12 Most Influential Video Games Of The 2000s

1. Devil May Cry

One of the key people behind the first two Resident Evil games, Hideki Kamiya, had a big task in envisioning a game for the PlayStation 2 that would have a similar impact to what those seminal survival horrors did for the PS1. And thus Devil May Cry was born - a super-stylised, combo-based action game whose mechanics have been replicated by other games to this day.

While the game maintained some of the creepy atmosphere of Resident Evil (those marionettes enemies are disturbing to this day), the double-jumping, enemy-juggling combat using a sword-and-pistols combo made Devil May Cry an action-game pioneer. Its technicality was on par with Street Fighter, with essentially an endless number of chained-together combos for you to execute, and a pumping soundtrack that picked up each time you got into a scrap.

Appropriately for a game that eschewed subtlety for stylisation, Devil May Cry's influence is immediately obvious in later big-hitting action games like God of War, Darksiders, Bayonetta, and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (the latter two of which were made by Kamiya's dev studio, PlatinumGames). It's a testament to Devil May Cry's formula that it's going strong to this day, virtually unchanged.

Have we missed anything out? Which games from this decade do you think changed the face of gaming as we know it? Let us know in the comments!