#stealth action

12) Batman: Arkham Origins (2013)

This game gets a lot of flak, but believe it or not, it’s actually my favorite in the Arkham series.  It’s City with a new coat of paint and a few more bugs, but City was still awesome, and so is this game.  It had plenty of clever predator stealth sequences, with more enemy variety to shake things up, that always made wiping out the bad guys swiftly and silently deeply rewarding.  AND it had more stealth action boss fights.  City had Mr. Freeze and a single predator fight rehashed twice with Two Face and Harley.  Origins had Mr. Freeze again, but with new additional options, and a pre-fight stage where you had to stay outta sight.  It also had Deadshot, the best of the three basic “predator boss” types, as well as TN-1 Bane as the final boss, and damn if it wasn’t intense.  With more gadgets and clever ways to mix and match, I think this game would be higher, but it’s still a great one for lovers of more approachable stealth action paired up with excellent brawler combat.

11) Assassin's Creed (2007)

The other AC games may be better, but AC1 is the only game in the series to stay consistent and simple with its design philosophy.  Here are targets for you to assassinate, here are bolstering crowds with beautiful cities to Parkour across or hide within, and at every turn, there are hiding spots but also enemies, making situations escalate organically and entertainingly with each assassination.  Hence why, despite most people regarding AC1 as the weakest entry, it's my personal favorite.  It's the one I replay the most and the one that just stays consistent with what it advertises.  No more, no less. 10) Hitman (2016)

I've yet to play the other Hitman games, and by accounts, each sequel is better than the last.  But you've seen the Jackie boy vids.  What more need be said?  :P

9) Death Stranding (2019)

Death Stranding's kind of a jack of all trades in the stealth action.  On one hand, you have conventional stealth action where you're infiltrating enemy camps and can either pick off all the bad guys one by one or go nuts and fight everybody head on.  On the other hand, you have BT's, whom you sneak around by holding your breath and moving slowly, lest these ghostly monsters drag you out to a tarpit for a boss fight.  The stealth is fairly simplistic but functional.  Combat as is would be fairly shallow, were it not for the sheer quantity of options you have in any given battle.  Seriously, you have a sticky gun that lets you snatch cargo straight off a bad guys back then immediately bludgeon him unconscious with it, and snatch HIS cargo to smash his BUDDY out cold with that in one fell swoop.  The way situations can organically just bleed from stealth to action and give you options for both makes it a blast.  And the boss fights against Cliff and Higgs are almost all I could ask for from stealth action battles. 8) Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020)

I DO wish the game had some stealth action boss fights, but far as superhero games are concerned, no game has better stealth action than Miles Morales.  It hits fast and is deeply gratifying.  You have corridors with as much as twenty plus bad guys, and you can clean it out in minutes thanks to being able to hide in plain sight through invisibility.  Venom Takedowns with let you wipe out a chain succession of enemies all at once.  Corridors have TONS of environmental advantages to wipe out a bunch of bad guys with one move.  And unlike Spider-Man or Arkham, if you're caught, just go invisible, flee, and go right back to picking off baddies in seconds.  It's like playing a predator sequence in an Arkham game on steroids...and in fast forward.  And the sheer volume of enemies you're often up against keeps it from feeling too easy. 7) Ghost Recon: Breakpoint (2019)

This game SUCKED at launch.  Like, it was actual trash that became a chore to finish when it first came out.  But fair's fair, Ubisoft stuck with it and the end result is one of the most customizable experiences I've ever had in gaming.  Like, this game is straight up now designed to let you change the entire experience simply by pausing the game and flipping a new options on and off and have it immediately go into effect.

I hated the injury mechanics of the first game because it slowed you down and led to a lot of random, unfair deaths because you could never predict which attacks would be critical and which wouldn’t.  So now, I can turn them off.  I thought bad guys were brain-dead.  So I can make them smarter.  I thought constantly slowing down when I'm running from bullets was detrimental, so now, I can make stamina limitless. 

I thought some areas had way too many guards to viably take out without co-op buddies...soooo I can activate an entire squad of AI partners all throughout the game with me and there's a lot of coordination you can do with your team for really covert missions...and you can even customize their look to create a team that looks as cool or goofy as you want.  It’s a really dorky thing, but I LOVE customization in shooters and being able to fully customize, not just yourself, but your team to look however you want in missions is really fun.

