Game Pass January 2025 – Review

We're into 2025 and what a start to the year. Six months and more of solid, (hopefully) top-quality Game Pass games in the pipeline, but how was January?

To see last month’s review click here. With December headed by Indiana Jones and Crash Team Racing, we had some true critical darlings in the list but, as has been standard for the past few months, the quantity and variety of titles was seriously lacking. It’s nice to be able to report that things have certainly turned around in January.

January 2025 – The Additions

Some absolutely fantastic games in here. My highlights start with Sniper Elite: Resistance, part of a series that feels like a Game Pass regular now, which, while it may be little more than a standalone DLC for Sniper Elite 5, is still a brilliant double-A game that many people would happily pay full price for. Lonely Mountains has almost gone viral, with that many people seeming to play it, though it hasn’t quite reached Palworld levels of attention yet. It’s a great get for the Game Pass team and is tremendous fun. And who could ignore Ninja Gaiden II Black, which shadow dropped very nicely during the recent Developer Direct.

Critical Reception

While unlike December 2024 we don’t have a heavy hitting first party release this month, what we do have is a much higher quantity of games, and much better variety. This is backed up by stellar Metacritic scores for a lot of the titles, including the likes of Citizen Sleeper 2 (85), Lonely Mountains (86) and Ninja Gaiden II: Black (80). I find it incredible that Carrion has not got a higher Metacritic score (75), but Road 76 (79), Shady Part of Me (78) and UFC 5 (78) all score in the high seventies. It’s worth mentioning also Diablo (94), which launched into Game Pass for PC, but of course as a classic game it’s maybe not quite as sought after as the score suggests.

Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap (70) and Eternal Strands (68) bring the average down, but it’s hard to deny January has been a great month for excellent Game Pass releases.

Recency

We got to enjoy six day one games out of the 12 total this month, which is not too shabby. Ninja Gaiden II: Black was, of course, a shadow drop, while Sniper Elite: Resistance is one we’d been looking forward to for some time. Citizen Sleeper 2 was also a day one release, as were Eternal Strands, Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap and Lonely Mountains.

On the other hand, Diablo was released in 1997, which pushes the average age way up, but we can’t really hold that against it can we!

January 2025 – The Leavers

We can never really complain with the same number leaving as departing in any given month, and it has to be said that this month’s leavers were pretty tame. It’s extremely indie heavy, with few, if any, big hitters departing.

Additions vs Leavers

We can’t complain about the quality of the games leaving compared to those coming in. Almost a perfect chart below, with just the quantity of games (even) and a very very tiny dip in user ratings contributing to the only blemishes you’ll see. A huge uplift in average Metascore from the games coming in, which is the main thing (given you’d naturally expect newer games to cost more etc.).

Vs. January 2024

Before we give a score for January 2025, it’s helpful to look at what January in 2024 was like, and you can see both the additions and the games that left that month, below.

Firstly, the additions, and there were several extremely high profile titles in the ranks. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, while old by this point, was still a big get for Game Pass; Hell Let Loose, a hugely popular FPS; Resident Evil 2 Remake, which speaks for itself; F1 2023, a popular yearly release from EA; We Happy Few, now with Xbox first party; and last, but not least, Palworld. A game that set the internet on fire not only due to its comparisons with Pokemon, but because it was great fun to play. And that’s just the highlights!

While I think you could argue that January 2024’s line-up did somehow manage to eclipse 2025, it also suffered from higher quality games leaving the service. GTA V heads the list, which was obviously a big blow, leaving a gap Microsoft clearly felt they had to fill. But there was also Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden as well as Hitman.

Even with the high profile games leaving the service (and you can really see the quality of those in the comparison below), it was still a brilliant month for Game Pass.

Conclusions

This month felt like a return to form for Game Pass. While we didn’t have any first party releases, that was more than made up for with a stacked line-up of third party titles, which sets the scene nicely for a full release period of the next six months. The one blemish? We saw in 2024 how a January on Game Pass could be better, so it’s difficult to award 2025 top marks in that respect

A statement of intent for Game Pass in 2025, let’s see how the wider Game Pass line-up fits around Xbox’s big first party releases in the months to come.

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 February 6th 2025.