You also had an impact on the world—taking down a tower and killing its commander revitalized the area, letting you renovate shops that would benefit you with new items and upgrades. A novel feature that let you hire, train, and dispense your own collection of assassins provided a feeling that things were happening even if you weren't there to witness them. It's easy to see the influence of Brotherhood in other open world games—and it's obvious when Ubisoft doesn't carry its lessons forward in its own.
How do you make a singleplayer game that thousands of people will still play on a daily basis almost 10 years after its release? Make it moddable. Does anyone talk about 's Doom these days? No, because what is there to talk about after you've finished it?
But 's Doom is still making news regularly because it's still being modded after 26 years, and I guarantee people will still be modding Skyrim for another decade, too. No need for years of DLC, no season passes required. Just give passionate and creative players the tools and freedom they need to craft their own fun.
It helps that even vanilla Skyrim is all about freedom and creating your own adventures. Its big open world is packed with quests, stories, characters, and lore, but once the tutorial is completed there's very little pushing you in any one particular direction.
You can go where you want and be who you want—you're the Dragonborn, sure, but you can play for hundreds of hours without ever kicking off the questline that introduces dragons into the world.
That same spirit of freedom applies to Skyrim's extreme moddability. Nexus Mods, a Skyrim modding hub, reports over 1. That keeps the aging RPG fresh with new adventures, companions, locations, weapons, spells, and complete overhauls of game systems long after you've completed the vanilla experience.
There's an entire lifetime of new experiences for players to discover and a way for Skyrim to endure long after Bethesda has moved on to other games. Fallout 3's ending was so disliked Bethesda rewrote it in the Broken Steel DLC, grafting on a new epilogue and a better climax. But if you didn't buy that DLC you still have the ending where your companions refuse to help because the finale was clearly plotted before they were added.
Mass Effect 3 was different. Its original ending was honestly no worse than Fallout 3's, but unlike Bethesda, BioWare did not wait seven months and two DLCs to address fan complaints. It was 16 days after its release when BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka wrote that "out of respect to our fans, we need to accept the criticism and feedback with humility" and three months later the Extended Cut was out. The fan rage at Mass Effect 3's ending was effective because it was organized.
If there's one thing YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit all agree on it's that anger is the best fuel for engagement. Legitimate complaints that the ending was a bit weak were buried under the kind of hyperbolic rage that goes viral.
It provided a playbook for fan discontent that's reared up again and again, from the reaction to No Man's Sky to the Sonic the Hedgehog movie.
After years of trying to explain that the stereotype of "entitled gamers" is a myth the s came along to say that no, actually some people are pretty entitled and will campaign to have an ArenaNet employee fired because she was rude to a Guild Wars 2 fan on Twitter.
Mass Effect 3 was just the first canary in this particular coal mine. CS:GO wasn't a big priority for PC Gamer's coverage that year—a lot of the game's development had been outsourced to Hidden Path, creators of a tower defense game.
Actually, it was mostly a port. With Microsoft and Sony's consoles getting long in the tooth, Valve didn't want to miss the business opportunity to bring one of its franchises to the Xbox and PlayStation. What inspired Valve to transform CS:GO from a console port into a flagship were the lessons learned over Team Fortress 2's development. Within the player-run Steam Market, custom AWPs, M4s, and Deagles—with 13 years of meaning soaked into their metal—became massive status symbols, with towering, real-dollar price tags.
The dullest pure-white MP7 skin can still fetch hundreds of dollars, simply because it's somewhat rare. But skins drew CS' most entrenched fans out of their favorite edition, and were the carrot that Global Offensive needed to absorb its older siblings. Not only could you earn limited-edition skins by watching big CS:GO tournaments, but third-party sites like CSGO Lounge let tens of thousands of players bet on esports matches with their Steam inventories.
Two YouTubers exploited the black market that had emerged around CS:GO, creating their own gambling website and marketing it to their audiences on YouTube and social media without disclosing their co-ownership, a scam that eventually led to new FCC guidelines governing influencers. CS:GO's rise coincided with Twitch's own, and as Valve discovered that it had a highly watchable, exciting spectator FPS, the studio began putting up prize money for major tournaments.
