The 15 best and worst Xbox 360 games that defined a generation

For the Xbox 360’s 20th anniversary, GameCentral reflects on the console’s most influential games and how their impact is still felt today.

Today marks the Xbox 360’s 20th anniversary here in the UK (in the US, it was November 22) and it remains the odd duck in the Xbox line-up, as unlike Microsoft’s other consoles it was the most influential of its generation.

Ask anyone who was gaming during the mid-2000s and early 2010s and they’ll tell you that that despite the PlayStation 3, and Wii, managing to outsell it in the long run, that era belonged to Xbox and cemented the brand as a genuine competitor to Sony.

Since then, Microsoft has thoroughly squandered all the goodwill it accrued, with subsequent consoles enjoying much sourer reputations. The Xbox One failed to reach the same level of sales success and the Xbox Series X/S has done even worse.

Surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly), Microsoft hasn’t acknowledged the 25th anniversary at all, but we wanted to look back at the games that defined not just the console, but that entire era of gaming… for better and worse.

Halo 3

The problem with modern day Xbox is that not only have console sales dried up but most of its biggest game franchises have been run into the ground. Halo’s Master Chief was once the closest thing Xbox had to a mascot, and the release of Halo 3 was such a cultural event that even non-gamers knew about it.

Aside from concluding the storyline that began with the original Halo from 2001, technological advancements meant more people could enjoy online multiplayer, at a time when the whole concept of online play was still relatively new.

After Bungie moved on from the series, Halo’s never managed to reach that level of superstardom again, but it may earn itself some new fans thanks to the upcoming Halo 1 remake and its PlayStation 5 release.

Gears Of War

The Xbox 360 era is often remembered for its oversaturation of dirty browns and greys, with so many games utterly devoid of colour, in what the developers imagined was a more mature and grounded art style. Gears Of War is perhaps the poster child for those types of games.

It’s an approach that paid dividends, though. Gears Of War’s premise of big, snarling soldiers wielding bigger guns, and fighting a gritty war against hordes of grotesque monsters, made it a smash hit and a key Xbox franchise.

Inspired by Resident Evil 4, it popularised the idea of third party shooters in general, while virtually inventing the concept of cover shooters, with even modern titles still taking influence from it.

Just like Halo, Gears Of War has never returned to the highs of the original Xbox 360 trilogy by Epic Games, but it’s hoping to make a comeback with prequel game E-Day in 2026.

Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

A lot of Call Of Duty games released on the Xbox 360 during its lifetime but Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is easily the most important one as it’s what turned the franchise into a household name, selling more than twice the number of copies of any of the previous entries.

Aside from ditching the series’ Second World War setting for a modern day conflict, Modern Warfare kickstarted the series’ propensity for rollercoaster campaign modes full of incredible set pieces, while also perfecting the multiplayer formula that has served as the foundation for the series ever since.

It’s perhaps fitting that Call Of Duty now falls under Microsoft’s umbrella, although it isn’t exactly flourishing nowadays. Modern Warfare developer Infinity Ward’s next game is supposedly due next year, but the newest entry – Black Ops 7 – is off to a terrible start, critically and commercially.

Left 4 Dead

We’re sorry to list nothing but shooters so far, but it wasn’t for nothing that the Xbox 360 was nicknamed the ShooterBox, with Left 4 Dead in particular thriving thanks to the rise in online multiplayer – letting friends shoot zombies together without needing to be in the same room.

Between the co-op campaign, competitive multiplayer, and survival mode, there was little reason to play Left 4 Dead solo. That was also influenced by Valve’s PC focus for its titles, which naturally favoured the Xbox 360 and ensured that both the original game and its sequel never came to PlayStation 3.

Left 4 Dead also best encapsulates the era’s zombie obsession. In those days, it felt like every other game needed zombies for mass market appeal. You not only had dedicated zombie games like Dead Island, but other franchises began incorporating the undead, with Call Of Duty’s Zombies mode becoming a series mainstay.

Bomberman: Act Zero

Let us stress that we’re not just highlighting good games with this list. This is about games that best exemplify the Xbox 360 generation and Bomberman: Act Zero encapsulates some of the industry’s worst traits at the time.

We don’t know what possessed Konami to reboot Bomberman into a gritty, armoured super soldier, fighting to the death in a futuristic dystopia, but this sort of extreme edgy attitude dominated games of the time. As with Gears Of War, Act Zero seems allergic to colour, with the colourful cartoon stylings of all the other games transformed into a blur of greys and browns.

Even if Act Zero had played as well as the regular Bomberman games, which it didn’t, the try-hard approach was so off-putting it was a complete flop. Although developer, and series creator, Hudson Soft were later subsumed into Konami as a whole, the series continues today and in full Technicolor.

