Our Most Wanted Games of 2025 – #10 to #6

Most Wanted 2025 – Atomfall & AC Shadows

It’s top ten time… kind of. We’ve got one final group of five, from ten down to six in our list, before we break things out and tackle the final bunch individually. But what games are going to be in this little group? Well, there’s a AAA selection here (if only through alliteration), and potentially a “quadruple-A” game that actually means it. But first, in at number 10…

10 – Citizen Sleeper 2 Starward Vector

PS5, XSX|S, NSW, PC – 31st January 2025

Sequel to one of the most acclaimed indie games of 2022, Citizen Sleeper 2 looks to take the same approach to its tabletop RPG narrative stylings, giving you a set of tools with which to navigate its rich narrative. There’s an overhauled dice system, new skills and, most significantly, a ship and a crew that you can customise for each Cycle as you take on jobs within the star system.

Still set in the Helion system, Citizen Sleeper 2 lets you hop into your ship, recruit a crew of characters to go with you and head out to explore the Belt, do jobs and get paid. You’re trying to escape your past, in which you fell under the control of a local criminal gang, rewriting your body’s code to do so, but introducing malfunctions to your system and having to run with a price on your head and no memories.

9 – Avowed

XSX|S, PC – 18th February 2025

Will you save the world or doom it? That’s the choice that runs through Avowed, as you gain more and more power on your journey as an envoy of the Aedyr Empire, tasked with investigating a spiritual plague that threatens the whole world.

Avowed takes us back to the Living Lands, a mysterious islands in the fantasy world of Eora, which it shares with Obsidian’s previous Pillars of Eternity games. However, where those games were both top-down CRPGs and part of the genre’s revival over the past decade, Avowed is shifting back to one of Obsidian’s areas of expertise: first person action RPG adventuring. Avowed is not a fully open world game, but has several large open areas that you can explore and, in that regard, it might be comparable to one of Obsidian’s other acclaimed hits, The Outer Worlds.

Originally set for release at the end of 2024, Xbox decided to hold off on Avowed’s launch in a busy release window to try and find a little bit of breathing room in early 2025. That…. hasn’t necessarily worked out, but with more time to polish and the promise of a first party Xbox game, this is certainly one to watch.

8 – Atomfall

PS5, XSX|S, PS4, XBO, PC – 27th March 2025

Oh sure, Chornobyl and Three Mile might the most infamous nuclear plant accidents in history, but we can do good old fashioned meltdown with the best of them in old Blighty. OK, so the Windscale Fire wasn’t a meltdown, but as it burned for several days, sprinkled nuclear material across the UK and to the continent, and was part of a government cover up, it’s pretty up there.

But what were they covering up, really? Atomfall spins us off into an alternate version of events where the surrounding area was rapidly locked down, the locals kept in line and monitored by the military group Protocol, and advanced retro-futuristic technology the order of the day. Can you unpick the mystery?

It might look like a very English Fallout, but this is a rather different style of game, where scarcity of resources plays a big factor in pushing you to melee – you get to fight roving bands of bandits dressed like Morris dancers – and investigating the story will be a bigger part of the experience.

7 – Assassin’s Creed Shadows

PS5, XSX|S, PC – 20th March 2025

Fans have been demanding an Assassin’s Creed set in Japan pretty much since 2007, and they’re finally going to get what they want with Assassin’s Creed Shadows – even if it’s been embroiled in a disappointingly inevitable amount of internet discourse, thanks in no small part to featuring a black immigrant samurai as one of the two playable characters. That’s something that Ubisoft has at times struggled to communicate well with fans and gamers around the world.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows takes us back to 16th century Japan during the Azuchi-Momoyama era, featuring a female ninja and a male samurai for its lead characters. That man is a historical character based off Yasuke, a man of African origin who was one of the rare immigrants to Japan and who served Oda Nobunaga. The female ninja is named Naoe from Iga Province, who is inducted into the local Assassin’s order to battle all those persky Templars. Their stories will be intertwined, letting you master complimentary playstyles as both characters have contrasting abilities – Naoe for stealth, Yasuke for direct combat. This will be a fresh take on the twin protagonists that we’ve seen on occasion through the Assassin’s Creed series.

6 – GTA 6

PS5, XSX|S, PC – Late 2025

It might almost seem sacrilegious for GTA 6 not to be topping our most wanted chart, and yet here we are. We’ve no doubt that, for the global gaming population, GTA 6 is set to be another defining cultural event, much like GTA 5 was back in 2013, but it’s not quite got our juices flowing the same way as the games that have made it into the top 5. Still, we’re as keen as anyone to see that second trailer…

Grand Theft Auto VI takes us all back to Vice City for another crime story, featuring Lucia as the first female protagonist in the series, getting out of prison at the start of the game after a bit of “bad luck”. Revisiting Vice City, this is a modern day setting in the fictionalised state of Leonida, deeply influenced by the breadth of American culture in the South East of the country and Florida in particular.

Take Two has targeted the back end of 2025 for release, though given the scale and ambition of these games, we wouldn’t be surprised to see this slip to early 2026, sneaking into the same financial year.

We’ve rattled through out Most Wanted 2025 lists so far, but it’s time for a little break, I think. We’ll see you on Monday for #5 and round this out through next week.

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