The first time I played through the original Halo, I started the single-player campaign under normal difficulty and simply followed the story through to its’ conclusion… but that was only the beginning of my relationship with the game. If I stopped there, I would’ve missed the depth of what has made this series a defining experience for me in many different ways. From playing the game cooperatively and conquering the Legendary difficulty setting, seeking out and finding all of the hidden skulls, and of course the multiplayer matches that kept me coming back for more, my completion of the core campaign was only the beginning. There was so much more to explore, and the deepest rewards only reveal themselves to the most diligent and committed seekers.
While Christ’s work on the cross has offered all of us forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with the Father, our acceptance of this gift is only the beginning of our lifelong pursuit of seeking and finding God. We are called to grow in our faith, continually building a deeper relationship with the Lord by studying and applying His written words, speaking to Him intentionally throughout the day in prayer, and purposefully participating with our fellow members in the body of Christ. His richest treasures are only revealed to those who dig the deepest, so let’s actively seek Him every day.
And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. Jeremiah 29:13
But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. Hebrews 11:6
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Back in the day I used to love ranking games I played in any given year, whether or not I was writing about them. It’s always been a fun exercise to try and determine what I enjoyed the most over the last 12 months and compare them to what my friends would choose.
However, in recent years, I not only found myself not keeping track of that stuff, but I also played fewer games overall. I can blame it on going back to school, my full-time job, or my devotion to watching Miami sports teams, but I think the overall desire to play everything has kinda faded.
2025 was an interesting year for me, as the release of the Switch 2 brought me back to a place I haven’t been in ages — I started playing videogames regularly again, and I re-examined my relationship with them.
I’ve been contributing to GameCritics for over five years, and it was five years ago that I wrote my first and last game of the year list, so I’m happy to come back and share something a little more lighthearted and personal. I’ll keep things relatively simple as I only want to highlight five games and a few superlatives.
Happy New Year, folks!
First, a few major 2025 games I only recently started/need to get to soon:
Arc Raiders
Metroid Prime 4
The Outer Worlds 2
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
Kingdom Come Deliverance II
Hades II
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (PS5)
Cyberpunk 2077 (Switch 2)
Borderlands 4
Second, the live service games/online shooters that found a way into my rotation in 2025:
My favorite videogame of all time is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. It’s the closest thing the medium has come to producing a perfect product, and the only videogame I’d say is worthy of being called art. I also really like Pro Skater 4, despite the changes to the established THPS formula.
This collection is a remake of both those games, in the same vein as 2020’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, featuring faithful recreations of the original levels with touched-up visuals and a few small tweaks to modernize the entire experience. It was a joy to revisit these games that I know like the back of my hand, feeling like a six-year-old and rediscovering every secret again.
It’s not quite perfect, and I know a few changes rubbed some people the wrong way (the soundtrack especially) but in an era where so many games are lost to time, I’m happy we have such an incredible memento to one of gaming’s raddest stars.
*
4 – Destiny 2: Renegades
I’ve been playing Destiny 2 on and off over the last two years, thanks to the insistence of a friend who’s been playing for a while. Every so often, the two of us will play through whichever expansion I pick up on sale or free via PS Plus and have a good time. I’m not well-versed in Destiny 2’s lore and used to ignore the loot grind to simply focus on its solid gunplay.
Renegades, however, was the expansion that got me to fully embrace Destiny 2 and its many systems, thanks to a host of meaningful tweaks and the return of old content. Playing through the Star Wars-inspired campaign and the curated list of separate extraction/horde mode missions was a highlight of 2025 for me, becoming one of the best online experiences I’ve ever had. I’m now fully immersed in this world, catching myself playing almost every night just to grind for some higher-level armor or simply stumbling upon a cool gun I found while completing a random co-op mission.
As a lapsed Star Wars fan, spotting all the references and seeing how Bungie managed to integrate the aesthetics of the series into their game was also cool, with guns reminiscent of Han Solo’s blaster and even an in-universe Lightsaber known as the Praxic Blade. Even with all the baggage a game like Destiny 2 carries, this expansion has its hooks in me, and it’s gonna be hard to shake from that for a while.
