If reaching the conclusion of levels and encounters is not your style, and you'd prefer to keep killing zombies (or Zeds) until you just can't kill them anymore, Killing Floor 2 has you sorted. The new Infinite Onslaught update includes, as the name implies, a new Endless Mode, which just keeps going and going.

"Challenge the relentless waves of Zeds that become increasingly crushing as more waves are defeated while The Patriarch takes over in the role as The Trader," reads the notes on Tripwire Interactive's website.

That's far from all. There are three new weapons, including the MAC-10 SMG, the Husk Cannon and a AF2011-A1 pistol. You can also now play as D.A.R, a "domestic assistant robot" who featured in the original Killing Floor. There are two new maps as well, in the form of Powercore (a community-designed map set in a subterranean facility) and DieSector (a sector, in which, you will, or may possibly, die).

The Infinite Onslaught update also adds new cosmetics, crates, achievements, and weapon skins, as well as bug fixes and quality of life improvements. The full update notes can be seen over here, and a trailer below:

'Crunch,' in modern parlance, is a period of unhealthy overwork during the lead up to a game's release. But in the not-too-distant past it could have also described the nature of the work itself: a crunching and culling of excess data, enough to squeeze the whole game onto a DVD or two and comfortably onto a 100GB (or smaller) hard drive.

Game sizes have always been limited by their delivery medium—Myst was famously made possible by the introduction of the CD-ROM drive—but in 2004, when dual-layer DVDs were introduced, it was already too late for the PC game shelves at retailers. Steam launched around the same time, and as broadband snaked further into the suburbs and beyond, no physical medium could keep up with downloading. Games were allowed to grow, and grow, constrained only by users' bandwidth and hard drive space. That's resulted in 100GB-plus games that wouldn't even fit on a Blu-ray disc, never mind a dual-layer DVD.

That's causing grief for players who don't have access to speedy internet connections, or who haven't recently upgraded their storage in a pricey SSD market. It's especially bad for those stuck with data caps, a maximum data allotment per month that, if exceeded, results in extra charges. Broadband Now has catalogued 210 internet service providers that impose data caps.

For PC gaming to get better for those with poor internet service, either games will have to get smaller (or at least stop growing), or our selection of ISPs will have to get better, providing quality, uncapped service to more customers. After speaking to a few game developers, I can say confidently that the former isn't going to happen. The upper limit of game sizes is only going to increase. 

What's taking up all the space? 

Audio contributes a great deal to file size, but it hasn't been the primary contributor to the growth of game sizes in general. The resolution (sample rate) of audio will depend on what sounds the developer is reproducing—Tripwire, for instance, uses 44kHz audio for weapon sounds, and 22kHz audio for speech—but that was already the case back when it released Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45, one of the first third-party games to release on Steam. 

The use of 5.1 surround sound audio over mono or stereo audio has been one reason games are getting bigger, but the simple inclusion of more audio has probably had a greater effect. We expect voiced characters and high fidelity audio far more than we once did.

Video, on the other hand, has broadly increased in resolution—from 640x480  cutscenes way back when all the way up to 4K—which has notably increased its footprint on game sizes. Video can be heavily compressed, though. "1500x compression factors are not unheard of," says Stardock lead developer Nathan Hanish, pointing to the H.264 codec. So while high-quality audio and high-resolution video have helped bulk up games, they alone can't account for the leaps in size we've taken since 2000.

One element does check all the boxes for exponential growth: textures. Like video, textures are increasing in resolution, except unlike video they aren't fond of being compressed. Images can be heavily compressed—as with jpgs—but artifacting would be noticable. And regarding Hanish's specific work on Stardock games, "[DirectDraw Surface] images have to use a GPU friendly memory layout," he writes. "They only use local block compression, and thus yield at best an 8-to-1 compression." 

On top of that, textures are also growing in complexity. "In 2005 you had a texture, just a texture, which is what later people would call a diffuse texture, but it's just a texture," says Tripwire Interactive president John Gibson. "And then in the next generation, you have a diffuse texture, a normal map texture, and usually a specular—like a 'shininess' texture. So not only are you using a higher-resolution texture, because video card memory increased, and computer memory increased, but you also have three of them for every object."

