The Top 30. Really when we get this high on the list, there’s very little to choose from between the games. They’re all just absolutely ridiculously good. Each and every one.
In this section, we’ll spend some time stealthily climbing things, getting into cover and collecting mushrooms...
If you’re just finding the list, I suggest you start at the beginning and work your way along from there:
Ladies and gentlemen, the Top 30...
30 - Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Sam Fisher is one of my favourite gravel-voiced badasses in any medium. Voiced by Mike Ironside for the first five games, he’s always been a tough-as-nails bastard who seems like he’d swat Solid Snake aside with both arms tied behind his back. Playing as him in the Splinter Cell series is great fun. Looking through the night-vision goggles, or the heat vision goggles for that matter, is a great game mechanism that allows you to be as stealthy as possible.
Previously in this list, I’ve mentioned just how absolutely terrible I am at stealth. The one exception is in Splinter Cell. Whatever it is about this one, maybe the controls, or the levels themselves, I often am able to get in, get out, and most of the time unseen. I do like to take out a few of the henchmen along the way each time though. Keep your achievements, I want to wall-split stand and drop on dudes’ heads at full force.
I picked Chaos Theory here, but it was a very close toss up between that and Splinter Cell Conviction. While Chaos Theory is pure SC stealth with the full range of gadgets, Conviction stripped things back and gave Sam Fisher only his wits as he battled his former employers. Story is surprisingly decent in most of this series too. Based on the “universe” of Tom Clancy’s many book series, the team responsible for the narrative here made a big effort to get the whole CIA, government conspiracy thing down, and in Chaos Theory in particular, it marries well to the sneaky gameplay.
This is an excellent game series, beaten only by one other stealth series that we’ll get to in a little bit...
29 - Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
Ninja Theory’s masterpiece is Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, a third-person action adventure game set in the world of the Chinese classic novel “Journey to the West” adapted to a futuristic apocalyptic setting. Players take charge of Monkey, a human with a monkey’s tail (which is never explained, as far as I can remember) who is voiced by Andy “Gollum” Serkis. The story is written by the game’s creative director with assistance from Alex Garland. On release, Enslaved was a big budget game, and it put Ninja Theory on the map.
Gameplay was based on a combination of Monkey’s melee skills, with climbing and use of weapons added to the mix. The game’s spectacular opening sequence takes part atop an aircraft that is gradually heading towards a catastrophic crash, with Monkey a prisoner on board. This dramatic setting throws you into the action and provides a cool setting for the game’s tutorial. Eventually you’ll meet up with Trip, and another ally called Pigsy (he’s a pig) and work together to get Monkey one step closer to figuring out what’s been going on in the mysterious Pyramid.
Enslaved is just all-round awesome. The narrative is engaging, the combat feels fresh and fast, and the setting and atmosphere is a joy to be in. The grim future is offset a little by the lush greens and blues of the nature that has slowly begun to reclaim the Earth. It’s impossible to miss the inspiration this game has had on countless others since it came out in 2010. Damn, I want to play this game again.
28 - HITMAN (2016)
Alright, folks. Agent 47 kinda never really made an impression on me originally. I was more of a Sam Fisher kind of guy. I never really clicked with the original Hitman for whatever reason. However, I got my hands on the 2016 episodic reboot, and holy fuckballs is that game good. Everything you thought you knew about stealth games, throw it in the bin. HITMAN nails every aspect of it.
Not only is this game so much better than the originals, it blows every other sneaky-bastard game out of the water. It has the best level design I’ve seen in years. The kill possibilities, the various Rube Goldberg Machine style permutations and the incredible array of achievements you are challenged with completing turn this dark assassin game into a sandbox of creativity.
To go into specifics about HITMAN would be to spoil it. If you’re interested in game design, or specifically level design, this game is the one on the list that I would urge you to play and learn from.
