The 20 Best Xbox 360 Games of All Time

As an open-world, sandbox-style game, Crackdown shares a lot of its DNA with the Grand Theft Auto series — and for good reason. Both games were created by Scottish developer David Jones (who also made Lemmings!), and the similarities are apparent. Set in a fictional Pacific City, Crackdown is basically GTA with superpowers. Players control an unnamed agent whose job is to take down various criminal organizations across a fully explorable and highly reactive metropolis.

With the ability to utilize melee weapons, guns, and (of course) vehicles to beat down bad guys, on top of a variety of superpowers, the game frankly plays better than the era’s GTA titles ever really did. With ink-like outlines on the characters, the aesthetic is comic booky on its own, but its combination of open-world crime sim and cartoonish physical feats feel like a natural predecessor to many of the legitimate superhero games that came later. Before there was Arkham City or Marvel’s Spider-Man, Crackdown let you bounce around its urban expanse with the flowing grace of Ang Lee’s Hulk.

Taking a page from Sony’s playbook of pilfering Nintendo’s working partners from under their nose, Microsoft pulled a coup when it bought British studio Rare in 2002. Previously, the company was mostly known for Nintendo-exclusive hits like Donkey Kong Country (1994), GoldenEye 007 (1997), and the Banjo-Kazooie series. But after its acquisition, Rare brought their own IP (namely, Perfect Dark and Banjo) to its new home at Xbox.

Perfect Dark Zero ended up being a solid launch title for the 360 in 2005, but it was the third Banjo-Kazooie game that must have really stung for Nintendo; they had lost one of their most popular mascot platformers, their bread and butter. Nuts & Bolts is also a huge departure from the series, which previously played somewhat closer to Super Mario 64. This new iteration redesigned the aesthetics of the world and characters, and weaves in a complex physics-based vehicle customization system that was ahead of its time. The Lego-like feature arrived a whole year before the first version of Minecraft hit PC, and 15 years prior to what the Zelda series would attempt with Tears of the Kingdom’s crafting mechanics.

Every gaming platform worth its salt must have its own fighting franchise. While PlayStation had Tekken, and everyone shared the spoils of Soulcalibur and Street Fighter for a while, Xbox made their mark by picking up Dead or Alive from publisher Tecmo. The third and fourth mainline entries in the franchise were exclusive to Xbox platforms, with Dead or Alive 4 only available on the 360.

Developed by Team Ninja, who would go on to have a bright future with Microsoft through its Ninja Gaiden series, Dead or Alive 4 was exactly the kind of fighting game the 360 needed to appeal to casual audiences. Known for its easy-to-play, over-the-top combat and ridiculous characters (including Ninja Gaiden’s Ryu and a newly created Spartan soldier from Halo lore), DOA served as an accessible entry for anyone picking up the new Xbox in its initial months. While it lacks outright gooner bait of beach volleyball found in the Xtreme sub-series, Dead or Alive 4 has real mechanical chops, and became an esports staple for a while and popularized virtual worlds and avatars well before modern games like Street Fighter 6 (2023) and Tekken 8 (2024).

While the big appeal of the 360 in the early days was its astounding graphics, you’d think that would mostly apply to big AAA blockbusters. But then there was Geometry Wars. Initially snuck into Xbox’s Project Gotham Racing 2 (2003) as a minigame, the twin-stick shooter was expanded as a full release for Xbox Live Arcade — the 360’s groundbreaking digital-only storefront. One of the first big hits for the virtual platform, Geometry Wars became the little game that everyone had to have (and was perfect for short binges in between rounds of Call of Duty).

The sequel was bigger and better, with a local cooperative multiplayer mode evocative of top-down arcade shooters, but with psychedelic visual aesthetic that would blow any stoner’s mind. Despite its humble design as a relatively straightforward shooter, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 is deceptively thrilling and an easy obsession to pick up to this day.

