The hits just keep coming – explore even more with Free Play Days! Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Riders Republic, AEW: Fight Forever, Dovetail Games Euro Fishing, Grounded 2 and Under The Waves are available this weekend for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and Essential to play from Thursday, October 9 until Sunday, October 12.

Between October 9 to October 16, Game Pass members can play Campaign, Multiplayer and Zombies in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 for free for a full week. This free trial will include the cinematic single-player campaign. Then, jump into all of Multiplayer with more than 40 multiplayer maps, including Gravity, Mothball, and Rig, which are brand-new in Season 06. In Zombies, partake in the thrilling Zombies saga with access to all six Round-Based Zombies maps. Dive in and experience the full breadth of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6!

Riders Republic and Kingdom Two Crowns are free for all Xbox members to try during Free Play Days (Xbox Game Pass Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and Essential membership not required). Enjoy even more time with Riders Republic as it will be unlocked until October 13.

Under the Waves is free for all Xbox members to try during Free Play Days (Xbox Game Pass Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and Essential membership not required) with a 2-hour timed trial.

How To Start Playing

Scroll down and find and install the games on each of the individual game details pages on Xbox.com. Clicking through will send you to the Microsoft Store, where you must be signed in to see the option to install with your Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and Essential membership. To download on console, click on the Subscriptions tab in the Xbox Store and navigate down to the Free Play Days collection on your Xbox One or Xbox Series X|S.

Keep The Fun Going

Purchase the game and other editions at a limited time discount and continue playing while keeping your Gamerscore and achievements earned during the event! Please note that discounts, percentages, and title availability may vary by title and region.

Free Play Days (Game Pass Membership Required)

Call of Duty®: Black Ops 6 – Cross-Gen Bundle

Activision Publishing Inc.

☆☆☆☆☆ 865

★★★★★

$69.99 $38.49

Get it now

Xbox Game Pass

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
Forced to go rogue. Hunted from within. This is Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Developed by Treyarch and Raven, Black Ops 6 is a spy action thriller set in the early ’90s, a period of transition and upheaval in global politics, characterized by the end of the Cold War and the rise of the United States as a single superpower. With a mind-bending narrative, and unbound by the rules of engagement, this is signature Black Ops.

AEW: Fight Forever

THQ Nordic

☆☆☆☆☆ 289

★★★★★

$39.99 $15.99

Get it now

AEW: Fight Forever
Optimized for Xbox Series X|S, Smart Delivery
Recognized for its retro approach to design including hand-crafted animations and nostalgic arcade feel, AEW: Fight Forever is now available as a part of Xbox Free Play Days. Presenting wrestling fans with their a chance to pull off wrestling moves only seen on the wildly popular AEW programming. Plus online co-op wrestling with Tag-Team matches that feature sequences of team maneuvers performed with simple commands.  AEW: Fight Forever will be a part of Xbox Free Play Days through October 12. Take advantage of the long roster of the most popular AEW wrestlers, wrestler customization, and multiple match types today!

Grounded 2

Xbox Game Studios

☆☆☆☆☆ 490

★★★★★

$29.99

Get it now

PC Game Pass

Xbox Game Pass

Grounded 2
Xbox Play Anywhere
In this open-world, single-player or co-op survival adventure, craft weapons and armor, build your base, and traverse the playground on your buggy. The Hairy and Scary update unleashes AXL the tarantula into Grounded 2,with a full armor set to craft, new weapons to wield, and new base décor. Fine-tune your loadout with new gear and build smarter with the streamlined BUILD.M interface as you prepare to face AXL on the back of your Buggy.

Dovetail Games Euro Fishing

Dovetail Games

☆☆☆☆☆ 288

★★★★★

$18.49

Get it now

Xbox One X Enhanced

Dovetail Games Euro Fishing
Master your rod, line and tactics, and refine your technique this weekend to become a top angler in Euro Fishing. Learn the basics or dive straight into one of the five unique European locations, each posing their own unique challenge to land the big catch. Whether casting solo or enjoying with friends, embrace the thrill of real fishing from the comfort of your own sofa.