HITMAN 2 came out a couple of years after the reboot and while I haven’t gotten to play it yet, I understand it actually includes an option to play the first game’s levels too if you own them already, so if you’re going to dive headfirst into this, I’d say it makes sense to try that version.
I’ll never look at a fashion show catwalk the same way again.
27 - Gears of War 2
Gears of War. What a huge game that was when it arrived on Xbox 360. I personally prefer the second one, but not by much. The whole series is pretty great. I recently played Gears of War 4 and Gears 5 and if you like the formula on offer here, they’re all amazing fun.
Find cover! Reload - but make sure you do an active reload! Take aim! Blow a Locust’s brains out? If not, chainsaw it in half.
That’s pretty much the entire game. Oh and the Hammer of Dawn! Think of a laser pointer that tells a satellite super weapon in orbit of the planet where to fire. That’s it!
Gears 2 added the amazing horde mode, which sends waves of enemies at you in an enclosed space. This mode has been copied and never bettered by hundreds of games since.
Gears of War 2 also has my favourite story of the series. Most of that is due to the adventures underground on Sera, as the COGs make their way through the gross, slimy mess of the alien underbelly to discover where all their friends and family have disappeared to. The acting is a mixture of endearing and outright ham-fisted, but you’re playing Gears of War for explosions and action, like a blockbuster action movie, not a slice of French cinema.
As a huge fan of Futurama, it’s also a lot of fun controlling Marcus Fenix, voiced by John DiMaggio, who is also the actor who plays Bender. Rev up the chainsaws. You’re gonna need ‘em.
26 - Diablo III
Time for Blizzard to make an appearance. If you know me well, you’re probably aware that I never got into World of Warcraft. It won;t be making an appearance on this list. I do, however, have a lot of love for two of their franchises. The first on this list is Diablo. Most of my experience is with Diablo III, and mainly on console (yes, PC master race, you can stop pointing your fingers and laughing) due to my lack of a powerful gaming PC when this was out.
Diablo III is so much fun. It’s a pure hack-and-slash dungeon crawler where you equip better gear as you go along, making your journey more exciting along the way. Unlike most Diablo players, I’m not playing this game to min-max a perfect build. I’m happy to pick abilities and upgrades that do cool stuff, rather than max out my character’s class’ best stuff in the most efficient way.
I just like exploding bad guys in inventive ways by the thousands. Diablo’s enemies are all nasty demon scum or horrific creatures that if they existed in the real world, I’d be signing up to NASA as a space monkey to get the hell off this planet. Killing them as a superhuman Crusader is sooooo much fun.
Diablo is a game of making numbers go higher, and the two most satisying onesto see increase are your character level and that all-important damage per second. Boss battles are fun, and usually an extension of the level around them, and everything you do in Diablo III feels like it’s a step towards getting stronger, faster and better. Lots of fun.
25 - Spelunky
This game is easily the one I’ve clocked the most Steam hours on. I’ve got hundreds of hours in it. For about 18 months, I played Spelunky for half an hour every lunch time in work. This deceptively cutesy 2D adventure game is devilishly difficult. It’s rogue-like, in that when you die there is no continuing, but you do get a few lives to keep you going until that happens. It is punishing, but as you get better and unlock the various stages’ shortcuts, you begin to make completing the game more viable as you go.
Spelunky seems like an innocent little platformer, but it’s filled to the brim with a huge variety of weapons, tools and enemies to master. Every step you take (sometimes in complete darkness) can result in all manner of danger, and you need to be on your toes like no other game here.
The best thing about this game is the challenge it provides. You’ll find yourself ignoring the shortcuts you’ve unlocked just so you can play through more levels, searching for upgrades and the critical extra lives provided by damsels in distress (which you can choose to be male or female, or even a dog if you don’t want to make it about romance!)
God, I love Spelunky. If you’ve been put off by its weird visual style, or the dorky looking characters, get over that and play it. It’s astonishingly good.
