time travel first person shooter

The 28 Best Games Involving Time Travel

Moving through time and space is a popular concept explored through many genres. It's a difficult element to get right, and these games do it best.

In video games, time travel can be as simple as rewinding gameplay or as complex as hopping across space-time dimensions. Furthermore, the concept is not limited to a single genre and is often manipulated in a variety of ways.

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Undoubtedly, people have been fascinated with time travel for a long time, even if the actual technology seems destined to remain exclusive to fiction. While some projects use it as a simple mechanic for retrying an action, other time travel games travel deep down the theoretical wormhole.

Updated on January 27, 2024, by Ritwik Mitra: Games need to understand the concept of time well if they wish to use it in their video games. Many titles have failed to adapt the full potential of the fourth dimension, which makes it all the more impressive when some games use the concept of time travel to great effect, elevating the quality of the final product as a result. These titles are incredible video games that fans should check out, especially if they want to see how effective time travel can be in a medium this immersive.

28 The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom

Zelda travels back in time to heal the master sword for link, the legend of zelda: tears of the kingdom.

Tears of the Kingdom had some big shoes to fill and took its sweet time to come out. This wait was worthwhile since players got to experience what many people consider a worthy sequel despite retreading familiar ground.

The story is certainly improved by leaps and bounds, with Zelda's tale being a fascinating one. She decides to become a dragon and help the Master Sword repair for ten thousand years before Link can finally harness its power once again.

27 Twelve Minutes

A time loop adventure that is pretty intriguing despite its missteps, twelve minutes.

The voice cast of Twelve Minutes was its biggest selling point, with James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe taking on the role of the three characters who play a central role in this narrative. The story focuses on a husband who is killed by a home intruder, only for time to rewind twelve minutes after these events have transpired.

The repetition and frustration caused by the time loop mechanic can make things somewhat irritating, but the central mystery at the heart of things ties events together in a neat way. That being said, this plot twist can also have a mixed reception from players.

26 Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within

The prince embarks on a journey after being punished for his use of the sands of time.

After the success of Sands of Time , Ubisoft took the bold approach of making the sequel darker and more foreboding to appeal to a new audience. The results were pretty mixed, with some people hating the edgy nature of this title while others loved how metal this game was, with everything from the storyline to the characters reflecting this.

There's a lot of time travel involved in Warrior Within , and it's handled with great care. While backtracking can be a huge issue in this title, the rest of the experience is a rollercoaster ride that players just can't get enough of!

25 Steins;Gate

A mind-bending time travel adventure that explores trauma and ptsd in a nuanced manner, steins;gate elite.

Steins;Gate is an anime that many people consider to be one of the best sci-fi shows of all time. However, some people might not be aware that the show is an adaptation of a visual novel that uses time travel as its central mechanic. Players control the protagonist Rintaro Okabe, a self-proclaimed mad scientist, who discovers a way to send messages back in time via his phone.

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The game involves navigating various branching timelines and making decisions that affect the outcome of the story. The use of time travel creates a complex and engaging narrative that keeps players invested throughout the story, with its many alternate endings revolving around whether players choose to mess around with the fabric of time or not.

24 Final Fantasy 13-2

The search for lightning spans different time periods, final fantasy 13-2.

Final Fantasy 13-2 serves as an official successor to one of the most divisive Final Fantasy games of all time. The sequel promotes Noel and Serah as protagonists and follows them as they travel through different moments in time in search of Lightning, who disappeared after the events of the first game.

Players who liked Final Fantasy 13 will likely have a great time with its sequel, especially if they wished the original game had more open areas and exploration. However, the story is pretty confusing, and even die-hard fans of Square Enix's franchise may find it hard to follow along with the plot.

23 Singularity

Time manipulation plays a central role in this underrated fps, singularity.

Singularity is a first-person shooter built around time manipulation. The game is set on an island in Russia called Katorga-12 where experiments with a substance called E99 have gone wrong, causing time anomalies and mutations.

Players use a device called the Time Manipulation Device (TMD) to navigate the island and manipulate time in various ways, such as aging or reversing objects and enemies. Singularity 's use of time manipulation creates unique and creative gameplay opportunities, making the FPS stand out from other entries in the genre.

22 Shadow Of Memories

A time loop adventure where players prevent the protagonist's death by traveling back in time, shadow of memories.