The most popular pros showcased their gun and knife fashion like sneakers on LeBron. The randomly generated, insanely hard adventure game remains eminently playable and impactful to this day. Thanks to an impeccable design, Spelunky is never unfair even if it sometimes feels that way. Other great randomly generated platformers, like Noita and Rogue Legacy , owe much to the core conceit of Spelunky , which encourages care and thoughtfulness rather than rote memorization.
All this leaves us with one question: Can the sequel possibly match this high-water mark? Back in , Nintendo looked like a spent force. While its rivals innovated with online services and technically advanced consoles, Nintendo sought ways to replicate its past, with tired ideas like a new Wii and a new DS.
In the next few years, the company would come perilously close to irrelevance. The Nintendo Switch , released in , reversed the decline. Breath of the Wild infuses its open-world role-playing formula with a cast of wonderful characters and stories, each glimmering with fairy-tale darkness. It constantly provokes and challenges with new problems and fresh solutions.
Ten years ago, this little survive-and-build indie game was just emerging from development test stage. Minecraft is the gateway to gaming. At the business end of Minecraft , owner Microsoft sees it as the key to its terrifying geo-tech utopian ambitions, via Minecraft Earth. Who will bet against this game spending at least another decade as a central component in our digital lives, and in the lives of those as-yet unborn?
With its blocky voxels and ping-pong audio effects, Minecraft neither looks nor sounds like a 21st-century game. And yet, it defines the best of the decade. It frames our children as inheritors of computing, and frames gaming as a potential force for good. When our descendants look back upon us and upon our time, they will see many images: of tyrants and cruelty, of waste and stupidity.
Grinding teeth, chuckles, groans, roars, and screams build into a rich soundscape overfilling my ears with menace. It does not sound like a video game from our world. Then I played Devil Daggers. I surely died within 20 seconds. And again. Then a bit more. A bit more. Even passing one minute felt like a triumph. It took hours to reach five minutes, egged on by rivalries with pals on the leaderboards.
Waves keep on spawning, spawners keep spawning more, bigger and tougher enemies arrive, the escalation constricts the battlefield, and it all seems such a challenge. Then you learn a bit more and survive a bit longer and realise that, actually, one wave you once found murderous was trying to feed you power-ups. You find yourself clearing waves before the next spawns. It feels chuffing great to reach the point of dancing between clouds of skulls and under the coils of a skullsnake, my knifehand flashing with power and so many awful noises in my ears.
Over this, my hand is wibble-wobble-warbling as it spits knives and will soon power up to full-on screaming. I adore this full-body experience. Graham: We named Devil Daggers as the best game of , and I've never felt more estranged from a comments section. The recurring refrain was, "Well, it's fine, but it doesn't have a lot of content though, does it? Its dozens of classes are clear characters, with their own colourful personalities and backstories. Nate: For the most part, I like sluggish, top-down games about organising things and increasing their complexity.
And most of my favourite games are that sort of thing. Alice L: I got really really into Overwatch for about a year. I even, embarrassingly, have a D.
Va bumper sticker on my car. Alice Bee: Ignore Graham. I played loads of TF2 in the bad old days, and Overwatch may be asking you to squint and pretend you've not seen a bunch of these ideas before, but it's so much more fun than Valve's competitive shooter attached to a hat economy. Especially if you like playing support characters which, obviously, should be called "the best class, you ungrateful bastards" and enjoying yourself at the same time.
The speed. The joy. You know how it starts in building games plopping us down alone in hostile place: first, you must knock down a tree. In Factorio, rather than starting you down the path of crafting increasingly tough axes, this tree fuels what will soon be a sprawling web of drills, conveyor belts, assemblers, generators, batteries, defenses, construction robots, and laboratories, a vast mechanism of machines building machines to build better machines.
Just the deep, brutal, chemical satisfaction of starting with nothing, and building it into a sprawling mass of ordered complexity. The difference between Factorio and other system-building games say, the Anno series, or other citybuilders where things process other things is an absolute chasm. Because Factorio guides you into its monstrous grandeur through steps so slight you never even know your feet are moving.
