The Green Army Men mode is now playable in Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, and it's free for all owners in a limited form. Rising Storm 2 itself is also free, though just for a week, and that sounds to me like a good excuse to play some Rising Storm 2 as small plastic men.

I recently tried out three of the four Green Army Men maps, and it's a bit more than a reskin: The modders have changed the weapons and adjusted the physics to create a slightly more chill version of Rising Storm 2. There's no fall damage, so jump out of helicopters all you like. You can fight at the bottom of a swimming pool, too.

You can only play as one class unless you buy the Green Army Men DLC. It's a bit pricey at $14.44 right now (which is more than Rising Storm 2 itself), but picking it up is largely a gesture of support for the modders, who get a cut of the revenue.

Join our server

Since it's easy to get into Rising Storm 2 right now with the free week going on, we figured we'd get some plastic wars going. If you want to join us, Tripwire set up a Green Army Men server for us. Head to the server browser and look for:

Server name: PC Gamer – Green Army MenIP address: 64.94.238.82

The easiest way to find it is to filter by the Green Army Men game type. The server's already full, so I'll check in with Tripwire to see if they're planning to get some more GAM servers online today.

Also, a raffle

Tripwire also tossed us some Steam keys for the Rising Storm 2 Deluxe Edition to pass along. Enter your email address below (or here) for a chance to get one. Tomorrow, 10 entrants will be randomly selected and emailed keys. (We won't see your email address, Godankey won't keep it after the raffle.)

In short: Rising Storm 2 is pretty fun (I reviewed it here), it's free for a week on Steam, and the now-official Green Army Men game type lets you use a flamethrower at the bottom of a hot tub, so come play it with us if that sounds like your kind of thing. I'll be on the server at around 7 pm Pacific tonight with whoever else I can recruit.

Rising Storm 2: Vietnam's new mode, launching this Tuesday, shrinks its battlefields to backyards and its soldiers to plastic toys: the ubiquitous Green Army Men who've spent decades fighting each other for control of carpets and lawns. There are four maps, one of which is the Christmas-themed map from last year's Army Men event, and the mode is free for all owners of Rising Storm 2. 

There's one caveat, which is that the free version locks you to just the Rifleman class. Buying the Green Army Men DLC will unlock the other classes, and you'll also be supporting the modders, who receive a cut of the revenue. (Here's the original Green Army Men mod, made by a team of seven modders who've been working in their spare time.) 

I tried the new maps last week while Tripwire VP Alan Wilson talked me through the mode, and they're pretty ridiculous, especially underwater.

Green Army Men is essentially 'Rising Storm-lite.' Guns are nerfed a bit, tracer ammo is on for most of them, there's no fall damage, and you'll rarely have to squint to make sure you're shooting at the right guy, as the teams are bright green and bright blue. (Although hiding against blue or green bits of the levels can be effective.)

The asymmetry of Rising Storm 2 is also gone. Both teams can spawn on squad leaders, and in levels which include helicopters, both teams have them. It's a way to take a break from the complexity and intensity of the typical Rising Storm 2 experience, Wilson suggests sometime before we plunge into a swimming pool to contest a point at the bottom.

Green Army Men's treatment of water is a good indication of what the whole thing is like: an answer to "wouldn't it be cool if..." without any worries about making sense outside the context of plastic dudes fighting pretend battles. 

The Pool Party map's central feature is littered with inflatable toys, and diving past them into the deep end, you might land on a toy submarine making loops, or drift slowly to the bottom under moon gravity. You can't drown (you're made of plastic) or actually swim, and there's no change to ballistics when you're underwater. The way out of the pool, as well as a hot tub in the Backyard map, is via bubbling jets that propel the toy men up and into the air. 

Back on the surface, players circle the pool with helicopters, which have simpler flight models and are useful as mobile spawn points given the lack of fall damage. Others snipe from atop umbrellas, or charge around with flamethrowers. (Those work underwater too, by the way.)

In the Beach Party map highlighted in the trailer at the top of this article, the water is shallow and so doesn't factor as much as it does in Pool Party and Backyard. It also changes up the mode. Where Pool Party and Backyard are played in Territory mode, where one attacking team attempts to capture points from a defending team, Beach Party is played in Supremacy mode.

