Best Games of 2005
Ranked by our critic's grades, best first.
God of WarA machine for delivering scale on aging hardware, driven by combat that stays readable in a crowd.Read the review
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos TheoryThe stealth genre's cleanest statement of intent, where light, sound and a knife are the entire toolkit.
Resident Evil 4 (2005)Moving the camera over a shoulder rewrote survival horror and the third-person shooter in a single release.
Devil May Cry 3: Dante's AwakeningThe combat system that every character action game since has been quietly copying.
Call of Duty 2The launch title that made regenerating health the default and turned a smoke grenade into a tactic rather than a decoration.
Shadow of the ColossusSixteen climbing puzzles that double as a question about whether you should be doing this at all.
Kingdom Hearts IIThe best action combat Square has ever shipped, wrapped in a plot that had already started eating itself.
Need for Speed: Most WantedThe police chase rewritten as a boss fight, and still the high point of the entire series.