FixForce Lands on Xbox Game Pass as Surgent Studios’ Riskiest Bet Yet

FixForce launched July 17, 2026 on Xbox Series X|S and PC, arriving Day One on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Premium and PC tiers straight out of the gate. It is a six-player co-op game about robot repair crews, drill-wrenches and decapitation as a minor inconvenience. It is also the first game Surgent Studios has ever published entirely on its own, after two darker, decorated titles built with outside publishers.

That detail changes how the launch reads. A studio that made its name on grief and industry trauma just spent its own money to ship a game about throwing your friends off scaffolding.

A Six-Player Wrench Party Built From Scrap

Surgent Studios describes FixForce as a chaotic co-op extraction platformer for up to six players, dropped into a world the studio calls a post-post-apocalyptic robot repair crew setting where humans are simply gone and nobody explains why. Players take control of small repair bots sent to fix broken machinery scattered across hazardous worksites, and the entire loop runs through one tool.

• Fix machines – the core job, using the drill-wrench to repair the broken tech that pays the bills.
• Build structures – the same tool lets a crew stack scrap into towers, bridges and ramps to reach areas otherwise sealed off.
• Retrieve fallen heads – when a bot runs out of battery, its head pops off but stays playable, scooting around until a teammate reattaches it to a fresh body.
• Launch items, and teammates – the drill-wrench can also throw scrap, tools and, inevitably, other players across gaps.

On FixForce’s official Steam store page, Surgent Studios frames the danger plainly: rogue bots, water hazards and falls are constant, but a lost head just means a rescue mission, not a lost run. It is a design choice built specifically to keep six people talking instead of one person sitting out.

Two Prestige Games, Then a Hard Left Turn

Before FixForce, Surgent Studios built its name on weight, not slapstick. Its debut, the BAFTA-winning Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, was a grief-driven metroidvania published under Electronic Arts’ EA Originals label. Its second game, Dead Take, was a surreal first-person horror title that dug into industry abuse.

FixForce breaks that pattern on purpose, and it does so without a publisher standing behind it. Surgent Studios founder Abubakar Salim, an actor known for voicing the lead in Assassin’s Creed Origins and for his role in House of the Dragon, explained the decision in the game’s reveal.

We saw the pure chaos and hilarity FixForce unleashed as it came together, so we made the decision to move quickly and publish it ourselves.

Salim, Surgent Studios’ founder and creative director, added that after building one game about grief and another about abuse, the team wanted a little bit of silly, stupid fun for a second, promising a return to darker material afterward. Self-publishing means Surgent keeps more of the revenue if FixForce lands, but it also means the studio alone absorbs the risk if a genre nobody expected from it falls flat.

FixForce Walks Into an Already Loud Room

Physics-driven co-op chaos is not an empty genre waiting for a first mover. FixForce’s own Steam listing places it alongside Peak, R.E.P.O, Lethal Company and Content Warning as comparable chaotic co-op games to play with friends, all titles that already built dedicated audiences around exactly this kind of session.

FixForce’s answer to that competition is its revive system. Several early Steam reviewers pointed to the same frustration with rival titles: getting knocked out early and then watching the rest of the run from the sidelines. One early access player wrote that being taken out in games like Lethal Company or R.E.P.O usually meant sitting around watching the rest of the time, and called that a real downer by comparison. FixForce’s floating, still-playable severed heads exist specifically to avoid that dead time.

Do Critics and Players Actually Agree on FixForce?

They do not, at least not yet. Early reviews split cleanly along a line between critics who found the game’s simplicity limiting and players who found it exactly what they wanted from a few hours with friends, and that gap is the clearest early signal on whether Surgent’s gamble is landing.

• GameSpot’s Jordan Ramée, an editor at the outlet, wrote that FixForce feels a little too kid-friendly for what he wants from a co-op game, calling it the studio’s first miss.
• Xbox Tavern’s review landed more in the middle, admitting the mechanics can feel overwhelming and demoralising at first, but concluding there is a lot of charm to Fixforce once a group settles into it.
• Steam’s user base disagrees with both takes so far, rating FixForce 96% positive across 27 reviews at launch.

The lone aggregated critic score tracked so far sits at 78, credited to Xbox Tavern’s review, a gap between critic caution and player enthusiasm that is common for party games built around messy improvisation rather than polish.

Landing Inside a Reshaped Game Pass Lineup

FixForce’s Day One placement is not happening in a stable Game Pass environment. Microsoft spent late 2025 raising Ultimate to $29.99 a month, then reversed course in April 2026, cutting it back to $22.99 under new Xbox Gaming CEO Asha Sharma after what Microsoft itself described as a price update effective that day. WinAddons has covered how that reversal still leaves Ultimate pricier than Sony’s competing tier even after the cut.

Where FixForce fits into that structure matters. Microsoft’s own first-party blockbusters increasingly get gated toward Ultimate and PC Game Pass, with Premium subscribers often waiting months for day-one Xbox exclusives. FixForce skips that gate entirely as a self-published indie deal, landing day one across three tiers at once.

Outside the subscription, FixForce is also for sale on its own. The Xbox Store lists it at £6.69, while Steam’s listing prices it at $7.99, cheap enough that Surgent is clearly betting on volume and word of mouth rather than a premium price tag.

Day One placements like this have become a pattern rather than an exception this year. WinAddons previously covered Escape the Backrooms joining Game Pass on release day, and a similar deal is already lined up for Mariachi Legends’ planned Day One arrival later in 2026. For a self-publishing indie studio, that kind of instant subscriber reach is worth far more than a higher list price would be.

Surgent Studios has already said this genre detour is temporary. Whether FixForce’s Game Pass numbers justify a sequel to the joke, or just a quick return to the grief and horror the studio built its name on, depends entirely on how many six-player crews actually show up to throw each other off scaffolding this summer.