Sony has announced the next batch of monthly titles coming to its PlayStation Plus subscription service.
From 6th May, PlayStation Plus members across all subscription tiers – that’s Essential, Extra and Premium – will be able to get their hands on the following three titles:
- Ark: Survival Ascended | PS5
- Balatro | PS5, PS4
- Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun | PS5, PS4
A particular highlight here is the poker-themed roguelike Balatro. Released last year, Balatro sold 1m copies in its first month and then proceeded to scoop up numerous awards, most recently including a BAFTA for Best Debut game.
“A poker roguelike is such a brilliant idea you almost don’t need to make it to see how clever it is. There are a few of these, and Balatro is comfortably the best I’ve played. It really is ingenious – and it’s also ingeniously simple,” reads Eurogamer’s Balatro review.
Meanwhile, we quite enjoyed the boltgun in Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, with Rick Lane stating it “earns a place in the pantheon of great video game weapons” in Eurogamer’s review. However, he didn’t feel the rest of the game’s arsenal could quite live up to the thrill of the boltgun.
“If you want to make a big ol’ mess with one excellent gun and several other decent ones, Boltgun satisfies this desire. A few design tweaks and a little more attention to detail would elevate it from a good shooter into a great one, but as a throwback starter course to the hotly anticipated main that is Space Marine 2, Boltgun does an acceptable job of stimulating the tastebuds,” reads Eurogamer’s Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun review.
Last up, we have Ark: Survival Ascended, an Unreal Engine 5 “next-generation remake” of the original Ark game. Our Matt took the souped up Ark for a whirl on its release, calling it “a striking upgrade”, but one that still has some flaws.
“Ark has long felt like a game that came into being through sheer fluke rather than any notable design acumen on the part of Wildcard, and it’s a sense only exacerbated in Ascended. There just doesn’t seem to be any consistency of vision here; you get new dinosaurs and new building pieces, a photo mode, cross-platform support – but tutorials are non-existent; I’m still stuck laboriously faffing around with an awkward, unintuitive inventory system; balance is all over the place, and on it goes,” he wrote in Eurogamer’s Ark: Survival Ascended feature from 2023.
“Ark: Survival Ascended is just an incredibly weird beast, a remake absolutely in thrall of the shiny stuff but with minimal regard for the fundamental annoyances that have long plagued the game.”
The above three games will be available for PS Plus subscribers until 2nd June.
As a reminder, with the approach of a new month, it does mean this is your last chance to get your mitts on April’s PS Plus games.
PlayStation Plus members have until 5th May to add RoboCop: Rogue City, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth – Hacker’s Memory to their game library.
You’ll find more details on what else is on offer in our full PlayStation Plus guide here.