While we love a great single-player game, we’re always always down for a great multiplayer experience — and there’s no shortage of ways to get those these days. Many of the most popular multiplayer games are free-to-play, which drastically lowers the barrier of entry for new players. Some are still paid, though, and you might not know whether the monetary investment into a game is worth it in the edge case that your friend group doesn’t like it. Thankfully, many of these full-price multiplayer games are available for no additional cost through PlayStation Plus Extra.
Heading into the weekend, I want to highlight three of those games. The first is an intense 5v5 competitive shooter from Ubisoft that emphasizes environmental destruction and tactical play. Next is the most successful asynchronous multiplayer game in the horror genre, where players must avoid a powerful killer as weak survivors. Finally, there’s a colorful cooperative shooter available via PS Plus Essential this month that everyone reading this should redeem if they can.
Rainbow Six Siege
While XDefiant is the new hotness when it comes to first-person shooter games from Ubisoft, Rainbow Six Siege is still immensely popular eight and a half years after its initial release. It’s a 5v5 competitive shooter in which each player controls an operator who has access to special weapons and gadgets. From there, it’s up to the defending team to set up traps properly and play well in order to fend off an attacking team trying to kill them all. Rainbow Six Siege can get very intense, but it’s also one of the most satisfying multiplayer games out there when you’re able to smartly anticipate and overcome whatever your opponent throws at you.
On top of that, it also features some of the most impressive environmental destruction in a modern realistic shooter, as it’s possible for either team to gain an edge in battle by breaking down walls or destroying other parts of levels in order to ambush or flank enemies. If you and your friends are competitively-minded multiplayer games, then Rainbow Six Siege is the best thing you can check out on PS Plus Extra this weekend.
Rainbow Six Siege is available on PS4 and PS5 through PS Plus Extra. It’s also available on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S via Xbox Game Pass.
Dead by Daylight
Several asynchronous multiplayer horror games based on movies, like Friday the 13th and Evil Dead, have come out over the years. None have had the staying power of Dead by Daylight. That’s probably because Dead by Daylight trail-blazed this gameplay formula and also serves as a melting pot of both original characters and crossover ones from franchises like Stranger Things, Silent Hill, Alien, and Dungeons & Dragons.
Its asynchronous setup means that Dead by Daylight can successfully deliver both the power fantasy of being a grotesque, strong killer like Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2 and the intense feeling of sneaking around and outsmarting a killer as a survivor like Alan Wake or Nick Cage (yes, he’s a playable character). Dead by Daylight is constantly being updated with new killers and survivors, and is even getting a new 2v8 mode this year, so it’s a good time to jump into this game.
The PS4 and PS5 versions of Dead by Daylight are available to PS Plus Extra subscribers. It’s also available on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android, and is part of the Xbox Game Pass catalog.
Borderlands 3
For those who prefer cooperative multiplayer games to competitive ones, the July PS Plus Essential title Borderlands 3 is one of your best options. It’s the third entry in the series that pioneered the “looter shooter,” a style of co-op game where players grind missions in order to find better and better weapons, each of which is procedurally generated with some unique stats and abilities. It doesn’t reinvent the franchise’s formula that much but retains the tight gunplay and visual style that helped make Borderlands iconic in the first place.
Playing on PS5, the vibrant cel-shaded art style of Borderlands 3 really pops and will likely age better than a lot of the other games released around the same time it did. While Borderlands 3‘s story isn’t anything special, the visuals and gameplay make it very worthwhile as a new co-op game of choice if your friend group hasn’t played it yet. A Borderlands movie hits theaters next month, so playing Borderlands 3 through PS Plus is also timely.
Borderlands 3 is available to redeem for PS Plus subscribers of any tier until August 6.
