It's time to complement our list of ultimate multiplayer games by creating a singleplayer list as well.
Just like our multiplayer list, we will use data from millions of reviews collected from steam to create a list of great games.
After publishing our ultimate multiplayer list, some people provided me with good feedback and suggested to lower the rating limit of 90% to 85%.
Applying a strict 90% threshold in my previous list, caused some really good games such as Destiny 2 and R6 to be excluded from the list. For this list we keep the required 90% review score. However we did include From the Depths which is rated at 89% but has a recent review rating of a whopping 96%.
Another point of critique after the multiplayer list, was the addition of some older classics. We think this was a valid point to make for the multiplayer list and we will definitely see if we can make another multiplayer list with more recent games.
However for singleplayer games, all-time classics should not be omitted if they didn't age too badly. That's why we did not exclude any game based on age alone.
As in the multiplayer list, we had to make some tough decisions to decide if a game should be singleplayer or multiplayer.
In these cases we asked ourselves the question: "Would this game have a high rating and long game-length without the multiplayer component?" If the answer is yes, we included the game in the list below.
We used the following filters to discover the games:
1 - Steam rating > 90 %We are only interested in high rated games and only included games with a rating above 90%. Some minor deviations were made based on recent reviews.
2 - Only gamesOn steam it is also possible to review videos, demo's, hardware, etc. These are not in scope for our list today.
3 - At least 1000 steam reviewsIf you are interested in lesser known games, check out our previous list covering exactly this. In this list we will look at better known games.
4 - Only singleplayer gamesThis post is part of a two post series: - Ultimate top 15 multiplayer games - Ultimate top 15 singleplayer games
Just as always, you can click on any image to find more detailed playtime-breakdowns.While Civ 5 made the list instead of Civ 6 due to its higher review score (96% vs 75%) and higher playtime (166h vs 97h). We would recommend you to have a look at Civ 6 as the recent review score is 92% and the lower playtimes are only because the game is 6 years younger (2016 vs 2010). Civ 6 might be more future proof and could provide similar game lengths.
Initially this spot was taken by Farming Simulator 17 with its 120 hours and 92% review rating. However Farming Simulator 19 is far more popular these days, has a recent review rating of 95% and is more future proof. This made us give the spot to Farming Simulator 19.
No we are not including this because it's so hot right now. It really belongs on here. It's a great game with a lot of playtime that got bumped out of the list due to its recent attention. Of the 300k Witcher 3 reviews, 58k are from the last three months. That is almost 20% and is a lot for a 4 year old game. These new players, that haven't had as much time to play the game, caused the playtime to decrease just enough to drop out of the top 15.