The Best Xbox Game Every Year 2001 - 2024

The Xbox One era was a truly troubling time for Microsoft. The following entries may well reflect that, as Xbox started to move away from exclusive releases and try to bill itself as the hub of entertainment in the home. Did nobody tell them they could do both?!

That's not to say that some games don't deserve their praise - and there is a lot to like about Capcom's Dead Rising 3 - but if a solid 7/10 is your best exclusive game of the year then that's very telling.

And whilst Dead Rising 3 was far from the prettiest princess at the next-gen ball, it found appropriately familiar ways to impress. The seamless, significantly bigger map than the first two games was populated with hordes of the undead and was the perfect staging area for mayhem. The refinement of the controls therefore goes a long way to making exploration (and zombie-killing sprees) a breeze, be that on foot or in one of the game's many new combo vehicles. Dead Rising is all about massive, mindless destruction and this was multiplied tenfold for every additional player added to the same map via the game's riotous co-op.

Hampered by lacklustre writing and tonal whiplash, Dead Rising 3 was at least a solid start to the Xbox One, but not the system-seller that a new console desperately needs.