In the latest of TF2's seemingly eternal supply of updates, the mercs are faced with their most outlandish threat yet. 

The update brings four new community created maps, some of them 'Invaded' versions of existing maps and others entirely new. The Watergate map introduces a new 'player destruction' mode, in which both teams have to collect beer from dead players and deliver it to a UFO in the middle of the map.

It's set up in much the same way as the Gun Mettle Update, with an 'Invasion Community Update Pass' available from the store which gives you a coin that tracks kills on invaded maps for the month that the event lasts. You don't need to buy it to access the maps, and all the money raised goes to the update's community creators.

Buying the pass also makes you eligible for random drops of 'Space Cases' that can contain anyone of a bunch of the new cosmetics that have also been added. When Valve have done similar things with CS:GO, I've often been able to make back the money by selling my first couple of crate drops—so long as it's in the first day or two before the price of them comes crashing down on the community market.

I still dip in to TF2 every now and then, and updates like this one are a great excuse for you to do the same. 

No one wants to end up in jail, but there’s something fascinating about life in the clink. There have been some great fictional prisons in literature and cinema—and video games too. The following hoosegows are some of the toughest, most brutal, and hardest to escape from in gaming. Some horrible prisons, both new and old, have made their way onto this list since we first wrote it.

From freezing Russian labor camps to max security space-jails, these are scariest imaginary prisons on PC.

B.J. Blazkowicz had to shoot an awful lot of Nazis to escape from the labyrinthine Castle Wolfenstein. As prisons go, Wolfenstein does offer some perks: ample access to weaponry, secret Nazi treasure, and delicious, hearty meals. On the downside, the dogs aren't very friendly and there's a giant Nazi with two machine guns standing between you and the exit. If you take too many bullets, you'll have to resort to eating dog food. Yuck.

Batman famously has one of the best rogue's galleries in comics, and his nemeses inevitably end up in Arkham, Gotham's prison for the criminally insane. 2009's brilliant Arkham Asylum makes the prison itself the star, imagining it as a densely interconnected 3D playground in the vein of Super Metroid. As Batman gains new bits of equipment he opens up new ways to explore and unlocks new shortcuts. In the end, Arkham Aslyum has some great depictions of Batman's villains and the dark knight's abilities, but mastering the asylum is the true joy.

The Souls series has some of the toughest prisons in gaming. Dark Souls starts you off in one, the Undead Asylum, which is guarded by an overweight demon that ruins newcomers on the reg. Dark Souls 2 has the Lost Bastille, a prison made entirely of cold grey stone, patrolled by undead knights and exploding mummies, and wraps with a boss battle against three nimble suits of armor. But Dark Souls 3’s Irithyll Dungeon is the prison-iest of all (most prison-y?). It glows a sickly green and greets you with the Jailers, spooky robed guards that lower your max health just by looking your way. Explore the cells and eventually you’ll run into the wretches, grotesque human-dragon hybrids, botched experiments of the Lothric family. Deeper in you’ll find giants taken prisoner, massive sewer rats looking for a snack, a downright mean basilisk ambush, some items that sound off a large scream when picked up to alert nearby enemies, a gluttonous humanoid with an enlarged hand for a head called—what else—the Monstrosity of Sin, and some sewer centipedes. Don't Google them.

It’s an awful place that folds over on itself in a disorienting search for one key after another, delaying your escape just beyond its rows and rows of thick iron bars. Get in, save Siegward, and never return. 

Protagonist Vito Scaletta gets busted for selling stolen ration stamps and ends up in the clink. This is an act break of sorts, separating the game’s 1940s and 1950s chapters. The slow walk through the gates, being yelled at by jeering prisoners, is straight out of The Shawshank Redemption. You pass the time by punching people and scrubbing toilets, before emerging into a terrifying world of quiffs and rock and roll.

JC Denton defects from UNATCO and becomes a wanted man. He’s captured and wakes up in a mysterious underground cell. With the help of a creepy AI calling itself Daedalus he manages to escape, only to discover that the sinister prison facility is located below UNATCO’s Liberty Island headquarters. Most people who mess with Majestic 12 end up dead, but JC uses his nano-powers to break out and flee to Hong Kong.

Butcher Bay is a space-prison for the galaxy’s toughest, gruffest space-bastards. Escape From Butcher Bay sees the titular Riddick, played by Vin Diesel, breaking out of this maximum security sci-fi prison by stabbing, choking, shooting, and sneaking past its small army of guards. But, even though escape is his top priority, he still finds the time to enter bare-knuckle boxing matches and shiv other prisoners.

