The Best Xbox 360 Games Of All Time – Pure Xbox

Looking for the best Xbox 360 games of all time? Crazy as it may seem, the good old Xbox 360 is now sixteen years old and, peering back over the history and back catalogue of Microsoft's amazing 7th gen console, there's an absolute feast of great games to choose from.

From excellent Xbox Arcade titles to fresh new franchises, top notch RPGs, thought-provoking shooters, amazing puzzlers, superhero spectaculars and more, there's something for every type of gamer here and most, if not all of them, are as impressive today as they were when they first released.

We've dug deep into this impressive array of titles in order to bring you what we consider to be the very best, the cream of the crop of Xbox 360 games in the list below. We've also gone ahead and flagged up whether each of our entries is available to grab via backwards compatibility on the current crop of consoles.

So, without further ado, let's jump in and see what we've picked as the best games on Xbox 360!

Whether or not you loved the very first Assassin's Creed game, or thought it little more than a fancy tech demo with a rather middling adventure attached, there's absolutely no doubting that its sequel came along and steered this fledgling franchise in exactly the right direction.

Assassin's Creed 2 provided the gameplay to go with the graphics in an outstanding game that sets players free across an astoundingly detailed Renaissance-era Italy, giving them a wonderfully intricate playground in which to stealth, stab and swordfight. Taking in multiple Italian cities, including Venice and Florence, and featuring cameos from a host of history's finest such as Leonardo da Vinci himself, Ezio's second outing is a fantastic, all-encompassing achievement that's a crowing glory in the pre-Origins Assassin's Creed series.

Rocksteady's take on the Dark Knight blew us all right out of our gaming chairs back in 2009 with its wonderfully bleak atmosphere, awesome combat and clever Metroid-esque world layout.

Donning the cape and cowl here saw players step into a world jam-packed full of detail, lore, an incredible cast of Gotham's deadliest villains and top-class voice acting from Kevin Conway, Mark Hamill and more. The free-flowing, combo-centric combat here was, and still is, some of the very best in video games and, combined with wonderfully well-realised detective/puzzle elements and a cracking story, resulted in an adventure that was easily the best superhero game ever released at the time. Batman: Arkham Asylum truly made us feel like we really were Batman and absolutely nailed what the Dark Knight is all about.

How do you follow up a game as breathtakingly good as Batman: Arkham Asylum? Well, you break down the walls of that infamous prison and give players a great big slice of city to run amok in.

The bright lights of Arkham City often mocked us from afar from certain vantage points in its predecessor, but Rocksteady's follow-up went ahead and delivered us a generously sized chunk Gotham City through which to grapnel, glide and zipline. The kickass combat, puzzles and metroidvania aspects return from the first game but in Batman: Arkham City they're joined by a truly liberating sense of being able to fully roleplay the bat, soaring down from above into street brawls, watching and waiting silently from a rooftop before gliding into battle, stalking your foes and choosing when to strike in style...it's wonderful stuff.

With a new rogue's gallery of villains to face off against, tons of puzzles, fantastic voice-acting, a top-notch story and New Game Plus mode that turns the heat up nicely, this one more than makes up for a slightly knuckleheaded portrayal of the Dark Knight himself by fully delivering the goods in the gameplay department. One of the great superhero games of all time, you owe it to yourself to glide right into this one.

One of the truly great action games of all time, Platinum Games' 2009 hack and slash extravaganza absolutely bewitched us way back when we first played it.

The story of an amnesiac, angel-slaying witch with guns on her shoes and a seriously killer haircut - and we really do mean killer - Bayonetta is one of the most slick, intricate and completely off the rails action experiences you're ever likely to have.

With sublime combo-centric combat that rewards players who take the time to learn, a completely nuts story that's absolutely dripping in lore and some of the most OTT boss fights and characters we've ever encountered, we just can't get enough of this Umbrian witch and her super sexy, ultra slick fighting style. Dodging into Witch Time to slow fights to a crawl, pummelling your heavenly foes into submission with a fist made from your hair, or racking them up for a Gigaton medieval torture finisher...hack and slash action just doesn't get any better than this, and if you think it does you can FUGGETABOUTIT!

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's 2012 shooter has become something of a cult classic over the years - we actually don't know anyone who doesn't love it - and for plenty of good reason.

