PS Plus October Games Lineup Adds F1 25, Hunt: Showdown 1896 and Earth Defense Force 2

Sony revealed the PlayStation Plus Monthly Games for October 2026: F1 25, Hunt: Showdown 1896, and Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2, free starting October 6.

Sony confirmed its PlayStation Plus Monthly Games lineup for October 2026 this Tuesday (30), and this time the pick spreads across very different crowds: racing, cooperative horror, and straight-up alien chaos. F1 25, Hunt: Showdown 1896, and Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 go free for subscribers starting October 6, straight from the official PlayStation Blog announcement.

F1 25 is the "serious" pick of the bunch. It's the official sim for the 2025 Formula 1 season, packing a Career mode, My Team 2.0 for anyone who wants to build a squad from scratch, and the F1 World online mode for group racing. If you liked the franchise but skipped the full price tag at launch, this is the easiest way to finally try it without spending a cent.

Hunt: Showdown 1896, from Crytek, pulls the darker card. It's an extraction shooter set in a corrupted late-19th-century world, where you go in solo or with up to two teammates to track down a boss, kill it, and get out with the bounty before rival hunters (or monsters) ruin your run. That fear of losing everything right at extraction is exactly what's kept the game alive this long.

Earth Defense Force: World Brothers 2 is the healthy counterweight to all that tension: voxel visuals, a literal square Earth, an alien invasion, and squads of up to four players built from a roster of goofy soldiers to take down giant monsters. It supports four-player online co-op plus two-player local split-screen, which is getting rarer by the year in new releases.

October's batch also comes with extras: exclusive Spider-Man: Brand New Day avatars unlocking on the 6th, plus horror-themed bundles for titles like Hunt: Showdown 1896 itself, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Overwatch 2. Anyone who hasn't claimed September's games yet (Sniper Elite: Resistance, MLB The Show 26, Wobbly Life, and Chained Echoes) has until the 5th before the lineup swaps over.

It's a smart lineup in practice because it covers three niches that rarely overlap: people who just want to race, people who want a real scare with friends, and people who just want to laugh while flattening buildings. The timing with Hunt: Showdown 1896 stands out because the game has been on a real upswing since its relaunch, and slotting it into PS Plus right at that peak is the kind of move Sony has been nailing fairly often lately.