[Last Chance] Best Cheap Games In Steam Summer Sale: Rainbow Six Siege, Yakuza 0, More

It's July 9, meaning the end of the big Steam sale is just a couple hours away. If you're interested in anything, now's the time to pick it up. While games will surely go on sale in the months to come, the next big sale likely won't be until the winter one in December, so if you're eager to play anything in particular, and you want to do so for cheap, don't wait any longer. The Yakuza games aren't going to play themselves.

Following on the heels of the Epic Games Store's first (and quite good) sale, the biggest event of the summer for PC gamers is finally here, as Steam's 2019 Summer Sale is live with thousands of game deals available right now. We've now reached the halfway point--the Summer Sale began on June 25 and runs for two full weeks, coming to an end on July 9. Although Steam sales have moved away from the need to check in daily--all of the games on sale are discounted for the duration--there is reason to boot up Steam every day. You can participate in a Grand Prix mini-game, competing for various rewards and even free games from your wishlist; after some initial confusion, Valve has ironed out the details in the hopes of making it clearer.

Similar to Amazon Prime Day (which is coming up soon on July 15), Steam's Summer Sale has a countless number of deals, and it can be overwhelming to wade through them all if you're not sure what you're looking for. And if you're on a budget, it might be even more difficult to pick out the gems among all the not-so-good games, the ones that are cheap for a reason.

We've already assembled a list of our picks for the best Steam sale deals, but what if you're dealing with a more limited budget? Looking specifically at games that cost $10 or less still leaves you with a ton of games to choose from, and many of them are great. It's a good problem to have, but not if you're looking to make a quick purchase. So we've rounded up a list of the best cheap PC game deals in the Steam Store right now. Note that while we focused on including games that are $10 or less, international pricing is included here as well.

One other thing to keep in mind if you're looking for the best deals: You might find Steam games for cheaper outside of Steam itself. But even if you are buying through Steam, there are some tips you should know to help you save more money.

Now then--let's take a look at the best and most affordable PC games on sale at the moment.

$10 / £7.49 / $12.49 AUD

The Yakuza series of open-world action-adventure games primarily follows the yakuza Kazuma Kiryu and his rise within the Tojo clan. The series has been around since 2005, but it has exploded in Western popularity recently, in no small part due to the success of Yakuza 0, which serves as a prequel to the original game. As a recent entry that starts at the earliest point in the story's timeline, many consider Yakuza 0 to be the best starting point for series newcomers. Be sure to spend a lot of time in side quests--a lot of the series' most fun and memorable content is often tucked away from the main story.

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$3.29 / £2.63 / $4.93 AUD

Although it was a buggy mess at release when Bethesda pressured Obsidian to push it out the door too early, Fallout: New Vegas has become the canonical cool kids' choice for best modern Fallout game. More than 3 and especially 4, New Vegas emphasizes choice and multiple approaches to every situation, both on the macro level of its story about the clash of three factions for control over the Hoover Dam, and on the micro level of how you approach individual quests. There's also a vibrant modding scene, ranging from cosmetic tune-ups to complete content overhauls, that's worth looking into on Nexus Mods.

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$9 / £6.59 / $10.50 AUD

Dark Souls casts a long shadow in modern gaming, but few of its obvious descendants stand alone quite so monumentally as Hollow Knight. It has all of the rich, mythic worldbuilding of From's opus, also telling the story of an ancient kingdom in ruin, but at the adorable scale of insects. Almost more than even Ni No Kuni, Hollow Knight feels like you're playing a Studio Ghibli film for all of its incredible charm. The platforming and exploration can feel a little punishing in the opening hours, but stick with it, because Hollow Knight has rightly been considered an instant classic in its own right.

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$5 / £3.49 / $7.25 AUD

Never has a game about paperwork been so compelling. Lucas Pope's Papers, Please casts you as a border control agent in Arstotzka, a fictional Eastern Bloc-style country. The action comprises checking people's documents against an increasingly-Byzantine list of requirements. It's a fantastic mix of puzzle and story that's totally unique. Pope is also one of the few developers that really prioritizes making games that have rock-bottom system requirements, so you could play this on practically a potato.

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$7.49 / £5.69 / $10.78 AUD

You may think that Darkest Dungeon is a stylish, 2D, tactical RPG about exploring the ruined depths of a corrupted family estate, and you wouldn't be wrong, but at its heart, Darkest Dungeon is the most brutal human resources management simulator ever devised. Outside of actually delving into the dungeons with parties of four, the real game lies in building up (and churning through) a stable of adventurers that inevitably get burnt out and become useless because the strain of dungeoneering is just too much for any sane person. Characters acquire traits that cause them to sometimes act of their own accord, which fundamentally changes how you relate to them as a player.