Play is essentially a voluntary fugue state, full of decisions so small you make them without really thinking, but adding up to works of monolithic scale. Sin: Efficiency is like salt. A little is vital. A little more in the right place at the right moment is delightful. But the salting of things is not a worthy or interesting goal to me. Instead, I enjoy elaborate looping constructs that make a kind of sense but only for that machine, only for that world, only to me.
This machinery has a history, and even when parts of it are taken up and recombined, that history belongs here. I am an archivist factorian, constructing systems based on the changing whims and inputs of time.
You might value efficiency. You might value symmetry, or environmentalism, or deep pools of backup resources. Your machine will be your own, and you will make it and know it and love it like nobody else could. Though your co-op partner might disagree about how to continue, and the game plans for disagreements. How very complex and clever.
I only mention this because it completely worked. And if a game can leave you with a sense of wonder at a time like that, and even make you feel nostalgic for the day you left your last parent in a hole forever, then it must be bloody well written. I say written, but damn near everything about the game is layered with craft, from the sweeping, atmospheric score, to the voice acting, to the elemental combat system. What a treat, to not only recapture the feeling of playing something you loved for the first time, but to exceed it.
And with a playable lizard man, too. And you know what? The most obvious, and spoiler free, response to the title is "a big weird house", because that's what you explore as you unravel the strange stories of the strange deaths of a strange family.
They all lived together somewhere in Washington state, and as you unlock each bedroom you get another piece of the puzzle that was their lives. The vignettes you see are inventive, and take full advantage of how games can tell stories in a unique way. And everyone remembers the one with the fish, don't they? Alice0: I am so grateful to Edith Finch for building this place for me to explore. What a treat of a house. Alice Bee: All the little stories in Edith Finch are about death, but very very few of them are actually sad, even if the deaths themselves are tragic.
The way you experience them is usually joyful, beautiful, hopeful, and not sad at all. Even what is perhaps the most tragic death of all becomes a lovely game where bath toys dance together like something out of Fantasia.
It's a really wonderful video game. Katharine: The bath bit almost destroyed me, but as Alice Bee just mentioned, most of the tragedies that haunt this jumbled old mansion are more joyful than sad. The bit with the swing, for example, is truly awful if you stop and think about it for a minute, but it's also one of the most peaceful and uplifting ends to a Finch story the game has. And oh, the bit with the fish-chopping!
What an absolute masterpiece. Graham: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad," wrote Philip Larkin. Which, yes, fine , but kids fuck up their mum and dad, too. Example: I used to be able to play things like Edith Finch and remain unaffected, but not anymore. It is one of my favourite games ever, but the bath scene reduced me to such a burbling mess that I can't ever play it again. Maybe when my kid is grown. This roguelikelike deck-building card game sends us up a strange fantasy tower to slay its beating heart and free ourselves from the Sisyphean cycle.
Collecting cards and artefacts along a run from friends and foes, the different classes can develop wild decks and combos as we face ever stranger and more powerful enemies. Through all this, combat remains clear and predictable, something to plan not wing.
Nate: When it comes to card games, Hearthstone is my thing. Or at least it was, until I had a slurp on this Slay the Soup. And what a broth it was. Oh, how wrong I was. Like any good roguelike usual disclaimers apply about the use of the term, etc, etc , you can only really get a feeling for Slay The Spire after beefing it on hundreds of attempts.
A mathematician friend once tried and failed to explain to me how there are multiple types of infinities. Alice0: Slay The Spire is plain and simple. Cards have easy numbers and clear consequences, and enemies telegraph their moves. Draw, cast, bish bash bosh. This magical tower is a colourful place with interesting enemies and a fun tone. The building blocks are simple but allow complex constructions. Luck plays a part, of course.
Such is the roguelikelike. Slay The Spire gives a satisfying amount of space to influence this. Each level we can plot our path through encounters, shops, and treasures. We get a pick of several rewards each time too, several options to shape or support our run. And as a recovering Magic: The Gathering rat, I like the space it gives me to optimise and hone runs, stripping cards back to build a lean engine of death. The character classes are great too.
