Xbox Games With Gold for August: A Fizzle of Crafting and Bot Battling

School’s starting back for a bunch of people this month, and it’s a complicated and mentally exhausting time for both parents and kids this year, which certainly merits some love from Xbox and their Games With Gold freebie program. What they’re offering this month isn’t impressive, but at least there’s some potential for both lengthy creative gaming sessions and quick, new bursts of outlandish battling. The legacy titles are, admittedly, pretty blah: one’s an enjoyable but outdated racing game, and the other’s often considered the weakest link in a strong, underappreciated franchise.  At least the Xbox One titles get some sparks flying, even though the absence of a robust blockbuster title (yet again) leaves something to be desired. Before squaring off with these titles, be sure to Grab a Year Xbox Live Membership Card from Amazon to pop in on the good times.

Xbox One

Portal Knights (August 1-31)

It’s hard not to look at Portal Knights and immediately think of other games, specifically one that’s been very popular for a long time now. The nuts-‘n-bolts of it are very similar to Minecraft, in that crafting resources and structures largely drives the incredibly open, vibrantly cartoonish world laid out for the players to explore, with or without an objective. Whether it does enough to really be different is a tough one, though, but an argument can be made for it.  There’s more of a propulsion to complete tasks in Portal Knights through a routine storyline, and while it might not be the most complex of systems, it also provides a role-playing experience through character creation and class selection. The visual presentation differs from it, too, in that the graphical polish and interconnecting “blocks” are more traditionally attractive. Once you get into the thick of Portal Knights, most players and critics agree that the similarities grow more profound, so those subtle differences could make or break one’s enjoyment.

Override: Mech City Brawl (August 16 – September 15)

Whether it’s defending the world from Godzilla-like monsters or taking on each other in head-to-head battles, people just enjoy seeing robots beat up on things and demolish the environment around them. That’s been a popular thing since the ‘80s, whether it’s Transformers and Mobile Suit Gundam or on a portable game scale with Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots, and that lineage feeds directly into what makes Override: Mech City Brawl an absorbing concept. There isn’t much more to it than being a 3D fighting game involving huge robots and landscapes that respond to their fights, and it doesn’t need to be much more when it executes the concept as soundly as developer The Balance has done here.  Players and critics do have issues with the depth and longevity of the game, though, where it seems like a night or two playing with friends – either on the couch through split-screen or online – is about all that can be assembled from this brawler, despite the concept.

Xbox / Xbox 360

MX Unleashed (August 1-15)

In the grand scheme of things, racing games tend to hold up better than most other genres. Whether it’s because the speed of racing controls were fine-tuned early in the history of videogames or because racing games don’t have to focus much on making realistic human bodies, gamers can go back a few generations and still get plenty of real enjoyment out of legacy titles. Modern advancements have made games based on off-road racing much more realistic, but the likes of MX Unleashed still holds onto enough genuine exhilaration and authentic movement to be worth a spin in the modern era … but only as a freebie, really. While the graphical advancements and precise controls made MX Unleashed a successfully immersive execution of the concept in its time, there isn’t much of a reason to choose it above modern titles still cranked out by Rainbow Studios, and you get the added ATV aspect of ‘em too.

Red Faction II (August 16-31)

Before they were known for the folks behind the outlandishly satisfying Saints Row line of sandbox games, Volition were responsible for cranking out one of the strongest, yet often overlooked shooter franchises out there: the Red Faction series. While it shifted from first to third person perspectives across the series’ evolution, its signature “Geo-Mod” tech of destructible environments remains its most impressive and attention-grabbing aspect. This installment, Red Faction II, differs from the others in that it takes place on Earth instead of Mars, while also focusing the game’s strengths into a more robust multiplayer experience. The streamlining – which also limits the destructible environments and made the game feel more zealously action-oriented – hasn’t been as kind to Red Faction II since it came out, where the other installments receive generally unchallenged praise and this one catches flak for minimizing unique features.

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