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$10 / £8.49 / $14.97 AUD

Rainbow Six Siege is like the lovechild of Counter-Strike and Overwatch, as a class-based FPS that's built around tight, asymmetric, squad-vs-squad matches in scenarios like hostage rescue or bomb defusal. Unique operators have different skills, forcing players to work in close concert to succeed. The game has a loyal player-base and has filled out with new maps, operators, and scenarios in the years since its initial release, making this the best time ever to get in on the action.

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$10 / £7.49 / $14.47 AUD

It's soccer, but with cars! This indie darling has a simple premise that's easy enough to pick up and play in quick online matches, but has an enormously high skill-ceiling if you get into it. Rocket League was also one of the first games to support full cross-platform play, so there's never any shortage of online games, no matter the mode.

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$7.49 / £5.74 / $10.73 AUD

When SimCity crashed and burned in 2013, Cities: Skylines was in the right place at the right time to become the de facto best modern city-builder. Because of the studio's previous games, Skylines is a traffic simulator at heart, and your cities live or die by how efficiently people and goods can get around them. Years of expansions haven't necessarily made it the richest civic simulation, but it's absolutely ideal if you just want a chill way to build and watch beautiful little cities.

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$9.89 / £6.59 / $14.17 AUD

Picking up the story from the first game (I know--I didn't realize it had a story, either!), Killing Floor 2 is a wave-based shooter where players take on waves of clone enemies and randomized bosses in a variety of cooperative and competitive modes. Resources collected from slain enemies can be spent between rounds on upgrades and class-specific perks, allowing for a strategic metagame on top of the basic FPS action.

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$1 / £0.71 / $1.45 AUD

Portal is one of the most beloved puzzle games of all time for both its mind-bending portal gun and its side-splitting writing. The sequel is just bigger and better in every way, with a longer story that adds great actors like J.K. Simmons and Stephen Merchant, new puzzle elements, and a completely separate campaign for two-player co-op. $1 is just a stupid price for this charming and well-made of a game.

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$10 / £7.19 / $14.38 AUD

Before there was an actual John Wick game in development, a lot of people considered Superhot to be the closest we've had of replicating that film franchise's signature style of tactical and balletic gunplay. It takes the basic mechanics of a first-person shooter, but reframes them as a sort of puzzle with the added twist that time only moves forward when you do. This lets you play out sequences that would be far too precise and badass for human players to pull off in real time.

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$7.49 / £5.69 / $10.75 AUD

Subset Games knocked its follow-up to FTL out of the park. Into the Breach is a mechs vs. kaiju tactics game that boils down its tactics to an elegant, perfect-information puzzle that's more about attrition and positioning than blasting monsters. Runs are quick, but with several ways to scale difficulty and a huge variety of maps, mechs, and enemies at play, Into the Breach ends up having no shortage of challenges to throw at players of any level.

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$8 / £6 / $11.58 AUD

Originally released in Japan in 2010, this visual novel is set in a private high school that's beset with a series of murders. Gameplay alternates between regular school life and how you spend your time (as is typical of the genre) and also investigative segments reminiscent of the Ace Attorney series. It's easily one of the best-known visual novels outside of Japan, making this a great entry point into the genre for anyone who's curious.

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$9 / £7.19 / $13.48 AU

Dragon's Dogma has been a slow burn since its initial 2012 release. Capcom's Monster Hunter team set out to make a western fantasy RPG in the vein of Skyrim (with a touch of Dark Souls' combat). The result is a charming curio that's been steadily updated and ported to the point that it's now more popular than ever, with a Netflix-produced anime on the way and a sequel feeling almost inevitable. If you're looking for a huge, meaty, quirky RPG, Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen may be just the thing.

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$7 / £5.24 / $8.73 AUD

Rockstar may be best known for its open-world titles like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, but Max Payne 3 is the studio's big swing at a more linear third-person shooter. It follows former detective Max Payne who's turned vigilante in Brazil after his wife and daughter were kidnapped (or taken, if you will). The game was praised at the time, particularly for its story, atmosphere, soundtrack, and detailed environments.

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$4 / £2.79 / $5.80 AUD

It's hard to imagine being a gamer for the last several years and not hearing about Undertale, which became an almost instant classic. This solo-developed RPG is about a little boy who falls into an underground world of monsters, but its retro graphics belie one of the most subtle and affecting narratives in modern games. It's famously possible to do an entirely pacifist run of the game, which has a huge impact on how the story plays out.

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$3 / £2.19 / $4.30 AUD

Crypt of the NecroDancer a traditional roguelike in many ways, about delving as deeply as you can into a dungeon for treasure, but with the added twist that every action--both yours and the enemies'--needs to happen on the beat with the fantastic, toe-tapping soundtrack. It's extremely charming, but the difficulty also ramps up quickly, so it's not for the faint of heart! It's no surprise that Nintendo had an unprecedented collaboration with the developer to create Cadence of Hyrule.

