Play the free beta of a new wild west battle royale this weekend

(Image credit: Team Grit)

New weekend plans: Checking out Grit, which I believe is the first noteworthy battle royale game of 2021 and the first old west-themed game of the year as well. My old weekend plans were putting on a cowboy hat and sauntering around the house yelling "yeehaw!" a lot, so the timing here really worked out.

Grit takes a traditional approach to battle royale: 100 cowboys enter, one cowboy leaves. But it has some fresh ideas about loot (guns you pick up become poker hands that give you perks), you can fight on horseback, and there are trains. The developers are banking on the western genre being as much a part of the appeal as the battle royale format.

You can get a key for this weekend's beta on Steam. If they run out, expect more beta tests between now and Grit's planned release on Early Access somewhere down the dusty trail.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).