“It used to be a high security prison,” says Alyx Vance, gravely. “It’s something much worse now.” She always was good at introductions. Nova Prospekt is an old prison that the Combine have converted into a facility for processing any ‘anti-citizen’ who fights against their tyranny. ‘Processing’ meaning being turned into a hideous half-machine monster. A grim place indeed, but no match for Gordon’s gravity gun.

The Suffering is a mostly forgotten 2004 shooter from Midway, set on the twisted Carnate Island off the coast of Maryland. The penitentiary itself, where you're on death row, is just the beginning—the whole island has a dark history, including an insane asylum and a whole lot of executions. Hell breaks loose immediately when an earthquake calls up hordes of twisted monsters, who proceed to wreak havoc on the prison. It all may sound like standard horror fare, but The Suffering stood out thanks to some fabulously creepy designs by Stan Winston Studios. Those are monsters we would not like to be trapped on an island with.

Probably the toughest prison on the list, Vorkuta is grim Russian labour camp and one of the most memorable levels in Black Ops. With help from Viktor ‘Gary Oldman’ Reznov, your fellow prisoners, a mini-gun called the Death Machine, and giant slingshots loaded with explosives you battle to freedom and destroy half the prison for good measure. Shame about that rubbish vehicle section at the end.

The prison ship Purgatory, operated by the Blue Suns mercenary company, is where unstable biotic Jack finds herself. Commander Shepard, hunting for the galaxy’s baddest asses, flies there in order to recruit her. Before it was a prison, the ship was used to transport animals, which explains the tiny cages masquerading as cells. It’s not all bad, though: if it gets crowded, the Blue Suns will dump you on a nearby planet.

This desert prison used to be a peaceful coal mining town, but now it’s a hellish jail. Cloud and co. are dumped here after a misunderstanding, and have to earn their freedom by entering, and winning, a chocobo race in the Golden Saucer theme park that looms over the prison. As far as I know, this is the only time in gaming history where you escape from jail by riding a giant chicken. Hopefully it’s not the last.

That’s not a very nice name. Why not Warmridge Prison? Dishonored protagonist Corvo Attano is sent here after being wrongly accused of murdering the Empress he was charged to protect. It’s an imposing building—designed by the same guy who dreamed up Nova Prospekt, Viktor Antonov—and serves as the game’s tutorial. Murderous inmates, brutal guards, and rats are among this foul place’s residents.

This Alaskan military base isn’t technically a prison, but Solid Snake finds himself imprisoned in a cell there during the first MGS. There are a few ways to escape, but my favourite is spilling a bottle of ketchup and lying down next to it. The idiot guard thinks you’ve killed yourself and rushes in to help, giving you a window to break out.

Only slightly harder to endure than listening to the band Bastille, this famous French prison was notorious for its brutal treatment of prisoners. It’s here that the foppish hero Arno Dorian learns how to fight, and ultimately becomes an assassin. After the French Revolution it was demolished and replaced with a monument, but it will live forever in the decidedly average Assassin’s Creed Unity. C’est la vie.

Hell's Prison, posted on Reddit, is just one of thousands of devious, depressing prisons concocted by Prison Architect players. There's probably a harsher prison lurking on a hard drive somewhere, but Hell's Prison is a good example of how totalitarian Prison Architect lets you be as a warden. 

"At any given time about 90-100 prisoners are in the initial stages of starvation and taking damage," reads the description. "The entire prison is one giant infirmary so that doctors automatically tend to them. Prisoners who are close to death are brought to the medical beds by the guards. I have yet to lose a prisoner to starvation."

Prison Architect's Steam Workshop is also full of fantastic creations and recreations, like Alcatraz. Now that's a tough prison.

One of the most famous video game prisons, this is where you start your adventure in Oblivion. You don’t know what your crime was or how you ended up there—you’re supposed to fill in the blanks—but a fateful encounter with the Emperor of Tamriel leads to your escape and transformation into a hero. You can return later and take the opportunity to teach gobshite Valen Dreth some manners.

Halloween has come to mean two things: rotting childrens' teeth with autumnal-coloured sweets, and Team Fortress 2. Every year for the past six years, Valve has pulled out all or most of the steps to throw a spooky shindig for its now free-to-play multiplayer shooter.

Er, except this year. Valve explains here that it's rather busy working on the next major update, so in lieu of a proper Halloween event it's bringing back all of the previous ones at once. Not only that, but there will be a showcase of the best community content.

