It’s official: Xbox Game Pass now supports streaming.
If you’re a subscriber to Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate service – which bundles in Game Pass and an Xbox Live Gold membership, making it ideal for anyone with an Xbox console – you can now access Microsoft’s streaming services on Android devices.
You’ll need Android version 6 or greater and a device that supports Bluetooth 4.0, but once those hardware and software hurdles are out of the way, there’s nothing standing between you and streaming games to your smartphone or tablet.
Here are our 15 favourite games on Xbox Game Pass that support this streaming feature, in no particular order. Quick disclaimer: some of these games may no longer be available when you subscribe, as the lineup changes frequently. Onward!
Yakuza: Like a Dragon
- Genre: RPG
- Audience: Mature
The final mainline game in the Yakuza series to be released before the franchise officially changed its name in the West to Like a Dragon is also one of its best.
Switching focus from longtime protagonist Kazuma Kiryu to new boy Ichiban Kasuga proves to be a stroke of inspired genius, as Kasuga brings exactly the kind of perspective the franchise needed to stay relevant.
Unlike Kiryu, Kasuga isn’t a stern warrior with an unswerving code of justice; he’s a goofy, likeable idiot with an irrepressible optimistic streak and a tendency to believe the best of everyone he meets.
This makes him an unfailingly adorable character and an easy man to root for, so when things start to get tragic – as they always do in Yakuza games – Kasuga’s story elicits more emotion than Kiryu’s ever has.
That’s not to say we don’t still love Kiryu, of course, but let’s just say that we’re thankful the upcoming (at time of writing) Infinite Wealth will once again star Kasuga, because we’re excited to see where his story goes next.
Gears Tactics
- Genre: Strategy
- Audience: Mature
Who’d have thought that when The Coalition declared its intention to create an XCOM-style game in the Gears of War universe, it would work so well?
The slower-paced and more methodical style of strategic gameplay serves this dark, gritty universe well, but there are a few pace-improving features in there to help combat move along a little quicker.
If you’ve ever felt like XCOM was too slow and deliberate, but you still enjoyed its cerebral, thoughtful systems, then Gears Tactics is definitely the game for you.
Different characters have different strengths, so you’ll need to build a varied and diverse team if you want to surmount Gears Tactics’ many complex challenges.
Even if you’re usually a Gears of War fan and you don’t often dabble in tactical RPGs, Gears Tactics is still a hugely solid offering that should help to convert you to the genre and may even serve as a gateway to deeper experiences.
As is arguably often the case with the Gears of War series, the narrative isn’t particularly attention-grabbing, but there’s so much tactical fun to be had here that it hardly matters.
Hi-Fi Rush
- Genre: Action
- Audience: T
When Hi-Fi Rush was released in early 2023, it arrived with basically no fanfare, but it quickly became one of the year’s best and most engaging games.
The reason was simple: Hi-Fi Rush is an uncomplicated experience that knows exactly what it is. Bethesda and developer Tango Gameworks haven’t stuffed their game with unnecessary microtransactions and bloat.
Instead, they’ve crafted a near-perfect 8-to-10-hour action-rhythm game with heavy spectacle fighter elements in which you guide protagonist Chai through a series of expertly-tuned levels that pulse along with the game’s excellent soundtrack.
Licensed music from bands like Nine Inch Nails and The Joy Formidable makes appearances throughout the game as well, meaning that if you’re a rock music aficionado, you’ll love Hi-Fi Rush even more.
If you’re looking for something that will challenge your thinkin’ brain, you likely won’t find it here, and the writing may prove divisive, but Hi-Fi Rush is a tremendously good time, and that’s really all it needs to be.
There are extra difficulty modes and challenges available if you want to push your skills to the limit, too, so Hi-Fi Rush is a great game to stream on Xbox Game Pass if you want to revisit the glory days of the PlayStation 2 era.
Batman: Arkham Knight
- Genre: Action, adventure
- Audience: Mature
Batman: Arkham Knight can’t quite match the highest highs of its predecessors, but it’s an excellent conclusion to an equally excellent trilogy (sorry, Batman: Arkham Origins).
