November's Game Pass highlights includes both irradiated mutants and complex avionics

November is a time for reflection, gazing out of the window at a carpet of dead leaves, and convincing yourself that you'll rake them up some day. Which, let's be real, is about as likely as you ever clearing your teetering backlog of games to play.

So instead of trying to battle the backlog, let's embrace it, and dive into the infinite game plunge that is PC Game Pass. This November, I will be taking to the skies, packing supplies for a jaunt around an anomaly-laden wasteland, and honing my reflexes to scalpel sharpness in a game that some (me) are calling '2D Sekiro.' It's a varied selection, so let's take a look at PC Gamer's top picks.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

Four years on from its glorious comeback, Microsoft's iconic flight sim hits the runway once more. With refined mechanics, improved physics, and new avionics tools to play with such as the Universal UNS-1 FMS and Honewell Primus Epic 2 (my personal favourite), developer Asobo is making all the moves to improve on a flight sim that is, by our account, one of the best ever made.

Nice new touches like preflight inspections pull you into the whole holistic flight experience that bit more, while Earth is more detailed than ever, boasting big numbers like over 2000 handcrafted points of interest, thousands of airports, not to mention the procedural generation of 1.5 billion buildings and 3 trillion trees scattered across our planet. Oh, and for the first time, you can land anywhere in the world, with a whole bunch of biomes to explore on the ground.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

Back in 2007, the original STALKER was a ruthless, atmospheric open-world shooter that incorporated survival elements—hunger, weapon durability, radiation, injuries that can't always be patched up with a bandaid—way before it became the norm in gaming. Its long-awaited sequel trudged through over a decade of studio closures, delays, and, ultimately, war in the developer's home country, to emerge as the Most Wanted game on PC. as voted by our Council, and now it's finally on the brink of release.

STALKER 2 looks set to retain that stark grittiness of the original, with factions occupying abandoned villages on the surface, while all kinds of dangerous anomalies and mutated horrors dynamically lurk in the wilderness and the irradiated underground. Our Harvey Randall was impressed by the game's dense atmosphere and hand-crafted world in his hands-on, which bodes well for our return to the exclusion zone.

Metal Slug Tactics

If you were around in the '90s, there's a good chance you threw a good few weeks' worth of pocket money into the Metal Slug arcade cabinets. The beautifully drawn, richly animated run-and-gun shooter never really went away, with plenty of iterations coming to PC over the years, but Metal Slug Tactics is the series' biggest overhaul to date, changing things up to a turn-based tactical format.

And it's a success for the most part, according to our Dom. Somehow it manages to retain some of that zippy pace of the arcade games while offering a healthy dose of tactical, precise combat in the vein of PCG favourite Into The Breach. Pick your ragtag crew of three soldiers, each with unique abilities, send them onto handcrafted battlefields against seemingly insurmountable odds, cause some colourful carnage, extract.

Nine Sols

Don't be fooled by the cute protagonist and lovely hand-drawn art style; Nine Sols is a tough Metroidvania set in a unique world that fuses Taoist fantasy with a cyberpunk dystopia. True to its Soulsy inspirations, this is a game of gruelling boss battles, last-second dodges and pitch-perfect parrying, as you dash and slash your way through barrages of blades, arrows, and fists.

It's always a fine margin between death and glory in Nine Sols, but the combat is so finely tuned that it rarely feels unfair. Sure, it's maybe a bit too easy to get lost in the interconnected 'vania world, but that world is such a feast for the eyes that even in those moments it's hard to complain too much about.

…and assorted delights from Acti-Blizz

Given that it was the biggest gaming news in recent years, you might have heard about Microsoft's acquisition of a little company called Activision-Blizzard. One of the many outcomes of this has been a steady trickle of some of the biggest games from the behemoth publisher's catalogue coming to Game Pass.

The headliner right now is Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which has just landed with a slick new movement system adding some action-movie chops to largely familiar fast-paced shooting. Strategy veterans, meanwhile, will be delighted to see that both StarCraft Remastered and the StarCraft II Campaign Collection have arrived this month, while the likes of Diablo 4, Crash N. Sane Trilogy, and Overwatch 2 have been around on the platform for a while now. Now, if they'll just give us Diablo 2: Resurrected, my autumn will be complete.