Microsoft Gaming Chief Asha Sharma Killed ‘This Is An Xbox’ Campaign as It ‘Didn’t Feel Like Xbox’ Credit: IGN
Microsoft has confirmed that its new gaming boss Asha Sharma personally killed the company’s controversial “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign — because, ironically, “it didn’t feel like Xbox.”
The promotional slogan was announced with fanfare back in late 2024 when Microsoft tried to convince the world that “Xbox” could actually refer to any object that played Xbox games. This meant your smartphone was an Xbox, your dusty old tablet was an Xbox, and even your Smart TV could be an Xbox — something that also rather suggested you no longer needed to buy an actual Xbox anymore.
For a company that was already having issues shifting Xbox consoles, the marketing campaign felt a little short-sighted — a view reportedly also held by numerous staff at Xbox itself, whose job it had been to try and make the Xbox Series X/S not a flop. In recent weeks, fans have spotted “This is an Xbox” marketing pages disappear from the internet, while a report has stated that team members had been “offended” by it ever existing. And now, Microsoft has officially confirmed the slogan is dead, with Sharma to thank for it being finished off.
“Asha retired ‘This is an Xbox’ because it didn’t feel like Xbox,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Windows Central. “She is personally leading a reset of how we show up as a brand.”
The narrative here certainly seems clear, with previous reporting pinning the promotional slogan’s existance on former Xbox CEO Sarah Bond, who received only the briefest of acknowledgements on her way out the door. Still, it should be remembered that Bond ultimately reported into former Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer, who Sharma has now directly replaced.
Regardless, with Bond gone following Sharma’s promotion, the latter seems happy to wipe the slate clean of a marketing campaign disliked by fans, and now at odds with the company’s fresh focus on selling the potential of Project Helix, Microsoft’s nebulous PC/console hybrid that it likely hopes will find a larger audience than Series X/S, whenever it actually arrives.
It may be that the very idea of an Xbox game is coming to an end. Microsoft has undeniably shifted its tactics, with a new focus on multi-platform releases, handheld Xboxes that are actually miniature Windows computers, and the potential that future Xbox consoles may simply be gaming PCs. So now seems as good a time as any to look back at the entire history of Microsoft’s console journey and rank the best Xbox games, with help from our friends at Outside Xbox, the multimillion-subscriber channel that serves up weekly videos about video games and video game-adjacent things
When we say “the best Xbox games,” we mean the ones that most evoke that weighty sense of “Xboxness.” Some are first-party, most are exclusives, and all of them are indelibly tied to the legacy of and fondness for a platform that’s left a massive mark on gaming. These are the 100 Best Xbox Games of All Time. We’ll be updating this list daily with 25 games at 7am PST/10am ET/3pm GMT from Tuesday, 20th January to Friday, 23rd January, until number one is revealed.
A large-scale, online multiplayer game show, played in real-time by actual players who could win actual prizes? It was a bold idea, and Microsoft’s 1 vs. 100 actually did it. Adapted from the TV show of the same name, players were randomly dropped into one of three pools whenever the show went live: the Crowd, the Mob, and the One, with the One competing against the Mob in trivia rounds where reaction times were just as important an ingredient to victory as the correct answer to the question being asked. Prizes ranged from 80 Microsoft Points ($1) to a free Xbox Live Arcade game, to 10,000 Microsoft Points ($125). 1 vs. 100 was a true social and technical experiment in the world of gaming, and here’s the thing: it worked! Sadly, it was canceled after two “seasons” and can’t be played now, but it lives on in the memory as one of the best and most innovative Xbox games ever made.
When Microsoft acquired Nintendo’s second-party darling Rare for $375 million, the possibilities were endless. One of the first games Xbox got from the British studio was Conker: Live and Reloaded, a remake of N64’s Conker’s Bad Fur Day that added online multiplayer. And while that competitive play was quite fun, thanks in part to the juxtaposition of over-the-top violence and adorable characters on screen, it was the technological level-up from the N64 original that was truly stunning. The action-platformer was now “fur-shaded,” giving the manes of Conker and his buddies a unique “next-gen” new look. Ironically, Live and Reloaded was actually more heavily censored than Bad Fur Day, but both campaign and multiplayer were nevertheless a great way to introduce Rare to its new Xbox player base.
Believe it or not, there was a time when EA didn’t support Xbox Live. And so Microsoft started building its own sports games that would take advantage of its online service, and of those titles, Top Spin was by far the best. It was a tennis sim featuring a career mode full of real-life pros, but what made Top Spin memorable – in addition to its core gameplay being so pitch-perfect, of course – was its online play. You’d create your character, build them up, and take them online, pitting yourself against other players in ranked matches that, if you won, would move you further up the global rankings. It all worked perfectly (and even tied in XSN, if you remember that little experiment), and made Top Spin the best tennis game the Xbox has ever been served up.
The Xbox 360 was a treasure chest full of those “7 out of 10s” that you just couldn’t put down; those rough-around-the-edges cult classics that kept us more than entertained for a weekend before we moved on to the next. Binary Domain is a perfect example – a third-person shooter from Yakuza developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, this sci-fi story didn’t play too differently from established cover shooters such as Gears of War, but came with its own unique quirks. Direct control of your squadmates was chief among these, with the ability to command them in six different languages via a headset or the Kinect sensor, a fun little gimmick that took advantage of the Xbox’s ultimately doomed experiment with its camera peripheral. Binary Domain may have never fully reached the heights of its lofty ambitions, but it still finds a place in our hearts.
The original Xbox was a maximalist, brutalist brick of post-Y2K design and Steel Battalion is the purest expression of its commitment to inconvenience. The Capcom-developed mech game is arguably nothing special by itself, but the humongous HOTAS horror with which it came bundled has earned it Xbox immortality. Weighing in at a whopping 17 pounds, boasting three panels, three foot pedals, and industrial-grade divorced dad energy, Steel Battalion is the video game equivalent of “rolling coal:” an excessive, magnificent, indulgent peripheral that cost $200 in 2002 money. Xbox is a burly, hefty console that demands a burly, hefty experience, and Steel Battalion more than fits the bill.
Xbox was a console designed to change the game, and so it made sense that the Oddworld series shifted direction when it arrived on the platform. Munch’s Oddysee saw the sidescrolling platformer leap into the third dimension, but it was 2005’s Stranger’s Wrath that really reinvented the series, delivering a bizarre gunslinging action-adventure in which you played a bounty hunter, bringing in targets dead or alive, rather than saving legions of Mudokons. As Stranger, you’re armed with a crossbow and a bandolier of “Live Ammunition”, as in, ammo that’s literally alive. Your chatterbox bullets, each an insect or tiny mammal with unique abilities, turn each hunt into a tactical showdown with more than a fistful of good laughs.
It’s gritty. It’s neon. It’s Fuzion Frenzy, an undeniable classic for the original Xbox that’s still fun today (if you don’t stay too long in the Waterfront minigames, that is). This party game gem was one of the few local multiplayer games that just about anyone could play, regardless of their experience with gaming. Simple yet helpful options like practicing a minigame before the real event, bots to fill open spots with varying levels of difficulty, and custom lengths for tournaments made welcoming others to the party even easier. Its wide span of minigames acted as a great introduction to all kinds of genres, too; from racing to rhythm, to strategy, to defense, Fuzion Frenzy has it all – and a sick visual aesthetic to boot.
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is a perfect relic from a time when it seemed like almost every third-party game that delivered a visual showcase on the Xbox 360 struggled to run properly on the PS3. Capcom’s mech-suit shooter played host to some memorable creature design that evoked some of sci-fi fiction’s greatest threats, and delivered spectacle that, at the time, was compared to games as well as thought of as Shadow of the Colossus. While its story may have left quite a bit to be desired, its action was well-received, as it took cues from Capcom classics such as Mega Man and Bionic Commando and modernised them to great effect. Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is by no means a classic in its own right, but is a great example of a time when, if you had the choice to play a multiplatform game on any console, it would always be the 360.
Nuts & Bolts began life as a remake of the original Nintendo 64 Banjo-Kazooie game, before developer Rare made the decision to create a completely new entry in the series for the Xbox 360. An ambitious project that stretched itself far beyond its 3D platforming roots, this 2008 sequel placed an emphasis on building vehicles in a flexible world that could be navigated in many different ways. 15 years before Nintendo experimented with similar ideas in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Rare was arguably ahead of the curve when it came to player freedom in wide open spaces, even if the final product never delivered the sort of game of the year-winning quality that Link’s adventures have. There’s no denying that Nuts & Bolts was divisive at launch, but its legacy only grows stronger over time, and it remains the most recent entry into the Banjo-Kazooie series.
We’d argue that Condemned: Criminal Origins was the most underrated of the Xbox 360’s day-one launch games. A first-person horror game with melee combat from the decorated developers at Monolith Productions, it got scarier and scarier the deeper you pushed into its campaign – and yes, we mean it got even more terrifying after the memorable department store mannequin sequence. As an FBI agent you had a toolbox of forensic tools to work with, but it was more what you had to work against that made this experience special – namely, an impeccably bleak atmosphere that heightened the fear that enveloped you as you played. It remains unique amongst horror games even today.
Indie games have grown so ubiquitous that the word itself has become a battleground, but 18 years ago, “indie” largely meant games on Xbox Live Arcade. XBLA was to indie games as Toonami was to anime: an influential pipeline that reshaped distribution and expanded our ideas of what games could be and who was allowed to make them. Headlining the inaugural “Summer of Arcade” in 2008, Castle Crashers was a colorful, chaotic belt-scroller with stylish hand-drawn art straight from Newgrounds, the anarchic animation scene that would later spawn the likes of Smiling Friends. It set a new standard for four-player co-op and helped spark a modern beat ‘em up revival alongside fellow XBLA stalwart Scott Pilgrim: The Game.
MechWarrior had long been a sci-fi giant-robot simulation staple on PC. In MechAssault, the BattleTech universe came to console as a faster-paced, gamepad-friendly version of everyone’s favorite 31st-century-set franchise, and it translated beautifully. You still got to pilot all of the coolest mechs from the PC series, and you could still target specific areas of your enemies in order to disable them or, in the case of a leg takeout, cause them to fall over and explode. But MechAssault boiled it down to purely the action, taking a lot of the between-mission simulation gameplay out of the equation. The revised formula worked, both in the single-player campaign and in the Xbox Live online multiplayer, where MechAssault quickly established itself as one of the most popular games on Microsoft’s then brand-new, broadband-only online gaming service.
