Neon futuresport Laser League is having a free open beta for the rest of the weekend

Laser League is a team-based multiplayer game about creating and dodging neon walls of light. You activate nodes to create walls of your team's colour that move around the level. You're okay to pass through your own, but touch an enemy's wall and you're toast. It looked fast and fun in Jody's hands-on with it last month.

This weekend you can try it out for free, thanks to an open beta that launched yesterday. It's running until 10pm PST tomorrow / 1am EST on Monday / 6am GST on Monday, so you've got a good 18 hours to get to grips with it. Just head over the Steam page and start downloading.

The beta features 12 maps for both 2v2 and 3v3 matches, and you'll be able to earn XP and level up. One thing you'll need to master is the class system: in addition to activating nodes you can use an ability that is specific to the class you've selected. They range from something simple like a short-range attack that kills an opponent to the more complex 'snipe', which lets you drop a marker, create a tracer line running away from it and then teleport back to it, eliminating anyone in your path.

Read more about the classes (as well as troubleshooting any problems with the beta) here. The game is entering Early Access on February 8, when it will cost $14.99.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.