The Best Xbox 360 Games of All Time – The Essentials Part 2 (2009 – 2011)
Part 1 Part 3
This is the second post discussing the greatest multiplatform titles released on the 360 that still hold up well today. Part one explains how I am doing this in more detail.
Unlike other lists, this guide tells you which games to skip because better versions exist elsewhere.
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 game sale.
2009 Continued
Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady)
Batman: Arkham Asylum drops you into a trap: the Joker’s seized control of the asylum, released the inmates, and Batman has to navigate it solo while stopping a Titan serum plot. This masterpiece revolutionized superhero gaming by perfecting the free-flow combat system that Mark of Kri pioneered years earlier. Rocksteady fixed the button-assignment issues and made it flow seamlessly, creating the blueprint that shaped Shadow of Mordor, Spider-Man, Sleeping Dogs, and countless action games since.
The predator stealth sections made you genuinely *feel* like Batman, watching thugs grow terrified as you picked them off one by one. Written by Batman scribe Paul Dini and with 29 Game of the Year awards to back it up, Arkham Asylum proved comic book games could be legitimately great. The combat still holds up beautifully today. It is one of the best games the 360 has ever played.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 follows Task Force 141 (Soap, Ghost, and Roach) hunting Vladimir Makarov across the globe while Army Rangers defend Washington D.C. from Russian invasion. This blockbuster masterpiece took CoD4’s foundation and cranked everything to eleven. The customizable killstreak system let players chain Predator missiles into AC-130s into tactical nukes, creating absolute chaos. Spec Ops introduced co-op missions that became the template for every co-op mode since.
Hans Zimmer’s score elevated the cinematic campaign to Hollywood levels, and controversial missions like “No Russian” proved games could tackle serious subjects. MW2’s “everything is overpowered” philosophy—UMP dominance, One Man Army noob tubes, unstoppable killstreaks—created its own chaotic balance that players still argue about today. The iconic story missions essential playing, while the original multiplayer’s unhinged chaos remains unmatched. With 26 Game of the Year awards, it’s still one of the best games ever made.
Red Faction: Guerrilla (Volition)
Red Faction: Guerrilla brought open-world guerrilla warfare to Mars, featuring destruction physics that still stand out today. In this open-world third-person shooter, mining engineer Alec Mason joins the Red Faction after witnessing his brother Dan’s execution. Players help Mason free Martian sectors through sabotage, ambushes, and hostage rescues. Thanks to the GeoMod 2.0 engine, the game calculated real structural physics, so you could bring down EDF watchtowers by destroying their supports or use stolen Walkers to smash through enemy bases.
Each victory let you collect salvage to buy better weapons and upgrades, helping you grow from an underdog into a real threat. The game’s approach to destruction later inspired titles like Teardown and Instruments of Destruction, but Guerrilla is still the best example of using physics-based demolition to support tactical gameplay instead of just showing off. It’s essential playing.
2010
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft Montreal)
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood turned Rome into a living assassination sandbox and delivered the series’ best combat flow and systems depth—one of the defining action games of the generation. Ezio (from AC II) rebuilds the city by burning Borgia towers and recruiting citizens into a brotherhood he can level up and call in for strikes, and rips apart Templar control while wreaking havoc on Leonardo’s war machines. It’s still AC’s best “one more objective” loop: fix a district, expand your network, then vanish into the crowd like a ghost with a crossbow.
Two big leaps made it timeless. First, Brotherhood recruits change how you plan every encounter: off-map contracts level them up, or whistle and watch them murder a patrol mid-chase. The Brotherhood recruit system was so beloved it returned 15 years later in AC Shadows. Second, the debut multiplayer, with Wanted and Manhunt modes using abilities like Smoke Bomb and Templar Vision, offered stealth PvP unlike anything else. Winning multiple awards, Brotherhood proved the formula could still evolve. If you don’t own any AC’s, get the Ezio Trilogy.
Call of Duty: Black Ops (Treyarch)
Call of Duty: Black Ops took Cold War espionage and made it cool. CIA operative Alex Mason gets interrogated to decode his fragmented memories and stop Soviet sleeper agents: Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and a mind-bending twist that players still debate today. Treyarch introduced Theater mode for recording killstreaks (later adopted by Halo and Forza), CoD Points as earnable currency, and Wager matches where you gambled your points in Gun Game and Sticks and Stones.