A launch game for the Xbox 360, Peter Jackson’s King Kong comes from a time when a huge graphical leap could be noticed from just one glance at a screen. The lush jungle of Skull Island set the stage for a licensed game that stood tall in an era when many fell flat, thanks to its relatively open approach to level design, immersive first-person perspective devoid of cluttered UI, and overall cinematic presentation that reflected the ambitions of The Lord of the Rings’ director’s remake. Sure, it’s not quite as revolutionary to play now, but it is representative of a moment in time when, much like its lead character, Xbox was about to become top of the food chain.
Full Spectrum Warrior famously started out not as a for-public-consumption video game, but as a training tool built for the US Army. It’s a real-time tactics game, but unlike just about anything that came before or since. Its entire premise revolves around the proper positioning of your squad of soldiers; it’s up to you to literally put your men and women in position to not just succeed, but also survive, as one wrong move will see just a few bullets quickly wipe out your squad. Tension is the primary emotion you’ll feel throughout Full Spectrum Warrior’s campaign, but in the very best and most enjoyable of ways.
At the time of the original Xbox’s arrival in November 2001, it was seen as a necessity for a console to launch with a strong fighting game offering, one of the most popular genres at the turn of the century. In preparation for that, Microsoft moved to obtain exclusivity on Team Ninja’s Dead or Alive series, which had previously appeared on both Sony’s PlayStation and Sega’s Dreamcast. The gamble paid off: Dead or Alive 3 instantly became a huge hit thanks to its lush visuals and slick combat, selling over 1 million copies in its first five months alone. It would go on to become one of the 10 best-selling games on the original Xbox console and help establish the platform’s solid foundations around the world.
A sequel to Rare’s hit N64 shooter, Perfect Dark Zero began life on the Gamecube before it was ordained as a flagship first-party launch title for Xbox 360 following Microsoft’s acquisition of the studio in 2002. While its development was a frantic sprint to meet the console’s release, the final product is a technical stunner of a stylish spy thriller that dazzled early adopters with glossy visuals and a sprawling multiplayer suite that supported a then-whopping 32 players– the perfect proving ground for a new generation of Xbox Live. Microsoft was clearly strapping the rocket to Joanna Dark as a triple-A franchise candidate, but her series struggled to find a lane among the Master Chiefs and Call of Dutys that dominated the platform. Even so, Perfect Dark Zero endures as an ambitious, feature-rich launch showcase, and after decades of false starts and development hell, it remains the last, best word on an Xbox almost-icon.
Panzer Dragon Orta showed that, even following the very public disaster of the Dreamcast, Sega was a company still willing to take risks and experiment. In this case, it meant rewinding time and returning Panzer Dragoon to its rail shooter roots, following a brief venture into the RPG space with 1998’s Panzer Dragoon Saga. The result was Panzer Dragoon Orta, an Xbox exclusive interpretation of the dragon-riding series that felt both comfortingly old-school and daringly modern. A beautiful, deceivingly complex slice of action, Orta took full advantage of the power of the Xbox to create one of the best examples of the on-rails shooter to date.
Is 2013’s Rayman Legends the greatest platformers that Nintendo never made? A personality-packed cartoon world, impeccable control system, sublime level design, and an ever-evolving set of mechanics would argue yes, it’s certainly in the running, and that’s even before we’ve gotten to the brilliantly bonkers rhythm-based challenge level set to a Mariachi band cover of ‘Eye of the Tiger’. Fun solo but absolutely joyous with three friends in tow, Rayman Legends is couch co-op perfection. Its 120 levels are full of surprises and crafted at such a consistently high standard that no sooner do you think you’ve found your favourite stage than another one has come along to dethrone it. There’s so much giddy gameplay stuffed into Rayman Legends that it even spills over into its loading screens, themselves mad scrambles for a bonus heart during the handful of seconds before each level begins. Beautiful, bountiful, and bouncing with energy, Rayman Legends is as good as 2D platforming gets, and proved a real treat in the dying days of Xbox’s golden 360 era.
Rainbow Six: Vegas isn’t just memorable for being a massive jump for the Tom Clancy series into the next-gen on the Xbox 360, but for its perspective shift: as you took cover from gunfire behind one-armed bandits and beside doorways, the camera pulled back from Rainbow Six’s typical first-person perspective and brought it into third-person, settling over each Operator’s shoulder – a trick that would be later copied by Brothers in Arms and Deus Ex. Meanwhile, Las Vegas proved to be a gorgeous and memorable setting for this bold new entry in the series, giving us glitzy shootouts on casino floors. And multiplayer, already a huge hit on Xbox Live with Rainbow Six 3, blew up again with Vegas, offering an unparalleled tactical, team-based competitive experience online. At the time of release, we called it “the best first-person shooter on the Xbox 360”, and while it may not have held onto that crown later in the console’s lifespan, it still remains a high point for the genre.
A game with perhaps the single saddest press of a button in all of games, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons set the template for what director Josef Fares would go on to achieve. A story-first puzzle game in which the game’s two playable brothers are controlled by an analog stick each, its smart approach to how you use an Xbox controller made it an instant under-the-radar hit when it landed with timed exclusivity on the 360. Fares would leave developer Starbreeze Studios after Brothers’ release to set up Hazelight and craft some of the best co-op games ever released, and while the likes of It Takes Two and Split Fiction push the bounds of creativity when it comes to gameplay, nothing since has quite packed the narrative punch that this journey of two boys trying to save their dying father does.
After a litigious split from Activision, the co-creators of Call of Duty jumped ship to EA and formed Respawn, determined to reinvent the online FPS for Xbox and beat their old game at its own game. 2014’s Titanfall dropped as the disappointing Ghosts left Call of Duty vulnerable, with acrobatic movement and wall-running gunfights that made “boots on the ground” shooters feel instantly archaic. While the MOBA-influenced multiplayer featured farming minions and screen-shaking ultimate mechs summoned from the sky, the lack of a campaign limited Titanfall’s impact, and by the time its multiplatform sequel more than rectified that mistake, it was far too late to conquer CoD.
Obsidian Entertainment has quietly become one of Microsoft’s most important studios, thanks to its consistently strong output ever since its 2018 acquisition. Following recent forays into oversized undergrowth in Grounded and Pentiment’s 17th-century Germany, the Pillars of Eternity developer returned to their roots in 2025 with not one, but two action RPGs. Avowed was great, but it was The Outer Worlds 2 that led the pack and sprinkled some of that Fallout: New Vegas magic onto the foundations of its solid, but not entirely successful predecessor, producing a significantly improved sequel. With trademark humour powering a sci-fi satire full of memorable moments, warring factions, and malleable skills and combat systems, The Outer Worlds 2 is one of Obsidian’s best RPGs to date, and as a result, one of Xbox’s.
Considering Microsoft’s recent history when it comes to the mishandling of its studios, it feels like somewhat of a miracle that we’re lucky enough to get brilliant little games like Keeper from Double Fine. A short and colourful trip, it takes a humble walking lighthouse and its bird companion on a journey full of puzzles that surprises with each turn and tumble its story and characters take. What starts out seeming so simple steadily reveals its secrets and joys in a hidden gem that feels like the exact sort of experience Game Pass was created for.
BioWare’s oft-forgotten 2005 RPG is the evolutionary link between Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. The Chinese mythology-inspired Jade Empire builds upon the moral choices of KOTOR, but leaves behind its cumbersome D&D-rooted combat in favour of real-time battles that better convey the fluidity of martial arts. With its wonderful companions, engaging romances, and richly detailed original worldbuilding, Jade Empire is very clearly the starting point for BioWare’s glittering 360 era, even if its achievements were quickly eclipsed by Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
Where Gears of War 4 reflected many of the themes of its predecessors, Gears 5 shattered the mirror to take the COGs into something bigger. Kait Diaz, JD Fenix, and Del Walker are joined by Marcus Fenix and other familiar faces in a story that expands the Gears of War lore in an exciting way as they are pitted against the Swarm’s escalated aggression. New combat additions like Jack’s abilities make for great campaign gameplay updates without straying too far from the focus on excellent cover-shooting, and its larger sandbox environments keep things fresh with optional exploration and, of course, more combat challenges. The iconic, gory mess of gunplay is also fantastic in the variety of multiplayer modes and Horde. Developer The Coalition put the cherry on top of this fantastic third-person shooter with the Hivebusters DLC, which features entirely new characters and a story that complements the main campaign. This complete package is easily on the Xbox One’s finest games.
Tunic looks adorable, but it hides a secret beneath its cute surface: it is an unapologetic cross between a 2D Zelda game and a soulslike. In Tunic, there are no tutorials or explanations of any kind. Ever. Instead, everything you need to know must be discovered and/or intuited from the pages of the old-school video game instruction manual you’ll find scattered about its overworld. Oh, except the text on those pages isn’t in any language spoken on Earth, but rather in its own unique-to-Tunic tongue. A timed console exclusive for the Xbox Series generation, Tunic plays like a game made for the adult versions of those who grew up on The Legend of Zelda before it went 3D, and we love it for that.
Xbox was envisioned as a bridge between the arcane sprawl of PC gaming and the streamlined comfort of the living room, a theory put to the test and proven by 2002’s Morrowind. The idea of exploring such an unwieldy RPG on a TV set, let alone navigating its many-layered menus with a big dog like the Duke controller in your hands, seemed unthinkable, but it largely works with some compromises. Visual fidelity is fine, but mod support is left behind, with console commands replaced by nigh-mandatory cheat codes. Stability is shaky and frequent saving is encouraged, despite increasing the already brutal load times. Bethesda worked closely with Xbox to unlock the console’s potential, utilizing tricks like stealthy system reboots to clear up memory. The relationship would blossom further with Oblivion’s Xbox 360 breakout and culminate in Microsoft purchasing the studio for $7.5 billion.
One of Xbox Live Arcade’s last gems was also a game so richly layered and textured that it strained the definition of what we’d known XBLA games to be up to that time. State of Decay was a bold rethink of the post-apocalyptic zombie game, focusing on simple survival and relationship management with your fellow humans rather than blasting as many undead as possible. Set in an open world, travel around the map could be stressful – as it probably really would be if we were ever trapped in a zombie apocalypse. It’s true that State of Decay was pretty rough around the edges with regard to bugs and technical performance, but its role-playing magnificence was well worth the extraneous hurdles you had to jump over (or, more accurately, barrel through in your truck that’s dangerously low on gas).
