Looking for your next PlayStation 5 game? Browse our best PS5 games of 2025 with quick summaries, pricing notes, and links to each full review.
VGChartz's Mark Nielsen: "If there's one genre you can almost always rely on to put out at least a few solid titles each year it's the RPG genre. Whether it's CRPGs, WRPGs, JRPGs, ARPGs, or MMORPGs, there are a lot of subgenres with rich histories and confusing abbreviations, and each of them brings something worthwhile to the table. This year in particular was a bit of an interesting one since it had no brand new entries in the really long-running, genre-defining series like Final Fantasy or SoulsBorneRing to step in and steal the show. Instead, our shortlist consists mainly of much more unique titles within the genre, but they're certainly no less deserving for that."
If you think ARC Raiders needs an FPS mode like Tarkov or Arena Breakout, then you deserve your fate in Embark Studios' shooter.
VGChartz: "Game of the Year for the strategy genre has traditionally been a fight between the real-time and turn-based sub-genres for the crown. Not so this year, which was more a battle between strategic city/civilisation-building titles and the blooming card battler genre. Representing the former, we have the latest entries in the stalwart Civilization and Anno series, while the latter is fronted by the sequel to Monster Train, with its twist on the Slay the Spire-style deck building campaign, and by Death Howl, which reinterprets similar influences within a Soulslike universe."
