Surprises and fan-pleasing references are hidden in plain sight around every corner, and the sprawling story has no shortage of classic villains to tangle with, from Joker and Two-Face to the more obscure Victor Zsasz and Hugo Strange. On top of all of that is an expanded range of gadgets that makes scouring the entire city for Riddler trophies a Batman fan's dream.
Look, you don't get an entire genre of game named after you and not make it on a game of the decade list. Dark Souls is arguably the most influential game of the decade.
Understandably, Demon's Souls did come first, but Dark Souls paved the way for the entire SoulsBorne franchise to become a cultural phenomenon, largely thanks to its central theme of survival and dedication.
Persevering among impossible odds that often feel unfair is a universal truth that every human understands. But what keeps people coming back is the tight combat system, intricate weapon upgrade trees, fashion souls dressing up with armor pieces , and world-building tucked neatly in the background and item descriptions for those willing to indulge themselves with a story of cyclical madness and suffering.
After more than a decade of hopeless dreaming, the fighting game community was finally blessed with a new Marvel vs. Capcom game. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 instantly reinvigorated the community with a modern character roster and a whole new set of combos and exploits to excavate from the complex game engine. Like any good sequel, Portal 2 takes what made the original so great and makes it much, much greater. The puzzles are more complex and brain-breakingly satisfying. The story and world are far more rich and detailed.
Not only is the overall scope of Portal 2 much broader, it even throws in a fiendishly difficult co-op mode. It's just as well Portal 2 set the bar so high, because Valve doesn't seem in any rush to make a third game.
For more, see our full Portal 2 review here. The first Saints Row was more or less an ersatz Grand Theft Auto with ragdoll physics and character customization, and the second one began to color outside the lines, but Saints Row The Third was where the franchise really came into its own and showed its true colors which are purple and silver, for the record.
The third entry transformed the eponymous heroes from a street gang to a cadre of celebrities running a global consumer brand, and then literally dropped them into the brand new city of Steelport, which rapidly became the goofiest sandbox action game to date.
Couple that with some top-notch developer support that has consistently added new content since release, and Terraria deserves to stand tall all on its own. There's a good reason why Skyrim has been ported to everything — even Amazon Alexa: it's fantastic. It is the quintessential open-world fantasy role-playing game. That it was released in and still hasn't been surpassed in its genre here at the end of the decade should give you a good idea of how high it set the bar.
Sure, it birthed many a meme and suffered many a glitch, but look at the game proper and you'll quickly remember why you fell in love with it. Before New Leaf, this cozy, low-stress simulation series had appeared in both Nintendo consoles and handhelds alike, but on 3DS it had finally found the perfect home. The little handheld was powerful enough to display beautiful graphics and animation and its portability inspired players to bring their towns with them anywhere to meet friends and share their game worlds in real life.
Fishing, bug collecting, buying furniture, and yes - even paying off a mortgage - have never been this fun and charming. Borderlands 2 improved on the already-great Borderlands with little tweaks and improvements to the experience in almost every category; BL2 brought better characters, a better antagonist Handsome Jack , improved though not perfected inventory management, and even the series' best DLC pack, 'Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep'.
To this day, we'd be hard-pressed to recommend a looter-shooter that looks and plays as well as this one does. For more, see our full Borderlands 2 review here. There's nothing quite like Diablo's hack-and-slash-and-loot gameplay formula. Blizzard further streamlined and refined that formula for the third main entry in the series.
And as flawed as Diablo III was early on hello, Auction House , Blizzard deserves credit for improving and expanding on the game until it became the new gold standard for the genre. The series even managed to make a seamless jump to consoles in the process.
Do you know the definition of insanity? The vivid, colorful, often psychedelic open-world setting of Far Cry 3 was a refreshing change after a slew of serious linear shooters with drab grey and brown palettes. You wanna know the definition of insanity? Not acknowledging this as one of the best games of the decade. For more, see our full Far Cry 3 review here.
