April’s Game Pass Lineup Is No Joke

Over the past few months, Microsoft has bucked expectations and irritated games journalists everywhere by dropping gems, like Tunic and Paradise Killer, on Game Pass without warning. Then it went silent on the Game Pass front for weeks. For a while there, some reasonable observers (hi) assumed Microsoft did away with revealing its Game Pass lineups in advance. But nope! Here’s everything coming to the games-on-demand service in the coming weeks.

April 5

• Cricket 22 (Cloud, Console)
• MLB The Show 2022 (Cloud, Console)

April 7

• Chinatown Detective Agency (Cloud, Console, PC)
• Dragon Age 2, via EA Play (Cloud)
• Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, via EA Play (Cloud)
• Star Wars: Squadrons, via EA Play (Cloud)

April 12

• Life is Strange: True Colours (Cloud, Console, PC)
• Panzer Corps 2 (PC)
• The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk (PC)

April 14

• Lost In Random, via EA Play (Cloud, Console, PC)

As for games getting the boot, F1 2019 will become unavailable on April 18, while the following will disappear a bit earlier, on April 15:

• ​​MLB The Show 21 (Cloud, Console)
• Rain On Your Parade (Cloud, Console, PC)
• The Long Dark (Cloud, Console, PC)
• Pathway (PC)

Yes, yes, pour one out The Long Dark seeing its long dark, but at least the void is getting filled by a bunch of other games that are worth your time.

Read More: What Lost In Random, 2021’s Most Innovative Game, Shares With Star Wars

There’s Lost In Random, a sleeper hit from last year that sports a Tim Burton-inspired art style and a unique combat system mixing both turn-based and real-time action. Chinatown Detective Agency is a point-and-click mystery adventure that requires you to do some actual real-world sleuthing (ok, let’s be real, Googling) outside of the game. And Life is Strange: True Colours was among Kotaku’s games of the year for 2021. Those are supplanted by a slew of cloud-gaming support for some EA blockbusters. All told, it’s a fairly solid lineup, particularly when you consider the impending release calendar famine, at least compared to the onslaught that was February and March.

This is also the first time Microsoft has put out a lineup since Sony revealed details about its forthcoming revamp of PS Plus. PS Plus, for those who don’t know, rolls out in June and exists in the same Venn diagram as Game Pass–at least in terms of giving access to a deep downloadable game library at a $US10ish to $US15ish monthly price point. The two services are somewhat different, however. For one thing, PS Plus 2.0 doesn’t (yet) come with a bundled-in access to a similar games-on-demand library like EA Play. Though, seeing as a good half of this month’s Game Pass offerings are from there — itself a ploy to get players to pay more for the higher-priced tier, which includes EA Play — maybe it could use one.