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Jul 29,  · replace.me helps you find the best deals on digital game downloads. Join our giveaways, track new sales, synchronize your Steam collection. Best action games to . Clashing swords, high speed car chases and epic guns promise Action. Discover the best Action games for PC, move through realistic worlds, fight enemies of all kinds, and complete engaging missions. Action games not only allow you to solve puzzles and tasks, but also to relive action-packed contexts and stories. Mar 31,  · Action games have a long history that spans all the way back to SEGA’s Jet Rocket, which launched in In the 50 years since, action games have come a long way. Features including dual shock controllers, hi-def graphics, theatrical-level cut scenes, and sophisticated sound effects make the best action PC games more immersive and thrilling. Jun 25,  · This genre of games gives us a complete gaming experience and entices us into the world of fantasy and imagination. Various things contribute to making the best action-adventure games, but the essential ingredients are worldbuilding, exploration, and alluring storytelling. These attributes add finesse to the gaming experience.
 
 

Best action game for pc.The 25 best action games on PC to play in | Rock Paper Shotgun

Everyone loves a good action game. It’s the driving force behind so many of our favourite PC games, but only a few can lay claim to being the best action games of all time. That’s why we’ve compiled this list – to sort the pulled punches from the bestest biffs that PC has to offer. Whether it’s the joy of pulling off a perfect combo, riding the wave of an explosive set-piece or the hair-raising thrill of dodging enemy attacks in slow-motion that gets you going, there’s an action game here for you.

As usual, we’re keeping our definition of ‘action’ fairly broad, but there are a few hard and fast rules we’re sticking to here.

You won’t find any platformers in here, though, or any Metroidvanias, as we already have dedicated lists for both of those. We’ve also focused on action games that we’d recommend you still play today. Indeed, in this particular iteration of our best action games list, you’ll find that several entries are for games that have been released in the last five years. That’s partly because a lot of action games don’t tend to age very well, but the key thing we’re looking for is how they feel under your fingers and thumbs.

A great action game, after all, isn’t just about looking handsome; it’s about having controls and systems that are just as fun to play today as they were when they first came out. There are plenty of great action games to be found on PC, but we’ve selected 25 of the best below. You might think that Max Payne’s superpower is being able to slip into slow-motion, but really it’s his ability to repeatedly leap onto his sides without bruising his shoulders or jabbing the house keys in his pocket into his thigh.

In any case, it’s these moves combined that make Max Payne a great action game. You’ll leap around corners, shift into slow motion as you sail through the air, and unload akimbo pistols into one mobster after another on the rain-soaked streets of New York.

The first Max Payne let you pull off these stunts first, but it’s Max Payne 2 we’d suggest you return to today. The first game is visually dated and lumbered with regrettable hallucinated platforming sequences, while the sequel still looks decent, is a tight six hours of leaping and blasting, and has the same dark comedy and purple prose.

It also added a new technological marvel between the first game in and this successor: physics. It’s old hat now, but spraying bullets everywhere is undeniably more satisfying – and more reminiscent of the John Woo movies which inspired it – when there are cardboard boxes and old buckets to send spilling from shelves. Where can I buy it: Steam , Humble. Assassin’s Creed had got a bit samey over the years, so when the series got a bit of a reboot with Assassin’s Creed: Oranges, everyone felt invigorated.

Ubisoft took the new template and improved upon it for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the story of a lone but preternaturally badass mercenary having jollies around Ancient Greece.

The ongoing AC lore about computer-wizard-aliens technically and sinister cults is, technically, still going, but who cares when you can sail a boat across the Aegean, meet the minotaur, kill the minotaur, and then head to Olympia for lunch.

The breadth of the world in Odyssey is extraordinary. Ubisoft managed to recreate an entire country. So many treasures from Greece have been lost, but even the least Classics-y nerd will be impressed by the chryselephantine statue of Zeus, or the giant Athena overlooking Athens from the acropolis.

