Play Gang Beasts for free this weekend

In the crowded field of local multiplayer games where up to four players can compete to pummel the guts out of each other through their faces, Gang Beasts stands out. Its clumsy balloon-limbed characters wear animal costumes, its levels include a ferris wheel and the tops of several moving trucks, and its physics turn everything into a stumbling shambles. Gang Beasts is still in early access but it's already hilarious.

On Steam Gang Beasts is free to try for the weekend as a way of stress-testing its new server architecture, networking, and so on. This is a perfect opportunity to sample a game that made our list of the best local multiplayer games and our list of 12 PC games with amazing combat.

That's no joke! The way Gang Beasts lets you control your arms independently, grabbing with one while punching with the other for instance, or just clambering up a wall over a pit while somebody else clings to your foot, turns every match into a perfect slapstick movie brawl.

The free weekend has started now and will end at 9pm Pacific time on Sunday, September 24. It's 33% off for the duration as well.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.