clearly based on Las Vegas, with replicas of the Luxor pyramid, Allegiant Stadium, and the Sphere among its borrowed landmarks. It feels futuristic, yet also credible as the type of city we might see in a few years’ time. Look beyond the casinos and skyscrapers, and you’ll find strip malls, condos, and regular neighborhoods: locales that wouldn’t look out of place in the present day, save for the appearance of high-tech drones and robots. It’s a glimpse into the future, but one that’s conceivable and thus recognizable.

The praise stops here, however. While the amount of effort that went into creating Redrock is apparent, it ultimately feels wasted. MindsEye is not the open-world game it may appear to be from the outside. These are glimpses of GTA DNA, but ultimately, it’s remarkably rigid and linear. In almost every mission, you’re given a designated vehicle to drive–others are off-limits and you can’t exit the one you’re in, even if it’s on fire–and must then head from point A to B. You’re actively discouraged from exploring, as the game will incessantly scold you before failing the mission if you veer too far off course. Not that there’s anything waiting for you if you do decide to venture from your GPS heading. There aren’t even any consequences for your actions. Crash into a bunch of cars or run over pedestrians and the world won’t react. The police don’t even respond if you commit crimes, so the whole thing feels empty and devoid of life, like you’re on a film set and nothing’s real. Redrock is little more than a flimsy backdrop for the most boring, straightforward missions imaginable.

When you’re not mindlessly driving from one location to the next, MindsEye occasionally drops you into protracted car chases where the most excitement you might find is from seeing another vehicle randomly explode. These chases aren’t all that different from your regular commute, as both end with a cutscene once you’ve reached a specific location. Nothing you do has any bearing on the outcome–you’re basically following a car until the game decides you’re done–but at least the vehicle handling can be somewhat fun. It’s easy to fly into high-speed handbrake turns, and the cars don’t feel like they’re superficially stuck to the road, so weaving through traffic is viable. There’s a palpable sense of weightlessness to each vehicle, though, so it doesn’t take much to flip a car with how uneven the physics engine is. In most other games, this wouldn’t be a problem, but it is when you’re not allowed to exit a car and find a new one. The sad thing is, once you are on foot, you’ll be begging to get back behind the wheel.

MindsEye is a cover shooter where cover rarely feels necessary. This is primarily due to the brain-dead enemy AI, which suffers from numerous issues that stifle what is already a bare-bones combat experience. When they’re not standing still, mindlessly running toward you, or instantly blinking in and out of cover with no animation linking these two stages together, enemies will often flee in one direction while firing in another, causing bullets to exit their barrels at impossible angles. Other times, enemies startlingly slow to react to you, especially if you run up beside them, and they’re about as accurate as a Stormtrooper with their helmet on backwards. You can even side-step bullets because of how slowly they travel toward you. Couple this with a brief time-to-kill, and it’s easy enough to stand in the open and mow down every enemy before they’re able to deplete your health bar. There’s no discernible difference between the medium and hard difficulty modes, either, try as I might to create some sort of challenge to make combat the least bit engaging. No such luck.

MindsEye

Even disregarding the AI, combat is stilted and lacks dynamism on a foundational level. There are no melee attacks, and additional tools like grenades aren’t unlocked until the very end of the game, and even then they’re frustrating to use because you don’t have direct aiming control without switching to a companion drone that follows you around. You can’t even blindfire from cover or use evasive maneuvers, such as rolling. Your options in a fight are extremely limited, and the guns at your disposal lack impact due to the game’s muted sound design and inadequate enemy reactions. Weapons also have a habit of appearing in your weapon wheel with no fanfare. I usually didn’t know I had new firearms until I noticed them in my inventory. The only time this differed was when MindsEye asked me to use a specific weapon that I didn’t even have in my inventory.

The entire game is relentlessly bland, adopting a formula seemingly designed to test how well you can stay awake while playing it. Many missions feel padded out just to justify the game’s price. I can’t count the number of times I drove somewhere for five minutes, engaged in a boring gunfight, then drove for another five minutes to watch an inconsequential cutscene. MindsEye deviates from this blueprint on a few occasions, but the results are equally bad. There’s an obligatory overdrawn stealth section where you spend most of your time waiting for the slowest robots in the world to pass so you can slip by. One mission has you fly a tiny drone into a woman’s apartment and essentially pixel-hunt for the right objects. There are even irritating one-off minigames for performing CPR and digging your own grave. Meanwhile, MindsEye’s most interesting set pieces are relegated to cutscenes.

Then there are these weird side missions that are only tangentially related to the plot. They transport you into either the past or the future, usually to complete a brief shootout that rewards you with a medal depending on how quickly you can kill everyone. There are no other benefits to doing these or improving your times. They’re just for the “fun” of it. The kicker is that you can also create these short missions yourself, using building tools that are currently in beta. This seems like a holdover or proof-of-concept for Everywhere, Build a Rocket Boy’s previously announced metaverse-adjacent project. The tools look daunting and are probably involved, but I didn’t have the patience to learn how to make missions that I didn’t enjoy playing in the first place.

MindsEye is not the worst game ever made, but I also seem to have come away mostly unscathed in terms of its potential technical issues. The internet is already awash with examples of glitches and performance problems, but occasional stuttering was the worst thing I experienced on PC. Still, even if you manage to achieve a stable experience, MindsEye still commits the cardinal sin of being mind-numbingly boring. More than anything, it feels like a game firmly trapped in the past. It wouldn’t have been good 15 years ago, either, but perhaps some of its design choices would have made more sense. As it is, issues like broken AI and uneven car physics simply exacerbate the problems with its archaic and insipid design. Impressive visuals can’t compensate for a lack of substance, whether that comes from its pointless world, tedious combat, or any number of other egregious shortcomings. If you’re looking for quality, cast your mind’s eye elsewhere.