Importantly, Odyssey continued the trend of harder combat, gear mattering more and stealth being your best option, which makes it feel less like busy work and more like an actual challenge. Most importantly, Kassandra, the female player character, is the best thing to happen to games for actual years.

There are some amongst you who will dispute that Ape Out is an action game, and to those I say, “Try saying that to a gorilla punching armed guards to death! Even if you could speak, gorillas famously do not understand the English language.

Ape Out is absolutely an action game, with the clarity of purpose and perfect design of a silverbacks noble fist. Played top down, Ape Out is vaguely reminiscent of other Devolver Digital favourite Hotline Miami, except instead of a man in an animal mask you are a giant furious ball of furry hominid, and instead of guns and bats and that you use your furious hominid limbs.

As the titular Ape who is trying to get Out, you speed through different floors of buildings a science lab, a military base, an office block to make your escape. The world is painted in vivid blocks of expressive colour: angry reds, cold unforgiving blues, bruised purples.

Soldiers with different weapons try to stop you, but cannot. They have body armour, shotguns and explosives. But you are an ape. Your controls are move, hit, and grab, so while you technically don’t have any weapons, you also very much do. You can hold on to a man with a machine gun and aim him at your buddies! A lad with dynamite is basically a grenade the size of a person! All this is without even mentioning the soundtrack, a masterpiece of procedural jazz drumming that matches pace with your orgy or destruction.

Ape Out is so much one whole, perfect thing that isn’t like playing a game so much as it is like having a profoundly beautiful, violent, synaesthetic thought. Sega’s open-world brawler RPG series about the Tokyo underworld finally branched out onto PC in , and its prequel Yakuza 0 remains both the best entry in the series, and the best starting-point for wannabe crime dads.

Its two protagonists Kiryu and Majima are quite different in tone and style, but they’re both absolutely delightful. What good boys, and what excellent thugs.

Yakuza 0 has something for everyone. It’s like a smaller scale GTA set in the backstreets of Tokyo its beautifully detailed city of Kamurocho is modeled after Tokyo’s Kabukicho entertainment district where you can thunk punks with your fists, bicycles, baseball bats or whatever manner of destructible street furniture you can lay your hands on, while also busting out dance moves, play arcade mini-games, help a floundering dominatrix believe in herself, befriend Michael Jackson, hire a chicken to be a property manager at your real estate business, and loads more.

It’s melodrama in video game form, and it fully commits to turning you into both Japan’s meanest, toughest mob man and its nicest uncle. It’s just such a lovely place to be, too. It’s warm and funny yet still an interesting crime drama, and its cities are chock full of diversions that make them feel like real, living places.

Outside of its raucous brawls, its action is pretty low-key compared to other games on this list, including designer Toshihiro Nagoshi’s other big work, Binary Domain which we’ve put next door to this entry , but it’s also something we’ll never get bored of. More please. On paper, this doesn’t sound great. It’s called Binary Domain, for starters, features a hero whose design brief was “draw a man with muscles” and attempts a misjudged voice system that sees you bellowing ignored orders at belligerent companions like an angry dog-owner in the park.

Binary Domain is what happened when the Yakuza team attempted to muscle in on the cover shooter craze of the early s: leaving behind Kamurocho, albeit for a different, futuristic Tokyo, and flooding it with hostile robots.

And giant robot animals. And a friendly French robot who wears a trendy scarf. It feels like a cynical bid for a western audience, but one that can’t stop the teams bizarro energy bubbling up. And if sticky cover mechanics and dubious AI allies speak to the team’s lack of experience in the genre, they get the most important bit right: shooting things feels great.

This is down to the nature of the enemy: armoured robots that shatter like ceramics as you chew through their outer layers and eventually sever limbs and heads. A decapitated robot will go haywire and blast its pals in the perfect payoff for your accuracy; legless droids pull themselves along the floor, creating hectic action where the damn things never stop coming. You can even go to a crap late-Victorian cinema, or just have a relaxing bath. Where can I buy it: Steam , Humble , Epic.

