Best Xbox 360 Games | Pure Xbox
Looking for the best Xbox 360 games? Crazy as it may seem, the good old Xbox 360 is now seventeen years old, and looking back at the history and back catalog of Microsoft’s amazing 7th generation console, it’s an absolute feast with great games to choose from.
From excellent Xbox Arcade titles to fresh new franchises, top-notch RPGs, thought-provoking shooters, amazing puzzles, superhero spectaculars and more, there’s something for every type of gamer here, and most, if not all, are just as impressive today as they were was when they were first released.
We’ve dug deep into this impressive selection of titles to bring you what we consider to be the very best Xbox 360 games in the list below. We’ve also gone ahead and flagged whether each of our entries are available to pick up via backwards compatibility on current consoles.
So, without further ado, let’s jump in and see what we’ve picked as the best games on Xbox 360!
Alan Wake (Xbox 360)
Publisher: Microsoft / Developer: Medium
Hello. Have you ever heard of Alan Wake? He’s a famous writer, you know.
Remedy’s 2010 action-adventure is an absolute cheesefest in all the best ways, with our big-headed protagonist, Alan Wake (he’s a writer, don’t you know), delivering plenty of terrible dialogue as he ventures into the darkness of Bright Falls in search of answers to why he has writer’s block, why he can’t remember anything and why one of his nightmare stories seems to have come alive.
The battle here is one a little clumsy, but using the safety of light sources combined with the flashlight and gun to fend off enemies is never less than fun anyway, and as much as the narrative is cheesy, it’s still engaging stuff with enough mystery to keep you hooked for the long haul.
If you’ve never played this one before, there’s now a fancy new remastered version available that smoothes out some of the rough edges, but wherever you choose to get stuck into, this is a highly original experience that’s certainly one of the best The Xbox 360 games of that generation.
- Backward compatible? Yes
Assassin’s Creed II (Xbox 360)
Publisher: Ubisoft / Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Whether you loved the very first Assassin’s Creed game or not, or thought it was little more than a fancy tech demo with a pretty mediocre adventure attached, there’s absolutely no doubt that the sequel came and ruled this fledgling franchise in exact correct direction.
Assassin’s Creed 2 provided the gameplay to match the graphics in an outstanding game that sets players free through an incredibly detailed Renaissance-era Italy, giving them a wonderfully intricate playground where they can sneak, stab and fight with swords. Taking in several Italian cities, including Venice and Florence, and featuring cameos from a number of history’s finest, such as Leonardo da Vinci himself, Ezio’s second outing is a stunning, all-encompassing achievement that is a credit to the pre-Origins Assassin’s Creed series .
- Backward compatible? Yes
Batman: Arkham Asylum (Xbox 360)
Publisher: Warner Bros / Developer: Rocksteady Studios
Rocksteady’s take on the Dark Knight blew us all right out of our gaming chairs back in 2009 with its wonderfully gloomy atmosphere, amazing combat, and clever Metroid-esque world layout.
Donning the cape and cowl here, players entered a world packed with detail, lore, an incredible cast of Gotham’s deadliest villains, and top-notch voice acting from Kevin Conway, Mark Hamill, and more. The free-flowing, combo-centric combat here was, and still is, some of the very best in video games, and combined with wonderfully well-realized detective/puzzle elements and a hard-hitting story, it resulted in an adventure that was easily the best superhero game ever published at the time. Batman: Arkham Asylum really made us feel like we were really Batman and absolutely nailed what the Dark Knight is all about.
- Backward compatible? No, but available as part of Batman: Arkham Collection and Batman: Return to Arkham
Batman: Arkham City (Xbox 360)
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive / Developer: Rocksteady Studios
How do you follow up a game as fantastically good as Batman: Arkham Asylum? Well, you break down the walls of the infamous prison and give the players a large part of the city to run amok in.
The bright lights of Arkham City often taunted us from afar from certain vantage points in its predecessor, but Rocksteady’s follow-up went further and gave us a generously sized Gotham City to grapple, slide and zipline through. The kickass battles, puzzles, and metroidvania aspects return from the first game, but in Batman: Arkham City they are joined by a truly liberating feeling of being able to fully play the bat, swooping down from above into street warfare, watching and waiting quietly from a rooftop before sliding into battle, stalking your enemies and choosing when to must strike in style. .it’s amazing stuff.
With a new rogues gallery of villains to face, tons of puzzles, fantastic voice acting, a top-notch story and New Game Plus mode that turns up the heat nicely, this one more than makes up for a slightly gnarly portrayal of the Dark Knight himself by delivering the goods in the gaming department. One of the the best Xbox 360 game of all time, you owe it to yourself to slide right into this one.
