The best games on Xbox One
The best games on Xbox One
From blockbusters to indies, over-the-top action rollercoasters to contemplative explorations, these are the best games available right now for Microsoft's Xbox One, as selected by the voracious gamers of VG247. We'll be checking back in with new games on the regular, as old favourites are succeeded and new challengers rise above the pack to win a place in our hearts.
And now, in alphabetical order: the best games on Xbox One.
A stand out both for the horror genre and the Aliens property, Alien Isolation came out of left field. A first-person adventure from a team near synonymous with real time strategy? A really, genuinely good licensed game? Who could have predicted this?
Alien Isolation isn't a shooter – it's a stealth game, and an unusual one in that the Alien AI is very hard to predict. Although it ruffled the feathers of those who like to “win” games by playing the system, for those in it for the atmosphere nothing beats the dread of having no clue where the creature might pop up next, or if it'll sniff you out this time.
The king has returned, although for some younger players this may be their first taste of a DICE game releasing in a decent enough state for unhesitating recommendations.
When EA announced Battlefield 1's WWI setting, we all sucked in our breath and glanced at each other uncomfortably. Whether the campaign is poignant and educational or exploitative and shallow is a matter of opinion, and we're all a bit tired of the painful mental acrobatics we need to do to justify our discomfort with historically-informed virtual warfare versus modern or future warfare. But if you can switch that part of your brain off, wow: fantastic action.
Dancing games are great, we don't care what anybody says. Lock your housemates outside, close all the blinds, check for hidden spy cams and just have a nice time while getting some useful aerobic exercise.
Dance Central Spotlight is the first in the Harmonix series for Xbox One, making use of the bundled Kinect. It works a little better than most Kinect games, and although it's still a bit patchy the on-screen camera feedback is a lot more useful than games that use controllers. Even with a slimmed-down music library, Dance Central Spotlight is a heck of a good time.
Magnificent. Very probably the franchise's swansong, as creator Hidetaka Miyazaki is well and truly over it after five games, but what a way to go out. Packed with cheeky references and another episode of the baffling, looping lore fans love unpacking and recombining, Dark Souls 3 is a Souls game for Souls fans as well as being the most accessible entry to date.
We say accessible, but we mean “fair”: bonfires are closer together, summoning works, upgrades are no longer potentially disastrous one-way horrors. But the challenge is still there, and PvP is even better than ever. Very much worth the effort.
There are two Dead Rising games console-exclusive to Xbox One and to be honest there's not a great deal to pick between them. Neither really nails the feel and formula that made the first game so special. Both of them dialled back the unforgiving mechanics, and the fourth entry removed the timer all together, much to the fanbase's horror.
But for all its failings – the new Frank West is unpopular, and the disconnect between the story, game and stated developer intentions is hilariously wide – Dead Rising 4 smooths many rough edges with more mature tech and the best action the series has ever seen. If you want to beat up endless zombies with daft objects, here's your ticket.
Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition
Diablo 3 faltered out of the gate but by the time it made the leap to consoles it was up and running, having ditched a number of systems, rebalanced everything, gained a bunch of new content and evolved into an ARPG worth investing in. Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls Ultimate Evil Edition is particularly special because it represents the most complete and feature-filled version of Diablo 3 to date.
To our surprise, Diablo 3 works really, really well on Xbox One. Perhaps we should have expected this given the popularity of earlier series entries on consoles, but I doubt anybody really appreciates just how well Blizzard managed the transition to control pads until they actually have it in their hands. Co-op this with your buddies for best results – from the comfort of your couch.
Someone has to keep the dream of immersive sims alive, and with Eidos Montreal's Thief and Deus Ex efforts falling a bit flat, it's a good thing Arkane is standing strong with its whalepunk stealth-em-up series. Building on the very solid foundations of the first game, Dishonored 2 adds a second protagonist and a suite of new powers to the mix.
