Game Pass February 2025 – Review

Avowed landed this month to kick off a huge pipeline of first party games, but how was the rest of the line-up?

To see last month’s review click here. We saw last year that in months when Microsoft had big first party games launching, generally the rest of the line-up was a bit slimmer. This is understandable, and is doubtless one of the reasons why the company went on their acquisition spree. It was a case of more of the same this month.

February 2025 – The Additions

Avowed is going to get mentioned a lot in this article, but it’s hard to avoid. Obsidian’s latest RPG epic has launched to high levels of acclaim and engagement with players. It was joined in the February line-up by 2024’s GOTY nominee (and winner in many cases) Balatro, which, while small in scope is absolutely a coup for Game Pass. Watch Dogs Legion and Far Cry: New Dawn show Ubisoft trying to eke more value from their big name IP, and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is an isometric RPG that may have passed you by but is well worth a look.

On a personal level, Kingdoms: Two Crowns is one of my favourite games EVER, though it has been in Game Pass before. And of course, F1 24 and Madden 25 shows the continual value of EA Play being bundled in with Game Pass Ultimate. I still take it for granted.

Critical Reception

We’ll start with Avowed, which snuck up to an 80 Metascore following quite glowing reviews and a general feeling that Obsidian played it pretty safe with this one. Incidentally, Outer Worlds was a 85, so possibly not quite enough of a jump, but still a good score that isn’t to be sniffed at. The highest rated game in this month’s list is, surprise surprise, Balatro (90). It’s joined in the top three by Kingdoms: Two Crowns (85) and the aforementioned Avowed.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (78) was very well reviewed when it launched, while Far Cry: New Dawn (71) and Watch Dogs: Legion (76), perhaps didn’t meet Ubisoft’s expectations, but are undoubtedly still fun to play (especially for “free”). Surprisingly, considering it’s from such a reliable series, F1 2024 (71) rounds the list out with a Metascore on the low side, and Madden 25 lagging behind on 69.

Funnily enough, Balatro also has the highest Xbox user score and Metacritic user score (4.5 and 4.1 respectively), followed by Warhammer 40,000 on Metacritic (4.1) and Kingdoms: Two Crowns (3.5 Xbox, 3.8 Metacritic), in a rare situation of the two review formats being pretty much in step. I will just say, Far Cry: New Dawn has good user reviews on Metacritic (3.5), so probably worth trying despite its low critic scores.

Recency

Unusually, it was a very poor month for day one releases, with only Avowed launching day and date into Game Pass. There are also only three games from 2024 in there (and two of those are sports games: Balatro, Madden 25 and F1 24). Kingdoms: Two Crowns (2018), Far Cry: New Dawn (2019) and Watch Dogs: Legion (2020) do bring the average down significantly.

February 2025 – The Leavers

A LOT of games left in February, with Tales of Arise probably the biggest name casualty. This is closely followed (particularly in terms of Metacritic scores), by Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, GRIS and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.

As we’ve seen a lot recently, multiple titles in the same series have also been hit, with Yakuza 3: Remastered and Yakuza 4: Remastered leaving the service. 16 games dropping out of Game Pass isn’t great whatever way you look at it, though overall they are, thankfully, some of the lower scoring games compared to what’s left.

Additions vs Leavers

Normal service seems to have been resumed (in terms of what we were seeing last year), with double the number of games leaving Game Pass as being added. Clearly, the games joining are higher quality, with a higher average Metascore, while also being newer and worth more in real terms. One of Game Pass’s greatest strengths, however, is its variety, so we do need to make sure the total number of games available on the service doesn’t drop too low.

Vs. February 2024

We always like to have a look at the same month in the previous year to see how Game Pass is evolving over a longer period of time, particularly when a lot in gaming is quite seasonal (with long summer droughts of new games commonplace, for instance).

Persona 3: Reload was probably the highlight from the impressive swathe of titles that got added to Game Pass in February 2024, instantly becoming one of the most critically acclaimed titles on the service, as well as being extremely popular with players. Other highlights included Tales of Arise, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and Resident Evil 3.

Almost incredibly (by present day standards), only four games left Game Pass in February 2024, with Galactic Civilizations II arguably the biggest loss – both critically and in terms of a genre stalwart leaving the service.

With the huge disparity between games being added and leaving, the table below is pretty one-sided. However, even with this in mind, there was very little to choose between the two sets of games in terms of critical reception or user scores – so the wealth of games coming in was great to see.

Conclusions

Avowed has landed really nicely, but (again, as we saw was a recurring theme at the end of last year), the rest of the line-up is quite thin. Balatro is a very nice addition, it has to be said, but the line-up still feels a bit lightweight and with very few newer games. This is exacerbated when you bear in mind the large number of games leaving Game Pass. While none are huge critical misses, is a shame to see, especially compared to February 2024.

A familiar feeling – an Xbox first party blockbuster keeps the Game Pass line-up for February from slipping to a 2 star score. There’s more to come in the next few months, so let’s see if this continues in March and April.

Some notes on this data: We are only interested in the Game Pass Ultimate tier for this. We may expand to look at other tiers in the future. For the purposes of this exercise, where the console or PC version of a game is already on Game Pass and the other version also joins, we do not count it as an additional game coming to the service. In the same way, if only one version leaves, we don’t count it as a departure. Prices and review scores listed is the data as of the date listed below, meaning the prices & scores of games from the year previously (when used in point of comparison in this article), are likely to be cheaper than they would have been when they actually joined Game Pass and may have different average scores (especially user scores).

For Metacritic scores, we generally take the score from the platform with the most reviews, unless there is a reason not to (e.g. instead of taking Goldeneye 64’s 96 Metacritic score for the recent Xbox re-release, we opt to not give it a score as there are not enough reviews of that version). Data captured March 7th 2025.