Below you will find a list of the top 5 Xbox 360 games that can be picked up easily for less than $15.

Assassin’s Creed

Assassin’s creed is an amazing bargain for under $15! Set in 2012 Desmond miles, a simple bartender, is kidnapped by a company to be used as a test subject. Desmond then becomes dedicated to death and has to assassinate various targets that he is given, in order to rise through the ranks of the Brotherhood. Aside from the main plot, the player is given the opportunity to embark on ’side’ adventures to save people and look at the current city from great heights, adding an extra bit of flexibility to the game.

Medal of Honor: Airborne

Medal of Honor Airborne is a FPS set in WWII where the player takes the role of Private First Class and later being promoted to Corporal. As you play, you get dropped into various operations worldwide including Italy, France, Germany and The Netherlands. Multiplayer mode is varied, and allows you play locally or online, individually or as a team, on many maps set all over the world, which are adaptations of maps from single player mode.

Project Gotham Racing 4

The 4^th release in the Project Gotham Racing series, Project Gotham Racing 4 takes you all over the world in various track courses New York to Shanghai, in all different weathers! The main emphasis on this particular version of the game has been realism, so expect to see lots of varying weather conditions!

Need for Speed: ProStreet

Need for Speed is, quite unbelievably, the 11^th instalment of Need for Speed, and things just keep getting better! The player takes the place of Ryan Cooper who is a street racer who enters a challenge day to win a Nissan 240SX, which becomes the start of his massive adventure. The difference between ProStreet and the previous versions of the games, is that its set in closed circuits, rather than on the street, perhaps so it doesn’t promote the illegal activity, but it’s still just as fun to play!

Saints Row

Saints Row is perhaps a popular take on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and trying to cut into their market share, is a good game, and for a bargain price. Being almost identical to GTA, players can walk around in an open world playing in third-person shooter style and hijack, and blow up, anything they feel necessary to do. The main difference to GTA, and this may make people feel like its better, is that if you ever fail a mission you can just retry without having to drive around and find it again, and you won’t lose all your weapons. The game also features a very nice online multiplayer mode across Xbox Live.

Fable 2 is the very latest addition to the Fable series. Unlike many shooter games of the current era, Fable is based in a time where guns are still very much a basic tool, and haven’t evolved into huge war machines. Fable 2 is based 500 years after the original Fable setting, but the technology still hasn’t advanced much but castles have appeared all over the world.

Gameplay

In the game, money can be obtained through doing quests and also by taking on jobs including Blacksmith, Woodcutter and Bartender – anything that would be typical of that era. Each job allows you to level up thus being able to earn more money as the game progresses. Economics also comes into the equation as, when stores have surplus or deficit stocks, you can sell your products for more or less respectively. ‘Relaxing’ is also an important concept in the game, given as exploration, in which the player explores to find out hidden areas and pick up new quests. There is even a feature called the ‘breadcrumb trail’ which means that, even if you are in the middle of a quest, you can go off and explore and the follow the breadcrumbs back to where you were!

The game also features a co-operative mode, via Xbox live, where other players can drop in and out at any stage.

The Review

Lucky for those of you trying Fable II without playing Fable, you’ll be pleased to hear that you don’t need to know a single thing about Fable to enjoy the game! With it being set 500 years later, there’s not a lot of continuity. And, for female gamers, there’s the opportunity to choose between a male and a female character, rather than being limited to the single choice as in the previous game.

Perhaps the best bit about the game is the huge level of exploration that can be done; perfect for those who just want to take a look around and just know what’s out there! You also form a strong emotional bond with your dog that accompanies you throughout your travels, so another plus for those of you out there who like Sims 2 Pets but need a little more excitement in a game!

Best Bits

• Exploration is massive; you can literally wander around for hours and still see things you haven’t seen before!
• Lots of funny scenarios
• Varied questing
• Good graphics

Halo 3 is the third instalment in the Halo franchise. Halo is perhaps one of the most popular and best selling games in the world for the Xbox 360, with Halo 3 taking $300m in its first week alone, and there are plenty of good reasons why!

Gameplay

Halo 3, like the other Halo games, is a first-person shooter which has the player fighting off a wide variety of alien enemies in order to on foot, and in vehicles. Halo 3 is a step up from Halo 2, in the sense that it is possible to dual-wield weapons and pick up usable items known as equipment. Set in the 26^th Century, the game is based on an interstellar war between humans (led by the United States) and a collection of alien forces known as the Covenant.

Single player follows a campaign style gameplay through 9 levels, thus completing the whole storyline set up by previous versions of the game.

Multiplayer mode is perhaps one of the best parts of Halo 3 as, after completing the game, it adds a whole new bit of fun to it and allows for the formation of clans, and playing with (or against) your friends. The campaign from single player can also be played in co-operative mode with 2 players on one Xbox, or 3 players via Xbox Live.

The Review

Compared to Halo 2, the developers seem to have got some bits straightened out in it; for example the narrative seems a lot more detailed and easy to see what’s happening and the ending isn’t such of a cliff hanger compared to previous versions! Halo 3 loses the secondary stories of Arbiter and the Elites, and focuses solely on Master Chief, for a much more intense and enjoyable game than previous releases.

Many gamers were worried that Halo 3 just wouldn’t live up to its immense reputation, but these anxieties were put to rest when a multitude of game review websites and magazines gave consistently high scores for the new game, and decided that the game included the ‘winning strategies’ that the other Halo games had included, just modernised it to keep up with growing competition from other developers.

Best Bits

• Truly immense storyline
• Online play is excellent fun; adds a new dimension to the game
• The map editor allows you to make maps do the most psychedelic of things!

Call of Duty 1 is the original Call of Duty game created, based on Quake III: Team arena. Released in 2004, Call of Duty 1 was a new era of FPS gaming. The game was based on 9 real-life historical battles; The battles of Normandy, the Bulge, Stalingrad, Warsaw and Berlin, and the special operations on Eder Dam, Bavarian Alps, Dulag III and Siegfried Lane.

What made Call of Duty 1 different to the multitude of FPS WWII games on the market at that time was that the developers seemed to get it ‘just right’; there is a great emphasis on making the game as user friendly as possible, by not having a large amount of keys to be pressed to carry out an action, or struggling to open doors, for example. It also pulled together the best parts from each WWII FPS on the market at that time, and put them together to make one ’super-game’.

The amount of detail in terms of how injuries were represented in the game were greatly stepped up from other attempts – the characters in the game will reflect the damage done. For example, if the character gets shot in the head he won’t survive, but if he gets shot in the shoulder he can be seen actively aware of this by clutching it, or by limping.

Gameplay

Gameplay for Call of Duty 1 seems to be centred on single player enjoyment. The campaign game format starts with the player being Private Joey Martin in Camp Toccoa, swiftly moving on to Ste. Mere Eglise before finishing that section of the campaign in Sainte-Marie-du-Mont.

With the American section of the campaign over, you take the place of a British non-commissioned officer, Jack Evans, capturing Pegasus Bridge. From then on you become a Russian conscript soldier, Alexei Ivanovich Voronin where you take part in the Battle of Stalingrad. Finally, the players take on a series of ‘final missions’, one for each country featured above, in order to finish the game.

There is a multiplayer mode available to the player, but it’s not as advanced as the future versions of Call of Duty, due to their being more capabilities available to the developers.

Some Awards

• All game – 4.5/5
• Edge – 7/10 – Seems to be the anomaly!
• GamePro – 5/5
• Gamespot – 9/10
• IGN 9.3/10

Best Bits

• Stunning graphics for a game of this era
• Fast paced gameplay