Under The Waves

Quantic Dream

☆☆☆☆☆ 177

★★★★★

$29.99 $5.99

Get it now

Free Trial

Under The Waves
Optimized for Xbox Series X|S
Stan, a professional diver in the North Sea, is struggling to overcome a life-changing loss during an extended mission underwater. Stuck in his self-imposed solitude, he starts to experience strange events and will have to make the most significant choice of his life…

Free Play Days For All

Kingdom Two Crowns

Raw Fury

☆☆☆☆☆ 283

★★★★★

$19.99 $3.99

Get it now

Xbox One X Enhanced

PC Game Pass

Xbox Game Pass

Free Trial

Kingdom Two Crowns
Optimized for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox Play Anywhere
The Kingdom game series is celebrating a decade since its first release this October with a new free update – the 2.3, 10th Rulerversary Major Update for Kingdom Two Crowns! A new challenge island will treat you with great festivities, beautiful landscapes, towering monuments, a new enemy and… party spirit (with obligatory party hats, cake and candles)!

Riders Republic

UBISOFT

☆☆☆☆☆ 551

★★★★★

$39.99 $9.99

Get it now

Xbox Game Pass

Riders Republic
Optimized for Xbox Series X|S, Smart Delivery
Jump into the Riders Republic massive multiplayer playground! Bike, ski, snowboard, or wingsuit across an open world sports paradise. Race in mass start events, develop your rider’s career, or kick back with friends and free roam the parks.

Don’t miss out on these exciting Free Play Days for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and Essential members! Learn more about Free Play Days here and stay tuned to Xbox Wire to find out about future Free Play Days and all the latest Xbox gaming news.

Released in 2022, the first Syberia left an impact on the adventure genre. Three sequels followed, and enriched the universe created by the author Benoît Sokal. Now, 2025 sees the arrival of a remaster of the first episode, which takes what made the success of the original, all while adding elements to bring it up to modern standards.

Between Remake and Remaster

Even though Syberia – Remastered logically presents itself as a remaster, the teams at Virtuallyz and Microids Studio Paris decided to modernize the game to speak to a broader audience. They immersed themselves into what had been done for Syberia – The World Before released in 2022, as Aurélien Lévêque, Game Director at Virtuallyz, explains: “The backgrounds have been entirely modeled after the original 2D plans, so we had to imagine some missing viewpoints. Even the characters have been entirely modeled and animated in 3D.”

“Fun fact: at the start of the project, we didn’t have enough 3D models for all the characters, so we used Felix Smetana, the receptionist at the Kronsky Hotel, everywhere when working on the cutscenes. After seeing him so many times, he ended up becoming the team’s mascot. Thankfully, we got the opportunity to work with the team at Microids Studio Paris, which developed Syberia – The World Before and Amerzone – The Explorer’s Legacy, to help us achieve the level of quality we aimed for.”

Taking advantage of this 3D modeling, the development team were able to completely revamp the camera to make the game more enjoyable and readable, all the while allowing players to better locate themselves in the environment. Moving protagonist Kate around has also been greatly improved, as Aurélien goes into details on the matter: “We took inspiration from many elements in The World Before, starting with the character controller, meaning the way Kate moves around using a controller or computer mouse. Microids Studio Paris also helped us with putting the camera in place.”

Always with modernization in mind, the team tried to make choices that would satisfy both old fans and new players who want to discover the series. As such, they decided to implement a quest journal in the vein of what was present in The World Before, and to offer two different game modes: Story Mode, which gives hints so that players won’t stay stuck too long, and Adventure Mode, in which no help is provided and is thus way closer to the original experience.