Although Rare joined the Xbox family with their own intellectual property in tow, they were also tasked with developing new ones. Their second game for the 360, Viva Piñata, is an exceptionally inventive take on the cozy life simulator genre — something like Animal Crossing meets Spore, but with cutesy piñata creatures populating its colorful world.

The first-person game requires players to clean up and foster a massive garden, customizing its layout and features as they see fit. Little minigames result in the creation of new piñatas and, with 60 types, the experience has shades of the creature collecting of games like Pokémon — except with a full prey/predator system wherein certain piñatas devour others to earn their place in the garden. Viva Piñata showed that there was room for whimsy alongside the more mature offerings on Xbox, and even ended up branching out into an animated kids’ series that aired on TV for multiple years.

While Xbox wasn’t home to the Final Fantasy series, Microsoft wasn’t content to be left out in the cold. Instead, they enlisted the series’ creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi, and composer, Nobuo Uematsu, to produce their own original role-playing game that would appeal to Japanese and North American fans of the genre.

Set in fantasy world on the cusp of a Magic-Industrial Revolution, Lost Odyssey bears all the hallmarks of classic JRPGs, including turn-based combat systems and an expansive world map to explore. With an emotionally gripping narrative following a band of amnesiac immortals, co-written by Japanese author Kiyoshi Sigematsu, the game hit hard at a time when its sister series was approaching creative stagnation. Although it never saw a sequel, its legacy has remained alive among cult fandom, including the creators of modern RPG favorites like Expedition 33.  

Few games manage to blend as many video game and storytelling genres as deftly as BioShock. Developed by Ken Levine as a spiritual successor to the classic PC series, System Shock, the first-person shooter combined elements of RPG progression, horror game pacing and aesthetics, and a heady philosophical bend to its story. Players take on the role of Jack, a passenger on a doomed transatlantic flight that crashes into the ocean, leaving the protagonist stranded in a previously lost underwater city called Rapture.

BioShock’s plot has long been celebrated as revolutionary insofar as convincing naysayers that games serve as a form of art. With a twisted vision that skewers the high-minded beliefs of everyone from Ayn Rand to Walt Disney, Rapture is a place of pure terror, fueled by civil unrest and classism. While the game was eventually ported to the PlayStation 3, it first found its console home on Xbox 360, and was a true feather in the cap for culture warriors looking to tout the exclusivity dominance of Microsoft’s platform. For over a year, BioShock alone was worth buying an Xbox for.

As with fighters, no console is complete without its own bespoke racing game. Following Project Gotham Racing, the Forza series became Xbox’s big ticket to competing against Sony’s Gran Turismo, although the franchise had a leg-up by diverging into two different sub-series in the 360 era. Forza Motorsport played like true racing sim, with realistic physics that required technical prowess; Forza Horizon was an open-world offshoot that catered to a more arcade-friendly crowd who wanted to explore huge expanses at blistering speeds.

Forza Motorsport 4 was the final game of its ilk for the Xbox 360, featuring hyper realistic graphics and complex physics that pushed the console to its limits. Players can control the vehicles from a third-person exterior perspective or behind-the-wheel from inside the cockpit. Through a partnership with Top Gear, the show’s host Jeremy Clarkson provided color commentary, breathing a new level of authenticity into Forza for dedicated gearheads. The game also featured some less-than-thrilling, motion-based controls designed for the Wii-chasing Kinect camera system, but they could easily be ignored to play Forza with a controller as intended.

One of the greatest aspects of the Xbox 360 was the sheer variety of genres it housed. While it was well known for its many shooters — a department where both Nintendo and Sony were slacking — 360 was also a platform for stellar RPGs. Specifically, Xbox became the console where Western roleplaying games thrived. Series like BioWare’s Mass Effect and Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls found roots on Microsoft’s device before eventually spreading outward, but one franchise has thrived wearing the Xbox banner: Peter Molyneaux’s Fable.