After revealing that the forthcoming update will feature "new maps, cosmetics, and a new campaign with contracts and weapon collections", Valve went on to explain the nature of this year's seasonally spooky box social.

"Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that there s something missing from that list: Halloween. The reality is, if we produce a holiday-specific event map this year, it means we'll have to stop working on everything else. So: We ve decided to turn Halloween mostly over to you. This year s Halloween Update will be a showcase of all the best Halloween-themed community content (items, maps, taunts and unusuals) you guys can come up with. We ll also be activating every one of our past six Halloween Updates, so there'll still be plenty of spooky holiday-themed game modes to play.

"Over the next month we ll be looking through the Workshop for anything tagged 'Halloween', so if you ve been working on an item you think would be perfect, make sure you get it submitted and tagged before October 18th, 2015."

You'll be pleased to hear that there are "no restrictions" on this year's Halloween items, meaning they can be viewed all year round. So if you're inclined to make TF2-themed stuff, and to put on Steam Workshop, go nuts.

When I was a young lad, my bedroom walls were all a dull shade of sky blue. Then my parents painted, and I enjoyed a slightly fresher-looking shade of sky blue. I'm not bitter about it or anything. I'm just saying that I wish Randy Slavey was my dad. Because Randy Slavey has created what has to be the coolest, and perhaps only, Portal-themed bedroom ever—the kind of thing a grown-ass man (like yours truly) would be proud to sleep in.

Slavey details the process of creating the bedroom over on Geekdad, beginning with the demolition of his son's previous bedroom, which Slavey built 15 years ago. After that, the real work began: priming, taping, and painting, much of it by hand, including a line of 255 individual circles representing the lights for the door triggers. Thanks to some less-than-perfect advice from the guy at the paint store, painting the furniture, which you'd think would be a much simpler process, sounds like it was even worse.

Then came the detail work, including a hidden message—you know which one—plus turrets, a companion cube, and Wifi-controlled LED bulbs in the ceiling. But what ties the room together are obviously the portals: round mirrors, ringed with colored rope lights and strategically mounted for that "3D to infinity!" look.

It is, and yes I'm going to say it, a triumph, and based on his reaction, Slavey's son clearly loves it. I don't blame him. Catch the full collection of photos, and a breakdown of how it was all done, at Geekdad.

Thanks, Make:.

According to determined intenet sleuths, Team Fortress 2 is being invaded by UFOs. Datamining the Team Fortress 2 update that rolled out earlier today, a user on the Facepunch forums discovered a bunch of new assets listed in the code. Words like 'invasion' and 'saucer' feature prominently, as does references to posters that feature these.

Then there are other TF2 players who have actually spotted UFOs by, you know, playing the game. Another user on the Facepunch forums spotted one of the aforementioned posters in the 2fort map, and YouTube user waterandroid even made a video of a flying saucer appearing in the skies above Dustbowl, as below:

Someone on Reddit has collated all of the evidence so far, and it's pretty compelling. I'd go so far as to say it's conclusive. The UFO Invasion update has been rumoured for a while after all, with this very unsubtle video leaking back in July. Oh, and Halloween is coming next month, so I wouldn't be surprised if all these sightings culminate in something around then.

Team Fortress 2 has some great battlegrounds, and—unlike pre-Global Offensive era CounterStrike—its community never settled for just a handful of favourites. Some, such as ctf_2fort, cp_dustbowl or pl_goldrush, are more easily found than others. Its seemingly endless server list always contains a few packed-out servers for just about every map. Even Hydro.

My favourite is Harvest, a community-made map taken on by Valve as an official part of the game. It s a King of the Hill map, a mode introduced two years into TF2 s now almost decade-long life. King of the Hill was based on the philosophy of small, compact environments, first introduced in Arena mode. It doesn t have Arena s restrictions, though, meaning there s no single life or limited player count. King of the Hill maps work just like any other TF2 map, only they re condensed around a single capture point. Your team s job is to capture that point and hold it for three minutes—with the time remaining for both teams ever present as part of the interface. 

Naturally, for this to work with TF2 s standard compliment of 24 players, the map design has to be really good. Largely, it is. King of the Hill maps are a patchwork of tight, balanced sections that naturally favour certain classes, but that always gives the player a possible counter to prevent any one class from dominating. Often these are heightened with the unpredictability of environmental elements. Sawmill has twin saw blades around its capture points, a sadistic boon for a Pyro or a Scout with a Force-A-Nature. Nucleus has a network of precarious catworks that hang over a deadly drop.