Shadow of Memories is a unique adventure game where players are tasked with preventing their murder by traveling back to the past. The protagonist, Eike, explores different time periods and makes several critical decisions that send ripples across the fabric of time and affect the outcome of the story.

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The use of time travel in Shadow of Memories creates a sense of mystery and suspense, as players try to unravel the events leading up to Eike's death. It's easily the most underrated game on this list that fans should check out.

21 TimeShift

An overlooked fps that lets players mess around with time.

TimeShift is an FPS where players control a soldier who is equipped with a suit that allows them to mess around with the fabric of time. The game involves navigating through various environments and using time itself to solve puzzles and defeat enemies.

This innovative use of time manipulation in TimeShift adds a layer of strategy and creativity to the gameplay . It's a shame that many people don't talk about this title since TimeShift had many great things going for it despite also having its share of faults.

20 Outer Wilds

One of the best implementations of a time loop seen in a video game, outer wilds.

Outer Wilds is a pretty unique game that has been criminally overlooked by many fans. The game deals with a time loop where the Sun turns into a supernova in 22 minutes, prompting players to explore the world and figure out its secrets piece by piece.

The time loop mechanic of Outer Wilds makes every batch of exploration a joy to go through. Fans of great sci-fi narratives will have a great time piecing together the mystery of this game.

19 The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask

Time resets when the moon crashes into the earth every three days, the legend of zelda: majora's mask.

Majora's Mask builds upon the amazing engine of Ocarina of Time which was just a legendary title in its own right. It placed Link in a darker world where the moon would crash into the Earth and end all life in three days .

This set up a perpetual cycle where players had to slowly get through the game while keeping this three-day limit in mind. It made for a great time, with Majora's Mask being a fan favorite of many despite the game being in the shadow of its predecessor.

18 Prince Of Persia: The Two Thrones

The prince finds the dagger of time once again, with the vizier coming back after a major time reversal, prince of persia: the two thrones.

The Sands of Time trilogy is where many fans think the Prince of Persia series peaked. The first game was a masterclass, with Warrior Within improving upon the combat system extensively despite the tone becoming a bit too mature and edgy for its good.

The Two Thrones serves as a perfect middle ground between the approach Ubisoft took for the past two games in the series. The great combat innovations were kept intact while the overall vibe of the game was more in line with The Sands of Time . Of course, as is the case with most games in the series, The Two Thrones also lets players mess around with time for their benefit throughout this journey.

17 Day Of The Tentacle

A classic lucasarts point-and-click game that dabbles in time travel quite a bit, day of the tentacle.

Day of the Tentacle is a beloved point-and-click adventure game that many fans still hold in high regard to this day. The remaster of this game ensures that players can enjoy what made this game special without being deterred by its old visuals.

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Day of the Tentacle prioritizes time travel quite a bit, interacting with environments across different time periods. It makes for an innovative premise with the puzzle-solving using this mechanic heavily as well.

16 Deathloop

A time loop that resets whenever colt fails to kill all eight visionaries by midnight.

Deathloop is another gem from Arkane Studios, combining their expertise in developing immersive sims with the concept of a time loop. Players need to kill eight targets in a row in the one-time loop to essentially finish the game.

This is easier said than done, and players need to come to grips with the mechanics of the game over multiple loops before attempting this herculean feat. It's a great gameplay loop, with the addition of Julianna making each journey through the loop a blast in its own right.

15 Back To The Future: The Game

A fun addition to the popular movie series with its own set of time-traveling shenanigans, back to the future: the game.

Back to the Future is one of the most iconic movie franchises of all time that focuses on time travel. However, most people aren't aware of the Back to the Future game released by Telltale that allows for a new chapter in this celebrated franchise.

Taking on the episodic format that was present in their adventure games, Back to the Future: The Game is a worthy addition to this celebrated franchise. The shenanigans that Morty and Doc Brown get up to throughout this title are quite entertaining and make for a fun adventure title.

A Revolutionary Indie Game Where Rewinding Time Is Critical To Solving Puzzles

Braid is one of the most innovative and entertaining indie titles of all time. The game's haunting story and excellent puzzle-solving mechanics make for an unforgettable experience that most people won't be forgetting anytime soon.

Rewinding time to figure out solutions to puzzles serves as the initial draw of the game, but it's the story that hooks players over time. Players who want to believe that they're the good guy in any video game will be in for a rude awakening when they check out Braid .

