5. Red Faction Guerilla
Remember Red Faction? Hell, remember THQ?! For a time, the two of them were revolutionising action in video games, most pertinently because their patented 'GeoMod' technology in the first Red Faction let you essentially terraform any part of the world geometry by blowing straight through it. This 'Worms in 3D' approach carried across multiple games where the budgets got bigger and the weapons got louder, until Guerrilla ditched the first-person tropes of the former generation and ushered in one hell of a game engine that would take this GeoMod-style gameplay to the next level. Think what Just Cause 3 is doing now, and take it back to 2009 - it was that mind-blowing, yet just as enjoyably anarchic. Buildings could be toppled, enemies would ragdoll and do cartwheels in all directions following any explosion, weapons were meaty and fun to fire - the whole thing did have a plot about taking back Mars (or something), but for an experience that revelled in its own destruction - Red Faction's first third-person outing is its finest.