Although the mixed-era aesthetic and quiet little lore details are a joy to explore, it's Arkane's level design that really shines in Dishonored 2. The Clockwork Mansion folding and unfolding around you is as unforgettable as it is initially daunting, and it's only the best known of a number of warren-like arenas through which you hunt, a shadow with a single target.
In the year 2017 we are puzzlingly if delightfully blessed with a significant number of old-school style western RPGs. While the big triple-A brands move into 3D space action, a counter-revolution brings us a stack of retro releases like Torment: Tides of Numenera and Wasteland 2. Our pick of the bunch is Larian's absorbingly self-aware fantasy RPG.
There is so much to discover in Divinity: Original Sin. The dev team's commitment to simulation is unrivalled, so that very often the question “I wonder if I can do this?” is a resounding yes, and it's one of the game ever to live up to the promise of freedom of play style and full systemic combat. Absorbing and entertaining solo, hilarious in co-op. pro tip: take the animal speech skill.
If Destiny belong to the PS4, Xbox One has a pretty great substitute: Microsoft and Ubisoft cozied up to secure timed exclusives for this evolving RPG, with the result that Xbox is the place to play. Xbox, with its long history of competitive multiplayer, is the perfect home for the compelling risk-reward PvP of the unique Dark Zone.
There's no denying The Division suffered growing pains, as Massive went through the same awkward motions as Bungie has, trying to nail a balanced, sustainable and fun daily experience. But the heart of the game is all good: good shooting, good RPG mechanics, good player interactions, good fiction. A long series of patches, updates and DLC drops have turned it into a far more worthy investment of your time, and Massive is locked in for a second season – so don't be afraid to jump in now. The water's still plenty warm.
Look, no, it's not the esport scene creating multiplayer banger Bethesda obviously hoped it would be, and you should feel free to completely ignore that part of it. But DOOM is something way more important than the publisher's wet dream of a money spinning multiplayer game: it's an incredible shooter that understands what made the original special and builds on that foundation rather than continuing on the path the genre has taken in all the year's since.
DOOM's single-player campaign plays so much faster than other FPS story modes, and totally eschews cover and hitscan in favour of rapid movement and real projectiles. You'll lead your fire, you'll dodge, and you'll think about positioning as you master each enemy type's attack patterns – and eventually you'll get right up in their faces and melee them for that sweet health boost. You won't ever stop moving, and that is the real winner here.
The best BioWare game for new-gen, until it does another one. Dragon Age: Inquisition is absolutely huge, representing hundreds of potential hours of gameplay for the really keen, and despite a tendency to edge towards filler content it delivers with scaling challenges (lower difficulties are button mashers; higher settings require minuscule tactical control and serious preparation legwork) and a plethora of interacting RPG systems.
As usual, BioWare's writing and especially its characters and dialogue are superb, and while you may pretend it's all about the politics we know you're in it for the kissing scenes.
Dying Light: The Following Enhanced Edition
A somewhat surprising inclusion, and not one we would have predicted back when TechLand parted ways with Dead Island and Deep Silver to make a new kind of zombie sandbox. A much less silly take on the zombie apocalypse, Dying Light is filled with moments of genuine horror, but it's the process of levelling up and upgrading equipment that makes it so compelling. Every venture in the dark brings risk and reward – and the opportunity to return with an enormous automatic weapon and take revenge on the scary monsters. Take advantage of the new parkour system to explore the open world in every direction.
The free support Techland threw at this one was amazing, and expansion The Following is a really worthy add-on. Bundling it all up for re-release as Dying Light: The Following Enhanced Edition is a move we applaud.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Special Edition
One of the best games of the last generation remains one of the best games in this one, and now you can have slightly better visuals to go with it. What's not to like? Bethesda made Skyrim Special Edition because it used Skyrim to figure out its new-gen tech for Fallout 4, and having done half the work already, it went ahead and finished the port. This is unlikely to happen again (sorry, Morrowind) fans, so it's a good thing every Elder Scrolls RPG has an almost unlimited amount of content, isn't it?