The Zombies mode hit peak addictiveness with celebrity voice casts and elaborate easter eggs that spawned massive community hunts. Black Ops balanced an excellent campaign with the franchise’s deepest multiplayer suite, creating the template that made Treyarch the studio fans trust most. There is debate whether the original or Black Ops II is the peak of the series, but why choose? Just get the trilogy.
Mass Effect 2 (BioWare)
Mass Effect 2 literally kills Shepard in the opening—talk about raising the stakes. You’re resurrected to stop the Collectors, but here’s the kicker: the entire game builds toward a suicide mission where your squad can permanently die based on your choices. Not reload-and-try-again deaths—gone forever, never showing up in ME3. Every loyalty mission, every ship upgrade, every specialist you pick for the final assault matters.
BioWare pioneered consequence-based storytelling where 30+ hours of relationships could end in tragedy if you screwed up. The suicide mission structure influenced Dragon Age Inquisition’s approach and became the template for choice-driven RPG finales. Combined with refined combat and characters you genuinely care about, Mass Effect 2 is pure space opera perfection. Winner of over 100 GOTY awards, it’s one of the greatest games (and trilogies) on any platform.
NBA 2K11 (Visual Concepts)
NBA 2K11 is pure basketball poetry and one of the greatest sports games ever made. Visual Concepts built everything around Michael Jordan, featuring the legendary Jordan Challenge mode where you recreate ten of MJ’s most iconic moments against the Pistons, Celtics, and Lakers. Each challenge featured era-specific presentation, custom commentary, and authentic rosters that made you feel like you were actually there, capturing ’80s and ’90s NBA atmosphere perfectly.
The mode was so successful that 2K brought it back in NBA 2K23 with 15 expanded scenarios and vintage broadcast filters. Combined with IsoMotion dribbling, which revolutionized ball-handling controls and deep franchise modes, NBA 2K11 proved that sports games could be more than just yearly roster updates. This was a legitimate masterpiece that still holds up today, and while 2K13 and 2K14 refined the simulation, 2K11’s Jordan Challenge remains the most iconic sports mode on Xbox 360.
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (Criterion Games)
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit brought Criterion Games’ chaos to the franchise with Seacrest County’s all-out war between racers and cops. Choose your side: an outlaw evading takedowns, or a cop deploying spike strips, EMPs, and roadblocks to wreck high-speed criminals. The real revolution was Autolog, the BAFTA-winning social system that automatically challenged you whenever friends beat your times, even when they weren’t online.
TheSixthAxis called it a defining moment in gaming because it created an addictive competition loop that never stopped, connecting players for constant head-to-head battles. It became the blueprint for social racing features in Shift 2 and beyond. Combined with signature speed and spectacular crashes, Hot Pursuit proved the cops-versus-racers formula still had juice. Pure arcade racing perfection.
Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar San Diego) 
Red Dead Redemption will absolutely wreck you. Government agents kidnap John Marston’s family and force him to hunt down his old gang members across New Austin and revolutionary Mexico. The journey from rancher back to gunslinger is brutal, and the ending proves nobody can outrun their past, delivering one of gaming’s most emotionally powerful conclusions.
The Dead Eye system turned shootouts into slow-motion perfection, letting you paint targets and watch bullets fly in cinematic glory. Rockstar proved open-world games could tell stories as powerful as the greatest Western films, influencing how later games like The Last of Us and The Witcher 3 approached emotionally-driven stories. RDR won over 100 GOTY awards as a result. This is Rockstar’s storytelling masterpiece on the 360, pure Western perfection.
Rock Band 3 (2010, Harmonix)
Rock Band 3 is the series’ absolute peak, and it’s not even close. Harmonix added keyboards, three-part harmonies, and revolutionary quality-of-life improvements like the “Overshell” menu system that let you switch instruments or difficulty mid-session without interrupting your bandmates. The hundreds of career goals and challenges kept you grinding, and immediate song access meant story mode wasn’t blocking tracks.
Then there’s Pro Mode, the truly insane part. Real Fender Squier guitars, MIDI controllers, and authentic keyboard techniques taught you real musical skills. Wired confirmed players could immediately play songs on real instruments after mastering them in Pro Mode. Pro Mode didn’t carry to Rock Band 4 (which regressed significantly), but RB3’s innovations proved rhythm games could be legitimate learning tools. This is music gaming’s crowning achievement.
