4. Mortal Kombat X
The fighting genre feels like it's taken a bit of a hit recently - when was the last time you played one? - as apart from this and Tekken 7 on the horizon, there's not a great many flagship face-smashers on the horizon, let alone padding out the past few years. Still, Mortal Kombat 9 was an fantastic release, with NetherRealm delivering a stunning campaign mode that took you from fight to fight with thrilling cutscenes all loading the next encounter underneath - making for one seamless thrill-ride of bone-breaking fatalities and plot revelations. For MKX it looks like they're pulling out all the stops too, throwing in even gorier finishers that are programmed into very detailed character models so you see every burst artery or popped eyeball, alongside a plethora of new fighters and stages,
and a swappable moveset for each character that ensures a heft of
replayability both online and off. It'd take Shang Tsung himself to derail the steam this one has built up, and with a developer so time-tested as the guys at NetherRealm, this is a dead cert for the best fighter in years.