Skyrim set a new standard for RPGs and is still having enormous impact on the industry today. Without Skyrim, we wouldn't have The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. We wouldn't have Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda. If you don't know why, it's time to check back in with Tamriel.
Oh it's “coming” to PS4, but so is heat death, you know? You can play Elite Dangerous: Horizons on your Xbox One right now, and indeed many a spacefaring captain does, losing tens of hours a week to trundling back and forth between stars.
One of the best things about Elite Dangerous is that its constantly expanding and updating. As long as you own the Horizons re-release you can expect new content to waddle out regularly, and although the advertised new features are lovely it's the secrets hidden in enormous reaches of Frontier's universe sim that really get us.
Old-fashioned and a little ugly, but still so damn essential. Fallout 4 has faults and it doesn't look very pretty, but it's an open world ripe for exploring, for building, for creating and surviving.
You can craft weapons and gear or scavenge whatever you find. You can follow the story or go your own way. There's so much packed into Bethesda's Boston Commonwealth it will keep you busy for months on end. From romancing companions to butchering whole factions, it's never dull, often hyper-violent, funny and life-consuming.
Sorry, PES – FIFA is the best football series. One year on from our last PS4 games check in, this still holds true, and we must resign ourselves to crossing at all the “FIFA 16″s and replacing them with “FIFA 17”. Once again, the annual release outdid its competitors.
This year's edition does more with Frostbite than ever before, so you can marvel at authentic details from your local pitches at higher fidelity than ever before. Also there's a new Premiere League story mode called The Journey, because no modern sports sim is complete without a soap opera. Oh, and Ultimate Team is still there, ready to help you embrace your compulsive tendencies.
Some games simply cannot be separated from their history, and you can see the long, tortured development of Final Fantasy 15 in its abbreviated story, the sudden wonkiness of the final few acts, and the way it never quite puts it all together. Also, the in-game advertising.
But if you can forgive these foibles and accept that patches and additions Square Enix is hurriedly applying, there's a lot to love here. Road tripping with your Best Boys is the heart of the experience, and the smashingly gorgeous world is just there to be a nice background to the fake Instagrams you take of your fake life. If this is royalty in crisis, it's a wonder Noctis cares enough to pursue his destiny. (You may not).
This slot used to be reserved for Forza Horizon 2, but somehow the follow-up managed to be even better for ditching the northern hemisphere to go down under. The vision of Australia presented here is hilariously inaccurate in all the meaningful ways (the snowy expansion, released during a record breaking summer, is only the start of the amusement for antipodeans), which makes the attention to tiny details even more poignant.
As with the two previous Forza Horizon games, all those assets and weather effects normally constrained to the narrow view around tracks are put to good work in a sandbox you'll love tearing around in. The compulsive need to do it all, collect everything and fill up your progress bars soon comes to dominate, although the sheer joy of racing and an urge to climb leaderboards certainly help. Drivatars make a lot of sense here, too. If you're a purist you may prefer the newer but Forza Horizon 3 is a terrific package for more than just chipping away at your best times.
While its more recent open world cousin deserves attention, Forza Motorsport 6 is the best vanilla racing sim experience on Xbox One. Racers always perform better at console launches, but with a few years extra experience on the console under its belt Turn 10 lived up to its name by cranking the dials skywards on this one.
With a new, lengthy story mode, twice as many vehicles as Forza 5 released with, rain and night racing in glorious HD, and seven new tracks you don't already know backwards, the is the strap in excuse you've been looking for. We used to favour Project CARS for top racer, but with the dust settled on both of them, we found ourselves favouring the flagship series instead.
Gears of War 4 has gone under the radar a little bit as Microsoft has fumbled around trying to work out how to sell games this generation, and that's a damn shame. Despite the shift in developer, it's a worthy continuation of the shooter series and far more memorable than prequel Gears of War: Judgment, which was produced with Epic still overseeing the ship.