- Backward compatible? No, but available as part of Batman: Arkham Collection and Batman: Return to Arkham
Bayonetta (Xbox 360)
Publisher: SEGA / Developer: PlatinumGames
One of the truly great action games of all time on the Xbox 360, Platinum Games’ 2009 hack and slash extravaganza enchanted us way back when we first played it.
The story of an amnesiac, angel-killing witch with guns on her shoes and a seriously killer – and we mean really killer – haircut Bayonetta is one of the smoothest, most intricate and completely off the rails action experiences you will ever have.
With sublime combo-centric combat that rewards players who take the time to learn, a completely insane story dripping with lore and some of the most OTT boss fights and characters we’ve ever encountered, we just can’t get enough of this Umbrisk witch and her super-sexy, ultra-happy fighting style. Dodging into Witch Time to slow battles to a crawl, beat your celestial enemies into submission with a fist made of your hair, or pick them up for a Gigaton medieval torture finisher… hack and slash action just doesn’t get better than this, and if you think it does, you can FUG IT!
- Backward compatible? Yes, and you can jump into the superb remastered version on current and next-gen consoles.
Binary Domain (Xbox 360)
Publisher: SEGA
Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s 2012 shooter has become something of a cult classic over the years – in fact, we don’t know anyone who doesn’t love it – and for good reason.
Binary domainits post-apocalyptic story tells of a world where robots are now the main workforce and charges you to blast the absolute hell out of absolutely tons of them, issue commands to your squad and see how your actions and attitude affect the game’s story through its unique consequence system ,
What really makes Binary Domain worthy of inclusion on this list, however, is how good it feels to tear robots apart here, blasting chunks of their exoskeletons with big, meaty weapons as they smartly flank and swarm your position. The muscle-bound cast of characters also spouts the raunchiest, rawest, dumbest lines of dialogue possible, which are exact what we are looking for in this scenario. It’s cathartic, OTT and ridiculous in all the best possible ways, looks good, has a completely crazy story and holds up to repeated playthroughs. If you haven’t yet, we highly recommend you seek this one out and get stuck in.
BioShock (Xbox 360)
Publisher: 2K games / Developer: 2K Australia
Ken Levine’s spiritual successor to System Shock, Bioshock is quite unlike anything we’ve ever played before or since.
A meditation on the nature of man and society that draws from the works of Ayn Rand, Huxley, Orwell and more to inform its nightmarish vision of an underwater utopia gone grievously wrong, it’s a gruesome, mesmerizing, genre-defining piece of work.
And away from the more cerebral elements, it’s also a damn good shooter, with countless ways to dispose of your terrifying enemies. Whether it’s through direct gunplay, plasmid-based attacks, stealthy stealth or meddling with mechanics to turn the tide in your favor, Bioshock’s combat is delightfully open-ended, giving you a robust set of options to set its truly haunting world in motion.
Jack’s journey from plane crash, to the bathosphere, to deep underwater hellhole and beyond is a true tour-de-force that stands up as one of the truly great games and a journey you simply owe it to yourself to take.
- Backward compatible? Yes
Bioshock Infinite (Xbox 360)
Publisher: 2K games / Developer: Irrational games
It’s hard to believe that 2013 is Bioshock Infinite is still the latest entry in the beloved series, but it certainly doesn’t disappoint, even by today’s standards. It’s quite a departure compared to the original Bioshock trilogy, which takes place in the flying steampunk city of Columbia (rather than focusing around the underworld city of Rapture), and that change of pace proved to be a wonderful breath of fresh air for the franchise .
These days, you’re probably best off playing this (and the rest of the Bioshock games) in Bioshock collection for Xbox One, but they’re also backwards compatible if you can get the Xbox 360 versions cheap.
- Backward compatible? Yes
Borderlands 2 (Xbox 360)
Publisher: 2K games / Developer: Gearbox software
Release date: TBA
Gearbox’s 2012 sequel took the undeniable promise of its predecessor and built on it fully, expanding your wacky adventures on Pandora into a fully-fledged epic adventure with a much-improved story, absolutely tons of loot and weapons, and tons of replay value.
Blasting around Pandora here with up to three friends in co-op mode, it’s hard to deny the continued allure of it Borderlands 2, we love the aesthetic, the gunplay is rock solid, Handsome Jack is a fantastic new character, the weapons are endlessly inventive…heck there’s enough good stuff here to help us completely ignore the fact that we absolutely loathe claptrap and aren’t big fans of the series’ humor in general – the gameplay is just so good. If you’re looking for a crazy looter shooter, this is a super solid shout.
- Backward compatible? Yes
