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.”