20 Best PS4 Action Games

Apotheon came out on PS4 and Windows on February 3, 2015, and it looks like nothing else on the console. It was Alientrap's second commercial game, and the studio drew the whole thing in the style of ancient Greek pottery, the black-figure kind you see behind glass in a museum. You play Nikandreos, a young warrior who wakes up to find his home destroyed, and the story takes him all the way up to Olympus to take the gifts of gods like Artemis and Apollo.

It was also later released for free for PlayStation Network subscribers, so there is a fair chance it is already sitting in your library. If it is, open it. Few games on this list have a look this strong, and it earns its spot on looks alone.

Darksiders III almost did not happen. Vigil Games had planned a third game, but Vigil was shut down along with its parent company, THQ. In April 2013 THQ began auctioning off the IP it had left, Darksiders included. The game finally arrived on PS4, Windows and Xbox One in November 2018. It takes place parallel to the first Darksiders, and this time you play Fury, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, hunting the seven deadly sins after they take physical form and escape.

It is also a departure for the series, with ideas borrowed from Metroidvanias and Soulslikes. Critics gave it mixed reviews. They pointed at the bugs, and some found the combat too simple. If you liked the first two games and can live with a few rough edges, it is a good long weekend.

Sifu is a kung fu game from Sloclap, a French studio whose first game was the fighting game Absolver in 2017. This time the team left out multiplayer so they could spend their time on the fighting. The style is based on Bak Mei kung fu, there are over 150 unique attacks, and a good parry lets you stun an enemy or throw them where you want.

The fights were modeled on 1970s and 1980s kung fu movies starring Jackie Chan, where one man takes on a whole room. The story starts with a man called Yang killing your teacher and finding the sifu's only child hiding nearby. You are that child, and the rest of the game is revenge. It sold over 4 million units by May 2025, and it became a TV show on Amazon Prime Video in December 2024.

Hotline Miami 2 started life as extra content for the first game and grew until it was longer than the original, so Dennaton made it a full sequel. It was planned as the last one, and the team put in every idea left over from the first game. It came out on 10 March 2015 on PS4, PS3, Vita and PC, with the console versions handled by Abstraction Games.

It is still a top-down bloodbath with a neon 80s look, but most chapters put you in a different character's shoes. One group, the Fans, are copycat killers trying to live up to the masked hero of the first game. The rooms are bigger and more open, with enemies coming at you from many directions. Critics loved the soundtrack and argued about the rest, the ending included.

Yakuza 6 is the last main game with Kazuma Kiryu as the hero, and it came out in Japan in December 2016. It was the first in the series made only for the PS4 and the first on the new Dragon Engine, which changed both the look and the fighting. Kiryu gets one fighting style this time, after the several he could switch between in 0 and Kiwami.

After Haruka is put in a coma by a hit and run, Kiryu follows her trail to Onomichi in Hiroshima, where she had been hiding from the paparazzi. The side stuff is as silly as ever, and the arcades hold real Sega games, from Out Run to Space Harrier. There is even Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown, and Yakuza 6 is the only official release of that version outside Japan.

Hitman 2 was made the hard way. Sales of the 2016 game fell short, so Square Enix sold IO Interactive. The studio, now independent, laid off nearly half of its staff while the sequel was about 25% done, and the game had to shrink. It still came together in about twenty-one months, because the groundwork was already there, and Warner Bros. published it.

This time the whole game came out at once, with no episodes, and its pink cover matches a more playful tone. Most critics saw it as an improvement on the first one. Since January 2023 it is no longer sold on its own. Its levels are now part of Hitman: World of Assassination, which is the way to play it today.

Furi is a game made only of boss fights. You play The Stranger, a prisoner freed by a man in a rabbit disguise called The Voice, who gives you a sword and a gun and tells you to fight for your freedom. The prison is ten floating islands, and each one has its own guardian waiting at the end of the path.