13 Dishonored 2

The stilton manor level is arkane at its very best, turning the concept of time into an ingenious gameplay mechanic, dishonored 2.

Arkane Studios has constantly been at the forefront of delivering spectacular immersive sim experiences. Dishonored 2 is no exception to this golden rule, with some people considering it to be superior to the critically acclaimed first game.

The level where players need to roam around Stilton Manor is easily one of the best parts of the entire game. This is mainly due to the innovative time travel mechanics present in this level that allow players to shift from the past to the present at a moment's notice.

12 EarthBound

Time travel plays a central role at both the start and end of the game.

The SNES was home to some of the most iconic games of all time. One such game was EarthBound , which has carved its way into the hearts of several gamers due to its amazing charm and imaginative gameplay.

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The game starts with a time traveler from the future who warns Ness about an impending apocalypse. Finally, near the end of the game, the party travels back in time so that they can fight the antagonist — Giygas — where he's at his most vulnerable.

11 Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Time is wound back before someone's death, with players using ghosts to manipulate objects and change fate, ghost trick: phantom detective.

Ghost Trick is easily one of the most underrated games ever made. The brainchild of the Ace Attorney series — Shu Takumi — was at the helm of this innovative mystery title that went under most people's radar upon release.

It's a shame, since Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is one of the most imaginative titles that uses the concept of time travel to great effect. Players need to prevent untimely murders by manipulating events as ghosts a few seconds before the time of death. Succeeding in doing so allows the player to alter the flow of time and help the story move smoothly.

10 Blinx: The Time Sweeper

Blinx: the time sweeper.

Released as an exclusive for the original Xbox, Blinx: The Time Sweeper is based on an anthropomorphic cat that can influence time in many ways. With the ability to speed up time, slow time down, stop time, and reverse events, time travel is an integral part of the game.

Blinx: The Time Sweeper is a fantastic game with immense replay value. How the medium of time is weaved with gameplay helps this title age spectacularly well, and it's a shame that this character didn't hit the ground running.

9 Quantum Break

Players use time powers in a sci-fi romp that can be a bit too overindulgent at times, quantum break.

From Remedy Entertainment comes an explosive action-adventure game out of science fiction. Quantum Break was released on PC and Xbox One in 2016. Initially, it would be a sequel to Alan Wake until the focus shifted to time travel.

Powers like "Time Vision" and "Time Echoes" are great examples of how the fourth dimension is used to elevate the title's gameplay, even if the nomenclature of these abilities could've used some work. The time-bending shenanigans in Quantum Break make it a fun game for players to get invested in.

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About This Game

• Harness time as the Ultimate Weapon: Slow, stop and reverse the flow of time to destroy your enemies
• Unleash a powerful arsenal of weapons and vehicles in 24 combat missions
• Up to 16-player multiplayer, featuring the use of time grenades in 14 different maps, allowing for unique style of slow, stop and reversal of time
• Completely customize your multiplayer experience with over 40 different features to fit your style of gameplay

System Requirements

• OS *: Windows(R) XP with latest service pack installed or Windows Vista™
• Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.0 GHz or AMD(R) equivalent
• Memory: 1 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) 6600 128 MB DirectX(R) 9.0c-compatible card with Pixel Shaders 2.0b support or equivalent (ATI(R) Radeon(R) x700) with latest DirectX drivers
• DirectX: DirectX(R) 9.0c
• Hard Drive: 8 GB free hard drive space
• Sound: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
• Note: TimeShift only supports multiplayer connectivity over LAN or direct connection

© 2007 Sierra Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. Designed and developed by Saber Interactive. Timeshift, Sierra and the Sierra logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Sierra Entertainment, Inc., in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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Best time travel games

Here's our list of the best time travel games with more timeloops and grandfather paradoxes than you can shake a stick at.

Looking for the best time travel games? These 10 entries mark the highlights of a genre that has been going strong for decades – promising the awe of hurtling forward in time, manipulating the present, or changing what’s happened in the past. Haven’t we all wanted to do that at some point?

Is time travel possible? Well, time travel is a pretty recognizable concept by now and has been around for as long as there have been people, whether in Hindu mythology or Japanese fairy tales. The idea of time travel in pop science fiction was widely popularized by H.G. Wells, who wrote the 1895 novel The Time Machine, as well as other stories that saw protagonists propelled into different eras.

