Halo 5 Is Free On Xbox One This Weekend

Looking for something new to play this weekend and don't want to spend any money? Microsoft has announced that Halo 5: Guardians is completely free to download and play starting now and running through the end of the weekend.

It's free on Xbox One as part of Microsoft's Free Play Days promotion which sees games drop to the low, low price of $0.00 for periods of time, usually on weekends. The one catch, if you can call it that, is that you need to have Xbox Live Gold.

To sweeten the deal, Halo 5 is offering double XP for the duration of the free play weekend, while the fun-time playlists Holiday Fiesta and Castle Wars are in rotation. The Holiday Fiesta playlist is aimed at celebrating the holidays, of course, and it features "snow-themed" variants of Halo 5 arena maps. Castle Wars, meanwhile, is a large-scale capture-the-flag mode that supports 16 players.

Halo 5 still has a very active player population, so you should have no trouble at all finding multiplayer matches. The game is also free with Xbox Game Pass, which further helps the game reach even more players.

The next mainline Halo game is Halo Infinite, which is in development for Xbox One and PC. We still don't know a whole lot about it, but Halo boss Frank O'Connor recently talked about how the game's multiplayer is tons of fun.