Each fight mixes fast sword fighting with dual-stick shooting. Every guardian has a different combat style, and they were all designed by Takashi Okazaki, the creator of Afro Samurai. The developers aimed for sixty frames per second to keep up with your reflexes, and the electro soundtrack, with Carpenter Brut among the artists, makes dying over and over feel almost fun.

Yakuza Kiwami is a remake of the first Yakuza from the PS2. Sega had thought about remaking it in 2015 for the series' tenth anniversary, but the team was busy with Yakuza 0. Once that game did well, the remake went ahead on the same engine, with the fighting reworked to play like the prequel's.

The best new idea is Majima Everywhere. Goro Majima, the series' favorite lunatic, turns up at random while you explore and picks a fight with you. Critics praised those run-ins and the simple combat, but they were split on the story and the side missions. GameSpot also felt Kamurocho could seem small next to other open worlds. If you played 0 first, this is where Kiryu's story goes next.

Alienation is Housemarque's twin-stick shooter with loot, published by Sony. It was announced at Gamescom in 2014 and kept slipping, first to March 2, 2016 and then by another three weeks, before it came out in April 2016. You aim with a blue laser, and any gun you do not want can be turned into metal and used to re-roll the stats of one you do.

Critics liked the twin-stick shooting and the co-op, and the missing local co-op they complained about was added later. Players who like Diablo get sent here. It is the same loop of killing things for better gear, only with aliens and a lot more explosions.

Ubisoft Montreal's For Honor started with Knights, Vikings and Samurai, and later added a Chinese-inspired faction, the Wu Lin, with the Marching Fire expansion. Fights are about direction. You hold your weapon left, right or top to block an attack from that side, and you attack from those same directions. The creative director called it a "shooter with swords", which is a fair way to describe the multiplayer modes. Friendly fire is on, so swinging wildly in a crowd can hurt your own team.

Critics singled out the combat as difficult and original. Players looking for a game to play against other people online get pointed here. Expect to lose a lot while you learn.

Control is Remedy's strangest game, and that is saying something. You play Jesse Faden, who walks into the Federal Bureau of Control, a secret U.S. government agency, and becomes its new Director by picking up a gun. The headquarters, the Oldest House, is a Brutalist skyscraper in New York City, and a hostile force called the Hiss has taken it over. The story was written by Sam Lake and inspired by the SCP Foundation stories.

The gun changes shape, and you also get supernatural powers in a building where nearly everything breaks, so a lot of fights end with you throwing a desk at someone. Players talk most about the shooting, and they do not all agree on it. It was nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2019 and had sold over 6 million units by March 2026.

Nex Machina is what happens when Housemarque, the studio behind Resogun and Alienation, teams up with Eugene Jarvis, the man who made Robotron and Smash TV. It came out on PS4 and Windows on 20 June 2017. It is an arcade shooter made with competition in mind, which means high scores and very little mercy.

Critics gave it positive reviews. Compared to Alienation, which sits a few places lower on this list, Nex Machina has no loot to manage and no stats to read. It is about your reflexes and your high score. It is loud and hard to put down, and if Robotron was before your time, this is the best way to find out why people still talk about it.

Enter the Gungeon is a top-down bullet hell roguelike, and almost everything in it is a gun joke. The enemies are shaped like bullets, the dungeon is the Gungeon, and you fight down its randomly built floors with a huge pile of strange firearms. You can dodge roll through shots and flip tables for cover. When you die, you lose everything and start again from the first floor.

It was made by Dodge Roll, a studio formed in 2014 by four people who left Mythic Entertainment, and it came out on April 5, 2016, with the PS4 version there on day one. Critics compared it to The Binding of Isaac, and by June 2020 it had sold over three million copies. A sequel is set for 2026.

The 2016 Hitman was a fresh start for Agent 47 and the first part of what became the World of Assassination trilogy. It first came out in episodes, and each location is a big sandbox with a target in it. Paris, Italy, Morocco, Bangkok, Colorado and Japan all get a level.

