I wrote one-sentence reviews of over 70 Steam demos to help you decide which to try before Next Fest ends - Related to ends, reviews, exciting, movies, 2025

I wrote one-sentence reviews of over 70 Steam demos to help you decide which to try before Next Fest ends

You ever play so many game demos that your brain turns into a kind of game-infused gelatin capable only of learning new controls and input schemes? Well, I have, and I did it for you.

Below, you'll find single-sentence assessments of nearly every one of the 83 demos I played during Steam Next Fest this month. I didn't include my top five, because I wrote about them in a separate article, and I skipped a few that I didn't think warranted even a brief comment, but I still wound up with 72 takes. My favorites of the list are bolded.

God Forsaken - A bland action roguelike.

Total Chaos - I'm not yet sold on this Doom mod turned standalone horror game, but it is pretty.

Nordhold - I'm a simple man: You give me hex-based grids and I'll play your weird little tower defense demo. It was good, too.

- I'm a simple man: You give me hex-based grids and I'll play your weird little tower defense demo. It was good, too. Missing Banban - Weird little 2D platformer. Did not find Banban.

Wheel World - A bike racing adventure-sports game where you are chosen by the bike gods. That is not a joke. It's also kind of good?

I Am Legion: Stand Survivors - One of the only promising bullet-hellish action roguelikes from the entire Next Fest—and even then just enough to keep watching.

Labyrinth of the Demon King - Delightfully atmospheric and somewhat upsetting first-person dungeon crawling survival horror game.

- Delightfully atmospheric and somewhat upsetting first-person dungeon crawling survival horror game. Unyielder - Boss rush movement FPS with looter shooting is probably exactly what some people want but it turns out I do not like that.

Reignbreaker - It's a Hades-like action roguelike that has a pretty unique "medievalpunk" style and actually understands the "punk" part of that.

Urban Jungle - An adorably chill little game about fitting as many houseplants as possible into your tiny apartment.

Dagger Directive - I never figured someone would be doing a deliberately lo-fi Operation Flashpoint successor in 2025 but you know what, more power to them.

Star Crafter - This wants to be the blank in the Factorio : Dyson Sphere Program :: Satisfactory : ???? analogy.

Blightstone - I'm not 100% sold on the tactics part of this hardcore resource-management roguelike.

Redemption of Liuyin - I'm just not sure you can pull off soulslike and high-fidelity graphics at this scale and budget, but I wish them luck.

Cybertaxi: Lunatic Nights - A bit too jank for my endorsement, but taxi driving in the kind of city where you need a flamethrower on your car is too fun a premise not to watch.

MechaKnights Legends - Really early proof-of-concept demo here, but fantasy mecha Monster Hunter is a good idea.

Jitter - A funky little spaceship management game that needs some control refinement.

Rock Crusher - It's early in development, but these are the solid bones of an incremental time-waster.

Chaos Front - China's foremost—to me, at least—indie strategy developer turns their hand to mech mercenary management.

- China's foremost—to me, at least—indie strategy developer turns their hand to mech mercenary management. Savara - A nicely pastel action-roguelike that's more fun than it appears in trailers.

Pochemeow - A strange little strategy game about running trade wars.

Death Ring: Second Impact - An intriguing little mecha tactics game about taking down waves of giant monsters.

Mystical Tactics - Lo-fi tactical RPG that moves at a nice quick pace.

Uber Urban - An indie city builder with a few novel mechanics.

- An indie city builder with a few novel mechanics. Sweep - A dungeon deckbuilder where you pick whatever cards you want from your hand, which reveals why we draw random hands to be honest.

Anoxia Station - Wouldn't have thought that a combination of colony sim and horror would work at all, but it does.

Starless Abyss - A thematically rad, rather hard deckbuilder about sci-fi scientists and occultists teaming up to battle eldritch horrors.

Scarecrow - Somehow furry Hotline Miami is more upsetting than regular Hotline Miami.

Wanderstop - A very wholesome little life sim from the dev of Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide—worth watching.

Conquest Dark - An action RPG that only runs on turbo fast mode, which is what's good and bad about it.

