Dirty Bomb Beta Is Live
If you can get in
It might appear that we didn't cover the news that Splash Damage's upcoming team shooter Dirty Bomb has been unrenamed Extraction and is now Dirty Bomb again, but what really happened was that all the chopping and changing sent our tags system into quantum disarray. There are in actual fact 418 posts about Dirty Bomb in our system, but they can only be seen if you can correctly guess which name the game is going under at any split second. It was called Dirty Bomb 655,315 times for the duration of the last sentence, and Extraction 641,978, so good luck with that. You'll probably have more luck getting into Dirty Bomb Extraction Dirty Bomb Extraction Dirty Extraction's closed beta, which went live today.
The London-set multiplayer argy-bargy, oi oi apples and pears, watch it guv'nor, is 'out' on Steam now, but it's a store page without an install option unless you get accepted to the beta. Lob your name in the hat here. Not sure of waiting times, but given this is a free to play shooter rather than a paid affair I presume they're not going to be too stingy about it. The game's out proper sometime this Summer.
Dirty Bomb is what Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory studio Splash Damage did after Brink didn't quite work out as planned. It's set in a post-disaster London, in which mercenaries gangs duke it out for whatever it is people duke it out for after the world's gone to hell. It seems to have dispatched with the free-running aspect of Brink, and the DIY character stuff, in favour of a straight-up fight between "a wide array of distinct Mercenaries", of which each player picks three per match.
I've not seen it in action first hand, so I'm afraid I can't tell you if the fancy-lookin' screenshots are at all representative of the real deal. However, apparently there's no restriction on discussing the closed beta once you're in, so I imagine we'll all been hearing plenty about Dirty Bomb Extraction Bomb Dirty Dirty soon.