Horizon Zero Dawn, Wreckfest lead December's PlayStation Now additions
Plus Darksiders 3, The Surge 2, and more.
Guerrilla Games' open-world action-RPG Horizon Zero Dawn leads a fresh batch of on-demand additions to Sony's PlayStation Now subscription service in December, with the likes of Wreckfest, Darksiders 3, The Surge 2, Broforce, and Stranded Deep bringing up the rear.
Horizon Zero Dawn, which seems as good a place as any to start, sees outcast and hunter Aloy embarking on a journey across a sumptuous future version of Earth, where wonderfully designed robotic wildlife roams free. It's an experience that blends exploration and (sometimes stealthy, sometimes bombastic) combat with solid results, and PlayStation Now subscribers can continue Aloy's adventure in its sizeable wintery expansion, The Frozen Wilds.
Next on the list is Wreckfest, a game Eurogamer's Martin Robinson called "a true successor to the brilliant Destruction Derby" before slapping it with a Recommended badge last year. "Wreckfest offers primal pleasures, and offers them up with little by way of pretension," he wrote. "It also offers them with a little bit of that Bugbear class that made those older Flatout games so treasured, and what a thrill is to have that back after far too long."
Moving on, it's the turn of Darksiders 3, which - following the adventures of Death and War in earlier games - focusses the series' usual hack-and-slash formula on new Horsemen, Fury. The ensuing journey across a post-apocalyptic Earth is one that Eurogamer contributor Malindy Hetfield suggested was a little too familiar for its own good in her review. "I can now confidently say," she wrote, "that Darksiders has done Darksiders better in the past."
The Surge 2, meanwhile, builds on developer Deck 13's original sci-fi Souls-like by shifting its satisfying limb-targeting combat and action-RPG trappings away from the first game's claustrophobic corridors and out into the more environmentally diverse streets of derelict urban sprawl Jericho City - with much more interesting results.
Finally, wrapping things up for December, are developer Free Lives' acclaimed, 80s-action-movie-obsessed run-and-gunner Broforce, plus Stranded Deep - an open-world survival adventure (complete with all the scavenging, crafting, and tumbling hunger meters you'd expect from the genre) with an emphasis on underwater exploration in the Pacific Ocean.
All of the above are available on PlayStation Now from today, 1st December, and only Wreckfest has a departure date, with the game set to leave the service on Monday, 31st May next year.