Fumes - A lo-fi vehicular combat game that was very, very close to being in my top 5.

- A lo-fi vehicular combat game that was very, very close to being in my top 5. Dice Legends - A cards and dice battler with not much to recommend it over others—still, genre lovers might want to take a look.

Neongarten - A delightfully minimalist cyberpunk puzzle city builder that jumped right onto my wishlist.

- A delightfully minimalist cyberpunk puzzle city builder that jumped right onto my wishlist. Where Noble Plans Lie - It needs work, but the idea of a city builder where you're actually trying to ruin the kingdom is cool.

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The 20 most exciting movies of spring 2025

Summer movie season is starting earlier and earlier every year, and this one is no exception. This spring has all kinds of exciting movies, and maybe even a few of the best and biggest movies of the year.

As you might expect, the biggest highlights are movies in the big franchises. The MCU is bringing out Thunderbolts* led by Florence Pugh and Sebastian Stan, while Tom Cruise is returning for what could be the (or at least his) last Mission: Impossible movie ever. Meanwhile, Disney is all in on live-action remakes, with Snow White and Lilo & Stitch due out in the next few months. Thankfully, there’s some exciting original movies coming too, like David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds or Ryan Coogler’s vampire horror movie Sinners.

To help you keep track of all the fantastic-looking movies that are on the way, we’ve made a list of the 20 best movies of spring 2025.

PLANKTON: THE MOVIE - Plankton’s world is flipped upside down when his plan for world domination is thwarted. Cr: Netflix/Nickelodeon Movies © 2025 Image: Nickelodeon/Netflix.

Cast: Mr. Lawrence, Jill Talley, Tom Kenny.

SpongeBob’s best character finally gets her due. That’s right — even though this movie is called Plankton, it’s Karen, his computer wife, who rises up and decides to dump his lame ass and take over the world herself. Meanwhile, Plankton has to team up with SpongeBob and the rest of the heroes in order to win her back. —Petrana Radulovic.

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo.

What’s superior than one Robert Pattinson doing slapstick comedy with a funny voice? Two Robert Pattinsons! Well, at least two. Bong Joon-ho’s newest movie has Pattinson playing a worker in a capitalist sci-fi hellscape who’s signed up to test the limits of a new human colony and get cloned every time he dies. —PR.

Cast: Dave Bautista, Milla Jovovich, Arly Jover.

The latest in a long series of #powercouplegoals collaborations between spouses Paul [website] Anderson and Milla Jovovich (the Resident Evil movies, 2020’s Monster Hunter, 2011’s The Three Musketeers), In the Lost Lands is billed as the first feature adaptation of George [website] Martin’s work. Adapted from Martin’s 1982 short story, it’s a dark fantasy about an infamous witch (Jovovich) who hires a grizzled hunter (Dave Bautista) to help her track down a werewolf through a post-apocalyptic landscape ruled by a tyrannical overlord and an even more tyrannical church. Just your basic future-fantasy Western slash monster movie, with a heavy side order of Furiosa in the setting and characters. —Tasha Robinson.

Cast: Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich, Juliette Lewis.

The second of A24’s eight scheduled genre-spanning 2025 movies (after Parthenope in early February), Opus follows a dedicated but frequently sidelined music journalist (The Bear and Bottoms co-star Ayo Edebiri) to the secretive compound of a cultishly adored pop star (John Malkovich) who wants her to hear his first album in 30 years. Mark Anthony Green’s directorial debut, a horror-thriller about fame and power, got mixed reviews at Sundance, but the lead performers remain promising. —TR.

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie.

Cast: Eric Bauza, Candi Milo, Peter MacNicol.

Daffy Duck and Porky Pig team up to save the Earth from an alien invasion. But considering their big personalities and generally dysfunctional working relationship, they might just drive each other crazy before they can save anyone. Where’s Bugs? Who knows? But Petunia Pig is also here. —PR.

Cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Stanley Tucci.

