Microsoft has just announced the games we’ll see included with Gold in January. The new lineup comes after a fairly disappointing December, especially considering it was the end of the year. It’s pleasing to say that January is looking ‘marginally’ better, especially if you like platformers.
Celeste is the headline game in this offering; Celeste is a 2D side-scrolling platform game similar to the likes of the older Mario games, but unlike Mario games Celeste is brutally difficult and will have you literally wanting to tear your hair out at times. Still, behind the challenging gameplay there’s some really cool mechanics not seen before in platforming games. You can download Celeste from the 1st to the 31st of January.
Next up is WRC 6 FIA World Rally Championship. It’s a pretty good rally game with all the features you’d expect to see and it also has great graphics. It’s not quite on the same level as Dirt 4 (in my opinion), but it’s a solid rally game, especially since you’re getting it for free. You can download WRC 6 from January 16th to February 15th.
Finally, we have the two backwards compatible Xbox 360 games. These are Far Cry 2, which you can download from the 16th to 31st of January, and Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, which you can download from the 1st to the 15th of January. Both of these games were received well by critics and players alike, so both are worth checking out if you can stomach the older looking graphics, which I can’t (just for the record).
All in all it’s a fairly decent month of free games, so as always you should go and download them, even if you don’t fancy playing them right now; once you’ve downloaded them they will stay in your game library no matter what, meaning you can uninstall them right away and download them again when you’re looking for a new game to play.
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