EA has been quietly packing its paid subscription service, Origin Access, with a long list of excellent games over the past few months. It all started when it let third-party publishers in on the act, adding most of the Batman games. Both The Witness and Wasteland 2 weren't far behind, and last month Mad Max, Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera all entered the fray. This month, it's the turn of relaxing underwater explorer Abzû and old-school RPG Tyranny, as well as seven others. They'll all be available to subscribers tomorrow.
Origin Access is a bit like Netflix for PC gaming: you pay $5/£4 a month, or $30/£20 for the whole year, and get unlimited access to the 100 or so games inside the "vault". Out of the nine new ones, I'm most looking forward to Tyranny, which has been on my list for a while. Steven said it had a great story with moral shades of grey, but that it was let down by a dud ending. Abzû was the 2016 game about a deep-sea diver that you probably saw screenshots of everywhere. It's both beautiful and relaxing.
Kingdom: New Lands looks interesting, too. It's the expanded and improved version of 2015 management game Kingdoms, which James thought was solid enough already.
Here's the full list of the nine new games:
- GoNNER, a side-scrolling shooter
- Europa Universalis III Complete
- Knights of Pen and Paper: +1 Edition
- The Guest, a creepy first-person exploration game
- Hearts of Iron III
- Victoria I Complete
- Abzû
- Tyranny
- Kingdom: New Lands
It's not as impressive a lineup as previous months, but it's a decent selection. If you want to sign up to Origin Access, you can do that here. Whatever you think about EA as a publisher, the service offers a lot of great games for a not-too-daunting subscription fee.