PS Plus vs. Xbox Games With Gold: Which Free Games Are Better? (December 2018)

PS Plus vs. Xbox Games With Gold: Which Free Games Are Better (December 2018)?

Sony PS Plus

Sony’s PS Plus freebies stack up pretty well this December, with SOMA your headline PS4 title. The first-person horror game plays a bit more like an atmospheric thriller akin to Alien Isolation than it does something like Outlast. The gameplay is measured, the ambiance tense and the setting is really quite striking. It’s the sort of harrowing tale that’ll you ponder long after rolling credits.

Onrush is your other PS4 title, an entertaining online vehicular combat game from the makers of Dirt and Grid. The fast-paced arcade gameplay and a plethora of customization options and various modes make for a fun and content-packed experience.

Over on PS3, Sterenden and Steins Gate comprise the lineup this month. The first is a tricky side-scroller with a pixelated aesthetic, while Steins Gate is a critically acclaimed visual novel that definitely deserves your attention.

Iconoclasts and Papers, Please come to PS Vita, although they’re also playable on PS4 thanks for cross-buy. The former, in particular, is well worth a look. The pixelated action-platformer Iconoclasts reviewed very well at launch and is certainly one of the better retro-inspired indie titles to come out in recent times.

• SOMA (PS4)
• Onrush (PS4)
• Steredenn (PS3)
• Steins;Gate (PS3)
• Iconoclasts (PS Vita + PS4)
• Papers, Please (PS Vita)

PS Plus vs. Xbox Games With Gold: Which Free Games Are Better (December 2018)?

Xbox Games with Gold

Xbox Games with Gold closes out the year with a fairly solid lineup. Xbox One owners get to download QUBE 2, a physics-based puzzle game, Never Alone, another puzzle-platformer of a different kind. Never Alone is the adorable tale of a native Alaskan girl and her arctic fox, which can be played either in single-player or couch co-op mode.

The other two available games are backward compatible titles from two different eras of Xbox history. From Dec. 1-15, the free game will be 2011’s Dragon Age 2, the second entry in BioWare’s fantasy role-playing franchise. Later in the month, subscribers will be able to download Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction.

Mercenaries, developed by the now-defunct Pandemic Studios and published by the also defunct LucasArts in 2005, marks the first time that Microsoft has offered an original Xbox game in its Games With Gold lineup.

• Qube 2 (Xbox One – all month)
• Never Alone (Xbox One Dec. 16-Jan. 15)
• Dragon Age 2 (Xbox One/360 Dec.1-15)
• Mercenaries (Xbox One/36 Dec.16-31)

Do remember that you can still download many of November’s Games with Gold.

PS Plus vs. Xbox Games With Gold: Which Free Games Are Better (December 2018)?

Who Wins?

It would have been nice for the year to end with a bang, but we can’t honestly say that either of these lineups has us hugely excited. That being said, there have been so many stellar months from both services in 2018 that we can hardly complain.

We’re picking PS Plus this month, simply because SOMA is a superb title that we consider a must-play. In fact, we scored it an exemplary 5/5 in our review back in 2016. It’s a standout title that hits the mark with its thought-provoking narrative and eerie dystopian locale.

Onrush, too, is a title that deserves a lot of credit for pioneering some innovation in a genre that’s as old as the hills. This is an arcadey vehicle combat game that stands next to games like Rocket League for adding layers of interesting new gameplay mechanics on top of a familiar blueprint while adding the sort competitive online play and progression systems that keep players coming back for more.

Games with Gold’s two headline titles are entertaining enough but don’t quite represent substantial enough experiences to topple PS Plus this time around.

Elsewhere, it’s nice to see backward compatibility adding strings to the bow of the service — especially the return of original Xbox titles like Mercenaries. The less said about Dragon Age 2 the better…