August's Xbox Games with Gold include For Honor and Forza Horizon 2
Plus Dead Space 3 and Epic Mickey 2 on Xbox 360.
Microsoft has unveiled its Games with Gold line-up for August, and it's a bit of a whopper, featuring Forza Horizon 2, For Honor, Dead Space 3, and Disney Epic Mickey 2.
Forza Horizon 2 - 10th Anniversary Edition and For Honor are this month's duo of Xbox One offerings. Xbox Live Gold members can download Forza for free throughout August, while For Honor can be acquired from August 16th to September 15th.
They're both incredibly strong offerings, but don't just take my word for it! When Forza Horizon 2 released back in 2014, Eurogamer said it set an "intimidatingly high bar" for other upcoming racers. "But in one aspect it seems unbeatable," noted Oli Welsh in his 9/10 review, "I can't imagine any of them are going to feel this happy".
Melee-focussed multiplayer fighter For Honor, meanwhile, received not one but two reviews from Eurogamer. Contributor Edwin Evans-Thirlwell revisited the game earlier this year to see the impact that Ubisoft's tremendous post-launch support had made. "If you've been holding off," he concluded, "there's never been a better time to get up close and personal."
If it's more free games you want, then August still has two Xbox 360 titles to offer in the form of Dead Space 3 and Disney Epic Mickey 2, both of which are backward-compatible on Xbox One.
Neither titles are as strong as their series predecessors, sadly, but still manage to shine at certain moments. "It's certainly not a great game," said Eurogamer of sci-fi shooty-horror Dead Space 3 when it released in 2013, "except perhaps as a poster child for the kitchen-sink development mentality of a console generation in its twilight months. But it does manage to balance out every misstep with something worthwhile. Sadly, newcomers with no preconceptions will likely enjoy this rollercoaster more than the series' fans."
As for Warren Spector's love-letter to Disney's bygone days, Epic Mickey 2, Christian Donlan said in his 4/10 review, "In truth, Mickey's lost rather than merely hidden here, trapped within a game that won't come into focus. Fascinating and frustrating by turn, there's just enough to make you cling to the hope that one day the development team will actually find him."
Dead Space 3 will be available to download free between August 1st and August 15th, while Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two is free from August 16th to August 31st. A few additional details, if you like that sort of thing, can be found on Microsoft's Xbox Wire site.