The 5 PS Plus Extra and Premium Games for August 2026 You Need to Pay Attention To
The PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium lineup for August 2026 is packed with heaters. Not every month is strong, but some drops are more stacked than usual. There are even two retro games this month, which is quite an anomaly. There’s only so much time in the day to get to these games, so prioritization is necessary.
As such, here is an unranked list of the five PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium games for August 2026 that subscribers should pay the most attention to. And with the exception of Helldivers 2, these games will be dropping in two batches — one on August 18th and another on August 25th — so it may take some time for all of these games to be available for members.
5) Metro Exodus
It’s quite ironic the best Metro game is the one that spends the least amount of time in the metro tunnels. Metro Exodus lets players explore the outside world more freely when compared to past titles, and the game somehow has one of the more engrossing open worlds in the medium, despite developer 4A Games’ inexperience making open maps. Instead of littering the landscape with obvious mission markers and radio towers to climb, Exodus gets players to explore around and guides them through their curiosity. This makes stumbling upon something useful or one of its more emergent moments that much more memorable.
Getting out the underground tunnels also ensures the game also has significantly more visual variety than past installments. Players trudge through a frozen wasteland, forested ruins, and even a Mad Max-style desert with its share of lunatics. Each of these explorable hubs is a great size and lets players poke around without feeling like they were padded to hit some quota. Exodus is a little more skewed toward action when compared to its predecessors, but it doesn’t feel like a bland shooter, as it still has enough of its identity as well some novel world design to overcome such superficial judgments.
4) Vampire Survivors
Vampire Survivors has been a phenomenon to the point of popularizing a whole genre. This auto-scrolling shooter seems simple because players don’t actively do much; as the genre name implies, just about everything but movement is automatic. However, Vampire Survivors is a classic exercise in knowing how to use feedback to hook players.
Wandering around the map and gathering upgrades is an absolute blast because of how ridiculous the effects get. After a few minutes, savvy players will have an orbiting wall of death around them that can easily handle all the hordes pouring in. Combined with all of the explosive, casino-like user interface elements that provide a ton of dopamine hits every few seconds, Vampire Survivors knows how to hit all the right buttons. It is one of the simpler forms of the “number go up” games and it — for good reason — could be thought of as exploitative, but it doesn’t have microtransactions and isn’t in service of a larger scheme.
3) Helldivers 2
Helldivers 2 is the kind of cooperative shooter that has a broad appeal. Its litany of difficulty options, endless loadout options, smooth gunplay, long string of unlocks, and multiple unique enemy factions make it quite the game for hardcore shooter players who want a deep experience that’s suited well for multiplayer.
Many games have some or all of those qualities, but Helldivers 2 goes above and beyond by knowing how to also court more casual players or even those who don’t care much for this genre. The satirical jingoistic tone reminiscent of Starship Troopers coats everything in a sense of humor that instantly separates it from its more serious peers. Saluting democracy and then carpet bombing a whole nest of bugs is quite silly. This also bleeds directly into the gameplay, since its sandbox of chaos is geared toward providing silly moments worthy of clipping. Friendly fire and physics go a long way in making this game far funnier than it would otherwise be. So while it may have all the bells and whistles for those who like to max out battle passes and optimize loadouts, it a great enough game to cover all sorts of bases and speaks to how well it is designed at its core.
2) Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 takes the immersive medieval RPG experience of the first game and improves it in just about every way. This sequel truly puts players into its world and asks them to roleplay in order to get the most out of it; even bathing is important, as characters don’t want to talk to a guy who smells like the inside of a slaughterhouse garbage scrap bin. All of its systems constantly clash together and lead to plenty of emergent stories that make each playthrough unique.
And while these less scripted events carry a lot of the game, protagonist Henry’s journey to resist King Sigismund of Luxembourg is written surprisingly well and makes this RPG more than just an anecdote simulator. So while its combat and exploration are solid enough, its ability to provide players with both an authored story and unscripted moments is what makes Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 quite the special experience.
1) Hell Is Us
Open-world games often lead players by the nose from objective to objective and contain a checklist that is designed to be as frictionless as possible. Hell Is Us, on the other hand, throws all that out the window and prioritizes a more immersive world where players have to pay attention to dialogue and environmental design to figure out where to go and what to do. This means using context clues to putting two and two together or listening to wind chimes to guide the way instead of following a yellow paint trailer or highlighted marker.
This design shift is so refreshing because it immerses players in the world and should be a template for other developers to iterate upon; Ubisoft alone could benefit from taking a page or two out of Hell Is Us‘ playbook. Combat isn’t as deep as it could be and the puzzles repeat more than they should, but Hell Is Us‘ unique approach to world design is reason enough to jump in.
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