What makes Gears of War 4 so good is The Coalition's masterful identification of what made the original games so sticky, and its willingness to double down on that and throw everything else out in favour of fresh material. The result feels familiar in a good way, like a well-fitting pair of shoes, but is new and interesting enough that you won't be bored. Cross-buy, cross-save and even cross-play with Windows 10 is a nice bonus, and a valuable lesson for all the other developers out there whinging that balancing multiplayer for keyboard and mouse as well as control pad is too hard.
There's no question of leaving GTA 5 off any best of list, even though it did launch last generation. You'd never guess it; Rockstar's done an uncannily good job of brushing up its already astounding tech for newer hardware.
What can be said about the juggernaut of our times? Should we highlight the multiplayer suite that provides endless hours of dicking about and fantasy fulfilment? The sprawling campaign with its multiple playable characters and on-the-fly character switching? The sheer pleasure of cruising the streets of faux-LA with no purpose in mind at all? There's a reason everyone and his dog played GTA 5, and you should, too.
Master Chief still isn't quite back up to form, but Halo 5: Guardiuans tries so hard it's easy to forgive its weaknesses. The campaign and accompanying story aren't the events Microsoft wanted them to be. Fortunately, the online multiplayer is where the meat of the game is at.
Arena Mode is the classic Halo of old, but Warzone is where 343 Industries has successfully shaken up the formula. Influenced by MOBAs, you fight AI and other players, both adding points to your team total. It's here that you get to play multiplayer first-person shooters differently, and the result is fresh and exciting, backed by the familiarity of the giant Spartans and friends.
The PC crowd may not be as impressed as the rest of us. but they aren't clutching a controller, marvelling at how, once again, It Has Been Made To Work. – and work even better than before. Remember when console RTS was impossible? Yeah. Not so much.
Microsoft really wasn't messing around with Halo Wars 2, bringing in strategy experts the Creative Assembly (Total War) to take up Ensemble's mandate. Despite the studio's hardcore chops this is an RTS that welcomes new potential strategy hounds; it's a fantastic place to dive into the genre when you find yourself champing for greater depth.
Astonishingly good, Hitman is the first game to make us sit up and say hey, maybe episodic really can work for triple-A experiences. Hitman has always been about exploring each level, replaying over and over again to unlock the potential crammed into every corner, discovering new ways to infiltrate and execute. Challenges and checklists are all very well, but dropping one level at a time was a fantastic way to ensure more players enjoyed this intended experience.
IO Interactive upped its game with the excellent Elusive Targets, too. These time-limited, one-try-only events rewarded those who'd put in the hours to learn the material in advance, while remixing levels in ways that felt fresh and challenging again. But even now, when the dust has settled, Hitman is a hell of a stealth action game.
Remember when Limbo came out and it was amazing and it took you on an emotional journey and stayed in the back of your mind for years? Inside is that, again, only this time PlayDead had so much money it was able to sit on it and refine away until what it got was so close to perfection as set a standard for everything else.
Forgiving puzzle platforming that demands problem solving rather than split-second timing, a carefully and deliberately unexplored setting, and an atmosphere fine tuned to the emotional breaking point (the game's haunting score was recorded through a real human skull) make Inside an experience you should not sleep on.
Lego Dimensions is expensive. Let's get that out the way first. But it's easily the best toys-to-life game out there, and the best Lego minifigures game in a portfolio full of quality competition.
The portal is an extra controller, asking players to build real-life Lego models, and that's all very cool. But the real pull here is the freedom of not being stuck with one theme. Dimensions is where The Simpsons meet Dr Who meets Scooby Doo meets Portal, Ninjago, DC Comics, Back to the Future and more. It's not a clumsy mash-up, it's a genuinely hilarious game that isn't just for kids, but for families as a whole. It's as essential in a family home as Monopoly and a Sunday roast.
