Game Pass Loses One Of Its Best Games, Gets Ubisoft’s Worst

On the one hand, Game Pass is losing a lovingly-made dungeon crawler that says things about the existence of modern life. But on the other hand, at least it’s getting one of the most callous Ubisoft map games in recent memory (I’ll give you one guess). Here’s what’s coming to Microsoft’s games-on-demand service in the coming weeks.

August 2

• Ghost Recon Wildlands (cloud, console, PC)

August 4

• Turbo Golf Racing (cloud, next-gen console, PC)

August 9

• Two Point Campus (cloud, console, PC)

August 11

• Cooking Simulator (cloud, console, PC)
• Expeditions: Rome (PC)
• Offworld Trading Company (PC)

And here’s the full list of games leaving as of August 15:

• Boyfriend Dungeon (cloud, console, PC)
• Curse of the Dead Gods (cloud, console, PC)
• Library of Ruina (cloud, console, PC)
• Starmancervia Game Preview (PC)
• Train Sim World 2 (cloud, console, PC)

Boyfriend Dungeondespite the messy, bad-faith controversy that defined its release last summer, is easily one of the most engaging dungeon-crawlers in recent years. Part dating sim, you date people who can transform into weapons, and use those weapons to battle the physical manifestations of your anxieties in isometric combat. Not only is the combat a blast, but it also features some sharp dialogue rife with incisive commentary about the good and ill of modern dating. It is a bummer to see it leave.

This month’s big Game Pass addition, Ghost Recon Wildlands, has…a lot less to say. Sure, Ubisoft’s co-op shooter sports solid gunplay and an impressively large, if not exactly lively, open world. But it’s also a politically abhorrent, borderline propagandistic game, portraying Bolivia as a narco-state overrun by cocaine-running cartels: You play as a squad of US special forces swooping in to “save” the “day.” Ubisoft did such a poor job at representing that country Bolivia’s interior minister sent a formal letter to the French government and threatened legal action.

But hey, at least Turbo Golf Racing—a game that basically looks like Rocket League grafted onto a golf course, and also a game that I’m only just learning about today—looks cool AF.