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June 16, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Samsung Odyssey 3D G9 gaming monitor review: Premium 4K gaming in 2D and glasses-free 3D

by admin June 16, 2025

Why you can trust Tom’s Hardware

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3D video is often touted as “the new thing,” but in fact, it has been around for many decades. Those of us old enough might remember those cardboard glasses at the theater with red and blue filters and the cheesy B-movies that went with them. After a long hiatus from the cinema, DLP projectors made it possible for shutter glasses to grace IMAX theaters today.

3D in consumer displays has followed a similar path, but the one constant has been those glasses. Though they take different forms, they all involve what is essentially a pair of goggles sitting on your head while you watch. Many would say this is why the format has never really caught on.

Glasses-free 3D is not new, but I haven’t seen any of the best gaming monitors in the genre until recently, when Samsung offered a test drive of its Odyssey 3D G9. It utilizes real-time eye tracking along with some slick software to create a 3D experience from dedicated content and conversion of 2D material as well. It’s also a premium gaming monitor featuring a 27-inch IPS panel, 4K resolution, 165 Hz refresh rate, Adaptive-Sync, HDR10, and a wide gamut color. Let’s take a look.

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Samsung Odyssey 3D G9 Specs

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Panel Type / Backlight

IPS / W-LED, edge array

Screen Size / Aspect Ratio

27 inches / 16:9

Max Resolution and Refresh Rate

3840×2160 @ 165 Hz

Row 3 – Cell 0

FreeSync and G-Sync Compatible

Row 4 – Cell 0

3D compatible w/conversion

Native Color Depth and Gamut

10-bit / DCI-P3

Response Time (GTG)

1ms

Brightness (mfr)

350 nits

Contrast (mfr)

1,000:1

Speakers

2x 5w

Video Inputs

1x DisplayPort 1.4

Row 11 – Cell 0

2x HDMI 2.1

Audio

3.5mm headphone output

USB 3.1

1x up, 1x down

Power Consumption

34.8w, brightness @ 200 nits

Panel Dimensions

WxHxD w/base

24.2 x 16.4-21.1 x 8 inches

(615 x 417-536 x 203mm)

Panel Thickness

1.8 inches (46mm)

Bezel Width

Top/Bottom: 0.7 inch (18mm)

Row 18 – Cell 0

Sides: 0.3 inch (8mm)

Weight

16.5 pounds (7.5kg)

Warranty

3 years

Today’s best Samsung 27″ Odyssey 3D G90XF 165Hz Gaming Monitor deals

The 3D G9 is first and foremost, a premium gaming monitor. Without its 3D technology, it still competes with the best 4K gaming monitors currently available, featuring 165 Hz, Adaptive-Sync, and a precise overdrive that delivers smooth motion resolution and quick responses. Accurate out-of-box color, wide gamut coverage, and high brightness ensure an excellent image that will satisfy gamers from casual to hardcore.

The 3D part adds a significant price premium. The 3D G9 currently retails for $1,800. And since you can find other gaming monitors with similar performance for less money, you have to know going in that you’re paying extra for that glasses-free 3D experience.

I first encountered this tech during my review of Acer’s SpatialLabs portable monitor about two years ago. Samsung uses the same technique of sensors that track the user’s eye and head movements to maintain a stereo image as you change your viewpoint. To this, the 3D G9 adds spatial audio that moves with the image, creating the illusion of surround sound. Not only does the 3D G9 play 3D-enabled games, but its companion app, Reality Hub, can convert 2D videos on the fly into 3D content.

When you’re not marveling at the 3D image or playing games, the 3D G9 is an extremely capable all-around display with wide gamut color that covers just under 90% of DCI-P3. Accuracy is spot-on without calibration, so you don’t need to do much to set it up. There’s plenty of brightness available for both SDR and HDR content, with 482 and 510 nits peak, respectively. A field dimming feature triples the contrast for both formats, up to around 2,600:1.

What do you need to make this magic happen? The hardware requirements for an optimal 3D experience are an Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 7 1700X processor and a GeForce RTX 3080 or RTX 4080. You’ll also need 32GB of DDR5-5600 RAM. If you have an AMD GPU, only side-by-side 3D formats are supported. You can do this over DisplayPort or HDMI, and you’ll need a USB connection to enable the sensor package.

If you have the budget and the will, the 3D G9 delivers a unique experience that you can’t get anywhere else, at least until I review the Acer SpatialLabs View 27, which will be very soon.

Assembly and Accessories

The 3D G9 comes in a slim box with its contents protected by crumbly foam. It resembles any other Odyssey monitor, wrapped in a plain brown box. Only the “3D” in the model name hints at what’s inside. The panel snaps onto a substantial stand with a wide upright and solid metal base. A small external power supply with right-angle plugs is included, along with HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB cables.

Product 360

Image 1 of 5

(Image credit: Samsung)(Image credit: Samsung)(Image credit: Samsung)(Image credit: Samsung)(Image credit: Samsung)

The 3D G9 doesn’t look vastly different from other Samsung monitors, or other monitors for that matter. It integrates its cutting-edge technology neatly with a slightly wider-than-normal top bezel and a small bulge at the bottom. These parts house the eye and head tracking sensors, which maintain the 3D effect. It’s important to note that this only works for a single user sitting directly in front of the monitor. If you are more than 25 degrees off-center, the image won’t look right. Also, since you’re seeing two phased images per frame, each one is 1920×1080 pixels at 60 Hz.

The screen is covered in a very shiny front layer, which is optically sharp but picks up every stray reflection. You’ll want to be thoughtful when placing the 3D G9 by avoiding windows and overhead light sources. It’s best used in dim or indirect light. Across the bottom of the panel is a bright LED band that can display one of 48 colors, or a series of moving effects, or sync with what’s happening on screen.

