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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:
Fortnite
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
Tom Clancy’s The Division
Overwatch 2
Marvel Rivals
The Crew Motorfest (my review)
Battlefield 6 (my review)
Third, the absolute worst game I have voluntarily poured 50+ hours into and will continue to play until the end of time:
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
And finally, a ranking of the yearly sports/racing games I played this year:
My Favorite Games of 2025:
5 – Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Here’s to you, Hideo.
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