I like how well card abilities, art, and names come together in decks that feel like playing as a knight with unholy brawn, a swift rogue whose dodges and rolls slip in a subtle blow or dagger, a robotic battle mage conjuring elements and upgrading itself, and a monk chain moves between stances.
What a fine cast of magical murderers. Check into the hotel opened in the mansion of an acclaimed jazz musician with this first-person explore-o-adventure game.
This is the follow-up to Off-Peak, set outside the city and beyond its strange train station. And it seems only natural that giant artworks cover every surface and fill every corner.
This hotel is so loud, so vivid, so unsubtle, so clashing, that every oddity is perfectly at home. Everything is a surprise and a treat, nothing is weird. It is an excellent place to explore, and its guests are in interesting bunch. Some are musicians seeking inspiration or education. Some are making a pilgrimage to pay homage to a great. Some are leeching from the legacy to bolster their status.
Some see it just as a branding opportunity. Some have even come to remember Norwood as a friend and collaborator. Norwood Suite explores the varied and complex relationships people have with music, how it can touch and ruin lives or become just another commodity. After being lost at sea, the Obra Dinn drifts back to civilisation with not a soul left but plenty of corpses.
Wielding a magical pocketwatch, we can see the moments of their death, exploring scenes of tragedy frozen in time. But who are all these corpses? How did everyone die? Alice Bee: More than one person I have lived with has remarked that I am, in some respects, the stereotype of a little old lady. I sit on the sofa, with a fluffy pink blanket over my legs, drink a lot of tea, and watch episodes of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.
I have read all the books, and I know the culprits already, so occasionally I'll throw a Midsomer Murders in to spice things up. What I am saying is, I love a mystery. Specifically, I love the mysteries where you have a chance of figuring out whodunnit yourself: the murderer has been introduced to you, in the pack of suspects, and then shuffled back amongst them.
I have, I'm sure, said many times before that Return Of The Obra Dinn is probably the only game where I have felt like I am actually detecting things - figuring them out myself, using logic, and being rewarded for it. Rewarded with the solution. And that is enough for a good detective. And my god, some of the surprises floored me. Even frozen in time, I felt unsafe.
Katharine: I, too, was a fervent shoe enthusiast in my approach to Obra Dinn, but the best thing about it was comparing notes with Matthew. He never once looked at a shoe during his first playthrough and ended up discovering an entirely different way of figuring out what's effectively the world's most obtuse version of Guess Who? So many possibilities exist in this game, and seeing friends and relatives arrive at the same conclusion via so many different methods made me appreciate its ingenuity even more.
A true masterpiece. Video Matthew: I replayed this recently - left it long enough to forget the most vital clues - and was dazzled afresh by its cleverness and the sheer horror of the thing. That art style, that music, that mystery.
But I still did it. Look, ma. Alice0: An open-world RPG set in small city spaces dense with detail where I can thunk punks with a bicycle sounds just grand to me. What makes me so adore Yakuza so much more is the melodramatic tone. It commits fully to both. Yakuza 0 is a crime melodrama focused on an backalley lot in Tokyo.
Who owns this lot? How far does this web of intrigue spread and how high does it go? And why is everyone trying to kill us? With our steely resolve, our strong moral code, our dramatic shouting, and our raw strength, we might just settle the matter. Yakuza 0 is a melodramatic family comedy about a wacky mobster who loves food, has a childlike wonder, is nervous around women, and wants to help every downtrodden person in the world.
Reunite families! Teach children kindness and self-confidence when you join a slot car racing league! Help a kid get back his stolen video game, and teach a valuable lesson in parenting to his dad! Help a floundering dominatrix believe in herself! Befriend a weird dude who hangs around in his pants yelling about porn! Befriend Michael Jackson! Hire a chicken to be a property manager at your real estate business! Kiryu and Majima are quite different and both absolutely delightful.
