Introducing the concept of gangs to Prison Architect, the Gangs expansion brings many new features to the game. Gangs will now begin to pop up around players’ facilities, each with their own personality traits and reputation, leading inmates with specific traits to naturally gravitate towards certain gangs.

As gang activity spreads in the prison, players have to gauge the ‘temperature’ of their prison, which tends to get hotter and more dangerous with the rise of gangs. To curtail this, players will have to make use of programs like Gang Rehabilitation to slow the spread of gangs.

New options for players include tattoo removal centers, regulated fight clubs, and the need to keep an eye on corruption in the staff.

Alongside Gangs, Prison Architect is also getting a free update, dubbed Kite, which brings general improvements and new content to the game, like guard dogs.

Godfall: Challenger Edition (which is also free with PlayStation Plus this month) is intriguing because it’s a scaled down version of the main game which doesn’t have the campaign or the expansion. Instead, players can immediately go to the endgame with Lightbringer, Dreamstones and the Ascended Tower of Trials. Along with a “spread” of weapons to choose from, there are also skill points for immediately upgrading one’s abilities.

Prison Architect is a lot more straightforward as players manage their own private prison, recruiting staff, managing finances and so on. You also have to deal with different kinds of prisoners based on their temperament and sentence length. Stay tuned for more details on future free games once next week’s go live.

Cities Skylines

After what seemed like a long, long time, Cities Skylines arrived and delivered a city-building experience that truly succeeds old-school SimCity. The sheer joy of getting your city up and running, watching it buzz about as you beautify it, manifests excellently in Cities: Skylines. Throw in Steam Workshop support for mods, tons of support from the developer and plenty of content updates for even more long-term replay value.

Microsoft has announced the free games that Xbox Live Gold subscribers will be getting in September as part of its Games With Gold program. These include both Xbox One titles and Xbox 360 games which are backwards compatible.

The Xbox One offerings include Prison Architect and Livelock. The former will be available through the next month, but Livelock can only be download from September 16th onwards. After that, it will be available until October 15th.

As for Xbox 360, there’s LEGO Star Wars 3: The Clone Wars, which will be available from September 1st to September 15th. From September  16th to September 30th, subscribers can download the Sega Vintage Collection: Monster World. This actually includes three titles – Wonder Boy in Monster Land (Monster World), Wonder Boy in Monster World (aka Wonder Boy 5: Monster World 3) and Monster World 4.

Those new to Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass can still pick up each for $2 – they’ll also receive an additional month for both services free.

Earlier this morning, Nintendo kicked off Gamescom for the Switch in style with a new, surprise unannounced Indies Highlight video presentation, which included new details about indie games coming to Nintendo’s platform, while also sharing more footage and information about games that had already been previously announced.

The key announcement from the video was, of course, that Windjammers 2 would be coming to the Switch (seriously, a Windjammers 2 exists), but that apart, the video showed off multiple great looking games, including Streets of Rogue, Moonlighter, This War of Mine, Slay the Spire, Everspace: Stellar Edition, Morphies Law, Prison Architect, and Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, among many others. You can catch the full presentation below for yourself to see the whole thing. Interestingly enough, Nintendo also added a little tease for “more” at the end- is a Nintendo Direct inbound? It seems like it’s about time for one, doesn’t it?

Regardless, as far as indie support on Switch goes, the little thing is on fire. The likes of Little Nightmares, Night in the Woods, Owlboy and many more have done very well on the Switch, while the excellent Hollow Knight managed to do even better. Hopefully these new games find an audience on the Switch too, just like so many other indie games have on Nintendo’s hybrid.

Electronic Arts continues to expand its Origin Access service with a bevy of new games. The newest titles to join the Vault, making them permanently accessible to subscribers, includes Mad Max, Pillars of Eternity: Hero Edition and Torment: Tides of Numenera.

Mad Max comes from Avalanche Studios and is a fairly above average open world game that combines brawling with car combat. Pillars of Eternity is Obsidian’s critically and commercially computer RPG that helped it surge back from the brink. Torment: Tides of Numenera comes from inXile Entertainment, the minds behind the Wasteland series.

Of course, there are five more including Prison Architect, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Virginia, Ember and Spore. Seeing Brothers makes sense, considering its creator Josef Fares developed A Way Out thanks to the EA Originals label. Similarly, Spore was developed by Maxis and published by EA.

Origin Access retails for a measly $5 per month or $30 per year (which works out to just $2.50 per month for 12 months). The Vault now encompasses titles like Dragon Age: Inquisition, The Witness, the Batman Arkham Trilogy, Titanfall 2, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Unravel and much more. The service also provides access to early timed betas of upcoming games along with discounts on EA digital content.

Prison Architect is a game that is about building better and more secure prisons that prevent prisoners from escaping. However, in 2015 a new mode known as Escape Mode changed this mechanic by allowing players to play as a prisoner tasked with escaping prison. While this mode has been available for PC, it has now been announced that the mode will be making it consoles in the form of paid DLC in the summer of 2018.

It may seem unfair that the mode has to paid for on consoles when it was free on PC, but Double Eleven have stated that they are “reworking that gameplay and additional new features specifically for our console players.” It remains to be seen what specific changes will be made, but it’s likely that the mode will be much more expansive than we’ve seen it on PC when it releases next year.

Do you have any thoughts on this announcement? Let us know in the comments section below.

Complete Prison Architect’s story mode with the help of this HD video walkthrough and game guide. Prison Architect is a management simulation title where the player must take care of a prison. Additional responsibilities include hiring new staff, assigning them to take care of prisoners and building more cells. Furthermore, the player also needs to take care of the finances, architect and govern several micro-management sections of the game. The game consists of five chapters which can be completed using the walkthrough below.

Prison Architect is now available for PC and mobile platforms including Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, and iOS. The game was developed and published by Introversion Software. Check out the video walkthrough of Prison Architect below and let us know if you have any questions in the comments section below.

Chapter 1 : Death Row
Chapter 2 : Palermo
Chapter 3 : GABOS
Chapter 4 : Conviction
Chapter 5 : Bootstraps

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“You’re not delivering the amount of sales, you’re making us work harder, and ultimately we’re getting paid less than what we do on PC. So I think they’re definitely – in the indie world – second class customers.” Referring to Microsoft charging $10,000 USD for a dev kit, he states, “It’s ridiculous, and it’s non-refundable once you’ve bought it. You’ve got to pay – I think our quality assurance bill was $30,000 for testing with Darwinia+, and it took four years to get the game certified to a standard that Microsoft wanted. It then sold rubbish. We hardly shipped any units on Xbox 360, compared to PC.”

For these reasons, Introversion’s next title, Prison Architect will be skipping XBox Live and PSN, instead making it’s way to Steam.

“We’ve got no interest in working with any of the big console owners now with Prison Architect. The only think we might do, once the game’s out there, is license it to another developer to do the port on our behalf. But Microsoft and Sony come along and they say, ‘well we don’t want to have your game second, we want to be first.’ Well, they can’t be first. We’re on PC because they’ve made it too hard. Also, they want exclusive content, well piss off.”

Source: GIBiz