*
3 –Forza Horizon 5 (PS5)
Yeah, this game came out in 2021 on Xbox (and I played a ridiculous amount of it at launch), but as soon as it hit PS5 in mid-2025, I was instantly hooked. As of writing, I have over 80 hours in this game, and it was my most-played PS5 game overall according to my PlayStation Wrapped.
Anyway, there really isn’s much I can add to this game that hasn’t been repeated to death already. Well over four years later, Forza Horizon 5 is one of the best racing games ever made, thanks to an exceptional (and highly customizable) handling model, a car list that has a little something for everybody, and a huge open world full of so much stuff to do. The variety within FH5 is also unmatched, with different racing disciplines for different tastes. Racing a modified, off-road Ford Bronco through the desert or a Corvette Stingray on a busy street at night is a thrill unlike any other. Shout out to the Rally Adventure DLC, which offers the closest thing to a modern, arcade rally racer that I’ve played in a while.
Between this, The Crew Motorfest, and Gran Turismo 7, my racing rotation on PS5 is absolutely stacked for years to come.
*
2 – Donkey Kong Bananza
Platformers are my bread and butter. Within the first few months of the Switch 2’s first year, we ended up getting the genre’s absolute best with Donkey Kong Bananza.
There’s a joy in traversing these open-ended levels as Nintendo’s most famous ape, with jumping and running feeling satisfying (as any good platformer should). The real stars, however, are the game’s destructible environments. DK can punch through virtually any surface, terraforming large swaths of the game world to search for secrets, create makeshift platforms, and even new paths to clear levels. The simple act of punching through the ground never got old, feeling as revolutionary as the act of jumping in a 3D space was in Super Mario 64. Pair all of that with grand boss battles and a host of awesome power-ups, and it is arguably a strong contender for one of the best platformers of all-time.
With the Switch 2 continuing its successful run of incredible first and third-party games, it’s gonna be hard to top this one for a while.
*
1 – Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
The state of major, triple-A action-adventure games is in a dire spot at the moment, with most experiences feeling like algorithmic messes that don’t do much to push the genre (or medium) forward. There is a high I have been chasing for almost ten years since I first played Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Hideo Kojima’s 2015 opus was, in my opinion, the peak of what action games could be, thanks to the unparalleled freedom it offered up to players, as well as intricate mechanics that no game has been able to replicate since. The act of interacting with its large, open-ended maps was a joy, and I have never felt so immersed in a video game since then (Red Dead Redemption II obviously comes close, but that’s a much slower experience overall).
Kojima seems to understand MGS V’s impact (and maybe read my mind) because 2025’s Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is the follow-up to Phantom Pain I not only wanted, but so desperately needed in a sea of uninteresting games. Featuring an enhanced combat suite that allowed for great improvisation and a huge open-world brimming with so much to see and do, it’s the type of game that begs to be lived in. The loop of prepping for a delivery and seeing what distractions I can find on my route was a joy, as was the very intentional movement system that forced me to slowly, yet effectively, complete any quest to the best of my abilities.
I also loved Sam’s story of connecting a shattered world. This science-fiction tale echoes the likes of David Brin’s The Postman, forcing me to reconcile with my fears of living in a deeply broken country as well as the anxiety I feel over someday wanting kids. It’s a big, beautiful, and sometimes messy experience and arguably one of this generation’s defining games.