If the original Modern Warfare established Call of Duty as a multiplayer behemoth, then Black Ops 2 turned it into the customisable colossus it is today. While 2011’s MW3 introduced weapon levelling, BLOPS 2 transformed it into the conveyor belt of modification unlocks we take for granted today. Those upgraded guns were fitted into a complete soldier package using the new Pick 10 system, allowing you to create your ideal class by arranging 10 components into the perfect form. Alongside an array of fantastic maps and modes, it’s little wonder that BLOPS 2 is considered one of CoD’s multiplayer peaks. Meanwhile, the outlandish campaign featured branching storylines and strange FPS/RTS hybrid missions, making it one of the most ambitious single-player offerings in the series’ multi-decade history.
In 2008, the idea that Microsoft would exclusively publish a JRPG for one of its consoles was an entirely left-field one. But that’s exactly what happened when Lost Odyssey arrived on the Xbox 360. Conceived and written by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, it clearly built upon the games he’d made for Nintendo and Sony platforms in more ways than one — namely, its approach to turn-based combat and the compositions of Nobuo Uematsu for its soundtrack. There’s no doubting the huge ambition behind what was supposed to be the first in a new series; Lost Odyssey was the largest Xbox game to date when it launched, taking up the space of four dual-layer DVDs. But one game is all we would ever get. It was praised for its rich story and compelling characters, but criticised for its dated approach to battling that ultimately left it feeling like an imitation of JRPG greats rather than a bold new leap for the genre. Lost Odyssey is still great when taken in isolation, though, and remains a curious Japanese side story for an otherwise Western-focused console library.
Building on the giddy, arcade-like thrills of SSX Tricky, SSX 3 expanded its courses into a full-on open-world ski resort that gave you the freedom to either tackle preset paths or just carve your own trails down the slopes of its towering terrain. Its controls were effortlessly precise and weighty, and its trick system felt smooth and rewarding, with a skill ceiling higher than K2 for those who wished to master its complex combos and Uber tricks. In fact, SSX 3 was so close to being perfect that it basically set an impossible standard for any subsequent snowboarding games to reach. Ubisoft’s Steep couldn’t achieve enough air to match SSX 3’s peak, and even the later series follow-ups like SSX on Tour and SSX Blur failed to conjure up the same kind of mountainside magic. We’re not trying to take the piste here, but SSX 3 isn’t just the greatest snowboarding game ever made; it might also be one of the best sports sims, period.
Its stunning, painterly art-style might invite expectations of a gentle, Ghibli-esque journey, but beneath Ori and the Blind Forest’s cutesy creature design lies a seriously demanding Metroidvania-style adventure. Ori evolves from powerless sprite-child to whirling dervish of destruction by gradually gaining the ability to double-jump, slingshot, and stomp through every insectoid enemy in their path, in an adventure that twists every which way across a sprawling 2D landscape of intoxicatingly beautiful interconnected areas. Its platforming is undeniably trying at times, but the juice is worth the squeeze, as Ori and the Blind Forest delivers a powerful narrative about family, hope, and sacrifice, the likes of which isn’t normally found outside of big-budget animated films. Its sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, may well have refined its combat and expanded upon its world, but Ori’s original adventure – initially an Xbox One exclusive – remains a special sojourn to be savoured.
After making a splash with Max Payne, Remedy Entertainment sold the franchise to Take-Two and partnered with Microsoft for the even more ambitious Alan Wake. Inspired by the misty Northwest aura of Twin Peaks and the self-referential side of Stephen King, the game spent years floundering as a sprawling open world before it was scrapped and reborn as an episodic thriller. It’s a Prestige game that screams “TV show” and oozes with funky product placement. You won’t find Energizer batteries, Verizon ads, or Microsoft Tag codes in the modern remaster, leaving this Xbox 360 classic as a flashlit fossil of the brand’s history.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (which predates the original Xbox) and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 (which did debut on Microsoft’s first console) aren’t just considered two of the best skating games in the business – they’re rightly regarded as amongst the greatest games ever made. However, when push comes to shuvit, it’s just impossible not to kickturn back to the grungy goodness of EA Black Box’s utterly brilliant Skate 2. While the first Skate set the tone for the series – a grounded, analogue stick-based trick system, a low-slung player camera to put the focus on realistic skating, and an authentic urban map that invited players to discover their own natural skating lines – Skate 2’s improvements were significant. The ability to get off your board and set positional markers were gamechangers at the height of the Xbox 360’s popularity, and made it a timeless classic that still holds up today. Dropping off the dam never, ever gets old. And hey, you could even change the colour of your board and clothes without it being a standalone microtransaction! Madcap yet meditative, Skate 2 is perfection on plywood.
Longtime Battlefield developer DICE proved it was capable of making more than just military shooters when it dropped Mirror’s Edge, a first-person parkour game where combat – and especially guns – are a last resort. Pulling off protagonist Faith’s moves in perfect sequence put you into a flow state, while the art direction is especially memorable on account of the near-future city’s stark use of primary colors that, in some cases, would visually cue where to go next. Mirror’s Edge was certainly a creative risk for DICE – a leap of Faith, if you will – and it paid off brilliantly.
A 2D murder mystery set in 16th-century Bavaria may not have been on anyone’s bingo card for Obsidian Entertainment in 2022, but that’s exactly what we got. Pentiment is a tense, details-driven detective game from the mind of Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer, which swaps out post-apocalyptic weaponry for the sharp tongue and soft brush of painter protagonist Andreas Maler, who is thrust into solving the case of a baron’s untimely death. A story full of intrigue with many choices to anxiously ponder over, Pentiment may not traditionally be the type of game you’d expect from an Xbox Game Studio, but we couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised by it.
Trials HD was actually developer RedLynx’s third crack at its addictive brand of meticulous motorcycling – the series began life as a browser-based Java game back in the year 2000. However, the much-publicised arrival of Trials HD on Xbox Live Arcade in 2009 turned the game into a bona fide phenomenon. Part racing game, part physics-based puzzle platformer, Trials HD is a gruelling competition against the clock (and your Xbox Live friends), about who can negotiate its series of increasingly tricky, 2.5D motorcycle trial courses the fastest. A trial-and-error masterpiece, Trials HD would have you chasing hundredths of a second into the wee hours of the morning if you weren’t careful. Asynchronous multiplayer at its finest and most frustrating.
The first Japanese studio to be part of Microsoft’s collection of developers, Tango Gameworks was built on the horror foundations of its founder, Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami. Having previously delivered The Evil Within series and Ghostwire: Tokyo, it’s fair enough to say that an ultra-colourful rhythm action game in the style of a Saturday morning animation was a little bit of a surprise for its next project. But that’s exactly what Hi-Fi Rush is, and its slick combat played to the beat of a soundtrack bursting with Nine Inch Nails, The Prodigy, and Fiona Apple hits turned out to be precisely as cool as that sounds. A pleasant surprise, it felt like a really great start to Tango Gameworks’ new era as an Xbox studio. All of this makes it even more baffling as to why the studio was frustratingly shut down just a year after Hi-Fi Rush’s release. Thankfully, the developer has since been saved by publisher Krafton, where hopes of a sequel live on.
The journey of Xbox into the Japanese market has been an uphill climb, but its persistence has resulted in some great games – Microsoft has bankrolled more than one prestige JRPG from legendary creators that barely moved the needle. It took a quirky Capcom sandbox about a Colorado shopping mall to become a killer app for Xbox 360. Dead Rising dazzled as a next generation stunner, with preposterous interactivity and enormous undead hordes that seemingly no other console could contain. Frank West’s punishing 72-hour-ordeal isn’t for the faint of heart or near of sight – the tiny text was all but illegible on standard definition TVs, prompting gamers to finally take the HDTV plunge just to decipher the intrusive ramblings of incessant questgiver Otis.
Halo 4 got more flak than it deserved, solely because it was the first mainline Halo game to be made without Bungie. But while we would agree that fledgling 343 Industries didn’t quite get the multiplayer right – unwisely following the Call of Duty-like loadouts path that Bungie’s Halo swan song, Reach, started down – it delivered a phenomenal single-player campaign that accomplished two things. First, Halo 4 was spectacularly gorgeous, pushing the aging Xbox 360 to its absolute limits. Second, it told a gripping, more personal story centered on the complicated relationship between Master Chief and Cortana, giving the former more lines of dialogue than he’d seemingly had in the previous three games combined. Halo’s post-Bungie track record has been inconsistent at best, but Halo 4 was never part of the problem.
Street Fighter 4 was the console fighting game at a time when the Xbox 360 dominated the living room. Capcom’s 2009 entry into its famed series hit just the spot as it mercurially blended an approachable design ideal for casual players with a level of depth targeted at hardcore fans, enabling the fighter to satisfy pretty much everyone who went toe-to-toe with Ryu, Ken, and the rest of its larger-than-life roster. Ignore its questionably animated cutscenes and it’s got pretty much everything you could hope for from a Street Fighter game. It’s one of the best fighting games ever made, and outside of the arcade, there was no better place to play it than on Xbox.
“PEGGLE 2!” These two words reverberated around the arena that housed Microsoft’s E3 press conference back in 2013. This particular exclamation may have been turned into a timeless meme, but let me tell you, I was just as excited as PopCap co-founder John Vechey was that day. A sequel to the high-score chasing, glowing peg-shooting puzzle arcade classic, Peggle 2 is as pure a joy as video games can be. Packed with dozens of levels to perfect and numerous fun characters with their own game-changing abilities to do that with, Peggle 2 was exclusive to Xbox for almost a year, and, somewhat sadly, marked the end of an era for PopCap, which had recently been acquired by EA. Outside of a few Bejeweled and Plants Vs. Zombies sequels, spin-offs, and mobile versions, the once innovative studio is now relatively quiet and home to none of its original leaders. What I’d give for a Peggle 3, though. Even if there’s no E3 to announce it at anymore.