Following on from the reboot, Rise Of The Tomb Raider felt like the new series of Lara Croft’s ruff, tuff survival adventures really found its footing. While ‘s Shadow Of The Tomb Raider had some good puzzle-and-platforming tombs, Rise combines the traditional Croftian theft of ancient artefacts with some really splendid survival and action bits, which is why it’s our pick of the bunch.

Perhaps the feeling of danger and isolation is enhanced because it’s so bloody cold. For much of Rise, Lara is on the back foot and stranded in Siberia, so scavenging and hunting to enhance your gear feels extra essential. Those moments where she can warm herself next to a pitiful little fire seem like an actual reprieve for Lara. Lara is packing a lot more metaphorical heat in Rise, though, with a buncha guns as well as the quieter stealth options.

In Shadow the emphasis is much more on the latter, but Rise is a lot of fun precisely because you know that if things go south and you get spotted by the Trinity goons, at least you’ve got a massive shotgun backing you up.

There are a lot more tense animal encounters in Rise, too, which channels the spirit of the classic Tomb Raider games. If you’re not sure where to start with the reboot, popping on a parka and joining Lara in the frozen wastes of Russia is probably the way to go. Look, we know we said no Metroidvanias on this list, but hear us out. Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow is not what you think it is. While its name may have become entangled with Nintendo’s twisty-turny space blaster series over the years, Lords of Shadow is as linear as they come.

And by golly what a corker it is, too. Once again, it’s a classic clash between the Belmonts and the big king Drac. This time, it’s Gabriel B stepping up to the Belmont plate, and armed with his trusty Combat Cross, he must wade through swamps, temples, forests, lakes and all manner of dungeons before he can finally confront his arch nemesis. It’s as broad and cliched as they come, but it’s also deliciously retro-feeling in its style and structure, drawing on the DNA of Super Castlevania IV and re-shaping it into the grand 3D adventure you’ve always dreamed of.

Indeed, with developers Mercurysteam going all in on the type of wild creature design you might expect from a Guillermo del Toro film, Lords of Shadow continues to have a wonderfully ethereal kind of beauty about it even today. Of course, thanks to Gabriel’s lethal Combat Cross, it’s not long before those cooing ‘ahhhh’s turn into ghoulish ‘uhhhh’s. This retractable chain whip swishes and slashes with deadly precision, and it’s probably the closest thing PC has to God of War’s Blades of Chaos, which, let’s not forget, is arguably one of the most satisfying hack and slash weapons of all time.

It also doubles up as a grappling hook, letting Gabriel soar to ever greater heights as he heads towards Dracula’s castle looming forever on the horizon, whether it’s taking down the game’s Shadow of the Colossus-style Titan bosses or sniffing out secret areas in the world around him.

Lords of Shadow can be a bit serious at times, and there are other games on this list that do the whole ‘evil, screen-hogging demon’ thing with a bit more style and sense of playfulness. In terms of epic scale and thrilling set-pieces, though, Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow still holds up as one of today’s action greats. Just a shame about the sequel, eh? Nuclear Throne is crunchier than a box of cornflakes. Nothing dies in its wasteland without going splat, no gun fires without a reverberating thud.

The deep wailing of the big robotic dog, moments before it vapourises you. Disaster lurks behind a moment’s hesitation, or a split-second misjudgement. The path there is paved with ignoble deaths. We think we all knew that we needed an action adventure version of The X-Files, didn’t we?

Jesse Faden is drawn to the Federal Bureau of Control essentially what would happen if Mulder and Scully were given an entire clandestine wing of government and accidentally becomes the head of the entire place by picking up a magic gun. At the same time, the building is being attacked by an entity called The Hiss, a malevolent energy seeping from another dimension.

Mondays, am I right? What follows is an original and satisfying shooty action game, because you don’t have to just shoot bad guys – you can also hurl fire extinguishers at them. And fly, as well. Control has been compared to things like Twin Peaks, because of the general tone.

Walls shift. New areas reveal option extras, like a kind of pan-dimensional fungus.

