It has an expanded set of moral quandaries which takes the immersion to a while new level. The draw distance and beautiful vistas are a treat to the eyes and the impressive destructible environment forms a key element of the gameplay. It makes various exercises of its power on your mind by making use of many tricks the series has long been known for. The efforts to make the interface more user friendly might lead you to believe that Civ V dumbs down the series, but make no mistake the apparatus powering the game is as complex as ever.
One last turn…. Mass Effect 2 is a landmark game, and lives to the hype of a sequel to the original which was a smash hit. The epic sci-fi role playing game continues the story of Commander Sheppard, and his journey to avert an impending galactic apocalypse.
Happy reading. Or skimming, for you terrible people only looking for the top 3. The past decade in RPG releases has been fascinating to watch. Early in the decade, even as many other games were adopting keystones of the genre like more involved stories and stat progression , it felt like RPGs were on the decline. Sure, there were still some quality releases, but they always felt like a big event, and they were often few and far between.
However, as the decade progressed, RPGs saw a huge resurgence. Now we are awash in an unbelievable number of amazing games, both Japanese and Western, along with an incredible lineup of indie titles.
The games that truly moved us over the last decade did so for almost as many reasons as there were releases: some refined the classic, turn-based RPG experience to a fine point, others presented an unbelievable amount of choices, and many told engaging, grand and emotional stories. So it should come as no surprise that our list of the 25 best RPGs plus graphic adventures and visual novels of the past decade reflects that same variety.
There is one constant in our list, though: these are all games that did at least one thing that truly distinguishes them from their peers. Bethesda probably thought they knew what they were doing when they lent the Fallout franchise to Obsidian Entertainment.
After all, Fallout 3 was a hit. Hopefully, Obsidian could quickly create a money grab spin-off that would capitalize on its popularity. Instead, Obsidian took the framework of Fallout 3 and created a game that improved on it in every way, setting the standard for open-world RPGs for the past decade.
Restoring much of the classic Fallout sense of humor and tone to the series, New Vegas throws players into a world where their choices have real consequences. Happy endings are never guaranteed, and one mistake in judgment can result in broken alliances, tragic massacres, or just pure silliness.
The spirit of New Vegas lives on in its spiritual sequel, The Outer Worlds , which was released just a few months ago. But if you want that pure, undiluted Nuka-Cola-flavored gameplay, you need to check out Fallout: New Vegas. Um, just make sure that you download a fan-made patch that fixes most of the many bugs first.
Those of us at RPGFan who have found the time in the last few months to play the game since its release have been sucked into a world we have fallen in love with. Every now and then, a new game comes along that completely takes you by surprise. In , Horizon Zero Dawn was that game. The world is utterly gorgeous, main character Aloy is one of the strongest female protagonists in the past decade, combat is fun and dynamic, the story develops some fascinating lore and intrigue, and the music is beautifully atmospheric.
Horizon Zero Dawn is the total package, and with a sequel possibly underway, it may be the beginning of a top-tier franchise. Combat is fast and addictive, with many new tools for players to experiment with. Although certainly not the first ontological mystery in the video game scene, Danganronpa has done its fair share to popularize this niche genre. Some may balk at the fanservice and starkly proportioned female characters, but at its heart lies a riveting mystery filled with the macabre and insight into the human psyche when everything is at stake.
Radiant Historia is one of those games where not only each part of it excellent, but the whole package is greater than the sum of its parts. The graphics are some of the most stunning to ever grace the humble DS. A colorful cast of characters embarks on a marvelous tale that marries the political intrigue of Final Fantasy Tactics with the time traveling and parallel world-hopping aspects of the Chrono games. Everywhere is strange and magical and full of wonders. Everywhere is awful.
The tragedy and horror becomes mundane. The best I can hope for is sleep. There is hope. A bit. A desperate hope. Maybe a fleeting hope, an impossible hope. But a hope. Telling players to draw sigils on their actual real meat skin in response to key moments is such a clever idea. You wear your belief in who you are and what the world has turned you into. The first time I played, I lied a bit about who I was and what I would do in an awful situation.
That sigil weighed heavy on my mind and my hand. It is an awful world. Your mind can be taken from you and the dregs distilled for consumption. Whatever freedom you have is an illusion and you are pressed to worship your jailor. You will be missed only as a tool. Bodies are broken a thousand ways and stripped for parts, as you well know after imperial agents supply hair, heretic bone, and angel leather for your workshop.