With new gadgets to enjoy and a Batmobile to help you stalk the streets of Gotham dispatching thugs, Batman: Arkham Knight introduces just enough toys and mechanics to keep you entertained.
There are the usual glut of Riddler trophies to collect, for instance, but this time around, the question mark master himself has also designed a rather contrived but nonetheless enjoyable series of Batmobile races to engage in as well.
That’s in addition to the usual side missions with colourful Batman villains to discover, as well as a plot that’s just as convoluted and enjoyable as you’ve come to expect from the Arkham series.
Of course, the Arkham series’ signature crunchy combat and gargoyle-centric stealth make a glorious return as well, and while some of Batman’s new abilities border on gimmicks, the core gameplay here remains inordinately satisfying.
Its core villain is disappointing and it doesn’t quite make the most of the gloriously unhinged Scarecrow, but Arkham Knight is a great game with a solid ending and plenty to recommend it.
Pentiment
- Genre: Adventure
- Audience: Mature
On the other end of the spectrum to action-packed experiences like Hi-Fi Rush and Batman: Arkham Knight is Pentiment, a detective-inflected narrative adventure from everyone’s favourite RPG merchants Obsidian.
Pentiment sets out its mission statement right from the get-go; it’s a slow-moving, pensive (no pun intended) pseudo-RPG in which you guide protagonist Andreas through the various stages of his life.
The game takes place in 16th-century Bavaria and spans a quarter of a century, so you get to see Andreas grow from a naive young man to a world-weary artist.
Along the way, you’ll investigate a murder mystery that threatens to tear the town of Tassing and the abbey of Kiersau apart, although Pentiment isn’t really about that murder mystery.
Rather, it’s about the lives of the various townsfolk in Tassing; how they intersect, what secrets the townsfolk are hiding, and what their attitude is towards Andreas and his foibles.
While Pentiment’s RPG elements are light, you do get the chance to loosely define where your Andreas’ areas of expertise lie, allowing him access to different dialogue options during different conversations.
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy
- Genre: Adventure
- Audience: B
Let’s get one thing straight before we begin here: Ace Attorney is a series that’s extremely heavy on text. If you don’t like to do a lot of reading – and we mean a lot of reading – then your energy will be best spent elsewhere.
However, if you’re happy to curl up with the equivalent of a great novel each time you sit down with one of Ace Attorney’s cases, you’ll be transported to a wonderfully-crafted world with plenty of crimes to solve.
The first Ace Attorney is a relatively straightforward courtroom drama with some truly, transcendently strange moments, and the second game in the series acts as a darker and more morally complex subversion of the first entry.
Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations, the third game in the franchise, brings things back to basics, and it’s the favourite of many fans thanks to its central prosecutor figure, the enigmatic Godot.
Quake
- Genre: Adventure
- Audience: Mature
At present, the shooter landscape is overflowing with simple, more arcade-style shooters that many have termed “boomer shooters”, perhaps somewhat inaccurately.
Quake is arguably the granddaddy of those shooters. It takes the lightning pace of Doom and transposes it to full 3D, filling the levels with more verticality and cranking the enemy variety lever up to eleven.
What results is a tense, strangely scary affair that may not have the most compelling narrative in the world, but that more than makes up for this deficiency with excellent atmosphere and plenty of frenetic shooting action.
Quake’s range of weaponry is exciting to use, with even more basic weapons providing a visceral thrill that later shooters simply can’t hope to match.
This newer version of Quake also comes complete with its expansion packs, so if you love the base game, you’ll find plenty to augment that experience as well.
If you’ve spent a lot of time with Id Software’s most recent Doom titles, as well as Machine Games’ Wolfenstein reboots, and you want to see where it all began, Quake makes for an excellent further exploration of the genre’s history.
Amnesia: The Bunker
- Genre: Horror
- Audience: T
Survival horror is a very difficult genre to get right. It takes a careful balance of resource allocation, situations with multiple solutions, and a compelling story to create a survival horror game people will actually want to play.
