What’s on Game Pass? September 2024

It’s been a subdued month of gaming for me. Compared to the previous few months that each saw notable games arrive on Game Pass, this past month has seen a mere trickle of games.

And none of that trickle has inspired me.

I never played Mafia when it released because I saw it as another open world competing with the likes of Grand Theft Auto. I tend to install all new arrivals on Game Pass to uncover my next favourite game. I can’t say a lot about Mafia: Definitive Edition other than, I didn’t enjoy it.

Creatures of Ava, whilst an attractive game, is bland and suffers from a lack of originality. There was something about it that made me think, AI. I suppose that would be a real insult if the game developers haven’t used any AI to make the game.

Core Keeper is another pixelate Stardew Valley lookalike and doesn’t offer anything new, or even intrigue me enough to keep playing. I was looking forward to the release of Star Trucker. Everything about the game made me think American Truck Simulator x Elite: Dangerous, and whilst the outcome is basically that, the game suffers from being a simulator that doesn’t simulate enough.

What Elite: Dangerous gets right is the level of detail; the idea of a sim is to nigh-on recreate the activity being simulated. Star Trucker is the ‘Space Trucker for Dummies’ book of the sim world and would have been better off with story and further use of character control outside the driver’s seat.

Doom + Doom II have made another return to Game Pass. Bethesda has added a load of modded content and other stuff that made me wonder why they aren’t putting more effort into their upcoming games. Doom is Doom, fun for a little nostalgia and nothing else.

Age of Mythology: Retold has arrived and is the best of this bunch. It’s essentially Age of Empires with a mythological twist. It’s easy enough to get into, but RTSs are more suited to the mouse and keyboard. Again, I wonder why games like this are ported to console when the money could be used to develop ‘original’ video games.

Expeditions: A MudRunner Game has finally made its way to Game Pass and is the last of the news additions I’ll be telling you about. Snow Runner was an excellent game, if not a little pointless and meta-existential crisis inducing. The graphics are undoubtedly sublime, and I find the idea of survey landscapes rather intriguing, like some future explorers uncovering the remains of a human civilisation that destroyed itself. The problem is these kinds of games simply don’t respect your time.

There’s not a huge number of upcoming games that I’m excited about. There is however, one. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Though the title is dreadful – and someone was paid to come up with that – it’s a new Indiana Jones game using the same gorgeously smooth engine that Wolfenstein was built on – ID Tech Engine. It’s bound to be good, right? Right…?

Being as this has been a dry month and none of the games I’ve played warrants a detailed review, let’s skip straight to what I have been playing.

What am I playing?

Darktide is the answer. As a fan of the Warhammer franchise, I’m bound to be biased. It’s like being a Star Wars fan: if you adore the franchise, Star Wars Outlaws will seem like a great game. That said Darktide is great.

I’ve already spoken about Darktide and I’m going to say a few more things. Darktide is an improved Vermintide with a better skin, because we all prefer the grim dark future to the… fantasy past. You team up with three other players to flatten hordes of the most astonishingly disgusting, impious horrors that teem from the warp.

I have finally finished levelling my Veteran to 30 and now I’m onto the final class of the four, which for me is Ogryn. I tried Ogryn for my second build and never got on with it. This time, I’m having great fun because it turns out, the Ogryn class suits my get-in-your-face playstyle better, especially now I’m a better player.

Only I don’t know where to go from here. One of the few flaws with Darktide is the lack of content and story.

Whilst we’re with Warhammer, playing Darktide is frequently sentimental, reminding me of collecting and painting Space Marines as a kid. So, I decided to purchase the Core Book, the Eisenhorn Omnibus and the first book of The Horus Heresy, Horus Rising to refamiliarize myself with the lore.

My intention is to read these and maybe, just maybe, pick up a Combat Patrol of my chosen army – so far that’s… I’ll leave that for now. Maybe take a guess and let us know over on our socials. What army do you play and what army do you think is my favourite, thus far?