And if you think the enemies are too easy to take down?  Turn on Terminator mode and have T-800's storming the place.  Yeah, freakin’ Terminators.  XD

The game gives you literally all the options you could ask for to have an experience perfectly tuned to what you WANT to have.  And the options you have make it so the game can feel like an entirely different, borderline strategy game instead of a solid third person shooter.  You can activate a drone now to coordinate your three AI buddies to stop and go where you want, mark targets for them to eliminate and have your eye on the entire battlefield.  It's honestly staggering how many options this game has.  And were the missions not so boilerplate and were the boss fights actual boss fights and not just reskins of basic enemies, this would be one of the best games ever.  As is, it's a genuinely impressive comeback story!  6) Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016)

Mankind Divided is the game Cyberpunk WISHES it was (Spoiler Alert: Cyberpunk isn’t very fun or responsive yet).  It's a game with some spectacular level design where there are dozens of ways around any given enemy and tons of options for any mission.  You have a wide assortment of augmentations to let you sneak or fight your way through any scenario and they give you the tools to use your robot powers in really clever ways for navigation purposes.  This is a game where even the simplest side mission has about a dozen different outcomes, and most of them are wholly organic.  What it needed was more...well, GAME.  After all, MD is a third of the game it was meant to be.  But it IS a marvel of stealth action goodness. 5) The Last of Us: Part 2 (2020)

I have a BUNCH of issues with this game, but on the subject of stealth action, TLOU2 is one of the best in the genre.  Every single encounter is highly difficult, but has dozens of variations.  The levels are all designed with tons of varied cover spots and hidden paths to let you navigate as you either pick off the bad guys one by one, or sneak past them.  The enemies range in their weaponry, but possess self preservation, so they aren't just standing around shooting aimlessly. 

And on top of that, combat is brutal.  Every bullet counts, and you feel the impact of every shot fired.  The melee system is simple but complements gunplay fantastically.  So if you wanna save bullets, you can shoot someone in the leg, and as they stagger, you can bumrush them, grab a hammer or brick you find on the ground as you're running and bludgeon them to death to save bullets.  The game also has a great lil "MGS4 Battlefield Stealth" system.  Several encounters have humans and infected, and you can pit the two against one another and either sneak around the carnage or use it to pick off the harder enemies.

The game also has a FAR better predator fight that's basically David's fight in the first game, but with way better mechanics.  The boss increasingly upgrades their weapon each time you attack them, the environment is perfect for this fight, and if you're caught, you aren't just dead, you have a means to escape a hairy situation.  TLOU2 may have been deeply polarizing, story-wise, but as a GAME, it's terrific.  And best yet, once you beat the main game, there's an encounter mode that lets you skip all the BS and just jump right into every single stealth action encounter and boss fight throughout the whole game risk free.  What's not to love about that? 4) Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater HD (2004 / 2010)

MGS3 is the first really great linear MGS game.  It ditches that terrible fixed camera, simplifies the controls, and has more than ten rooms where you do any sneaking.  Its best moments are proto-MGSV outposts, where you have an area with tons of guards and multiple paths to your objective, and a whole lot of opportunities to get creative.  It was also the first MGS game that made combat just as viable as stealth.  You CAN actually just punch your way through the bad guys now, and the end result is shockingly fun thanks to all the weapons and more intuitive controls.  But the real star is the boss battles.  MGS3 has some of the best bosses of any video game I've ever played in my life.  And MOST of them incorporate stealth beautifully.  To the point where you can eliminate half the bosses with any of 'em ever even knowing your location, and giving you a plethora of variety in the bosses themselves AND the means in which you fight them.

3) Splinter Cell: Blacklist (2013)

Splinter Cell's an odd series.  The story is nonsense yet also pretty drab and simplistic.  Sam Fisher REALLY isn't an interesting character, none of the characters are except the villain and anti-hero scumbag.  But as a VIDEO GAME, Blacklist is the peak of linear stealth action.  MGS3 had boss fights, and THAT was the biggest mark for the game.  And Blacklist only has a single boss fight, which is basically a slightly elongated version of Deadshot's "fight" in City. 

But the moment-to-moment gameplay is out of this world good.  You have brilliant level design that makes sneaking from A to B deeply gratifying, but you also have insane mobility that makes you feel like the biggest badass when you play.  There can be a room full of guards.  And like a game of chess, with the right moves, you can end them in seconds, which requires skill to pull off, rushing the first guy and taking him down, shooting his buddy, then using execute to auto-kill up to three guards you've marked who were in range.  It's about using the systems the game gives you to maximize efficiency on the field.  And you can pick off bad guys using your environment, or climbing a plethora of terrain. 

