Top 10 Year-End Video Games

Some things never change. Since the dawn of the gaming industry, the holiday season has always seen the biggest deluge of triple-A releases, a list seemingly far too long to get through in what little free time you have. We can’t give you more time, but we can help with this top 10 ranking of the best games that saw release between September and December. Read on, confident that each choice on this list is better than the last.

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No, this was not the Star Wars game we were looking for. Devoid of a single-player campaign, this is a thin multiplayer-only offering with a ranking system that’s almost totally meaningless. So how does it make the cut? This is for the kids, man. More specifically, it’s something to easily play with kids without having to explain very much. It’s important to remember that a hardcore gamer’s disappointment is often a casual gamer’s godsend. If you’re looking for a shooter with depth, see Destiny and Fallout. But for a mindless shooter, you can do a lot worse than this one, which still looks and sounds exactly like the Star Wars you love. And it’s hard to stay mad about that.

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We heaped praise on Halo 5 when it was first released in October for good reason: The multiplayer suite is as robust as ever, the game makes excellent use of the Xbox One’s graphical capabilities, and the limited edition of the game has all sorts of awesome extras to enthrall collectors. The cliffhanger of a story can be a little hard to stomach—especially when you consider the fact that a development cycle for a new Halo game is three years—but there are enough gameplay innovations to make Halo a big winner in 2015.

A growing number of hardcore gamers love to hate on Call of Duty because of the annual attention it gets (a lot) versus the innovations it makes in storytelling and gameplay (only a little). But the truth is this: Call of Duty is as close as anyone has ever gotten to making a playable, big budget action movie. And we get a new 6-8 hour adventure every year. Gaming snobs can continue to turn their noses up. The rest of are too busy having fun to notice.    

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New defensive controls make trying to stop your opponent (almost) as exciting as trying to score. FIFA 16 deserves kudos for being the first in the series to feature a female athlete on the cover, but the game’s greatest trick remains its ability to recreate the feel of big games and high-leverage moments. Whether you’re dominating and having fun picking apart your opponent’s D or you’re overmatched and clinging to life by the skin of your goaltender’s teeth, FIFA is fun either way. 

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A seemingly dead-and-gone genre came roaring back to life this year in the form of brand new offerings from Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Guitar Hero was the champ for three big reasons: 1) It put you on a real stage to look at real crowd reactions (no more goofy avatars), 2) It offers up a constantly-growing list of downloadable tracks, and 3) Developers created a new controller with six buttons on the neck (three high and three low) for a gameplay experience that’s just a little bit closer to the real thing.

Nintendo finally loosens up by turning the developer tools to classic Mario titles—the original Super Mario Bros., Mario 3, Super Mario World, and more—over to the players. Create insane challenges and upload them for your friends to try, or test your might against ludicrous concoctions from all around the world. It’s cliché to say the possibilities are endless, but here, they actually are, and it’s easy to imagine a subculture of gamers still playing this thing a decade from now.

An expansion pack this high on the list? Those who’ve played it won’t argue. The Taken King rights the Destiny ship in a major way, offering a clear, concise story that feels as big as the original game. Players who missed out on the first year of Destiny are welcomed with open arms, too, and are quickly brought up to speed so they’ll have the minimum level requirements to attack The Taken King’s awesome new challenges.

The 2013 reboot of this franchise was easily the best Tomb Raider game ever made, and one of the best games released that year. This follow-up (a timed exclusive to Xbox One, with PS4 users having to wait until sometime in 2016) doubles down on everything that made the reboot so great: A slick story full of interesting MacGuffins and memorable characters, breathtaking visuals, and devilishly difficult platforming elements. The developer also listened to players who wanted more tombs to raid and puzzles to solve, without losing any of the adrenaline-spiking action.

Less is more. Unless you’re talking about Fallout. In that case, more is more. Fallout 4 offers more of everything you’ve loved about the series, most notably those moments of discovery that are lurking around every corner in a world so huge you could easily spend, as contributing reviewer Stephen Rosenberg put it, “hundreds of hours” and still find new things to do. More from Rosenberg’s original review: “In the hours I spent playing the game, more than half my time was spent playing around with weapon and armor customization and town building, hoarding every plate, tin can, toaster, and bottle of glue I could get my hands on… In short, it’s extravagant.”

The clear game of the year for most critics, the Phantom Pain rules for too many reasons to enumerate here. The short of it is this: Hideo Kojima’s penchant for long cut scenes and stories filled with deep psychological elements didn’t seem like it would lend itself well to an open-world format. But Kojima defied all expectations and delivered his magnum opus, the greatest MGS game ever made. Saddle up and enjoy what sadly looks to be the last entry in an historic franchise.