10 Hardest Xbox 360 Games Of All Time

Summary

• Xbox 360 had uniquely challenging games that were not found on retail shelves, making the digital marketplace the ultimate spot for a good challenge.
• Games like Dark Souls, Ninja Gaiden 2, and Super Meat Boy delivered brutal difficulty levels that pushed players to their limits.
• Titles like Cloudberry Kingdom and Flock! are not only some of the hardest Xbox 360 games but among the most challenging ever created.

The Xbox 360 feels like it exists in a bizarre world when it comes to challenging games. This console generation was when titles generally started to get much easier, and as such, most of the hardest games were not on retail shelves.

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Instead, this is when Xbox Live Arcade and indie games came into the fray with that retro-style toughness. It's astounding how difficult these digital games are compared to full-price retail ones. Not to say there aren't any hard retail games, but the digital marketplace definitely was the spot to look for if you wanted a good challenge.

These titles are the hardest games overall, but they are not the hardest to get all the achievements in.

10 Dark Souls

Prepare To Die

Without question, the most obvious challenging game on the 360 would be the first Dark Souls. It was the first Souls game to come to the platform and a rude awakening for many at the time. In a world where most games were pretty easy, Dark Souls felt like a mugging with its level design, traps, dastardly enemies, and challenging bosses.

However, as Dark Souls is an RPG, you can grind, and since the combat is far slower paced, the difficulty's a lot easier than something that goes at a million miles per hour. Still, Dark Souls is the hard game that brought many to the dance, and as such, it deserves to be in the top echelon of the system.

9 Ninja Gaiden 2

Ahead Lie Challenges Beyond Imagination

If you wanted to know what a brutal game would be that goes at a million miles per hour, Ninja Gaiden 2 would be it. There's a reason you don't have a lock-on system in this game: it's so fast-paced it would be useless. Master Ninja difficulty has to be one of the hardest challenges on the console.

The enemies are upgraded to their hardest variants early on, you can die pretty quickly, and the prices at Muramasa's Shop are ludicrous. Doing a full run without skipping fights and without farming money is wildly tough, and even if you do that, the difficulty might still be too much for you. At least you get a sweet costume and Gamer Picture afterward, which is a great reward.

8 Super Meat Boy

Old-School Toughness

One of the more notable difficult XBLA titles is Super Meat Boy. People often say the controls in this game are super tight, which they are once you get used to it. The controls are definitely a big part of why Super Meat Boy's so tough; it controls like no other platformer. Like the main character himself, the movement is super slippery, and you'll die a lot because of it at first.

Or maybe never because, like retro horror game tank controls, some might not get it down at all. Beating the game itself is really challenging, but attaining 100 percent completion and doing every level will be unearthly difficult for most players. Super Meat Boy deserves its reputation as one of the hardest platformers of the modern era.

7 Flock!

Frustration On A Different Level

A game you've probably never heard of before is Flock! It's another XBLA title in which you control a small UFO and must herd sheep all the way to the mothership to beat the level. It sounds simple, but guiding the sheep can be ridiculously frustrating.

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You'll try to be careful, but the sheep can end up falling into the water anyway because it's so hard to navigate them. This is one title you might end up swearing up a storm because it's that infuriating.

6 Call Of Duty: Classic

The Hardest COD Campaign

It's great to see that nearly all the 360 Call of Duty games are backward compatible on newer systems, but two are missing in action. One is the 360 port of Black Ops 3, while the other is Call of Duty: Classic. To be frank, this is sort of a blessing because the console ports of COD1 have the hardest Veteran campaign in the series.

You have no regenerating health, which means every hit of damage matters greatly here. On PC, however, you had a handy quick save feature that Infinity Ward and Activision, in its infinite wisdom, removed in the console ports. The game was literally designed with quick saving in mind, but no, checkpoints are the only option here.

5 Trials Evolution

For The Experts

Between Trials HD and Evolution, HD was the more popular title that saw more play, but Evolution remains harder. This is largely due to the DLC extreme tracks, which are the hardest yet in the series. Magic Marker has that wild jump into a vertical climb that roadblocked certain players for quite some time.

Then there's the two big levels, The Forge and The Great Fire. Some of the checkpoints in these levels are so tough to nail down consistently that it took ages for people to zero fault these tracks when they came out. In terms of the base game, both titles are roughly equal in difficulty, but with the DLC included, Evolution pushes you just a bit harder past your limits.

4 The Impossible Game

Brutal, But More Important Than You May Think

Not only were there Xbox Live Arcade games to buy but also Xbox Live Indie games. The storefront for indie games has been shut down for a long time, so many of the titles are forgotten, but one that shouldn't is The Impossible Game. It's a simple affair with only one button to jump, but regardless, you'll die thousands of times.

The gameplay is part execution and part memorization, as the levels are quite long, but you have no checkpoints. You have checkpoints in practice mode, but it's still hard, and the music's different, almost in a mocking fashion. The legacy of this game's difficulty holds true because The Impossible Game would be a primary inspiration for Geometry Dash, a platformer with a huge community focused on beating the hardest levels.

3 Ikaruga

An Especially Hard 360 Port

Bullet hell games have to be some of the hardest titles ever made, and while Ikaruga isn't as challenging as the Touhou Seirensen series, it's still one of the toughest on 360. An amazing shoot-'em-up with a neat system to swap between black and blue bullets, you'll get crushed the first time playing.

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On several ports of Ikaruga, you get infinite continues right off the bat, but the Xbox 360 version just had to screw you over. You get more continues as you put more hours into the game, meaning you'll have to clock in eight hours of play to unlock infinite continues. That's just ridiculous.

2 Vanquish

A Difficulty Mode The Devs Knew Were Too Much

Vanquish has to be one of the best titles from PlatinumGames, but it's also one of the studio's hardest. This largely comes from God Hard, the highest difficulty setting. God Hard essentially makes all the other difficulties baby mode in comparison because it's no joke.

It breaks the game down to its core, removing stuff like the upgrade system and cutting the time you have in AR mode, making you have to play as best as you possibly can. There's not even an achievement for beating it, which is a clear sign that the devs knew how difficult it was. They didn't want people complaining, like with Wolfenstein 2 in its Mein Leben mode.

1 Cloudberry Kingdom

One Of The Hardest Games Ever Created

Cloudberry Kingdom is not only the hardest Xbox 360 game but one of the hardest games ever made, and to be frank, it's mainly due to the last two levels. The core game remains moderately challenging, but chapter seven heats things up significantly, and it keeps burning and burning until you get to level 319.

This is when virtually everyone will tap out because the path to get all the way to the end is so strict and so demanding that it almost seems too much for a human. Only 14 people on TrueAchievements have beaten every level, which is an astronomically small amount for the website.

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