Set 500 years after the 2004 original, Fable II returns players to the fantasy world of Abion, but much has changed (and will change) throughout the journey. Unlike many RPGs which tout branching paths and open-ended gameplay, Fable II delivers on a fully reactive world that shifts and evolves throughout the protagonist’s lifespan. The player character’s actions inform their moral alignments, and genuine relationships can be fostered — even leading to marriage. Visiting towns and interacting with people can have a butterfly effect on how things look further down the line in ways that feel organic. Without a hard questline, it’s up to the player to decide how they’ll live in this world, and what they’ll make of it.

One of the best offerings from Xbox Live Arcade, Limbo was one of the biggest indie games of its time when it arrived in 2010. Developed by Playdead, the 2D side-scroller employs an extremely moody and grim atmosphere to powerful effect — its film noir-inspired monochromatic visuals are equally enthralling and eerie. The story is minimalist, centering on an unnamed boy who finds himself at the edge of hell, pursued by a horrific spider through the forest as he searches for his missing sister.

Like some other 2D indie games of the era, Limbo’s side-scrolling mechanics are more puzzle-focused than twitchy platforming, forcing the boy to survive environmental hazards like bear traps that are often concealed by the silhouette darkness of the world. The deaths sustained in failure are brutal, and paired with the game’s dour visuals (inspired by German Expressionism), it can be off-putting to audiences who are expecting a more playful gaming experience. But for those who are willing to risk the momentary depression, it’s an awe-inspiring audiovisual journey that’s satisfying to solve, even if its ending can be frustratingly ambiguous for some.

The original 2D Ninja Gaiden games were crown-jewel actioners for the NES, famous for their difficulty and cinematic presentation. But with 2004’s Ninja Gaiden 3D reboot for Xbox, the franchise became something else entirely as Team Ninja and publisher Microsoft cooked up a truly brutal celebration of hardcore combat and wince-inducing violence. With Ninja Gaiden II — arguably the series’ peak — the franchise slipped even further into ludicrous depravity in glorious ways.

Ninja Gaiden II’s combat is faster, more complex, and upps the elegant savagery to new heights with the introduction of the dismemberment system. Fighting enemies becomes a choreographed dance aimed at lopping off limbs to initiate an insta-kill — a system that eight years later would make Doom’s reinvention so successful — and the dense waves of different enemy types make every encounter a full-on murder puzzle. Before Soulslike style became the norm for third-person action games, Ninja Gaiden reigned supreme (and still does to many fans). And although remixed ports of Gaiden II and its sequel would eventually hit other platforms, his appearance in this game and the Dead or Alive series catapulted protagonist Ryu Hayabusa into Xbox icon status alongside the likes of Halo’s Master Chief.

Although its ubiquity is a given these days, Minecraft originally started as something much humbler. The indie game, created by controversial figure Markus “Notch” Persson, circulated in public alpha form in 2009 before launching in full in 2011. It garnered a feverish cult quickly, but things really exploded in 2012 when Minecraft arrived on Xbox 360 — a platform where kids everywhere can be glued to the TV with a controller without needing to boot up a PC.

Eventually, in 2014, Microsoft would go all in by buying Minecraft outright, leading to the cultural phenomenon we know today where a blocky crafting sandbox has become the highest-selling game ever, with physical playsets filling store aisles and billion-dollar movies dominating the box office. But like placing a little voxel that builds the foundation for something more, Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition was an essential part of the franchise’s rise, and for a generation of console gamers was a formative experience.

One of the key selling points for Xbox 360 was its relatively seamless online multiplayer setup with its Live service. Building off the network of its predecessor and Microsoft’s iron grip on the computing world, Xbox Live brought console players a connected experience much closer to what PC gamers had been enjoying for years — making it the go-to platform for competitive and cooperative shooters for anyone not married to a mouse and keyboard. That position opened opportunities for famously PC-oriented developers like Valve to start bringing their games to a whole new audience.