Kinect Star Wars

Kinect may have been commercially successful but it seems fair to say that it was never actually popular. Despite being the fastest selling consumer electronics device ever, at the time, the Kinect is, perhaps more than any other single thing, directly responsible for the downfall of Xbox.

A motion sensing camera, that sat under your TV, it was Microsoft’s answer to the success of the Wii. The device was ambitious in how it offered games that could be played with just your body, with no controller required, but it never worked as well as the adverts pretended and almost all the games were awful.

Kinect Star Wars – a glorified minigame collection featuring Jedi power fantasies, pod-racing, Rancor destruction, and, of course, dancing – was particularly infamous, not only for its poor quality but the faked live demonstration that Microsoft used to promote it.

Unfortunately, Microsoft was so enamoured with Kinect in general it took its eye off the ball in terms of normal games, just as Sony was finally getting its act together with the PlayStation 3. Microsoft learned nothing from that and their insistence on bundling Kinect with the Xbox One, thereby increasingly the price and lowering the power of the console, sealed their doom as a console manufacturer.

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved

The indie game scene as we know it today owes a great debt to the Xbox Live Arcade service. It gave smaller studios and games a place to stand on their own, so as not to be overshadowed by the usual triple-A fare, and was an instant success.

One of the first big hits was Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, which revitalised dual-stick shooters and made them a mainstay of that era of indie gaming, thanks to its old school vibes and colourful visuals.

Other early hits include Limbo and Braid, which were not only great games in their own right but things that would never be released physically by traditional publishers. Indie gaming was already a thing on PC at the time but with Xbox Live Arcade it suddenly became a mass market business.

Dark Void/Quantum Theory

The Xbox 360 era was a disaster for the Japanese side of the games industry. Almost all Japanese companies struggled with the technical leap from the previous generation and suddenly found they had no experience with the dominant genres of the time, particular first person shooters and online titles in general.

There were generally two different responses to the problem: either employan (invariably low rent) American studio to make games for them or try to mimic Western made games themselves.

In Dark Void’s case, Capcom partnered with American studio Airtight Games, to try its hand at a sci-fi cover shooter. It wasn’t very good, resembling almost every other third person shooter on the market, with only a jetpack as a unique hook.

Koei Tecmo, meanwhile, had a go with a Gears Of War knock-off called Quantum Theory. This one was made by a Japanese team but you wouldn’t know to look at it. Even ignoring how it was a pale imitator, it was an amalgamation of every gritty shooter cliché you can think of, without any sense of charm or novelty.

Lost Planet

Sticking with Capcom, the fate of Lost Planet encapsulates the whole story of the Xbox 360 generation, from a Japanese perspective at least. The original was a third person shooter desperate to ape the success of Halo, albeit with giant mech suits you could pilot.

It was a mild success, so Capcom tried to follow that up with a multiplayer-focused sequel, trying to take advantage of the popularity of Gears Of War and Call Of Duty. It was less successful though and so their third attempt was to hire Californian studio Spark Unlimited – infamous for a string of cheap, poor quality games during the era – to make a more story driven sequel.

When that didn’t work out Capcom just gave up on the series altogether and, in the next generation, went back to making games themselves, as they, and the rest of the Japanese industry, found their feet again.

Resident Evil 5 & 6

Resident Evil had already shed most of its survival horror elements to become more action orientated with Resident Evil 4, but after that series creator Shinji Mikami left. You could tell immediately too, as the next two games became listless copies, devoid of the previous games’ innovation.

The fifth game wasn’t too bad, although it’s co-op mode was another obvious attempt by Japanese companies to copy trends initiated by Western developers.

Resident Evil 6 was when the series came off the rails, with Capcom publicly proclaiming they were looking for Call Of Duty levels of success. The game that resulted was a bloated mess, that wasn’t in the least bit scary, with almost no redeeming qualities.

Both games were commercially successful, but Capcom rejected the trivialisation of the franchise by taking it back to its survival horror roots with the soft reboot that was Resident Evil 7. And they’ve been on a roll ever since.

Fable 2

Although Microsoft certainly seem to think so, given how long they’ve been working on the reboot, it’s arguable as to whether Fable counts as a key Xbox franchise or not. It’s only had one really good entry and it’s indicative of Microsoft’s mistakes that they failed to follow-up properly on the successes of Fable 2.

Fable could’ve been Xbox’s answer to The Legend Of Zelda, with its morality system that allowed you to play as a good or amoral character, but instead the immediate follow-up squandered all its good ideas on more restrictive gameplay and an obsession with attracting casual gamers.

Things only got worse from there, with a typically shonky Kinect spin-off, which led to founder Peter Molyneux leaving developer Lionhead and then Microsoft shutting the entire studio down. Which was not a good lead in to the next generation.

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