Squad alpha version 11 adds British Armed Forces, Afghan-themed map and nine new weapons

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Weapon handling tightened across the board.

Squad, the 50v50 multiplayer military FPS, has been in alpha for nearly three years. That's a long time for its Kickstarter backers to wait, but developer Offworld Industries has slowly but surely built a solid shooter packed with features, to the point where virtually everything I read about it now is positive. The 11th alpha version arrived this week, adding the British Armed Forces alongside a new map and a huge stash of weapons and vehicles. 

The British soldiers will be heavily reliant on armored transport, and they're bringing two new vehicles with them: an 18-soldier transport truck (it can also carry supplies instead of soldiers) and the FV510, a heavily-armoured infantry vehicle that boasts a beefy autocannon and a machine gun. British infantry soldiers will rely on the L85A2, a bullpup rifle that can switch between semi-automatic and full auto fire modes. 

The new faction will appear on multiple maps, including the newly-released Kamdesh Highlands, set in the far eastern part of Afghanistan. It's a mountainous map with a number of criss-crossing roads and hamlets dotted around. 

Alongside the L85A2 rifle, the game adds nine other weapons, most of them geared towards the new British forces. They include a light machine gun, a sniper rifle, and a grenade launcher. 

The US Army gets a new vehicle, too: the M2A3 IFV, which is now the most heavily-armed vehicle in the game. Its calling card is a TOW launcher that fires missiles that you can steer in mid-air. The update also brings lots of mechanical changes to Squad, including tighter recoil and quicker prone to crouch speed. You can read about all the changes in the full patch notes.

Squad is due to leave Early Access at the end of the year.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

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.