24 - Super Mario Bros. 3
Here he is. The Italian plumber. Choosing Super Mario Bros. 3 over Super Mario Bros. was tough. They’re both pretty freakin’ amazing, especially when you consider how old they are now, and how well they hold up to this day. Whether you like platform games or not, chances are you’ve probably played one or both of these. They’re iconic for a reason. That reason is that they’re absolutely fucking incredible.
What makes Mario 3 my favourite of the series is mainly the range of power ups you can get. The levels are more varied too. Mario can get into a giant shoe. Or dress like a frog. It makes him a nightmare to control on land, but he swims amazingly when wearing it. The best power up though, of course, is the tanooki suit. Mario gets some racoon ears and a tail and if he runs fast enough, he can take off and fly for a limited time.
The levels are unbelievable here too. The game’s world map is smart, in that it often gives you a chance to take an alternative route if you’re having trouble, but those chances are limited and often reserved for the trickiest levels in the game. Little things like the memory-match game in the toad house, or the slot machine for extra lives are just added fun. Let’s also remember that this game is very difficult, and when I was a kid, I must have played through the whole thing dozens of times only to lose my last life in one of the final levels. But we always kept going back to try again.
That’s video games at its best. Special shout out to Super Mario World, Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Maker, which are all amazing and deserve your full attention too.
23 - Tetris
This game speaks for itself. It’s Tetris.
I also highly recommend Tetris 99 and Tetris Effect.
Amazing!
22 - XCOM: Enemy Unknown
It’s actually painful that a game this good didn’t make the Top 20. XCOM is one of those strategy game institutions that, when this reboot came along, it was either going to completely shatter the legacy of the originals, or reinvent it for the better. Luckily it was the latter. XCOM 2 is also excellent, and pretty much shares this slot in the list.
XCOM is all about managing your military and scientific resources in the wake of an aggressive alien invasion. Players are forced, from the very beginning, to make decisions with far-reaching consequences, as to whether they save the planet from the never-ending hordes of aliens, or fail the world’s governments and civilians, resulting in their enslavement. At the macro level, XCOM’s base management is fascinating. You need to manage surveillance across the globe to stop regions losing the fight, while juggling researching the alien corpses you find on the battlefield, and developing advanced technologies needed to keep up with the other-worldly overlords.
Between managing your base and waiting for upgrades are tactical squad based battles, where you engage in turns-based combat with the alien forces. Your troops move about the battlefield, planning moves and taking shots at enemies, while trying to rescue civilians and complete objectives before it’s too late. The stress is high… and then you realise that if your troops are injured or killed, you have fewer, likely weaker units for the next round.
XCOM is amazing. It’s made all the more fun by customising your squad of troops with the names of family and friends, and creating your own narrative journey as you play. Oh shit, Simon took another near-fatal shot from an alien. Jonny and Glennon had better haul over there and save his ass again. Get your shit together, Simon.
21 - Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Playing Mario Kart in grand prix mode is like the most pure form of digital happiness. The Switch version, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, provides more and more flavours of that happiness for you to enjoy. The game is just a delight. It can also be a cruel bastard. And somehow that makes it even more fun.
Mario Kart’s ability to engage the player in that one-more-race mentality is incredibly addictive. The quick-fire laps, the easy to comprehend controls and intuitive weapons, the detail in the karts and bikes that give you your preferred control scheme… it’s all just beautiful UX and game design.
Mario Kart is at its best when players are of comparable skill level, and the gulf between noob and expert in this game can be vast. Online play with ELO rankings dictating your competition results in a fantastic experience most times, with a community of players who seems to be non-toxic (rare these days in online gaming) even when a blue shell wrecks your race.
Mario Kart is a gaming institution and a series that should persist through time as one of the greatest ever.
Jeez, the games are getting better all the time. It’s like as if they’re arranged in an order that makes sure that would happen, or something!
Come back tomorrow for the top 20!
