Sony Furiously Rides Through July With Eclectic PS+ Freebies

From ancient Japan and Civil War-era America to the depths of the biblical underworld itself, Sony’s docket of free PlayStation Plus games for July reaches far and wide in its variety of settings and time periods. The majority of them are fast-paced action games, both classic and modern, though there’s a JRPG and a quirky real-time strategy outing thrown in for good measure. One commonality can be easily spotted among all of ’em, and it’s that they’re all bursting at the seams with distinctive personality, making for a diverse and splendid array of free PS+ downloads for subscribers this month.  Ready to jump into the titles?

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The Game Bakers

PS4

Furi

Furi marks the first original console release from The Game Bakers, the team behind the mobile indies like Squids and Combo Crew, and it’s a bit of a departure from their traditional fare. Character designs from the mind of Afro Samurai creator Takashi Okazaki fill the spaces of battle arenas, where a white-haired protagonist wielding a sword dashes his way through elaborate obstacles and energy expulsions to reach his targets. Fast-paced strategic maneuvers and gunplay work in tandem to create a good balance of challenge and reward, building to what’s already been deemed one of the year’s sleeper hits. Furi hit the PlayStation Store on July 5th.

Saints Row IV: Gat Out of Hell

Saints Row IV transformed what was planned to be a DLC upgrade of Saints Row: The Third into its own bonkers standalone game, which took the gangsta Saints to outer space as they fled alien invaders who imprisoned them in Matrix-like simulations. After taking on the challenge of making the Saints Row franchise even more outlandish than it already was with the superpowers and science-fiction spoofing of IV, it makes perfect sense that Volition would send the Saints somewhere even more out-there for a big standalone expansion. Thus, they released Gat Out Of Hell, which, yeah, sends them to Hell. Specifically, it sends two of the characters — Johnny Gat and Kinzie Kensington — to the fiery depths to rescue The Boss, the player’s custom character from Saints Row IV. An insane sense of humor, the hot new sandbox to explore, and a bevy of weapons can’t quite mask the short length and lack of polish, but fans should still get a charge out of this finale to the Saints Row experience.

Techland

PS3

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

Before Rockstar aimed heaps of attention at the wild, wild west genre with Red Dead Redemption, Techland and Ubisoft beat the open-world kings to the draw with the prequel Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. The first-person shooter sends the McCall Brothers across mid-1800s America and south of the border for a rip-roaring, emotional adventure, one that delivers engaging yet old-hat shooter controls and rigid level design. Despite getting positive marks for the setting and writing, the critical and commercial reception was about as lukewarm as a water trough, citing that Bound in Blood did little to innovate its genre and lacked the right kinds of multiplayer functionality that’d take it to another level.

Fat Princess

Titan Studios baked up quite a gem way back in 2009 with Fat Princess, their real-time strategy game. The concept is simple: rescue your team’s princess from the opposing team’s stronghold. There’s a catch, though, and it comes in the form of cake slices that immediately make the princess heavier, and thus much more difficult to carry from place to place. The quirks little charms interweave with the brisk strategy of the battlefield and the game’s various modes, and while its multi-chapter campaign works perfectly well as a single-player experience, the bulk of the fun can be found either in its split-screen duels or online multiplayer.

Alfa System

PS Vita

Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines

In the vein of other Japanese RPGs that came before it, Oreshika: Tainted Bloodlines — also known as Over My Dead Body 2 — carries over the setting from its previous game without a direct plot continuation. Set 100 years after the events of the original, this installment from storied role-playing developer Alfa System involves progressing through multiple generations of a family as the player works to lift a curse placed upon their clan, shortly after they were found guilty of crimes they didn’t commit. Interacting with Japanese mythology in the process, Tainted Bloodlines fuses together the turn-based dungeon grinding rhythm of Final Fantasy with some of the watercolor-like styling of Okami,  producing an experience that critics have praised for its visual splendor and fabled grandeur of the plotting.

Prince of Persia: Revelations

Finally, we’ve got Prince of Persia: Revelations. The title may throw off some who haven’t owned a PSP in the past, since that’s actually the rebranded name for a port of the PS2-era installment in the franchise, Warrior Within. It’s a noticeably different take on the atmosphere and the Prince himself, giving the game a harder, darker edge than its whimsical predecessor, Sands of Time, with its gloomy protagonist and brutal violence. The franchise’s signature platforming, exploration, and responsive swordplay combat return underneath the M-rated gristle and the shift toward a metal-inspired soundtrack, conjuring an engrossingly fluid action game despite how it abandons some of Prince of Persia‘s Arabian Nights-like charms.

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