Top Five PC February 2018: Most Popular Videogames

1) Kingdom Come: Deliverance  is an action role-playing game set in an open world environment and played from a first-person perspective which utilizes a classless RPG system, allowing the player to customize their skills to take on roles such as a warrior, bard, thief or their hybrids. Abilities and stats grow depending on what the player does and says through branched dialogue trees. During conversations, the time a player takes to make a decision is limited and will have an effect on their relationships with others. Reputation is based on player choices and therefore can bring consequences.

Character bodies and faces are created through the combination of multiple, individual pieces with finishing touches. The clothing system features 16 item slots and items on many areas of the body that can be layered. For example, a heavily armored knight may on his upper body wear a gambeson, followed by mail and plate armour, with a tabard or surcoat over top, for a total of four clothing items in the chest slots. Each clothing type provides different levels of protection against different types of weapons. Clothing also gets progressively more worn, dirty, or bloody through use, affecting the character's appearance. The player is able to use a variety of weapons including swords, knives, axes, hammers or bows. Horses are featured heavily in the game, and are designed to act with their own AI while under the player's control, moving or jumping to avoid small obstacles or dangers. The player can also fight from horseback and use their steed to carry items if they need additional inventory space, but warhorses are also competent combatants with their own AI. Steeds come with five slots for armor and attachments.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance also features a needs system which requires the player to sleep and eat in order to stay healthy. Equipment and clothing also degrade and require repair. Foodstuffs and other perishable items will spoil over time. The game uses skill/stat-based mini-games for many of these tasks including weapon and armor repair, as well as for gathering new items by picking locks or pockets, distilling alcohol or creating medicines. The game uses long- and short-ranged weapons in combat which is based on a physics system using inverse kinematics to determine the reactions of both combatants based on the speed and weight of a blow. This system aims to add greater variety and realism to the combat, coupled with a variety of basic combat moves and combination moves, some of which can be unlocked by skill points. Different weapons have different characteristics making them useful for different purposes. For example, a sword is a quick weapon for striking and parrying, but is not very effective against heavy armor.

Quests are intended to be nonlinear, with multiple ways to complete objectives to allow multiple character types to be viable. The storyline features some large scale events such as castle sieges and large battles. Every non-player character (NPC) has their daily routine, and every routine can be affected by the player. Characters are able to react to all player actions and adjust their routines to them. NPCs will report crimes to authorities, who will punish the player accordingly, either with a fine, time in jail, or by subjecting them to the stocks or torture. Crime will affect economics and people will get suspicious or aggressive after unresolved crimes.

2) Age of Empires: Definitive Edition Age of Empires requires the player to develop a civilization from a handful of hunter-gatherers to an expansive Iron Age Empire. To assure victory, the player must gather resources in order to pay for new units, buildings and more advanced technology. Resources must also be preserved, as no new resources become available as the game progresses, for example, trees that are cut down will not grow back.

Twelve civilizations are available. Each with individual sets of attributes, including a varying number of available technologies and units. Each civilization has technologies unique to them, so that no civilization possesses all the technologies possible within the game.

A major component of the game is the advancement through four ages. These are the Stone Age (Mesolithic/Nomad/Paleolithic), the Tool Age (Neolithic/Chalcolithic), the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Advancement between ages is researched at the Town Center, and each advancement brings the player new technologies, weapons, and units.

3) Celeste  is a platform game in which players control a girl named Madeline as she makes her way up a mountain while avoiding various deadly obstacles. Along with jumping and climbing up walls for a limited amount of time, Madeline has the ability to perform a mid-air dash in any direction. This move can only be performed once and must be replenished by either landing on the ground or hitting certain objects such as replenishing crystals. Throughout each level, the player will encounter additional gimmicks, such as springs that launch the player or feathers that allow brief flight, and deadly objects such as spikes which will return Madeline to the start of a section if she dies. Hidden throughout each level are optional strawberries, obtained through challenging platforming or puzzle solving sections, which slightly affect the game's ending depending on how many are collected. Additionally, there are cassette tapes which unlock harder "B-Side" variations of certain levels, and hearts used to access post-game content. The original Celeste Classic Pico-8 prototype can also be found as a hidden minigame.

4) Fe  is an action-adventure game in which the player controls Fe, a fox-like creature within a forest that is highly responsive to the songs of the creatures and plants within it. The forest creatures are being attacked by entities called the Silent Ones for unknown reasons that threaten the forest's wildlife. Fe is able to sing to other creatures and objects as to gain their help. These creatures can teach Fe a new song which gives the fox additional abilities through the forest, such as activating a flower that acts as a jump-pad to launch Fe to higher locations and explore more of the world.

The game has been noted to have minimal instructions, requiring the player to experiment and to perceive the forest's ecosystem to determine how to progress, instead of a set of objectives. One example requires the player to observe that one species of bird likes a certain type of flower, suggesting that they may be able to use the bird's song to interact in a different manner than if they used the flower's song. Fe has been favorably compared to Journey and Shadow of the Colossus for this "hands-off" approach to gameplay.

5) Dragon Ball Fighter Z The gameplay borrows concepts from several other fighting games, primarily the Marvel vs. Capcom series' control scheme and team mechanics. Players each select three characters to form a team. One character is controlled, and can be switched with one of the other characters at any time. Players can also call one of their other characters to perform an "Assist" move, allowing simultaneous attacks and combos with the entire team. All three of the opponent's characters must be defeated to win the game.

The universal "Vanish" and "Dragon Rush" moves resemble the Roman Cancel system commonly found in Arc System Works gamesand Guilty Gear Xrd's Dust attacks respectively, while the "Super Dash" move resembles the Homing system of Arcana Heart. Players can also "Ki Charge" to manually increase their super meter, similar to previous Dragon Ball fighting games.

The game also includes other features, such as "Come on Shenron!", that allows players to gather the Dragon Balls one by one as the fight progresses by special moves and combos. Once all seven are assembled by a player, Shenron appears to grant a wish, and allows players to choose one among the following benefits: increasing their fighter's strength, revive a fallen ally, recover a fighter's health or increase resistance to damage. Another feature is the "Dramatic Finish" mode, in which if some characters win the fight against specific enemies, special cutscenes are triggered related to events from the Dragon Ball series.

Dragon Ball FighterZ features a ranking system in both its arcade mode as well as in online multiplayer, where players increase their rank with subsequent wins.