Harvest has no such gimmick—at least not in its regular variant, that is. It s a symmetrical map with a dilapidated shed housing its central control point, and two large farmhouses situated opposite each team s spawn. This is all it needs to house each of TF2 s nine classes. It s a beautifully intricate space, giving each class a location to shine and each opponent a way to counter or circumnavigate that threat. 

Snipers, for instance, can take residence at the back of the map—towards the side of either farmhouse, or even standing on either of the small side-sheds. As always, it s a perilous position. The sight lines are long, but narrow. Snipers are vulnerable to enemy players using cover for a sneak attack, or to long-range classes firing down the spawn trench. Pyros, meanwhile, can revel in the ambush potential afforded by the enclosed control point, but are at the mercy of Soldiers and Demomen who, with a simple rocket-jump, can fire through the exposed roof. 

Seemingly innocuous details provide potential windows of situational safety. Players might not think twice about the small section of fence that extends out next to the spawn point. For a seasoned Spy, though, it s the perfect decloaking point to rejoin your team in a natural looking way—at least until a Pyro gets wise to the tactic. Each farmhouse, too, is its own minibattleground, simultaneously used for alternate routes to the central area, a potential respite from danger, and a direct means of reaching the Soldier who s inevitably camped on its roof. 

In motion, the interplay between classes across these conflict hotspots paints a picture of beautiful carnage. The lack of space gives King of the Hill maps a sense of chaos and immediacy. After rounding the corner of Harvest s farmhouse, you re forced to make a series of snap decisions as to where you ll be the biggest credit to your team. It s guaranteed that at least three miniature battles will be occurring at once, and all could be potentially crucial in capturing—or holding—the objective. It s a great map to spectate, purely in terms of violence per square foot. 

How much do I love Harvest? I paid real money for a Map Stamp to reward its creator, Sean Heyo Cutino. I d barely be prepared to do that for most Valve-made maps. Especially Hydro.

When I saw the release trailer for Half-Line Miami, I assumed it was a gag whipped up by somebody bored with the wait for Half-Life 3, or a set of skinned levels built in Hotline Miami's level editor. It is neither. Half-Line Miami is a free, fully playable mash-up of Hotline Miami and Half-Life 2, complete with the G-Man introduction, and it's really good.

The actual gameplay is straight out of Hotline Miami, but the maps, enemies, and sound effects are taken from Half-Life 2. And instead of the usual assortment of blunt objects and firearms, you're equipped with the gravity gun, which works exactly like it does in HL2: Pick something up—explosive barrels included—and then fire it at your enemies to turn them into pulp.

There are eight levels in all, one for each area in Half-Life 2. For players who are into the DIY thing, it comes with a level editor as well. The soundtrack by Sung is pretty fantastic too. And it's free!

"I made this game as a declaration of my love for these 2 games, and as an experiment in game design," creator Thomas Kole explained.

Grab it—trust me, it's worth your time—at Itch.io.

Team Fortress 2 has a new mode! It's called Pass Time, it's in beta, and you can see what it looks like above.

A little overwhelming, right?

It's an American Football/Football (delete as applicable) style mode, but also there are guns. Your team's job is to grab a ball from the centre of the map, and punt it into the glowing target deep in the enemy's base.

If you're carrying the ball, you can't use a weapon. You do, however, get a brief speed boost—and can see the location of all teammates and enemies highlighted around the map. You can also pass the ball—allowing for the possibility of it being intercepted. 

It's pretty exciting. At least, it was across the brief period I played. I went in to grab a screenshot, immediately scored a goal, declared myself King Of All Team Fortress 2, and left.

Interestingly, the mode was envisioned by Bad Robot and co-developed by Escalation Studios. "PASS Time marks Bad Robot's first foray into rapidly iterative content, and they're really excited to get feedback on their beta so they can work with the TF community to evolve the game," says the TF2 blog's announcement post. "This is a new way of doing things for them, and they're looking forward to working with you to see how it grows over time."

To recap, the production firm co-producing the new Star Wars film has teamed up with Valve to create a new sports-influenced capture-the-flag style mode for Team Fortress 2; a game about hats. Videogames are weird.

If you'd like to play Pass Time: open TF2 and, in the Play Multiplayer menu, select "Play Beta Maps". Alternatively, go to the server browser and search for "pass_warehouse".