Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order has some exceptional gameplay, but its story and protagonist are mostly uninspiring
(Picture: EA / Respawn Entertainment)Sony has revealed the three games for PlayStation Plus Essential subscribers this January, to kick off 2023.
Two of the three are very big names indeed. And all three played well with reviewers when they were released, giving you plenty of entertainment to stave off the January blues.
What’s coming to PlayStation Plus Essential in January?
In order of average score on Metacritic, these are the games coming to PlayStation Plus Essential.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
The biggest of January’s PS Plus releases is Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. The action-adventure game owes more than a passing debt to the Dark Souls franchise, albeit with less punishing gameplay and the more colourful world of Star Wars.
It gets a decent 79 per cent rating on Metacritic, with reviewers praising its combat, world design, and story on release in winter 2019. The imminent arrival of its sequel - Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - this March gives you an idea of why Respawn is happy to give it away now, though...
Fallout 76
It’s fair to say that Fallout 76 - Bethesda’s attempt at turning the renowned post-apocolyptic solo RPG experience into a great multiplayer adventure - got off to a rough start. Indeed, the scores at launch, frozen in time at Metacritic, still give it a decidedly poor average of 52 per cent.
But Bethesda has kept plugging away and it has come on in leaps and bounds since then, with content updates making it almost unrecognisable from the game that launched four years ago, as this Reddit post explains.
Is it worth trying afresh in 2023? Well, the price is right for PS Plus subscribers...
Axiom Verge 2
Finally, if you’re a fan of Metroidvania-style scrollers, Axiom Verge 2 will be right up your alley. It’s 2053, and you’re Indra Chaudhari: a billionaire instructed to head to Antactica on the hunt for her missing daughter.
If boss battles put you off the Metroidvania genre, you should know that Axiom Verge 2 makes them mostly optional, which is pretty unusual. It impressed critics with a Metacritic score of 76 per cent, so it’s well worth giving a go if you have some gaming downtime in January.
What was on PlayStation Plus Essential in December 2022?
New arrivals mean that December’s games left the service on Monday, January 2, and you can no longer add them to your library. To recap, this is what’s left PlayStation Plus Essential:
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition
Mass Effect is a game that should need very little introduction. One of the greatest action RPGs of all time, the Legendary Edition bundles the original trilogy together in glorious 4K, along with more than 40 pieces of DLC to enjoy. It’s a rich space opera, packed with memorable characters and a science-fiction story that’ll stick with you long after the closing credits have rolled.
The original Mass Effect feels a tiny bit dated now - unsurprisingly, given it was released 15 years ago - but it’s still a sensible starting point, because decisions you make in the games echo through their sequels. And selecting what you would have done via a checklist (which it does without a saved game to consult) just isn’t the same.
Biomutant
Biomutant divided opinion when it was released last year, as the 66 per cent average on Metacritic shows. It’s nothing if not ambitious, though: an open-world kung-fu fable where you play a raccoon-like warrior in a post-apocalyptic world, battling other mutants while building your own weapons and recoding your DNA to change your play style. As with some of the best game stories, your decisions made on a whim can affect the storyline in dramatic ways further down the road.
While it may not have universally wowed the critics, there are enough interesting ideas here to make it worth a go.
Hot Wheels: Unleashed
This new release came to PS Plus on day one - and it impressed, scoring 72 per cent on Metacritic.
Unleashed is a brawler in the vein of Super Smash Bros and Power Stone. You pick one of 10 gods and beat the hell out of the others in a 3D environment, and it really doesn’t look much more complex than that. This is probably just as well given the three Mass Effect games and Biomutant add up to at least 72 hours of gameplay between them...
Want more games? Consider PlayStation Plus Extra or Premium
PlayStation Plus Essential (£6.99 per month) is the entry-level subscription service from Sony but, if you want more, there are two possible upgrades: Extra and Premium.
The next tier up, PlayStation Plus Extra (£10.99 per month), offers the same free games, cloud saves, and online multiplayer of the Essential tier, but adds access to the game catalogue. This includes access to a rolling collection of hundreds of games including, at the time of writing, the likes of Stray and Returnal.
Finally, there’s PlayStation Plus Premium (£13.49 per month). This includes all the benefits from the previous two tiers but adds in the classic catalogue, with games from previous generations of PlayStation, as well as extras like early-game trials and cloud-streamed titles.