In Supremacy, both teams can go after any and all objectives, but only earn points from a captured objective if it is connected to their home base by a chain of other captured objectives. (Essentially, this turns 'back-capping' into a way to deny the other team points rather than earn more for your own team, unless you control most or all objectives.) I prefer the Territory maps, but only having played one round on each map, I can't give anything close to a comprehensive criticism.

Some of the environmental sounds are too-loud and annoying—the ocean noises on Beach Party especially—and Pool Party is perhaps too cluttered with party flotsam, such that decoding the map is a bit strenuous. But I had a great time on all of them, and again if you own the game, you can try them out without buying the DLC.

Rising Storm 2 is currently pretty cheap on Steam, and will be free-to-play for a week following the DLC launch. Since we also had a good time during the original Army Men holiday event, we asked Tripwire if they'd set up a Green Army Men server for us, and they gave the thumbs up, so join us in the PC Gamer server if you want to give it a go during the free week.

Though I mostly played woefully during my preview session, I'll leave you with a gif of me picking a tiny green Wilson off of an umbrella. He got me back with a flamethrower more than once, but for some reason I didn't make any gifs of those moments.

Tripwire's Killing Floor 2 and Rising Storm 2: Vietnam are both getting their first major updates of 2019 today, and anyone can check them out on Steam this week. Both games will be free to try from 10 am PT today until 10 am PT on Friday, and both series will be on sale for the duration.

Killing Floor 2: Cyber Revolt decks the zed-murdering multiplayer romp in neon lights and transforms players into street samurai and cyberpunks. The update throws a new map, Spillway, into the mix, and players will get to muck around with two new weapons: the Killerwatt and the Helios Rifle. Expect new music, enhancements, achievements and cosmetics. 

Take a look at the Killing Floor 2: Cyber Revolt trailer below. 

Over in Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, two reimagined Red Orchestra 2 maps are being introduced, along with a community-made map that's been polished and made official. Apache Snow, DMZ and Saigon can all be fought over from today. 

Keep an eye out for them shedding their price later today. 

As a a gritty, realistic-ish multiplayer FPS about 64-player, brutal, attritional warfare with napalm strikes, flamethrowers, and helicopters, Rising Storm 2: Vietnam is the perfect fit for a novelty map. Miniaturized maps like Counter-Strike's de_rats have never been balanced tactical chessboards—they're playgrounds of stupidity that give us permission to play loosely in competitive games.

The Green Army Men Christmas event happening now in RS2 is refreshing, transformative, and exactly the sort of lighthearted thing I want to play over holiday break. Moving the mechanics of RS2 out of Vietnam and into a toy-cluttered suburban living room that looks like it just got carpet bombed by Santa injects a new mood and fighting style into Antimatter and Tripwire's scrappy shooter. 

Camouflage is non-existent on the hardwood floor. Your whole body is a single shade of luminous, plastic blue or green (the two factions battling for domestic supremacy), and even at extreme ranges, a single pixel of your body catches the eye. There are lengths of tinsel up on the banister that you can kinda-sorta hide in, but otherwise almost all of the dozens of props populating the map are solid toys and household objects set at right angles. Around stacks of giant Duplo blocks, I fought like I was in a speedball match, holding down an angle behind cover as a teammate leapfrogged forward, advancing once they could cover me.

In other zones, the absence of jungle to hide in makes Green Army Men feel like a high-fidelity amusement park shooting gallery. From certain positions, you can see almost the entire length of the massive, seven-capture-point map. In an elevated spot like above the fireplace mantle, you might eye three for four enemies darting between different areas of Lincoln Log cover, moments that test your target prioritization and ability to snap off quick shots. Elevated positions are really valuable, though, and a skilled player can do serious damage from up high by firing, retreating a little back behind their ledge, then reemerging to pick from the many unaware targets scurrying across the floor.

RS2's easy lethality does work well with this theme, though. One burst of an M16 is usually all it takes to knock over a blue bad guy, so the lives of these cheap plastic men feel disposable, as if the whole match is the effort of kids invisibly knocking over figurines with rubber bands. That mindset had me playing less cautiously, embracing the absurdity of calling in an artillery strike on a highway of orange Hot Wheels track or charging through a cavernous ventilation shaft that's been graffitied with crayon.