Those objects—their meshes—are increasingly complex, too. A breakdown of Tripwire's games tells the story. In the mid-2000s, Red Orchestra 1 released at 2.6GB, which players thought was awfully big at the time. ("People would complain if we did a 100 megabyte patch," says Gibson.) Sound only accounted for 327MB of that release, and environmental meshes and textures weighed in at 1.4GB. Jump to Killing Floor 2, which released last year, and sound now accounts for 1.1GB of the whole. Environmental meshes and textures? 17.4GB.

"One of the quickest ways to make your game look better is to up the texture resolution," says Gibson. "Content will be authored at a very high resolution no matter what game you're making, and then you res it down to what will fit into memory. And as memory expands, people keep doing higher and higher resolution textures."

The same trend can be seen in Stardock games from 2003 to the present, beginning with Galactic Civilization 1: Ultimate Edition, which was largely bulked up by Bink video files. In 2011's Galactic Civilization 2: Ultimate Edition, textures grew to snag about 15 percent of the total filesize on their own. In 2015, Galactic Civilization 3's textures grabbed another five percent to become 20 percent of the total size. And in Stardock's latest, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, textures account for 60 percent of the total file size, says Hanish.

Textures aren't the only culprit, of course. Some games have no 'textures' in the 3D rendering sense in the first place, and some are very heavy on high-res video and can attribute the bulk of their size to that. Everything else has been growing, too, including executables, geometry, redistributables, and so on. But "textures have grown exponentially and represent (by far) the largest absolute and proportional area of growth—at least for Stardock products," writes Hanish, so if you want something to blame, look to the mossy rocks, the peeling wallpaper, and the freckled faces.

Why are some games so much bigger than others? 

Game sizes can be confusing. Why, for instance, are The Witcher 3 and Rainbow Six: Siege both 50GB despite one being an open world RPG and the other being a multiplayer shooter? Such comparisons indicate that the 'scope' or 'size' of a game, as we perceive it in terms of 'a world' or 'hours of story,' has little bearing on install size. Vast plains built of terrain geometry and repeating grass textures appear bigger in our heads than they actually are on disk, while a complex gun model that's physically small in-game may weigh more than we know.

NBA2K17 is 66GB, for instance, a hefty install size. Why would a game that takes place within NBA arenas be bigger than the entire world of The Witcher 3? For one thing, every player from every team is modeled and textured to a high degree of fidelity, whereas The Witcher 3 probably contains far fewer unique bodies and faces. And as Hanish pointed out when I brought up the topic, there's likely a heap of motion-captured animation data in NBA2K17. 

There are other questions. How much video is included? And audio? And is it compressed? Titanfall was a big game after install—48GB—because it included uncompressed audio to lessen CPU load. We can assume that from Respawn's point of view, accommodating dual-core CPUs would increase the number of satisfied customers more than a smaller install would have. 

Why not just compress everything?

That 48GB Titanfall install was 'only' a 21GB download, though, meaning it was heavily compressed. So why don't more games do that? An educated guess: it was only the fact that Titanfall's large install size was mostly audio that made it possible to compress it to 21GB in the first place.   

It's those pesky textures again. We've established that textures have been the biggest contributor to the overall increase of game sizes, and as Hanish said, textures can't be too heavily compressed. Unfortunately, they also can't be heavily compressed during download and then transcoded at install time, because that process "is extremely CPU and memory intensive and must really be performed in the studio," says Hanish (adding later that "some flavors of dds are much more intense than others to transcode").

That's not to say that compression doesn't occur (Steam itself compresses games and decompresses them after download, Gibson tells me). Nor does it mean developers don't take pains to decrease download sizes. It just isn't practical for every type of data, and isn't nearly as vital as it used to be.

