Call of Duty: Black Ops 4's battle royale mode Blackout is free to play throughout April

Poor Blackout. For a brief period last year I thought Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s battle royale mode was going to take off. Blackout looked like Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds but played like Call of Duty—a perfect combination, I thought, for those who wanted a more grounded battle royale experience without all of PUBG’s jank.

And then Apex Legends happened. Respawn’s battle royale folded in many of the same improvements as Blackout—more mobility, snappier shootings, better inventory management. Oh, and it was free. Turns out, it’s a lot easier to build and retain an audience when your game’s not behind a paywall, and while Apex Legends undoubtedly stole players from Fortnite and PUBG, it was Blackout’s distant third-place position that really seemed to be cannibalized overnight.

Cue this week’s news: Blackout is free for the entire month of April.

Not free to keep, mind you. Activision’s calling it a “Free Access” window. Still, that’s an incredibly generous “demo.” These trial periods usually last a weekend or maybe a week, certainly not an entire month.

I’d hazard this tells us two things. First, it’s confirmation that yes, Apex significantly hurt Blackout’s player base. You run this sort of promotion to try and shore up your server population and build hype again, especially in battle royale games where you need around 100 players per match.

Two, I’d guess that Activision is toying with the idea of Blackout going free-to-play. First Blackout was confined to the traditional $60 version of Black Ops 4. Then Activision made a special $30 edition with just arena multiplayer and Blackout. Free-to-play next? It doesn’t seem like an outrageous scenario.

Maybe April 30 comes and goes and Blackout’s still free. Maybe the “Access Window” ends on April 30, but there’s a pivot to free-to-play this summer. Or maybe it’s the next version of Blackout that gets the free-to-play treatment, divorced from Infinity Ward’s more traditional Call of Duty this fall.

In any case, it’s worth checking out if you’ve got the time. I raved about Blackout last year. It’s faster than PUBG but more realistic and grounded than Fortnite, a sweet spot for me. There’s also a new map this week, which I’m interested in checking out. It’s set on Alcatraz, San Francisco’s famed prison island, which sits just a few miles away from me in the Bay. Close quarters battle royale is a unique premise, and the map looks like a faithful 1-to-1 reproduction with some very unique sightlines.

And hey, it’s free. Might as well pop in. You can grab Blackout through Blizzard’s Battle.net client, and Activision says all progress will carry over if you decide to keep playing past April 30.

15 years later, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is finally happening

Good things come to those who wait, and in this case to those who waited a long time. Fifteen years after the release of one of the most beloved “cult” role-playing games ever made, it’s finally getting a sequel in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2.

Crackdown 3 review: Why?

In 2007, I played the Crackdown demo more than probably any other Xbox 360 release that year. The demo, not the full game. It was probably a year or two before I bought a copy of the full game, but the Crackdown demo had a generous one-hour timer on it, and in that one hour you could do whatever you wanted. Skill progression was accelerated as well, I think, so in that hour you could easily get to the point where you were jumping over buildings or tossing cars at enemies.

Anthem review: A great first impression and not much else

Anthem is a striking example of how familiarity breeds contempt. It makes, without a doubt, one of the best first impressions I’ve ever seen. It looks stunning as you delve into the Heart of Rage for the first time, wind kicking up sand and ash, heat roiling off rivers of lava. And that sense of awe continues for the first hour or two. I mean, come on, you can fly. It’s amazing. You’re bootleg Iron Man, rocketing through a lush jungle filled with crumbling temples and alien wildlife.

Far Cry New Dawn review: A surprisingly satisfying refresh, with some lingering old problems

Far Cry: New Dawn is something of a paradox. On the one hand it’s exactly what the series needed, a significant mechanical shakeup that’s breathed life into ideas that grew stale two or three entries back. There’s complexity,

Total War: Three Kingdoms preview: A complete overhaul of Creative Assembly's historical approach

Few previews feel so fraught with danger as Total War. It’s a series with some very high highs, including the original Rome, Medieval II, Shogun II, and (more recently) the Warhammer games.

The Humble Sonic Bundle gives you 6 Sonic the Hedgehog games for $1, or 12 games for $15

There’s a great Humble Bundle available right now with one of the most legendary classic console characters to ever grace the PC platform. Until the end of the month, you can get a Humble Sonic Bundle packing up to 12 games depending on how much you want to pay.

John Romero celebrates Doom's 25th anniversary with Sigil, a free fifth chapter for the original game

Today’s the 25th anniversary of Doom, if you can believe it. On December 10, 1993 people first stepped foot onto a demon-infested Mars, courtesy of id Software. And while id’s upcoming sequel Doom Eternal is the next official follow-up, Mr. Doom himself a.k.a. John Romero today revealed his own personal celebration of Doom’s legacy, titled Sigil.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive goes free-to-play, adds a battle royale mode called Danger Zone

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s finally making the free-to-play pivot, ditching the $15 barrier to entry it’s maintained since release in 2012. Starting today you can head over to Steam and grab the full game, including multiplayer modes, for free—though you can still pay $15 for “Prime” status and earn some extra skins.

It seems like an obvious move to keep Counter-Strike competitive in the modern era, what with the rise of the battle royale genre. CS:GO is even getting its own take on the phenomenon, called CS:GO Danger Zone, an 18-player battle royale(ish) mode that involves scrounging for supplies and money around the map. Timing that release with the move to free-to-play could convince an entire new generation of Playerunknown’s Battlegroundsplayers to give Counter-Strike a shot...maybe.