Binary Domain's post-apocalyptic story tells of a world where robots are now the main workforce and charges you with blasting the absolute hell out of absolutely tons of them, issuing commands to your squad and watching how your actions and attitude affected the game's storyline through its unique Consequence System,

However, what really makes Binary Domain worthy of inclusion on this list is just how good it feels to rip robots apart here, blowing chunks off their exoskeletons with great big meaty weapons as they cleverly flank and swarm your position. The musclebound cast of characters also spout the cheesiest, gruffest, dumbest lines of dialogue possible, which is exactly what we're looking for in this scenario. It's cathartic, OTT and ridiculous in all the best possible ways, looks great, has a completely mad story and stands up well to repeated playthroughs. If you haven't yet, we strongly recommend you seek this one out and get stuck in.

Ken Levine's spiritual successor to System Shock, Bioshock is quite unlike anything we're ever played before or since.

A meditation on the nature of man and society that draws from the works of Ayn Rand, Huxley, Orwell and more to inform its nightmarish vision of an underwater utopia gone seriously wrong, it's a horrifying, mesmerising, genre-defining piece of work.

And away from its more cerebral elements it's also a damn great shooter, with myriad ways with which to dispose of your terrifying foes. Whether through straight-up gunplay, plasmid-based attacks, sneaky stealth or meddling with mechanics to turn the tide in your favour, Bioshock's combat is delightfully open-ended, giving you a robust set of options with which to set about its truly haunting world.

Jack's journey from plane crash, to bathysphere, to deep underwater hellhole and beyond is a genuine tour-de-force that stands up as one of the truly great games and a journey you simply owe it to yourself to take.

It's hard to believe that 2013's Bioshock Infinite is still the most recent entry in the beloved series, but it certainly doesn't disappoint, even by today's standards. It's quite a departure compared to the original Bioshock trilogy, taking place in the flying steampunk city of Columbia (instead of focusing around the underworld city of Rapture), and that change of pace proved a fantastic breath of fresh air for the franchise.

These days, you're probably best off playing this one (and the rest of the Bioshock games) in the Bioshock Collection for Xbox One, but they're also backwards compatible if you can grab the Xbox 360 versions cheap.

Publisher: 2K Games / Developer: Gearbox Software

Release Date: TBA

Gearbox's 2012 sequel took the undeniable promise of its predecessor and built upon it fully, expanding your zany adventures on Pandora into a fully-fledged epic adventure with a much-improved story, absolutely tons of loot and guns and plenty of replay value.

Blasting around Pandora here with up to three friends in co-op mode it's hard to deny the continued allure of Borderlands 2, we love the aesthetic, the gunplay is rock solid, Handsome Jack is an awesome new character, the weapons are endlessly inventive...heck there's enough good stuff here to help us completely ignore the fact that we absolutely loathe claptrap and aren't huge fans of the series' humour in general - the gameplay is just that good. If you're looking for some madcap looter shooter action, this is a super solid shout.

We weren't entirely sure what to make of the idea of an open world Burnout game when we first got wind of Burnout Paradise, we like our Burnout tightly contained on tricky little tracks and full of spectacular smashes. However, once we actually got our hands on this one, we quickly realised that Criterion Games had crafted a cracker.

Paradise City is custom built to accommodate your most destructive tendencies, a bespoke playground littered with hidden paths, jumps, shortcuts destructible objects and events at every junction. The smashing action, driving and sense of speed feels great here, this game is just fun to play around in, the showtime events bring the madness of Crash Mode back to life and online play is seamlessly integrated into the experience.

With tons of cars to takedown and add to your collection, an excellent soundtrack (even if that DJ needs shutting up) and visuals that still look great today, Burnout Paradise is a fantastic open world entry into one of our favourite racing franchises.

Publisher: Activision / Developer: Infinity Ward

Release Date: TBA

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's shifting to a modern theatre of war brought the horrors of conflict home in a way the series had failed to do up until this point.

Yes we'd had the D-Day landings and countless other historical events chronicled in detail in previous releases in the franchise, but there was something disturbingly immediate about Modern Warfare. The spooky green glow of night-vision, the terrorists we knew were currently our real world enemies, that AC-130 Gunship level where you flattened so many human targets indiscriminately...it was something entirely different.

And yet the same. For all the horror, this was Call of Duty as it ever was, an almost on-rails ride through a short and spectacular campaign, something to polish up your skills and get you used to the game's tweaked mechanics before you were unleashed on the massively revamped multiplayer with its perks and loadouts and everything that the game still adheres to all this time later.

A high point in the series for sure, Modern Warfare set a new standard for Infinity Ward and delivered an experience that still stands up as one of the very best Call of Duty's to date.

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The Best Xbox 360 Games Of All Time - Pure Xbox