33 Best Graphics Video Games in for High-end Gaming PC – TechGamesNews.25. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

Similarly, Battlefield 4 was used as an example of what the new generation PS4 and Xbox One were capable of, yet the series began back in with Battlefield Of course since the early part of the 21st century PC graphical grunt has increased exponentially, giving rise to not only great action gameplay, but stunning visuals to match.

Half-Life 2 Over a year late and surrounded by the controversy that is Steam, science hero Gordon Freeman returns to a world under new management Gears of War Is the PC version the best? Noire To die for. The Path A path worth walking. Mass Effect 2 You say potato, I say potato. Batman: Arkham City It doesn’t take the world’s greatest detective to spot that this is an expertly crafted adventure, one that maintains a breathtaking pace and invigorating rhythm from beginning to end.

Grand Theft Auto 5 A view to a kill. Dark Souls 2 A matter of life and death. The studio channeled its penchant for smooth movement, excellent set-piece design, and considered storytelling into what is undoubtedly one of the best Star Wars games of all-time.

Jedi: Fallen Order is a fun romp, with a great structure and truly awesome lightsaber combat. One of the best weapons in entertainment history is given a new lease on life here, making us feel like a Jedi unlike any game before it. How do you think you’d fare in a zombie apocalypse? Dying Light 2 will let you put that bravado to the test, dropping you into a sprawling city and leaving you free to survive with whatever weapons and equipment you can get your hands on. Dying Light 2 is so effective as an action game because of its willingness to shift its cadence between brutal melee combat and the ability to move about freely; navigating towering rooftops can feel just as suspenseful as swinging a spike-covered baseball bat into a crowd of fast-approaching zombies, and that’s all a part of its charm.

Dead Cells is the perfect pick-up-and-play action game. It’s the sort of experience that creates an unshakable ‘just more try’ dynamic, forever willing you deeper into its worlds.

Dead Cells is certainly challenging, but it’s so perfectly designed — from its generated level design to precise combat and aggressive enemy AI — that you’ll be only too happy to try and try again. Don’t let its retro aesthetic fool you either, this is a roguelike built for modern audiences to appreciate.

It’s an action game that’s overflowing with variety, a gauntlet stacked with ever-surmounting challenges, and an experience that always feels as if it’s testing, and improving, your ambition to succeed. PlatinumGames has always had a penchant for stylish action. The studio has a keen understanding of the action genre and nowhere is that more evident than in Bayonetta 2. It’s silly, and absurdist, pushing you into battles with angels and demons that tower beyond the borders of your television, all as you take control of a witch with pistols affixed to the bottom of her boots, but that’s all part of the appeal.

Bayonetta 2 is a pure video game , unwilling to take itself too seriously and the sort of bold, bombastic action sequences that’ll make you fall in love with this genre all over again. Nier Automata is one of those games that, if you spend enough time with it, you’ll soon find yourself trying to convince your friends that it’s one of the greatest games of all time.

That’s because there’s far more than meets the eye with this styling action game. While it certainly follows in the footsteps of PlatinumGames’ previous works — Bayonetta and Vanquish in particular, which are each sterling works in their own right — Nier Automata is this weird little beast.

It’s a transformative experience, shifting effortlessly from caustic combat to frantic bullet-hell to open-world RPG, and it’s all the better because of it. Tough to master, great to play, and surprising until the end, Nier: Automata… it has to be played to be believed.

One reason Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel, Horizon Forbidden West , are so utterly enthralling is that they are able to take sublime action and thread it carefully through a sprawling open world. As expansive as these games are, combat remains at the heart of the experience — Aloy is free to explore, but battling humongous robotic dinosaurs with all manner of melee weapons, electronic traps, and environmental effects is always the focus.

Horizon Forbidden West isn’t just a showcase for the power of the PS5, it’s a stunning look at the future of the action genre, melding great combat design with a world you’ll be desperate to spend time in. If you play Hades, you will fall in love with it. That’s a deal you make with the devil — well, developer Supergiant Games — should you put this game in your hands.