But for now, while those sigils last, at least you can see who you are. While the marks have faded, With Those We Love Alive has lingered in the back of my head for five years now. Explore a procedurally-generated island covered in procedurally-generated buildings which are procedurally-generated art galleries decorated with procedurally-generated wallpaper and containing procedurally-generated exhibitions of procedurally-generated art by procedurally-generated artists, with bonus procedurally-generated sound installations.
Alice0: It is good when the algorithm generates a gallery of genuinely pleasant pictures. It is better when the name generated for a picture somehow evokes or supports it. Secret Habitat is a good serendipity generator.
It is best when you find a gallery of garbage with one shockingly incongruous picture, one picture which redeems this awful exhibition. What I most like about what could be a fancy tech demo is how god damn spooky Secret Habitat is. What is this world covered in monolith-black art galleries? Who built this? What are they trying to learn? Or do? Or replicate?
Is this a success? Discovering this island feels like a threat. We were not meant to be here. We should feel afraid that we have received this attention. I am very happy to be sprinting across a blasted landscape between art galleries, cooing and admiring procedurally-generated pictures before steeling myself for the next dash through the scouring wind. God help us. Graham: A world of infinite art galleries filled with infinite procedural art sounds like hell, doomed to both ponderous and filled with noise.
Secret Habitat avoids being ponderous by, as Alice says, letting you sprint. Moving between its art galleries happens at a joyful clip - you're a big kid who loves art so much they can't wait to see the next painting. It avoids being filled with noise by All its paintings are abstract patterns, textures, fuzz, and yet again and again it throws up things that are good enough for me to screenshot.
I don't do anything with these screenshots, but I like knowing that they're there, the generator's work preserved. Ah, now my computer's the art gallery, isn't it. Jules Verne's classic rip-roaring colonial gentleman's adventure of travel and ill-advised gambling was given an update. In the process, Inkle created an exemplar of what text adventures can be.
After betting that he can circumnavigate the world in 80 days, Phileas Fogg sets out with you, his manservant Passepartout. From there you explore the twists and turns to be found in an alternate, steampunky version of , by having conversations with strangers, learning something, and moving on.
There are so many diverting side paths to follow, and many secrets to uncover, as you race against the ticking clock. Sin: This is the one. This is the game I never hesitate to recommend. Above all, of course, this is a wonderfully written myriad of possible stories. Each playthrough is different.
Different legs of your journey could be farcical, frivolous, seditious, warm, interesting, or heartbreakingly beautiful, but each is wonderful. Alice Bee: You can complete the journey in 80 Days in far less than 80 game days, but if you do that you've probably cheated yourself. There's so much lying under the surface of this game. I advise you to take the scenic route. Graham: The most human videogame, alternately about caring for your travel companion, and forging the world's longest 'missed connections' list with the people you meet on your travels.
Importantly, those people exist independently from you: you are not their saviour, and they will push back at any attempt to reduce them to a part of your tourism. There is nothing else like 80 Days in games. Katharine: 80 Days is a constant surprise and delight. I'll never forget the moment when, on my first playthrough, my beleaguered Passepartout woke up dazed and hungover and I quote "in the silks of an Ottoman harem girl" after an unexpectedly long night out on the town.
This was Day 13 of my trip around the world, and I almost stood up and applauded the man for finally breaking free of his master Phileas Fogg's old timer tyranny and actually going out and enjoying himself for once. That old fool can bloody well tie his own shoelaces for once in his life, damnit, and there is nothing he can do to stop me.
But as Graham's just said, 80 Days is a game full of 'missed connections', which is precisely what makes it such a delicious and enticing trip every time I come to play it. This is one virtual holiday I never grow tired of, and there is no greater feeling in the world than returning to your favourite forks in the road and seeing where the paths less travelled might take you next.
Aw shit, here we go again. It's still the shiniest modern-day urban sandbox around, though Rockstar have since outdone themselves in ye olden days with Red Dead Redemption 2 and all its simulated heat-reactive horse scrotums. It has increasingly absurd multiplayer crimes galore in the GTA Online mode too. Alice Bee: I never got into GTA Online, which shocking success will probably keep everyone at Rockstar employed for the next 20 years, but the singleplayer is still an absolute banger.