What good boys. What excellent thugs. Kiryu slamming thugs with bicycles and boxing blows, Majima whirling around with a baseball bat and breakdancing moves. Never not melodramatic. I forgive its few mastubatory missteps. Its cities are bustling and full of fun diversions that make me digitally live there. Ah, I want to stop writing this now and go hang out with the nice crimeboys again.
In this space RPG, the galaxy is your sandbox. Faction conflicts, business, and personal interests run the simulation, the universe changing around you as you build your crew, ship, reputation, and fortune.
What sort of spaceman do you want to be? Sin: Star Traders Colon Frontiers lets you do what you want. You can hire a new crew, kicking out those bounty hunters you trained, and replacing them with diplomats and spies instead. Star Traders is brimming with hidden people and events. Its encounters are driven by local and regional politics, most of which you can influence if you ferret out the hidden faction contacts who jostle for influence as they make everything move.
Your terrifying-but-fair pirate might become a key diplomat in an era-defining trial. Your unassuming spy might double as a merchant, your scavenger pivot to hunting aliens. And who knows, that swordsman you recruited might have potential as a field medic, and become one of your favourite officers after a hasty field promotion.
The work the Trese Brothers put into supporting their game is truly phenomenal too. Creep around, disguise yourself, and learn the many possible ways to kill people as Ian Hitman returns for new targets and opportunities. Graham: A point-and-click adventure where instead of sticking tape to a fence to make a moustache from cat hair, you're putting a bomb in a toilet and poison on a fish to make a man do an explosive poo.
Hitman 2 which contains all the levels from 's also excellent Hitman offers a series of elaborate Rube Goldberg devices where you need to work out which domino to place and push to make a person die at the end of the chain. This turns out to be disturbingly satisfying. All the parts are laid out and waiting for you, but it still tricks you into feeling clever for manipulating them as required. And Hitman 2 contains levels so vast and surprising that I think I'd be happy if IO just followed this template forever, releasing 5 or 6 new murder playgrounds every couple of years.
Monsters have risen from the depths of the Earth to ravage the remains of humanity, and only a timeline-tripping squad of mech pilots can stop them. The second game from the makers of FTL sends us out to mash the monsters in short turn-based tactical battles focused on manipulating enemy movement.
Blessed with certainty, we become master manipulators shuffling enemies around the battlefield, nudging attacks onto different targets, and setting up clever chains. Which is why I absolutely loved Into The Breach, until I realised it was just a series of Pacific-Rim-styled chess puzzles, and quit in a cloud of my own prejudices.
It feels like a classic turn-based tactics game. Not just planning; a game about packing for a caravan holiday could be about planning. This is a game about being able to mentally simulate the future interaction of known quantities, and plan a series of actions that takes advantage of all those interactions to achieve your own goals. About being so clever you can see into the future, essentially. I like my tactics with a side order of chaos and improvisation.
I prefer to react, rather than to act. Big robots shoving big insectoid monsters into each other, into skyscrapers, into lakes. You do this in order to warp those enemy's intended next turn. They're going to shove your mate, so you shove them first so that their shove actually shoves their mate. Take that, shovetoids!
Do this successfully enough and you can preempt the enemy's every attempted attack, leaving you with a squad at full health, and a saved city in awe of your genius. Battles are almost an afterthought in this strategy game which focuses on the finance and intrigue behind army-building. Even the greatest plans can be undone by the flesh, one torn ligament taking down your linchpin soldier.
Graham: Football is about stories: long-running rivalries, last-minute comebacks, underdogs rising up and legends on the fall. That's what makes it more than just an impressive simulation, and that's why people write Football Manager fan fiction.
It is an impressive simulation, though. You can talk about dwarves getting sad that their cat died, but Football Manager isn't far off Dwarf Fortress when it comes to attention to detail.
Aside from the 40 or so visible and invisible stats which determine a player's performance on the pitch, there's also a representation of their personality, morale, and more. You can poke at these things via conversations with players, working to get the best out of your players by amping them up before a big game, or compelling them to sign a new contract by appealing to their ego.