Oculus VR coder Tom Forsyth, who previously worked on games for the PC, Dreamcast, and Xbox, recalls the crunching required to squeeze games onto discs back in the late '90s and early 2000s. He built utilities to compare compressed and uncompressed textures, to determine which looked acceptable in their compressed state and which had to be left uncompressed. He also hunted down duplicate textures and other unnecessary bits and pieces. While working on StarTopia, Forsyth even invented his own audio compression format to solve a problem with the music—with a week before shipping. Solving these problems, sometimes at the last minute, was necessary, as "you either fit on the disc or you didn't."

The same space-saving efforts happen today (Hanish described more-or-less precisely the same processes), but because an extra 200MB no longer blocks a release, and Steam won't take a bigger cut for a bigger game, there's far less incentive now to set a hard size limit during development. If shaving off a gig means a delay, or means resources can't be allocated to pressing bug fixes and improvements, it probably isn't going to happen.

"It's an infinite rabbit-hole," writes Forsyth. "You could spend years on compressing this stuff. But nobody has the time. Especially as you only really appreciate the problem once you're close to shipping. So do you delay shipping by a month to reduce the download size by 20 percent? That's a terrible trade-off—nobody would do that."

No developer I've spoken to denies that, with enough time and work, bytes can probably be taken off of any final build—at least until you get to some theoretical lower limit. But does cutting 50MB matter for a 30GB release? That's especially questionable when, as Gibson points out, the game is probably going to grow after release anyway. Free Killing Floor 2 updates have added new maps, modes, skins, items, and so on since its release.

2D games and intentionally low-poly, flatly-textured games will continue keeping the low bar low. Stardew Valley, for instance, is only a 462MB download. But Forza Motorsport 7 is a 96.5GB download, and there's no sign that the upper bar is going to stop rising.

"The moral of the story is: buy stock in ISPs and hard drive companies," jokes Gibson. And that's how it is. As our hardware gets better, developers are going to want to use more and more of our memory for higher quality audio, video, geometry, and textures—which means bigger games. We have little choice but to rely on our internet service providers to make fast, uncapped connections affordable. Unfortunately, ISPs, many of which pushed to repeal Net Neutrality regulations in the US, are not great allies. But at least our big, big games are going to look shiny (or specular) as hell.

The pantheon of great videogame weapons is dominated by shotguns, rocket launchers, and the odd sword or hammer. And it makes sense, these tools are responsible for the large majority of blood you’ll spill in most games. It’s a shame though, because there’s something wonderful and elegant about a perfect grenade toss—that graceful arc through the air before unleashing untold, instant destruction. If the rat-a-tat of a gun is the string section of an orchestra, grenades are that ear-splitting crash cymbal. Pound for pound, grenades can be every bit as satisfying—and there’s no shortage of wacky grenades that rival the most absurd guns.

In honor of these little death dealers, we’re rounding up the best grenades in PC gaming—from the satisfying shockwave of FEAR’s frag grenades to the divine chorus that spells doom for your team in Worms. If you like watching things explode (or implode!), we’ve got some good ‘nades for you.

Holy Hand Grenade - Worms 

Few grenades are capable of triggering horrific childhood memories quite like Worms’ Holy Hand Grenade. I vividly remember the dread of seeing one plop down next to several of my worms, a chorus of angels singing a triumphant “Hallelujah!” before blasting them all straight to hell. It’s the enormity of God’s holy wrath contained in the tiniest of weapons. Compared to Worm’s other assortment of absurd weaponry, the Holy Hand Grenade is elegant and simple: You throw it and count to three—four shall thou not count, neither count thou two, accepting that thou then proceed to three—and revel in the obscenely large explosion capable of destroying a huge portion of the map. And if the initial blast doesn’t finish off your enemy, you can always rest easy knowing it’ll send them soaring through the air to a watery grave. Monty Python might have invented it, but Worms’ hilarious variation is what really made this one of PC gaming’s most iconic grenades. — Steven Messner