Fez is one of the most clever puzzle platformers around, with mind-bending complexity and a deep web of secrets to uncover when you dig past its adorable exterior. While Fire Emblem had slowly been gaining popularity in the West, largely thanks to the inclusion of some its characters in Smash Bros.
Even if Switch's Fire Emblem: Three Houses furthered this popularity substantially, many hold strong that Awakening is the franchise's apex. Awakening set a standard for Fire Emblem moving forward by making the series more accessible, and adding a focus on inter-party relationships that will remain the norm for its foreseeable future.
No game simulates the feeling of being in command of a starship flying by the seat of your pants like FTL: Faster Than Light. It's a game you shouldn't expect to survive - more likely, you'll be blasted out of the sky by a vastly superior enemy ship or boarded by a death squad of giant killer insects who massacre your crew.
Its tactical combat never gets old, tons of loot and random events keep every game feeling unpredictable, and unlockable ships force you to change up your strategies.
And every so often, you might even win. A gruesome, fluorescent, neo-noir top-down shooter that often rapidly veered into beat-em-up and stealth territory, Hotline Miami was the arthouse indie darling that kicked the door down so hard it broke our nose and knocked us unconscious. For more, see our full Hotline Miami review here. Pure stealth games are hard to come by these days, but 's Mark of the Ninja served as a shining example of why this genre shouldn't be going extinct.
Its beautiful cel-shaded, comic-book-style art gave it a distinct look that brilliantly complemented its gameplay, and its story even managed to keep you hooked for the duration of the adventure. You got to do all sorts of ninja-y things, like crawl along ceilings, throw ninja stars, and silently slit the bad guys' throats. It oozes both blood AND style. One of the most standout features of Pokemon Black 2 and White 2 was the innovative key system, which made it the only core Pokemon that enabled players to change the difficulty.
The extended backstories and narrative points make its story one of the best in Pokemon history, and the content seems to never end even after the credits. It has new cities to explore, an always-on Pokemon World Tournament, and dozens of other things to do and see, making it a standout Pokemon adventure of this generation.
Although it must be said that the story owes a lot to Three Kings great movie , Spec Ops: The Line became legendary as the war shooter that highlighted the cost of human lives over the usual cool-factor, and the futility of war over just the frags. Leading your squad through a desert hellscape into worse and worse situations, with little to no hope of a happy ending, was a new experience for many gamers.
Spec Ops took us to darker places even than "No Russian," and kept us there for longer stretches of time. A game willing to ask: where is the line? For more, see our full Spec Ops: The Line review here. Adventure games are hardly new, but Telltale's twist on them certainly was.
In stripping away almost everything but the dialogue and dialogue choices, the studio was able to let the story become the single most important thing in the game, and they never did it better than in their first season of The Walking Dead.
The choices you make along the way in this first and best season range from savage to heartbreaking, and the final moments are some of the most emotionally impactful in any game ever. You won't forget this story. Dota 2 starts with the simple objective of destroying an enemy base, but its heroes and their unique abilities plus an abundance of items and nuanced mechanics all work together to make it one of the deepest team strategy games around.
Since it came out of beta in , it's undergone so many significant changes that, while not always perfect, continued to bean engaging and exciting game to learn.
It isn't made more complex just by adding more heroes or maps, though. Dota takes an incredible amount of time to even begin to master one of its five roles, but if you're down for the challenge, it'll definitely be a game experience you'll unlikely find anywhere else. This is perhaps one of the most underrated games of all time.
This gives you all the benefit of interacting with others without actually requiring you to, you know For more, see our full Dark Arisen review here. Players can change classes on a whim, queue up into dungeons with a simple click of a button, or forgo the story entirely to focus on crafting or cooking.
And, with the promise of a more streamlined story update and the ability to tackle dungeons with NPCs, that accessibility is about to become even better. Final Fantasy 14 spent this decade in a state of rebirth. It will likely spend the next decade thriving. Gone Home is a game that made you think, down to your shivering fingers, that it was a horror story, then revealed itself to be a love story. For more, see our full Gone Home review here. Everything in GTA V was leaps and bounds ahead of previous entries visually, technically, tonally, and stylistically.
