5 Games From the 2000s You Forgot Were Awesome

The 2000s were chock-full of great games. Microsoft, Nintendo, and PlayStation were all pumping out consoles, and developers delivered on their end of the bargain with new games all the time. This era was the rise of fan-favorite series like Halo, Grand Theft Auto, and God of War, among many, many others. With all of those great games constantly dropping, it was easy for solid games to get lost in the mix, especially when looking back. Even if they did break through, you rarely hear people talking about the five games listed below.

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Here are five 2000s games that are just as good as you remember.

5) Crackdown

Crackdown definitely had its moment in the sun, thanks in part to the first game including a demo of Halo 3‘s multiplayer mode. That brought people through the door, but many of them stuck around because Crackdown‘s brand of open-world superhero action was a blast. There’s not much story in this one, but who cares when you can jump over blocks in a single bound?

Unfortunately, the two sequels were disappointing. It’s a shame because that first game was special, and deserves to be remembered for how much fun it was to run around Pacific City. The sequels tainted that, and left fans with a bad taste in their collective mouths. It doesn’t necessarily mean they look down on the first game, but it’s not remembered as fondly as it should.

4) The Movies

The Movies didn’t enjoy the sales of Crackdown, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t one of the most ambitious games of the era. You’d expect nothing less from Peter Molyneux and his team at Lionhead Studios. Using in-game assets, players could create an entire film and then upload it to the game’s website for others to watch.

It doesn’t quite realize the full vision, but that’s a Lionhead game for you. The Movies is full of innovation and was probably ahead of its time. In 2024, Super Sly Fox released Blockbuster Inc., a spiritual successor to The Movies, but it disappointed fans with its limited content compared to the original, which launched in 2005. Maybe someday, Molyneux will come back and give fans the sequel The Movies deserves.

3) Freedom Fighters

Developer IO Interactive is best known for its Hitman series these days, but in the 2000s, the team was much more prone to trying out new ideas. That did lead to Kane & Lynch, which is a relatively middling shooter, but it also gave us Freedom Fighters.

This third-person shooter is set in an alternate version of history in which the Soviet Union has taken over New York City. As you work your way through the campaign, you’ll earn charisma points, which you can use to recruit up to 12 squadmates.

This is where Freedom Fighters gets good. Using relatively simple commands, you can send your squadmates into combat alongside you, helping turn the tide against the Soviet forces. For the time, the squadmate AI was exceptional, and the world was full of detail. It seemed primed for a sequel that would build on those ideas, but instead Kane & Lynch happened.

2) City of Heroes

Everybody was trying to milk the MMO crowd in the 2000s. Developers and publishers saw the success games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft were having, and wanted some of that subscription money. Most of them failed to capture an audience, but City of Heroes briefly stood out as a breath of fresh air for the genre.

City of Heroes had an eight-year run in the MMO space, with players loving the character creation and fresh take on the genre. Remember, the most successful MMOs at the time were all of the sword-and-shield variety. Seeing superheroes darting around the world was a marvel.

When NCSoft announced the servers were closing in 2012, fans quickly went to work on getting private servers up and running. Several servers were running in the background in the years since, but in 2024, the fans made a deal with NCSoft to make the fan server official.

1) Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction

Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction and its sequel put players into a huge open world and let them do pretty much whatever they wanted. One of Playground of Destruction‘s big selling points was that you could level every building in the game world. Imagine a Grand Theft Auto-like rampage mission mixed with the world destruction of Red Faction.

You could easily lose hours just running around the world destroying everything you see, but the campaign was equally fun to run through. There are five different factions, and players must work their way through the Deck of 52, which is a collection of targets you need to take out to finish the game.

Most notably, the “face card missions” require you to take down the toughest targets, with the Ace being the hardest to track down. It’s not on the same level as the Nemesis system in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, but it has a similar way of pulling you through the game. Unfortunately, a third game was cancelled when Pandemic Studios shut down in 2009, but the leaked footage looked pretty great.

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