With Amnesia: The Bunker, developer Frictional Games has found an innovative and exciting way to improve on the core survival horror formula, adding in immersive sim elements and heavy replayability for a fresh take on the genre.
The titular bunker is full of winding passageways and dark shadows, in which any manner of beasties could be lurking. You must explore this bunker in order to find a way out, but you’re being hunted by something that doesn’t want you to leave.
Problems in Amnesia: The Bunker can often have multiple solutions; this is fairly far from the standard Resident Evil “find specific key for specific lock” gameplay style.
If you’ve ever found yourself devising a solution for a survival horror problem that the game you’re playing subsequently won’t let you enact, Amnesia: The Bunker is very much a game you should be streaming on Xbox Game Pass.
Dragon Age: Inquisition
- Genre: RPG
- Audience: Mature
This absolutely isn’t the game for anyone who loves the CRPG-heavy tactical gameplay of Dragon Age: Origins.
If you’re here for well-developed characters and a compelling fantasy world, however, Inquisition more than delivers.
After the lacklustre showing of Dragon Age 2, Inquisition returns to what BioWare does best: a set of three-dimensional companions, a nice uncomplicated evil to thwart, and a huge world full of distractions and sidequests to explore. You get your own castle, too!
The combat in Dragon Age: Inquisition has moved on significantly since the isometric shenanigans of Origins; it’s akin to a sort of MMORPG-inspired hack-and-slash game in which you must manage cooldowns and use Dark Souls-style healing flasks whenever possible.
As such, RPG purists may turn their noses up at Dragon Age: Inquisition, but it’s got a great plot, some nice character-building moments, and the return of Varric, which is always nice.
If you treat Inquisition more as a spiritual successor to Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 rather than a direct sequel, you’ll have a better time with it. Just don’t expect to be challenged too much over the course of your playthrough.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition
- Genre: RPG
- Audience: Mature
Collecting the first three games in the Mass Effect series, Mass Effect Legendary Edition is pretty much inarguably the best way to experience BioWare’s epic space opera in all its glory.
All three games have undergone some changes; they’ve had visual and gameplay improvements, and Mass Effect 3 has been tweaked to remove its original focus on multiplayer challenges.
However, it’s the original Mass Effect that’s had the biggest makeover, with its gameplay style and UI altered extensively to bring it more in line with subsequent entries in the series.
Otherwise, though, these are still the same excellent spacefaring RPGs you experienced in the late 2000s and early 2010s, complete with Mass Effect 3’s divisive ending (which has also been improved slightly thanks to the inclusion of the game’s subsequent DLC packs).
The complexity of the RPG elements won’t satisfy anyone who’s coming from more complex fare like Baldur’s Gate 3, but Mass Effect still has an important story to tell in the modern era, and the range of characters you can meet across all three games makes the trilogy worth at least a single playthrough.
Spiritfarer: Farewell Edition
- Genre: Adventure
- Audience: T
Now for something completely different.
You won’t find traditional gaming staples like combat or levelling up in Spiritfarer. Instead, Thunder Lotus’ game offers a deeply meditative, peaceful experience in which you get to know a series of characters before shepherding them on to the afterlife.
Along the way, you’ll upgrade your ferry – which used to belong to the boatman Charon – and pet your adorable cat Daffodil plenty of times.
The Farewell Edition of Spiritfarer also boasts three extra characters, all of whom bring something unique to the calm, serene life sim.
In particular, Jackie the hyena manages to deal with some pretty heavy themes in an emotionally compelling, cathartic, and sensitive way, although he might hit a little too close to home for some players.
Spiritfarer might have a heavy emotional dimension to it, but it’s also a great life sim with plenty of interlocking systems and progression paths to enjoy, as well as some genuinely inspired minigames that tie into the lives of your friends in interesting ways.
If you don’t cry while accompanying at least one of your animal companions to the Everdoor, then you might want to check that your emotions are working properly.
