Feature: 2023 Has Already Treated Us To Multiple GOTY Candidates On Xbox

It's the end of another busy week, and with the launch of Hogwarts Legacy happening today (the standard version), we thought we'd take a quick chance to reflect on just how good the new release slate has been for Xbox in 2023 so far.

Looking at Metacritic, Xbox has been absolutely inundated with top-quality titles over the past few weeks. You can see in the list below what the current averages are for the top Xbox Series X games in 2023 (although we've removed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition as that came out in digital form last year).

Keep in mind that Metacritic only ranks the "top" list based on games with 7 professional reviews or more, otherwise Backfirewall_ (83) and We Were Here Forever (81) would also be included in the eighth and ninth spots respectively. .

1. Persona 4 Golden (90)
2. Dead Space (89)
3. Hogwarts Legacy (89)
4. Hi-Fi RUSH (88)
5. Persona 3 Portable (87)
6. Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition (87)
7. Monster Hunter Rise (86)
8. One Piece Odyssey (78)

If you think back to the majority of recent years, we haven't seen this level of quantity of potential Game of the Year titles during January and early February - it's typically a quieter period for new releases, but not this year!

It looks like that momentum is going to continue as we progress through February and get into March and April as well, with the likes of Atomic Heart, Wo Long Fallen Dynasty, Resident Evil 4, Minecraft Legends, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and much more on the slate over the next few weeks. Exciting stuff ahead, folks!