Pulse Grenade - Destiny 2 

I generally don’t like a damage-over-time ‘nades, but until these were nerfed they were straight up broken in Destiny 2. Pulse Grenades are arc-powered pineapples that are exclusive to the Warlock Stormcaller and the Titan Striker subclasses, the latter of which could carry two at once with the top skill tree. Toss a Pulse Grenade down and the initial impact sends enemies pinwheeling through the air. Anything not killed instantly is then flash fried by repeated bursts of electrical energy that look like a fire in a sparkler factory. The funny thing is that Pulse grenades were absolutely garbage in Destiny 1, but for the sequel they were buffed to be good enough to melt bosses, whilst almost every other grenade got reduced to water balloon effectiveness. But that’s Bungie’s sandbox balance team for you. The daft bastards. — Tim Clark 

N6A3 Fragmentation Grenade - FEAR 

*Slow motion voice* Get dowwn!

I don't know what porn is, but watching a N6A3 fragmentation grenade explode in slow motion is grenade porn. The explosion bends the air into a visible concussive bubble, a shockwave that sends office supplies flying and men's asses to the ground. There's a half-second of quiet as everything floats away from the grenade's center, and then pop, fire and shrapnel fill the screen and dissolve the men and their asses into errant blood spatter textures and goofy little giblets. It takes some time for the smoke to clear. Exhale with it as you try to convince yourself FEAR came out over ten years ago. — James Davenport 

Medic grenade - Killing Floor 2 

Killing Floor 2 is so focused on shooting and blowing stuff up that even its medics get to shoot you (with love) and blow you up (with vitality). I love that KF2's medic class doesn't have to slow down or weild a Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch-like proton pack to do the job: just alt fire to stick a teammate with a healing dart, or throw a medic grenade to pop a cloud of blue smoke for everyone to suck into their lungs. It’s not the most impressive visual effect, but nailing a toss and capturing your struggling teammates in the cool, healthy embrace of your medicinal gas, which also damages Zeds, can prevent a team wipe—and I love saving my teammates by violently chucking metal at them.— Tyler Wilde

Boogie Bomb - Fortnite Battle Royale 

Would you rather your digital avatar be torn limb from limb by bits of shrapnel or would you rather lose control of it altogether, forced into some stupid boogie nights wiggle as your executioner watches and laughs? Sure, Fortnite Battle Royale's Boogie Bomb is cute, but the reality is a horror show, a tool built for humiliation. Death by one such mirror-plated 'nade is like being taken to the influencer gallows, where you're forced to tromp around and bash cymbals together for a meme-hemorrhaging audience before the floor gives out. I'll take the shrapnel, please. — James Davenport

Thermal Imploder - Star Wars Battlefront

The best grenades don’t always have to have to do something wacky, sometimes it’s all in the presentation—and in that regard the Thermal Imploder is unparalleled (except by FEAR’s N6A3 ‘nade, maybe). EA’s Battlefront stuck relatively close to Star War’s canon when it came to weaponry, but the Thermal Imploder is an exception I’m willing to make. The blast effect is gorgeous, but it’s really the bwah-bwuuuuh! of its detonation that makes this grenade stand out. If FEAR's frag grenade is grenade porn for the eyes, then the Thermal Imploder is grenade porno music for the ears. — Steven Messner

Candela - Rainbow Six Siege 

The fanciest flash grenade in video games, Ying's 'candela' spits out not one but six independent flash charges in quick succession, making it hard to shield yourself from. It also has strangely nuanced throwing behavior. If you cook it, up to three LEDs will illuminate on the candela before throwing. The more lights that are lit, the further the tactical light ball will roll along a floor. And separately, you can simply affix the thing to any 'soft' wall in Siege to flash through the wall. It's fun to hurl into a bombsite or hostage room, knowing at the very least you've sent anyone inside scattering. — Evan Lahti

Singularity grenade - Borderlands 2 

I played most of Borderlands 2 solo as Maya, so singularity grenades, which suck enemies into a little black hole before exploding, were my best friend. I sampled a few other grenade mods in the early hours, but once I found my first singularity, I never looked back. I'd actually hold onto low-level singularity mods instead of using higher-level bouncing betty mods and the like. They're that good, especially for Maya, whose super skill preys on clusters of enemies. They're also fabulous with rocket launchers, and I have fond memories of gawking at their Geforce PhysX particle effects. Remember when that was still novel? Where do the years go... — Austin Wood