Once-and-future Avengers directors Anthony and Joe Russo are launching their new sprawling science fiction movie on Netflix: Loosely based on a 2018 novel from Swedish retrofuturist Simon Stålenhag (whose work also inspired the Tales from the Loop TV show, board game, TTRPG, etc.), The Electric State has a teenager (Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown) on a road trip to track down her missing brother via a robot (Anthony Mackie) he sent to find her. The twist: They’re living in a post-robot-apocalypse world where the robots have all been banned to a wasteland. Early looks at this one have a strong [website] Artificial Intelligence feel, with a side order of Ready Player One and a whole lot of familiar names: Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Woody Harrelson, Jenny Slate, Giancarlo Esposito, and a lot more. —TR.

Cast: Rachel Zegler, Gal Gadot, Andrew Burnap.

It’s another Disney live-action remake! This one is full of… well, let’s just say that the CG dwarfs are a choice. And they did Rachel Zegler so damn dirty with that haircut and Party City-esque dress. But Zegler has pipes, and maybe the fact she looks and acts like a literal Disney Princess might be enough to save this one. —PR.

Cast: Eiza González, Aaron Paul, Iko Uwais.

In space, no one can hear you say “Hey, where’d all my crewmates go?” Eiza González (3 Body Problem) stars as a woman who wakes up in a space station, her memory missing and her companions all dead. Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul co-stars as the ominous figure from her past who arrives to “help.” Directed and soundtracked by composer Flying Lotus (Kuso), this original science fiction thriller looks like a banger, hitting some discomfiting Alien vibes without being yet another derivative Alien movie. —TR.

Cast: Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter.

A24’s new comedy horror fantasy is about the fallout of a man and his daughter hitting a unicorn with their car. The man’s pharmaceutical CEO boss immediately wants to exploit the unicorn’s magical properties. But if there’s one thing we should all take away from old legends, it’s that you should not fuck around with a magical animal with a spear on its head. —PR.

Cast: Danielle Deadwyler, Okwui Okpokwasili, Russell Hornsby.

Prolific director Jaume Collet-Serra has his hits and misses: He was behind the virally popular Netflix thriller Carry-On, the excellent shark-attack movie The Shallows, and the startling horror film Orphan, but also the infamous superhero flop Black Adam. Here, he’s back with a mysterious Blumhouse movie that looks a bit like a creepypasta riff: A grieving woman (Danielle Deadwyler) and her family are haunted by a threatening apparition with an opaque warning. —TR.

Cast: Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Emma Myers.

The Minecraft movie is a little bit like Jumanji, but instead of being sucked into a jungle, the group of misfits gets pulled into the Minecraft world, where everything is cube-shaped and thrives on imagination. Also, Jack Black is here! So it is really like Jumanji. —PR.

Cast: Al Pacino, Dan Stevens, Ashley Greene.

It feels late in the game for a movie about an old priest (Al Pacino) and a young priest (Dan Stevens) facing a young woman who’s allegedly possessed by a demon. The twist in this case is that the young woman was inspired by Emma Schmidt, aka Anna Ecklund, a real-life woman whose alleged possession and monthslong exorcism in 1920s Iowa inspired several other horror movies. —TR.

Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton.

The exciting return of Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Fruitvale Station) stars Michael B. Jordan and, well, Michael B. Jordan as a pair of twins menaced by a supernatural force in the 1930s. The initial trailer looks slick, confident, and hard-hitting — somewhere between a ghost story and a bootlegger crime thriller. But the marketing has deliberately kept most facts about the movie under wraps, leaving the real nature of the horror here thrillingly opaque. —TR.

Cast: Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion.

The sort-of movie adaptation of the 2015 horror game Until Dawn puts a few new twists on the story, uniting some squabbling characters against an immediately obvious supernatural evil, and setting the story in a time loop, where different horrific monsters kill the characters every night, setting up a scenario where they have to out-think the setting and escape the loop before their 13th and final death. The execution looks a bit like 13 different iterations on The Cabin in the Woods, due to the proliferation of creepy creatures, the self-awareness of it all, and the sense of a trap closing on a pretty familiar cast of characters, but it remains to be seen whether Until Dawn the movie has any such sense of humor to it. —TR.

Cast: Helena Zengel, Finn Wolfhard, Willem Dafoe.