The tracking sensors are cleverly hidden in the bezel and are barely visible. This element means you’ll be hard-pressed to tell the 3D G9 from a regular monitor. You can just see them in the third photo above.

From the sides and back, all you see is silver plastic and smooth surfaces with no visible texture or style lines. The back has a single vent across the top and a small logo offset to the left. The stand is unique in my experience with a wide upright featuring a small cable management hole. It includes full ergonomics with 3/15 degrees tilt and 4.7 inches of height plus a 90-degree portrait mode. There is no swivel adjustment. Movements are firm, almost too firm, but keep the 3D G9 in place without wobbling.

Input face rearwards and include two HDMI 2.1, one DisplayPort 1.4, and USB 3.1, one upstream and two down. You’ll need the former for 3D operation. There is no headphone jack, but the internal speakers produce clean sound with decent volume from their five-watt op-amps. Also on the input panel is the OSD joystick, which controls all monitor functions.

OSD Features

The 3D G9’s OSD resembles that of any Samsung gaming monitor, featuring a dashboard-style interface that displays status information at the top and a menu tree. There are five sub-menus with everything needed for calibration, gaming aids, and 3D operation.

Image 1 of 5

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

The Game menu has all video processing options and the sole 3D control, which is an input selector. You can bind either HDMI or DisplayPort to the 3D function with equal capability. There is no advantage to one over the other. 3D doesn’t work with Adaptive-Sync or HDR and tops out at FHD 60 Hz. The only gaming aid is a selection of aiming points. The Edge Lighting feature is here as well with 48 colors, six effects, and a sync option.

In the Picture menu, you’ll find 10 picture modes. Eco is the default and unlike most monitors, it does not limit brightness. And it’s blessed with perfect color, no calibration needed. You can tweak it if you want with fixed color temps, gamma presets and single-point white balance sliders. A gamut selector toggles between Native (full gamut) and Auto which switches between sRGB for SDR and P3 for HDR. Also here is local dimming, which is a bit misleading. The 3D G9 only employs field dimming to increase contrast but it’s available for SDR and HDR and gets you up to around 2,600:1. For HDR, you can turn on dynamic tone mapping which improves the look of HDR10’s static metadata.

The 3D G9 included Picture-in-Picture (PIP) to display two video sources simultaneously. The window can be sized and moved, you can play sound from either input, or change the aspect ratio.

Samsung Odyssey 3D G9 Calibration Settings

Calibrating the 3D G9 is unnecessary in its default Eco mode. If you want auto color gamut switching, change that option to Auto from Native, which shows the full gamut all the time, around 90% coverage of DCI-P3. If you do want to tweak, reduce gamma and green by one click each for a tiny drop in error values, but you won’t see a significant visual difference to the image. Those settings are below. The dimming can be used in SDR and HDR modes and works well when set on High to stretch contrast to 2,600:1. Though it’s called local dimming, it is in fact a field dimming feature.

For HDR content, you can adjust any image parameter, but that too is unnecessary. I recommend engaging the dynamic tone mapping, Active versus the default Static setting. My SDR settings are shown below.

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Picture Mode

Eco

Brightness 200 nits

Brightness 120 nits

Brightness 100 nits

Brightness 80 nits

Brightness 50 nits

5 (min. 22 nits)

Contrast

Gamma

-1

Color Temp User

Red 0, Green -1, Blue 0

Gaming and Hands-on

Diving first into the 3D G9’s 3D operation, I downloaded and installed the Reality Hub app. You’ll need to specify which input, HDMI or DisplayPort, is used for 3D, and make a USB connection to get it working. Reality Hub is the central point for all 3D content and video conversion. You can register games and use it to apply AI processing to 2D video that’s playing full screen.

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

In practice, the 3D effect is extremely deep. The third axis is as realistic as I’ve ever seen from any 3D display. There’s no sacrifice to going glasses-free. In fact, I found it deeper than what I’ve seen using DLP Link with a projector. Gaming is something that should be savored. You won’t want to play fast-paced shooters because they go by too quickly to enjoy the scenery. That’s just as well because the resolution is halved to FHD, and the refresh rate maxes at 60 Hz. But as I explored a virtual world, I took my time to enjoy the effect. The 3D G9’s eye tracking is precise and responds instantly to changes in viewpoint. I could move my eyes and head, and the 3D effect never wavered. I could only compare it to the Acer SpatialLabs 3D portable monitor I reviewed two years ago, and Samsung’s version is definitely superior.

Of the 3D G9’s tricks, my favorite is the video conversion. Once you’ve installed Reality Hub, it’s always running in the system tray and when you play a full screen video, a pop-up asks if you’d like to convert it to 3D. Answering yes makes the screen shift for a few seconds while the AI does its thing and then you’re presented with perfect 3D video. There’s no visible crosstalk and the effect stays solid if you move your head up to 25 degrees off-center. You also need to stay within 22-37 inches (55-95cm) for optimal viewing.

I played content from YouTube as well as Netflix, Discovery+ and Disney+. 3D doesn’t work with HDR, but all the SDR streams I played were rendered perfectly. The effect is almost mesmerizing and definitely addictive. Watching 3D without glasses removes the gimmick vibe it always had for me. If you’re a fan of desktop TV watching and you want 3D, the 3D G9 will be your jam.

For regular games like Doom Eternal, I enjoyed the 3D G9’s bright and colorful HDR rendering. Though it doesn’t have the contrast of a Mini LED or OLED screen, it does have higher peaks than most edge-lit monitors. Color and tone mapping were spot-on as well.

Gaming response is on par with the best 4K LCD panels I’ve reviewed. Input lag is low enough that I couldn’t perceive it, and motion processing is super smooth. You won’t get 4K frame rates much higher than the 3D G9’s 165fps unless you play on a 240 Hz OLED.

