We are all on the edge of our seats just waiting for Doom: The Dark Agesto unlock on our PCs and consoles, but Game Pass is the gift that keeps on giving. We’re barely even a week into the month and we already have a slate of new additions to the service, including a day one title. Whether you’re just trying to pass the time this weekend as fast as possible before Doom, or have no interest in that gory shooter and are looking for something a bit different to play before your next upcoming Xbox Series X game comes out, we won’t leave you hanging. These are the 3 best new Xbox Game Pass games we know you will love playing this weekend.
Revenge of the Savage Planet
Just like with its first game, developer Raccoon Logic (formerly known as Typhoon Studios) takes aim at the absurdity and heartless nature of modern corporations and their incompetency with Revenge of the Savage Planet. As a game, this entry opens things up as an open world adventure with crafting and lite Metroidvania elements as you unlock new pieces of equipment. From the jump, this game proudly presents its world as a parody, with your main character waking from a cryopod and watching an orientation video immediately followed by a video laying you off. Similar to High on Life, the gameplay is merely okay here, but it is the world and humor that will win you over.
We can’t say we ever imagined a horror game based on fishing, unless we played as the fish, perhaps. Dredge sets you on the dark and dangerous waters off the town of Greater Marrow. Using your dingy little fishing boat, you will go out fishing and salvaging items by completing a little minigame. However, as you venture further out to sea and stay out after dark, panic will rise, you will begin to hallucinate, and monsters from deep below will come to the surface. By trading in your hauls, you can upgrade your boat to go further and stay out longer to catch more deadly game. Besides being a mechanically addicting game despite the stress, there is also a lovely little horror tale to follow.
Dredge is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Mobile, and PC.
Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2
Dragon Ball fans, it is time to break out your OC and bring them to life. Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 is the ultimate fanfiction Dragon Ball game where your unique character travels through time to help make sure the events of the story occur as they are supposed to. This includes inserting yourself in all the key battles of the show, from Goku’s fight with Radditz through the entire Z saga, but even non-canonical and new story moments that will be a blast for fans who have theorycrafted how hypothetical battles would play out. The gameplay is easy enough to get into as a 3D arena fighter, but has multiple hub areas to explore, NPCs to talk to, almost endless amounts of quests, and a huge multiplayer community that is still going strong.
Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, and PC.
May’s Game Pass lineup has been announced, and to no one’s surprise, Doom: The Dark Ages is the biggest name on the list. It’s far from the only game worth playing, though! This month is filled with choices that range from anime-inspired fighters to quirky Metroidvanias that will keep you entertained for hours to come.
We also get the return of a former Game Pass title, several games jumping tiers, and new perks and DLC.
Dredge (Cloud, PC, Console) — May 6
Team17
Dredge is an indie hit that combines fishing with Lovecraftian terror. It’s a single-player, story-driven game that has the player fishing to earn money, craft upgrades, and sometimes, discover secrets beneath the waves. If you enjoy playing it, there’s a live-action film adaptation in the works.
Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 (Cloud, PC, Console) — May 7
Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 is an open-world brawler that has you exploring a large city, battling fan-favorite characters, and diving into a story made specifically for fans of the Dragon Ball franchise. It requires more skill than just button-mashing to win fights, but don’t worry: you don’t have to be a pro fighting game player. The whole game takes between 30 and 40 hours to complete, so there’s plenty to keep you busy.
Revenge of the Savage Planet (Cloud, PC, Console) — May 8
Racoon Logic
Revenge of the Savage Planetis a sarcastic, over-the-top Metroidvania where you play a corporate drone abandoned on a distant planet with little gear and a burning desire to go full John Wick on your former employer. You’ll need to explore the world and collect upgrades to survive and make your way back to Earth.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed combines RPG and relationship-building elements with a brawler framework. You can expect to finish the game in ten to 14 hours, chock-full of the Turtles action you want.
Warhammer: Vermintide 2 (Cloud, Console) — May 13
Making a grand return to the Game Pass library after a long absence, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is a wave shooter similar to Helldivers 2 set in the Warhammer Fantasy world. Team up with three other players to fight your way through hordes of enemies, collect loot, and upgrade your character to be an even more effective killing machine.
Doom: The Dark Ages (Cloud, PC, Console) — May 15
Bethesda
The prequel to Doom and Doom: Eternal, Doom: The Dark Ages is more of the same demon-slaying action but with a medieval twist. Clad in a cape and wielding a shield ringed in sawblades, you’ll fight against more demons and enemies than you can shake a BFG at.
Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo (Cloud, PC, Console) — May 16
This day-one Game Pass release throws the player into Limbo, where you’ll have to help the many stranded souls there let go of the regrets that keep them bound. It’s a cute, brightly-colored papercraft game that can serve as a palette cleanser after playing some of the darker titles on this list.
Firefighting Simulator: The Squad (Cloud, PC, Console) — May 20
Ever wondered what it’s like to be a firefighter? Firefighting Simulator lets you discover that for yourself, either in single-player mode or with up to three friends.
Police Simulator: Patrol Officers (Cloud, PC, Console) — May 20
It’s Firefighting Simulator, but with police. You can choose to diligently do your job, or you can try to recreate Police Academy with your friends.
In addition to these new titles, Dungeons of Hinterberg, Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, and Metal Slug Tactics are all coming to the Game Pass Standard tier on May 7.
To make it in today’s cutthroat world, sometimes it feels like you have to be a taker to survive. It’s a ruthless mentality that makes the rich richer, crooked politicians more powerful, and countries more bloodthirsty. They take, take, and take until there’s nothing left for the rest of us, hoarding money, eliminating jobs, and destroying homes in the name of self preservation. Perhaps that’s what makes your typical video game so appealing. In something like Red Dead Redemption 2, players get to live out a true power fantasy: one where a world is theirs to take. Animals exist to be skinned, plants to be plucked, and corpses to be looted. Even in games where we’re meant to be the “good guy,” we’re often embodying the world of the worst. We become natural disasters that ravage worlds until we choose to stop playing.
Revenge of the Savage Planettakes that subtext and mines it for satirical gold, just as its hero smashes every rock in sight in search of precious metals. Building on the sci-fi comedy of 2020’s Journey to the Savage Planet, developer Raccoon Logic only gets more explicit about its targets while moving the series from a Metroid Primehomage to a third-person adventure game that hides righteous anger behind irreverence. When you don’t have the power to be a true taker, you can at least take no prisoners.
Though its story ultimately feels unfocused and its one-note action leaves it lacking in identity, Revenge of the Savage Planet succeeds as a sci-fi romp. It lets players loose into a series of interplanetary playgrounds designed to be sucked dry by a corporate drone tasked with becoming a bully. It’s a charming slice of dark comedy that’s perhaps not mean enough to totally land its point.
Sound familiar?
It doesn’t take long for Revenge of the Savage Planet to show its teeth. Upon starting my adventure, I’m greeted by a corporate orientation video. A peppy vice president tells me that I am now a member of Alta Interglobal, a holdings company that has acquired my previous employer, Kindred Aerospace. As part of the new family, my job is to be part of an intergalactic colonization mission. Once I unfreeze from my cryopod after a century of sleep, I’ll be dropped on a planet with a habitat and tasked with creating a livable community that Alta can later fill with inhabitants.
That’s followed immediately by a second video informing me that I’ve been fired while asleep, as Alta has axed the entirety of the Kindred staff post-acquisition.
That setup will likely sound familiar to you in any number of contexts. Most recently, it’s the story of media holdings company Valnet acquiring gaming website Polygon, only to immediately gut the majority of its staff. If you know anything about the Savage Planet series’ developer, though, you’ll recognize a more personal target for Racoon Logic. Following the release of Journey to the Savage Planet, the studio was bought by Google as part of its short-lived Stadia initiative. Google would shut down Racoon Logic (then known as Typhoon Studios) just a few years later before it could even produce a game. That trauma is very clearly at the center of this sequel, with Alta standing in as the face of corporate incompetence.
The story is at its best when it tugs on that thread. One running sidequest has me uncovering Alta’s dirty laundry, taking what I imagine are thinly veiled shots at Google’s own issues behind the scenes. Less successful is where the narrative ultimately ends up. The stretch up to the final battle takes a left-turn into a meta-commentary about game design that feels entirely disconnected from the Alta story. It’s an underwhelming conclusion that leaves me wondering if all the corporate satire before it is there primarily as an inside joke for the developers (I can’t fully blame them; I’d jump at the opportunity to get my just desserts against my worst bosses too).
