Xbox Game Pass January 2025 – Wave 1 announced

07 Jan 2025, 14:13 · TrueAchievements

Xbox Game Pass January 2025 – Wave 1 announced

The Xbox Game Pass January 2025 lineup includes Diablo, EA Sports UFC 5, and four more games for Game Pass Ultimate, Standard, and PC.

Sean Carey

Published 07 Jan 2025

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Microsoft has now revealed the first wave of Xbox Game Pass January 2025 games! A total of six games, including EA Sports UFC 5, will join the service across the Game Pass Ultimate, Standard, and PC soon. It appears to be a good month for Standard subscribers as the majority of games coming to Game Pass with this drop are for the Standard tier.

Xbox Game Pass January 2025 wave one lineup includes Diablo

The Xbox Game Pass lineup for January 2025 brings six games to various tiers across the service
Four games are coming to Game Pass Standard on January 8
The original Diablo is joining Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass for PC players

Microsoft is kicking off the new year with a bang for Game Pass Standard subscribers. Lightyear Frontier, My Time at Sandrock, Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders, and Rolling Hills: Make Sushi Make Friends, all of which are already included in the Ultimate tier, will join Game Pass Standard on January 8. For Ultimate subscribers, things are a little more muted, with just EA Sports UFC 5 and Diablo joining on January 14.

Things are looking a bit brighter for Ultimate subscribers towards the end of the month. Eternal Strands, Sniper Elite: Resistance, and Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector all join the service as day-one additions as January comes to a close.

Here is the Xbox Game Pass January 2025 wave one lineup schedule:

Available today
   •  Road 96 — Game Pass Ultimate, Standard, PC (Cloud, Console, and PC)

January 8
   •  Lightyear Frontier — Game Pass Standard (Xbox Series X|S)
   •  My Time at Sandrock — Game Pass Standard (Console)
   •  Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders— Game Pass Standard (Xbox Series X|S)
   •  Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends — Game Pass Standard (Console)

January 14
   •  EA Sports UFC 5 — Game Pass Ultimate via EA Play (Xbox Series X|S and Cloud)
   •  Diablo — Game Pass Ultimate, PC Game Pass (PC)

Sean —

Lightyear Frontier

Here are the Lightyear Frontier achievements
Joins Game Pass on: January 8
Game Pass Tier: Game Pass Standard
Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PC

Lightyear Frontier is an open-world farming adventure game that tasks you with starting up your very own interstellar homestead. While living the quiet life on this strange alien world, you will build an exofarm, grow alien crops, and explore the lands around you in a specialized mech. Lightyear Frontier is billed as a peaceful farming experience, so don't go into this one expecting any combat.

Despite being in Game Preview, Lightyear Frontier does have an achievement list. According to estimates, it will take you around 20 hours to unlock all 45 Lightyear Frontier achievements.

Heidi —

Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends

The Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends offer a purely cozy experience
Joins Game Pass on: January 8
Game Pass Tier: Game Pass Standard
Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC

Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends joined Game Pass as a day-one addition last year and will soon be available for Game Pass Standard, too. It tells a charming story of a Sushi Bot with big dreams of becoming a renowned chef and, as the name suggests, making friends along the way.

That’s exactly what the game delivers, and it’s great fun. Making friends plays into the restaurant management bit and vice versa, so that we can improve relationships and our restaurant while zooming around the town of Rolling Hills to collect ingredients, solve problems, and live our best Sushi Bot life.

Estimates suggest unlocking the 12 Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends achievements will take between 12 and 15 hours.

Tom —

Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders

Steal from the rich and unlock the Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders achievements
Joins Game Pass on: January 8
Game Pass Tier: Game Pass Standard
Platforms: Xbox Series X|S

Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders joined Game Pass Ultimate and PC last year, and now it's heading to Xbox Game Pass Standard for players on Xbox Series X|S.

Set in 12th-Century England, Sherwood Builders takes us to Nottingham, where Robin Hood's band of outlaws is giving the Sheriff a headache. It's an open-world action-RPG with building elements, giving us the tools to craft a secret hideout village to use as a base as we travel the world to help Nottingham's locals.

Be aware that this is a big one, with 100 achievements attached to the base game. On your merry way to completion, you'll have a chance to dip your toes in all manner of activities, however, such as playing in archery tournaments, witnessing beheadings, watching hangings, and other family-friendly affairs. What a wild time, indeed.

Heidi —

My Time at Sandrock

The My Time at Sandrock achievements will take you a good chunk of time
Joins Game Pass on: January 8
Game Pass Tier: Game Pass Standard
Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC

My Time at Sandrock, the sequel to the popular My Time at Portia, arrived for Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass last year and will soon join Game Pass Standard on January 8

Like the first game, it’s set in a post-apocalyptic world (but think less zombies and more adorableness) and sees you building up your Workshop. The sequel tasks you with restoring and defending the town, making friends with its locals, and diving into what is a pretty insane amount of content.

If you loved My Time at Portia, you’ll love this too, but it’s worth a try even if you didn’t get along with the first game since the sequel improves in a lot of areas. It has a hefty completion time of around 80-100 hours but offers enough charm and great content to keep you hooked for much longer.

Kes —

EA Sports UFC 5

Get sweaty and spend 30 hours grappling with the EA Sports UFC 5 achievements
Joins Game Pass on: January 14
Game Pass Tier: Xbox Game Pass Ultimate via EA Play
Platforms: Xbox Series X|S and Cloud

The Ultimate Fighting Championship returned to video game form a few years ago with UFC 5. Looking better and sweatier than ever on Xbox Series X|S, this is a sports game with a huge divide between the critical reception of the game and some of the more hardcore fans of the combat sport.

With some tweaks to prior games, including a new submissions system, it looks cleaner and runs smoother than any other UFC game. However, it hasn’t exactly made any strides forward with some of the issues of old games like strike registration being a bit shoddy. Some technical fighting techniques remain missing — a thorn in the side of the hardcore players who want a more dense representation of the sport.

In any case, it looks pretty, and if you are a more casual fan of UFC, I think you’ll find a decent enough representation of the sport here. Plus, I think UFC 5 looks great graphically all these years later!

Tom —

Diablo

The Diablo achievements are still locked in Hell
Joins Game Pass on: January 14
Game Pass Tier: Game Pass Ultimate and PC
Platforms: PC

Released in 1997, the first Diablo was an absolute treat for action-RPG fans. Sure, it's aged a bit now, and it’s slower-paced than its modern sequels, but it's an exceptional game that should be played by anyone with a fleeting interest in the genre — some of my earliest gaming memories were forged in the fires of Blizzard's Hell.

Rocking the Warrior, Sorcerer, and Rogue classes, Diablo sees you delving through 16 randomly generated dungeons beneath the town of Tristram as you burrow ever closer to the gates of Hell. It's a ton of fun, throwing random quests, NPCs, gear, and enemies at you with each run and keeping the experience fresh.

Sadly, it seems unlikely that we'll get any achievements with this one, but if you have a PC and want to see where the series began, I highly recommend you boot up this cracking game.

If you missed it, Microsoft has also announced that six games are leaving Game Pass in January 2025. What do you make of these new additions? Do any of these games deserve a spot on our list of the best Game Pass games? Let us know down in the comments.
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Written by Sean Carey
A big fan of Xbox achievements, Sean has committed to playing as many of the best RPGs, racing games, and first-person shooters on and off Xbox Game Pass as possible. Before joining TrueAchievements, Sean earned a degree in journalism from Solent University.