Highlights
- This week's free games on the Epic Games Store are Homeworld Remastered Collection and Severed Steel, catering to sci-fi fans with RTS and FPS gameplay.
- Bloons TD 6 and Loop Hero will be the next free game available on August 3, offering smaller but still worthwhile experiences.
- The free offerings on the Epic Games Store have been enjoyable and diverse, and Bloons could be a refresher from some otherwise intense games.
Befitting its typical every Thursday at 10 am CT rotation, the Epic Games Store has made its latest free offerings (Homeworld Remastered Collection and Severed Steel) available, while revealing the games that will join next week: tower-defense game Bloons TD 6 and Loop Hero.
Previously, the Epic Games Store gave away Elder Scrolls Online and Murder by Numbers, ensuring that players had distinct options. The former, as an MMO, has hundreds of hours of content players can enjoy, so hopefully everyone was able to pick it up before the swap out. Whereas the previous offerings were completely different games, the Epic Games Store free games for July 27 are devoted to Sci-Fi fans: Homeworld Remastered Collection and Severed Steel. The former is incredibly popular, but if sci-fi fans are unfamiliar, it's an RTS game based on space battles where unit types, fleet formations, and flight tactics all come into effect. Meanwhile, Severed Steel is an FPS boasting a fluid stunt system, destructible environments, and a lot of trigger finger work in a sci-fi setting and superstructure.
After this week, though, Epic Games Store users will be able to claim Bloons TD 6 and Loop Hero, with the games remaining free from August 3 until August 10. The former is an iconic, if somewhat niche, franchise that many fans will already know about. It's a tower defense game featuring playful visuals, co-op gameplay, fun and zany characters, and so on. In it, players will need to fend over waves of increasingly challenging enemies. Meanwhile, Loop Hero sees players trying to save a world from a lich, with unique loop-based gameplay.
Epic Games Store List (July/August 2023)
- Homeworld Remastered Collection (July 27 - August 3)
- Severed Steel (July 27 - August 3)
- Bloons TD 6 (August 3 - August 10)
- Loop Hero (August 3 - August 10)
Bloons and Loop Hero may not live up to everyone's expectations, but something more mindless and fun to follow a big MMO, intense RTS gameplay, and so forth makes sense. At the same time, it's worth mentioning Baldur's Gate 3's PC release is on August 3 too, meaning that this could have been a big giveaway that could still go largely ignored. After all, BG3 is an entry in a franchise that has defined CRPGs. Still, between sessions of it, some relaxing Loop Hero and Bloons gameplay could be fun.
All in all, it's been a pretty great few weeks on the Epic Games Store. From time to time, it appears to get into a rut where the offerings are incredibly small or niche, meaning that the only real reason to check them out is that they're free. That really can't be said about last week's offering, that can't be said about EGS' giveaway of Homeworld Remastered Collection and Severed Steel, and the ease and popularity of a tower defense game could be seen as a small refresher.
Epic Games Store users get a handful of games every month.