10 Video Games So Great They Ruined The Series

5. Halo 3

Now, now. I'm not suggesting that Halo: Reach was a bad game, far from it. It's just that, well, it wasn't the thrilling concluding chapter of a trilogy that completely revolutionised the first-person shooter genre on consoles.

Halo 3 was the first game in the series to launch on the Xbox 360, and featured a campaign that beautifully sees out the story of Master Chief and friends. It was brilliantly paced and masterfully written, proving that you can have a futuristic shooter with a faceless protagonist that you actually care about. It was the last entry in the series to not feel like an earnest futuristic shooter, exhibiting a spirit that was comparatively lacking in its successors.

It also introduced console gamers to large-scale multiplayer warfare, and even though Reach - and more recently Guardians - improved the series in this area, the memories of how fresh and new it felt at the time of Halo 3 make it stand out.

With subsequent Halo stories never matching up to the original trilogy's, it perhaps isn't all that surprising - though still sad - that the campaign was dropped altogether for Halo 5.