Our recap of the best Game Pass additions for each month of 2022 takes us back to May, which brought us yet more variety with games featuring everything from dinosaurs to undead hordes.
May brought us another month of Xbox Game Pass additions — including one which made it onto our list of the best games on Game Pass — and we’ve combed through the lot to highlight some of the best and biggest games to join the Game Pass library in May, continuing our breakdown of the best Game Pass additions in 2022. May brought us an interesting variety, including Citizen Sleeper and Sniper Elite 5!
Citizen Sleeper
Narrative RPG Citizen Sleeper joined Game Pass in early May, taking us to the worn-down space station known as Erlin’s Eye where everybody aims to survive and rid themselves of the control of the corporation Essen-Arp. Our character is made up of a human’s consciousness sitting inside a body belonging to Essen-Arp, with the added ability of being able to hack its way into Erlin’s Eye’s systems to uncover new secrets. The space station is home to all sorts of characters, and we have to figure out who we can trust and how we can survive to see the next cycle. Citizen Sleeper joined Xbox Game Pass as a day-one addition — it’s a shorter game, with an estimated completion of around eight to ten hours, but it’s already gone down well on TrueAchievements where it’s scored a rating of 4.06/5, and it serves as another example of the sort of variety Game Pass can offer with a library made up of imaginative indies.
Roleplaying in the ruins of interplanetary capitalism. Live the life of an escaped worker, washed-up on a lawless station at the edge of an interstellar society. Inspired by the flexibility and freedom of TTRPGs, explore the station, choose your friends, escape your past and change your future.
Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair Anniversary Edition
Following hot on the heels of the first game joining Game Pass back in January, Danganronpa 2 arrived in the service in May to give us a second slice of that wonderful/horrible killing game. With an all-new cast of (somehow) even stranger characters to grow close to and/or suspicious of, an interesting new setting far removed from the trappings of a schoolhouse, and plenty more mysteries and murders to solve, it’s another captivating tale with more than its fair share of surprises in store. These extend even past the credits, with a much more fleshed-out post-game that includes additional new modes and features to keep you playing long after you beat the story. With more of that delightfully dark humour that made the original game so special, improvements to class trials to make them even more intense, and some proper head-scratchers for cases, Danganronpa 2 is well worth your time — for maximum effect, you’ll want to play the original first, which you should get on sooner rather than later if you haven’t, as it might not be sticking around in Game Pass for long now…
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising
With another change of pace, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising — a precursor to 2023’s upcoming JRPG Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes — joined Game Pass as 2.5D action-RPG with town-upgrading aspects. After Runebarrows were found underground following earthquakes around the town of New Nevaeh, heroes CJ and Garoo (who hope to find treasure there) join forces with Isha, whose goal is to repair the town. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is another shorter game (with an estimated completion time of between 15 and 20 hours) and it could perhaps have been overlooked without the visibility boost that an Xbox Game Pass launch brought it; in return, it introduced more variety to the Game Pass line-up.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is an action RPG set in the same world as Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. Features town-upgrading mechanics, fast-paced combat, and important back-story for several of the Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes cast of characters.
Jurassic World Evolution 2
Ok, so it may have come up a few times before, but I love the Jurassic World Evolution games, and it was great to see the sequel join Xbox Game Pass less than a year after it launched. There may be disputes between those who like to build an efficient dino sanctuary and those who prefer to unleash the carnivores and watch chaos unfold, but at least we can agree that Jurassic World Evolution 2 added a solid management sim to the Game Pass library, especially since, as a sequel, it was able to polish a few things from the first game and add the new Chaos Theory mode for even more, well, chaos. Plus, hearing Jeff Goldblum chatter about dinos is always fun.
Jurassic World Evolution 2 is the much-anticipated sequel to Frontier’s highly successful Jurassic World Evolution. This bold new era in the Jurassic World Evolution game franchise builds upon the ground-breaking and immersive 2018 management simulation.
Vampire Survivors
Let us journey away from the realm of dinosaurs and into the world of top-down bullet hell roguelike Vampire Survivors. The Game Pass launch of the console version of Vampire Survivors was still months away, but May brought us the Game Preview version to PC Game Pass, letting us finally sink our teeth into defeating waves of undead enemies. There’s something ridiculously fun about Vampire Survivors’ gameplay loop, and it’s easy to end up playing for much longer than you’d initially planned. It was a huge hit in Early Access on Steam, so it was a great get for PC Game Pass, shoring up the library with another excellent game.
Vampire Survivors is a time survival game with minimalistic gameplay and roguelite elements.
Sniper Elite 5
The Xbox Game Pass team refused to slow down with May’s additions even as June approached — in another change of pace, third-person shooter Sniper Elite 5 joined Xbox Game Pass as a fantastic day-one addition towards the end of May. The game had been well-reviewed and seems to have since been similarly popular on TrueAchievements, reaching a rating of 4.06/5 and scooping up over 70,000 players on the site.
The award-winning series returns as Karl Fairburne fights to uncover Project Kraken in 1944 France. The genre-defining authentic sniping, with enhanced kill cam, has never looked or felt better as you fight across immersive maps to stop the Nazi war machine in its tracks.
We’ll be back soon to carry on this breakdown of the best Game Pass additions for each month of 2022 — did we mention any of your favourite Game Pass additions for May, or is there anything you think should be on here too? Let us know in the comments!