Preserving Benoît Sokal’s legacy

The team did everything to find the right balance between the wish to improve the author’s vision and staying true as possible to the DNA of the original. Thus, if the original cutscenes have simply been upscaled, the backgrounds have benefited from a complete overhaul. Used to the Unity engine, Virtuallyz and Microids Studio Paris were able to greatly improve the visuals to enhance Benoît Sokal’s vision without altering the geography of the locations. In addition, by using the HDRP (Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline), Virtuallyz was able to make the whole experience more immersive than ever, as Aurélien points out: “The HDRP is a rendering pipeline made for next-gen or current-gen consoles. It enables more realistic lighting, but also more control on ‘material PBR’ (Physically Based Rendering), generally used to add a sense of realism and texture to objects. All those factors allowed for an improvement of the scenery, as well as for the characters.”

The sound design was also reworked. Given that the original plot hasn’t been modified, the decision to keep the original dubbing and music was made quite early into the project. However, the devs have improved some old sounds that didn’t age well, and created new ones (such as the crackling of the chimney fire) to emphasize the immersion. Aurélien adds: “We worked on FMOD so that the voices and sounds would take into account the acoustics of the rooms or of the exterior.”

The studio faced some challenges with the cutscenes, especially as they were trying make the direction smoother while also making sure that everything would be consistent, no matter the language.

“As each language uses a different duration, we had to design an ingenious system so that the cutscenes would adapt to the duration of each sound,” Aurélien explains. “A lot of work was done to make sure that everything would interlink perfectly, and we even added new animations with travelling effects to make the whole thing more dynamic and harmonious.”

The team made all those improvements to improve Benoît Sokal’s original vision and give Syberia a new lease of life. Get ready for a one-of-a-kind journey across Europe in Syberia – Remastered, releasing on November 6 on Xbox Series X|S.

Syberia – Remastered

Microids

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

$29.99

Pre-order

More than 20 years after its original release, Syberia is reborn in a fully modernized version. Rediscover its iconic locations and unforgettable characters through a stunning visual overhaul, redesigned gameplay, and the same captivating storytelling that made it a classic. Kate Walker, a brilliant lawyer from New York, is sent to a remote village in the French Alps to finalize the sale of an old automaton factory. But what begins as a routine assignment soon turns into an extraordinary journey across Eastern Europe and its snow-covered landscapes. Accompanied by Oscar, a loyal and one-of-a-kind automaton, Kate sets out to explore mysterious and forgotten places, filled with eccentric characters, as she follows the trail of Hans Voralberg, a genius inventor pursuing a seemingly impossible dream: finding the last living mammoths on the mythical island of Syberia. An unexpected, thrilling, and deeply emotional voyage that will challenge everything she thought she knew. First released in 2002, Syberia became a reference in the adventure genre, praised for its unique atmosphere, sharp writing, and the richness of Benoît Sokal’s artistic vision. This remaster is a new opportunity to (re)discover the masterpiece, following in the footsteps of other titles from Benoît Sokal such as “Syberia: The World Before” and the newly released “Amerzone: The Explorer’s Legacy”. KEY FEATURES – A faithful and stunning overhaul: Meet Syberia’s iconic characters fully redesigned and explore the game’s most emblematic locations brought to life in beautifully enhanced 3D. Every environment has been carefully rebuilt with an art direction that stays true to Benoît Sokal’s unique style, offering an even deeper immersion into his singular visual universe. – Reimagined mechanical puzzles: Enjoy a fresh take on the game’s intricate puzzles, redesigned to provide a smoother and more intuitive experience while preserving their essential role in uncovering the secrets behind Voralberg’s genius. – A modernized gameplay experience: Rediscover Kate Walker’s journey with an updated user interface, improved 3D navigation, and more fluid controls tailored to today’s standards, all without compromising the game’s contemplative and narrative soul. – A rich and immersive world: From the alpine town of Valadilène to the frozen edges of Eastern Russia, Syberia transports you into a world of mystery, automatons, and poetic machinery. Dive into a clockpunk adventure where realism blends seamlessly with dreamlike wonder. – A moving and unforgettable story: Experience a deeply human narrative, as Kate Walker’s legal assignment turns into a profound journey of self-discovery. Filled with unexpected encounters, emotional choices, and moments of awe, Syberia’s tale blurs the line between strangeness and the sublime.