Mechabellum free on Epic until 1 October — and Astrea too

Mechabellum free on the Epic Games Store is the better half of this week's giveaway, and it is not close. Epic put Mechabellum and Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles on the counter at 16:00 BST on 24 September 2026, and both come off it at 16:00 BST on 1 October. Claim both — clicking costs nothing. But only one of them is a giveaway of something that was genuinely expensive, and our own price record makes that unusually easy to show.

We have logged the cheapest live offer for both games every day since 18 June 2026. As read on 25 September 2026, Mechabellum's median day put its cheapest key at $4.81, and the last price we recorded before the giveaway was $4.59 at Driffle, held from 20 to 22 September. Astrea's median day, across 60 tracked days, was $0.88 — and the cheapest offer we logged on 24 September, the day the giveaway began, was $1.11 at Eneba.

What Mechabellum free on Epic actually gets you

Mechabellum is a mech auto-battler from Game River, published by Dreamhaven, which left early access on 26 September 2024. You draft units, place them on a grid, pick upgrades, and then watch the round resolve itself without touching anything. Between rounds you see what your opponent fielded and adjust. There is no clicking speed involved and no build order to memorise — it is closer to a drafting game than to a real-time strategy game.

That structure is the reason it has held an audience. It sits at 19,580 Steam reviews as of 25 September 2026, 16,386 of them positive — a shade under 84%, which Steam rates Very Positive. The complaints in the negative column are mostly about matchmaking and balance churn across seasons, which is what happens to a competitive game that keeps reworking units; the praise is near-unanimous about the core loop.

The whole game is the moment before this: where you put things, and what you upgrade. After that you are a spectator. (Official Steam screenshot)

Why the price record matters here

A giveaway is worth what the thing would otherwise have cost you, and that is the number nobody reports. Across the 70 days we tracked Mechabellum before this week, its cheapest offer never went above $8.99 — logged on 18 June, the first day of our record — and never fell below the $4.59 it hit in the days immediately before the giveaway. It is a game that discounts shallowly and steadily, because it is live-service adjacent and still adding seasons. Five dollars of value, claimed in a click, is a real result.

Astrea is the opposite pattern. Its highest tracked price in our window was $16.25, also on 18 June, and from there it fell hard and stayed down: a median day of $0.88 means that for most of the summer you could have bought it for less than a coffee. That does not make it a bad game. It makes the giveaway a convenience rather than a windfall. If you have been sitting on a wishlist alert for Astrea, you were about to get it for a dollar anyway.

The official trailer, from Mechabellum's own YouTube channel. It shows the scale reasonably honestly, if not the amount of time you will spend staring at a grid.

Astrea is good — claim it second

Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles is a deck-builder from Little Leo Games that uses dice instead of cards. The twist is a dual damage system: your dice deal either Purification or Corruption, and corrupting yourself is sometimes the correct play, because corrupted dice hit harder. Managing that tension — deliberately poisoning your own pool to win faster — is the whole game, and it is a genuinely novel idea in a genre that has had very few of them since Slay the Spire.

It has 4,558 Steam reviews as of 25 September 2026, 4,174 positive, a touch over 91%. That is a better score than Mechabellum's, and if you only have time for one of the two this week, Astrea is probably the more pleasant evening. It is simply worth less as a giveaway.

Purification on one side, Corruption on the other. The interesting decisions are the ones where you choose to take the damage. (Official Steam screenshot)

What free on Epic costs you

Two caveats, both structural rather than sinister. An Epic giveaway gives you an Epic licence, not a Steam key — the game lives in the Epic launcher permanently, your Steam friends list does not follow you there, and Steam achievements and Workshop content do not exist on that copy. For Mechabellum specifically this matters more than usual, because it is a multiplayer game: the Epic build has its own storefront presence and you will want to check which player pool you land in before investing ranked time.

Once the round starts you cannot intervene, which is why the drafting screen carries all the tension. (Official Steam screenshot)

The second is the one people forget: claimed is not installed. A claimed Epic freebie stays in your library for good, so there is no urgency beyond the deadline. Claim both now, decide later. We laid out how the various weekly free-game channels compare in how to get free PC games legally every week, and the Epic-versus-Steam trade-offs in Steam vs Epic vs GOG.

Astrea's launch trailer. This is the GameTrailers mirror rather than the developer's own upload, but it is the publisher's cut.

The other free games running right now

Epic is not the only counter open. Our free-games tracker also currently lists Mindcop, a non-linear detective game in which you enter suspects' heads to catch them lying, and Crystal Crisis, a competitive puzzle-fighter with a crossover cast. Both are giveaways rather than free-to-play, which means the same rule applies: claim now, decide later.

Mindcop is the pick of the two if you want something you will actually finish. It is short, it is strange, and the central mechanic — reading minds in real time while the clock runs — is not quite like anything else.

Mindcop's interrogations run on a timer, which is what stops it playing like a point-and-click. (Official Steam screenshot)

Bottom line

Claim both before 16:00 BST on 1 October, because a click is free. Then install Mechabellum. It is the one our record says you would otherwise have paid about five dollars for, it is the one with 19,580 reviews behind it, and an auto-battler is the rare genre where a free copy actually matters — the value is in the opponent pool, and giveaways make opponent pools bigger.

Astrea is the better-reviewed game and the one to reach for on a quiet evening, but it has been available for about a dollar all summer and will be again. If you are trying to work out what any giveaway is really worth, the method is the same one we use here: compare it to the floor, not the sticker. That argument is set out in full in what is a historical low price, and we ran the same exercise on the Astral Ascent and LUFTRAUSERS week earlier this month. If you would rather buy strategy games than wait for them, our strategy games on sale list is the place to start.