But is that a good move for Counter-Strike and the people who love it? A few years ago Valve wouldn’t even let players gift CS:GO during the Steam Sale, saying it would harm the community by introducing people who didn’t stick around long-term. Rumor has it the $15 price tag was also kept up so long to dissuade cheaters from circumventing a ban by simply making a new Steam account.

Both those worries still seem justified—hell, a pro Counter-Strike player was caught cheating during a tournament this year. And a move to free-to-play is bound to generate a large influx of players who have never played before and won’t stick around to learn the ins and outs of a brutally difficult game. Valve mitigates this somewhat by putting “Prime” players into their own segregated multiplayer hopper, meaning most longtime fans will be unaffected by the free-to-play move, but it’s still going to affect the game’s community.

Of course, it also gets people installing Steam—and maybe that’s the goal here. Valve’s seemed a bit besieged the last few months, and even more so after the announcement of the Epic Games Store earlier this week. Maintaining a library of games you can only play with Steam is one way to keep players hooked, and it’s far easier to sneak onto someone’s hard drive with free games than paid.

And besides, CS:GO’s been built like a free-to-play game for years. It even had an entire (shady) gambling scene built around trading CS:GO weapon skins based on their real-world money value. Removing the $15 price tag just underlines the business model Valve’s already relied on since 2013.

In any case, it’s free and you can grab it now. If you’ve never played Counter-Strike before, be prepared to die a lot, and often. But hey, at least now you don’t have to pay for the privilege.

Epic Games is creating a Steam rival and Valve should be scared

Valve must be sleeping poorly these days. Steam is still king of PC gaming at the moment, but it’s an increasingly belabored kingdom beset on all sides by would-be rulers. Today presents perhaps the strongest challenge yet: Epic, flush with Fortnite cash, will open its own storefront in the near future. It’s cross-platform, cuts developers a much better deal, focuses on discoverability and communication from the get-go, and of course ties in with Epic’s work on the Unreal graphics engine.

Battlefield V is about to get a huge ray tracing performance boost, Nvidia says

Three weeks back, EA officially turned RTX on in Battlefield V, becoming the first game to support the radical real-time ray tracing capabilities of Nvidia’s  GeForce RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti graphics cards. Real-time ray tracing has long been considered the Holy Grail of gaming graphics. The fact that it’s running at all in modern games is very technically impressive and required the addition of dedicated hardware in Nvidia’s graphics cards.

Just Cause 4 review impressions: A buggy and boring overhaul

Being in a creative rut is bad, but getting out of one isn’t always better. The proof? Just Cause 4 ($60 on Humble), a game that could’ve been a mindless retread of old ideas but instead opts to do something different, with middling results. Everyone’s favorite explosion simulator has been overhauled from head to toe, but the changes here often make for a tedious, meandering experience even when the game’s at its most exciting.

Pokemon Go: New Gen 4 Evolutions Now Available

The first wave of Gen 4 Pokemon debuted in Pokemon Go last month,

and since then, developer Niantic has been slowly introducing more monsters originally from the Sinnoh region to the mobile game. During Pokemon Go's third annual Halloween event, the studio added a handful of new Ghost- and Dark-type Pokemon, and now a few new Gen 4 evolutions are available.

Darksiders III review: A slightly disappointing sequel that hopefully merits another

Is it possible to die of boredom?" It's one of the earliest lines in Darksiders III, and for a while there at the start I thought I might find out the answer. There's no getting around it: The early hours of Darksiders III are slooow, a massive misstep from a series that opened in 2010 by calling down the capital-A Apocalypse and turning Earth to ruins.

Check out this exclusive look at Guild Wars 2's jaw-dropping Infernal Leap roller beetle track

At a time when everyone is raging about bugs in another game, ArenaNet is trying to get everyone talking about bugs in its own Guild Wars 2. In this case, it’s for good reason.

Battlefield V review: World War II never changes

Battlefield V releases today. It also released five days ago, and it released on November 9, depending on who’s asking, and what version of the game you bought. Regardless,

Fallout 76 review: Almost hell, West Virginia

Let’s just recount the bugs, shall we? It started with the Bureau of Tourism, a mission you pick up mere hours into the game—and, if you were one of the many unlucky players, a mission you could never finish.

Memories Retold review: All's finally quiet on the Western Front

n 2014 Ubisoft commemorated the hundredth anniversary of World War I with a game called Valiant Hearts. Though hand-animated, it nevertheless told a grisly and often tragic story about the Great War, and it’s an experience that’s stuck with me for years now.

Microsoft acquires CRPG heavyweights Obsidian and InXile

For years Microsoft’s talked about renewing its commitment to PC gaming, with mixed results. Today’s announcements might signal an actual push towards that future, though.

Hitman 2 review: Absolutely killer

It starts with a small roadside bar, and a man yelling into his phone. “Get me out of here, Dex.” The man is P-Power, celebrity tattoo artist. Poor old P-Power’s been called down to Colombia to correct a neck tattoo on local cartel boss Rico Delgado. “He kills people, for fun!” says P-Power. “What if he doesn’t like my work?”