For everyday use, the 3D G9 excels with a sharply detailed image. 4K at 27 inches means the highest pixel density short of an 8K screen at 163ppi. It was perfect for Photoshop, Word and Excel, which all benefit from high resolution. The screen’s front layer was a little challenging to place being so shiny, but optically, it was a cut above the norm.

Takeaway: The 3D G9 is an extremely competent 4K gaming monitor with quick response and a colorful, sharp and bright image. It’s expensive, but you’re getting glasses-free 3D, which is superbly done and will upconvert any full-screen 2D video. The effect is incredibly lifelike and deep, and unlike anything else you’ve seen before. It’s a huge leap over the Acer SpatialLabs 3D portable I saw two years ago. If 3D is the future, the 3D G9 is ahead of its time.

MORE: Best Gaming Monitors

MORE: How We Test PC Monitors

MORE: How to Buy a PC Monitor

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June 16, 2025 0 comments

The Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan is pictured in a pink living space.

Product Reviews

Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan review: prompt particle detection and satisfying airflow helped me overlook the disappointing lack of smart features

by admin June 16, 2025

Why you can trust TechRadar

We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan: two-minute review

The Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan is a tower fan and air purifier combo that helps you beat the heat while improving the quality of the surrounding air.

Available in the US, UK, and Australia, you can find the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan with a list price of $429.99 / £449.99 / AU$799 at Dyson or third-party retailers. As I write this, there are discounts available at Dyson US and Amazon UK, reducing the price to $299.99 / £349.99, so it’s worth checking if there are savings to be made before you buy.

With its bladeless loop amplifier, glossy plastic, and metallic finishes, the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan has the modern, clean aesthetic we’ve come to expect from the brand. Generally, it’s available in a white and nickel colorway, but there’s a bonus option of black and nickel over in the US.

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(Image credit: Future)

Unlike most of the best fans and best air purifiers, the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan lacks onboard controls and app compatibility, and can only be controlled with the included remote control. While this in itself isn’t an issue, as the remote works well and has a magnetic, curved design that makes it easy to store on the top of the loop amplifier, it does mean that you’d be a bit scuppered if you happened to lose the remote. Not to mention that, at this price point, it’s verging on stingy that Dyson hasn’t given the TP10 the app compatibility that’s included with their more expensive products.

Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan (White) at Newegg for $429.99

In terms of the fan performance, I got the results I expected when testing the TP10 Purifying Fan; namely that it produced a smooth and cooling flow of air, the strength of which was particularly impressive when running at top speed, as I could still feel the cooling effects 14ft / 4.3m away.

As the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan’s sensors can only detect particulate matter and not VOCs (volatile organic compounds), it won’t automatically react to all airborne nasties, but it’s still capable of filtering them thanks to the HEPA H13 and activated carbon filter. The LCD screen displays the real-time levels of PM2.5 and PM10 in micrograms per cubic meter, with color coding making it clear how this translates to air quality, ranging from good to very poor. There’s also a 24-hour graph, which offers a basic indication of the changes in air quality over time.

(Image credit: Future)

I was happy with the speedy detection and prompt air clearing I recorded during my time testing the TP10 Purifying Fan, with it detecting and clearing contamination from dry shampoo within a minute of me spraying it, and automatically upping its power when my two fluffy cats paid a visit. It didn’t make a noticeable impact on food odors or the dry shampoo fragrance, however.

The noise levels were also commendable, with the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan giving whisper-quiet readings as low as 26dB and 33dB in auto mode and on fan speed one, and the highest reading on fan speed ten being just 52dB, which is equivalent to light traffic.

Despite my frustrations around the lack of app support, I’d still recommend the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan, thanks to the overall good performance from both elements. If you’ve not got your heart set on a Dyson, or don’t want to have a tower fan running in the colder months, I recommend teaming up the Blueair Blue Pure 411i Max with the Shark TurboBlade. Both performed well in our testing, and thanks to regular deals, the two together often work out cheaper than the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 alone.

Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan review: price & availability

List price: $429.99 / £449.99 / AU$799
Available now in the US, UK, and Australia

Available from Dyson and other retailers, the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 purifying fan has a list price of $429.99 / £449.99 / AU$799. It’s available in white and silver, with an additional option of black and nickel for shoppers in the US. It’s worth keeping a lookout for potential savings, as at the time of writing, there’s a generous $130 saving on the white model at Dyson US, bringing the cost down to $299.99. Meanwhile, in the UK, there’s a 22% discount in effect, lowering the price to £349.99.

According to Dyson, the 360 Combi Glass HEPA + Carbon air purifier filter used in the TP10 could last around 12 months of 12-hour use. Replacement filters have a list price of $79.99 / £75 / AU$99, so it’s worth considering whether you’re happy to commit to paying this out on a fairly regular basis before making a purchase.

I initially considered the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan a little overpriced, largely due to the lack of app support for the cost, but the TP10 won me over with its strong airflow, prompt particulate detection, and quick reaction times. Could you get a separate tower fan and air purifier that would do the job just as well for less money? Probably, but if you’re a Dyson fan who wants a Dyson fan, plus an air purifier, I’d recommend this combo.

Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan review: specs

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Type

Purifying tower fan

Fan speeds

Oscillation

45, 90, 180, 350 degrees

Timer

Yes

CADR (Clean air delivery rate)

Requested

Filter

HEPA H13 and activated carbon

Particle sizes detected

PM2.5, PM10

Dimensions

8.7 x 8.7 x 41.3 inches / 22 x 22 x 105cm

Weight

10.4 lb / 4.7kg

Control

Onboard power button and remote control

Timer

Only in sleep mode

Additional modes

Sleep mode

Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan review: design and features

Offers real-time, color-coded PM2.5 and PM10 readings
No smart features or app compatibility
HEPA H13 filters are easy to access and replace

Featuring the classic Dyson aesthetic with its bladeless fan and smooth curves, this is a purifying fan I didn’t mind having out on display. That being said, I did find the glossy white plastic was a bit of a dust and lint magnet. The metallic nickel-color plastic was too, but it was barely noticeable compared to the white.