Many of these systems are deliberately opaque, which means they're often unrewarding to tinker with, but there's rarely a situation where the game just rolls a die. Even the in-game weather is simulated, so that doing it on a rainy Sunday in Watford is the result of an actual weather front rolling across town, affecting any other games being played nearby. For me, it's the summer breaks I'm addicted to. I live for finding young players - fictional regens, ideally - and turning them into superstars through training and a gradual introduction to the first team.
This is better than levelling characters in any other RPG. Note that we've not picked any particular entry in the series to hold this spot on the list. Football Manager long ago invented the wheel and has since settled down into a steady routine of adding automatic doozits and more cup-holders. If you're going to play any in the series, it should probably be the most recent - and they remove the old entries from sale so you have no little choice in the matter, anyway.
At the end of an era, civilisation has long-since fallen into tragedy and ruin, haunted by remnants of what once was. Still, you get to stab a lot of people. This fantasy action-RPG has a reputation for being murderously tough mostly because it requires you to pause, think, and learn. Die, respawn, take a deep breath, parry, counter-attack and away you go. These are indeed all great. Adam and I ruffled some feathers when we semi-cheekily declared or I remember it was chiefly us two agitating for it?
I stand by it. Dark Souls very much is a roleplaying game. It has choices and it has consequences. You can form friendships and alliances. You can save people and you can can betray them. You can find hidden quests and stories.
But, wonderfully, very little of this is presented in standard RPG ways. To roleplay, you need to know that you have this choice - and forces driving the plot would very much prefer you did not have ideas of your own. Perhaps you also like helping other players and always drop a summon sign to be drawn in and fight alongside them, maybe joining a covenant dedicated to helping.
Leaving misleading messages for other players is a classic dick move. Maybe you even joined the soulstealing cult deemed so dangerous that a whole city was drowned to stop them, because you wanted to invade and kill other players. And what does it say about someone who joins a group dedicated to fighting invaders? After the disappointing release of Fallout 76 , many people were left with the impression that not only was the Fallout franchise in its twilight years but that the ideas it represented were waning as well.
The Outer Worlds is its own adventure worth experiencing, but it will forever be remembered as the game that justified your nostalgia for an entire school of RPG game design. This decade will likely be largely remembered for the rise of the indie video game scene, even if the foundations for that revolution were laid years before. This was the decade that saw a series of small visionary creators deliver experiences that major studios had long since abandoned or never attempted.
Fez remains one of the most facinating indie games released to date. This is a game that made you feel like every single decision you made mattered and would affect the characters around you in big ways. The game takes B. Blazkowicz into new territory narratively and provides an incisive look into the nature of tyranny and how its philosophies have poisoned America.
No other genre kicked down the door this decade quite like the roguelike. The Binding of Issac was one of the clearest early declarations that the roguelike genre was here to stay. That just sounds like a recipe for success, and it proved to be just that. Like Braid before it, Limbo was a declaration that the timeless appeal of the 2D platformer could be used as the vehicle for fascinating new ideas and design concepts.
Limbo is a perfectly crafted adventure that proves that personality wins the day in game design. The scenario of a young woman returning to her childhood home in Oregon only to find it mysteriously abandoned is initially terrifying, and the game capitalizes on this. But none of this should distract from the fact that this is one of the finest Metal Gear games ever made, thanks to some major improvements to the combat and navigation systems.
Here is where you truly become the Big Boss. Oh, Diablo 3. For some, Diablo 3 will always be remembered as the game that launched with server problems, questionable online mechanics, and content that felt lacking in comparison to the legendary Diablo 2.
Yet, in a decade that saw so many games benefit from the era of updates, few titles changed their legacy quite as quickly and dramatically as Diablo 3. Then Arkham City took all of that and added in an open-world full of bad guys, missions to complete, and Batman lore. There are plenty of fan-favorite heroes and villains, as well as quite a few deep cuts, to find here.
Without cutting, we watch Nathan Drake hop onto the plane from a moving Jeep, fight a gaggle of baddies in the cargo bay, blow up said plane, and then parachute down to safety. Nathan, Elena, and Sully are perfect protagonists, and the interpersonal drama between them is just the icing on the cake. During this trip, he finds himself in the middle of a supernatural catastrophe created by his own mind.