While 2007’s The Orange Box is probably the best deal ever made in gaming (including Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal), it was Valve’s other big game series of the era that really hit the sweet spot on Xbox. Left 4 Dead and its sequel are four-player cooperative shooters where survivors must work together to make their way through maze-like levels while fending off the never-ending onslaught of the undead. Arguably the best cooperative games ever made (and some of the best first-person shooters to boot), they’re basically the blueprint for this style of game, endlessly imitated but never beaten, and are still played rabidly to this day. On Xbox 360, Left 4 Dead 2 was designed with two-player couch co-op in mind, making it one of the best ways to burn a weekend with a buddy.

Like many indie games with small dev teams, Fez was famously an uphill battle to make — a story detailed in the 2012 documentary Indie Game: The Movie. But after its five-year production cycle, the pixelated puzzler launched on Xbox Live Arcade to massive success. One of the most beloved indie games ever, Fez is a foundational text for the entire scene; its long-running reign kicked off thanks in part to the Xbox platform — although the relationship between its publisher and the game’s co-creator later soured.

The game itself is a delightfully mind-bending puzzler that toys with shifting 2D-3D perspectives as players rotate the levels themselves to reveal hidden pathways for its marshmallow-like protagonist, Gomez, to follow. One of the great examples of how pixel art can be visually rich, Fez’s universe is never static; its environments are packed with small details and motion that breathe life into everything even deep into its background. With a hypnotic chiptune soundtrack composed by Rich “Disasterpeace” Vreeland, it’s the kind of puzzle game that fully envelops you to bask in.

One of the great coups of the first Xbox era was the release of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind in 2002. While PlayStation was swimming in Japanese RPGs like Final Fantasy, Xbox fans took solace in the unfathomably large medieval vision of Bethesda’s D&D-inspired, role-playing opus. When it came time for the next installment, Oblivion, audiences were practically foaming at the mouth.

Oblivion is well-known for its massive explorable world which, powered by an advanced AI system, was filled with NPCs engaging in complex behavioral patterns on their own accord. With a seemingly endless amount to discover, it’s the type of game that can be played for years on end, and was so beloved that even its successor, Skyrim (A.K.A., one of the highest-selling RPGs ever), was considered a backstep by many. Although it has tons of bugs and the janky animations that Bethesda games are known for, it was an impressive technical feat at the time — and despite coming to PS3 a year later, the Xbox 360 version is considered far superior for both how it ran and the additional content released by the publisher. For console players, the 360 edition was the definitive way to play up until this year’s surprise remaster.

While the 360 was home to an awesome number of RPGs, its best might just be a sci-fi shooter hybrid called Mass Effect. Developed by BioWare, whose credentials include Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the Mass Effect series had high expectations behind it — which it handily surpassed (at least with the first two entries). The game follows a group of heroes of all different alien species brought together to combat an interstellar threat to the Milky Way galaxy, led by a fully customizable Commander Shepherd.

Mass Effect marries third-person shooter gameplay with strategic RPG mechanics, letting players build their Shepherd to play as they like, as well as issue real-time orders to their party members in the heat of battle. It partially popularized the Paragon system where moral choices in branching conversation would impact how the story plays out, even down to who lives or dies. Over the course of three games, major decisions would be carried over via save data, meaning that the full journey was tailored to each player over years’ worth of investment. The hook, however, was that the first game was Xbox-exclusive; anyone playing the sequel on PS3 didn’t have the option to experience the starting chapter, let alone continue the threads they personally created. Until the trilogy capper arrived in 2012 with a PS3 port of the original game, the only way for console users to experience Mass Effect as intended was on Xbox 360.

Of the many fantastic indie games released for Xbox Live Arcade, perhaps the greatest splash was made by Braid. The 2D puzzle-platformer arrived in 2009 just as the indie scene was gaining traction, and the experience it delivered subverted expectations.