A useful combo for the summer months, the Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 consists of a bladeless tower fan that sits on a purifying unit. This purifying unit houses a HEPA H13 filter, with H13 being considered to be within the highest tier of HEPA air filtration, and is understood to capture 99.95% of particles as small as 0.2 microns. The filter comes in two halves, with one half clipping into the front of the purifying unit, the other at the back. Both halves are easy to get to thanks to the push-down catches on either side of the unit.

(Image credit: Future)

There are ten fan speeds to cycle through, as well as an auto mode, which uses the sensors on the TP10 Purifying Fan to detect and react to the presence of particulate matter with a diameter of up to ten micrometers. It can’t detect VOCs (volatile organic compounds), which can be emitted by paint and cleaning chemicals, among other sources, but the carbon element of the 360 Combi Glass HEPA and Carbon air purifier filter means it’s still capable of clearing them from the air.

One thing that frustrates me with some Dyson devices is the lack of smart features and app compatibility. Considering this functionality is available with the more expensive Dyson products, and far cheaper brands offer remote control and air quality data via their apps, it seems a little unfair for Dyson to hold this feature back unless customers are willing to pay an even higher premium.

Aside from the power button, there’s a distinct lack of onboard controls on the TP10. This isn’t an outright issue, as I’d have used the included remote control nine times out of ten anyway, but with no app compatibility, it does mean I’d find myself in a bit of a pickle if I managed to lose the remote. As with all of the Dyson remotes I’ve used, the one for the TP10 is curved and magnetized, meaning it can be kept on the top of the fan.

(Image credit: Future)

The round LCD screen on the front of the TP10 is bright and large enough to read easily. It was easy to cycle through the multiple different displays using the information button on the remote control. The information I was most interested in was the particle readings, and I was happy to find there were dedicated screens showing the ambient levels of both PM2.5 and PM10. Both readings are independently communicated in numerals and color rating, making them simple to understand. The TP10 has been programmed to classify readings below 35 micrograms per cubic meter as good air quality, with higher readings colored either yellow for fair air quality, orange for poor, or red for very poor.

While the lack of a companion app means it’s not possible to view historical data, or real-time data when away from home, there’s a 24-hour graph on one of the display screens, so I could at least see if there’d been any spikes in contamination throughout the day – though that was as detailed as it got. It’s worth noting that the continuous monitoring needed to support this function isn’t enabled by default, but it’s a simple case of holding the auto button on the remote for five seconds to enable it.

Design score: 3.5 out of 5

Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan review: performance

Returned air quality to an acceptable level within a minute of air contamination
Didn’t reduce or eliminate odors from cooking or fragrances
Quickly reacted to the presence of cat fluff and dander

All of the fan functions performed as expected during my time testing the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan. It was good to have a wide range of oscillation options, with four choices from 45 to 350 degrees, and I appreciated that, unlike the Dyson Cool CF1 desk fan, the TP10 remembered the last oscillation setting I’d used, so I didn’t have to cycle through the options each time. I find it curious that the timer on the TP10 Purifying Fan is only available in sleep mode, which dims the display, so I had to use the remote to wake the display if I wanted to view the current air quality reading whenever I used the timer.

The airflow felt smooth, but seemed to fluctuate a little at times. In terms of fan strength, I found I could feel a noticeable, cool breeze around 4ft / 1.2m away from the TP10 Purifying Fan on setting one, 7ft / 2m on setting five, and 14ft / 4.3m on speed 10, which is admirable considering it doesn’t run very loud.

(Image credit: Future)

To test the PM2.5 detection while the fan was on auto mode, I sprayed some dry shampoo around two feet away from the front of the TP10. The sensors picked up the presence of the dry shampoo particles in about 16 seconds, and I saw the levels of PM2.5 per cubic meter rapidly climbing on the LDC screen.

It was interesting to see a numerical representation of the speed at which the Dyson TP10 cleared the air, as not all air purifiers offer this level of data. In this case, the contamination dropped from 89 micrograms per cubic meter to 35 micrograms per cubic meter, which was back within the green range, within a minute of me spraying the dry shampoo. While it made quick work of clearing the particulates in the air, it didn’t have any effect on the odor from the dry shampoo or from the food smells from the minestrone soup I had on my lunch break.

It’s very easy to tell whether the larger-particle sensors on an air purifier are doing their job once I get my two very fluffy cats involved in the testing process, after evicting them from my living room for the initial stages of my testing, so that I can set a baseline. It was clear the particle sensors on the TP10 were sensitive to pet-related particles like fur and dander after both kitties came to investigate, as both the PM2.5 and PM10 readings rose by around eight micrograms, and the fan speed increased slightly to compensate. It stayed at roughly this level, with the occasional ramp-up in speed, for the entire time they were in the room. Once they’d wandered off, it took less than ten minutes for the purifier to bring the reading back down to its usual level.

(Image credit: Future)

The Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan operated really quietly, considering its size, with a lower than whisper-quiet reading of just 26dB when idling on auto mode, rising to 33dB on fan speed one, 38dB on speed 5, and just 52dB on speed ten, which is comparable to light traffic or background music. This is particularly positive when compared to the readings I got from the Molekule Air Pro, which gave an output of 38dB at the lowest fan speed, 51dB on speed three, and a pretty shouty 78dB at speed six, though admittedly the TP10 doesn’t have any where near as many bells and whistles.

As an added testament to the quiet functioning of the TP10 Purifying Fan, my very timid female cat spooks at most things, but was comfortable enough to touch her nose on the display even when the purifier was ramping up in response to her presence. It’s also worth mentioning that it was quiet enough to fall asleep next to, and I could happily watch TV with the TP10 running at level five fan speed nearby.

