The most popular action RPG games

The Lost Vale is the great “what if” of the Ultima series. Developed as an expansion to Pagan but never officially released, it became the stuff of legend. Players were...

Don’t let the tongue-twister title fool you—Divine Divinity is a classic in the sprawling world of RPGs. Think of it as Diablo’s eccentric cousin who insists on t...

If System Shock was a warning, System Shock 2 is the full-blown nightmare that follows. This time, the horror seeps into every corner of the experience, blending RPG mechanics with...

System Shock drops you into a space station run by an AI that has clearly read too many villain manuals and decided to try them all at once. SHODAN, the game’s iconic antagon...

Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption is an action role-playing game released in 2000 by Nihilistic Software and published by Activision. It is based on the "Vampire: The Masquerade...

Enclave is a dark fantasy action game that feels slightly out of time, in both good and bad ways. Its world is grim, its tone serious, and its combat intentionally weighty. You&rsq...

Arx Fatalis is basically what happens when someone takes “dungeons and dragons” way too literally. You start trapped in a gloomy underground world because—oops&md...

Before Diablo made clicking on dungeons cool, DarkSpyre was already throwing players into labyrinths filled with monsters and puzzles. Released in 1990, it combines hack-and-slash ...

Shadowcaster is a first-person action role-playing game developed by Raven Software and published by Origin Systems. It was released in 1993 for MS-DOS computers.In Shadowcaster, p...

Dragons of Flame (1989) was SSI’s continuation of the Dragonlance saga, following up on Heroes of the Lance. Like its predecessor, it was a side-scrolling action RPG that tes...

Part action-RPG, part body-horror fairy tale, Entomorph: Plague of the Darkfall (1995) is the game where you slowly transform into an insect and, somehow, that’s not even the...

Building on its predecessor, Labyrinth of Worlds expands the formula by throwing you across multiple dimensions. Each world has its own flavor—icy wastelands, alien landscape...

Welcome to the Ys series, where you swing swords by running headfirst into enemies. The Vanished Omens introduces Adol Christin, red-haired hero extraordinaire, as he embarks on a ...

Post-apocalyptic survival meets real estate management in Burntime, where the world is ruined, but you still need to hire employees and secure water rights. It’s like Mad Max...

Beyond Divinity is an action RPG developed by Larian Studios and released in 2004 as the direct sequel to Divine Divinity. It builds on its predecessor’s isometric, real-time...

Long before indie developers made “roguelike” a buzzword, someone decided to fuse Doom with permadeath and ASCII graphics. The result: Doom: The Roguelike (2005). On pa...

Ultimuh MCMLXVII: Part 2 of the 39th Trilogy wins points immediately for its audacious title alone. This action-adventure leans heavily into sci-fi weirdness, combining philosophic...