The sixth generation of consoles was arguably the golden age of racing games. Some of the genre’s biggest series have never sold better than they did at the height of the early- to mid-2000s. Back then, pure driving still loomed large. Indeed, on the original Xbox Microsoft published FOUR separate, first-party racers alone: Midtown Madness 3, the RalliSport Challenge series, the original Forza Motorsport, and the first two Project Gotham Racing games. In a tight race, however, it’s probably PGR2 that deserves the kudos. From automotive maestros Bizarre Creations, PGR2 was an exercise in high-speed, arcade racing perfection, packed full of the hottest cars of the era and focused on tight racing through a range of real-world cities like Barcelona, Stockholm, Sydney, Edinburgh, Washington D.C. and many more. Not a good enough case? Well, keep in mind that PGR2 was also the birthplace of Geometry Wars.
CoD was an Xbox cornerstone long before Microsoft’s Activision acquisition, back when Call of Duty 2 blitzed through the Xbox 360 launch as its most essential title. Roughly four out of every five early adopters shelled out $60 to christen their new consoles with Infinity Ward’s smash hit sequel, which introduces modern FPS staples like regenerating health and on-screen grenade indicators. The campaign is a cinematic triumph spanning four different POVs across three continents, but CoD’s transition to console came with some caveats: the PC version’s free multiplayer supported 64 soldiers, but hardware constraints capped the console at just eight– despite the premium price of Xbox Live.
Until Mark of the Ninja arrived on Xbox Live Arcade in 2012, 2D stealth hadn’t been done memorably well in quite a long time. Developer Klei Entertainment changed that with their comic-book-styled, side-scrolling stealth gem that mixed an excellent use of light, shadow, and sound with fun items, multiple ways to complete each stage, and engaging challenges you got duly rewarded for – like completing a level without killing anyone. Mark of the Ninja plays just as well today as it did when it first dropped, and so remains one of the very best stealth games out there.
Slinking out of the garage way back in 2006, Eden Games’ Test Drive: Unlimited weaponised the cutting-edge connectivity of the brand-new Xbox 360 and Xbox Live for a pioneering, open-world driving MMO that was stunningly ahead of its time. However, it’s 2012’s Forza Horizon – from UK racing powerhouse Playground Games – that stood on its shoulders and went on to set the tone for more than a decade of open-world racing dominance. Horizon took Forza Motorsport’s dedicated commitment to curating a comprehensively nerdy car list – plus its recognisable look and feel – and set it all loose on the open roads of rural Colorado to a rocking soundtrack. Everyone has their favourite Forza Horizon. Maybe you love the seasonal shifts of FH4, or you’re one of the 50 million players of FH5. Sentimentally, FH3 is more or less my favourite game… of all time. However, there’s no denying the impact of the first Forza Horizon on the Xbox world.
Jet Set Radio was yet another Sega series in need of a new home following the infamous failure of the Dreamcast. Luckily for fans of skating around a futuristic Tokyo, it found exactly that in the original Xbox when Jet Set Radio Future landed in 2002. This switch to Microsoft hardware enabled the team at Smilebit to transport the series’ unique skating action into wider open-world zones and display its cel-shaded aesthetic in even greater fidelity, all powered by the kind of soundtrack that it’s hard to imagine Jet Set Radio without. As good a game as it was, it also broke out into the wider culture around it like few games do, translating itself into real-world fashion items, and even popping up in the music video for No Doubt’s “Hella Good”. A cult-classic, Jet Set Radio Future remains a series that its fervent fanbase would love to see return for one last roll of the shoe sole again. Sadly, it remains a colourful relic of its time. At least for now.
Grand Theft Auto’s dominance wasn’t always an inevitability. Before GTA 4 established platform parity in 2008, it still felt like a Sony-first franchise, and Xbox spent years searching for its own “GTA killer.” The first Saint’s Row leaned too hard into crime-sim imitation, but 2007’s Crackdown upended the open-world arms race with superhuman police leaping across buildings and gobbling up agility orbs in arcade ecstasy. The brainchild of GTA creator David Jones, Crackdown’s empowerment presaged other superhero sandboxes like Prototype and Infamous. And, if the prospect of picking up a car and pounding crooks into the Pacific City pavement wasn’t enticing enough, buying Crackdown was the only ticket into the could-not-miss beta for Halo 3.
Halo writer Joseph Staten directed Halo 3: ODST, a standalone spinoff set on Earth during the events of Halo 2. For the first time in Halo history, you didn’t play as a Spartan, but rather a very un-augmented ODST, meaning that Covenant Elites, Hunters, and Brutes were even larger and more imposing than you were used to. Between flashback missions that detailed the stories of each member of your team of “Helljumpers”, you explored a sprawling, open hub city, at night, in the rain, lending ODST a film noir vibe, which was beautifully reinforced by longtime Halo composer Marty O’Donnell’s stunning piano-driven, jazz-influenced soundtrack. And as a bonus, it also introduced the fantastic four-player PvE Firefight mode to Halo’s multiplayer.
Renowned developer Insomniac Games has historically stayed exclusive to PlayStation. The major exception was 2014’s Sunset Overdrive, an absolutely incredible open-world punk action-adventure that had style, attitude, and traversal that made navigating its dystopian world a blast. Play it now and you’ll see that it walked so that the studio’s subsequent Spider-Man games could run. Sunset Overdrive remains arguably the most underrated Xbox exclusive ever, done dirty by having the misfortune of shipping in Fall of 2014, when the Xbox brand was still reeling from the PR disaster that was the console’s unveiling in 2013.
Taking the timeless gameplay of Super Metroid and turbocharging it with modern twin-stick controls and striking Unreal Engine 3 visuals, Shadow Complex was a revelation on Xbox Live Arcade when it launched on Xbox 360 in 2009. A blockbuster action experience delivered at a budget price point, Shadow Complex is like a Metroidvania if it were made by JJ Abrams. It features a pulp thriller plot to blow up San Francisco and the only person who can stop it is an everyman hero who gradually evolves into an unstoppable cyber ninja, endowed with a growing arsenal of weapons and abilities, from foam grenades to create makeshift platforms to friction-dampening boots that allow him to sprint across water. It’s hard to say for sure, but it’s possible that the success of Shadow Complex helped to breathe new life into the Metroidvania sub-genre, which has since gone on to enjoy amazing adventures like Hollow Knight, Ori and the Blind Forest, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.
Developer Double Fine’s creative prowess shines once again with Psychonauts 2. Raz has moved up from psychic summer camp to psychic internship at his dream espionage organization, the Psychonauts. As these things go, trouble finds the spy-in-training quickly, demanding Raz dive into more wild minds as he tries to help save the Psychonauts from doom. As with its predecessor, there are plenty of collectibles to find, new and returning goofy characters, and a grander story with a bigger world to match. Neat new abilities join familiar ones with a good upgrade system that allows you to take on increasingly more challenging enemies like Bad Ideas, Regrets, Panic Attacks, and other terrors of the mind. Psychonauts 2 is simply more of what we’ve come to expect from Double Fine, which means a fantastically funny and meaningful adventure.
Microsoft poached Rare from Nintendo in hopes of importing some family-friendly charm to soften the Dew-drenched, deathmatch machismo of the Xbox brand. Its first attempt was doomed by the uninspired gameplay and eerily anatomical title of “Grabbed by the Ghoulies.” Viva Piñata was a more sophisticated swing, an off-kilter life sim where you recruit, tame, and breed a society of living candy vessels. Microsoft put its whole back into promoting the paper mâché menagerie, complete with a tie-in television series, but the game baffled fans hoping for a brand new Banjo-Kazooie. Still, Rare’s refusal to take the easy road is admirable, and much like the equally bizarre Nuts & Bolts, Viva Piñata has earned its flowers over time.
Microsoft Flight Simulator is witchcraft. There’s really no other way to describe a game where every person who plays it can quip, “Hey, I can see my house from here.” The rebirth of the over 40-year-old Flight Simulator series – which had been on ice since Flight Simulator X in 2006 – Microsoft Flight Simulator is, without exaggeration, one of the most astonishing technical achievements in the business. With 2000 terabytes of satellite and high-altitude photography on tap, Microsoft Flight Simulator can stream THE ENTIRE WORLD to your TV. Arriving in 2020 (just as the world had stopped anybody travelling anywhere) Microsoft Flight Simulator was the perfect game for an imperfect time – but it remains a jaw-dropping experience for the uninitiated even today.
Limbo is one of the most beautiful games – by any definition or interpretation of the word – ever made. It has no dialogue and yet tells a moving story, with impeccable sound design that begs to be experienced through a good pair of headphones. Its puzzle-platformer gameplay isn’t overly complex or difficult, but every moment is exhilarating. If you’ve never played Limbo, which was one of the signature Xbox Live Arcade games for the Xbox 360, fix that immediately. It remains as brilliant as ever.
It’s certainly true that Forza Motorsport games throughout the Xbox One era – and all the way up to 2023’s Forza Motorsport for Xbox Series X|S and PC – have maintained the series’ fabulous feel and expanded the garage. The consensus amongst the Forza faithful, however, is that Forza Motorsport 4 represents the peak of the franchise, dropping just as it was becoming evident seismic shifts in car culture were imminent. “We are an endangered species, you and me,” riffs Jeremy Clarkson in the game’s intro, riding high on the surging popularity of the BBC’s Top Gear in the late 2000s. “We fear for our love of roaring V8s and the smell of burnt rubber. We’re told to think of economy and the environment, not excitement and enjoyment. In an age of hybrid this and lentil-matic that, we are the odd ones out.” Arriving on the tail-end of the Xbox 360, Forza Motorsport 4 was the absolute king of the car-PG format at the time. It had the vehicle dynamics. It had the tuning options. It had the richest selection of cars from all over the globe – not just Japan – and you could apply highly-detailed liveries to them. It even had the ability to run totally custom events with the AI driving handpicked cars selected from your own garage, which no Forza Motorsport game has allowed since.
It’s perhaps easy to forget just how massive it felt that a new Tomb Raider game was going to be exclusive to an Xbox console. But that’s exactly what happened when Crystal Dynamics’ 2015 sequel landed on Xbox One a whole year before it did on PlayStation 4. At a time when Nathan Drake was one of Sony’s leading poster boys, it’s not difficult to see why Microsoft would be so keen on getting the jump on its rival by securing his forebearer, Lara Croft. But beyond the business backstory, there remains the fact that Rise of the Tomb Raider is a fantastic game in its own right, and one that can genuinely go toe-to-toe with the best that the Uncharted series has to offer. Lara’s Siberian expedition opens up into a fantastic stealth-action playground with secrets and treasures hidden in the snow, glinting in dark caves, and, yes, buried deep in tombs. It’s the pick of the modern Tomb Raider games and, arguably, the best the series has ever been, as well as being a landmark moment in the long-running console wars.