While many modern games utilize some kind of repeating loop, like Hades or Loop Hero, the best time travel games take this a step further – allowing the player to distort time for their own ends, or forcing them to adapt to imprisonment within it.

These games don’t just use time travel as a story hook, but an integral part of how the game works – which is what helps them stand out among the bog-standard shooters, puzzle games, and platformers out there. 

So, if you loved watching the likes of Groundhog Day or Russian Doll , then these are the games for you. Who knows, maybe one of these titles will end up on our (or even your) space video games that should be movies or TV shows list. While you’re at it, make sure to check out our guide to the best time travel movies too, or if you’re after more games then these upcoming space games will interest you. 

10. Deathloop

• Release date: September 14, 2021
• Platform: PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox Series X/S

Possibly the best PS5 exclusive to have released on the console at the time (though it has since released on Xbox too), Deathloop is a thrilling time-travel first-person shooter (FPS) romp from the developers behind Dishonored.

You play as Colt, an assassin, who is on a mission to eliminate eight ultra-powerful individuals. These gifted beings are exploiting a time loop machine on a subarctic island to live the same day over and over, essentially becoming immortal and being able to do whatever they desire every night without consequence.

You must take out all eight to stop the loop from restarting – using what you learn across multiple loops to navigate the island and complete your mission in one perfect run. With slick gunplay, a gripping story, and a fascinating sci-fi premise, we don’t recommend you sleep on this one.

9. Twelve Minutes

• Release date: August 19, 2021
• Platform: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PC

It’s a fun, curious mystery game, with plenty of satisfaction to be had from toying with the objects and locations in your compact apartment to see how it’ll affect the outcome.

A curious time loop game, mostly in the star talent brought in to voice its trio of main characters: Daisy Ridley (Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker), James McAvoy (X-Men: First Class, Trance), and Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man, The Lighthouse).

The action takes place in a small, one-bedroom apartment, where McAvoy’s protagonist comes home to find a number of surprises waiting for him – one of which is an armed assailant claiming to be a police officer pounding on their door. When you’re knocked unconscious, you begin the time loop again and have to figure out what’s really going on in order to escape the loop for good.

8. Titanfall 2

• Release date: October 28, 2016
• Platform: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC

The sequel to Respawn’s futuristic mecha-combat FPS is a thrilling ride. It has a single-player campaign that pivots effortlessly between fascinating game mechanics, never feeling a need to dwell too long on each one.

The time travel mission, ‘Effect and Cause,’ is a real standout. It allows you to shift between the past and present mid-air as you run, shoot, and platform your way across an expansive military facility. Paired with Respawn’s excellent gunplay, this acclaimed shooter offers far more imagination than the average Call of Duty game.

The brisk campaign has plenty of other thrills to recommend it, but its seamless utilization of time travel as an integral game mechanic – even while limited to a single level – makes it well worth inclusion in this list.

7. Outer Wilds

• Release date: May 28, 2019
• Platform: Xbox One, PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch, PC

Another time loop game, you say? Outer Wilds is a standout indie game, so much so that it’s made our best space games list. It sees you scour a solar system to unpack its mysteries, over a series of 22-minute time loops that reset your progress just as the nearest sun explodes into a supernova. Phew.

As with Deathloop, you’ll have to do more than simply map out the game – needing to learn when certain events occur, or which actions are available in the orbits of the solar system’s planetary bodies. Starting out as a student project, Outer Wilds has gone on to be one of the best indie games in recent years, with a heady mix of environmental exploration, galactic mystery, and survival sim all in one.

6. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

• Release date: November 21, 1998
• Platform: Nintendo 64, GameCube, Wii, Wii U, Nintendo Switch

The best game of all time? It’s hard to argue with this assessment for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (OoT), a landmark 3D action-adventure game that launched on the Nintendo 64 in 1998. In it, the young hero Link finds a magical ocarina which is able to change the weather, transport him across distant lands, and even propel him through time to a post-apocalyptic world.

It’s not a one-way trip, thankfully, and much of the puzzle work in OoT is in traveling back and forth between time periods, using what you learn and obtain to progress in each setting. As ever, you’re fighting a great evil, battling monsters, gathering weapons and tools for your journey, and figuring out troublesome dungeons – but time travel is what elevates Ocarina of Time into a game of truly mythical proportions.

