Odin (181)It’s Thursday, and that means it’s free PC game day over at the Epic Games Store! Every week, Epic Games offers one (and sometimes more) free games, from indie greats to AAA titles that will blow your socks off.
This week, you can already grab The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and Rogue Legacy, but next week’s games have already been revealed. XCOM 2 and Insurmountable will be free April 14th-21st.
XCOM 2 is the sequel to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the 2012 award-winning strategy game of the year.
Earth has changed. Twenty years have passed since world leaders offered an unconditional surrender to alien forces. XCOM, the planet’s last line of defense, was left decimated and scattered. Now, in XCOM 2, the aliens rule Earth, building shining cities that promise a brilliant future for humanity on the surface, while concealing a sinister agenda and eliminating all who dissent from their new order.
Only those who live at the edges of the world have a margin of freedom. Here, a force gathers once again to stand up for humanity. Always on the run, and facing impossible odds, the remnant XCOM forces must find a way to ignite a global resistance, and eliminate the alien threat once and for all.
One of the mainstay epics of all time, XCOM 2 offers the innovative turn-based sci-fi combat that transformed the genre and built upon the themes of the long-running XCOM franchise. It’s a masterpiece of a game, and features modding support for huge replayability.
Firaxis Games has a long and proud history, providing the world with Civilizations games and XCOM titles alike. But, in 2022 they’re going to be releasing their first combination title with Marvel Studios, Marvel's Midnight Suns.
After centuries of sleep, Lilith, Mother of Demons, has been revived by Hydra through a twist of dark magic and science. Pushed to the brink, the Avengers desperately look to fight fire with hellfire and enlist the help of the Midnight Suns - Nico Minoru, Blade, Magik, and Ghost Rider.
The Epic Games Store has been around for a while, the lesser-known alternative to Steam, the nearly-ubiquitous platform for game purchases since it launched in 2003. But, where Steam originally existed and launched to promote Valve games, Epic Games Store launched in 2018 and quickly rose to success on the Fortnite franchise. At the time of Epic’s launch, Steam took a dramatic 30% cut from the sales of video games through their platform! This hurt both game designers and users, just wasn’t very nice. But the folks behind Epic realized something excellent: they could take a much lower cut and still have a profitable business. This led them to fast domination of the indie market, as small publishers flocked to the far better terms offered by Epic.
Epic Games Store offers some seriously incredible discounts on a regular basis, in addition to all the normal discounts one would expect on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the usual holidays. But the most exciting is their weekly free game or add-on, which simply harpoons all competitors.
When I first heard about this free game, I thought that can’t be real. They must only offer tiny indie games. Not at all, dear reader. Not. At. All. Epic frequently lists unbelievable A-lister games on their weekly deal, as well as sometimes offer two free games instead of one. In addition, just because a studio is smaller doesn’t mean the games it makes aren’t impressive. I’ve picked up some of my favorite new games, for free, from this platform, and most of them have been made by smaller studios (or as side-projects for teams from big studios).