Licensed games were largely seen as a punchline before the age of Xbox; lazy cash-ins pilloried for ruining countless weekend rentals. Things changed in the 2000s as high-quality IP adaptations finally came into their own, like The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. Instead of an uninspired movie tie-in, Butcher Bay serves as a canonical prequel to Pitch Black, exploring Riddick’s breakout from the titular triple-max security prison. Developed with the input and begoggled likeness of devoted gamer Vin Diesel, it offers an atmospheric stealth experience that stands out from the bombastic shooters that defined the platform. Butcher Bay helped restore the reputation of licensed games alongside other Xbox hits of the era, like Spider-Man 2, several Lord of the Rings bangers, and, of course, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic– stay tuned for more on that one.
Hades and its sequel may have introduced the artistic powerhouse that is Supergiant Games to the masses, but the journey towards those masterpieces began with a little Xbox Live Arcade game called Bastion. Released as part of 2011’s Summer of Arcade series, this isometric ARPG has you take “The Kid” on a journey through beautiful hand-painted locations that construct themselves, tile by tile, as you push onwards into unseen dangers. You can see the building blocks of what would become Hades in the weapons, which all offer unique spins on the core combat, as well as Darren Korb’s astonishing music and Jen Zee’s art, but the thing that really makes Bastion stand tall remains unique: a dynamic narration, provided by the honeyed tones of Logan Cunningham, that commentates on every battle you fight and choice you make.
While it might not have been the first game to offer a morality system, action-RPG Fable stood out from the rest by making your choices glaringly apparent, with both your evolving appearance and in the reactions from the world around you. A noble character developed a halo and was cheered on by villagers, while naughtier adventurers sprouted horns and forced non-playable characters to recoil in horror. As a result, the world of Albion felt truly alive, whether you were roaming its winding countryside paths or ducking into the nearest inn for a pint, but it also didn’t take itself too seriously. Released on the original Xbox in 2004, Fable was British developed and its distinct, self-aware and often absurd sense of humour gave it a refreshingly charming atmosphere completely at odds with the more serious approaches of other RPGs at the time. After all, how many Final Fantasy games have a dedicated fart button? That cheekiness combined with a vibrant art style and simple-yet-satisfying combat system made Fable an approachable on-ramp to the RPG genre for a lot of Xbox owners, and provided plenty of fond memories for anyone who’s ever been chastened for chasing chickens.
Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge felt somewhat revolutionary, because you could actually get out of the plane. Sure it was only in select spots, such as to hop into a stationary gun turret, but this was 2003, when nobody outside of Rockstar had cracked the open-world code yet. And so this beautiful, alternate-history 1930s aerial combat game with gamepad-perfect arcade-y controls was incredibly fun to play, not to mention memorable for its unique setting and uniquely fun 16-player multiplayer matches via split-screen, System Link, or Xbox Live. It’s a shame that it never got a sequel, but it nevertheless left a mark on Xbox, and is now fondly remembered over 20 years later.
Cuphead floored everyone when it was first revealed at an indie showcase. When it finally shipped – initially as an Xbox exclusive – it somehow managed to deliver on its unbelievable potential. We say “unbelievable” because it was genuinely difficult to see how it could have been made: every frame was hand-drawn and inked. But it had gameplay to match the graphics, with boss battle after boss battle challenging you (and a friend, if a second player jumped in as Mugman). A singular triumph, Cuphead is as special today as it was the day it was released for Xbox One.
Xbox has, not entirely unfairly, earned a somewhat “aggro” image over the years. But, nestled cozily between soul-patched COG soldiers and teabagging Spartans is a tender meditation on healing. A souped-up sequel to Moon Studios’ stellar Ori and the Blind Forest, Will of the Wisps swaps sprites for fluid 3D models and multilayered dreamscapes that paint a stunning HDR showcase. The richer world, expanded combat, and welcome quality-of-life improvements refined Ori’s first adventure into a Metroidvania masterpiece of kinetic movement, breathtaking art design, and emotional storytelling that hits harder than its cozy artstyle suggests.
Braid was one of the most progressive puzzle-platform games at the time of its exclusive release on the Xbox 360 in 2008, and more than a decade later it’s lost none of its impact. Numerous other games have used a rewind ability to correct an untimely death or to undo a racing line that veers too wide on a corner, but very few offer a level of time manipulation as consistently captivating as the evolving temporal powers found in Braid. Each of its six worlds serve up a fresh new spin on the core concept – in one the flow of time is matched to the main character’s movements to the left or right, while in another a shadow character appears after time is rewound to perform an instant replay of the player’s previous actions. Braid wasn’t just a brilliant game in its own right, though, it was also a significant early milestone for the Xbox Live Arcade service, proving that indie games could find major success with console audiences. Nowadays indie games dominate the digital storefronts of Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, but these audiences may never have been exposed to the likes of Hollow Knight, Celeste, or Stardew Valley, were it not for the groundbreaking efforts of Jonathon Blow’s masterpiece. We only wish we could turn back time to play Braid for the first time all over again.
2007’s Assassin’s Creed may have been a solid first stab at an open-world assassin adventure, but it wasn’t until its 2009 follow-up that Ubisoft Montreal managed to drop down from the rafters and truly nail the execution. Assassin’s Creed 2 is resoundingly superior to its predecessor in absolutely every way; its Italian renaissance setting is vast and vibrant, its combat and parkour systems are deeper and more fluid, its side quests and activities are surprising and diverse, and its hero, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, is charismatic and relatable, remaining arguably the most compelling protagonist in the series to date. The Assassin’s Creed series has subsequently had more ups and downs than a run across a row of rooftops, but long before it became bogged down with unnecessary RPG systems and open-world bloat, Assassin’s Creed 2 stood as a landmark for the series so tall you could just about spring off the top of it and plummet down into a conveniently placed haybale.
Due to Rock Band’s unique nature, we’ve chosen Rock Band 3 here even though it wasn’t necessarily the peak of the series’ power because it rolled in all of the DLC songs from the previous two games, and also added an all-new fifth instrument: keyboards. If you were a gamer during the Rock Band/Guitar Hero era, odds are you have very fond memories of your time playing Harmonix’s music-simulating masterpiece. Simply put, there truly wasn’t – and still hasn’t been – a multiplayer experience anything like it. It somehow managed to accomplish what it set out to do: make you feel like you were in a rock band, playing your favorite songs with your friends.
Ubisoft answered the tactical espionage action of Konami’s Metal Gear Solid with its dadcore spycraft classic, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. This timed-exclusive embodies everything that separated the first Xbox from its console contemporaries: Splinter Cell is Western. It oozes serious GWOT-era operator vibes and boasts best-in-class lighting tech driven by gadgets and shadows. Above all else, it’s green. Splinter Cell couldn’t be more Xbox if it had a built-in Ethernet port. Sam Fisher would eventually infiltrate other platforms, but his first mission helped define Xbox as the home for hardnosed, hardware-forward action.
Despite being one of the most popular superheroes in the history of spandex, the Dark Knight hadn’t really enjoyed too many successful outings in the world of video games prior to 2009. That all changed with the release of Batman: Arkham Asylum, an instant Caped Crusader classic that fused the ingenious storytelling techniques and ominous atmosphere of BioShock with the moreish, gadget-based exploration of Metroid to produce a compelling creep around an island institution crawling with iconic villains. Batman: Arkham Asylum ratcheted up the standard for superhero games moving forward and put developer Rocksteady Studios on the map. Sure, 2011’s Arkham City may have given us a bigger sandbox to glide around in, and it wasn’t until 2015’s Arkham Knight that we were finally handed the keys to the Batmobile, but Arkham Asylum that was the first game to properly make us feel like we’d donned the cowl and strapped on the utility belt of the World’s Greatest Detective, and for that reason it still looms larger than a Bat signal beamed above the Gotham City skyline.
After spending a decade in cold storage, it was astonishing to see Fallout spring back to life in 2008. This wasn’t just a new sequel, though. The series’ resurrection, handled by new custodian Bethesda Game Studios, felt like a genuine miracle. Transformed from an isometric CRPG into an expansive, sprawling open world, Fallout 3 felt like leaping into the future with a single step, even if the ramshackle nature of the Gamebryo engine made that step a little clumsy. Far more than the “Oblivion with guns” that sceptics once predicted, Bethesda’s careful reimagining of Interplay’s original ideas became an irradiated sandbox of possibilities, filled with deep dialogue trees, intersecting systems, and stories of the long-dead told through hundreds of posed skeletons.
Fallout 3 and its successor, New Vegas, are similarly shaped RPGs, hence them being so close together on this list. But while they may look alike, New Vegas is cut from very different cloth, taking its predecessor’s many achievements and refining them to create a more immersive, reactive experience. As you navigate the shark-infested waters of the Mojave wasteland, your relationships with the world’s multiple factions are pushed, pulled, and twisted. Deep role-playing systems allow you to achieve your goals through a wide variety of approaches, but more importantly, the story bends to your choices, resulting in a finale that feels entirely of your orchestration. It’s the journey, though, that’s ultimately more important than the destination, and New Vegas’ array of incredibly written quests, intelligent plot beats, and cast of fantastically messy characters is what makes it one of the finest RPGs of the 21st century.
The core of MachineGames, developer of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, got its start working on another game on this list, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. The parallels between these games grow more obvious the more time you spend with Indy, even though their settings, protagonists, and tones have nothing in common. But The Great Circle, like Riddick, takes a licensed character and builds an unexpected framework of gameplay around him that works brilliantly. No one expected a first-person Indiana Jones, but the more you play, the more sense it makes. Add in the puzzles, stealth gameplay, and note-perfect performance from Harrison Ford stand-in Troy Baker and you have the best that MachineGames has made yet, and arguably the best Bethesda-published game of the Xbox Series generation.