Frag Grenade - XCOM

On the surface, frags in XCOM are not that impressive. You can cause more damage by shooting someone, their range isn't great, they destroy equipment so you can't salvage stuff off anyone you do manage to kill with them, and lining up that bubble showing where they will land can be annoying. It's not flashy, it's not special, it doesn't draw attention to itself. It's the Jimmy Stewart of handheld explosives. But the humble XCOM frag grenade is in everybody's inventory from mission one, they destroy cover, and you don't have a percentage chance to miss with them. They always lands where you want and cause enough damage to kill a baseline sectoid. The number of turns where I've messed up every easy shot and found myself in a situation where someone's fucked unless I can cause precisely three points of damage to that one guy over there are beyond counting. In those situations, the XCOM frag grenade is the best.— Jody Macgregor

Incendiary Grenade - The Division 

If the twenty first century has taught us anything, and so far it probably hasn’t, it’s that blowing people up is bad. But for real transgressive thrills you can’t beat setting (pretend) people on fire.  I think my love of immolating NPCs began with TimeSplitters on PS1, because Free Radical Design went the extra mile to code in really scared HOLYFUCKIMONFIRE screams. But it was with The Division that my pyromania took root. I main the Firecrest gear set which is built around setting dudes on fire. Mostly with the rinky dink flamethrower turret, but also with the extra Incendiary Grenades the gear grants. Pop one of these spicy little peppers and it spills liquid napalm over a satisfyingly wide surface area. Enemies caught within the nade’s roast radius start flapping around like, well… like their arses on fire. With the Wildfire talent enabled the burn spreads to their colleagues in that satisfyingly organic way that Ubisoft games seem to have nailed. I dunno, man. Burning is just the best. — Tim Clark

A bar from 2004's Vampire - The Masquerade: Bloodlines has been recreated in breathtaking detail in Killing Floor 2 as a custom map.

In this five minute video, creator Synchaoz takes us on a peaceful tour of the entire set... and then they let us see it in action in its full bloody, gory glory, too. It's worth a peek if just for the music choice, to be honest—who doesn't love a Tears for Fears cover? (Edit: It's by Scandroid, apparently - thanks, KananTheViking!)

When questioned about how long it'd taken to perfect the level, creator Synchaoz said: "As a rough estimate I'd say around 130 hours or so, including play tests. I had some pre-built sections (like the vampire tomb and parts of the backstage room) from old map projects that were cancelled, which I was able to copy/paste and just do minor modifications on, which shaved off a handful hours of work."

"The Asylum, The Last Round and Vesuvius were considered to be added as side-areas," the creator added, "but due to time and logistics I decided to stick to The Confession and instead expand it according to my own vision."

In our Killing Floor 2 review, we awarded the shooter 81, stating: "If you want a perfect replica of Killing Floor, with its specific classes and balancing, Killing Floor 2 isn’t that. But it is a visual spectacle, and a challenging, fun co-op shooter with an active mapmaking community."

The Killing Floor 2 Halloween Horrors content pack, with a new map and achievements, a pair of new weapons, a new (actually returning) enemy and boss, limited-time Halloween themed unlockables, daily missions, and the Dosh Vault, is now live—and free—on Steam.

The new map, called Nightmare, features randomized rooms "themed after a different nightmare or phobia," which will challenge players to "conquer their fears and the attack Zeds simultaneously." Because nothing says "overcoming your fear of public speaking" like a desperate, gore-soaked last stand against onrushing hordes of screaming mutants, right? 

Actually, it might. Having your face chewed on really puts things in perspective. 

