Just bought an Xbox Series S/X? Here are the 25 best Xbox Game Pass games to download right away.
If you owned an Xbox One X or Xbox One S in the last console generation, you probably know how fantastic Xbox Game Pass is – but, if you’re just joining the Green Team for the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X, let us be the first to tell you that it’s probably the best way you can start off your game collection on the new console. Xbox Game Pass is like if the ease and convenience of Netflix met the video game rental store you remember as a kid, and the result is an all-you-can-download service that offers over 100 titles that are available to download whenever you want, and are yours to keep as long as you stay subscribed to the service. On it, you’ll find brand-new first-party Xbox games like Gears 5 and Halo Infinite there on the day they launch, plus classic gems from the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era. If those weren’t enough to choose from already, Microsoft and EA now offer the entire EA Play catalogue of games on the service – with games like UFC 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, FIFA 20 and more – at no extra cost. As great as the service is, however, it can be a bit overwhelming for first-time users. The way the service is organized isn’t exactly conducive to finding the best games, or even the most popular ones. It’s more or less just a mish-mash of games all thrown together with the newest additions at the top. So, rather than force you to dig through the catalogue yourself, we’ve put together a list of the best, must-download games from the service. That way you know what to look for when you load up the service or, if you haven’t yet subscribed, what you’re getting should you decide to commit to Microsoft’s massive all-you-can-download subscription service. There are a lot of places you can start on this list, but few are better than Alien: Isolation, a survival-horror game from Creative Assembly and SEGA that task you with surviving an alien-infested ship. If you’ve always admonished the characters in horror movies that make an easily avoidable mistake that turns out to be fatal, here’s your chance to prove that you’d make the better first mate. ARK Survival Evolved is Minecraft meets Jurassic Park – which, even on paper, sounds amazing. It’s an action-adventure survival game that puts you on an island with basically nothing in hand, and tasks you to build up a basecamp. From there, you’ll need to go out and capture the local fauna – everything from dinosaurs and pre-historic mammals to straight-up monsters – and breed them. The only problem? It’s all an open-world MMO, and you’ll have other players to contend with too. We might be waiting a while for the next Batman movie with Robert Pattinson, but if you need your fix of the caped crusader before that, check out Batman: Arkham Knight on Xbox Game Pass. The final entry in Rocksteady’s Batman trilogy also works as a great standalone title as you don the cowl to stop Batman’s entire rogues gallery from taking over Gotham in what has to be the longest night in Batman’s career. Having Doom Eternal on Xbox Game Pass only proves how great value the service really is. This game came out in March 2020, and by October, it was already on the service. Not only is it cool that it’s a recently released game, but Doom Eternal is actually one of the better shooters released this year. It’s fast-paced and frenetic, putting you against the hordes of Hell with nothing but a butt-load of armor and artillery. A great one to download if you’re into the idea of going full tilt against an army of demons. Thanks to the recent partnership between EA and Microsoft, gamers can now get EA Play games as part of their Xbox Game Pass subscription at no extra cost. While EA Play brings a ton of great new games to download, the one that stands above the rest is Bioware’s ambitious open-world RPG, Dragon Age: Inquisition. It was our Game of the Year back in 2014 when it released, and it still holds up as one of the best games from last generation. If you missed it before, now’s as good a time as any to give it a shot. Unfortunately you won’t find Bethesda’s sprawling fantasy epic The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on Xbox Game Pass, but you will find the next best thing – The Elder Scrolls Online. An MMO set in the world of Tamriel, The Elder Scrolls Online has you select from one of three factions, aligned by their geographic locations in the world. Within your faction you’ll form guilds to fight against one another and quest to the far reaches of Bethesda’s sprawling game world, all without paying a monthly fee.
