A new slate of high-profile games is coming to Xbox Game Pass for consoles tomorrow. Bandai Namco’s Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown and Focus Home Interactive’s The Surge 2 will be available along with investigative thriller Kona from Parabole. The Surge 2 will also be available for Xbox Game Pass for PC later in March.

On March 24th, Xbox One and PC players get Bleeding Edge, Ninja Theory’s team-based brawler. March 26th marks the arrival of Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid on consoles, which will also be available for Xbox Game Pass for PC later this month. Astroglaster rounds out the remaining PC releases for the month.

Unfortunately, there a number of titles that will be leaving both Game Pass platforms this month. Console players will be losing Borderlands: The Handsome Collection, The Golf Club 2 and LEGO Worlds. PC players will be losing out on Battle Chef Brigade, Kingsway and Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You. Both platforms will lose Operencia: The Stolen Sun, Cities: Skylines and Vampyr in addition to the above.

Earlier in the year, we got an unexpected, but pleasant, surprise with Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid. The game is a solid fighting game and includes loads of great fan service for fans of the long running franchise. Even more has been added with the likes of a story mode and material taken from various entries in the Power Rangers saga. But it’s not done yet, by any means, as the game will get a second season.

The trailer for the second season is below. It’ll feature free content, such as a new Arena and Ultra, but the paid content is a new costume for the White Ranger, as well as Anubis ‘Doggie’ Cruger from Power Rangers S.P.D., Eric Myers from Power Rangers Time Force and Dai Shi from Power Rangers Jungle Fury. Each character can be purchased separately or all at once via a season pass.

Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch and PC. The second season content will roll out across this week.

Probably one of the more unexpected titles to come out recently was Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid. A fighting game adaptation of the long-running media series, the game included a lot of callbacks to multiple different periods in the franchise (and even has cross-play between some versions). Today, nWay released a free update for the game that has added even more callbacks for fans.

The new update will add a brand new story mode where players go through a re-imagining of the critically acclaimed Shattered Grid event from Boom! Studios’ Power Rangers comic book series. It also adds three new playable characters: Dragon Armor Trini, Udonna, and Cenozoic Blue Ranger. With them come four new arenas (two that will be selectable, and two only for the new story mode). For maximum fan service, actors from the original American version of Power Rangers came in to voice characters for both the story mode and during combat. You can check out a full overview of the update here, and watch the trailer below to see what the story mode will look like.

Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch, with a PC version to release later in the year.

Taehoon Kim, the CEO of nWay, the studio behind the recently released Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, has had a few things to say in relation to cross-play on Sony’s PlayStation 4. The game features cross-play between Xbox One, Switch, and PC, but not the PS4. During a panel at PAX East 2019 (as transcribed by GamesBeat), Taehoon Kim highlighted how he felt Sony’s limiting crossplay is hurting families, esports, and the continuing trend of games as a service.

“People want to play with their friends, and not all of your friends are going to be on the exact same platform as you are,” said Kim. “Being able to do that is great. Also, families like to play together. One thing we’ve seen with games like Vainglory and Fortnite is that a whole family may want to play together, but nobody owns four PlayStations. Dad’s going to play on the iPad, one kid is on the PS4, another kid is on his phone. That kind of gameplay is only possible through cross-play.

“Also, connecting cross-play to the more recent notion of games as a service is especially powerful. When you’re running a game as a service, you want people to be able to access that game from any device. Fortnite is one of the best examples right now. Being able to access that on any device — mobile, Switch, PC, console — that’s very important.

“Another consideration is matchmaking around peripherals. Having that factored in to your servers and matchmaking is going to be important, depending on what type of controls you’re using. If you’re using a controller, you need to make sure matchmaking puts you together with other players who are doing the same.”

Cross-play has become something of a rising issue in the game industry over the last few years. With the rise of online free to play games like Fortnite and Rocket League on a multitude of systems, questions of opening once closed ecosystems have become a bigger talking point. While Nintendo and Microsoft have opened their platforms much more to cross-play than they have in the past, Sony has resisted the idea. Multiple developers, including Besthesda, have noted Sony’s resistance to the idea.

Whether or not that will change any time soon remains to be seen.

Without further ado then, let’s begin.

MORTAL KOMBAT 11

People have been looking forward to Mortal Kombat 11 for some time now, and after much anticipation, it’s finally almost here. Typically, it looks absolutely incredible. Promising much gore, Brutalities, and Fatalities, combined with what’s looking like a strong roster, as well as the kind of strong campaigns NeatherRealm Studios usually delivers, Mortal Kombat 11 is undoubtedly very close to the top of many most-anticipated lists.

Power Rangers: Battle For Grid is a brand new fighting game based on Power Rangers that was announced earlier today. It’s headed to PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC, and will be a tag based fighting game (somewhat in the vein of Dragon Ball FighterZ).

When the game launches, it will actually probably be worst on the PS4, however. The developers confirmed in the press release announcing the game that the Switch, Xbox One, and PC versions of the game will have cross-platform play as well as cross-platform progression, which means you can play with players on other systems with these versions, and carry your progress across these versions. However, the PS4 version will not have either of these capabilities. If nothing else, this means that finding matches on the PS4 will be harder, theoretically, than it will be on the other versions.

It’s unclear why the PS4 version of the game is left out of the unified pool in this instance, because with games like Rocket League and Fortnite, Sony have begun to allow cross platform play and progression to some degree. Hopefully, in the future, that capability can be patched into the PS4 version of this game as well.

Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid launches for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC later this year. Check out the game’s announcement trailer below.