Anyway, the full Halloween Horrors patch notes are up on the Killing Floor 2 forums, but here's the quick rundown: 

• New Map – Nightmare lives up to its name, dropping players into random rooms representing a variety of nightmares and phobias and tasking players to holdout against waves of Zeds.
• New Weapons – Medics get up close and very personal with the Hemogoblin, which drills into Zeds, draining their blood leaving emaciated corpses in their wake. Demolitionists receive their own high-tech in the Seeker Six, a rocket launcher that brings the ability to lock on to enemies and fire up to six rockets simultaneously.
• New Enemies – King Fleshpound and the Quarter Pounds cannot be contained and have broken out of the Poundemonium weekly game mode! Both enemies have been rebalanced for their introduction into survival game mode and will appear in normal play.
• New Limited Time Items – Earn Halloween Treat Tickets by playing the game, or purchasing Premium tickets through the store, and exchange them in-game for themed cosmetic items.
• New Daily Missions and Dosh Vault System – Players will receive a random set of missions each day that can be completed to earn Vault Dosh. While it won’t be usable to purchase items during matches, players will receive free Vault Crates containing cosmetic items at various milestones as their Vault Dosh accumulates.
• New Crates – New Emote, Weapon Skin, and Cosmetic crates have been added to the drop pool.

Killing Floor 2: Halloween Horrors is live now, and as I mentioned, is free. Enjoy the trailer.

Killing Floor: Incursion is basically a VR version of the zombie splatterfest Killing Floor, although as we said in our preview, the actual gameplay is somewhat different. There's still plenty of killing—"Killing Floor: Incursion has some good killing," as Steven opined—but instead of "wave-based hordes that slowly wear you down," the action is interspersed with puzzles, object interactions, exploration, and trading. 

But it's always smart to play to your strengths, and that's what Tripwire Interactive is doing with its first content pack. The central element of the update will be a new game mode called Holdout, a "continuous onslaught of enemies for you (and a friend) to fend off, before succumbing to the horde." 

"After players complete a level in the campaign, that level will be opened up to be played in Holdout. Inside this level will be a single location that players are tasked with defending as long as possible," Tripwire explained. "Starting with a pistol and knife, players will need to scavenge for better weapons as time goes on. As players progress, the Zeds will start getting more aggressive and more challenging Zeds will enter the fray, including multiple bosses at once!" 

The studio said that the details aren't locked down yet, and that "everything is subject to change as we continue to iterate on the gameplay." A release date for Holdout hasn't been set, but it's expected to be ready later this year, and will be free for all Incursion owners. Tripwire said it will share more information about the mode as development progresses. 

Don't look now, but right now might be the best time ever for multiplayer FPSes. I'm old enough to have experienced the [to the tune of Bryan Adams] 'FPSummer of Ninety-Nine' that gave us, egad, Quake III, Unreal Tournament, Team Fortress Classic, and the beginning of Counter-Strike. I think 2017 surpasses that.

In terms of depth, frequency of support, and contrasting kinds of multiplayer FPSes I can dig into, I don't think there's been a better moment for the PC gamer. The appropriate way to make this argument is with bullet points:

• An Arma mod on steroids is the most popular FPS on Steam. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is a story generator that balances intense firefights with goofing around. It's a 100-person free-for-all on a massive map that also respects your time. This week PUBG is running its first major tournament at Gamescom, with a $350,000 prize pool.  
• Even with PUBG alongside it, Arma 3—an intricate and often demanding sim—averages about 22,000 concurrent players daily. That's five times the playerbase it had at launch in 2013. 
• Blizzard's first FPS is colorful, competitive, and inclusive. But maybe most noteworthy is the tenacity and transparency with which Blizzard has iterated on Overwatch over time: it's been patched more than 120 times since launch, with seven seasonal events so far. 

• Investment money is pouring into Blizzard's Overwatch League, which will hopefully lay the groundwork for stable team rosters and great tournaments.
• Tribes isn't dead, it was just sleeping.
• Valve's support for CS:GO has been inconsistent, but the shooter has nevertheless cemented itself as an insanely deep competitive game. You could spend months working on your grenade technique alone. With its massive tournaments and a little help from online gambling, CS:GO has paved the way for all other FPS' esports scenes.
• Quake is back. Even with a free-to-play business model, rentable characters, and 'ultimate' abilities attached to each champion, Quake Champions bunnyhops and talks like a pure Quake game.
• One of the biggest game publishers in the world made a multiplayer-only, PC-first, tactical FPS and has supported it well for two years. Rainbow Six Siege has 2.3M daily players on all platforms.
• One decade after Halo 2, Destiny 2 is coming to PC. 

