Dusk
Release date: 2018
Developer: David Szymanski
Link: Steam
One of our highest-rated shooters of last year, Dusk is a riff on classic FPS games, with clear influences from Quake, Doom and Half-Life. If you worried first-person shooters had gotten too slow since the ’90s ended, this is probably the game for you. Set across three campaigns, you’ll play with a fun and often ludicrous armoury—the Riveter, for example, which launches exploding rivets at your foes. It’s more than just a throwback, though, filled with memorable, varied levels and a genuinely good little horror-themed story.
Titanfall 2
Release Date: 2016
Developer: Respawn Entertainment
Link: Origin
Somehow Titanfall 2’s campaign ended up being the star of the show for us, despite a host of high-value multiplayer options as well. Development of the game’s single-player was treated like a game jam of sorts, where different members of the team would pitch their ideas for what a singleplayer Titanfall 2 idea level look like. The end result brings a really curious mix of thrilling platforming challenges, one-off level-changing tools and even puzzle elements, alongside BT, a charming mech pal who’s like having a giant talking metal dog.
Bulletstorm
Release date: 2011
Developer: People Can Fly, Epic Games
Link: Steam
Bulletstorm is an incredibly well-made score attack shooter that’s a little different than everything else on the list. The energy leash, the ability to kick enemies and the fast player movement give you plenty of scope to put together cool, flashy combos and to use your armory creatively. The sweary, deliberately immature script, put together by comic book writer Rick Remender, matches the over-the-top action perfectly. It’s now available in an upgraded Full Clip Edition on Steam, complete with optional embarrassing Duke Nukem appendage, though the price tag of £30/$50 is eyebrow-raising for a six year-old game, considering the old version would still be perfectly fine had the GfWL stuff been patched out of it.
No One Lives Forever
Release date: 2000
Developer: Monolith
Where many classics play better in our memories than on our modern PCs, No One Lives Forever holds up brilliantly today thanks to the garish ‘60s art direction, a fine arsenal (from a petite .38 Airweight with dum dum rounds to lipstick grenades and a briefcase missile launcher), as well as remarkably sophisticated AI. Monolith wraps it all up in endlessly inventive level design and writing so consistently hilarious that it created its own genre—the comedy FPS—and hasn’t been outdone since. If only there was an easy way to download it on digital platforms today.
Metro 2033
Release date: 2010
Developer: 4A Games
Link: Steam
In the Metro series, mankind survives in the tunnels beneath Moscow, having abandoned the nuclear-irradiated overworld which is now infested with mutated creatures. With the idea is that ammo is finite and each stash is precious, Metro walks an interesting line between survival horror and first-person shooter. The guns feel great, but it’s the fiction around them, the commitment to such a bleak tone, and the gorgeous environments with just a few signs of human life that you’ll remember Metro for. Now in a Redux version, it looks even more fantastic than before.
BioShock
Release Date: 2007
Developer: Irrational Games
Link: Steam
BioShock’s greatest asset is its setting, and what Rapture provides from its ruined eden are enemies that are hysterical, tragic figures. One encounter with a Splicer or a Big Daddy can arc from curiosity, to sympathy, and then swing into full-on fear and violent panic. One of the best things Irrational does is imbue its monsters with terrifying sound design: the psychotic speech of Splicers, the fog horn drone and steel steps of the Big Daddies. The claustrophobia and anxiety Rapture throws at you gives you permission to fight recklessly, tooth-and-nail with powerful plasmids and upgraded shotguns as a way of getting revenge on the horrors that haunt you.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
Release date: 2010
Developer: GSC Game World
Link: Steam
What’s most refreshing about Pripyat is how much trust it puts in you to figure out its brutal setting yourself. In The Zone, standing next to the wrong pond might be all it takes to kill you—it’s the genre’s capital city of death, populated with zombies that carry guns, invisible humanoid Cthulhus, and horrifying walls of energy that have emanate “nope” in a mile-wide radius. It’s a game blissfully low of exposition and hand-holding, making each time you escape alive feel earned. GSC’s compromises between realism and playability are smart, and excellent ballistics modeling and tracer effects bullet make for gritty firefights. It only improves with mods.
F.E.A.R.
Release date: 2005
Developer: Monolith
Link: Amazon
F.E.A.R.’s supernatural encounters are somewhat segregated from its shootouts. One moment you’re a time-slowing, slide-kicking SWAT superman, the next corridor you’re peeing your pants because an eight-year-old ghost is lurking in your hallway. That pacing empowers and scares you, a feat for games that combine action and horror. The creepiness that permeates everything works with F.E.A.R.’s outstanding weapon design, clever enemy pathfinding, and dimly-lit offices that are simultaneously unsettling and cathartic to blow apart in slow motion.
Far Cry 4
Release date: 2014
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Link: Steam
The other games in the Far Cry series have plenty to recommend them, but Far Cry 4 is the latest (outside of Primal) and best. It properly buys into the big and silly, letting you raid bases on elephant back, hang glide, and dangle from gyrocopters. It’s the best use of the open-world formula that Ubisoft pretty much applies to all its big games. As a shooter, it’s fantastic fun, but it’s these extra tools, and how easy it is to find yourself thrown into an absurdly fun and chaotic set-piece, that make this one of the best FPS games around.