It's an oldie, but a goodie. You can find the game through Nintendo Switch Online, or on Nintendo DS systems.

5. Quantum Break

• Release date: April 5, 2016
• Platform: Xbox One, PC

Back in 2016 when Quantum Break released, it was the best-selling game published by Microsoft on the Xbox One. While it soon ceded that title to Sea of Thieves (who needs time travel when you have sea shanties?) it’s still a landmark game, and a fascinating experiment in interactive storytelling.

The main conceit of Quantum Break is its mix of gameplay with an interactive TV show that breaks up the story’s five acts, allowing you to make key decisions that affect the narrative for the rest of the game.

Originally conceived as a sequel to Alan Wake, before pivoting into a new IP, Quantum Break is set in a world where a failed time travel experiment allows you to halt, freeze, accelerate, and generally manipulate time around you – inevitably used to ramp up combat as you take on hordes of soldiers and try to fix a fracture in time itself. Time ‘stutters’ can also freeze objects in your environment, creating obstacles or platforms that help and hinder your progress along the way.

4. Life is Strange

• Release date: January 20, 2015
• Platform: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PC, Android

While more recent Life is Strange games play around with the powers of empathy, or telekinesis, the original game is what started the franchise off with such aplomb – following the fortunes of a young girl who is able to rewind time.

Maxine ‘Max’ Caulfield discovers her time-manipulation ability when a classmate faces an unexpected danger – managing to undo the day’s events and keep them alive. As ever, time travel has unintended consequences, and while Max can aid or even save various people in her life, she finds the outcome isn’t always for the best in the long term. 

With a strikingly impressionistic art style, branching narratives, surprisingly high stakes for a high school story, and a good helping of teen angst, this episodic adventure is well worth a try.

3. Wanderer

• Release date: January 27, 2022
• Platform: PlayStation VR, SteamVR, Oculus

If you’re looking for a time-travel VR game, you’ve come to the right place. Wanderer is a first-person puzzle adventure that has you traveling back through time to prevent an apocalyptic present.

With a talking watch on your wrist, and the ability to jump to different places and periods, Wanderer lives up to its name, seeing you jettison across centuries of history and even to the moon. In each case, action is found in localized puzzles (escape rooms, essentially), some of which take imaginative back-and-forth travel to get the right objects for the right situation. 

You’ll get around 10 hours of play out of this one, along with some brain-bending puzzles that make the most of the VR medium (along with one of the best VR headsets )

• Release date: August 6, 2008
• Platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Switch, PC, Mac, Linux

Few games play so successfully with time as Braid, a 2008 indie platformer initially launched on Xbox 360 to great acclaim. The developer went on to create The Witness with the profits from this game.

You play Tim, who is trying to find and rescue a princess from some unspecified monster. So far, so Mario. However, things aren’t quite so simple as running and jumping on Goombas: Braid utilizes a number of different time-based mechanics, from a simple rewind (helpful after jumping and missing a ledge) to whole levels that move forward in time as you move right and backward as you move left.

It’s a mind-melting game in many ways, and you may find the story elusive at first, it being gradually pieced together by jigsaw pieces you collect throughout your journey – and blown open by its subversive conclusion. But a recurring theme is the idea of wanting to redo or undo the past, and you won’t find a game that needles this idea as effectively or imaginatively as Braid.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

• Release date: April 27, 2000
• Platform: Nintendo 64, GameCube, Wii, Wii U, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo DS

How could we list the best time travel games without Majora’s Mask? This follow-up to Ocarina of Time takes place in the same land of Hyrule as its predecessor just two months later, even re-using many in-game assets. The key difference is that an unhinged-looking moon going to crash into the Earth, obliterating everything – and you find yourself reliving the same three days over and over in an attempt to prevent the cataclysmic event from happening.

Those three days come to around an hour of actual gameplay time, meaning you play through a loop quite swiftly, but the real magic of Majora’s Mask is in how it expands on the time-warping magic of OoT. Here you’ll use the ocarina to jump back to the start of the loop, slow down the passage of time, or jump forward to a later day, navigating time like a puzzle dungeon in need of solving.

Earning widespread acclaim, Majora’s Mask has been rereleased several times throughout the years. For modern gamers, you can find the game through Nintendo Switch Online, or on Nintendo DS systems.

