On September 4th, Age of Mythology: Retold, a remake of the 2002 real-time strategy classic, will go live for cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X/S. Following last week’s advanced access launch, it’s garnered a “Very Positive” rating on Steam based on 3,421 user reviews.

September 5th sees the launch of Expeditions: A MudRunner Game for cloud, PC, and consoles. As the latest title in the MudRunner series, it takes a more adventure-heavy approach, with players mapping out regions and surmounting obstacles in the wild.

Riders Republic follows on September 11th, with the multiplayer title offering numerous outdoor sports like bike racing, skiing, snowboarding, and wingsuiting. There are also massive races in which up to 64 players can participate. Train Sim World 5 closes out the wave when it launches on September 17th for cloud, consoles and PC.

Check out the titles leaving the service on September 15th:

• Ashes of Singularity: Escalation (PC)
• FIFA 23 (Cloud, Console, and PC, EA Play)
• Payday 3 (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Slime Rancher 2 (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• SpiderHeck (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• You Suck At Parking (Cloud, Console, and PC)

Sons of the Forest

Sons of the Forest is a brutal survival game that tasks players to hold their backs against cannibalistic primals with only a limited few resources to spare. It presents its brutal world with gorgeous graphics and striking attention to detail, and the gradual process of collecting resources and becoming more powerful is one that will keep you hooked for dozens upon dozens of hours. Add to that the ability to enjoy exploring with friends, and Sons of the Forest becomes a great option for a co-op open-world experience.

After having spent quite a bit of time being missing from the biggest storefront for PC gaming, Far Cry 6 will now be coming to Steam on May 11. Riders Republic is coming to Steam on June 8, Rainbow Six Extraction on June 15, and Monopoly Madness on June 22.

While the addition of these games to Steam does mark the end of an exclusivity period, it is still unknown whether future Ubisoft titles will be available on Steam at launch, or if they will also follow a similar period of exclusivity on Epic Games Store.

Ubisoft has recently brought some of its games to Steam, including The Division 2, Scott Pilgrim vs The World and Ghost Recon Breakpoint back in January.

The company’s most recent release has been the ongoing beta for XDefiant, the PC version for which is currently exclusive to Ubisoft’s own platform.

BMX will be coming to Riders Republic as part of season 4, alongside a new playground—Area 52—and new career, all focusing on BMX. The game is also getting new tricks, gear, and outfits. BMX-adjacent brands like Vans and Odyssey are also making their way into the game.

Season 4 will be available in Riders Republic as a free update on September 14. The BMX features will be available early for Year 1 Pass owners.

Riders Republic is set in a large open world made out of multiple American National parks, such as Mammoth Mountain and Bryce Canyon. Players can take part in a number of extreme sports, like snowboarding, wingsuiting, and biking, each featuring a separate career path.

Riders Republic was originally released in October last year, and is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and Stadia.

During this time, the entire game will be playable from start to finish. You can even play with other players in all of the activities (though an Xbox Live Gold subscription is mandatory for Xbox players). Preloads for the free weekend start today at 8 AM PT but are only applicable for PS4 and PS5.

Those who enjoy the free weekend can pick up the full game at 50 percent discount for a limited time. Progression also carries over so you can continue where you left off. Riders Republic is available for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, PC and Google Stadia. Check out our official review here to see if it’s worth it.

The new additions include fresh new exotics and unique cosmetics, new live events and seasonal activities, new mass races to participate in. There’s also a brand new Jumbo Bike, which is one of the aforementioned exotics. Winter Bash and all of its contents are included in the Season Pass, as will the upcoming two seasons that Ubisoft had previously briefly detailed.

In our review of Riders Republic, we awarded it a score of 7/10, saying, “What Riders Republic lacks in depth, it more than makes up for in variety.” You can read our full review through here.

Riders Republic is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Stadia.

FIFA 22 dropped to second place for the week while Mario Party Superstars remained stable at third place. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe saw a 30 percent increase in sales thanks to strong Switch sales and ranked in fourth. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales also benefited from increased PS5 stock with sales jumping by 342 percent and landing it in fifth place.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy went from second to sixth place with sales falling by 64 percent week on week. Ubisoft’s Riders Republic has gone from eighth to 16th place after following a 48 percent sales drop. Even Far Cry 6 saw a fairly big drop, going from fourth to tenth place. Check out the full top ten for the week below.

After a rather lengthy series of introductory races where the game shepherds you through the basics, and beats you over the head with its presentation, it does take the training wheels off and pretty much lets you go wherever you want, however you want. You want to ride a snowmobile in a skate park bowl? Go for it. Why not? The variety here is a fun hook that Riders Republic heavily leans on to great effect. Most events at first focus on a single mode – whether it be mountain biking, snowboarding, wingsuits, skiing, it’s all here and most of it all becomes available within the first few hours of playing. All of the different modes feel distinct enough and do force you to approach them with slightly different mindsets, but as you find yourself getting tired of racking up points on grid rails in snowy mountains, you can effortlessly switch over to a biking race against over 50 other players down a treacherous mountain path. The varied locals and terrain types complement the different events nicely.

"Upon closer inspection, the game does have a few bumps in the road that still allow other, more narrowly-focused racers to leave it in the dust in some ways. Still, if you like your racers vast, varied, and a bit silly, Riders Republic might just be up your alley."