I'll ignore the extremely low ball parody aspects it's not like making fun of LA is fruit you have to reach particularly high for, after all in favour of talking about how that version of LA feels so genuinely alive. It seems that the whole city will function entirely without any input from you. That farm will keep farmin'. That minimum wage fast food server will keep servin'.
You can sit and watch the whole world go by. It's enforced by how, when you switch between the three protagonists, the won't be where you last left them - they go about their business paying no nevermind to you. Alice0: I did get into GTA Online, slowly building my own crime empire upon heists, drugs, guns, and even a nightclub. I like to pop on a podcast and ride my BMX around, pulling sikk tricks through traffic and nudging the simulation.
And yes, I spend a lot of time and money on playing dress-up. Disclosure: I have pals who work at Rockstar. And the online definitely wasn't Getting run over and dragged through a car wash on my way to get my impounded car was not, as the kids say, the one.
But the single player? I've completed it several times now. I also love the colour palette, which is surprisingly brighter and more saturated than the often-muddy fare of open world environments. I do hope I get to spend more time admiring it, along with my old pal Gerald of Rivendell, before too long. Decades of sneaking and monologuing climax in the final Metal Gear from Kojima Productions. Sin: MGS5 called my bluff.
And skip the cut scenes, obviously. And oh god here I go. The semi-structured stealth sandbox stabfest finally lets us loose to play with those clever details and just-complex-enough systems, even if you just want to play the same bit 20 times in a row to see how many ways you can do it.
Messing with hapless guards has never been so entertaining and I fear it never will again. At times it has the wonderful old mix of earnestly mixing the politics of war with full-on daftness but these moments are few and far between.
Metal Gear Solid is at its best when earnest, serious, and ludicrous. The story is an unfinished mess and has some truly ghastly, hateful parts but I do like parts and just wish it had the more balanced and complete Metal Gear personality.
Well, if you want Metal Gear stealth sandbox with less of the plotsprawl, mate, try Ground Zeroes. The standalone prequel is a small, focused, and more challenging murderbox that will reward you for learning the area well as it returns again and again for new missions. I like Quiet as a pal in the field, mind. And synchronised stealth takedowns with her feel oh so cool. Graham: A game in which you can hide inside a box? A game in which you can pin a poster of a woman to the front of that box and prompt all the guards in a base to come ogle and applaud at said woman, before you pop out and slow motion shoot them all in the head with a silenced pistol?
Video Matthew: I should probably disclose that I appeared in a Metal Gear documentary that came with the game. But was I asked to also star in Death Stranding? Of all the games on this list, Undertale may be the only one to have inspired a wrestler's ring entrance. In fact, Toby Fox's gloomy cutey of an RPG has burrowed into pop-culture consciousness in a unique way. Perhaps it's the way combat becomes a mixture of a text puzzle and a bullet-hell, perhaps it's the cast of weird monsters, perhaps it's that you can go on a date with a skeleton.
Whatever the reason, Undertale left an impression. Alice Bee: As observed by many, Megalovania is a fucking jam. But that aside, what I remember most from playing Undertale is thinking it was very clever.
It seemed, even then, to be destined to be a game extremely loved in an extremely online way. Not memes, exactly, but a lot of texts posts starting "Here's the thing you need to know about Undyne. But I liked it most when it was being funny or sweet. See: that date with the skeleton, in a date outfit that is a crop t-shirt saying Cool Dude. Undertale has empathy. It has empathy in a way very few works of fiction do, and it's up front about it.
It's not trying to trick you into be empathetic, it just wants you to be a nice person. But at the end of the game you discover those stand for Execution Points and Level of Violence. You're not supposed to kill anyone, you're supposed to figure out the other options, because duh. My surrogate parent monster at the start of the game refused to get out of my way, so I killed her. But then I immediately regretted it, and reloaded. But the game still knew. It knew what I did.
Skylines lets us plant cities, seeding asphalt and concrete to watch them grow and buzz with life. The city will largely take care of itself, but you can make weed and fertilise with policies and plans to make it truly shine.
Or in this case, the chain of office. One spring night in , Cities: Skylines rode in off the steppe, marched into the campaign yurt of old Mayor SimCity, and beasted off his head with one pleasingly-curved swing of his asphalt broadsword. Also, this is a very funny sketch.