The game almost plays like Arkham half the times when you're climbing walls or pipes and dropping down on bad guys or shooting them from overhead.  It has a huge variety of gadgets to aide you as well, and combat is incredibly difficult but doable.  Sam can only take a few hits before he's dead, but the means to shake off enemies is fair, and recovering from a slip-up is more fun than it is frustrating.  The campaign has several excellent missions which would satisfy a person as is.  But it also comes with over a dozen bonus missions you can access from your allies, each one taking place in entirely new settings with new enemies and storylines, each one with simpler and more streamlined objectives (perfect stealth, predator missions where you kill all the enemies, and survival waves where you have to fend off increasingly harder enemies).  AND it has the best kind of co-op.  Like Peace Walker, you can play any side mission with buddies.  But it also has missions exclusive to co-op, designed to be fully embraced with a buddy you can play with on the couch or online.  It's a game with tons of content, and all of it is mostly excellent. 2) Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015)

MGSV is the best game I've played.  That's because it's a game that hits all of my buttons.  The outposts are examples of perfect level design.  Each one is designed with a huge array of cover spots and multiple paths, direct or secret, to an objective area.  As a result, every mission allows you to get in, carry out your objective, and get out without raising a stink.  And when you screw up, it doesn't feel like punishment, because the combat of this game is fantastic. 

Everything is highly responsive, so your inputs happen with no delays.  You can go from diving to shooting from the ground in a tenth of a second.  And combat lets you seamlessly go from shooting, snatching guns from bad guys and blowing away with it, to taking breathers behind cover or with a human shield.  The enemy AI is the best the series has ever had.  They have way more self preservation, they're liberal with grenades, have way more variety in their weapons, and actually use turret guns and mortar cannons now. 

The missions themselves can be resolved tons of different ways.  Assassination missions play out like small-scale Hitman missions, without the frustration of screwing up and restarting because missions are so short, you just roll with the punches.  And the overall feel of a mission changes dramatically, depending on your loadout, the paths you choose in the level, your playstyle, and the time of day you select when you start a mission. 

There are only a few major downsides to the gameplay.  The bosses lack variety, like, I REALLY wish MGSV had more XOF assassins like Quiet to confront along with the Skulls and MoF.  Some missions are a bit too samey, and there aren't enough larger scale outposts.  Some more enemy variety wouldn't have been remiss.  And finally, the open world itself is pretty lifeless.  It works to complement the missions, like giving you a whole stretch of land to carry out ambushes or battle the Skulls anywhere you please.  But open world games are best when they have more to react to and engage with, or secrets to find.  Oh yeah, and the main villain should've had a boss fight, a stealth action shootout at that because that’s what the OG plan was until Kojima decided to be slightly more pretentious than usual. 

But beyond that, this game is a freakin' masterpiece.

So why is number 2 on the list even if it's the best game I've ever played?

Because this game exists... 1) Deus Ex (2000)

Deus Ex isn't as mechanically good as MGSV.  It's even that good mechanically, like, playing it now, it feels pretty clunky and not the least bit smooth.  Still fun, but you feel the age.  So why is it number 1?  Simple.  Deus Ex is the most open-ended video game ever made.  It's a stealth action RPG where every, and I mean, EVERY single level has dozens upon dozens of different paths to choose and make your own.  It has class specialization, meaning the build you create gives you a whole ton of new paths and strategies to use for hacking or flexibility. 

Every single mission takes place in a sprawling area.  You have an objective, obstructions blocking your way, and a whole bunch of guards.  You can blaze right to a solution, resolving a situation in minutes.  Or, you can take your time and find any number of different paths to your goal.  And all throughout each mission, there's tons of things to find as you explore.  There's entire other side missions with their own plethora of options.  Lots of really clever flavor text.  Upgrades to bolster your augmentations.  And really ominous messages you can find that'll come into play later. 

The bosses may lack variety but each one is a perfect stealth action battle where you can choose any number of options against the bosses, right down to running away from them and the game outright acknowledging that the boss enemies weren't killed.  Best yet, it's a game designed to be broken.  Unlike Human Revolution, all the bosses are recurring characters you spend plenty of time with.  But you can outright blow them away WELL in advance and the game will acknowledge their deaths and keep going anyway.  If you engage in a boss battle during a designated boss fight, but avoid them or run away, then that boss will turn up again for a rematch later. 

This is a game where you can create your own cover spots or platforms by gathering vending machines and dumpsters and piling them on top of each other.  Where specialization changes the entire feel of the campaign and incentivizes repeat playthroughs just to come up with different builds and experience missions in whole new ways.  And best yet, this is a game where when you're in a hub, whatever you see around you, you can interact with.  If you see buildings in the distance, you'll be able to go in and explore, and there's always something to find. Deus Ex is number one because there will never be another game like it.  It's debatable that no other game will ever be as FUN as MGSV, but no other game will ever be as open ended as Deus Ex because it's literally impossible.  The game is clunky and cheap looking because the engine it was built on was a low-memory one.  They traded in graphics fidelity and more impressive flow for the sake of creating a vast video game with an impossible amount of content to constantly stumble upon.  And unlike all the other games on this list, that open endedness actually DOES translate into the story, giving you dozens of different branching paths to the story, and sadly, only three fairly weak endings, but damn, if the journey up ain't a blast.