Lovely Planet
Release date: 2014
Developer: QUICKTEQUILA
Link: Steam
It sounds cute, and it’s cute-looking, but Lovely Planet is a challenging shooter in which precision matters above everything else, and memorizing the maps is all but essential. You have to kill every enemy in every level and navigate through obstacle courses of potential environmental mishaps, and you have to do this across 100 levels. Thanks in part to an unconventional but pretty art style, there’s nothing else quite like Lovely Planet on PC.
Devil Daggers
Release date: 2016
Developer: Sorath
Link: Steam
The satanic first-person time attack game does nothing to explain itself, dropping you into a flat hellplane where you stave off waves of demons of increasing number and difficulty. It initially comes off as a stylish ode to ‘90s FPS games and arcade shooters like Robotron or Geometry Wars, but unlike those games, Devil Daggers isn’t intent on leaving you smiling. It’s bleak in its presentation and unforgiving in its play. One hit from a stray demon, and it’s over. Even surviving a minute is quite the testament.
Because Devil Daggers concentrates so intently on spatial awareness and aim, it can leverage every aspect of its design in crucial ways. For example, since the first-person perspective means you can’t see what’s behind you, learning specific demon sounds and relating their position to where you hear them is a skill essential to success. A single run can take anywhere from five seconds to five minutes (if you’re a god), which is a short enough cycle to learn how specific demons behave, how firing modes affect mobility, spawn patterns—it’s the kind of game that you can see the shape of within a minute of play, but one that hides a ton of depth in its focused design. Devil Daggers may not have an explosive campaign or a cutthroat multiplayer mode or a huge arsenal of fun weapons, but it embodies what makes shooters so great in a dense package: pointing and clicking demon skulls out of existence.
Wolfenstein: The New Order
Release date: 2014
Developer: MachineGames
Link: Steam
This big, silly revival of Wolfenstein has inventive level design, a daft but entertaining story based on an alternate WWII history, and guns that feel amazing to fire. It also made dual-wielding an exciting idea for the first time in about a decade. You battle boilerplate robo-dogs, you fight Nazis on the Moon.
The feel of the machine guns and shotguns is spot-on. The former Starbreeze leads who formed MachineGames reinterpreted Wolfenstein in a way that made it exciting and new both for the series’ existing audience and for those gamers coming in fresh. This big, chunky shooter is so much more than just a retro pastiche, offering variety and production values you rarely get to enjoy in singleplayer games these days. The sequel’s looking pretty great, too.
Doom and Doom 2
Release date: 1993
Developer: id Software
Wolfenstein 3D preceded it by a year, but Doom is in the DNA of everything here. It’s the progenitor of moving, aiming, and shooting things that hate your health bar in a 3D environment. Hunting for access cards and thumbing walls with spacebar doesn’t have the appeal today that it did in 1993, but Carmack’s technical feats (like creating height differences in a 3D environment, a totally new concept at the time) and well-animated sprites help Doom hold up as an agile, colorful, essential shooter that happens to be the foundation for every other game here.
Doom and Doom 2 have also been elevated by the modding community. More than 20 years later, they’re still going strong. You’ll find new weapons, new campaigns and total conversions that let you be everything from a pirate to a cartoon square. Even John Romero is still releasing maps.
Doom (2016)
Release date: 2016
Developer: id Software
Link: Steam
We were all surprised by Doom. In the first minute, you hop out of a sarcophagus and smash in a demon skull. Five minutes later, you’re taking out imps with a shotgun by the dozen. One hour, and you’re dashing through Hell, leaping through the air to tear out a Cacodemon’s big glassy eye. Doom wastes no time getting you into the action and establishing an identity as one of the purest shooters to land in years. It’s a significant departure from the slow, disempowering survival horror of Doom 3 and a return to the original’s cheeky brutality and signature speed. Instead of following popular FPS trends, Doom went back to what made it a classic without compromise, focusing and expanding its best qualities into new mechanics.
Combat arenas are dotted with power ups, health and ammo pickups, jump pads and teleporters—it’s like playing Doom on a Quake multiplayer map—and they’re fun, not just necessary, to traverse. With the ability to double jump, arenas transform into platforming playgrounds designed for cool moments. Hit a jump pad, point blank a Cacodemon with the Super Shotgun, switch to the chainsaw mid-air, and split a Baron in half on the way down. Brutal Kill melee attacks leverage the constant movement required to stay ahead of the demon hordes by asking you to throw yourself directly into the fray for a sliver of health. Playful secrets are strewn through each level and the story is simple enough to follow without really paying attention to it. The basic jist: close the portal to hell, kill some demons.
Doom is the perfect response to FPS bloat. It cuts the crap and gets to the point. You want to click on some demons and make them go away? You want to feel cool and skilled doing it? Doom is on the case.