Graham: It's all about the roads, isn't it? SimCity offered an always off-balance set of scales, where adding a little more houses over here required a little more industry over there and so on, till the map was full.
Cities: Skylines grabs that system wholesale, but really it's the roads that hold my attention, from trying to design the perfect road network before placing a single building, to endlessly tweaking junctions and off-ramps for hours to try to reduce those downtown traffic jams.
There is always more to do, and watching your ants scurry around your ant farm more efficiently is its own reward. Alice L: God, I love Cities. I just can't seem to deal with my trash effciently, and I always build so many roads to try and keep all the pollution away from my townsfolk that I just run out of money. And to that I say: sandbox! Conduct industrial espionage for fun and profit in this turn-based tactical stealth game from the makers of Mark Of The Ninja. Blessed with generous knowledge of enemy movements, try to thread the needle as your agents move through facilities and dodge guards as the security response escalates.
Build and upgrade a stable of agents, steal new gear, and try not to lose them by getting greedy. But a shiny new crimetool is just the other side of this locked door Graham: Invisible, Inc. You know not only where the guards are, but where they're going to walk to.
Every route and vision cone is visible on the UI. It should be easy, then, to sneak into its proc gen office floors and make off with the goods, right?
Ha ha, you fool. Perfect information doesn't make you perfect. You're going to make mistakes. In part because the game delights in tempting you. Sure, you can get what you need and leave, but push on into another room or two and you might find a new tool, a new character, or rescue the character you got captured on the last mission.
The more you push, the more guards will start wandering the floor in search of intruders, the more you'll find yourself having to make sacrifices of your characters. That's tough because the character design here is great, both in terms of the unique skills your crew each have, and in their visual design. Invisible, Inc. If your favourite bit of any XCOM fight is the moment before all hell breaks loose - or if you really liked the recent Mutant: Year Zero - give this a try next.
It's a tighter game, but its reduced scope brings clarity of purpose and design. Arkane created a world of political intrigue and class struggle, where everyone is betraying everyone else, and then let you be an assassin in it. An assassin with magic powers. The sequel, though the PC build was initially plagued with performance issues on release, goes further than the original in creating an exquisite playground for you to exploit.
Hack a clockwork robot here, flood an entire building with knockout gas there, and decide the fate of a nation. Alice Bee: How do I love thee, Dishonored? Let me count the ways. Not literally, though, or we'll be here all day. I was being poetic, like. I think Dishonored 2 is probably the perfect form of Dishonored much as I also enjoy Death Of The Outsider, and its portrayal of a world caught in the moment between past and future, between the old ways and the new.
Because you're given the option of playing as Emily or Corvo, you get two entirely different ways to play the game, even on top of the lethal vs. Christ, though, Dishonored 2 is just so fucking stylish. It's the sexiest game to ever feature no shagging. Mission four is the Clockwork Mansion, where you have to break into the home of big science weirdo Kirin Jindosh. He's really gone hard and gone home, transforming his mansion into a weird collection of moving parts, guarded by hideous clockwork automata.
And yet, you can outsmart him. You can sneak into the walls. You can burrow into his little nest. You can be as a ghost. The whole game is like that. It is well oiled machine, and you can become a cog in it, an unknown, unseen presence that spins this way, then that, subtly changing the workings. Or you can be a big stabby murder girl. Up to you, isn't it? Katharine: How do I love thee, Clockwork Mansion?
It was, what, five hours I spent crawling around inside your walls, dodging your hulking great clockwork soldiers and trying desperately avoid your network of surveillance bots? Or was it eight? Or nine? Whatever number it was, I'd do it all again in an instant. In truth, I needn't have spent that long slipping through the cracks of this single, but fiendishly brilliant Dishonored 2 level. This burden I brought upon myself. Having played and adored the first Dishonored but also wholly misunderstanding how its chaos system worked, I made a solemn vow upon starting Dishonored 2 that not only was I going to finish the game with Low Chaos this time, thereby getting the 'good' ending, but I was also going to do it completely unseen and without shedding a single drop of blood - and my Shadow and Clean Hands achievements remain two of my greatest gaming accomplishments to this day.