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Screen Rant

10 video games that let you use time as a weapon.

Video games have come up with a lot of creative ways to damage enemies, and some games even let players harness the power of time itself.

From bricks to foam fingers to shark guns, there has never been a shortage of clever or just plain odd weapons for video game fans to use on their in-game enemies. Likewise, games have also bestowed a variety of powers upon players, from electricity to telekinesis to time itself.

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Many games allow players to utilize the powers of time to solve puzzles, unravel a complicated narrative, or best of all, battle through foes like a superhero. Whether they are indie platforms or hardcore shooters, these games let players turn time itself into a weapon.

Quantum Break (2016)

Quantum Break is a game entirely based around the concept of time. From the game's combat to its puzzle-solving to its complicated plot, time is front and center throughout all of it. Players collect a wide variety of time-based powers to help them progress through the story, both for offense and exploration.

Time can be slowed or stopped entirely to traverse platforming sections or to battle enemies, as well as while quickly dodging enemy attacks or approaching them in a blink to deal damage. Time can also be used to locate hidden collectibles in-game, meaning time can be both a weapon or a helpful tool.

Superhot (2016)

The incredible  Superhot is easily one of the most unique and innovative shooters in recent years, most notably for its core mechanic of how in-game time works. Instead of playing like a regular action game, time only moves in  Superhot at the same speed that the player does.

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This ability allows players to pull off some incredible stunts, such as dodging projectiles, catching weapons out of the air, or slicing bullets clean in half with a sword. Players can play the game at whatever pace they need to complete the levels and feel like they are dodging bullets in the Matrix the whole time.

Titanfall 2 (2016)

The fantastic  Titanfall 2 is considered by many to be one of the best first-person shooters of all time , mostly due to its unrivaled gameplay. One of the game's most popular levels gives players control of a time travel device in addition to their regular weapons.

Throughout the levels, players can jump back in forth in time at will and must finish tasks in both the past and present to complete the level. The layout of both time periods is nearly identical, making for a seamless transition as players traverse the level and fight through enemies. The section has gone down as one of the most well-received missions of recent years.

Braid (2008)

Braid is a unique puzzle-platformer that received high praise for its clever implementation of its time travel mechanics. Players can reverse or rewind time at any point to solve the game's challenges, and each new world adds even more elements.

One world features objects that are not affected by time travel, one moves time forward or backward depending on which direction the player moves, and one centers around a magic ring that slows time further the closer objects get to it. Time has multiple uses in  Braid , each one more interesting than the last.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004)

Metal Gear Solid 3 does not give players any kind of time-based powers, nor does time travel even feature in its plot, but it still has one of the funniest and most iconic weaponizations of time in any game. During the campaign, players will come up against The End, a legendary and ancient sniper.

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The fight is tense and difficult, but it has a famous exploit that has gone down in gaming history. If players wait long enough or set their console's clock far enough ahead, then The End will actually die of old age before the player can take the final shot. It may not be a flashy power, but in this fight, time can be the strongest weapon.

Timeshift (2007)

Timeshift is another first-person shooter that features time manipulation as its central gameplay gimmick. Much like  Quantum Break , players are given a variety of time-based powers that are used to solve in-game puzzles and combat enemies.

The main abilities in the game are to slow down time and stop it altogether, and both must be used at certain times in the game to progress. Slowing time also allows players to dodge bullets, close in or flank enemies, and even steal their weapons from them.  Timeshift  has fallen under the radar, but it still has many loyal fans.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003)

The  Prince of Persia series is a long-running franchise that has gone through multiple studios and has been adapted to film, toys, and a questionably cast movie.  The Sands of Time is widely considered to be one of the best entries into the franchise, even being the basis for the film adaptation.

The game centers around the titular prince as he finds a dagger that allows him to manipulate the flow of time. The dagger allows the prince to stop and slow time, freeze enemies, and reverse time if he dies. The game even went on to inspire the gameplay and time travel mechanics of the  Assassin's Creed  series that came after it, and it has an anticipated remake seemingly coming soon .

Singularity (2010)

Singularity  is an underrated first-person shooter  that differentiates itself from the rest by giving players the Time Manipulation Device in addition to their large weapon arsenal. The TMD gives players a host of time-related powers.