The quick detection, reaction, and purifying times meant I was pleased with the performance of the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan overall, though I didn’t find it made the air feel quite as fresh as the GoveeLife Smart Air Purifier Lite.

Performance score: 4.5 out of 5

Should I buy the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan?

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Section

Notes

Score

Value for money

The TP10’s premium design, pleasant cooling, and powerful purifying performance mean you won’t be disappointed, but you could save money by ditching Dyson and combining a well-performing fan and purifier instead.

4/5

Design & Features

The smooth curves, bladeless design, and nice material finish make the TP10 an attractive purifying solution. It detects and communicates the ambient levels of particulate matter before they’re captured by the HEPA H13 filter. It’s just a shame there’s no smart features.

3.5/5

Performance

I appreciated the satisfyingly strong airflow and prompt purifying performance, with the TP10’s sensors making quick work of detecting and removing particles from the air. Its quiet operation meant it wasn’t disruptive, so much so that it didn’t phase my flighty feline.

4.5/5

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan review: Also consider

Swipe to scroll horizontallyHeader Cell – Column 0

Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10

Blueair Blue Pure 411i Max / Blue Max 3250i

Shark TurboBlade

Type

Purifying tower fan

Air purifier

Multi-directional tower fan

Price

$429.99 / £449.99 / AU$799

$169.99 / £169

$299.99 / £249.99

Fan speeds

Additional modes

Auto, sleep mode

Auto, night mode

Natural Breeze, Sleep Mode, BreezeBoost

Oscillation

Up to 350 degrees

N/A

Up to 180 degrees

Filter

HEPA H13 and activated carbon

HEPASilent and activated carbon

N/A

App support

Yes

Dimensions

8.7 x 8.7 x 41.3 inches / 220 x 220 x 1,050mm

18.9 x 10.6 x 10.6″ / 481 x 269 x 269 mm

11.8 x 31.6 x 44.8″ / 300 x 800 x 1,120mm (max)

Weight

10.4 lb / 4.7kg

7.5 lbs / 3.4 kg

15lb / 8.8kg

How I tested the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan

I used the TP10 purifying fan in the office and at home
I observed its detection and purification skills
I evaluated the strength of the airflow and the sound levels

I used the Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan in our photo studio, my home office, and my bedroom for one week. I evaluated how easy it was to operate, along with the build quality and aesthetics, and explored the available functions and features.

I tested the strength of the airflow by determining at what distance I could still feel a cooling breeze. I also observed the TP10 Purifying Fan’s detection and purification skills, both passively and during standardized testing.

I used a decibel meter app on my iPhone to record the noise levels, taking readings from around 2ft / 600mm away, ensuring the fan wasn’t blowing directly into the microphone.

I checked the timer worked as expected, and tested out the sleep mode to see whether the TP10 Purifying Fan was quiet enough for me to be able to sleep well with it running overnight.

Dyson Purifier Cool Gen1 TP10 Purifying Fan: Price Comparison

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June 16, 2025 0 comments

Dell 14 Plus 2-in-1 Review: A solid 2-in-1, though not without compromise

Product Reviews

Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch review: purple imperfect

by admin June 16, 2025

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Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch: Two-minute review

I have been begging Apple to release a purple MacBook for a few years now and have been repeatedly disappointed year after year, so when I found out that the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch was going to sport a pastel purple colorway, it really was Microsoft’s game to lose here.

And while it doesn’t quite come close enough to dethroning the Apple MacBook Air 13-inch, performance-wise, it’s a very solid everyday laptop that looks undeniably superior to Apple’s rather boring MacBook Air design over the past couple of years.

The Surface Laptop 13-inch starts at $899.99 / £1,099 / AU$1,699 on Microsoft’s website, which is roughly the same price as the MacBook Air 13-inch (which starts at $999 / £999 / AU$1,699), but its performance, at times, is substantially slower than Apple’s best laptop, making it an iffy value proposition for those who could go either way as far as operating systems go.

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Had the Surface Laptop 13-inch shipped with an Intel Lunar Lake chip rather than the underpowered Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus 8-core SoC, this would be an entirely different review, as I’d be giving this laptop six-out-of-five stars, because in just about every other way than its performance and minor compatibility issues, this is the best ultrabook I’ve ever put my hands on.

Aesthetically, it’s an upgrade over its larger Surface Laptop 7 sibling that launched last year, with a tighter form factor that is exceptionally lightweight and sleek. It’s 3:2 display offers plenty of real estate for a laptop this small, and its keyboard and trackpad are a dream to type on.

Best of all, it comes in purple (technically ‘Violet’), though you will pay slightly more for this color option than the base platinum colorway as it is only available on the higher capacity configuration.

Meanwhile, the ARM-based Snapdragon X Plus is an incredibly efficient chip, getting just over 17 hours of battery life on a single charge in my testing, which easily translates into two full workdays or more without recharging, outlasting even the latest MacBook Air 13-inch models.

If all you’re looking for is a gorgeous-looking laptop that is great for everyday computing tasks, school work, and general productivity—while liberating you from having to keep a constant eye out for power outlets to recharge day after day—then the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch is one of the best Windows laptops you can buy. It just isn’t the knockout blow against the MacBook Air that Windows fans might be hoping for.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch: Price & availability

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

How much does it cost? Starts at $899.99 / £1,039 / AU$1,699
When is it available? It’s available now
Where can you get it? You can buy it in the US, UK, and Australia

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch is available now, starting at $899.99 / £899 / AU$1,699 directly from Microsoft or at retail partners. It comes in slightly cheaper than the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 in the US and UK, (starting at $1,099.99 and £1,039, respectively). In Australia, however, the larger Surface Laptop 7 13.8-inch starts out cheaper at AU$1,597 (and it comes with more powerful hardware to boot).

