Best video games of the 2010s

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild▲ Rising

You step out of the Shrine of Resurrection, look toward Death Mountain, and realize you can just walk there — climbing any surface, ignoring every invisible wall Zelda games had trained you to respect for thirty years. It didn't just reboot a franchise, it rewrote the grammar of open-world design, making 'chemistry over checklist' the industry's new north star. Every Ubisoft towerscape since has been chasing the freedom Nintendo gave away for free.

Year: 2017Critic score: 9.7/10

added by IJRin 9 rankings

Super Mario Odyssey▲ Rising

Cappy lands on a Bullet Bill, or a T-Rex, or a Goomba wearing a tiny top hat, and suddenly 3D platforming has more verbs than it's had in twenty years. New Donk City's Jump Up, Super Star sequence is the single most purely joyful five minutes gaming produced this decade, proof that a 30-year-old mascot could still feel brand new. It's the platonic ideal of 'more games should just be fun.'

Year: 2017Critic score: 9.7/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

Grand Theft Auto V▲ Rising

Trevor Philips torturing a man for information while cracking jokes is the exact tonal whiplash GTA V mastered and never let go of, three protagonists letting Rockstar tell a heist story, a satire, and a Michael Mann homage simultaneously. It launched in 2013 and somehow never left, GTA Online quietly becoming one of the most profitable entertainment products in history for a decade straight. Love it or resent its chokehold on the culture, nothing defined 'live service before live service was a term' like this did.

Year: 2013Critic score: 9.7/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

Red Dead Redemption 2▲ Rising

Arthur Morgan cleaning his revolver at a slowly dying campfire, horse balls actually shrinking in cold water, an entire prologue buried in snow before you fire a single meaningful shot — Rockstar built the most obsessively lived-in world ever rendered and then had the nerve to make it a tragedy about a dying way of life. It's the decade's argument that games could be slow, mournful, and still be blockbusters. The ending, whichever one you get, wrecks you either way.

Year: 2018Critic score: 9.7/10

added by IJRin 11 rankings

Mass Effect 2▲ Rising

The suicide mission finale, where every recruitment mission, every loyalty quest, every offhand conversation you'd had for forty hours suddenly determined who lived and who got vaporized in an air duct, is still the high-water mark for consequence in branching narrative design. BioWare took a clunky RPG and turned it into the best squad-based space opera ever made, with Mordin Solus alone worth the price of admission. It's the decade's proof that player choice could feel earned instead of cosmetic.

Year: 2010Critic score: 9.5/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

God of War (2018)

That single unbroken camera take, no cuts for the entire game, turned Kratos's rage-fueled rampage into something startlingly intimate — a father teaching his son to hunt while quietly failing to teach him how to grieve. Trading the button-mashing carnage of the PS2 trilogy for a Norse-mythology character study was the kind of reinvention that shouldn't have worked and became one of the decade's most acclaimed games instead. 'Boy' has never carried so much weight in two letters.

Year: 2018Critic score: 9.4/10

added by IJRin 5 rankings

Portal 2▼ Falling

Wheatley's betrayal turns a beloved sidekick into one of gaming's great comedic villains, and Cave Johnson's lemon-scented rants prove Valve could still out-write anyone in the medium. The co-op campaign, built from scratch as genuinely collaborative puzzle design rather than a bolted-on mode, remains one of the smartest two-player experiences ever shipped. A sequel that had no business being better than a stone-cold classic somehow was.

Year: 2011Critic score: 9.5/10

added by IJRin 7 rankings

The Last of Us

The opening ten minutes, before the title card even hits, taught an entire industry that games could gut-punch you with prestige-TV pacing and mean it — Sarah's death remains one of the only video game moments that made mainstream critics who'd never touched a controller stop and take notice. Joel's final lie to Ellie is the moral gray area the whole genre spent the rest of the decade trying to replicate. It didn't invent the cinematic survival game, but it perfected it into a genre-defining monument.

Year: 2013Critic score: 9.5/10

added by IJRin 13 rankings

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End▼ Falling

The Madagascar car chase is still the high-water mark for scripted, cinematic action sequences, a symphony of collapsing buildings and physics-driven chaos that plays like an interactive Indiana Jones film. Naughty Dog used it to give Nathan Drake the send-off he'd earned, trading globe-trotting bombast for a quieter meditation on legacy, marriage, and knowing when to walk away. It's the decade's most technically polished argument that blockbuster games could also have an ending that actually means something.

Year: 2016Critic score: 9.3/10

added by IJRin 3 rankings

Hollow Knight▼ Falling

A two-person team in Adelaide built Hallownest, a decaying insect kingdom so dense with secrets that players are still finding new paths years later, and made a Metroidvania so punishing and gorgeous it single-handedly revived the entire genre's commercial viability. The Hollow Knight-Radiance final boss fight is a masterclass in earning every ounce of difficulty through fair, elegant design. For a game with barely any text, it tells one of the decade's most quietly devastating stories.

Year: 2017Critic score: 9.4/10

added by IJRin 10 rankings

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt▼ Falling

Bloody Baron, a quest that starts as 'find my missing wife' and spirals into abortion, alcoholism, and a genuinely tragic monster, proved side content could carry more weight than most games' entire main campaigns. CD Projekt Red turned a niche Polish RPG series into the genre's new gold standard, geralt's gravelly cynicism masking a story about choices with no clean outcomes. It remains the game every open-world RPG since has been unfavorably compared to.

Year: 2015Critic score: 9.3/10

added by IJRin 9 rankings

Skyrim▼ Falling

You're supposed to be heading to your execution and forty hours later you're a vampire lord who married a blacksmith and adopted three orphans, having completely forgotten the dragon that started all this. Bethesda's jankiest masterpiece became a cultural meme machine, still getting remastered and re-released on every conceivable platform including, apparently, refrigerators. No game this decade sold the fantasy of 'go anywhere, be anyone' with less friction and more emergent chaos.

Year: 2011Critic score: 9.4/10

added by IJRin 4 rankings