Braid follows a man named Tim who is doing the tried-and-true gaming schtick of rescuing a princess from a castle. Each level is designed like a bizarro spin on 2D platformers like Super Mario, with enemies to dodge and pathways to unlock, but with a time-altering twist. Most of the puzzle solutions rely on time manipulation; players must set up an action, rewind, and capitalize on the domino effect they’ve set in motion in a Rube Goldberg-esque way. But the big surprise, which is subtlety seeded in text throughout the game, is about the nature of Tim and the princess’ relationship — a final act shift that recontextualizes the entire game. With watercolor-like aesthetics and a cozy vibe, Braid engrosses the senses successfully enough to temper the frustrations of even the game’s toughest puzzles.

When you think of Xbox, it’s practically a given that Halo comes to mind. The first-person shooter series, originally snatched from Apple before it could become their killer app, it’s the flagship franchise for Microsoft gaming, and revolutionized how first-person shooters worked on home consoles. After the first two games landed as instant classics on the original Xbox, the 360 era expanded into a different, bigger phase — fleshing out the lore with sequels, prequels, and spin-offs.

While the numbered entries in the franchise fall firmly into high sci-fi fantasy territory, telling a sweeping spacefaring war story centered on the superhuman Spartan Master Chief, Halo: Reach has more dramatic ambitions. A prequel to the very first game, it follows a group of elite soldiers called the Noble Six, who fight in futility to protect the human-occupied world of Reach from the series’ alien villains, the Covenant. Going in, fans of the series already knew the outcome; the mission is doomed and the game’s story is a desperate, somber march toward the inevitable death of the characters. The Seven Samurai-like framing (or Rogue One if you’re a fetus), imbues Reach with a more complex tone than the other entries in the series, and scales the fantastical elements back for something more intimate.

What Halo is to first-person shooters, Gears of War is to third-person. The sci-fi series, whose original trilogy (and then some) launched on the Xbox 360 from 2006 to 2013, was one of the defining action franchises of the era. Alongside Resident Evil 4, which arrived just a year prior to the first Gears, the series’ over-the-shoulder gunplay changed the industry, setting the standard for how shooters would look and feel to this day. Gears also popularized the sticky cover mechanics that emphasized taking refuge in between fire, something Sony themselves would copy with its popular Uncharted series.

But there’s a special kind of stupid to Gears of War that’s part of its charm. Every hero in this world is an impossible wide and stout muscleman (or later woman), who speaks solely in gruff cliches. It’s a bombastic action experience through and through, and the second installment is easily the best. The story campaign is fully playable in two-player co-op, and the enhanced competitive multiplayer mode brought up to 10 players head-to-head online to rip each other apart with rifle-mounted chainsaws. Roll your eyes all you want, but they literally don’t make them like this anymore; the Gears series has mostly floundered in later sequels, with Microsoft coasting on nostalgia with a remaster of the first game every few years. For players of a certain age, this was peak — well, along with one other game.

This is the one — the game that might as well have been pre-installed in every Xbox 360 console rolling out the gate. Although it launched two years into the console’s life cycle and was ultimately outsold by Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, anyone looking for the definitive gameplay experience on Microsoft’s best console could no further than Halo 3. The biggest entry in the series served as the end of the trilogy, and alongside 2010’s Reach, also acted as a swansong for the franchise’s creators, Bungie, before handing over the reins for games of diminishing quality.

Halo 3 has it all: an action-packed campaign that can be conquered by two-players in couch co-op or up to four online; a best-in-class competitive multiplayer suite with deathmatch, capture-the-flag, and ranked play; and a full map editor called The Forge that added endless customization for fans to continue creating their own experiences for years to come. It was played far and wide from dorms to living rooms to furnished basements, and remains one of the greatest games of all time.

While many would argue that Halo 2 is the best in the series, Halo 3 showed that everything its predecessor did could be done on a bigger scale with more modern features, and stands as a hallmark for the franchise that never quite reached these heights again. Picking up Halo 3 feels like a rosy memory of simpler times, before battle passes and endless annual iteration made everything into homogenous slop. And it still kicks, too, and is worth firing up via The Master Chief Collection on Xbox Game Pass.