While it’s classed as a roguelike, that genre branding comes with decades of baggage attached to it that belies the action mastery at the heart of Hades. While Hades is undoubtedly challenging, its combat is indisputably impressive. Death equals rebirth equals a chance to try, try again.

Hades pulls off this wonderful trick where it always feels as if you’re improving, learning something new about the parade of loveable villains openly mocking you, even as you’re being put on your ass. It’s a damned good time. I’ll tell you what’s rare: an action game with a heart. And I’ll tell you what’s like gold dust in an industry renowned for its poe-faced protagonists: an action game that can have you genuinely laughing out loud.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy has both of these qualities, packaging them together with a kinetic adventure that delights from its first combat sequence through to its last.

Eidos Montreal delivered a real sleeper hit in Guardians of the Galaxy; this is one of those games players and developers alike will talk about with real reverence in a couple of years due to its unique combat system and masterful world-building, so why not get into it now — you know, before it was cool.

Remedy Entertainment has built itself quite the reputation. Through games like Alan Wake, Max Payne, and Quantum Break it has become known for creating weird, energetic, and contemplative adventures.

With Control , it felt as if Remedy put all of that expertise into a single experience — an action game that isn’t afraid to embrace the supernatural and shift its gears to accommodate waning attention spans.

Whether you’re blasting through waves of Hiss agents, trying to navigate ever-shifting combat spaces, or sifting through paperwork to get a better understanding of the world-state, Control always rises to meet the moment. The Last of Us: Part 2 isn’t for the faint of heart. Naughty Dog effectively unleashed a hour gut punch upon an unsuspecting world and we still haven’t recovered. Part-adventure game, chronicling two characters on intertwining tracks of revenge, and part-action experience, featuring some of the most meticulously detailed shooting and stealth mechanics you’ll ever hope to see.

The Last of Us 2 is a true achievement, visually ambitious and sonically imposing, pushing fidelity and performance in a way that few studios can. It’s sad, somber, exhilarating, and awe-inspiring; an action game that will get your blood pumping before it rips your damned heart out.

Devil May Cry is the action genre incarnate. The series has always been audacious and outlandish, planting its tongue so firmly in cheek that it’s a surprise it doesn’t pierce the skin. That’s on the power of Dante alone, the silver-haired fox who is as happy wielding dual-pistols as he is bloody huge swords, motorbikes, and any other objects he can get his demonic hands on.

Devil May Cry 5 is a hell of a good time as a result, even as it shifts gears between a roster of characters — a pure adrenaline rush of climbing combos and suffocatingly tight combat mechanics, a heavy metal rhythm action game in all but name.

FromSoftware’s gothic adventure is unlike any other. While it may draw from the same demonic force as Dark Souls, and be just as capable at wearing down the patience of any players that dare step into its gauntlets, Bloodborne succeeds on the power of its action.

On that carefully balanced cadence between attack and defense, full-throated assaults and perfectly-timed retreats. Bloodborne isn’t for everyone, but those who are willing to put in the time and energy to crash through its skill ceiling will find an action game that is uncompromising, exhilarating, and utterly enthralling.

For years, anytime Insomniac released a video game it was met with a ‘yeah, this is good, but I’d bet they’d make one hell of a Spider-Man game. It’s pure fan-service, a keen reflection of the agility of Spider-Man as a hero and the humanity of poor Peter Parker behind the mask.

Nathan Drake couldn’t have hoped for a better send-off. With a Thief’s End, Naughty Dog embraced the legacy of PlayStation’s most important mascot in a generation and delivered a truly seminal adventure. Uncharted has always felt as if it were this smooth blend of Tomb Raider’s action and Indiana Jones’ attitude, and nowhere is that better represented than in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.

Whether you’re new to the series or have been following along from the beginning, this is cinematic action at its finest — leading you from one heart-stopping set-piece to another with heart, humor, and an atmosphere of swashbuckling resilience that you can’t help but fall in love with.

Few believed that Sony Santa Monica would be able to make Kratos relevant again.