After much delay, I’m finally updating the list of my top games on PlayStation 4. Previously this had been a Top 10 list, but with all the games I’ve played since the start of the year, and the changes that I’ve made to the rankings, I’ve decided that it’s time for me to expand the list to a Top 15. Even with this expansion, however, there were a few games that barely missed the cut. An honorable mention has to be given to The Division, Rime, Abzu, and Valiant Hearts; all of which I enjoyed and was sad to leave off this list.

Before I lay out my list, let me give a few quick notes on it. First, obviously, this is a personal list, so it’s limited to just the games I’ve played. There are too many games to play these days and there are some genres that I like more than others, so this list is no doubt missing many legendary games that I’ve simply never played. Second, and somewhat related to the first note, I normally don’t play games until several months to several years after they’ve been released, so you’re not going to see anything recent on this list. Third, I placed no special restrictions on what games could appear on this list other than that I played them for the first time on PlayStation 4. That means remakes/remasters and ports of older games are in contention alongside games that first debuted in the current console generation.

With all that out of the way, below is the list of my Top 15 PlayStation 4 games. Clicking the titles of the games will take you to their respective writing pieces where I discuss them in greater depth. Underneath the list I’ve included a section with short blurbs that give basic details of each game and some of my thoughts on them.

 

Ricardo’s Top 15 PlayStation 4 Games

15. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Remastered
14. Bastion
13. Infamous: Second Son
12. Battlefield 1
11. Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
10. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
9. Injustice 2: Legendary Edition
8. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
7. Watch Dogs
6. Ratchet and Clank
5. Child of Light
4. Batman: Arkham Knight
3. Shadow of the Colossus
2. Destiny (Complete Edition)
1. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

15. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Remastered

Kicking off my list is the remastered version of one of the most influential first-person shooters in the history of video games. I played the original Modern Warfare on PlayStation 3, working through the singleplayer campaign many times and also dabbling a little bit in the multiplayer, so when the remastered edition was released I knew I’d have to check it out. Even 12 years later, Modern Warfare’s singleplayer campaign still holds up and with the remastered edition of the game there are a ton of small additions that have been made on top of the improved audio and visuals. Hopefully one day Activision will give us Modern War 2 Remastered, but I’d also be happy to get World at War Remastered.

 

14. Bastion

In Bastion you play as the Kid, a young man who wakes up to find his entire civilization has been upended by a disaster known as the Calamity. The only way to make things right is for the Kid to complete a device known as the Bastion, and in an interesting twist the Kid’s entire journey is told by an old man who narrates everything that happens in the game. In addition to this novel storytelling technique, Bastion has a few other tricks up its sleeve, including a colorful fantasy world that assembles around the Kid as he moves forward and fun, responsive gameplay that kept me coming back for more. Bastion on PlayStation 4 may be a port of an older game, with the original edition having been released back in 2011, but even today it can still compete with its modern gaming counterparts.

 

13. Infamous: Second Son

Amongst the human population are a small number of persons, called Conduits, who have super powers and are largely feared by the rest of humanity. In Second Son you are Delsin Rowe, a very special Conduit who has the unique ability to absorb and copy the powers of other Conduits. Seattle is Delsin’s playground to flex his powers, and the choice to be either a superhero or a super jerk is entirely up to you. Will Delsin strive to heal the rift between regular humans and Conduits, or will he show humanity just how afraid they should be of Conduits? Either way, Second Son is a power trip.

 

12. Battlefield 1

Having fallen off the Battlefield bandwagon years ago, I was very pleased to come back into the fold with Battlefield 1, which takes the series back in time a hundred years to the days of the First World War. One of the marks of a great game is that it can be fun even if you’re bad at it, and Battlefield 1 is a good example of this because I had a blast playing Battlefield 1’s multiplayer despite the fact that my KDR is just awful. Of all the online modes Operations quickly became a favorite of mine with its epic 32 vs 32 matches that span multiple maps. Great audio and visuals compliment the experience, and as a pleasant surprise Battlefield 1 also delivers the best Battlefield singleplayer campaign that I’ve ever played.

 

11. Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition

Tomb Raider is a reboot of the long-running series by the same name and the Definitive Edition of it was my first time playing a Tomb Raider game. In it we see a new origin story of Lara Croft and her transformation from a history nerd who doesn’t like to get her hands dirty into a badass survivor who faces down an island of crazed zealots and supernatural foes. Taking cues from the Uncharted series, Tomb Raider is an excellent mix of exploration, combat, puzzles, and character moments for Lara. I may be really late to the Tomb Raider party, but I’m glad I showed up when I did.

 

10. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

What happened here? That’s the question you’ll be trying to answer in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Set in fictional Shropshire County in 1980s rural England, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture has you walking around a land that appears to have been abandoned just a few minutes before you arrived. Mysterious visions of the events in Shropshire prior to the mass-disappearance give you tantalizing pieces of the puzzle as well as insights into the lives of the people who are now gone. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture’s story had me hooked from start to finish of it’s five or so hour playtime, and together with its outstanding soundtrack and colorful visuals made for one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had in the last few years.

 

9. Injustice 2: Legendary Edition

Fighting games generally aren’t my thing these days but the Injustice games have been a notable exception. This partly has to due with the fact that the Injustice games have set the bar for storytelling within fighting games, giving us a legitimately good story set in the DC Comics Multiverse, and partly because they’ve got rock-solid fighting mechanics. Injustice 2 is just about everything one could hope for in a sequel, refining what made the first game great as well as adding in some interesting new game modes and mechanics to form an impressive fighting game. With the Legendary Edition of the game you also get all of the DLC characters that have come out since launch, which only adds to the fun because now you’ve got even more characters to go fisticuffs with.