Rare’s swashbuckling pirate fantasy released in a famously barebones state, though the emptiness is partly the point. Sea of Thieves strips away minimaps, quest logs, and traditional progression in favor of a nearly HUD-less online experience that offers players “tools, not rules” designed for emergent stories and nautical camaraderie. Despite a commercially successful maiden voyage, Sea of Thieves’ lack of structure raised doubts about its long-term viability, but Rare found its sea legs with years of free expansions and an excellent Anniversary Update that lured players into a pirate’s life. Microsoft’s most successful new IP of the generation, Sea of Thieves ultimately enticed 40 million scurvy dogs to set sail aloft its immaculately rendered waves, transforming a risky experiment into a return to form for Rare and a pillar of the modern Xbox age.
While the Xbox brand is arguably best known for its muscular shooters, one of its biggest success stories is a platformer designed as a tribute to 1990s Nintendo. Super Meat Boy landed on XBLA in 2010 and was likely responsible for thousands of broken controllers that year, thanks to its incredibly difficult (or “old-school”) platforming challenges. As a small cube of bloody meat, you must run and jump with absolute split-second precision through over 300 gauntlets of swinging saw blades, crumbling floors, incoming missiles, and fatal drops, all in the name of rescuing your beloved Bandage Girl from the evil Dr. Fetus. Its genius quirk is that you leave trails of meat juice wherever you run, which remain in place across your many, many, many attempts at each level. Not by your own choice, you’ll paint the town red.
Up until Grand Theft Auto 4, the series had been a PlayStation timed exclusive. But Microsoft not only convinced Rockstar to ship Niko Bellic’s immigrant crime story day-and-date on the Xbox 360, they also ponied up to secure timed exclusivity on not one but two outstanding expansions: The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. But even setting the business stuff aside, GTA 4 was simply incredible – a true next-gen game built from the ground up for the Xbox 360 generation. It took players back to Liberty City, where the series’ modern life began with GTA 3, but this rendition of Rockstar’s fictional New York City was filled with new memorable characters (Brucie!) and hilarious universe-builders like the in-game TV shows. GTA 4 took the series to a new level, both technically and creatively.
The most downloaded Xbox Live Arcade game in history, it’s somewhat surprising that Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved started out life as a minigame in Project Gotham Racing 2, but life is funny like that. A high-score chaser of the most moreish kind, Geometry Wars’ beauty is in its simplicity: you’re tasked with little more than gunning down increasingly dangerous waves of enemies while avoiding swarms of colourful, pixelated shapes. With this twin-stick shooter, developer Bizarre Creations created a surprise hit that was played as much as any other in the 360 era, and is just as satisfying (and as much of a threat to any other task you may have planned) today as it was back in 2005. Sometimes less really is more.
Frequently hailed as the pinnacle of arcade racing, Burnout 3: Takedown inverts the genre by rewarding ruthless aggression. Build boost by tempting traffic fate and detonate your rivals with the titular mechanism, slowing time to savor the riveting real-time deformation of their shattered chassis. And if you find yourself on the wrong end of a pileup, the Aftertouch mechanic lets you nudge your smoldering ruin to make a posthumous play against your opponents. Paired with the pileup pyromania of Crash Mode and DJ Stryker’s infectious pop punk playlist, Burnout 3 remains a masterpiece of vehicular violence.
Exploring mysteries among the stars of a dying solar system is simultaneously somehow peaceful and exhilarating in Outer Wilds. Every 22 minutes, everything ends. Except for you, the end is just another beginning and another chance to roast a marshmallow at a campfire. Or, you know, figure out why you’re stuck in a time loop. Outer Wilds leaves several threads on the ground for players to pick up, pull on, drop, and unravel at any pace, making it an adventure that rewards your curiosity. The more you learn about the strange solar system’s history and natural phenomenon, the more threads you’ll be able to follow. The gorgeous music, creative planet design, and gut punch of a story makes Outer Wilds as impactful as crash landing your ship into one its wild planets.
While it’s no surprise to see one of the greatest RPGs of all time on this list, its deserving placement here is as much to do with the Xbox 360 as it is Bethesda’s achievements. If you were there for its 2011 launch, you’ll recall the debilitating bugs of the PS3 version, among them a save file problem that caused so many performance issues that it rendered the game near unplayable. The Xbox 360 version suffered far fewer issues, making Microsoft’s console the default place to experience the remarkably detailed, sprawling land of Skyrim. While it can be successfully argued that both Oblivion and Morrowind are better, more interesting RPGs, there’s no rebuttal for Skyrim’s sense of place; Bethesda created one of the most authentic worlds of the generation. No wonder it’s been able to effortlessly coax people back to it with multiple re-releases.
Left 4 Dead 2 isn’t an unusual sequel in the traditional sense: it took everything its preceding four-player PvE zombie-slaying first-person shooter did so well and made it all even better. What is unusual is how quickly it arrived: Valve, a top-of-the-industry powerhouse not known for getting anything done with haste, turned the sequel around in a year. And despite the lightning-fast turnaround, it didn’t feel the slightest bit rushed. It was as polished as ever, delivering four new survivors and five sublimely themed new campaigns, as well as an improved AI Director that kept gameplay fresh on every single run. And don’t forget about the return of Versus, a stellar PvP mode in which human players took control of the Special Infected with the aim of making the human-controlled Survivors’ lives a living Hell. Sadly, though, Valve still can’t count to three, and so L4D2 is the most recent game in this stellar series.
In 2006, Xbox 360 owners were craving a shooter that would do for Microsoft’s second generation system what Halo: Combat Evolved did for the original Xbox, and their appetite for destruction was well and truly sated by Epic Games’ Gears of War. This landmark third-person shooter featured revolutionary cover mechanics, satisfyingly weighty combat, and high definition visuals that were truly cutting edge… And by that we mean the petrol-powered, skull-splitting chainsaw bayonet form of cutting edge. Gears of War was both gore-packed and gorgeous, but there were plenty of smarts beneath its striking surface level sheen, with innovative features like the Active Reload mechanic that enabled faster reloads and damage boosts from the perfectly timed chambering of fresh ammo clips, to keep players invested in every carbine rifle shot they spent. Gears of War would go on to sell over five million copies, spawn a series of sequels, spin-offs and remakes, and be reimagined in everything from books to board games, but it all started with the squad of roadie-running dude-bros in this original cover-based classic.
Bungie’s goodbye to Halo left nothing on the table, emotionally speaking. For some, Halo: Reach is their favorite in the entire series, largely on the back of how well the studio executed the narrative and gameplay behind the campaign, in which players lived out the doomed-from-the-start story of Noble Team, a group of Spartans sent to the planet Reach to fend off the first wave of Covenant before the events of Halo 1. Multiplayer isn’t what most players remember Reach for, but they absolutely remember Reach: the planet, the characters, and the campaign. It was a perfect farewell to a franchise from a legendary Xbox studio.
After delivering one of the GOAT adaptations of someone else’s IP, Bioware earned a sci-fi sandbox it didn’t have to share. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic vets Casey Hudson and Drew Karpyshyn built a formidable mythos from scratch, with a dozen sentient species, an ancient eldritch history, and a codex bursting with technobabble. The first Mass Effect is an absurd display of confidence for a brand new RPG setting, and its Paragon/Renegade morality system and long-tail choices were a glimpse into the future of seventh-generation storytelling. The mechanics and tech feel like a first draft, but Mass Effect only grows into its ambition throughout the trilogy, and it’s not a spoiler to say we haven’t seen the last of Commander Shepard on this list.
2D or not 2D? That is the question, or at least it was when it came to this wonderfully distinct puzzle-platformer that relied on the careful rotation of a colourful 3D world to uncover new 2D plains to navigate, cleverly turning otherwise impossible gaps into potential paths forward. Released in 2012 as a one-year exclusive on Xbox 360, Fez was an 8-bit inspired breath of fresh air that placed a heavy emphasis on player discovery and freedom, and featured a total absence of enemies and combat in order to minimise any sense of friction or frustration. Its intricate and immaculate design has since influenced a number of other excellent indie games like Monument Valley, Tunic, and Animal Well, but Fez isn’t some relic to be relegated to the annals of videogame history, it’s every bit as exciting to discover (or rediscover) today as it was more than a decade ago. Hats off.
Ahead of its release, creator Cliff Bleszinski brashly declared this shooter sequel to be “bigger, better, and more badass” than the 2006 original, but if anything he underpromised and overdelivered. Gears of War 2 was certainly all of the above, but also more brooding in its atmosphere, brainier with its smarter cover mechanics and the use of Locust as meatshields, and bloodier by far. If there’s a stretch of gameplay more soaked in gore than the shoulders-deep slosh through a Riftworm’s gushing innards midway through Gears of War 2’s spectacular campaign, we’re yet to experience it. Outside of its story, Gears of War 2 also delivered one of the defining multiplayer modes for the series with the debut of Horde mode, the fiercely addictive wave-based survival game type that has since been mimicked by countless other popular shooters like Call of Duty, Halo, and Doom. Bigger, better, and more badass? You better bloody believe it.
Rockstar inherited 2004’s Red Dead Revolver following its 2002 acquisition of Midnight Club and Smuggler’s Run developer Angel Studios. However, while that game began life as a Capcom-backed, conventional shooter that shared a seat at the saloon with the Japanese publisher’s iconic cowboy classic Gun.Smoke, 2010’s Red Dead Redemption was a different animal entirely. It’s a vast and sweeping open-world Western that takes Rockstar’s best-in-class approach to sandbox game design and sets it loose on the dying frontiers of the Old West of the early 1900s. All-time classics like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and cultural hits like HBO’s Deadwood are justifiably praised for their stunning depictions of this era of US history, but there’s a crucial department in which Red Dead Redemption comes up trumps. It doesn’t just put this world in front of you to observe – it transports you into it to live in. The piano player stopped in awe all over again when the unimpeachable Red Dead Redemption 2 strode through the swinging doors in 2018, but it can’t be understated what an essential Xbox 360 experience Red Dead Redemption was at the time.
Ninja Gaiden Black, the “1.1” version of the high-speed, high-skill action game that rebooted and revived the 1980s franchise, wasn’t just good. Or great. Or amazing. It was so close to perfect that its arguably still the best example of its genre, even in 2026. Across a series of memorable stages and unforgettably tough boss fights – we see you, Alma – Ninja Gaiden Black tested you at every turn. But it gave you every tool you needed right from the jump; it was simply up to you to learn how to properly wield those tools. As a bigger-picture aside, game director Tomonobu Itagaki, his colleagues at Team Ninja, and publisher Tecmo legitimized the Xbox as a viable platform for Japanese game developers, something the fledgling American-made Xbox sorely needed in order to stand a chance in the competitive console marketplace.