The Surface Laptop 7 13.8-inch also features a more powerful Qualcomm chip, a sharper screen, and better port support (though no Violet colorway, you’ll have to settle for the equally gorgeous Sapphire option).

Similarly, the Surface Laptop 13-inch is also slightly cheaper than the MacBook Air 13-inch with M4 in the US (starting at $999), while being slightly more expensive in the UK (the base MacBook Air 13-inch start at £999), while there is no difference in starting price between the two in Australia.

Compare this, however, with a similar memory-and-storage-specced Dell 14 Plus, starting at $799.99 / £999 / AU$1,298, but which comes with more powerful x86 processors from AMD and Intel, meaning that you get better performance without any compatibility worries that comes with ARM-based chips.

Granted, none of these competing laptops look anywhere near as good as the Surface Laptop 13-inch, but if your main interest is performance, there are cheaper options that will get you what you want.

All that said, however, this is the best-looking laptop you’re going to find at this price, in my opinion, and yes, that includes the entire MacBook lineup. If you want to look good at a cafe while reading emails, or streaming Netflix in an airport lounge while waiting for a flight, this laptop will turn heads (at least in Violet) without totally breaking the bank.

The only real knock I can point to is that the long-term value of the Surface Laptop 13-inch is lower than a MacBook Air 13-inch with M4. The latter is much more performant and it will stay ‘current’ for a few years longer than the Surface Laptop 13-inch, in all likelihood.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch: Specs

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus 8-core SoC
16GB LPDDR5x
The display could be better

There isn’t a whole lot of variation in terms of spec configurations for the Surface Laptop 13-inch, with the biggest difference being some extra storage and two additional colorway options.

Swipe to scroll horizontallyMicrosoft Surface Laptop 13-inch Base Specs

Price:

$899.99 at Microsoft.com | £899 at Microsoft.com| AU$1,699 at Microsoft.com

Colorways:

Platinum

CPU:

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus 8-core

GPU:

Qualcomm Adreno X1-45

Memory:

16GB LPDDR5X-4300

Storage:

256GB SSD

Screen:

13-inch, 3:2, 1920x1280p 60Hz, 400-nit, Touch PixelSense

Ports:

2 x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 w/ DP and Power Delivery, 1 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, 1 x combo jack

Battery (WHr):

50WHr

Wireless:

WiFi 7, BT 5.4

Camera:

1080p

Weight:

2.7 lbs (1.22 kg)

Dimensions:

11.25 x 8.43 x 0.61 ins | (285.65 x 214.14 x 15.6mm)

For $100 / £100 / AU$200 more, you can upgrade the storage on the Surface Laptop 13-inch to 512GB and get additional Violet and Ocean colorway options, but otherwise the more expensive configuration (which I tested out for this review) is identical to the base configuration.

Swipe to scroll horizontallyMicrosoft Surface Laptop 13-inch Max Specs

Price:

$999.99 at Microsoft.com | £999 at Microsoft.com| AU$1,899 at Microsoft.com

Colorways:

Platinum, Violet, Ocean

CPU:

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus 8-core

GPU:

Qualcomm Adreno X1-45

Memory:

16GB LPDDR5X-4300

Storage:

512GB SSD

Screen:

13-inch, 3:2, 1920x1280p 60Hz, 400-nit, Touch PixelSense display

Ports:

2 x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 w/ DP and Power Delivery, 1 x USB Type-A 3.1, 1 x 3.5mm combo jack

Battery (WHr):

50WHr

Wireless:

WiFi 7, BT 5.4

Camera:

1080p

Weight:

2.7 lbs (1.22 kg)

Dimensions:

11.25 x 8.43 x 0.61 ins | (285.65 x 214.14 x 15.6mm)

There’s no option to upgrade the memory or storage on any of these models beyond the configuration options at the time of purchase, which does make the longevity of the Surface Laptop 13-inch’s specs more limited than laptops like the Dell 14 Plus, where you can at least upgrade the storage if you’d like.

And while the specs on the MacBook Air 13-inch with M4 might not be upgradable either, they are simply better overall for a relatively small increase in price, meaning the long-term value of the MacBook Air 13-inch (M4) is superior overall.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch: Design

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

Beautiful color options and fantastic aesthetics
Light and portable
Display resolution is only 1280p with no HDR

The design of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch is simply stunning. There’s no other way to describe it. Starting with the exterior aesthetics, the Surface Laptop 13-inch is as close to a MacBook Air for Windows as you’re going to find on the market, and in my opinion, it’s even better looking thanks to the additional Violet and Ocean colorways alongside the default Platinum look of the base model. You pay extra for the splash of color, but it’s a worthwhile investment. The machined aluminum finish of the laptop chassis, along with the pastel-ish hue of the chassis and the darker, more matte color of the keycaps and trackpad.

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

The display on the Surface Laptop 13-inch is a step down from the larger 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 7 from 2024, which had a maximum resolution of 2,304×1,536p (a PPI of 201, compared to the 1,920×1,280p Surface Laptop 13-inch’s 178 PPI) and 120Hz refresh compared to just 60Hz for the Surface Laptop 13-inch.

It also has a lower contrast ratio of 1,000:1 compared to the larger version’s 1,400:1. The Surface Laptop 7’s display is also made of Corning Gorilla Glass 5. In contrast, the Surface Laptop 13-inch’s display is only “Strengthened glass” according to Microsoft’s official spec sheet for the Surface Laptop lineup.

The display does max out at 400-nits, though, which is nice and bright enough for most people and situations, but you might struggle to see the screen properly if you’re using the laptop outside on a bright sunny day.

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

I found that carrying the Surface Laptop 13-inch around was very easy, as it fit in pretty much any bag and was thin and compact enough that I was able to use it sitting in an airplane seat during my 15-hour flight to Computex 2025 last month with almost no issue.