• Tripwire and Antimatter Games are quietly making some of the best FPSes on this list. Killing Floor 2, which just ran a great summer event, deserves some sort of blood-soaked Emmy for its gore system and gun animations. Rising Storm 2: Vietnam represents one of the best midpoints between authenticity and accessibility, continuing the series' ambitious focus on asymmetry.
• Battlefield 1, with easily the best infantry combat in the series, chugs along with paid expansions.
• March's Day of Infamy is a worthy successor to Day of Defeat, with great co-op to boot.
• Unreal Tournament is being remade as a unique collaboration between modders and Epic.
• Expect a major update to Team Fortress 2 when it turns 10 on October 10.
• Call of Duty: WWII is getting a beta on PC.
• 20 years after GoldenEye came out on Nintendo 64, the best version of it exists on PC and is maintained by a team of passionate fans. It's free.
• LawBreakers is rather good.
• Most of these games are funded by cosmetic microtransactions that don't affect gameplay, rather than expansions or map packs that would fragment the player base.
• The 144hz monitors you should play these games on are getting cheaper. 

I'm accepting counter-arguments in the comments. 

This week you'll probably want to keep some extra distance between you and the mobs of flesh that chase you around in Killing Floor 2. In KF2's final Weekly Outbreak event, "Boom," zeds explode when they die, hurting anyone or anything around them. Larger zeds explode like a miniature nuke, dealing even more splash damage.

Survive Boom on Suicidal difficulty and you'll earn the "Mind Blown" headgear, a stylish cosmetic that makes it look like mushroom clouds are coming out of your ears. 

This concludes Killing Floor 2's Weekly Outbreak events, which began in June at the start of the Summer Sideshow update.

The Humble Monthly Bundle for September is now available for purchase, once again offering over $100 in games for just $12. As is the way with these super-secret deals, all but one game in the package—Killing Floor 2—will remain hidden until the purchasing window has closed. 

It works like this: For $12 per month, you get one game immediately—in this case, Killing Floor 2—and the rest at the end of the month, when the next Humble Monthly goes live. It's subscription-based but you can cancel anytime, so you can grab the ones you like without being committed any further. And it's usually a really good deal, even without taking the bonus games into account—Killing Floor 2 normally goes for $30 on its own, for instance. 

But the extras aren't just pointless throwaways. The August monthly bundle offered Pillars of Eternity and NBA 2K17 up front, plus One Piece Burning Blood, Offworld Trading Company, War for the Overworld, Overcooked, Wuppo, Nongunz, Quiet City, and Kevin Eastman's Underwhere issues 1-4. That's not bad for 12 bucks. 

The September Humble Monthly Bundle will be available for purchase until September 1.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

In the past month or two, Tripwire has been playing fast and loose with the size of its dismemberable heads and torsos over the course of its Weekly Outbreak events. This week's new mutator, Beefcake, embiggens zeds that score hits against you.

Tripwire tells me via email:

"Whenever Zeds damage a player they get bigger and gain more health. they also become more dangerous because their reach also increases. Be sure to kill Sirens and King Crawlers quickly because the siren scream will 'grow' any Zeds in her scream radius. The king crawler and Zeds that pass through the gas cloud will also 'grow.'"

Beat the event on Suicidal difficulty and you'll earn the Horzine Armor Precious, a golden suit that'll match the helmet featured in a different Outbreak last month. This is one of the last KF2 Weekly Outbreaks, which Tripwire creative director Bill Munk announced at the PC Gaming Show last month at E3. Here's next week's event, the final one of the summer:     

August 8—Boom - Zeds under pressure; may explode.

Maybe it was something they ate? Bad gas? Whatever it was, Zeds explode when killed in this outbreak.