The Best PlayStation 3 Games of All Time – Console Exclusives

Best PSN Games       Best PS3 Essentials      Console Exclusives Part 2

Welcome to my series on the best PlayStation 3 games ever made, and how to best play them today. Last time I covered multiplatform games. This time, I will focus on the top games you could only play on the PS3. They had so many I will have to break this up into two posts.

Unlike other lists, this guide tells you which games to skip because better versions exist elsewhere.

The focus is on the best games released for the console that still hold up well today. If a newer version of a game is clearly better than the PS3 release, I leave out the original and mention the improved version at the end, so you can enjoy the best experience today.

To make my list a game needs to demonstrate at least two of the following: genre-defining innovation, outstanding technical excellence, enduring cultural impact, or universal acclaim.

Finally, heads up—I earn a small commission if you buy anything through my links. I only link to games I genuinely recommend. If a remaster or remake is better I tell you, even if it means losing a PS3 game sale. Let’s explore the best console-exclusive games:

2007

Ninja Gaiden Sigma (Team Ninja)

Ninja Gaiden Sigma is the PS3’s quintessential character‑action showcase: fast, brutal, and surgical with razor‑clean visuals that make every slash satisfying. As Ryu Hayabusa, you pursue the stolen Dark Dragon Blade through the Vigoorian Empire, carving through fiends and warlords while colliding with Rachel and Alma in a revenge tale that doubles as a relentless combat gauntlet. The draw is the feel: tight inputs, aggressive enemy AI, cancel‑friendly strings, and a deep arsenal that rewards mastery and improvisation across escalating arenas.​

Sigma isn’t just a port—it remixes Ninja Gaiden/Black with playable Rachel chapters, the dual‑katana Dragon’s Claw & Tiger’s Fang, new areas, and a smarter, steadier camera to keep the action in frame. Team Ninja’s overhaul adds crisp textures, self‑shadowed characters, and a blistering 60fps even at 1080p, keeping set pieces fluid and fair. It streamlines backtracking and puzzles in favor of a denser combat flow, sharpening pacing without dulling the challenge. The result is the PS3 action standard‑bearer—refined, demanding, and still a thrill to master today.

Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (Insomniac Games)

Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction is among the best games ever made for the PS3, and redefined what platformers could look like. It delivered the sharpest shooting, wildest weapons, and most ambitious worlds in a package IGN crowned best game they’d played on any platform in 2007. Ratchet discovers he’s the last Lombax when Emperor Tachyon hunts him across the galaxy for the Dimensionator, uncovering his species’ extinction while Clank encounters the mysterious Zoni.

The Groovitron forces enemies to dance mid-battle, raritanium upgrades make guns feel unique, and Sixaxis steering adds flair to skydiving sequences without slowing the pace. Space cities, asteroid belts, and platforming gauntlets showcase beautiful art direction, and the combat stays smooth even when chaos fills the screen. ToD kicked off the Future trilogy that defined PS3 platforming.

2008

LittleBIGPlanet (Media Molecule)

LittleBigPlanet proved players wanted to build, not just play, and sparked a user-generated content revolution that paved the way for Minecraft, Roblox, Dreams, and Fortnite’s creative mode. Sackboy journeys across Craftworld’s imaginative landscapes to rescue the Creator Curators, but the real magic happens when players step into the level editor.

Media Molecule’s “Play, Create, Share” philosophy handed players the same tools the studio used to build campaign levels, and the community responded with eleven million user-created levels over the series. The deep creation suite let anyone craft platforming challenges, puzzles, and even entirely new game genres. LBP ended up winning 25 Game of the Year awards, defining what mainstream creation tools could accomplish.

MotorStorm: Pacific Rift (Evolution Studios)

MotorStorm: Pacific Rift perfected off-road racing with environmental hazards that turned tracks into dynamic battlegrounds: water cooled overheating engines, lava melted vehicles, and dense foliage wrecked smaller racers. Eight vehicle classes tear across a volcanic island’s sixteen courses, each designed with multiple routes that favor specific vehicle types and reward strategic risk-taking.

Critics praised Pacific Rift for fixing almost every issue from the original and delivering twice the courses with shortcuts everywhere, and also celebrated the return of split-screen racing for up to four players. The boost system rides the edge between speed and explosion, with water offering cooling relief and fire punishing greed. Sixteen-player online matches delivered chaos that fans remember as the series’ golden age, and the brutal difficulty earned it a spot among the hardest PS3 platinum trophies.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (Kojima Productions)

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was Kojima’s epic farewell to Solid Snake with cinematic stealth gameplay, devastating boss battles, and a story that tied every loose end across twenty years of Metal Gear lore. Old Snake, rapidly aging and fighting through his final mission, must stop Liquid Ocelot from seizing control of the Sons of the Patriots AI system that governs war itself across five globe-spanning acts.

MGS4 refined the stealth sandbox with adaptive camouflage, the Drebin weapon marketplace, and free-form encounters that rewarded Ghost runs as much as action. Boss fights against the Beauty and the Beast Unit combined Psycho Mantis-style gimmicks with emotional storytelling. The final fight against Liquid Ocelot goes through every Metal Gear combat system in a single brawl that is one of gaming’s greatest send-offs. Reviewers called it “the ultimate Metal Gear game” and “without equal,” collecting 40 Game of the Year awards.

Valkyria Chronicles (Sega)

Valkyria Chronicles redefined tactical RPGs by ditching the grid for real-time aiming, where every bullet counts and positioning wins battles. BLiTZ mixes turn-based planning with third‑person aim—pick a soldier, dash through fire, line up the shot, and sweat the interception fire. It’s tense, readable, and way more flexible than grid‑locked SRPGs. Welkin and Alicia lead Squad 7 through a war story that mixes squad banter with ace‑up‑the‑sleeve Valkyria myth, and the cast’s quirks actually matter on the battlefield via Potentials.