Vanquish (PlatinumGames)
Vanquish is one of the era’s most innovative shooters, a game that perfected boost-slide combat by making sliding your primary weapon instead of a way to reach cover. You play DARPA agent Sam Gideon, deployed to a hijacked space colony in a prototype rocket-boosted suit to stop a Russian coup from incinerating San Francisco with a stolen solar weapon. The innovation is layering bullet-hell enemy waves, transforming BLADE weaponry, and pattern-heavy mech bosses onto a boost-slide system that never lets you stop moving.
Mikami’s vision turned defensive cover mechanics into pure offensive momentum, where every rocket-slide feels like controlled chaos. The 2020 remaster runs at 60fps and confirms what 2010 missed: between God Hard challenge modes and arcade scoring, Vanquish remains one of the most thrilling, replayable action games ever made.
2011
Batman: Arkham City (Rocksteady)
Batman: Arkham City cranked everything up from Arkham Asylum. Joker poisons Batman with his own blood disease, forcing a race to find a cure from Mr. Freeze while investigating Hugo Strange’s Protocol 10—a plot that threatens all of Arkham City. The free-flow combat got even better with gadget integration, aerial attacks, and multi-enemy counters that made you feel unstoppable.
But the real genius? The Mr. Freeze boss fight forced you to constantly adapt tactics, no repeating the same move twice. That adaptive design influenced boss battles in countless games since, while Detective Mode’s investigative mechanics showed up everywhere from Hogwarts Legacy to The Witcher 3’s enhanced senses. The result was 42 GoTY awards. The combat still feels incredible today, proving Arkham City isn’t just the best superhero game on the 360, it’s superhero gaming perfection.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Games)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the Xbox 360’s tightest, most feature-complete shooter. It’s blisteringly responsive at 60 fps, with a campaign/Spec Ops/multiplayer package that defined the annual FPS. The trilogy finale delivers: Price and Yuri hunt Makarov across a globe-spanning World War III, revenge-fueled missions from Paris to Dubai that climax in a satisfying way. Spec Ops returns with a new Survival mode for replayable two-player firefights alongside curated co-op missions that scale from stealth to siege.
Multiplayer refines the series: Strike Packages rework killstreaks into Assault/Support/Specialist paths that reward objectives and teamwork, while Kill Confirmed shifts focus to dog-tag control, turning every death into a tactical mini-objective. The Telegraph awarded it 100/100, calling it “the perfect starting point, more accommodating and encompassing than ever,” cementing COD’s dominance on Xbox 360. If you don’t own any of the MW series, just buy the trilogy.
Dark Souls (From Software)
Dark Souls took Demon’s Souls’ brutal formula and adapted it into one of gaming’s most influential action RPGs. You’re a cursed Undead escaping through the interconnected kingdom of Lordran, where stamina-based combat punishes mistakes and bonfire checkpoints become lifelines. The genius was the online integration: bloodstain death replays warning of danger, cryptic player messages (helpful or trolling), phantom co-op summons, and PvP invasions that kept you paranoid.
Dark Souls’ multiplatform success made it the genre’s namesake, spawning everything from Nioh to Hollow Knight to Elden Ring. The interconnected world design and “tough but fair” philosophy became the gold standard for challenging action RPGs. Even today, the Xbox 360 version remains playable via backward compatibility.
Dead Space 2 (Visceral Games)
Dead Space 2 ramped up the terror from DS1. Isaac Clarke battles Necromorph hordes aboard the Sprawl while his dead girlfriend Nicole haunts every corner of his fractured mind. The strategic dismemberment combat remains brilliant: surgically remove limbs, not spray bullets. Hardcore mode’s brutal three-save limit across the entire campaign created genuine dread—one mistake and hours of progress vanish.
The improved zero-gravity sections let you fly freely through space rather than jump between platforms, and the in-world HUD kept immersion tight. Dead Space 2’s atmospheric horror and UI design influenced The Callisto Protocol and countless sci-fi games since. While the remake offers modern polish, the 360 version remains a masterclass in survival horror: tense, terrifying, and unforgettable.
Part 3 is here
Games Not Included
Fallout: New Vegas (2010). F:NV was and is a buggy mess on the 360. The save game corruption issue meant bad news. Play the Xbox One/Series X version, or better yet the PC version.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (2010). This was a fabulous game, but it’s primary appeal was online play. Since the servers shut down, the way to play the best part of the game is gone.
Battlefield 3 (2011). Same deal as BC2, really.
Final Fantasy XIII (2010). It’s playable on the 360, but its technical limitations keep it from being recommended. The best version to play is the PS3, sorry.
L.A. Noire (2011). Same deal as FFXIII.
Shift 2: Unleashed (2011). Similar deal as FFXIII