As I type this, we’re at the top of January and waiting for two events that should be happening in the WoW Classic space this month. The first is the Burning Crusade Anniversary prepatch on January 13th, which will reshape the systems of those servers and open up some more character options. But the second […]
Welcome back to MassivelyOP’s annual awards for one more special honoree. Readers will remember that a few years ago, we decided to institute a lifetime achievement award specifically to honor an MMORPG that has made a significant contribution to the genre over the course of its lifetime and the genre’s history but may not be […]
Welcome back to MassivelyOP’s annual MMORPG awards for 2025! Today’s award is for the MMORPG of the Year, which was awarded to Throne & Liberty last year. Longtime readers will recall that way back in 2014, our staff was so disillusioned with the new MMOs launching that we withheld this award and picked “nothing” as our […]
So here we are, at the top of a new year, 12 whole months of screwing around in video games laid out before us. In tonight’s Massively Overthinking, we have but one question: What are you gonna do with those 12 months?! I’m asking our writers and readers to rattle off what they think will […]
Every time people discuss new things they would love to see in long-running MMORPGs, I see at least a few people speculating about things that aren’t just not happening but would fundamentally break the game. And it always makes a little twitch start up right behind my eye. It’s not that I don’t understand the […]
Welcome back to MassivelyOP’s annual MMORPG awards for 2025! Today’s award is for the Most Anticipated MMO, which was awarded to Star’s Reach last year. This award can be frustrating since many of the games and expansions we’re picking from here haven’t changed much as we’re still waiting on them. We’ll see how it goes in […]
While I would go so far as to say that I have an affection for the team here at RPS, they certainly tried my patience when it came to the Advent Calendar voting. How dare they not have played and loved the same games as me through the year? Here I was, new head honcho, and I couldn't find a single one in the bunch who had put the necessary hours into Chip 'n Clawz vs. The Brainoids. Shameful.
Thank goodness I can put that right with my Selection Box.
Lurking is a tense little arachnophobic horror game where your pet spider and snake get a mysterious eight-legged visitor.
In Lurking you are an exotic pet owner, whose pride and joy are their large pet spider and even larger pet snake. You feed crickets and mice, and give them water, then head off to work each day. However, one day a mysterious box arrives at … Read More
Ahhh… can you smell that new house scent? It’s an aroma laced with fragrances of potential, creativity, and belonging. That’s right, player housing is now a reality in World of Warcraft, and although this is only early access and the initial iteration of the system, there’s a ton of room for players to claim and […]
Welcome to the end of the year, everyone! Somehow we all got here, seriously, and that means it’s time for our annual roundup of stories and events over the last year. I’m sure that some of these will have people saying that they were not surprised by anything that happened over the course of 2025, in […]
Classic Guild Wars fans divide neatly into two groups. No, not Kurzick vs. Luxon. No, not heroes or no heroes. No, not runners and runnees. It’s simple: Are you a Spamadan person floating in a sea of trade deals, or are you a kid hanging out in Great Temple of Balthazar international, complaining about your […]
In perhaps one of the quietest expansion releases to date, Lord of the Rings Online welcomed Kingdoms of Harad today. This marks the third and final installment of the Song of Waves and Wind cycle that began back in Corsairs of Umbar. “The Kingdoms of Harad stand at a crossroads, their rivalries sharpening as a […]
On yesterday’s MOP Podcast, Justin was rattling off the immense list of MMORPGs with big launches this week, and among them was EverQuest, whose Shattering of Ro expansion formally launched last night. This is Classic EverQuest, mind you, and it has a long list of its own: Shattering of Ro is the game’s 32nd expansion, […]
If you anticipated that the debut of player housing in World of Warcraft would be a hot mess, then prepare to be validated because it totally was. Last night’s launch of Patch 11.2.7 prompted a predictable stampede of players who couldn’t teleport into the housing district or change neighborhoods for lengthy periods of time. Bugs […]
Where were you when you first heard about the original Guild Wars? For me, it was late 2004 when the online gaming world was entranced with World of Warcraft. I was reading through a games magazine that posted a whole spread on this new project that some outfit called ArenaNet was making. What caught my […]
Well, I kind of expected this would happen. No matter how much or how little I might think of an MMORPG or MMO, I never like to really see less of them, but my return trip back into New World for this round of Choose My Adventure just reaffirmed that Amazon is throwing the baby […]
Warning! Warning! There’s a house in your future! Wait, that sounds perhaps less warning-related than it should with World of Warcraft’s The Warning update landing tonight. But that is a big focus for this patch, right down to articles highlighting how achievements and every era of crafting can feed into finding decorations for your house. “Players who […]
You may not believe this, but I didn’t really want to write this column about Final Fantasy XIV because it is entirely based on a game of telephone that is going to disappoint someone down the line. Let’s take a moment to recap. Back a couple of weeks ago, Naoki Yoshida (producer and director of FFXIV) gave […]
