Fall’s a great season for picking up some games you’ve been meaning to get around to. Luckily, as the holidays start to close in, publishers and storefronts begin heavily discounting huge chunks of their respective catalogs to help in that department. These sales often come in waves, and it’s now Xbox’s turn to host a “seasonal savings” sale which features some pretty great and overlooked games until October 14. Here are the games we feel are most worth your time and cash.
Assassin’s Creed Antiquity Pack
So you’ve probably heard by now that Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been delayed, which means there’s now a perfect opportunity for folks to catch up on the older open-world RPGs in the series. Back in 2017, Ubisoft reinvented the franchise with Assassin’s Creed Origins, turning the open-world stealth games into action-RPGs a la The Witcher series. Origins, set in ancient Egypt, sets the series’ current storyline in motion and was expounded upon in the subsequent game Odyssey, which moves the series to Greece. Both Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey are massive as hell, and some of the most unabashed fun in the franchise, and now they’re packaged together as the Antiquity Pack for $US20. While I’ve yet to play Origins, I easily spent about a hundred hours in Odyssey, and believe it or not, I was cutting corners to meet a deadline at the time. You’re likely to spend the next several months wrapping up both, which is perfect considering Shadows is now set to release at the tail end of February in 2025, so get on it.
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy
I am just as surprised as the rest of you that there’s a great Guardians of the Galaxy game that vaguely resembles Mass Effect’s squad-based third-person shooter action, but it’s true! Eidos’ stab at Marvel’s beloved found family of screw-ups and intergalactic criminals has way more going for it than first meets the eye. I don’t love the characterization of some of the Guardians in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but this game takes them surprisingly seriously, and characters like Drax and Mantis benefit greatly from a story that lets them shine rather than relegating them to the role of bit player. It’s also just fun getting to play in Marvel’s cosmos rather than settling for looking at it on the big screen.
Its gameplay, which places you in Star-Lord’s boots, allows you to issue commands to the likes of Groot, Rocket Raccoon, Drax, and Gamora. It’s a bit simplistic in action, and never grows too deep in complexity, but it’s also a fluid system that rarely falters. It gets you from point A to point B, which is all you’re really going to want to accomplish, because the real draw of the game is its characters, the banter between them, and the direction of its story, which centers their individual grief and troubled pasts. It’s familiar territory for Guardians of the Galaxy, and just like the movies and comics about them, the resolutions are heartwarming—except now all of that charm is blown up to a game that takes all of about a weekend to blast through. You can and should pick up Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy while it’s on sale for $US12.
Judgment
I found Judgment just as I was settling into a brutal rut. Let me tell you, there’s few things as engaging as a Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios game when you’ve got nothing but time to devote to it. You’ve heard it a million times before and you will hear it a million more times, but games like the Like A Dragon series, and standalone spinoffs like Judgment, are more than worth the price of admission, and you will get more game than you bargained for.
Judgment, which is set in Kamurocho just like the mainline Like A Dragon/Yakuza games, follows Yagami, a private detective in the neighborhood. While Judgment features much of the same brawler action that can be found throughout the series, it also throws in classic mystery elements, like an intriguing conspiracy, foot chases, crime-scene investigations, and tailing segments to spice things up. If RGG’s immense series has intrigued you in the past, but scared you off due to the sheer depth of it all, I can’t recommend this spinoff enough. Judgment is just $US12 right now, and it’s well worth it while it’s discounted.
Party Animals
Party Animals is one of the titles that regularly crops up during my friends and I’s game nights. Much like Gang Beasts before it, Party Animals is a floppy, comedic party game where a bunch of animals throw hands on increasingly ludicrous arenas, like a submarine that begins to descend into the ocean, or a bomber jet that tilts in either direction to shake combatants off. My absolute favorite of the bunch pits teams against one another on a circular stage with a black hole generator in its center. Every minute or so, the whole lobby begins to get pulled into the void with more and more ferocity, sending players flailing for something to cling to or someone to knock out and leave to the whims of the black hole.
In case you couldn’t tell, Party Animals is a silly and enormously good time. There are typical last man standing matches, but there are also maps and modes that complicate matters in outstanding ways. One mode, for example, asks teams to retrieve objectives to bring back to their own bases to score, and another map even sticks teams on their own trains, where they can then jump between cars, take out enemies, and pull on their brakes, all the while throwing coal in the furnace of their own in order to speed up. That’s just scratching the surface of Party Animals too. Our new favorite pastime over the last several months has been entering a lodge in a private match and playing the most intense games of Uno against each other. One of my favorite nights in recent memory involves several children invading our lobby, talking shit to one another, and trolling us during an intense card game before eventually emptying out because of their own curfews. Party Animals is on Game Pass, but you should pick it up while it’s discounted to $US10.
Sunset Overdrive
Insomniac has made a lot of games, including a number of PlayStation exclusives like the recent run of Spider-Man titles and the long-running Ratchet & Clank series. For what it’s worth though, I still think my favorite game of theirs is Xbox’s Sunset Overdrive, a punk and anarchy-driven open world shooter with a truly ridiculous sense of style and the most propulsive movement mechanics. Sunset Overdrive bears the hallmarks of an Insomniac joint—like a preposterous armory of weapons including a gun that fires vinyl discs—and is set in a world constructed like one big Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater level. You can dash through the air, grind on rails and power lines, skid on water, and bounce off of car hoods, and you spend the entire game doing so while repelling mutants transformed by a faulty soda product from the corporation that basically owns the city. Sunset Overdrive is like an anti-capitalist fever dream set in a bouncy house from the mind of a punk who spent a lot of time at Webster Hall growing up.
It’s been years since I last played, and I’m sure parts of it haven’t aged exceptionally well, but I think that if you stick through it and get a feel for its movement systems, you’ll find a charming little relic of the early Xbox One era. Sunset Overdrive will always be on Game Pass, but you should pick it up for $US5, or alternatively nab the deluxe edition with all of its accompanying DLC for $US7.49.
The Quarry
Supermassive Games made a hit with Until Dawn, a horror adventure game that spun Quantic Dream’s whole shtick into something, you know, that’s actually fun. Well, the studio eventually made a spiritual successor that continued riffing on schlocky horror films, and set it in a sleepaway summer camp. Thus we got The Quarry, which stars the likes of Hollywood celebrities like Skyler Gisondo (Booksmart), Justice Smith (Detective Pikachu), Ariel Winter (Modern Family), and none other than Scream king David Arquette. Just like Until Dawn before it, you are dropped into the shoes of the diverse cast in episodic fashion as they unravel the mysteries of the nearby quarry and the forces trying to kill them on the last night of camp.
This time around though, The Quarry features more quality-of-life additions that acknowledge the fun that folks had playing Until Dawn in groups. It has a more robust online multiplayer mode, for example, that allows one player to host several others in a single lobby, who then get to vote on major decisions that will alter the story. Additionally, there’s a movie mode that streamlines the story of the game in order to transform it into a film-like experience, allowing players to just sit back and watch the game’s grisly plot unfold before them. Regardless of how you want to experience The Quarry, it’s a polished horror game that’s fun alone or with friends, and the deluxe edition is on sale for $US20.
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