You can also experience everything at your leisure in the “zen” mode where your progression is not affected and you can just mess around. Normally this is a mode I would probably ignore but here it’s a worthy distraction and pretty helpful when you’re getting used to things. Where the variety shines brightest though is in the more ridiculous vehicles like the rocket powered wingsuits and rocket sleds that can apparently travel across rocky deserts, and the events that switch between multiple modes of racing in real time. These events don’t make a lot of sense, but they do realize the potential of Riders Republic in a big way – and effectively make the game stand out.

As you might expect, there is a bit of a tradeoff here. The game’s remarkable diversity does come at the cost of some depth. It stops short of ever feeling too arcadey to be challenging, but the simplicity of most events does mean that switching around to different modes will eventually become more of a necessity to keep things interesting than an organic leisurely exploration of the game’s many ideas. Now, you can change a few options around and even alter the playstyle to give you a bit more control over the racing itself, but more control over the same handful of superficial nuances doesn’t go as far as I would have liked with keeping things challenging. That’s not to say there aren’t challenges to be found in Riders Republic, but once you’ve mastered each of the game’s devices, which frankly doesn’t take very long at all, you’ll inevitably start to bump your head on their relatively low ceilings. The game seems totally fine with paying this price though, and for the sheer number of things there are to do, and how fun they can be, I wouldn’t call it a bad deal overall. Riders Republic clearly isn’t interested in being a particularly technical racer, nor is it about mastering some sort of huge learning curve. It’s about dressing up as a unicorn, joining up with equally ridiculously-dressed people online, and having some light-hearted racing fun.

And for that, it’s impossible to not admire it. Of course, with a racer that is less focused on the technical aspects, you will run the risk of running face first into some issues. Depending on the event, it can be hard to tell if certain rock formations are obstacles or can double as ramps until it’s too late for it to matter. It can also be tough to find the end of a combo spin where you level back out if you haven’t perfectly memorized that particular animation. And the score-focused trick events can quickly go from being a breeze with the game guiding you from one grind rail to another – to being very unforgiving when you try to grind on something that looks grindable, but apparently isn’t. Lacking nuance and being focused on it are both fine in my book, but inexplicably going back and forth between those two philosophies is not a fun road to go down and sort of flies in the face of the fun light-hearted elevator pitch of the game. I also found it a bit odd that they included a rewinding mechanic that allows you to backtrack if you screw up, given that the races include other people online and therefore can’t rewind them. That makes the feature a risky move that can easily do more harm than good. Oftentimes, you’re probably better off just course-correcting in real-time.

Warts and all, the game runs great on the PS5. This is expected given the fairly mediocre graphics and conservative number of environmental effects, but even still, I have no major hitches or frame drops to report and that matters most in a game like this.

"The attitude of the gameplay and overall thrust of what it wants to be is an admirable attempt at a fun, social, arcadey open world racing experience with plenty to see and do."

Customization is also an area where you would correctly expect this game to be paying mind. Everything from the character’s face, hair, clothes, masks, and more are up to you to customize. It’s not as deep as a typical RPG might be, but for a game primarily about racing, it’s not a bad selection of options. Much of the better costumes and other items are clearly designed to interest you in buying the in-game currency with real money, but it’s not too bad. If you play the game as much as it’s designed to be played, you’ll find yourself able to afford most things within a reasonable amount of time. Especially if you go for the three sub-challenges each event has.

The attitude of the gameplay and overall thrust of what it wants to be is an admirable attempt at a fun, social, arcadey open world racing experience with plenty to see and do. It has its fair share of stumbling blocks and they are mostly in areas you would expect like short-sighted design choices and gameplay that can feel a bit shallow once you’ve learned the ropes. But just as notably, it excels in the exact areas it aims to with plenty of customization, a massive online world, and plenty of functionality to back it up like cross platform play and letting you create a group of up to five friends so you can challenge each other in the game’s many different events. Overall, I don’t expect hardcore racing game aficionados to get a lot of satisfaction out of it, especially ones that don’t care much for social features and online functionality, but for those who do want that and don’t mind refinement being secondary, it’s a solid choice.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.

Mario Party Superstars was the other big release, debuting in third place with sales being six percent lower than Super Mario Party. Then there’s Riders Republic debuting in eighth place with 52 percent of sales on PS5. Ubisoft’s other major new release for the season, Far Cry 6, fell to fourth place following a 23 percent drop in sales.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes went from a sixth place debut to 21st place after a 52 percent sales drop. Metroid Dread dropped to 15th place as sales fell by 34 percent but it’s already on its way to becoming the series’ sixth best-selling title of all time (Metroid: Other M currently occupies the spot). Check out the Gfk top ten for the week below.

Set in a large open world composed of multiple American National parks like Mammoth Mountain, Bryce Canyon and so on, players can partake in a number of different sports. Snowboarding, wingsuiting and biking are some of the activities available with each having a separate career path. The main appeal is multiplayer though with co-op exploration, 6v6 modes and Mass Races where over 50 players can participate.

This is only just the beginning though as Riders Republic will have seasonal content drops with live events, new cosmetics and BMX, a new sport with its own career path. Stay tuned for more details on updates in the coming months.