The PlayStation 4 sits comfortably atop the throne as one of the last generation’s best consoles. It’s the bestselling platform of the lot, with its early success being pinned mostly to its solid exclusive titles and aggressively timed DLC deals in the face of the competition. As of 2022, the PS4 has shipped more than 117 million units worldwide.
Things have evened out in recent years when it comes to exclusives, but throughout the generation, Sony’s wedge of a machine has built up a healthy catalog of games across every conceivable genre. Its successor, the PlayStation 5, is backward-compatible with nearly every PS4 game, meaning you’ll likely find yourself coming back to games from the previous generation on your new machine. There is a cluster of PS5 games that won’t ever be coming to PS4 though.
Either way, here is our definitive list of the best PS4 games.
Kicking off our list is the cat game everyone is talking about. That’s right, in Stray, you play as a feline tasked with escaping a desolate, cyberpunk city, while freeing a group of trapped robots in the process. While this game is a cat lover’s dream, it’s great for all players, partially because it’s so approachable. The main focus in Stray isn’t to stump you, but rather, to take you on a memorable journey, with light action, platforming, and puzzles sprinkled throughout. Its art is gorgeous, the music is fantastic, and its story will probably make you cry.
The Dark Souls formula got a healthy dose of speed and horror when Bloodborne released in 2015, and FromSoftware has managed to make things even more extreme in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Set in Sengoku-era Japan rather than a wholly original world, the game is nonetheless filled with magic and monsters ready to kill you at a moment’s notice. No enemy is too weak to deserve your attention, and many are formidable in one-on-one fights. The real meat of Buy at Amazon , however, are the boss fights. They play out like choreographed dances, requiring you to learn a boss’s every move before you’re ready to go in for the kill. With the Posture system becoming more important in most fights than a standard health bar, you need to stay aggressive, but getting greedy will result in a swift death.
Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career back in 2010 while still in high school, and subsequently graduated summa cum laude from Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism in 2016.
In addition to video games, Gabe has also covered television, film, and music, and he has done everything from news to reviews and video work. You can follow him on Twitter @GamingAngelGabe.
Joseph Yaden is a freelance journalist who covers Nintendo, shooters, and horror games. He mostly covers game guides for Digital Trends, but can also be found writing for Inverse. When he's not writing about video games he can usually be found petting his cats and listening to some Progressive Metal. He thinks Meshuggah is tight. Twitter: @JosephYaden
For years, Call of Duty’s campaign mode has used big, scripted set pieces to tell the overarching story amid all the adrenaline-pumping action. The 2023 Modern Warfare 3 tried to shake up the established formula by introducing a handful of short open combat missions, and I genuinely liked the idea, but the game's overall negative reception seeped into how those missions were received.
I feared the next iteration might abandon the idea because of the backlash, but I am glad it didn't. MW4’s “Stranded” mission uses the same approach, but instead of fragmenting it across the campaign, it puts it all in a single large-scale open-world mission.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.