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$5 / £3.74 / $6.24

PlatinumGames' Bayonetta is a spectacular action game in the vein of Devil May Cry from that series' creator, Hideki Kamiya. It follows Bayonetta, the eponymous witch who uses guns and her long, magic hair to battle angels. The beloved sequel only released on Nintendo platforms, so this is the only way to enjoy this character--who has become canonical enough to feature in Super Smash Bros--on PC.

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$10 / £7.49 / $14.97 AUD

Wolfenstein 3D precedes Doom as one of the original first-person shooters in the early 90's, so it's fitting that MachineGames' revival of the series helped to elevate the genre to a whole new level for the 21st century. You play as B.J. Blazkowicz, an American resistance soldier in an alternate history where the Nazis won World War II. The action is fast and fun, striking a perfect balance between seriousness and goofiness, but maybe the game's greatest accomplishment is taking one of the original, generic shooter guys and turning him into a real, multidimensional character that we actually care about now.

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$5 / £4 / $7.48 AUD

Thumper is a "rhythm violence" game that was one of the first breakout hits of the modern VR boom (although it doesn't require VR to play). You control a beetle as it rockets down a colorful, linear track, dodging obstacles and hitting glowing notes in time to the intense, pounding music.

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$2.49 / £1.74 / $3.62 AUD

This rogue-lite about commanding the crew of a space ship on the run from a rebel army was a hugely influential and successful debut from Subset Games. The puzzle of how you cultivate your crew and ship as you weave between randomly-generated star systems perfectly complements the moment-to-moment gameplay of ordering individual crew members around to man and repair various systems in ship-to-ship combat. It's pretty tough to actually survive through to the final boss, but the variety of unlockable ships and the huge amount of potential encounters allows every run to feel fresh.

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$5 / £3.74 / $7.23 AUD

Klei brings an insane amount of charm and polish to everything it makes, and Invisible, Inc. is no different. It's a turn-based tactical squad game with very similar basic mechanics to XCOM, but with smaller squads of cyberpunk secret agents stealthily infiltrating corporate facilities in a near-future dystopia. The procedurally-generated levels always feel tough, but fair, and the range of agents that you can recruit allows for a wide variety of play styles and strategies.

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$10 / £7.49 / $14.23 AUD

Lots of series diehards like to grouse about how Dark Souls II is their least favorite of From Software's famously-tough action RPGs, but that frankly still puts it head and shoulders above most other video games. The game is also just a lot better than people gave it credit for, offering a more dreamlike take on Dark Souls' grim, mythic fantasy. Scholar of the First Sin actually changes some of the content around from the original release as well, allowing a fresh experience even for people who have played it before.

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$5 / £5 / $7.23 AUD

BioWare's space opera action-RPG follows Commander Shepard and their crew of sexy, diverse aliens as they try to defend the galaxy from an invading threat. This sequel stripped out some of the more fiddly mechanics from the first game and gave it a greater focus on action. Critics universally praised it for its story and characters in particular, and many people consider this to be BioWare's peak as a studio before its more troubled recent years.

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$5 / £3.74 / $7.48 AUD

Before his big comeback with The Evil Within, Shinji Mikami revolutionized survival-horror and third-person action games with Resident Evil 4. It put a greater emphasis on action and gunplay than previous series entries that focused more on scarcity of resources and horror, and as a result was hugely influential on all third-person action games, not just the horror genre.

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$10 / £8 / $14.47 AUD

This top-down shooter takes inspiration from sci-fi films like Aliens or Starship Troopers, casting you as space marines dropping onto hostile alien worlds in the name of "Super Earth." You can play solo, but the experience is really designed for one to four players working cooperatively. Just like the studio's previous game, Magicka, friendly fire can't be turned off, forcing players to carefully coordinate while working together.

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$3.74 / £3

The original Hotline Miami--an intense, violent, top-down shooter about brutally killing lots of Russian mobsters--was one of Devolver Digital's first breakout hits, helping to define the publisher's colorful, edgy aesthetic. The sequel is set both before and after the action of the first game and was generally praised for expanding upon it in every way, if not particularly innovating on the formula.

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$7 / £5.39 / $10 AUD

Homeworld: Remastered Collection provides a thorough visual update to two absolute classics of real-time strategy games from the late '90s/early aughts. Command fleets of spaceships in live, fully 3D battles that look like they're right out of an episode of Babylon 5 (better, frankly, given how well some of that show's visuals have aged). The Remastered Collection gives both games full, HD upgrades along with mod support, as well as including archival "Classic" versions for nostalgic or curious players who want to compare.

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$3.49 / £2.51 / $5.07

After Baldur's Gate, but before Mass Effect, BioWare revolutionized 3D RPGs with Knights of the Old Republic, a 2003 game set in the Star Wars universe that's widely held as one of the best uses of the Star Wars license ever. The story is set millennia before the rise of the Empire, at a moment when the Galactic Republic and Jedi were under heavy assault by the Sith. Fans of both Star Wars and RPGs are doing themselves a massive disservice if they haven't checked out "KOTOR" yet.

See it at Steam