Zombies Ate My Xbox

With the arrival of Windows 8, Microsoft have continued their ‘free Xbox LIVE games’ strategy first pursued on the Windows Phone (reviews of all the games can be found here) and expanded to the Xbox 360 with Happy Wars, chock full of achievements, online capabilities and Live Tiles, Microsoft’s latest weapon in the operating system war with Apple and Google.

Live Tiles act as sort of ‘active connections’ to the game or app and can bring up live information to you as you look at your desktop (or mobile home screen). For apps this is commonly stuff like live weather or stock market information (because, like, we are all major shareholders in something, right…? Uh, maybe not), but for games it can bring through your current progress, score, achievements unlocked, friend scores and so on.

One element of all the games that features strongly due to the nature of Xbox LIVE is the online connectivity. Superficially this is fine and as expected but given the fact that Microsoft’s Surface tablets, the flagship Windows 8 device, are currently wifi only it’s a bit frustrating.

Some titles pull your saved game data and stats only when connected to the internet, so if you’re playing offline you won’t necessarily be able to play with your vital statistics (ho, ho) if you’re using your Surface tablet on the move, unless you also have mobile broadband to connect to.

Every one of these free Xbox LIVE-enabled games on Windows 8 is reviewed below, with the total achievement score available in the game stated in brackets after the title of the game.

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