The decision to move between three drastically different protagonists, essentially giving the story its own id, ego, and superego or at the very least, three monkeys trying to avoid seeing, hearing, or speaking any evil was more than just a novel way of adding variety, it helped keep even the most absurd and game-ey activities grounded against its pitch-perfect sendup of 21st-century southern California. The multiplayer component, GTA Online, is still going strong six years later thanks to its incredibly active community and regular drops.
Kentucky Route Zero is a great American novel, just in video game form. Quiet and surreal, Kentucky Route Zero is a magical-realist game that follows the lives of seemingly regular people along the eponymous Route Zero. Players flow through a dreamlike story that's short on conflict but has plenty of mystery and ambiance.
Kentucky Route Zero was an early example of the "artsy indie games" genre. But, even as the term falls into disuse, Kentucky Route Zero's achievements in visual arts and writing continues to withstand any and all cynical generalizations about indie games.
Even dedicated indie gamers scoffed at the notion that paperwork could be made into a thrilling game, but that's just what Lucas Pope did with Papers, Please. As a beleaguered checkpoint worker in the retro-pixel Soviet Satellite State of Arstotzka, you do little more than process papers, cross-reference it with ever-changing sets of rules, take or refuse bribes, and tranq dart a few folks who try to jump the line.
Yet, most of us soon found ourselves hypnotically addicted not only to the game loop, but the involving story that ultimately leaves the fate of a nation in your hands. It is, quite simply, a masterclass in game design, with not only every run being different than the last, but every run also telling its own story. Stories about that one time an explosive crate blew up and knocked a rock into the shopkeeper, and how you persevered despite having an angry old man with a shotgun following you for the rest of the run.
Or how you managed to make it all the way through the mines and the jungle without losing a single heart, only to whip a UFO in the caves, have the spacecraft blow up a piece of ground to your left, knocking a mine towards you, which blows up at your feet, sending you hurtling into the abyss.
Spelunky is absolutely full of unforgettable gaming moments just waiting to be discovered, and the best part is, those moments will be unique to you.
The Last of Us raised the bar for cinematic storytelling in games, and it's a bar few games have managed to reach in the years since. Naughty Dog's story is beautifully written and rendered, with incredible performances by Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson tying it all together.
It forces players to deal with moral complexities, to reckon with Joel's actions and Ellie's fate. The Last of Us is a storytelling triumph, and one that sticks in the mind years after its first release. For more, see our full review of The Last of Us. But with 80 Days, the British studio went one step more, using video games to take a choose-your-own-adventure structure further than it ever could on paper.
It has style in spades, but more important than that is how well Bayonetta 2 actually plays. For more, see our full review of Bayonetta 2 here. Turns out being stuck in a room with limited access to cameras and doors to defend yourself from relentless nightmare animatronics is a sure way to make you scream. Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is an excellent and intuitive digital card game inspired by the likes of MTG. Altering a crucial handful of aspects from its at-times-esoteric source material, Hearthstone is easy to understand and play but difficult to master.
Its single-player adventures challenge new and returning players while the ever-evolving ranked seasons offer an arena for competitive players to assert their deck-building dominance. Its success prompted a wave of imitators but none have quite hit the high bar for ease of use and instantly addicting gameplay set by Hearthstone. For more, see our full Hearthstone review here.
While it was never originally envisioned as a game - rather a teaser for one - P. To this day, you hear stories of people who have held onto their old PlayStation 4 consoles simply because it still has P.
The legacy P. Yes, Death Stranding is now here, but the Silent Hills that got away will go down in gaming history as one of the most sought after games that will never see the light of day.
It may not be the most faithful thing to the Lord of the Rings lore and its combat is ripped almost wholesale from Batman, but Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor has a secret weapon. The Nemesis system's ability to generate an endless parade of orc and uruk villains, each with their own colorful names, personalities, and strengths and weaknesses, gave extraordinary life to this open-world action game.
