Go behind enemy vines with the March Xbox Games With Gold

The ides of March may be a taboo subject around a Caesar salad bar, but for gamers? The third month of the year is looking pretty good if you happen to be nostalgic, starved of action and you feel like playing with your food. Xbox’s regular Games With Gold promotion that doles out free games has a whopper of a selection that happens to scratch all three of those moods, as the month ahead will see the following games released as freebies:

• Adventure Time: Pirates of the Enchiridion – March 1-31
• Star Wars: Republic Commando – March 1-15
• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance – March 16-31
• Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 – March 16-April 15

SAUCY JACK! I’ve waxed plenty in the past about my love for Metal Gear Solid’s greatest spin-off (Go eat a high-frequency vibrational sword Metal Gear Survive), and guess what? I’M GOING TO WAX SOME MORE! MISTER MIYAGI WOULD BE PROUD! For reals though, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is still brilliant. High-energy, bonkers story and featuring one of the best final boss fights in all of video game history.

It’s Platinum Games at their finest hour, resulting in a miracle that was created at the eleventh hour and that still manages to shine bright like a diamond some several years after release. Y’know, back when Konami weren’t the most despised dog in the video game publisher yard. Next up, you’ve got an Adventure Time game that I happen to know absolutely nothing about.

Seeing as how it’s Adventure Time though, it’ll probably be weird, littered with references to fantasy and have some charming moments so I’m sure it’ll be alright. Plants vs Zombies 2: Garden Warfare is the big one though. A sequel nobody expected to a game that people expected even less, Garden Warfare is still surprisingly brilliant stuff from the Plants vs Zombies universe.

It’s colourful, hilarious and once you’ve peeled the skin off of a Zombie general as a sentient giant orange that wields cutting edge Vitamin C lasers, you’ll wonder how you missed out on this masterpiece of a game. As a certain devilishly handsome reviewer still said in his review for the game (Ladies):

Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 is gloriously silly in the best way possible and excels at a grass-roots level thanks to some of the tightest gameplay around.

Finally, there’s Star Wars: Republic Commando, a lean and mean shooter that allowed you to slip a few commands to your crack squad of commando Clone Troopers, this is one of the better Star Wars games around from a more elegant and civilised age. Heck, it’s still better than anything that EA is doing with the license today, although that’s not exactly a hard benchmark to hop over lately.

All good stuff, and leagues better than PlayStation’s meagre offerings for March I reckon.

Last Updated: February 28, 2019