It’s easy to find Xbox 360 games that are full of pure high-octane action.
The Xbox 360 had an amazing library of games with intense fighting and nonstop action in the form of shooters and hack-and-slash games over the course of its nearly 20-year life. Even though the Xbox 360 store is closing in 2024, you still have a lot of time to get these action games and other great finds.
Many of these games have action scenes that never end, but some may have better storylines and others may focus more on great gunplay. There are a lot of books from different types of themes, like sci-fi, fantasy, crime plays, and even history books.
Stranglehold
If you mix all of Max Payne’s gaming features with a John Woo plot, you get a game like Stranglehold. It’s the real follow-up to John Woo’s 1992 movie Hard Boiled, with Chow Yun-Fat playing Inspector Tequila Yuen again and Woo co-directing. He is a director who has mastered the style with movies like “A Better Tomorrow,” “The Killer,” and “Face/Off.” The game’s features are based on this style.
Throughout the game, Stranglehold features intense and bloody fast-paced third-person shootouts. These include standoffs, where you have to dodge bullets and shoot targets up close, and bullet time combat, where you have to dive and shoot with two guns at the same time. You can even get something good out of the world.
Middle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor
Peter Jackson’s series had some of the best fights between the epic heroes and Sauron’s Orcs. The Lord of the Rings is about Frodo’s journey with the Ring of Power. Shadow of Mordor really takes the idea of killing orcs and runs with it. The world is full of them, and you’ll be fighting them all over the place, so their heads and bodies will quickly pile up.
Hack-and-slash swordplay with counters in the style of Mad Max and Batman: Arkham Asylum is available, and killings are more bloody than in the movies. It takes place before The Lord of the Rings and stars a hunter named Talion who is connected to the Wraith Celebrimbor. Talion can use different Wraith powers to help him fight and ride horses. And he uses a Nemesis ranking system to get rid of Orc leaders.
Sleeping Dogs
With a lot of ideas from Grand Theft Auto and martial arts action, the video game Sleeping Dogs was made. The main focus of the game is its beat ’em up style fighting, which is based on counters and lets you grab and drag your enemies into things in the world to defeat them. It also has cool effects at the end.
The game stars Lucy Liu, James Hong, Will Yun Lee, and Emma Stone, among others. You play as a police officer named Wei Shen who has been sent from San Francisco to Hong Kong to work secretly to stop Triads. Like GTA, you can move around the open-world map in a variety of vehicles. There is also a cell phone feature and a wanted-level system.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Spider-Man from Marvel is on the PlayStation 4 and 5, but the Xbox 360 has its own Marvel gem. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a very violent game with action that is more like the 2017 movie Logan than the 2009 movie it is based on. The most aggressive Logan ever is shown in this game, as he charges at enemy forces and rips them apart with his claws.
His character is a real beast—a mix of Predator and Kratos. Who can throw enemies around and go into rage mode to hit them harder. You also fight bosses that look like huge golems, and as you progress, you can get better at different skills. The story doesn’t have much to do with the movie. I; instead, the creator made new plots to make it a different experience.
Rise Of The Tomb Raider
Rise of the Tomb Raider, which came out in 2015, was the last Tomb Raider game to be launched on old-gen. This movie is a follow-up to the reboot in 2013. It follows Laura on a movie trip to Syria and Siberia. Where she searches for the legendary Slavic area of Kitezh with her field partner Jonah.
As always, climbing and scaling are very exciting, and the fighting is mostly the same. You can use Laura’s shooting skills and make your own arrows to sneak up on Trinity’s forces or go at them full-on. Like most stories in the series, this one has magical elements. The Divine Source, an object that can give people eternal life, has ties to the Byzantine era.
Max Payne 3
Max Payne is a dark neo-noir detective show with crazy gunplay thanks to the bullet time Shootdodge system. The first two action games were made by Remedy, but Rockstar Games. Which made Grand Theft Auto, took on the third and final game. It was an updated and new take on the series that gave it a new character model and a new setting in Brazil. It also got some Rockstar-style graphics while keeping the original story.
Max is no longer living in New York City or working as a detective. He is now using his skills as a private security officer for a wealthy family with political ties in São Paulo. Once some of its members are taken hostage as part of a bigger plot. Max Payne will keep going until he gets revenge.
Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag
If you like Assassin’s Creed games and the kind of action you see in Black Sails or Pirates of the Caribbean, Black Flag has the best fighting and open world of any old-gen Backrooms Game. Instead of the later RPGs, this one makes it easy to fight groups of enemies by timing your parries just right to chain kills or by throwing smoke bombs and using your secret blade in the smoke.
As Edward Kenway, the pirate, you are in charge of the Jackdaw and can sail and board Galleons to steal their goods after you’ve used guns to weaken them. With all of your tools, including berserker darts, guns, swords, and rope dart. You can fight enemies in a lot of different ways. You’ll also be able to use a weapon from your ship to hunt sharks and whales.
Red Dead Redemption
Red Dead Redemption is an even more realistic action game from Rockstar for the Xbox 360. It takes place in the Western US in the early 1900s, before World War I, and you play as John Marston. A former gang member turned bounty hunter who goes after his old friends. One of the most beautiful things you can do on the 360 is just ride a horse through the beautiful scenery.
There are a lot of shootouts in the tasks; they happen almost nonstop and ofte. While you’re on horses for extra excitement. There’s also the Dead Eye system, which slows time down and lets you mark as many targets as you want before quickly firing on each one. And the arsenal has some of the best guns of the time.
Gears Of War Series
The Xbox 360 only has the first three Gears of War games and the 2013 spin-off Gears of War: Judgement. You can’t play Gears of War 4 or 5. The story is set in the world of Sera, where COG troops fight an underground alien race called the Locust Horde with chainsaw bayonet weapons. It’s one of the best third-person shooters you can play.
Taking cover and firing over the shoulder is a big part of battle in these game. Which have some cool monster designs and well-known action-hero characters like Marcus Fenix, Dominic Santiago, and Damon Baird.
BioShock Infinite
You have twice as many guns in BioShock Infinite, which makes it the perfect mix of great action and great story. And that doesn’t mean dual-wielding. Instead, your other hand gets special powers from vigors that let you control towers and make them fire at enemies or send a wave of crows to peck at enemies and confuse you while you shoot, among other things.
Columbia’s sky world is full of fast-paced action. You can often find it while riding the sky rail and shooting enemies or getting on flying cars in the sky. It has more mind-bending twists and turns than the games that came before it. And it adds a partner system with Elizabeth, who can open tears to other worlds.
