Futuristic multiplayer sports game Laser League leaves Early Access, play for free until Monday

Laser League is a game about bouncing neon walls of death into your opponents in a tight multiplayer arena, and it's just finished its short stint in Early Access, which started in February. To celebrate its full release, it's free to play until Monday at 10am PT/1pm ET/6pm BST, and if you like what you see then you can buy it at a 40% discount, making it $8.99/£6.59.

I've been following it since Jody tried it out in December, and if you're a fan of fast-paced multiplayer games, it might be one to check out. You play in a team of two or three, and have to touch nodes on the map to activate the laser-y walls and send them bouncing around the arena. If you get hit by an enemy's wall, you're toast, so it's all about map control, timing, and coordinating movements with your teammates.

Each of the six classes have different abilities, such as slashing your opponents with a short-range blade, and power-ups will appear periodically on the map. There are 15, and they'll do things like revive allies or speed up your walls.

The game launched with 16 maps and added seven new ones yesterday, which is plenty. It doesn't look like the kind of game you'd spend hours and hours on end with, but it should be easy to pick up and play. If you want to try it out, you can download it for free from its Steam page.

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.