Thanks to the new consoles still being less than a year old, many of the best Xbox Series X games (and Series S games) are cross-generation ones. But the new ones are beginning to trickle through, and thanks to that full backwards compatibility – and the huge range of next-gen-optimised games that Xbox has assembled – there's plenty of choice. If you want that full backlog taken into consideration, take a look at our best Xbox One games list, which has some lovely picks, from major classics to hidden gems, and our lists of the best Game Pass games and all Xbox backwards compatibility games are probably of interest to you, too.
For this list, like our best PS5 games list, we're focusing purely on actual Xbox Series X/S games. What does that mean? Well, we've defined that here as games that are either: exclusive to the consoles (of which there are only a couple at present), new cross-gen games that arrived on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S simultaneously, or earlier Xbox One games that have been updated with significant Xbox Series X/S patches, which Microsoft handily labels as "optimised for Xbox Series X/S".
Because of the much greater number of "optimised" games that the Xbox Series X/S has compared to the PS5, we've expanded this list slightly to 15 games, but you can expect this list to grow quickly as the library for Microsoft's latest machines is fleshed out.
