PC Building Simulator 2 is Guitar Hero for nerds

digitaltrends.com:

I’ve been building PCs for most of my life, so PC Building Simulator was never a game I actively sought out. I’ve played it dozens of times for hours on end, but it was more a social experience — a game I’d boot up when friends were over to mess around or gawk over expensive graphics cards that we only wish we could afford.

PC Building Simulator 2, now in open beta on the Epic Games Store, isn’t any different. It’s Guitar Hero for PC enthusiasts, leaning more heavily on being a game than being a tool for learning how to build a PC. As someone who tenses up at too much thermal paste, I expected for PC Building Simulator 2 to disappoint me, but it didn’t — despite some gamified elements getting in the way of actually building a PC.

Guitar Hero is the best touchstone for PC Building Simulator 2. It gives you the feeling of building a PC, with some licensed components in tow, but it glosses over a lot of the critical areas when it comes to assembling a machine. Cable management? Don’t worry about it, just click the highlighted ports. RAM placement? Any slot will do. The list goes on.

I started my preview of the beta with the timed career mode. If you’ve played the first game, you know the deal: Your faceless uncle left you another decrepit PC shop, and it’s your job to bring in orders, complete them with competence, and balance your budget so you can afford new components (and most importantly, rent).

My business was starting to boom, but things were a little too quiet. I started pushing back, malignantly messing up PC builds to see if customers would get upset. I left PCIe brackets missing, intentionally installed the GPU and RAM in the wrong slots, and absolutely drowned every CPU in thermal paste.

But nothing happened.