Total War: Three Kingdoms and FIFA 22 lead June's new Xbox Game Pass games
Plus Shadowrun Trilogy, Far Cry 5
I don't buy every iteration of FIFA, but I do want to give each entry a whirl to see how it has rebalanced the balls, tweaked the kicks, and polished the grass. Xbox Game Pass now helps me in my tests by, eventually, adding each iteration, and FIFA 22 is now available through the subscription service as part of June's haul of new games.
Also added this past week: the Shadowrun Trilogy, Total War: Three Kingdoms, Naraka: Bladepoint. And Far Cry 5 will arrive on July 1st.
Total War: Three Kingdoms is generally considered one of the better modern entries of Creative Assembly's historical strategy series; the Shadowrun Trilogy is a series of turn-based cyberpunk RPGs which get better with each entry; Naraka Bladepoint is a third-person samurai battle royale with fun movement; and, lastly, Far Cry 5 is... Well, it's a lesser Far Cry, but there's a bow and arrow and there are forts so I still played it for 20 hours.
FIFA 22, meanwhile, is... fine? I do not like this year's balance and tweaks, and a year of watching lots of Premier League football has made it abundantly obvious that FIFA cannot represent the modern tactics of a Liverpool or Man City. Beneath that, it remains FIFA, and it's not like there's any competent football alternative.
As always, new games walking onto the Game Pass tracks mean the trolley must be diverted to eradicate a handful of older games from the service. This time, FIFA 20, Jurassic World Evolution, Last Stop and MotoGP 20 will all fall under the wheels on June 30th.
New customers can sign-up for $1 until the end of the month, and from June 28th UK users will get a 30-day free trial to Paramount+, a streaming service I didn't even realise was available in the UK. Which I guess is why they're including it here. You can read all the details on the Xbox blog.