Yes, it involved a lot of quick saves and quick reloads. Yes, it probably took twice as long to play as it perhaps should have done, but it was worth it reader, because Dishonored 2 is a masterpiece of design, ingenuity and general splendidness. Karnaca is a city that twists, turns and loops back in on itself without ever losing its sense of place or structure. It's Jindosh's Clockwork Mansion writ large across an entire urban sprawl, and for me its warren of plague-ridden shops, murderous alleyways and lived-in apartment blocks are far more treacherous and enticing destinations than their Dunwall equivalents ever were.
As you pick through the aftermath of the city's devastating Bloodfly invasion, you too start to feel like some sort of disease that's rippling through its corrupted streets, dismantling its upper echelons from the inside out before leaving without a trace. There are so many secrets to uncover and so many paths you can take to try and get there, yet all the while it's a city that adheres to the strict tick-tick-tick of its clockwork logic. The Clockwork Mansion may leave an indelible mark on the early hours of Dishonored 2, but this is by no means a game that peaks early.
Beyond Jindosh's mansion, his spirit comes back to bite you in the ass when you encounter his devilish Jindosh Lock, and moments later you're being dazzled once again by the time-travelling puzzle box that is Aramis Stilton's decaying manor house.
Finally, it all culminates in the sweetest, most delicious serving of hot revenge I've ever seen in a video game. It is, in a word, perfect, and my ultimate game of the decade by a blinking country mile. After a decade lain fallow, uncertain of its place in the modern FPS scene, the game that made Id Software returned in a shower of guts.
The reborn Doom is fast, it is nimble, it is loud, and it rewards you for tearing demons apart with your bare hands. Dave: The moment I knew that the revamped Doom was something special was when the Doom Slayer pumped his shotgun in time with the music.
Doom has a vibe, you see - a 90s power fantasy unashamed of how much cheese is heaped on. After all, do we not order entire boards of cheese at restaurants? Cheese is great! And Doom gets this. For you see, Doom wants you to slay demons in the most barbaric way possible. Glory Kills give you health pickups, while chopping things with the chainsaw makes the enemy cadaver spew ammunition like a fountain.
This means less time is spent running away to recover and replenish, and more time is spent killing things! Explore all the thrills, chills, responsibilities, and mundanities of building a colony on another world in this survival management game.
Your plans may be big and your blueprints impressive but can be all too easily undone by shortages, spoilage, raiders, aliens, fires, your own mistakes, or the quiet ticking time bomb of a colonist who is so sick of people clomping around at night that they snap.
A bit like Dwarf Fortress, in space, with menus to click and pictures to look at. Nate: One of the worst names of the decade, for one of the best games. But for everyone else, and especially for those people whose sense of humour focuses entirely on hooting like delighted chimps whenever they spot someone using a word that also has a Sex Meaning, RimWorld sounded like a themepark based on the concept of licking arseholes.
For just a few examples of the tales you can set up with RimWorld, I defer to that cool guy Nate, who listed five of his favourites here. RimWorld is both an answer to that and its own distinct idea. Its mix of base building, survival, and life sim is just about right, and its famous harshness easy to mitigate for those who just want to have a good time, or bump up for those who relish a cascading disaster sim. Its mostly optional darkness - slavery, organ harvesting, cannibalism - is counteracted by its pleasant atmosphere and the warm glow of pemmican on the fire, or feeding a flock of fluffy chicks, or getting all your potatoes into storage after the harvest.
And you can be a nomad too. Oh my god. Stay standing for as long as you can in this simple arena FPS. Run around this empty oval arena and shoot skulls with your one gun while a timer counts up. Good luck. And my god, it looks and sounds like nothing else.
Alice0: I was taken with Devil Daggers at first sight. I adore the old 3D style of unfiltered textures and jittering vertices applied to skulls, skulls, skulls - a torrent of skulls more complex and numerous than was possible in Mass Effect 2 achieved some controversy on one hand and wild success on the other. While some people argue Mass Effect 2 isn't even an RPG, BioWare's sci-fi epic was massively successful - both with the wider public and, it seems, with our readers.
Streamlined and further polished from the original Mass Effect , the key to its success is undoubtedly the cast of characters and their personal quests. The overall plot looks a little flimsy if you look too closely but the structure encourages players to build relationships with a range of interesting characters, not just stick with a core small group.
There are some memorable moments in those personal quests and surprising emotional gravitas for an action space opera. The effort Larian Studios put into revamping Divinity 2 was well worth it. It attracted the attention of our visitors and made it to third place, closely followed by Dragon Age: Awakenings. Games Developers Publishers.
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