Summer has arrived in London, and it’s pretty glorious all right. But I say that as someone on the third floor with a nice south-facing window and a cat dozing in the sunlight. Parts of London are today, I say exaggerating only an awful lot, Hellish. You hop on the Central Line during rush hour tonight and you’ll see. So where better to set a level in a co-op horror shooter?

Killing Floor‘s annual summer update has arrived, with goodies including a new Underground map and a new playable mutant-murdering lady. And, as they cannily do with big updates, developers Tripwire have also launched a few new paid DLC packs and put the game on sale.

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Dear readers, until today I had thought that the screaming and chattering noises spiders make in movies and video games were entirely fictional. I had intended to post a Killing Floor 2 trailer which introduces a few of its mutants, including the arachnoid Crawler, and say something clever about the “shared unnatural sonic vocabulary” of popular media. But, curious about the origins of this, I read around a little (looked on Yahoo! Answers) and discovered the world is a terrible place.

Now I know that some spiders do actually hiss and rattle (‘stridulate,’ we say–know your enemy), I find this trailer for the co-op FPS abhorrent and oh god why have the hairs on my neck pricked up what’s that feeling is there a spider on me you have to tell me I mean it.

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Killing Floor is a pleasantly solid co-op survival FPS, blessed with chunky-feeling guns and ridiculous English accents shouting daft Britishisms. It also cemented Tripwire Interactive as one of my favourite developers for banging it full of new monsters, levels, and special events for years after launch in a way that only Valve match nowadays. Now, delightfully, a sequel’s coming. Imaginatively titled Killing Floor 2, it seems to have as its core new feature, er, buckets of gore.

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“Doing anything nice this weekend?” the hairdresser asks, running their hands through your luxuriant quiff. “I’m actually heading out on a whistle-stop tour of battlefields on World War 2′s Eastern and Pacific fronts,” you reply, leaning back to press your scalp into their supple fingers as they gasp in respect and admiration, “and I’ll have the cyber razor cut thanks.”

Ho ho but while your haircare specialist now believes you’re a big-shot billionaire history expert, you’re merely planning to take advantage of the Company of Heroes 2 and Rising Storm free weekends on Steam. All and sundry can play Relic’s RTS and Tripwire’s FPS for two days, and they’re on sale too. Later today a familiar voice will respond to your cry for reinforcements, as confident as mousse and warm as curling tongs, and you’ll know: everything’s going to be okay.

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“Some days war takes patience, but other days it demands action,” the sergeant barks, I write, lazily imagining how sergeants may speak in all those WW2 films from the 1960s that I haven’t watched. “Today is a day for action,” I hint to lead into the crux of this video game news post for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. “… you maggot,” the sergeant adds then immediately regrets and blushes, fearing he’s perhaps a major conflict or two ahead of language like that.

It is a day for action, mind. Until 6pm today, Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad is free on Steam. Not just free to play for one day, oh no. If you grab it in time, it’s yours to keep forever. If you don’t, I guess you would need to pay money to own and play it, and make a decision about whether that’s something you’d like to do or not.

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Tripwire is set to release a new free content pack for Rising Storm – the Pacific Theatre cousin of Red Orchestra 2 – and it’s called Island Assault. The name implies much. I had a play with it over the weekend, and I’ll tell you about that experience, below. (There’s a trailer, too!)

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Red Orchestra 2′s Pacific-theatre standalone expansion, Rising Storm, appeared last week and offered tough-as-nails World War II multiplayer for the discerning FPS player. I waded on to its tropical beaches with my rifle above my head. Here’s Wot I Think.> (more…)

Rising Storm - a quasi-sideways-sequel-but-also-merger with the splendid Red Orchestra 2 – has been released. As you might expect, it’s a multiplayer FPS where US Army and Marine Corps battles the Imperial Japanese Army across the Pacific theatre.

I’m planning on spending a little time with this – I’m generally reminded of why I always get a kick out of this series of games, particularly with the asymmetrical nature of the two factions, as well as suppression and morale stuff. Anyway, more on this soon, so in the meantime go watch the launch trailer below. (more…)

Red Orchestra 2 occupies some space on my hard-drive. I keep it there, along with Sniper Elite V2 and Build & Shoot, to satisfy a basic need I have to shoot at a tiny cluster of pixels in the distance and hope that their widows are weeping come the end of the round. I’m not a super expert at it, but it’s satisfying enough for me to keep my sights trained on the upcoming Pacific-based Rising Storm, Tripwire’s mod-gone-pro expansion thing. (more…)

Tripwire are having a busy weekend, with the announcement of Killing Floor’s now-traditional Christmas spectacular, and a free weekend on Steam for Red Orchestra 2. This Christmas’ Killing Floor event is IN SPAAAACE, which puts robots and Evil Santa on the moon (a free map with Christmas-themed baddies). Could anything be more festive? Watch the trailer below, and decide for yourself.

R’ochestra meanwhile is free from now until Monday. It’s a fantastic, rumpled bastard of a game. Worth a few squeezes of the mouse button. (more…)