Not the Skidrow you might think
Let’s clear this up first. Despite the big chrome SKIDROW & RELOADED logo, this site isn’t run by the SKIDROW scene group. It’s a fan-run download blog that collects cracked PC games from many groups and posts them with download links. It has been around a long time and gets a lot of traffic, but the name is a brand, not a credential.
A grunge theme straight out of 2012
The background is a ruined city skyline with yellow quarantine tape and a figure in a face mask peeking in from the left. The content sits in a dark, scratched-metal column with grey text that’s a bit hard to read. Up top: Home, Games List, PC Games, PC Repack, Game Updates, Donate (with a red heart), DMCA and Request Game. On the right, a search box and an Upcoming Games list with release dates. There’s no mobile layout, so phones get the shrunken desktop version.
It’s dated, but it loaded quickly on my visit and it’s easy enough to scan once your eyes adjust to grey-on-black.
What’s coming out
Everything on the front page on my visit was posted the same day. It’s About Pirates with a Goldberg crack, Football Academy Simulator and Find the Needle in early access, Gears of War: E-Day, Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 2, Dying Light 2 v1.30.2 and Icarus updates. Most are tagged P2P, meaning they come from peer-to-peer groups rather than the traditional scene. The counter says page 1 of 4,189, so the back catalogue is huge.
Every post shows the same coloured line under the cover art: ONE FTP LINK and TORRENT. Many posts sit in a Request Accepted category, so the request form clearly does get used. Comment counts are low on most posts, though Gears of War had 14 when I looked, and those comments are worth reading for install problems or missing files.
Repacks, installs and fakes
The PC Repack section holds compressed versions that download smaller but take longer to install, since your PC does the decompressing. Full releases are bigger but quicker to set up. Either way, check the post for the full size before you commit your bandwidth to 60-odd gigabytes.
Fakes are the bigger issue with this name. Search for skidrow on any search engine and you’ll find a pile of look-alike domains. Make sure you’re on skidrowreloaded.com before you click anything.
The ad situation
Here’s my real gripe. I didn’t see banners on the homepage, but the code includes a popunder script from rapidadexchange.com and a tracker from usrpubtrck.com. Translation: click a post or a link and you may get a new tab or window you didn’t ask for. The homepage itself is also very heavy, at roughly 700 KB of HTML.
Who should use it
PC gamers who want new cracks fast and are comfortable with an ad blocker and an antivirus. If popunders make you nervous or you’re on a phone, this is a rough ride.