Raccoon Logic
Don’t take any of it too seriously. Revenge of the Savage Planet ultimately aims for the irreverence of an Adult Swim show. ultimately aims for the irreverence of an Adult Swim show. There’s a world called Nuflorida. My habitat is filled with over the top commercials that feel like they were pulled out of a Tim and Eric episode. It features an original song about pissing on the company dime. As light as its jabs may feel at times, it still lands plenty of little hits that got some consistent chuckles out of me.
Colonialist mayhem
If you’re still looking for more depth, Revenge of the Savage Planet is most functional as a broad satire on the world’s worst C-words: colonialism and consumerism. As a stranded Kindred employee trained to suck planets dry, each open-world area I visit is a candy shop that’s mine for the taking. The premise isn’t anything new: Each planet is filled with resources to mine, map activities to check off my list until there are none left, and animals to research — or kick until they explode into a green mist. Everything I gather can be brought back to the computer at my habitat and run through a 3D printer to get new upgrades for my gun, jump pack, and more. The more of a jerk I am, the more efficiently I can bully the local wildlife and hoard resources.
If the first Savage Planet game was a spoof of Metroid Prime, imagining Samus Aran as a total dick out to disrupt Tallon IV’s peace, the sequel is more of a riff on Subnautica. It’s not a survival game, but it does play with some similar ideas. I need to gather up resources and safely return them to my base to 3D print new gear, craft outfits, or make furniture to decorate my habitat. If I die before I get home, I’ll need to go back out and pick it all up again. Is it right to shoot an adorable little alien racoon just so I can have a pool table? That’s what Revenge of the Savage Planet asks through its gleeful cartoon mischief. My little space man sure doesn’t seem too upset about it, as he joyfully wobbles around and punts critters like soccer balls.
Naturally, Raccoon Logic gets to have its cake and eat it too. Even if it’s classifiable as parody, it still plays its open-world exploration straight much of the time. I get new gizmos that allow me to grapple up to cliffs, grind on rails, swim underwater, and more. I eventually gain the power to melt amber blockades with goo bombs so I can get chow down on an egg and get a health upgrade. It’s a serviceable, if a little boilerplate, Metroid-adjacent hook, but it still ultimately aims to be a slice of lighthearted fun that can be enjoyed or with a friend in co-op play. Maybe that’s why the story stops short of really pulling the big guns out: Raccoon Logic is still interested in making the kind of game it’s poking fun at.
I don’t mean that as much of a knock here; that’s just the language of this type of genre video game. If anything, the power fantasy isn’t strong enough to intoxicate and poison me. Combat is particularly weak, as my primary weapon is a dinky pea shooter laser. Most enemies just need to be taken down by peppering them with dinky shots, and upgrades like dodge rolls barely charge that. I can scan critters to find their weak spots and attack for extra stun damage, but even its by the books boss battles never feel all too exciting. If you’re going to make me feel like a power hungry prick, at least dial up the absurdity to tempt me down the path of violence.
Sometimes Raccoon Logic’s heart feels like its more in crafting fun little environmental puzzles than colonialist destruction. My favorite gameplay moments have me using conductive goo to carry an electrified mushroom’s charge to a closed door, or navigating an invisible maze by spraying green goop to reveal where the walls are. There’s a sincere joy in figuring out how the handful of alien planets work, from a worm-filled desert to a multi-level mountain. Journey to the Savage Planet‘s Metroid Prime-inspired scan visor returns too and remains a highlight, allowing me to catalogue every plant and critter I find. I’m torn between being a researcher and a menace; the former is more enticing, but the latter drives the satire.
Racoon Logic
I’m left with a delightful sequel that perhaps could have benefitted from being a little meaner. In both Savage Planet games, I find myself wishing that Raccoon Logic would really let me have it. Allow me to really screw these alien worlds up and punt me into the stratosphere once I’ve crossed too many lines. But then, I’d be a scapegoat, wouldn’t I? It’s like when The Last of Us scolds players for carrying out acts of scripted violence that they can’t avoid. I’m no taker; I’m just trying to survive in the kill or be killed environment that the developers have placed me in. I can empathize with my little spaceman through that lens. He’s just a jester in Alta’s corporate circus, just as Raccoon Logic was a cute plaything to Google.
Perhaps we’re all a little blameless for playing into a world that’s designed as a slapstick colosseum that we’re forced to compete in. And if we’re all clowns to the world’s most powerful forces, maybe it’s time to change which butts we’re punting into the sun.
