Which Ubi You Be? The 10 Best Ubisoft Games Of All Time

Jade and her piggish sidekick Uncle Pey'j were meant to help uncover the conspiracy set out by a strange alien race through a trilogy of games. But, perhaps the first victim of the "Call of Duty effect," Beyond Good & Evil debuted in the middle of a sandwich of AAA titles in the 2003 holiday rush, including the debut of Activision's FPS series. Thus, though it was one of the most critically-acclaimed games of the year, BGE sold like hotcakes infested with herpes. Ubisoft had no choice but to kill off the budding franchise, until a growing chorus of fans forced the developer's hand in going through with a sequel. We've seen glimpses of something in the works, but it's three years in the making by now, and we're getting a little antsy. And HD remasters don't count!

Sega had first dibs on publishing this to Japanese audiences, but Ubi handled the release to North Americans (you, probably) in late 2000. Grandia II, Spanish for "great day," was the sophomore effort of developer Game Arts within the series, focusing on the misadventures of mercenary Ryudo. The Japanese role-playing game was heralded for its Final Fantasy-like approach to the genre, with its own tweaks—such as being able to move around on the battlefield between turns.

Sadly, the "submarine simulation" video game genre is quite the lonely category to be in if you're a video game. Yet, Ubisoft went there. (Hell, they took the plunge with the Imagine series too, so why not?) And Silent Hunter III is actually a surprisingly decent title, despite its kinda-sorta lame premise as an open-world playground for submarines. Following the life and times of sailors in the theater of World War II, the game employs fairly decent U-Boat warfare as well as subtle nods to historical (sinking of the Bismarck) and fake (Das Boot) encounters on the high seas. Man the torpedoes!

Crytek came into video game development with guns blazing, almost literally, with their 2004 first-person shooter published by Ubisoft. The game introduced us to ex-Special Forces badass Jack Carver as he went on a killing spree on his way toward revenge through the lush jungles of the South Pacific. The bland FPS experience was masked by the crazy good graphics the developers were able to cram into the thing. This motif would continue among the Crytek crew when they unleashed the PC-resource hogging Crysis on the world several years later. RIP, shitty graphics cards.

You may have thought Activision was the first to deploy two different development teams for to pump out annual iterations of its flagship franchise, but Ubi was on that 12-month installment plan years earlier, with their Splinter Cell series being shared on a staggered schedule by their Shanghai and Montreal teams. While Ubi Montreal's effort (Chaos Theory) wasn't too shabby, we're giving props to the much less heralded Chinese subsidiary. Pandora Tomorrow features the return of protagonist Sam Fisher in all of his covert glory, but also the first-ever implementation of multiplayer in the series.

Lovers of flight combat were happily surprised by this title that crash landed onto PCs in 2001. So much so that the game has been steadily supported, and is still being patched to this day. And it's no wonder why: IL-2 Sturmovik accurately encapsulates the thrilling dogfighting of the Eastern Front in World War II, allowing you to take full control of more than 30 different types of Allied and Axis aircraft. If that doesn't get your blitzkrieg boiling, the game also supports up to 100-player online multiplayer matches. That's right: three digits.

If this game felt like a blast from the past, it was! A reboot of the Brøderbund (remember them?) 1998 classic Prince of Persia, this title finally gave the Prince his due as a platforming genius, being able to leap tall walls with a single bound and swing across treacherous chasms with ease. That is, unless he fell and died—at which point he'd simply use some of his magic pile of sand and rewind time to much greener (and alive) pastures. Ubisoft, being the brand marketing geniuses that they are, sold the film rights to Disney, which led to the eponymous 2010 film starring Jake Gyllenhaal's chest hair.

While the Assassin's Creed series debuted with a stellar opening number in 2007, many thought it featured repetitive gameplay that didn't do the fantastic storyline any justice. All it took was a change of scenery—to Renaissance-era Italy—to supercharge our enthusiasm about Desmond Miles' struggle against the Templars throughout history. This second game in the series also introduced playboy Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a much more versatile character that allowed Ubi to squeeze out yet another sequel in Brotherhood. Not that we're complaining or anything.

As games became more and more sophisticated with high-definition graphics and balls-to-the-wall action sequences, franchises like Metal Gear Solid helped create a wholly new genre for more discerning, strategic gamers: the stealth action game. Splinter Cell was Ubi's attempt at capturing that part of the market, and they did it with aplomb thanks to a protagonist named Sam Fisher. A secret agent who finds himself back on duty, Fisher goes hot on the trail of a political conspiracy in the Middle East, only to become embroiled in a race against time to diffuse a nuclear bomb. We hate when that happens!

Ubi has created lots of various game characters who all serve the brand well, but none carry the flag better than Rayman. And Rayman 2: The Great Escape was the best game featuring the publisher's white-gloved protagonist. The 3D platformer took what made games like Super Mario 64 successful—from exploring plentiful and various environment to taking on enemies of all sizes—and made them its own with a new soundtrack and voice cast to boot. Put all of those factors together and it's no wonder why it's considered by many (including us) to be the best title ever published by the Ubisoft gang.