SpeedRunners is one of those multiplayer games that you can play with friends quite a bit. Each round is quick, your reflexes are tested to the limit and it makes a really good show for a livestream. Now, if you’ve been unsure whether it’s for you or not you’ve a chance to give it a risk-free go: it’s free all this weekend on Steam.

Still in Early Access right now and developed by Dutch developer DoubleDutch Games with tinyBuild being the publishers, SpeedRunners lets you control a number of colourful characters who seem to take inspiration from superheroes so you can jump, swing and race around the levels to be the last survivor per round. There’s also ways you can mess up your opponents too, so it’s a wonderful multiplayer game. After all, who doesn’t enjoy messing with their friends in game?

It’ll be free until the end of Sunday, and is also on sale for a third of its usual £10.99/$14.99 price at £3.62/$4.94. There’s also two Youtuber Packs available for 49p/98 cents each, in case that floats your boat.

If you’ve been playing games for any length of time, chances are you’ve seen the Havok logo before. Havok is a middleware company and it’s Havok engine provides all of those lovely ragdoll physics you are used to seeing in various games. It seems that Microsoft has been rather interested in the company, as they have just acquired Havok from Intel for an undisclosed sum.  A corporate article regarding the purchase reads, in part:

Microsoft’s acquisition of Havok continues our tradition of empowering developers by providing them with the tools to unleash their creativity to the world.We will continue to innovate for the benefit of development partners. Part of this innovation will include building the most complete cloud service, which we’ve just started to show through games like ‘Crackdown 3.”

IGN reached out to Microsoft for further comment and recieved a response to several questions, the most pertinent being the availability of Havok to other console manufacturers:

“We will continue to license Havok’s technology to the broad AAA games industry. This also means that we will continue to license Havok’s technology to run across various game consoles including Sony and Nintendo.”

Havok, of course was recently used to power such games as Destiny, Watch_Dogs, and Dark Souls 2.

IO Interactive show us the latest installment of their hit assassination’em up, Hitman!

The developer session kicked off showing us some pretty standard gameplay for a Hitman game, however there are options, lots and lots of options. It seems that as per the words of Travis and Sven, the two employees of IO Interactive who took us all through the Showstopper Level of Hitman,

“You will experience a rich and detailed sandbox, every person has a name”

It certainly looks like they’re correct at least on the rich sandbox part of that statement, the level is very densely populated, the crowds move, mill and mingle around as one would expect a large crowd of posh twats to and the level itself is pretty bloody expansive, including a large manor house with two floors, large garden grounds, numerous balconies (with vantage points of course) and plenty of staff members and civilians with nicely tailored clothes to steal.

Keeping with the whole options angle I mentioned earlier it doesn’t stop there. We’ve been given numerous types of poison, the ability to have weapons and equipment dropped into the level before the player begins and even ways to smuggle weapons and equipment past security checkpoints. Which is something I look forward to utilising, even Metal Gear Solid doesn’t have a feature like that and that’s pretty much the franchise that wrote the book on stealth. We’ll undoubtedly have the usual staples of the series however, I’d hate to see 47 without his Silverballers and Garrotte wire.

But there is a ton to see and do in this level, it isn’t just kill one target, in this Showstopper level we have two. One is the man behind the fashion show and the other is his accomplice who is holding a secret auction to sell off “deadly secrets” to some very unscrupulous people and of course all these options can come into play. Maybe you’ll drop one of your Silverballers that’ll get picked up by a security guard, taken past a checkpoint which you will then bypass and retrieve your gun afterwards which you will then utilise in a trigger pulling fashion to silently kill someone…maybe. There’s even more than one escape option, a chopper or a speedboat though you will have to find the keys. You may decide to get a Sniper Rifle smuggled in, camp out on a vantage point and shoot your way out afterwards or my personal favourite, attempt to bypass everything in a disguise and get discovered almost instantly. Almost mind you.

So allow me to summarise. Options. You need to take out the target, pick a path and get to it.

You can watch the full developer session below, Enjoy!

Today’s Homefront: The Revolution developer session was a bit of a surprise today here at geek towers. We all expected Homefront 2, as the Devs from Dambuster Studios also joked about at the start of the session.

What we got, was a more than pleasant surprise. We started seeing what we first thought was another open world dirge fest. What we saw, was a structured area game (including green, yellow and red zones where gameplay takes place as separate maps), that including stunning graphics and effects including weather effects, such as fog and rain that creates puddles that then dry out naturally as the tarmac warms up again and a real day/night cycle (an overly inflated one by the devs to show it off to better effect). To the near end of the presentation showing off the dynamic enemy spawn areas, meaning that no two people doing the same mission will see the same troubles.

It’s this dynamic enemy placement that Digmbot and I most found interesting. The idea that a snipe could be around any corner, or as you walk through a building, a full enemy patrol with an APC may be there to surprise you (or for you to surprise)

They ended the session with a bit of info about the map they were using at EGX this week, which also happened to be the Gamescom map aswell this year, and that they had been pulling player activity info the whole time. Including where people died in the map, how they died and which enemy killed them, including one sniper who accounted for the most players deaths (apart from self inflicted ones). The funniest statistic was how many players had set themselves on fire. Not been set on fire from an enemy as none in that zone had flamethrowers or similar, but had walked through flame (your clothes are flammable) and even those that had misused Molotov cocktails (including one guy who must have dropped one at his own feet at the very start of the zone, which they took great delight in laughing about, I hope that guy wasn’t watching)

This all culminated in a beautiful looking game that I went from not caring about to being determined to play it tomorrow when I’m back at EGX and may even get early next year when it’s out!

Great Job Dambuster Studios!

Homefront: The Revolution is slated for a Spring 2016 release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and STEAM