A challenger to Telltale's hold on the episodic adventure crown, Life is Strange boasts a much more dynamic approach to the formula – not to mention a much less buggy and stiff engine underpinning Dontnod's efforts. Subverting the consequential choice trope with a time reversal mechanic, offering clearly defined borders and puzzles more involved than “click on the thing”, Life is Strange outshines its rivals in the space.
But it's the atmosphere that really gets us, tugging at a deep-rooted nostalgia for adolescence – or perhaps just for the media that celebrates it. Max and Chloe's creators may not have got the hang of natural-sounding teenage dialogue, but they nailed the rest of it.
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain
Despite the post-launch fallout that has seen visionary creator Hideo Kojima leave his baby behind, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is still a fantastic game – one of the very best on this generation of consoles.
That's because it's a bizarre and unique, hilarious, violent, exhilarating stealth sandbox. It offers an almost overwhelming amount of choice to tackle missions, and throws out a bunch of boring stealth cliches we've become numb to over the years. The story is uncharacteristic in that it's subdued, but the meta game of building Motherbase will keep you busy for months. The only downside is that we're pretty sure there will never be another game like Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
So here's the situation: you've got a highly customisable character with a bevy of growth options. You've got an enormous open world navigable by stealth, parkour and all-out battle. You've got a hell of a license. How do you convince jaded players to dive into the oodles of content you've packed into this weighty adventure?
The answer is Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor‘s award-winning Nemesis system, which has semi-randomly-generated mini-bosses standing between you and your final goals. Taking these foes down, manipulating the command structure of Sauron's army, and watching the consequences of your kills unfold is a fascinating and very personal piece of organic story telling unique to every playthrough.
The phenomenon that is Minecraft is found on every platform, but it was the Xbox 360 version that really blew the roof off. It has since been supplanted by its new-gen cousin, chiefly because Mojang and 4J kindly put in the extra work needed to make it possible to import your existing worlds. The enormous Minecraft player base has very little reason not to upgrade to the newer version, with its larger worlds and more bells and whistles.
Xbox has always been the home of console Minecraft, and now that Microsoft owns Mojang we only expect that to become more pronounced.
The slickest fighter of the generation you can actually buy for Xbox, Mortal Kombat X does a great deal more than just turn the franchise's trademark gore up to 11 – although that definitely happens.
Perhaps the most interesting new addition (besides Johnny Cage and Sonya's daughter, a baffling development to a plot already stretched thin to breaking) is the addition of multiple fighting styles for each character. Essentially expanding the roster of fighters, the ability to select different approaches with a single character means you can never quite be sure what you're facing until the action kicks off, complicating the meta and putting the emphasis back on emphasis and on-the-fly tactics rather than tried-and-tested strategies.
Microsoft is very proud of first-party fighter Killer Instinct, but despite Rare's legacy it's not quite on Mortal Kombat's level, is it? No competition. Injustice 2 might do the job, though.
Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition
A magical sidescroller with over 30 awards to its name, Ori and the Blind Forest lives up to the hype – especially in this new version, which boasts cross-save with Windows 10 as well as a stack of new content and features.
Stunning hand-painted graphics meet flexible upgrade paths for one of the most ravishingly lovely explore-‘em-ups of all time. Ticks a lot of those Metroidvania boxes we don't see enough of these days, too.
The scariest game on consoles now that Silent Hills teaser P.T. has been pulled, Outlast is a mostly combat-free survival horror in which running and stealth are your only defence. You think you've seen enough spooky abandoned psychiatric hospitals in your time to be immune to the horrors of a new one, but you are wrong.
A more polished effort than Zombie's Daylight, Outlast is memorably terrifying. The plot and events are absolute nonsense, but you won't care, because you'll be shitting yourself. Highly recommended, except for pregnant women and people with heart conditions.
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