And when you can start capturing them and turning them to your side, it can be hard not to feel a twinge of sadness when your favorite pets fall in battle. For more, see our full Shadow of Mordor review here. What started as a Kickstarter-funded pixel art action platforming game starring a knight with a shovel went on to become one of the most beloved and instantly recognizable franchises of the decade.
But Shovel Knight utilizes those retro games as a jump off point to create something wholly new and modernized, making it one of the best games in its genre. For more, see our full review of Shovel Knight here. Bloodborne, as weird as it sounds, is like an antique clock.
The elements that make up the game are like precisely-machined materials where each piece clicks and glides into each other perfectly.
While Bloodborne shares many similarities with Dark Souls particularly with how combat works, the real magic of Bloodborne is how it translates the fear of the unknown into a tangible gameplay loop. More than that, the world From Software created feels so mysterious and infinite that fans are still convinced there are undiscovered secrets hidden within the game.
Bloodborne is so successful at worldbuilding that it almost feels like an Eldritch object itself. For more, see our full review of Bloodborne here. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain took the tactical espionage action formula and applied it to a massive open-world, giving players unprecedented freedom, as well as a huge toolbox of weapons, gadgets, vehicles, and companions to complete their objectives however they saw fit. The team delivered a product that was designed around the core customer for these kinds of games, with virtually no incentive to dumb it down.
Pillars of Eternity was tough as nails, required thoughtful character building and tactical combat management, and rewarded players with exceptionally deep combat and storytelling. For more, see our full review of Pillars of Eternity here. Taking admittedly circular inspiration from Uncharted and expanding on it in nearly every aspect, Rise of the Tomb Raider is part action-adventure, part RPG, part Metroidvania, and all amazing.
For more, see our full Rise of the Tomb Raider review here. This is a game that was so carefully and meticulously crafted, that even its most forgettable side missions would overshadow the A-plot of most other RPGs.
This is a game that unapologetically handles moral ambiguity, sexuality and dark humor in a way that never feels edgelord-y, which is nothing short of a miracle.
The Witcher 3, in short, is a goddamn masterpiece. For more, see our full review of The Witcher 3 here. Undertale's music and select characters — we're looking at you, Sans — may be what's most generally known about this RPG, but they're only a small part of what makes it an incredible game.
This adventure stars your human character falling into the underground world of monsters. For more, see our full Undertale review here. The Yakuza games are basically beat-em-up RPGs with intense, convoluted campaigns , and an abundance of bizarre sub-stories and minigames - and the latter is where Yakuza 0 shines.
For more, see our full review of Yakuza 0 here. Few developers have honed the art of level design like Arkane Studios, and Dishonored 2 sees the developer working at the height of the craft. Each unique location is meticulously thought out, combing an ornate steampunk aesthetic with a myriad of pathways and opportunities that allow for an almost endless variety of stealthy or, if you prefer, stabby approaches.
Combine all this with supernatural powers that are as much tools as they are weapons, and you have the immersive sim of the decade. The odds of DOOM rebooting itself into something that could even remotely live up to its legendary, industry-changing predecessor was somewhere between slim and none. But id Software, infused by a new generation of talented developers who grew up on the old id guard's classic, managed to strike a near-perfect balance of reverence for the originals with a fresh, bold redefinition of DOOM for modern times.
It accomplished that with speed and ultra-violence. DOOM plays FAST — just as the original did for its time in — and you can get downright medieval on the asses of your demon enemies thanks to the Glory Kill system, which allows you to essentially perform one-button Mortal Kombat-style Fatality moves on weakened bad guys.
Even better, DOOM offers a meaty campaign in which you gain new and improved abilities as you go, meaning you become even faster and more ultra-violent as the game progresses. For more, see our full Doom review here. Take the creative leads behind Telltale's The Walking Dead: Season 1 and set them loose on their own original idea and what do you get? Firewatch, a riveting, artistically beautiful story of a man named Henry, who's a bit lost in his life and trying to help find his way forward by spending a summer alone as a firewatch lookout in the Wyoming woods.