The watercolor art style makes every battle feel like a moving painting, and Squad 7’s Potentials system means character quirks actually shape tactics. Sega’s engine delivered a storybook aesthetic that hasn’t aged, and the strategic depth rewards smart positioning over brute force. This game was so good it spawned spawned four sequels, an anime series, and manga adaptations.

2009

Demon’s Souls (FromSoftware)

Demon’s Souls is the rare game that meets all four of my pillars: genre-defining innovation, technical excellence, enduring cultural impact, and universal acclaim. Why? It’s the first Soulslike, the action RPG that did for third-person dungeon crawlers what Diablo did for isometric loot games: it invented a complete template before spawning an entire copycat genre. Its systems were more complex than its successors, too: World Tendency shifted each level between Pure White and Pure Black based on your actions, creating easier or harder encounters. Death slashed your maximum HP to 50% in Soul Form, far harsher than anything Dark Souls imposed.​​

The plot has a simple objective but cryptic execution: you are bound to the Nexus hub and sent through archstones into Boletaria’s ruined castles to slay demon lords and confront the Old One. Every swing drains stamina, every shortcut makes later runs safer, and messages, bloodstains, and invasions from other players turn exploration into a shared, lonely nightmare. It is still the blueprint that every Soulsborne game followed. See below for the PS5 remake.

inFAMOUS (Sucker Punch)

Infamous nailed the open-world superhero formula before Spider-Man PS4 existed, letting you choose whether to save Empire City, or raze it with electric fury. A courier named Cole MacGrath survives a blast that destroys half the city and grants him electric powers. It leaves him hunted, hated, and forced to choose between protecting or dominating a city in chaos. The Karma system isn’t window dressing: good powers bring precision and restoration, evil powers bring area-effect destruction, and NPCs react in real time depending on how you wield lightning.

Cole’s traversal flows naturally across power lines and rooftops, letting you zip-line on cables, glide with electric thrust, and drop lightning storms steered with Sixaxis motion controls. The city feels electric—literally—with every billboard, car, and generator offering a recharge, and combat blends third-person aiming with environmental traps that reward creative thinking. Infamous influenced everything from Sunset Overdrive to Spider-Man PS4’s superhero traversal formula. It still plays great today, with a sequel that refined the formula even more.

Killzone 2 (Guerrilla Games)

Killzone 2 is one of the best PS3 shooters ever, and a brilliant technical showcase that influenced the industry. Sergeant Tomas “Sev” Sevchenko leads an ISA invasion of Helghan to capture dictator Scolar Visari, only to find themselves outgunned by Colonel Radec’s forces, Petrusite arc towers, and eventually the nuclear Red Dust weapon that threatens to wipe out both armies. The weighty controls give every weapon heft and recoil, making firefights feel brutal and deliberate rather than twitchy. Love it or hate it, nothing else felt like this.

Guerrilla Games built a deferred rendering engine that redefined what PS3 hardware could do. Multiplayer’s rotating objectives—Warzone mode shifts from assassination to capture to search-and-destroy mid-match—kept 32-player battles unpredictable and chaotic. It won multiple awards, including gaming’s first Ivor Novello Award for its soundtrack. It still holds up today: fans have revived online servers, and the presentation remains stunning.

Uncharted 2 (Naughty Dog)

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is one of the greatest games ever made; not just for PS3, but for an entire generation. Nathan Drake chases Marco Polo’s lost fleet to the mythical city of Shambhala while dodging war criminal Zoran Lazarević, collapsing monasteries, and superhuman guardians. The train sequence—Nate fighting through moving cars, dodging a helicopter, and battling a tank on looping rails—became the generation’s defining set piece, a masterclass in moving level design that Naughty Dog spent years trying to top.

Naughty Dog pushed the Cell processor to 100% utilization, delivering real-time moving environments and over 500 in-game cinematic animations that made every moment feel alive. Uncharted 2 swept over 100 Game of the Year awards and proved games could deliver blockbuster action with Hollywood pacing, influencing cinematic storytelling for the next decade.

2010

Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream)

Heavy Rain proved interactive drama could be terrifying when every QTE matters and any protagonist can die permanently—no reloads, no second chances. It’s a cinematic thriller where you control characters through on-screen button prompts and quick-time events, with your choices permanently shaping the story. Four protagonists hunt the Origami Killer before another victim drowns: father Ethan Mars, journalist Madison Paige, FBI profiler Norman Jayden, and private detective Scott Shelby.

HR’s 2,000-page branching script made every button press matter. The heavy, deliberate controls turned routine actions into tense moments, grounding players in a thriller where mistakes had lasting consequences. It won three BAFTA awards and influenced how developers approached choice-driven narratives for years after.

Part 2 is here

Games Not Included

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (2007). The Nathan Drake Collection is completely superior to the first game, and an improvement on games 2 and 3 also, just not as much.

Demon’s Souls (2009). Originally I said the PS5 remake completely replaces it–they rebuilt the assets from scratch. However, many players say the remake looks better but misses the point: swapping the original’s deliberately oppressive, sickly atmosphere for generic dark fantasy polish. The choice is yours.

Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time (2009) is a terrific game, everyone should play it. While it came within a hair’s breadth, it did not qualify quite strongly enough to be included in my list.

Yakuza 3 (2010) is far better in the Yakuza Remastered Collection, additional content is included and it contains Yakuza 0-6.

Best and Forgotten Games