I was going to end this story advocating for Green Army Men being more than a temporary event, when I was reminded that, duh, like a few of the most popular things on PC, Green Army Men emerged from a mod. The mode was one of the winners of Tripwire and Antimatter's modding contest earlier this year, and this Christmas map is a continuation of that work by the original, four-person team. Multiple GAM maps are already available on Steam Workshop, including a Pool Party, and it isn't hard to find servers that exclusively run the mode through RS2's browser.

Asked about the possibility of making this mod a more permanent part of RS2, Tripwire VP Alan Wilson told me via email says it's already heard lots of positive feedback in the last year. "We'll take stock after the holidays and see what the demand for it is," Wilson says. "We'll certainly be happy to help the mod team along—but we may need to look at it more seriously."

Toy soldiers are deadly. You don’t want to walk around barefoot when they’re near, that’s for sure. Those guns might not fire bullets, but standing on one is like being stabbed by a tiny bayonet. They’ve taken over Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, as well. The war of the wee plastic warriors is a timed holiday event created in collaboration with the Green Army Men mod team. Watch the trailer above.

Instead of playing in the jungles of Vietnam, players can duke it out across the living room, complete with Christmas accoutrements. There’s a big Christmas tree, presents, decorations—the perfect battlefield for a bunch of murderous toys. 

You can hop into this plastic war from the main menu between now and January 7, unlocking a special M1 Christmas helmet for the regular game while you’re at it. If that’s not enough reason to enlist, you’ll also earn double XP while you're melting your enemies. And, like cheap stocking-fillers that nobody wants, you can earn 12 festive achievements.   

I have plenty of fond memories of playing the definitely-not-as-good-as-I-remember Army Men series from 3DO, which is likely a cornerstone for the event and the mod, and I appreciate not needing to take off my rose-tinted glasses for this particular nostalgia trip.

Multiplayer FPS Rising Storm 2: Vietnam is getting an ambitious 64-player campaign that spans 11 battles. Between battles, each side votes on tactical decisions, such as where to attack, where to defend, and what faction they want to put on the frontline.

To win, you have to capture every territory on the overall tactical map or accrue more victory points, which you gain for winning individual maps. As you proceed through the battles, spread over 11 years, the equipment and commander abilities for both the northern and southern Vietnamese forces will change to reflect the real-life technological advancements and political events that happened during the Vietnam War.

Each side will have a special ability that will grant "unique, asymmetric advantages for a single battle", but they can only use it once every three battles. That should throw up some interesting tactical decisions: in a close campaign, do you counter your enemy's ability with your own, or wait until the enemy has used theirs so you get a clear shot?

I'm absolutely intrigued by it. I haven't played Rising Storm 2 in a good six months, but this is definitely going to pull me back. If you want more detail, the devs have set out a full hypothetical flow of how a single campaign would work here.

Alongside the new campaign comes a big update in its own right that adds a new map called Highway 14. It's for the Territories game mode, and sees both sides clash along a highway and in several small towns. The map came from a modding competition, which is nice to see. Don't expect it to be perfect just yet: it's still technically in beta, so you might find a few bugs.

Tripwire and Antimatter Games have also reduced overall weapon recoil while crouching and prone, and tweaked individual weapon mechanics. You can read about them, as well as big fixes and more minor changes to the UI, animations and player roles, in the full patch notes.

Read Tyler's review of the game here.

Rising Storm 2: Vietnam's free Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) update is releasing on May 29, but owners of the game can take it for an early spin this Saturday, May 19 during a brief beta testing period. 

The update will add five new maps, as well as the ARVN faction, new guns, and the Douglas A-1 Skyraider ground-attack aircraft commander ability. (Read more on what's included here.)

Saturday's beta run from 2 pm to 6 pm EDT (11 am to 3 pm PDT, 7 pm to 11 pm BST). If you own Rising Storm 2: Vietnam on Steam, you can join in by finding the Rising Storm 2: Vietnam CTB Beta game in your Steam library. After downloading and running it, look for CTB servers in the server browser during the beta period.

If you don't own Rising Storm 2, Tripwire has provided us with 20 Steam keys for the Deluxe Edition to give away here. You can enter the raffle by clicking the link below and entering your email address. On Saturday morning at 9 am Pacific, 20 random winners will be emailed codes.

Click here to enter the raffle

Note that Godankey won't keep your email address after the raffle concludes, and we won't see it. 

If you're a PC Gamer Club member, also check the Discord server's #giveaways channel today for a chance to win one of 10 additional codes. Good luck!

