{"id":37891,"date":"2020-02-15T13:17:48","date_gmt":"2020-02-15T21:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/?p=37891"},"modified":"2020-02-15T13:17:48","modified_gmt":"2020-02-15T21:17:48","slug":"xbox-february-games-with-gold-an-enigmatic-hodgepodge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/bens-bytes\/xbox-february-games-with-gold-an-enigmatic-hodgepodge\/","title":{"rendered":"Xbox February Games With Gold an Enigmatic Hodgepodge"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Love may be in the air during February, but that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that the Xbox will receive some love with its Games With Gold free downloads. While the Lovecraftian horror-lovin\u2019 side of me can\u2019t help but be enthusiastic about one of the games and the Star Wars title will certainly get nostalgic butterflies a-fluttering in the stomach, this month still feels a bit underwhelming in terms of gaming potential. One AAA game from 2 \u2013 soon to be 3 \u2013 console generations ago doesn\u2019t quite do enough to impress, but at least there\u2019s some unique and substantial odd-and-end freebies to enjoy during these quiet months of a console release year, even if the critical reception to them isn\u2019t exactly head over heels. \u00a0Let\u2019s take a closer look.<\/p>\n

Click Here to Grab\u00a0a 12-Month\u00a0Xbox Live Gold Subscription\u00a0at Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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\"cthulhu<\/p>\n

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Xbox One<\/h3>\n

TT Isle of Man (February 1-29)<\/h4>\n

Nestled right in the middle of the waters separating Ireland, Scotland and the UK lies the Isle of Man, the location of one of the most dangerous motorcycle races out there, the Isle of Man TT. \u00a0Roughly 150 racers have died during the event\u2019s hundred-plus year history \u2013 several years suffering 5-6 deaths \u2013 and the continuation on this in recent years, even after safety modifications, reaffirms that dangerous reputation. \u00a0TT Isle of Man<\/em> naturally aims to capture the scope of that danger, as racers zip along the makeshift course through narrow streets and heavily curved roads of the countryside. \u00a0The developers clearly wanted this raw experience to speak for itself as more of a simulator than a game, as critics have praised the realism and responsiveness while dinging it for a lack of game content beyond racing itself.<\/p>\n

Call of Cthulhu (February 16-March 15)<\/h4>\n

The looming mysteries of H.P. Lovecraft\u2019s brand of horror have taken on different shapes over the years, especially in the realm of tabletop and role-playing games. Most notably, Sandy Petersen developed a pen-and-paper RPG named after perhaps the author\u2019s most iconic narrative, Call of Cthulhu<\/strong>, which has evolved across over a half-dozen editions and added numerous modules.\u00a0 This video game of the same name derives its influence from both Lovecraft\u2019s seminal writings and, more directly, from Petersen\u2019s RPG. It spins a yarn about an island off the eastern US coast that has been engulfed in dark, mystical circumstance and the detective who gets embroiled in an investigation within, which allows the game to venture into an interactive survival horror experience not unlike Silent Hill<\/em> or Fatal Frame<\/em>, where preserving one\u2019s sanity becomes the key aspect of the game\u2019s role-playing elements.<\/p>\n

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Xbox 360<\/h3>\n

Fable Heroes (February 1-15)<\/h4>\n

There hasn\u2019t been a proper Fable action-RPG released for almost a decade now, but that hasn\u2019t stopped development teams from squeezing life out of the brand in other semi-related gaming genres. The first of these games is Fable Heroes, released by the franchise\u2019s original developers Lionhead Studios in 2012, which shifts the gameplay from a 3D, open action design space to an on-the-rails, scrolling arcade framework. Following on the heels of the popularity of Castle Crashers<\/em> and Trine<\/em>, this game fits somewhere between the two ideaas as a cluster of adventurers cooperate with one another \u2013 and compete against each other \u2013 to defeat enemies across Fable<\/em>\u2019s Albion landscape, involving both couch co-op and online multiplayer. Like some of the issues befitting the later standard Fable<\/em>\u00a0games, however, Heroes<\/em> suffers from having plenty of content yet not enough of an excitement factor to keep engaging in said content, scoring low among critics and even lower among players.<\/p>\n

Star Wars: Battlefront (February 16-29)<\/h4>\n

Let\u2019s pour one out for Pandemic Studios, whose work in the action spectrum of gaming was filled with exhilaration and personality; if you get the chance, give their final game The Saboteur<\/em> a go. Perhaps they\u2019re best known for their one-two punch of Star Wars: Battlefront<\/em> games, though, which does something in the Xbox era that many fans of the space-opera franchise have always wanted.\u00a0 Players are thrown into the momentous battles of good vs. evil spread across the film franchise, and the game lets them choose which side they want to be on and how they want to engage the battles. There are different character classes to pick from, vehicles to pilot, strategies to implement and resources to allocate, which quite simply offers those playing Star Wars: Battlefront<\/em> a lot of freedom in a multiplayer space \u2026 even though critics ding this first Battlefront for its lackluster campaign design and enemy AI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Love may be in the air during February, but that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that the Xbox will receive some love with its Games With Gold free downloads. While the Lovecraftian horror-lovin\u2019 side of me can\u2019t help but be enthusiastic about one of the games and the Star Wars title will certainly get nostalgic butterflies a-fluttering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":37892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bens-bytes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37891"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37894,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37891\/revisions\/37894"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}