In a remote village in the Carpathian mountains, humans fend off the monstrous ochi. But when a lonely girl discovers a baby ochi, she’s determined to return it to its family — and discovers that maybe these strange creatures aren’t as vicious as she was led to believe. —PR.

Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce.

David Cronenberg’s latest body-horror movie is a heavy one: It centers on a grieving CEO (Vincent Cassel) who invents a technology that lets people monitor their loved ones’ graves, using a phone app to watch their bodies decay in real time. When vandals destroy a cemetery featuring his technology — including desecrating his wife’s grave — he has to figure out who and why. —TR.

Cast: Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s answer to the Suicide Squad forces a group of reluctant antiheroes — including Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and Red Guardian (David Harbour) — to team up for a mission. Will they get a chance at redemption? Or, more importantly, will the MCU? —PR.

Cast: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Richard Harmon.

The sixth installment in the Final Destination series has been pitched as a bit of a soft reboot for the series, not that continuity has ever mattered in movies built around people who escape death in a freak accident, and are then stalked by death via increasingly unlikely accidents. This time around, the action kicks off with a college student having recurring nightmares about death. Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, directors of the underseen, extremely fun 2018 sci-fi thriller Freaks, take the wheel this time out. —TR.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

Cast: Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg.

Tom Cruise takes up where he left off with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, back in 2023, still fighting a world-spanning, all-powerful AI via lots of dangerous stunts. Expect the mission to be possible, just barely. —TR.

Cast: Maia Kealoha, Chris Sanders, Sydney Agudong.

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Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti review: bad start, decent GPU

Zotac GeForce RTX 5070 Ti AMP Extreme Infinity specs: CUDA Cores: 8960.

I’m a bit late to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, which means that this review – while already a dismal failure in the glowing robot eyes of the Internet nowness machine – can at least factor in the context of the GPU’s first few days on sale. unveiled context can be summarised thusly: Ah. Umm. Errrrrrrr.

No, early life has not been kind to the RTX 5070 Ti. Inadequate stocks and the lack of an Nvidia-made Founders Edition, unlike those of the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, have cut the chances of finding one at the intended £729 / $749 RRP to pretty much nada. Not to mention how some models are shipping with missing render output units, potentially hurting performance. It’s a saddening start, made all the more unfortunate by the fact that the RTX 5070 Ti really isn’t a bad graphics card in itself.

If it were me, sure, I’d probably hold out for a base price model – the one I’ve been testing, Zotac’s GeForce RTX 5070 Ti AMP Extreme Infinity, ups itself to £910 / $930, with styling that’s slightly too 'Decepticon’s lunchbox' for my tastes. But within all that bulk is a GPU that can both eat max-quality 1440p alive and withstand the rigours of 4K, especially with the help of the DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation (MFG) that the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4070 Ti Super miss out on.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti review: 4K benchmarks.

To show what I mean, we return to the RPS test rig, which I’ve just updated with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (taking the place of the Intel Core i9-13900K). For the second time in 2025, this kills the comparison value of all previous GPU benchmark results – you’re welcome! – but the 9800X3D should prove the enhanced option in time, especially for the 1080p and 1440p tests where it most comfortably beats the i9-13900K. Anyhow, look, graphs:

In addition to thumping the RTX 4070 Ti in relatively faster games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus, the RTX 5070 Ti also keeps its head much improved in tricky ones like Cyberpunk 2077 F1 24. It’s actually knocking on the RTX 5080’s door in the latter, and is more or less neck and neck in Assassin’s Creed Mirage.

I didn’t have a handy RTX 4070 Ti Super to test with the new rig, though extrapolating from how it compared to the RTX 4070 Ti in previous tests, I’d be surprised if you wouldn’t still get double-digit framerate upgrades from all of these games outside Horizon Forbidden West. The RTX 5070 Ti also sticks with the last-gen Super version’s VRAM upgrades, and goes one step further by switching its 16GB of 256-bit memory to GDDR7. Definitely enough for 4K, in other words.

