Xbox Game Pass gets one of the best combat games of recent times for free

With the launch of the new Xbox Game Pass Standard tier last month, quite a few of the monthly game announcements for October are titles already available to Ultimate subscribers. However, there are a few new entrants coming that everyone can enjoy.

Perhaps the most exciting is Sifu, a martial arts adventure with a hugely stylised look and superb combat engine.

Sifu | Official Launch Trailer | PS4, PS5 & PC - YouTube

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Set in China, you play the nameless child of a murdered sifu – a martial arts teacher – who embarks on a quest of revenge against his father's killers.

It is played in third-person and has an interesting game mechanic in that when you die, you are resurrected at the same spot but your character is now visually and physically older. This gives you more powerful moves to better handle the area you struggled with, but also puts a finite amount of time on the clock – you only get a certain amount of resurrections.

The best part of the game is easily its combat, with over 150 kung fu attacks available. And new content has been added since its release in 2022, so there's even more to discover in the latest version of the game.

Sifu will be available for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and Windows on Xbox Game Pass Standard, Ultimate, Xbox Cloud Gaming and PC Game Pass from 2 October.

Also to be added to Xbox Game Pass this month is Mad Streets, another combat game but far less serious. It's a multiplayer party game instead, with madcap physics-based brawling and cartoon graphics. That will be available from 7 October.

And finally, Inscryption is a spooky cross between a roguelike deck-builder and an escape room. There are puzzles to be solved as the story unravels, and it's a fitting addition in the build-up to Halloween.

You can play it across all Game Pass plans from 10 October.