We’ve spent decades taking Peter Molyneux’s hyperbolic promises with a mountain of salt, but the over-ambitious dev definitely delivered with Fable 2. Lionhead’s sequel leaned hard into landchad life-sim fantasy: players buy property, procreate, and get punished with big devil horns for their lack of purity. A glowing “breadcrumb trail” expedites the exploration of Albion, while an economic aspect adds idle-game addictiveness to the RPG. Boasting a reactive world, interactive cutscenes, and a sense of whimsy unusual for Xbox, Fable 2 is a deep and deliciously British fairy tale about the moral turpitude of chasing passive income.
Sam Fisher snuck onto the gaming scene with Ubisoft Montreal’s smart and stunning stealth game Splinter Cell in 2002, and after an excellent sequel made by a different development squad, the Montreal team returned for 2005’s Chaos Theory, which wasn’t just the peak of the series, but one of the three best games to ever hit the original Xbox. Its sandbox-style single-player let you tackle missions in myriad ways (the Bank being among many highlights), its 3v3 Spies vs. Mercenaries multiplayer was unlike any other competitive multiplayer, and it even had a bespoke four-mission (later expanded to six via free DLC) two-player co-op campaign that was ahead of its time. It was also one of the best-looking (and sounding!) games on the first Xbox to boot. I gave this game a 9.9 out of 10 when I worked at Official Xbox Magazine, and I stand by that score.
Sure, The Elder Scrolls had been on a console before – the original Xbox got a (very good) port of Morrowind – but it was Oblivion arriving on PC and Xbox 360 simultaneously that truly sent this series into the upper stratosphere of RPGs. Not only was it a brilliant open world, high fantasy epic packed with memorable sidequests and hidden surprises aplenty (anyone else ever find the unicorn?), it was also a jaw-dropping visual stunner that boldly declared that the HD Era had arrived, and you had to buy a 360 ASAP to get in on the fun. Oblivion was the introduction to The Elder Scrolls for many gamers, and what an intro it was.
Few games have single-handedly had as big an impact on the industry as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. In 2007, developer Infinity Ward took the bold decision to switch up its established WW2 formula and take its first-person shooter into the present day. The result was not only one of the best FPS campaigns to ever have been created, but a multiplayer offering that revolutionised the way online shooters would be played for the next two decades. The former is packed with iconic missions, from its rain-soaked ship infiltration opening in Crew Expendable, to All Ghillied Up’s expectation-defying behind-enemy-lines sniper stealth, as well as introducing us to characters such as Captain Price and Soap MacTavish that fans would grow to love. The latter took age-old deathmatch and objective-based modes, but perfected them thanks to a fantastic selection of handcrafted maps, and a perks and levelling system that was simple yet oh-so-satisfying. At the time, it was near-impossible to think that a shooter could come along and challenge what Bungie was doing following Halo 3, especially on Xbox. Call of Duty not only did just that, but stole Master Chief’s thunder completely and, arguably, hasn’t given it back ever since. Co-creator Vince Zampella may recently have left us, but the legacy of what he helped build will live on through Modern Warfare and every shooter that has followed it.
BioWare was once the undisputed wizard of the in-depth PC CRPG, a reputation built upon the dense, isometric Infinity Engine that powered hits like Baldur’s Gate. Translating that breadth and depth from the desktop to the living room would be no easy task, and while Star Wars: Knights of the Republic doesn’t entirely succeed as a seamless console experience, it comes shockingly close. Developed at the height of the Star Wars prequel era, when licensed games still drew understandable side-eye, BioWare wisely declined LucasArts’ proposal to directly adapt Attack of the Clones. Instead, the studio told its own story set 4,000 years before the rise of the Empire, offering enough creative freedom to define the Old Republic era for decades to come. That latitude let BioWare stretch its narrative muscles and sketch the blueprint for the branching, character-driven storytelling that would eventually evolve into Mass Effect and Dragon Age. KOTOR is far from perfect. The rigid D&D-derived d20 rules are barely hidden behind the curtain, and you can practically hear dice clattering beneath the round-based combat that often devolves into an awkward slog of missed swings and clunky party wrangling. Multiple builds are available, but the power fantasy of lightsabers and O.P. Force abilities nudge most players down a similar path. Friction is constant between infuriating Swoop races, the momentum-shattering tutorial slog of Taris, and the tedium of the climactic Star Forge– but the sheer strength of the script absolves the game of its many mechanical sins. With compelling characters like the xenocidal droid HK-47 and emotionally unavailable himbo Carth Onasi, a planet-hopping journey that carries you across the Star Wars galaxy, and a monumental narrative twist that casts your entire experience in a shocking new light, KOTOR is a landmark game that truly cemented the RPG credibility of the Xbox brand.
One of the great ironies in gaming history is that Microsoft’s defining franchise for its Xbox console was introduced to the world by Steve Jobs on a Macworld stage. Bungie’s Halo began life as a real-time-strategy title for Mac and PC before mutating into the first-person shooter that changed everything forever. Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000 and fast-tracked Halo as the centerpiece of its strange new console, leaving the studio just nine frantic months to turn years of scattered prototypes into a system seller. Microsoft had so much riding on the project it even insisted on the clumsy “Combat Evolved” subtitle rather than allowing the simple, ethereal “Halo” to stand alone. It was a wild sprint, but Halo loudly delivered the blueprint for how shooters would come to function on console. While PC players juggled a gun for every number key, Halo forced tough choices by limiting your arsenal to two. Generous but subtle aim assist bridged the precision gap between mouse and thumbstick, no ironsights required. Grenades and melee were no longer awkward inventory items but immediate actions with dedicated buttons, unifying ranged attacks, explosives, and strikes into the “golden triangle” that finally made FPS feel intuitive on a couch. With Xbox Live still a year away, players lugged heavy CRTs between dorm rooms for LAN parties, daisy-chaining giant black consoles with System Link cables that seemed to stretch for miles, all to get three-shotted by a pistol in Battle Creek. Halo was worth it. The game gave birth to a community of fans, competitors, and creators that established the brand’s shared identity– and while it’s bittersweet to see such a foundational text finally appear on rival hardware with the “”Campaign Evolved”” remake’s PS5 version, Master Chief will carry the emerald spirit of Xbox wherever he goes.
Unlike the expressive mascot characters of Nintendo or Sony, the first Xbox was defined by a literally faceless super-soldier. Instead of a cute purple cube or a DVD player that could stand vertically, Xbox dominated your living room with a brooding black box. It’s not the most inviting aesthetic, but the brand has always been friendlier and more welcoming than its armor would let on. From the early days of Live to 360’s endearing avatars and social events like 1 vs. 100, the gruff Xbox has always harbored a secret desire to be an all-inclusive community destination– a festival, like Forza Horizon 5. FH5 is a frictionless open-world racing game that celebrates the fact that you’re playing it – it’s so aggressively friendly that the game literally greets you by name and calls you a superstar every chance it gets. It constantly showers you with cars, confetti, and accolades for almost everything you do across its breathtaking vistas. The driving hits a forgiving middle ground: less rigid than a stern racing simulator, but you aren’t exactly grinding rails or spamming boost. The cars have weight and the tires have grip, but there’s a helpful rewind button to keep the vibes intact. It’s a game that encourages you to forget the map and chase the horizon. Importantly, Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t leave anyone out of the festivities. It leads the industry with best-in-class accessibility, with granular difficulty, robust colorblind tools, and onscreen interpreters for two entirely unique sign languages. The inclusivity even extends to the character creator, which features options for prosthetics and hearing aids– all part of a brand-wide commitment that’s since become a core pillar of the Xbox identity. It’s a premium product with astonishing visuals, powerful sound design, and an engrossing loop of discovery that earned it IGN’s 2021 Game of the Year – the only racing game to ever pull that off – and if you had Game Pass, it was already waiting for you on day one. Forza Horizon 5 is the fully realized promise of the modern Xbox ecosystem, a subscription-selling showcase built on the belief that powerful hardware is best used to throw a fiesta for everyone.
For a massive corporate behemoth, Microsoft has been pretty solid when it comes to supporting artsy, indie titles, giving small developers the opportunity to turn their scrappy experiments into household-name hits that reshaped the industry from the bottom up. Leading off the initial Summer of Arcade lineup, Playdead’s Limbo embodied everything amazing about Xbox indie gaming: a melancholic, monochrome, impeccably-designed puzzle platformer with simple controls and a minimalistic HUD that offered little assistance in an age of overwhelming tutorialization. Limbo was everything a video game shouldn’t be by 2010 standards, but its triumph validated the idea that intent and atmosphere are a viable path to success. Playdead didn’t look to reinvent the wheel with its followup, Inside. Like Limbo, it’s a minimalistic side-scroller, but with richer lighting, thicker atmosphere, and a new engine that renders our silent hero’s gruesome ends with startling, wet fluidity. A new mechanic allows you to puppeteer NPCs to solve puzzles and traverse spaces, while a wordless, steadily escalating narrative evokes unthinkable horrors and enduring ambiguity. It all culminates in a shocking ending sequence that flips the perspective, mechanics, and genre itself into a body horror hoedown that must be experienced. The long wait for Inside nearly resulted in a victory for Microsoft’s biggest competition: while Limbo was a year-long Xbox exclusive, Inside was on the verge of signing a lucrative deal with Sony. Xbox head Phil Spencer personally intervened, reportedly telling the devs that he “can make anything happen.” The result was a 2-month exclusivity window in exchange for a massively-hyped reveal at E3 2014, a deal that solidified Xbox’s reputation as a patron of high-concept artistic vision and rewarded fans’ faith in the indie scene.
