Borderlands played as a tabletop campaign Tiny Tina is making up as she goes, on a board you walk across.
The 2025 entry moves to Kairos, drops the level gates and gives every vault hunter a grappling hook.
Two Calypso twins streaming their own cult, and a billion guns across four planets.
Handsome Jack before he was the villain, on Pandora’s moon with low gravity and oxygen kits.
A Caribbean island under Anton Castillo, played by Giancarlo Esposito, and a guerrilla war fought from the jungle.
Montana seventeen years after the nuclear ending of Far Cry 5, in pink bloom and scavenged weapons.
Ten thousand years BC in the Far Cry 4 valley: no guns, a spoken Proto-Indo-European language and animals you tame.
The 2010 reboot by MercurySteam, with Patrick Stewart narrating and a combat system borrowed from God of War.
Soma Cruz absorbing the souls of everything he kills, and the best of the DS trilogy.
The first handheld Metroidvania of the run, with a card system that stacks two decks of magic.
The Mega Drive entry: 1917 Europe, two playable hunters and a stage that walks up the leaning tower of Pisa.
The whip finally aims in eight directions; the 1991 remake of the first game and its high point on the SNES.
The story-led one: 47 on the run protecting a girl, with checkpoint levels instead of open sandboxes.
A wounded 47 remembering earlier jobs in a Paris hotel room; the darkest the series has been.
Mark and execute, interrogations in real rooms, and objectives projected onto the walls.
Fisher undercover inside a terrorist cell, with a trust meter that makes every mission two missions.
Sam Fisher in Indonesia and Paris, and the asymmetric spies-versus-mercenaries multiplayer nothing has matched since.
The 2025 entry: 1960s Japan, a town swallowed by fog and flowers, written by Ryukishi07.
A prisoner loose in the town after a crash, in rain that makes the monsters worse; the last one Konami published before the reboot.
A retelling with no combat at all - you run, and the game quietly psychoanalyses you and rewrites itself.
A soldier comes home to Shepherd’s Glen looking for his brother; the first made outside Japan.
The prequel: a lorry driver stops at a burning house seven years before the first game.
An apartment you cannot leave, chained from the inside, with a hole in the bathroom wall.
Thor’s hammer, Helheim and Avalon, closing the story Legend started.
Crystal Dynamics take over and rebuild the controls; Lara moves the way she always should have.
The troubled Paris-set reboot that ended Core Design’s run with the character.
Four flashbacks told at her own memorial - Rome, a Russian submarine, an Irish island and a New York skyscraper.
Lara in Egypt for a whole game, and the ending in which Core Design tried to kill her off.
Five destinations from the Nevada desert to Antarctica, and the hardest level design the series ever shipped.
The kart sequel: same drift boost, new alien circuits and a story mode split across five teams.
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