Except it turns out he's not truly alone; he's got Delilah, a fellow lookout the next tower over who becomes Henry's only other true human point of contact over the course of the season. The Olly Moss art direction, incredible writing, and award-winning performances by Cissy Jones Delilah and Richard Sommer Henry make Firewatch one of the finest adventure games of the decade.
For more, see our full review of Firewatch here. While Inside is not narratively related to its predecessor, it is clear that Inside could not and would not exist without Limbo. Inside has exactly zero dialogue in its entire three-hour campaign, but it nevertheless tells one of the most strange and compelling stories of any game this decade, about a boy infiltrating a dystopian industrial complex and finding Its ending will stick with you for a long, long time after you complete it.
The great sports wars of the last decade, which saw EA and 2K battling for exclusive sports video game rights, had at least one loser: gamers. But out of that darkness rose MLB The Show, which has spent the better part of this decade as an elite simulation recreation of America's pastime. Ever-impressive graphics, fantastic player animations, and rock-solid pitching, batting, and fielding engines make for the total package. Plus, the perennially good Road to the Show mode gives players a good excuse to keep playing every day in an effort to get their created player promoted to the bigs.
Many tried to crack the hero shooter over the past 10 years, but it took Blizzard to take these seeds ideas and grow something truly special in Overwatch. It's a dizzying amalgam of unique character design, stunningly realised style and compellingly dynamic gameplay that has never stopped being ludicrously fun. Overwatch is a singular experience that is far and away the best of its kind.
It offers variety, depth, diversity and flair that very few come close to matching. For more, see our full Overwatch review here. There's no more stylish game this generation than Persona 5. Kingdom Hearts Rock Band 2 Marvel vs. Capcom 2 Lost Odyssey Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare BioShock Katamari Damacy Civilization III. Thunderfall , Dec 1, Dash5 , Dec 1, Really, CIV3? I liked that one the least. I would preferred they put CIV2 in, at least.
CIV3 was so Afforess , Dec 1, Joined: Nov 14, Messages: 16, Location: Somerset. Civ III is perfectly moddable. It's just a matter of learning the - ah - eccentric design decisions that determine how it is modded. Plotinus , Dec 2, I think that Civ4 is superior in every way to Civ3.
No contest in my opinion. In fact I think Civ4 is one of the best games of all time. The only game I liked better was Xcom. Joined: Mar 17, Messages: 6, Location: Ohio. Quintillus , Dec 2, Hey guys! Let's start a 3 vs 4 flamewar! Civ4 is in the running for Crispy Gamer's Game of the Decade. WildWeazel , Dec 2, Joined: Apr 21, Messages: 4, I still play Civ 3 from time to time. There are some scenarios that I like to play. I think CIV is better, but Civ 3 was pretty close.
And my brother still plays Civ 3, he says he doesn't like civ 3. Joined: Aug 22, Messages: 2, Joined: Nov 17, Messages: Nimzo Lord , Dec 2, Swein Forkbeard , Dec 3, Joined: Sep 26, Messages: Here it is: Spoiler :.
Part Three Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Shenmue II Left 4 Dead Skies of Arcadia Paper Mario Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Cave Story Ico GK , Dec 3, CIV could be 1? Probably not though. I get the feeling it's gonna be some anime game as number one. I doubt Civ IV will be listed. Soda , Dec 3, The top 20 has been posted. Here's what I think. The latter two not making it is quite surprising!
World of Warcraft in the top 20 was a bit of a given. Nice to see Metroid Prime and Wind Waker in the top 15 though. Take that, GameCube haters! And Pikmin 2 in the top 20 was surprising, as was Silent Hill 2 and Okami in the top As far as Edge's Top goes, here were the top 50 from what I remember: Spoiler :.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 2. Super Mario 64 3. Half-Life 2 and episodes 4. Resident Evil 4 5. Super Mario World 7. Tetris 8. Super Mario Galaxy 9. Halo 3 Yoshi's Island LittleBigPlanet Grand Theft Auto IV Street Fighter IV Super Metroid World of Warcraft
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