Xbox has played a vital role in translating the arcane complexity of PC-centric genres into a language spoken by the console masses, and there’s no better example of this superpower than BioShock. The spiritual successor to System Shock 2, a game so dense it has a dedicated “worm launcher” button, BioShock distills the multifaceted systems of an immersive sim into an easy-to-understand loop of drones, protectors, and harvesters – Little Sisters, Big Daddies, and medium-sized splicers– to be dealt with via plasmid powers, guns, and traps, with no need to memorize a phone book’s worth of keybinds. The birth of BioShock was not a simple one for Ken Levine and the crew at Irrational Games. Playtesters famously despised the dark setting and confusing experience all the way through its development, but the last second addition of an opening sequence primed players’ for the unforgettable fallen world they were about to witness– and served as one the greatest demos of all time. In 2007, as you watched your plane’s fuselage sink into the flaming, oil-slicked ocean and descended into the rotting Art Deco ruins of Rapture, it became utterly clear that the next gen had fully arrived – and it was only on Xbox 360. For a year, at least. But in that short time, BioShock was like an Electro Bolt to the veins of an industry in desperate need of storytelling ambition. Alongside Mass Effect, which arrived three months later, it spawned an artform-wide crisis of clunky moral choice systems and navel-gazing explorations of player agency. The game might seem quaint now, but like its shrugworthy final boss Atlas, BioShock carried a lot of Xbox’s prestige on its shoulders.
![<b>5. Halo 2</b><br><br> You couldn’t step outside in 2004 without inhaling hype for Halo 2 – it was a mix of anticipation and promotional mastery that hadn't been seen since the Mortal Mondays and Sonic 2sdays of years past. A viral ARG game called I Love Bees had IRC nerds braving hurricanes to hunt for payphones, while Halo 2’s trailers demanded space on the big screen before showings of I, Robot and Catwoman. Xbox exec Peter Moore got the release date permanently tattooed on his arm, and the band Breaking Benjamin blew us away with the first and best nu-metal song written specifically for Team Slayer. Expectations lay heavily on Bungie as the studio ballooned the sequel’s scope after Halo’s success, writing checks they simply couldn’t cash within the schedule. The entire third act of the campaign was cut, leaving an infamous cliffhanger as Master Chief tells us we’re about to get to the good part right before the game smashes to credits, and a large-scale “Warfare” mode involving airstrikes and squad-based combat was similarly scrapped. Everything about development spelled “disaster,” yet the game was anything but. Halo 2 landed like a Scorpion tank in the streets of New Mombasa, grossing $125 million within 24 hours of release. The single-player introduces new enemies like Brutes and offers the Covenant’s perspective through Keith David’s icy Arbiter, while dual-wielded weapons, tighter balance, and top-tier set piece missions earn Halo its blockbuster bona fides. It was the multiplayer, however, that truly made Halo 2 integral to Xbox. It didn’t launch with Xbox Live, though it wasn’t for lack of trying, and after making do for a year with the likes of MechAssault and Unreal Championship, players were rewarded with a revolutionary online experience. Matchmaking, stat-tracking, a seamless party system and official clan support allowed you to enlist your buddies in a brotherhood named [BUNZ]. More than just an incredible FPS, Halo 2 stitched together the social fabric of Xbox and laid the foundation for a connected world to come.](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/XIJyCrwNlI_b.pnJ9yyyzQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTEyNDI7aD0xMjQy/https://media.zenfs.com/en/ign_articles_326/a3f8b9474e9111e0e67ef309ba69711f)
You couldn’t step outside in 2004 without inhaling hype for Halo 2 – it was a mix of anticipation and promotional mastery that hadn’t been seen since the Mortal Mondays and Sonic 2sdays of years past. A viral ARG game called I Love Bees had IRC nerds braving hurricanes to hunt for payphones, while Halo 2’s trailers demanded space on the big screen before showings of I, Robot and Catwoman. Xbox exec Peter Moore got the release date permanently tattooed on his arm, and the band Breaking Benjamin blew us away with the first and best nu-metal song written specifically for Team Slayer. Expectations lay heavily on Bungie as the studio ballooned the sequel’s scope after Halo’s success, writing checks they simply couldn’t cash within the schedule. The entire third act of the campaign was cut, leaving an infamous cliffhanger as Master Chief tells us we’re about to get to the good part right before the game smashes to credits, and a large-scale “Warfare” mode involving airstrikes and squad-based combat was similarly scrapped. Everything about development spelled “disaster,” yet the game was anything but. Halo 2 landed like a Scorpion tank in the streets of New Mombasa, grossing $125 million within 24 hours of release. The single-player introduces new enemies like Brutes and offers the Covenant’s perspective through Keith David’s icy Arbiter, while dual-wielded weapons, tighter balance, and top-tier set piece missions earn Halo its blockbuster bona fides. It was the multiplayer, however, that truly made Halo 2 integral to Xbox. It didn’t launch with Xbox Live, though it wasn’t for lack of trying, and after making do for a year with the likes of MechAssault and Unreal Championship, players were rewarded with a revolutionary online experience. Matchmaking, stat-tracking, a seamless party system and official clan support allowed you to enlist your buddies in a brotherhood named [BUNZ]. More than just an incredible FPS, Halo 2 stitched together the social fabric of Xbox and laid the foundation for a connected world to come.
For better and for worse, Gears of War was the zeitgeist-defining franchise of seventh-generation console gaming. It popularized cover-based shooting amidst arenas filled with chest-high walls. It introduced the “roadie run,” a hunched camera sprint that shook like our hypermasculine heroes were being hounded by TMZ. Its ethos of “destroyed beauty” became shorthand for brown and bloom triple-A prestige, while melancholy pop covers attempted to imbue gravitas onto neckless meat mountains made of deltoids and durags. But something unexpected happened over time: Gears grew up. In a medium where sequels often buckle under bloat, every entry in the Gears of War trilogy successfully refined the formula. From the revolutionary Horde mode to the wall-bouncing shotgun meta of multiplayer, its mechanical systems sharpened and crystalized until they hit their final form in Gears of War 3. Gears 3 is the forever version of the series’ design, honed to razor precision and bolstered by additions like the beefed up Horde 2.0. We’d come to expect such incremental improvements from Gears over the years, but the real surprise was the story finally settling into its armor. After years of dismissal as a mindless shooter in which He-Men geeked on HGH brutalize snarling monsters, Gears 3 shocked the world with genuine emotional payoff: The reveal of Adam Fenix, the sacrifice of a fan-favorite character, and a somber reprise of “Mad World” that earns its tears for fears. Gears of War 3 is the swan song of the Unreal Engine 3 era, as Cliff Bleszinski and Epic squeeze every ounce of power, performance, and raw vascularity from aging Xbox 360 hardware to deliver a refreshingly vibrant finale that easily hangs with early Xbox One titles. While The Coalition carries the torch today and the series has emerged on other platforms, Gears of War 3 remains the pinnacle – a bro-dude blockbuster that leaves a lump in your throat and proves that behind all the bulk and bravado, Xbox actually has a soul.
Before it became the swirling cosmic mass around which the entire gaming industry revolves, Grand Theft Auto 5 was simply a highly-anticipated sequel. It was always going to be big, but few could have predicted the cultural gravity contained on that disc– or discs, plural, for Xbox 360 owners working around the console’s lack of Blu-ray support. By 2013, the hardware was eight years old, owners of aging consoles winced at the jet-engine roar of their machines and braced for flashing red rings as they booted up GTA 5, but the game ran with surprising resilience, proving Xbox was no longer a secondary platform for Rockstar’s crown jewel. That technical achievement was outshined only by ambition. GTA 5 reinvented the series with a tripartite protagonist structure that lets you experience the streets of Los Santos through the chaotic collision of three wildly different crime-story archetypes. A formalized heist system codified some of series’ most iconic past missions into a core game mechanic complete with strategic crew management and multi-stage setups, while its sandbox overflowed with bespoke activities and an unmatched sense of SoCal scale. More than a decade later, the city still feels alive in a way few open worlds ever have. The Xbox One version sanded away the remaining rough edges with visual upgrades and an eye-opening first-person mode, while giving GTA Online the headroom to metastasize into the default video game for millions of players. That longevity affirmed Xbox’s role as the ultimate generalist console– the best place to play the world’s biggest games. GTA 5 earns its place here through design excellence and cultural dominance, a landmark open-world achievement and a cornerstone of the Xbox identity: massive, accessible, endlessly replayable, and impossible to ignore.
BioWare’s greatest strength has always been its casts of kooky companions, and Mass Effect 2 leans into that entirely, constructing an entire triple-A experience about hanging out with your buddies, earning their trust, and hurling them headlong into a suicide mission because Martin Sheen told you to. The main plot, revolving around mysterious Collectors, is pretty obvious middle-chapter wheel spinning as we await the arrival of the Reapers, but the lack of forward propulsion doesn’t really matter when you’re falling in love with a girl in a gas mask or singing Gilbert and Sullivan with a brilliant amphibian. It’s a hard sci-fi, space opera slice of life. Mass Effect 2 sands down the overly-technical RPG barbs of its predecessor, moving away from tabletop-inspired combat in favor of punchy, cover-based shooting with regenerating health and snappy biotic powers on speed-dial. The aggravating planet exploration of the first game is replaced by the oddly zen loop of launching probes to farm resources for crucial upgrades. Even conversation receives a kinetic upgrade with the introduction of context-sensitive interrupts that allow Shepard to quite literally pull the trigger on certain scenes, providing the satisfaction of punting a mouthy merc mid-monologue. “BioWare Magic” has become a rather infamous and oft-debated industry term, but whatever it is, it’s extremely evident in Mass Effect 2. The magic is in making you care so deeply about the weirdo outcasts sitting in your cargo bay that the thought of losing even one of them is unacceptable. It turns a series of flags in your save file into a personal crusade to find the perfect permutation where all your friends survive. While Mass Effect 3 inflated the scale and delivered the saga a satisfying, (eventually) epic conclusion, Mass Effect 2 remains the series’ high water mark and the definitive Xbox RPG: a timeless fusion of hardware and heart.
Microsoft boss Satya Nadella recently backed Xbox by insisting that Microsoft is “long on gaming” and will always invest in it. Days later, Microsoft revealed early features of Project Helix, while confirming plans to send alpha versions of the hardware to developers in 2027. Whether it will also launch publicly in 2027, however, remains to be seen.
Continued external pressures on the games industry, such as component shortages and logistical challenges sparked by global trade issues — including an ever-changing set of tariffs and conflict in the Middle East — have contributed to higher costs across the board. Earlier today, Xbox’s big rival PlayStation confirmed it was raising its console prices yet again, with PS5 Pro set to rise in cost by a staggering $150. The PS5, of course, can already play numerous Xbox-published games — but is it an Xbox? Apparently no, not anymore.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
IGN and Yahoo may earn commission from links in this article.