This is basically a Stephen King game. What truly makes this game special, though, is its status a true horror adventure that is certainly incredibly scary in parts but is more about experiencing a journey through a world that celebrates the genre as well as it utilizes its best aspects.
He ultimately found what he was looking for in his own family, a powerful farewell for the series that speaks to the storytelling prowess of the mighty Naughty Dog.
Few games released this decade inspired quite the passion that Undertale ignited. Undertale calls back to RPGs like Earthbound with its quirky characters, active combat mechanics, and humorous writing. But what makes the game a classic is its tight bullet-hell gameplay, which can be punishing but is always fair to the player. It was a risk for StudioMDHR to develop such an artistically out-there title, but the gaming community thankfully embraced Cuphead wholeheartedly. Luckily, it still had most of human history to ape from, including the golden age of pirates, who stalked the Caribbean for treasure in the s.
This game lets you truly live your pirate fantasies: dig for buried treasure, pillage enemy fortresses, command your men in hectic ship battles, and drink rum. Oh, and you can do some parkour-heavy assassin stuff, too. Nothing will ever top the original Dead Space , a masterpiece of both horror atmosphere and storytelling, but this sequel is a very close second. This one also features one of the most gruesome playable sequences ever put in a video game. We love to see it. Black Ops is not only the best Call of Duty game of the decade but perhaps the best in the entire series of first-person shooters.
A slightly trippy, paranoia-filled campaign takes the Call of Duty story into new avenues where even reality is called into question. Who really killed JFK?
We lost hours playing these in college! Time will tell what the legacy of the 3DS will be, but you get the feeling that the device will always be partially defined by the relative failures of its core technological gimmick.
This sequel moves the action from the Capital Wasteland to Boston, where the shadow of the mysterious, technologically-advanced Institute looms over the rest of postapocalyptic society. You play as a Vault Dweller who is initially searching for their son but is soon thrust into a much bigger conspiracy involving artificial intelligence and much more.
About as well as BioWare did in But this final fight against the merciless Reapers is bigger than any one character, and Mass Effect 3 feels appropriately epic, with big, explosive action sequences and galaxy-altering life or death decisions perhaps to a fault.
Taken on its own, without all of the story baggage, Mass Effect 3 is a great action RPG that will thrill you and break your heart in turn. Few games in the past decade have had the cultural impact that Minecraft had. It transcended generations, spawned an endless line of toys, clothing, and merchandise, and became the best-selling video game EVER. Minecraft remains a prominent franchise, with new ways to experience the world coming soon. As hard as it may be to remember now, there were also some who felt that Overwatch could never live up to the expectations set by fellow team-based shooter, Team Fortress 2.
The game is a series of discoveries that starts with something as simple as realizing that pickaxes break rocks or that clams can be sold for gold. Every step in this world opens up a series of new possibilities that allow you to organically discover thousands of options at whatever pace you feel playing. It would have been so easy for Bloodborne to be another Dark Souls game. From a business standpoint, we doubt that Sony would have balked at the idea of a PS4 exclusive Dark Souls game.
Instead, FromSoftware used Bloodborne as proof that the Souls genre is more about a series of larger concepts than it is a collection of strict mechanics. Unlike other forms of entertainment, video games are evolving in wild, wondrous ways all the time, and Journey represents a true paradigm shift.
Not competitive, but empathetic. Not rigid, but nebulous. With only hints of a story tying this murderous rampage through a demon-infested Mars together, this reboot is really all about the fast-paced gameplay, gruesome monsters, fiery atmosphere, and tight level design.
There are no conceits or pretensions here. Run into a room, kill all the demons inside of it, destroy the portal to Hell, and repeat. It would have been easy for Rockstar to deliver just another Red Dead Redemption game and bask in the accolades. While some people mostly jokingly referred to Red Dead Redemption as GTA with horses, that basic formula still resulted in an undeniably enjoyable experience that doubled as the best western game ever released up to that point.
Red Dead Redemption II is more than that. It challenges preconceived notions of video game pacing and open-world storytelling.
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