While leaks suggest that August will be a good month for Xbox Game Pass, it will take a little bit of time for Microsoft to get the ball rolling on that. As such, this is your last chance to play some of the great new titles that came to Xbox Game Pass throughout the month of July ahead of this wave of new titles. If you’re wondering what you should play this weekend, check out at least one of these three games, and you’ll have a fantastic time.
Valorant is now widely available on Xbox Series X/S with full controller support and cross-play with PlayStation 5. No beta access is required. While Valorant is technically a free-to-play game you don’t need Game Pass for, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers get a lot of helpful bonuses within Valorant. Namely, subscribers immediately unlock all Agents and get a 20% match XP boost from playing. If you enjoy ultra-competitive games, the Xbox port of Riot Games’ 5v5 hero shooter is worth playing if you have Xbox Game Pass. You can also play Valorant on PC and PS5 now.
Journey to the Savage Planet hit Xbox Game Pass in early July, and it’s a fun, satirical first-person game where players explore a weird alien planet for a megacorporation that couldn’t care less about them. The adventure has hues of Metroid Prime as players spend a lot of time scanning odd flora and fauna on the planet, although it’s a bit more active than those games in terms of the delivery of its narrative, exploration, and combat. Journey to the Savage Planet: Employee of the Month Edition is available through Xbox Game Pass across PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. It’s also on Nintendo Switch, PS4, and PS5.
For fans of indie games, The Case of the Golden Idol is a hidden gem on Xbox Game Pass worth trying out if you haven’t already. In it, players have to solve murders by piecing together context clues in the environment. Players find keywords by surveying each scenario point-and-click adventure style, and can then use those to stitch together the criminal, victim, location, weapons used, and more for each case. It’s the kind of game that makes you feel very smart while playing it because it’s full of “aha” moments. You can try The Case of the Golden Idol via Xbox Game Pass on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and the cloud. It’s also on Mac, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, iOS, and Android.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.