Multiplayer FPS Rising Storm 2: Vietnam will add a new faction later this month: the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the military force of South Vietnam that fought alongside US soldiers against the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

The update, due on May 29, will also add five maps, two of which are designed for the ARVN. Quang Tri is a supremacy map—teams have to capture control points and connect them to their home base—while A Sau is a nighttime territory map, which tasks the ARVN with defending an airfield and fortified camp against the NVA.

The other three maps come from a recent modding contest. They are:

• Firebase Georgina, in which the NVA attack positions held by the US Army.
• Borderwatch, which sees Australian forces push through jungles and open fields to attack the Viet Cong.
• Resort, a helicopter-assisted assault from the sea by the US Marines against a Viet Cong-held position.

The ARVN were armed and funded by the US, and their arsenal largely consisted of older US military equipment. In Rising Storm 2, they get access to the likes of the M1 Garand, the Thompson M1A1 SMG and the M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR).

I was a big fan of the game when it first came out last year, but I haven't dipped back in since last summer. It made Evan's list of the best multiplayer FPSs you probably aren't playing in September, and I might well give it a shot again after the ARVN update.

Read Tripwire's full Steam post on the ARVN update here.

If you've been reading PC Gamer for awhile, you know that we're fans of Rising Storm, Antimatter Games and Tripwire Interactive's multiplayer FPS series. We've loved Rising Storm's scale, authenticity, asymmetry, and teamwork, and the fact that it originated as the work of a bunch of enthusiastic, war-nerd modders.

If you're a fan, too, joining the PC Gamer Club at the Legendary Tier will now net you something special: a set of custom-made cosmetics for Rising Storm 2: Vietnam's factions. For the United States, a "Make Mods, Not War" helmet slogan pays tribute to one of our favorite parts of PC gaming and Tripwire's history. For the PAVN, a bathtub tattoo, for no reason in particular. And for the Australian ANZAC forces, a tattoo of our ancient and unforgettable mascot, Coconut Monkey.

Existing Legendary members should be receiving their item code by email soon, and new members will find their code in the welcome email after joining. Note that these are in-game items which require a copy of Rising Storm 2 to use, but you can hold on to your codes for as long as you want. (If you're interested, RS2 happens to be on sale right now in the Humble Hope for Orphans Bundle.)

These new additions join a growing set of great PC Gamer Club Legendary bonuses, which include a week's membership to RuneScape and an exclusive pet, an ad-free website, a digital subscription to PC Gamer magazine, new game keys in your inbox every month, and more. Check out all the benefits here, and sign up to the Legendary tier for just $5 a month at club.pcgamer.com.

PS, If you're already a member, check your welcome email to make sure you've joined the Discord server (shoot an email to help@pcgamer.com if you're not sure how). We'd love to play Rising Storm 2 with you while sporting our new bathtub ink.

Rising Storm 2: Vietnam features in our list of the best multiplayer FPSes you probably aren't playing—with Evan saying it strikes a sweet spot between authenticity and accessibility. Its latest complimentary update dives further into the former with a host of era-appropriate guns, maps and vehicles. 

Named the 'Bushranger' update, the shooter's new patch introduces Australian forces—a "major player on the anti-Communist side of the war for ten years"—who bring with them unique customisation possibilities and voiceovers. 

On the weapons front, expect the L1A1 SLR semi-automatic rifle and its fully automatic L2A1 LMG variant. The gravity-assisted Owens SMG 9mm machine carbine packs a pretty heavy punch, while the F1 SMG comes with a detachable bayonet and can be toggled between semi and fully automatic modes. The Browning Hi-Power pistol is also semi-auto and sports a 13-round magazine.

Long Tan, Rung Sac and Operation Forrest make up the maps—the latter of which is billed as a "large-scale map taking place across swamps and farmland" that features the game's "longest engagement distances to date."

Throw the Huey "Bushranger" Attack Helicopter into that mix, and there's plenty to get busy with in Rising Storm 2's latest update. 

As you may expect, the Bushranger update also comes with a host of bug fixes—the extent of which can be read via these patch notes. 

And if the above sounds interesting, Rising Storm 2: Vietnam is subject to a 50 percent discount on Steam now through December 1 at 10am PT/6pm GMT. At half-price, it'll cost you £9.49/$12.49.