The RTX 5070 Ti is also more flexible with its frame generation. The usual disclaimers apply: Nvidia’s AI generated frames increase input lag rather than cutting it, so you should always ensure a stable base of traditionally rendered frames before trying frame gen. But that’s more attainable with the new model than it was on the RTX 4070 Ti – with upscaling, the RTX 5070 Ti can just about manage playable framerates with Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2’s harshest settings, path tracing included.

Obviously, 4x MFG puts visual smoothness beyond anything the RTX 4070 Ti can hope for. What’s arguably more key, though, is that the older GPU falls short of 30fps, meaning it’s not suitable for running this calibre of quality settings with out without frame gen. The RTX 5070 Ti is.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti review: 1440p benchmarks.

The RTX 5070 Ti also makes sense as a luxury 1440p driver. Although neither of its predecessors were lacking here, the new GPU still makes some sizeable gains, with Horizon Forbidden West and Total War: Warhammer III benefitting especially. There also looks to be plenty of headroom for more pixel-heavy ultrawide resolutions, like 3440x1440.

Without the added strain of 4K, the RTX 5070 Ti can also really start excelling with those difficult path tracing and ray tracing effects. Take Alan Wake 2: the RTX 4070 Ti is plenty playable here, averaging 45fps with the aid of Quality-level DLSS upscaling, but the RTX 5070 Ti’s 55fps is visibly slicker and slightly more responsive in the hand. Then, once again, MFG steps in to win the numbers game decisively.

The only real cause for pause here – not that you can simply hop on Ebuyer right now and rush your way to an RTX 5070 Ti purchase – is that it’ll be worth waiting to see how the incoming RTX 5070 compares, possibly as well as the AMD Radeon 9070 XT. The RTX 5070 Ti can evidently coast its way to smooth 1440p, though its close proximity to the RTX 5080 also makes me wonder if it might be more of a 'budget' (relatively speaking) 4K contender, with cheaper alternatives making for enhanced value on Quad HD monitors. We’ll see.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti review: 1080p benchmarks.

Unlike with the RTX 5080, I suspect there might be at least some maddened souls who’d consider an RTX 5070 Ti for humble 1080p. Thus, here’s a graph to show how silly that would be:

It’s not that the RTX 5070 Ti stops being faster than what came before – granted, with the aid of perhaps the most bottleneck-avoidant CPU on the planet – but when you get so far into the triple digits, numerical advantages cease to have the impact that they do below 120fps or so. Especially so, if you don’t have the kind of high-end monitor whose refresh rate is enough to keep pace with the frame output.

There are certainly much more efficient graphics cards for 1080p, with the RTX 5070 Ti being rated for 300W of max power drinkage and requiring at least a 700W PSU. 750W, in the case of this Zotac model, though at least it’s not an energy hog as a matter of course: I recorded it peaking at 253W, well shy of its official maximum, while running an intensive Cyberpunk 2077 session. I’ll also concede that one upside to its goliath dimensions is cooling performance, with the GPU temp only reaching 54°c under load. That’s positively icy by modern graphics card standards; the high-tech, dual-axial fan design of the RTX 5080 Founders Edition cooler could only keep its lid at 65°c.

For £729, you could chalk up the RTX 5070 Ti as another serviceable if rarely exciting Nvidia GPU. As we’ve seen, however, the problem is that you have about as much chance of getting this card for £729 as you do of buying Alexandra Palace for a tenner. And when actual prices are running so close to the entry level of the RTX 5080 – which, for all its own stock shortages, has a Founders Edition that is at least sold in theory for under a grand – then it’s fair to start asking questions. Questions like "Why should I not just get the 5080 instead?" and "How, Nvidia, did you forget what happened in 2020?"

While the RTX 5080 goes harder on PSUs, and doesn’t provide much meaningful extra oomph at 1440p, it is more generally futureproofed, with a marked 4K advantage that can be enjoyed today. At saner prices, the RTX 5070 Ti would still be more of a crowdpleaser, but there are clearly some kinks that need working out before it’s seriously worth your cash.

This review is based on a retail unit provided by the manufacturer.

[website] - Official Release Trailer - YouTube Watch On.

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