One of the major changes in Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred is the ability to scale the difficulty way higher than you could before. Most players are gradually climbing the torment tiers as they gear their characters up, but some players are speedrunning to the top just to see how fast they can do it.

For Diablo 4 streamer Mekuna, the ascent from a level 1 sorceress to a level 70 sorceress capable of holding her own in the hardest difficulty took around 17 hours of non-stop grinding. And because Blizzard intentionally kept a lot of late-game details secret, he also had to quickly come up with a build that could take him there.

That build ended up being centered around a new variant of the Blizzard skill. Instead of dropping hail onto enemies, Mekuna spams the lightning variant of it to fry packs of enemies in seconds. Watching all the bright circles stack up in his final dungeon run is like opening a website in light mode at night—you almost have to squint to see what's going on.

He reached torment 12 on hour 20 of his Twitch stream, making him probably one of the first to get that far in so little time and on so little sleep. He kicked off the expansion playing the new warlock class through the campaign and eventually ditched it for the class that has taken him to the top of Diablo 4's unofficial competitive leaderboards before. By the looks of it, he still had quite a lot of upgrades to obtain when he achieved it. I didn't catch any infinite damage bugs going on, but it's possible the build is a little stronger than Blizzard intended.

A lot is possible when you have that much uninterrupted time to play, but Mekuna's achievement confirms that Diablo 4's new torment tiers aren't impossible to survive—at least with characters as strong as his. Blizzard told PC Gamer earlier this year that torment 12 would be "really fucking hard," and while I still believe that, it's clear there will be outliers as there always are with Diablo 4. That said, it's nice to see that it isn't some bizarre bug-exploiting build that made it that far.

There is one small caveat here that's worth mentioning though: Mekuna may have finished torment 12, but there are other ways of increasing the difficulty on top of that through the new activity skill trees. Some of the upgrades in there can boost monsters up a few levels even higher than the torment tier would normally allow. I'd be curious if he can survive those too.

Lord of Hatred's new skill trees, item crafting system, and reworked difficulty tiers mean all previous ways to measure a character's power are useless, so I'm excited to see how all the other classes fare, especially paladins and warlocks. Soon the game's leaderboards will go live and we'll be able to see what absurdly powerful builds players have come up with.

PC Gamer Editor-in-Chief Phil Savage is a man of impeccable taste, but I still hold a tiny grudge against him for not breaking the seal on PC Gamer's 98% review threshold to award Vanquish, the Xbox 360-era PlatinumGames shooter brought to PC in 2017, an unprecedented perfect score. "Beyond the laser-focused core loop, there isn't much to Vanquish. You start with knee-sliding acrobatics, and end the same way—around six or so hours later," Phil wrote in his 80% review when Vanquish arrived on PC.

True enough, past Phil. But also: the Vanquish knee slide is the sickest move ever programmed into a videogame, followed closely by the second sickest move ever programmed into a videogame, in which at the press of a button Vanquish hero Sam Gideon pops off the helmet of his super suit, blasts a cig, and then flicks it away. There's an achievement for distracting robots with a cigarette before you shoot them. Only the Pope could do it better.

I'm afraid the math is clearly on my side here: that's a 100/100 right there.

On a superficial level, I've seen some chatter in the last couple weeks that Capcom's excellent Pragmata has a bit of a Vanquish vibe to it. I get the comparison, in that it's a pretty straightforward third-person shooter made by a Japanese developer, also starring a guy in a white astronaut-style space suit. You can do little jet-powered dashes in Pragmata, though nothing as prolonged or flashy as Sam's rocket knee slides in Vanquish.

Having finished Pragmata, I don't think the two games are particularly similar in tone or pacing or even how the action feels in the hand—but I understand the comparisons anyway. Because what Pragmata reminds the Vanquish faithful of is the sensibility of all-killer-no-filler action games circa 2010. "We didn't know how good we had it," and that sort of thing. By recognizing Pragmata in 2026 for its earnest and unpretentious focus on shooting robots with one neat trick up its sleeve, we can right the wrongs of Vanquish and games like it not selling as well as it deserved way back when.

(Let's be real: It's mostly the suits, though.)

Whatever the reason, I'm excited to report Vanquish's numbers on Steam in the wake of Pragmata's release are up. Way up. If, uh, you go by percentages and only look at the last couple months of activity. According to Vanquish's SteamDB page, it's up an impressive 34.8% in peak players over the last 30 days, for a gain of 16 whole people knee sliding in simultaneous bliss. Meanwhile, the average player count is up even more, at a 52.9% increase—that's 26 more people playing Vanquish every day on Steam, on average! Twenty six people whose lives are for certain better this month than they were in March.

Is this MONUMENTAL increase in active Vanquish players actually due to Pragmata's release? Is it, in fact, even noteworthy? Rude of you to ask for a reality check, frankly. I'm not a "data guy" or even what they call "good at math," but I'm also not a liar, so I have to admit that this spike is pretty much in line with Vanquish's history over the last few years, and it saw even more players jumping back in in September 2024, September 2025 and even this February.

You could maybe attribute each of those bursts of interest to recent Steam sales, though they don't seem to happen during the sales themselves. Vanquish is, coincidentally, on sale right now, for 70% off, a discount Sega has been throwing at it every couple months for most of the last decade. But the shape of the player chart for the past few weeks is noticeably a touch spikier, and exhibits slightly higher troughs, than its past lows. Given the fondness Pragmata has stirred up for Xbox 360-style shooters, I think the correlation just barely holds water.

But even if it doesn't, you could make it so by replaying Vanquish right now, or buying it for $6. Despite now seeming quintessentially of its era, it was almost a send-up of other third-person shooters in its day, with over-the-top gruff hoo-ra American heroes battling against evil space Russians, as written by Japanese developers. It has QTEs that were becoming overdone and garnering a player backlash, but you can't hate the QTEs in Vanquish because they're so damn cool. It's a cover shooter that actively discourages you from spending time in cover. I don't think I will ever play the first couple Gears of Wars again as long as I live, but I hope to slide my ass around in Vanquish many more times before I die.

It may be an 80% game, but it's the most 100/100 80% game of them all.