How you reach the target is up to you. You can put on a disguise and walk in the front door, or set up an accident that looks like nobody's fault. Finishing challenges unlocks new tools and starting points, so you end up replaying the same level to find another way in. The series started in 2000 with Hitman: Codename 47, which its designer described as "a guy in a suit blasting away in a Chinese restaurant." Agent 47 has become much quieter since then.

Gravity Rush 2 is the sequel to Gravity Rush, directed again by Keiichiro Toyama, and it is still about Kat, who can change which way gravity pulls her. You can fall up into the sky and land on the side of a building. This time she has three gravity styles, the original plus Lunar and Jupiter, and Jupiter makes her heavy so her attacks have more impact. You switch between them with the touch pad.

It is a big game, with three times as many missions as the first one, and it runs between 20 and 40 hours. Raven, the rival from the first game, now fights at Kat's side. One player called it "a fantastic change of pace from other AAA games", and that sums it up.

The first Helldivers was a top-down shooter, unlike its third-person sequel from 2024. Mankind lives under a managed democracy, and you are one of the Helldivers sent out to defend Super Earth from aliens. The tone is satire, the kind where the propaganda is the joke and you are the punchline.

Up to four players go down together, and you can hurt each other with your guns and with the air strikes and turrets you call in. Fighting is often a bad idea, because the enemy has infinite reinforcements and there are no rewards for just killing things. Players who want a top-down co-op shooter tend to name it next to Alienation. It had sold over 4 million units by May 2024.

Devil May Cry 5 came out on 8 March 2019, and director Hideaki Itsuno set out to make it his best work. Capcom built it on the RE Engine from Resident Evil 7, so the demons and the city they overrun look close to real, and the setting is based on parts of London.

You play three characters, but only one per mission, and each fights in a very different way. The game gives you a style rating as you go, based on how much you mix up your moves and how long your combos run, and the music changes with how well you are doing. Players point to it whenever someone asks for a game with great combat. It has sold 14.24 million units as of June 2026, the most in the series.

The Order: 1886 is set in a Victorian London where engineers are far ahead of their time, with railguns and zeppelins, and an elite order of knights fights an ancient enemy. It is a third-person game built to feel like a film, down to the 2.40:1 aspect ratio, which gives you black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.

It came out on February 20, 2015, and debuted at No. 1 in the UK retail chart. Reviews were mixed. Critics praised the graphics and the production, and they complained about the short length. Only two PS4 action games get recommended more by players, though. Go in expecting a beautiful, short action film that you get to steer, and you will have a good time.

Sekiro is FromSoftware's ninja game, and director Hidetaka Miyazaki wanted it to be a departure from Dark Souls. Tenchu, an old ninja series tied to the studio, was the starting point. You play Wolf, a shinobi trying to rescue his kidnapped lord in a made-up version of Sengoku-era Japan. There are no classes and no stats to build. Fights are about posture. You block and deflect until your enemy's guard breaks, and then you finish them.

GameSpot wrote that it "rewrites the rules of engagement", and it won Game of the Year at The Game Awards. It is very hard. The grappling hook lets you vault between tree branches and rooftops, and you can even pause it, which reviewers praised. It had sold over ten million units by September 2023.

Yakuza 0 is a beat 'em up set in 1988, during Japan's bubble economy, and it is a prequel to the whole series. You switch between Kazuma Kiryu in Tokyo's Kamurocho and Goro Majima in Osaka's Sotenbori, and both of them can swap between several fighting styles.

Money is everywhere in this one. Every heavy attack makes enemies drop cash, which suits a story about the bubble years. Between fights you can manage businesses and play a huge number of minigames. The English team wrote "34 pages of Mahjong explanation" for the localization, which tells you how deep the side stuff goes. It is the game that brought the series to a big Western audience, and players rave about it. Players recommend it more than any other PS4 action game.