PS Plus October Games Are Live Today: F1 25, Hunt: Showdown 1896, and Earth Defense Force

OCTOBER — First Tuesday of the month means one thing for PlayStation owners: the subscription vending machine has restocked. Sony has confirmed October 2026’s PS Plus Essential monthly games, and they’re claimable starting today — F1 25 on PS5, Hunt: Showdown 1896 on PS5, and Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 on PS4 and PS5. Add all three to your library and they’re yours for as long as you stay subscribed. Skip them and, well, that’s the deal — September’s claim window closed on October 5, and whatever you didn’t grab is gone.

On paper, this is one of the stronger Essential months in recent memory: a big-budget licensed sports title, a hardcore multiplayer darling, and a co-op oddity. But “on paper” is doing some work there, so let’s be honest about what each of these actually is — who they’re for, who should skip them, and whether October is worth your bandwidth.

F1 25: the headliner, and the value play

F1 25 is the reason this month matters. It’s the official licensed Formula 1 game from Codemasters and EA — the real cars, the real teams, the real drivers, the real circuits — and it’s comfortably the most expensive game of the three at retail. Getting a current annual sports title on Essential is exactly what the subscription is supposed to be for: the kind of game you’d hesitate to buy at full price but will absolutely devour for free.

What you’re getting is the full modern F1 package: career modes where you climb from rookie to champion, team-management play, the cinematic Braking Point story mode the series has run in recent entries, and online racing against the world. The driving feel in recent Codemasters F1 games has been genuinely excellent — grippy, communicative, and, crucially, playable on a controller with the assists on. You don’t need a wheel rig in your living room to enjoy this, though it helps.

The honest caveats: it’s an annual sports title, so if you played last year’s entry to death, you know the rhythm — iteration, not revolution. And if racing games aren’t your thing, no free price tag changes that. But for anyone with even a passing interest in motorsport, or anyone who’s ever thought they’d try an F1 game if it weren’t seventy bucks, this is your month. Claim it first, ask questions later.

Hunt: Showdown 1896: the one for the brave

Then there’s Hunt: Showdown 1896, which is — and I say this with love — the most stressful good time in multiplayer gaming. Crytek’s extraction shooter drops you and a partner into a monster-infested hellscape to hunt a bounty, and then asks you to get out alive while up to ten other players try to take it from you. Your hunter can die permanently. Your gear is gone when they do. Every distant gunshot is a decision: push toward it, or run the other way?

The reputation is deserved on both ends. Hunt is famous for having arguably the best sound design in the industry — you can track players by the crows they startle, the dogs they set barking, the glass they crunch underfoot — and for generating stories no scripted game can match. It’s also famous for a learning curve shaped like a cliff. Your first dozen hours will be mostly dying to people who heard you coming from three compounds away.

So here’s the honest take: if you want the single most intense multiplayer experience on this month’s list and you have a friend willing to suffer with you, Hunt is a gift. If you bounce off difficult games, or you play solo and hate voice chat, it will eat you alive. Either way, it costs you nothing to find out which camp you’re in — that’s the whole point of the subscription.

Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2: beautiful chaos

And then, to cleanse the palate: giant bugs, voxel soldiers, and four-player co-op screaming. Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 is the blocky-styled spinoff of the long-running EDF series — the one where humanity fights off planet-scale insect invasions with an arsenal that escalates from rifles to orbital stupidity. The whole series runs on earnest B-movie energy: the voice acting is broad, the physics are janky, the scale is absurd, and the fun is completely real.

This is the couch game of the month, full stop. Grab three friends, pick classes, and spend an evening yelling “EDF! EDF!” while a spider the size of a bus levels a city block. It is not sophisticated. It is not trying to be. It knows exactly what it is, and what it is happens to be a perfect Friday-night game. The PS4 version being included is a nice touch for anyone who hasn’t upgraded yet — everybody eats.

So is October worth claiming?

Yes — with the usual subscription caveat that “worth it” depends on your shelf. If you already own F1 25, the month’s value drops to Hunt’s tension and EDF’s chaos, which is still a respectable haul. If you own none of the three, this is genuinely one of the better Essential drops in a while: a premium sports title, a hardcore multiplayer gem, and a party game cover three completely different moods.

The move is the same as every month: claim all three today even if you’re not sure. They sit in your library until you’re ready, and the only Essential games anyone regrets are the ones they forgot to grab. Set a reminder for the end of the month if you have to — the window closes and it does not reopen.

The fine print: Oct 14, the price tiers, and the protest that changed nothing

A few housekeeping notes. The month’s Extra and Premium catalog additions get announced on October 14 — Essential is just the opening act. On pricing, NME lists the UK tiers at £7.99/month for Essential, £11.99 for Extra, and £14.99 for Premium, and the value conversation around those numbers has been loud ever since the controversial price hike.

Loudest of all was the player protest over Sony’s move to scrap physical releases from early 2028 — a genuinely emotional issue for collectors and preservationists. But per NME, that protest reportedly had “no measurable impact” on engagement. Which is either a testament to how many subscribers never think about the tiers, or a reminder that internet outrage and subscriber behavior are two different species. Probably both.

Either way: the games are live today, the claiming takes thirty seconds, and October’s lineup is good enough that the price-tier discourse can wait until after you’ve added F1 25 to the library. More from the games desk: Xbox Free Play Days’ Ubisoft weekend for the other side of the console aisle, everything else releasing today, and our look at The Witcher 3’s PS5 performance patch if your backlog needs feeding.