Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4 was among the big shooters that accompanied the Xbox One launch, meant to show what the new generation would do with massive online battles. The single-player campaign follows a squad of American soldiers caught up in a conflict between the United States, Russia and China, and serves mainly as a slick, cinematically staged ride full of scripted disasters. The game's real center of gravity lies elsewhere, though: in the sixty-four-player multiplayer, where infantry, tanks, helicopters and jets meet on huge maps, and where a single well-coordinated squad can turn the whole match around.

The foundation is four classes with different loadouts, a squad system whose members revive each other and share ammunition, and the famous environmental destruction that gradually reduces concrete cover to rubble. DICE added so-called Levolution on top, big scripted twists where a skyscraper collapses or a dam bursts and the map transforms from the ground up. A Commander mode let one player watch the battlefield from above, mark targets and call in support, turning multiplayer into a game even for those who didn't want to pull the trigger. The Xbox One version ran at a lower resolution than full HD, but in exchange kept a brisk pace and doubled the number of players per server compared to the Xbox 360 generation.

The atmosphere rests above all on sound: the booming echo of gunfire between buildings, the whistle of shrapnel and the roar of engines were among the best things shooters of the time had to offer. Reception was initially mixed, as the game suffered from crashes, lost progress and server problems after launch, leading to a long string of fixes and delays to the studio's other projects. Once the technical state settled down, Battlefield 4 earned a reputation as one of the best-tuned online shooters of its time, and the community stuck with it for years. Even today it plays as a textbook example of large-scale team chaos with rules, where teamwork wins out over pure aim.