Persona 4 Golden
- Genre: RPG
- Audience: Mature
Persona 5 oozes style and class, and it’s arguably the culmination of Persona’s core gameplay design, but there’s a melancholy to the world of Persona 4 Golden that other Persona games simply can’t match.
The small, sleepy town of Inaba is suddenly host to a series of grisly murders, and you and your friends must investigate these murders by entering a parallel world contained within televisions.
What follows is a mixture of life sim and JRPG, with a heavy emphasis on procedurally-generated dungeon-crawling and building relationships with your friends while you’re not engaged in exploration or combat.
The mixture of high-stakes battling for your very soul and hanging out with your friends at the shopping centre is what Persona is built around, and Persona 4 achieves this balance perhaps better than any other game in the series.
Your friends are diverse and interesting, and each of them has their own cross to bear, as evidenced by the fact that it’s essentially their psyches you’ll be exploring during the dungeon-crawling sections.
If you loved Persona 5, take a step back in time and check out its predecessor. We don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition
- Genre: RPG
- Audience: Mature
What more remains to be said about Skyrim, arguably one of the most famous video games in the world, at this point? Even non-gamers have heard of Skyrim, and many of them have likely tried it out themselves as well.
Where more recent Bethesda fare like Starfield falters through overly fussy UI design and a staid, boring world, Skyrim enthrals, thanks to open-ended exploration and a focus on player discovery that creates an addictive gameplay loop.
Skyrim’s core story absolutely is not worth writing home about; it’s dull, filled with unmemorable characters, and emotionally completely empty.
However, there’s an absolute treasure trove of side content to discover in Skyrim, and many of the game’s sidequests, including murder mysteries and dalliances with gods, are far more interesting than its core narrative.
It’s entirely possible – and likely – that you’ll lose hours upon hours just wandering the land of Skyrim itself, conversing with its inhabitants and seeing what kind of crazy shenanigans the game will throw at you as you try to move between two points.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
- Genre: Action, adventure
- Audience: T
What’s the best way to adapt Star Wars, one of the most legendary movie franchises of all time, into a video game? Well, it turns out that developer Respawn has the answer: just make an extremely solid game.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a sort of pseudo-Metroidvania action-adventure game that combines elements of Dark Souls, Metroid Prime, and Uncharted into a wholly compelling single-player experience.
The game isn’t going to light the world on fire, and since it’s a prequel, it can’t move the Star Wars universe forward in any interesting or particularly progressive ways.
Despite that, the tale of fugitive Jedi Cal Kestis is still fun to experience, and his little droid friend BD-1 is just as adorable as any of the series’ robotic companions have been up to this point.
There’s no one element of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order that particularly manages to stand out as exceptional, but given that all of its constituent elements are well-implemented, that doesn’t matter.
This is a great game that has no desire to drain your wallet of all its money; it’s an old-school offering that should appeal if you miss the days when games weren’t filled with microtransactions and money-making schemes.
Prey
- Genre: Horror
- Audience: Mature
We still think it’s fair to call Bethesda and Arkane’s Prey one of the most consistently underrated games that’s been released in the last ten years.
This is a modern attempt to create a game along the lines of Deus Ex, Thief, and the immersive sims that surrounded, predated, and followed those incredibly influential titles.
Perhaps the game with which Prey most notably shares its DNA is System Shock 2; like that game, Prey is set in a space station after a major catastrophe has killed most of its inhabitants or forced them into hiding.
The narrative that unfolds over the next 15 to 20 hours isn’t anywhere near as compelling or special as System Shock 2’s, but Prey boasts a dizzyingly complex world to explore, filled with nooks and crannies to dig through for resources.
The Neuromod system gives you the chance to build your character however you like; will you make a scrappy engineer who’s good at fixing things, a strong security specialist with the brawn to move heavy objects and uncover secret passages, or a psychic soldier who can blast enemies with alien mind powers?
However you choose to approach Prey’s world, it opens up for you in different ways, making this a game that’s worth playing and replaying on Xbox Game Pass.
