Game Pass offers up three games, including one of 2016’s best

Patient gamers celebrate! One of 2016’s best games has just been added to the Game Pass service, and if you’ve been holding out on buying it, then prepare to be rewarded. Watch Dogs 2 (Cloud, Console and PC), in our opinion the best in the series, gets its time in the Game Pass sun today. 

But if a 40-hour plus Ubisoft open world game isn’t your brand of biscuit, then we have a couple of others to announce. Indie starlet As Dusk Falls (Cloud, Console and PC) is waiting for you to download, and – if you have a PC – you can embark on Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation (PC). 

Watch Dogs 2 needs very little in the way of introduction, and the likelihood is that most of you have played it already. But if you haven’t then this was a refinement of the occasionally janky Watch Dogs formula, an action-adventure-stealth game that took place in San Francisco Bay, working with the shady group DedSec to take down The Man. It also has a spot of cooperative multiplayer, which – whisper it – still has servers that are up and running. Knowing Ubisoft’s penchant for shutting those bad boys down, now might be the time to get some PvE. 

We liked Watch Dogs 2, saying “I’m loving my time in the Watch Dogs 2 world. It’s a step up from the first game and really does put down a marker for future games in this franchise. The story, characters, hacking and mission structure is great fun, with its deep pockets and knowing winks at the audience.” Grab your PDA and start installing some trojans. Or something. 

As Dusk Falls is the one that we’re most looking forward to. Revealed in detail at the Xbox & Bethesda Showcase, it immediately grabbed our attention with its A Scanner Darkly-style animation and focus on single-player narrative. It spans multiple decades, as the fallout of a robbery-gone-wrong impacts on multiple generations. Initial reviews have been positive, and we’re limbering up to give it our verdict. Expect a review soon. 

We know a lot less about Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, mainly because we’re an Xbox site and this is – at least for the moment – a PC game. But you can see what audience they’re aiming for: this looks like prime Command & Conquer, sprinkled with Dune and Starcraft. It’s a massively multiplayer real-time strategy game, and we can now see why it may not be fated to land on Xbox. Mapping the controls alone would give any designer a headache. 

We can also announce the new games arriving on the service in the second half of July. You’re getting MotoGP 22 (Cloud, Console, and PC) and Torment: Tides of Numenera (Cloud and Console) on July 21st, while the masterful Inside (Cloud, Console, and PC) arrives on July 29th.

Finally, there’s the less happy subject of Game Pass leavers. At the end of the month, we’re losing Dodgeball Academia (Cloud, Console, and PC), Katamari Damacy Reroll (Cloud, Console, and PC), Lumines Remastered (Cloud, Console, and PC), Omno (Cloud, Console, and PC) and Raji: An Ancient Epic (Cloud, Console, and PC).

Have you been waiting six years to play Watch Dogs 2? Let us know in the comments or on our social channels.