 

8. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

Once again it’s time to dive back into the Animus, a machine that allows its users to experience the lives of people from the distant past, and this time you are Edward Kenway, a pirate turned assassin whose ship prowled the waters of the Caribbean in the early 1700s. Though Black Flag does feature the usual Assassin’s Creed elements of traversal, stealth, melee combat, assassinations, and exploration, at the heart of the experience is fantastic naval gameplay that lets you live out your pirate fantasies of battling on high seas, plundering valuable cargo, and building up your ship and Edward to become the most fearsome pirate around. Black Flag is the pirate game we’ve always wanted and it is undeniably one of the best entries in the voluminous Assassin’s Creed series.

 

7. Watch Dogs

In the very near future the city of Chicago has become the world’s first Smart City, with much of its infrastructure and utilities controlled by a central operating system. As you might expect, protagonist Aiden Pearce has manage to hack it along with the innumerable number of smart devices being carried around by Chicago’s citizens. Traveling deep into Chicago’s seedy underbelly to find out who ordered the failed attempt on his life that left his niece dead, Aiden has the city itself to use as his tool. There’s an undeniable satisfaction to clearing an area of enemies without firing a single shot or ditching pursuers by turning the city against them, and once you play Watch Dogs you’ll see why it can be hard for me to go back to modern open world games that don’t have its hacking mechanics.

 

6. Ratchet and Clank

If Ratchet & Clank doesn’t put a smile on your face then I don’t know what will. A remake of the iconic PS2 game, Ratchet & Clank is an absolute delight to play and has some of the most hilarious weapons you’ll find in a video game, including one that turn enemies into sheep, another that cause impromptu dance parties to break out, and the trash-talking killer robot named Mr. Zurkon. With a visual style that might best be described as Pixar-esque and a classic story of misfits out to save the galaxy, Ratchet and Clank is the sort of game that reminds you why you love playing video games.

 

5. Child of Light

Bursting onto the scene as one of my favorite games so far this generation, Child of Light tells the story of a young girl named Aurora who wakes up one day in the fantasy world of Lemuria. Although hesitant at first, Aurora embarks on a fairy tale adventure to recover Lemuria’s light from the grip of an evil queen and find her way home. Employing a rich watercolor palate on an impressively deep and detailed art style, Child of Light brings the fantasy world of Lemuria to life in a way that I haven’t seen in years and encourages you to explore to explore every last inch of it. Combine a short but charming story and great visuals with elegantly simple gameplay and you’ve got a fantasy RPG like few others.

 

4. Batman: Arkham Knight

What has always made the Arkham games great is that they make you feel like Batman—the detective, the predator, the martial arts master—and Batman: Arkham Knight is no different from its predecessors. In the fourth and final entry of the series, all of Gotham City is under threat, with Scarecrow, aided by several other Batman villains as well as the mysterious Arkham Knight, threatening to plunge Batman’s city beneath a cloud of fear toxin. Batman has a long, dark night ahead of him, but this time he can call on some help from allies like Nightwing, Catwoman, and Robin as he slowly unravels Scarecrow’s plot and frees the city from the clutches of the Arkham Knight’s militia. While it’s kind of sad to see the Arkham series of games end, with Arkham Knight it went out on a high note and guaranteed the series’ status of having some of the best superhero games ever made.

 

3. Shadow of the Colossus

The original Shadow of the Colossus was one of my favorite games of the PlayStation 2 generation and the ground-up remake of the game for PlayStation 4 is nothing short of phenomenal. While the it’s still the same game in terms of story and design, the PlayStation 4 version of Shadow of the Colossus fixes most of the old game’s notable issues and has such a dramatic visual overhaul that it was almost like I was living out that old gamer fantasy of playing a favorite game again for the first time. If you missed out on the original Shadow of the Colossus the PlayStation 4 version is the best way to experience this classic game about a man on a quest to take down 16 colossi scattered across a strange and beautiful world. Simply put, Shadow of the Colossus on PlayStation 4 is the best remastered/remade game I’ve ever played and is the standard that I measure all other remasters and remakes against.

 

2. Destiny (Complete Edition)

Were I rating Destiny solely on its base version and the condition it was in when I first played it, I think it’s safe to say it would be many slots further down on the list. With all the expansion packs and improvements that have been made since launch, however, Destiny has transformed into one of my favorite games of this console generation. Continual refinements to the Destiny formula created an addicting and incredibly fun sci-fi FPS that I poured over 100 hours into, and even though I’ve now stopped playing I still sometimes go online to see what’s going on in the world of Destiny. Whether it was playing story missions, teaming up with other players to complete Strikes, or dipping my feet into competitive multiplayer, Destiny was a blast and I’m looking forward to working through Destiny 2.

 

1. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

It is now 2019 and my 2016 Game of the Year is still sitting pretty atop the list of my top 15 PlayStation 4 games. At this point I’ve showered so many accolades on Uncharted 4 that I don’t know what else to say. It perfectly wraps up Nathan Drake’s storyline, delivers everything that we’ve come to expect from an Uncharted game, and shows once again why developer Naughty Dog is one of the best developers in the entire video games industry. It is both the best game I’ve played so far on this console generation and my favorite game of this console generation. Kicking it off its throne is certainly possible, given that I’ve not gotten around to playing certain games like Horizon: Zero Dawn or The Witcher 3, but the fact that it’s survived so long at the top of the mountain is an impressive feat to say the least.