Speaking of using the laptop, the key switches are quiet and have good travel and responsiveness, and everything is well-spaced, so you don’t feel cramped despite the laptop’s smaller size. The trackpad is likewise responsive and smooth, making navigation and clicking around the desktop a breeze.

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

One thing that’s not that great is the port selection, which is limited to two USB-C Gen 3.2 ports, a USB-A Gen 3.1 port, and a 3.5mm jack for a headset. It’d have been nice to get some USB4 ports in there like you get with the larger Surface Laptop 7 models, but both USB-C ports do support power delivery and DP 1.4 output (though if you’re trying to connect to more than one monitor, you need one port per monitor, rather than being able to daisy-chain them to just a single port).

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

The webcam, meanwhile, is a 1080p Surface Studio Camera that is crisp enough, but unlike the larger Surface Laptop models from last year, it does not support Windows Hello authentication, and it doesn’t have a physical privacy shutter, which in 2025 should be pretty much mandatory, so along with the port and display downgrades, I’ve got to ding what is otherwise a nearly perfect design.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch: Performance

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

A performance downgrade from last year’s Surface Laptop
Some compatibility issues with ARM architecture still linger
Gaming is functionally a no-go

What holds the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch from really being the fierce MacBook Air competitor that many of us hoped it would be is the 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus SoC.

When I reviewed the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 last year, I was genuinely impressed by the performance of the Snapdragon X Elite chip, despite the compatibility challenges that Windows-on-Arm is still working through. That was a much more powerful chip, though, and even the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus SoC offers noticeably better performance than what the Surface Laptop 13-inch is packing.

The 8-core chip isn’t awful, to be clear. It’s perfectly good for general computing tasks like streaming, school work, and office productivity, and it’s probably one of the best student laptops out there for those who want a little bit of style to go along with their studies.

But if you need this laptop to do anything other than writing up papers and reports, streaming movies, or using web-based cloud software, you will likely be unhappy with what you’re getting here for the price.

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

The most direct and obvious comparisons I can make with this laptop is the Apple MacBook Air 13-inch with Apple Silicon (starting with the Apple M2), the larger 13.8-inch Surface Laptop 7, the recently released Dell 14 Plus, last year’s Dell XPS 13 (with both Intel and Qualcomm SoCs), and the Asus Zenbook A14 with the entry-level Snapdragon X SoC.

Only the M2 MacBook Air 13-inch and Dell 14 Plus are cheaper than the Surface Laptop 13-inch (at least at the time of review), and all of these laptops start around the same price, give or take a hundred bucks or so.

The models I’ve tested and that TechRadar has reviewed in the past vary by spec, so it’s not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison laid out in the charts above, as some of the Dell and Apple notebooks’ advantages can be easily chalked up to more expensive processors.

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

If you go with any of those systems at the same price as the Surface Laptop 13-inch I tested, the performance difference might not be nearly as dramatic on paper, and almost certainly won’t be all that noticeable.

Still, it’s pretty clear that the Surface Laptop 13-inch either lands somewhere in the middle of its competition, or comes in second or third from the bottom. Add to that some performance issues stemming from Microsoft’s Prism software layer that translates x86-architecture-designed programs, which is pretty much every Windows program, to be ARM-compatible.

Generally, this works rather well, but it does introduce system overhead that will slow things down. In short, unless you’re running a piece of rare ARM-native software, you will almost never get as good an experience with Windows software on ARM as you would with the x86 architecture powering Intel and AMD chips.

The question really comes down to whether or not the performance is good enough, and I think that for most people, it will be (unless you want to load up Steam and get into PC gaming. The best gaming laptop, this is not).

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

Much like the MacBook Air 13-inch, the Surface Laptop 13-inch is more geared toward casual computing needs and productivity work, and it excels at these tasks.

So, even though the MacBook Air 13-inch with M4 gets roughly twice as many FPS as the Surface Laptop 13-inch, the MacBook Air 13-inch still struggles to maintain playable frame rates unless you seriously scale back your graphics settings.

The MacBook’s gaming advantage, then, only really looks intimidating as a percentage, but in practice, none of the laptops I tested were suitable for the task of playing, say, Cyberpunk 2077 at max settings and native resolution.

What it really boils down to, then, is whether you’re just looking for a new laptop to keep up with friends and family, maybe do some office work, or write that Sci-Fi novel at the local coffee shop that you’ve been meaning to finally get around to this year.

If those are the boxes that need ticking, any of the laptops listed above will get the job done, but none will look as good as the Violet Surface Laptop 13-inch.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch: Battery Life

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

How long does it last on a single charge? 17 hours and 14 minutes
How long to recharge from empty to full? With the included 45W charger, it takes about two and a half hours to charge to full.

One other key area where the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch shines is its stellar battery life. In my testing, it ran about 17 hours and 14 minutes on average in my battery test, thanks to the super efficient ARM architecture. This puts it in fourth place overall in my 10 laptop test group, but it does outlast all three MacBook Air 13-inch models in the group by an hour or more.

So even though it’s not officially in the battery life winner’s circle, you can’t ask for much more from a laptop this thin and light.

Should you buy the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch?

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)Swipe to scroll horizontallyMicrosoft Surface Laptop 13 Scorecard

Buy the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch if…

Don’t buy it if…

Also consider

If my Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch review has you looking at other options, here are three other laptops you should consider instead…

How I tested the Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch

I spent about a month with the device
I used our standard suite of benchmarking tools and performance tests
I used it as my primary work laptop, including taking it on an international work trip

I spent about a month with the Surface Laptop 13-inch, far longer than I usually spend with a device under review. While this was mostly due to circumstance (Computex and WWDC, in particular), this did allow me to do a much deeper dive.

In addition to my normal benchmarking process, I took extra time to retest some competing laptops we had in the office to come up with a more thorough comparison against the Surface Laptop 13-inch’s competitors.

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June 16, 2025 0 comments