I'm not gonna commit to any overall "greatest games of all time" because there are so many individual aspects to almost every game that it's very hard to really rate them as the whole package. But there are a few games that I think of as "near perfect action games" that I find mechanically so compelling that I keep coming back to playing them or at least replaying parts of them pretty much regardless from their plot or presentation.
Resident Evil 4 is one of them. Both versions. It, along with the two Max Payne games, pretty much defined what Third Person Shooters are supposed to play like. Even though they obviously play quite differently. But between the core gameplay, the individual encounters and level design and it's pacing it's just a game where you hardly ever spend much time doing things that aren't fun. And most of them are fun, no matter how often you play them, even more when you vary up your arsenal a bit.
Bayonetta is another game that I basically keep installed because I regularly feel like playing a level or two. It's just a good combat system. I don't know. Whenever I haven't played it for a while, I come back to it and I'm surprised just how good it feels to control. And I think most of the levels and bossfights are individually fun to play. I mean, I don't care for the gimmicky bike and shoot em up sections (They aren't even bad, they just outstay their welcome) or the QTE's or the platforming, but the regular gameplay just always feels satisfying.
FEAR is another one. It's widely considered one of the best first person shooters which is interesting, because a lot of its individual aspects aren't even that good. The gunplay isn't all that tactile and there are no iron sights, there's way to much visual noise when you use bullet time, but the AI, the encounter design and the gore do all the heavy lifting. There was an indie shooter released last year called Trepang2 which did its best to replicate FEAR's combat (with some elements from Crysis) but it just didn't get there because it didn't grasp what made the leveldesign in FEAR 1 work. And this is a tangent, but it's my issue with a lot of recent shooters, especially the new Doom games. The overreliance on clearly defined combat arenas. And the new Doom games are built around it but it doesn't gel at all with FEAR's combat. Most of the sets the encounters in FEAR took place in were pretty confined and the battles at fairly short range. Trepang2 went for wider arenas and... well, it didn't really work for that kind of gameplay. That's all I'm saying.
Last of Us 2 is the last one that come to mind. Which might just be my favourite Third Person Shooter and might be the only one that I enjoy more than RE4. If course it also builds on that game in a lot of respects, I mean fairly late in the game you fight what's basically a Resident Evil boss. But the combat in it just feels so good. It has all those super weighty animations and super detailled gore along with fairly open battlefields and extremely reactive enemies. It's the encounter with human enemies more than the one with zombies, but it's amazing how you can set traps, wound them in different ways with different weapons, they'll react dynamically searching for the player or keeping close together when they're being stealthy, there's a lot of super fluid transitions between crawling, crouching, melee and gunplay. And again, gore and dynamic enemy injuries are just some of the best I've seen. The combat encounters are super tense and super brutal, especially on higher difficulties when you have to play it as more of a stealth game. It's definitely a game where you replay individual segments, rather than the whole game, considering it has a lot of slow, uneventful narrative stuff between sone of them but every single action sequence goes incredibly hard, and there are a lot of them.