The device can be used to travel between the two time periods of the game's plot, age or de-age various objects to solve puzzles, and do the same to unfortunate enemies that might cross its path. Enemies can be rapidly aged into dust or de-aged into a grotesque primordial creature. It may not be subtle, but it sure is fun.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)

The Legend of Zelda   is easily one of the greatest video game franchises of all time , and  Ocarina of Time is one of the best games in the series, as well as one of the best games ever made. The game takes place over two separate time periods, and time is at the center of its plot.

Using the titular ocarina and the Master Sword, players can change between young Link and his adult self. Each one has unique abilities that are needed to progress through certain areas of the game. While time is not specifically used in combat, it is essential to progressing through the game. Though many new titles have entered the franchise over the years, the game has still weathered the test of time.

TimeSplitters Series (2000-2005)

A cult classic and an absolute gem, the  TimeSplitters series is a criminally overlooked but beloved action series. The game puts players in the shoes of Sergeant Cortez as he battles the evil Timesplitter aliens across multiple time periods.

Each game features levels through various points in history, from Victorian England to the Old West to the distant future, and hosts a variety of weaponry for each. The third game,  Future Perfect , even featured a genius mechanic, where players would play through the same section multiple times as different versions of Cortez. The game is clever, hilarious, and a blast. If gamers haven't played it,  TimeSplitters is well worth their time.

NEXT: 10 Most Underrated Licensed Video Games You Should Try Today

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The Best First-Person Shooter Campaigns

Halo, Half-Life, Titanfall, and many more!

By Gabe Gurwin on July 26, 2022 at 6:00AM PDT

The first-person shooter barely existed before the early '90s. It was an oddity in an industry dominated by platforming and role-playing games, and no one could have predicted just how much things were about to change. From Wolfenstein 3D to newer games like Deathloop, first-person shooters have seen enormous success, and for many of them, that comes down to a great single-player campaign. Sure, multiplayer is great too, but playing through a story through the eyes of a badass shotgun-wielding hero is tough to beat.

There have been a lot of great first-person shooter campaigns over the years, but only a select few rose to the top. These, in no particular order, are the best FPS campaigns of all time.

Picking just one Halo campaign to include on this list? Were it so easy… but Halo 2 remains a masterpiece close to two decades after it released. That's astounding when you consider that a huge chunk of the game had to be cut in order to get it out by the end of 2004, leading to a cliffhanger ending that became a running joke--of course, the sequel is available now, making it significantly less frustrating.

Halo 2 succeeds the way almost all great FPS campaigns do: subverting expectations. Just like how Halo: Combat Evolved made a sudden pivot to the Flood, turning into something of a horror game in the process, Halo 2 made an even bigger change by introducing the Arbiter as a playable character. A huge portion of the game is spent playing as this Covenant outcast, and the game's exploration of the aliens' religious zealotry puts the war in an entirely new context.

Doom (2016)

It seemed like a hopeless task to reboot the Doom series, which had been dormant for more than a decade and had been usurped in popularity by gray-and-brown military shooters. But that's exactly what id Software did, reviving Doomguy from his long slumber for one of the best first-person shooter campaigns of all time. Showing an active disregard for nitty-gritty story details (our hero literally punches computers rather than listen to long-winded explanations) the game tasks you with ripping and tearing every demon you come across. And you are a very good listener.

What makes Doom so effective is that, just like the 1993 original, it doesn't want you to hide behind walls and fire a shot every now and then. Instead, via a mix of powerful melee finishing moves and different ammunition types, you're encouraged to sprint all over the map as you blast the Hellspawn standing in your way. It's something Doom Eternal also did a few years later, though that game's increased focus on lore may not be everyone's cup of demon blood.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

Another first-person shooter franchise previously developed (but not created) by id Software, Wolfenstein was handed off to Machine Games following the lackluster 2009 game simply titled Wolfenstein. Machine Games didn't outright reboot the series, but it transformed it so radically that you can basically consider Wolfenstein: The New Order to be a fresh start. Set in an alternate history where Nazi Germany has won WW2 and is in control of much of the world by the 1960s, the game tasks BJ Blazkowicz and a ragtag gang of resistance fighters with killing as many fascist monsters as possible.

But that isn't what made The New Order so revolutionary. The reason its campaign worked was the quiet and character-building moments in between all that carnage and violence. BJ finally feels like a real person, balancing his desire to rid the world of all Nazis with his caring, soft-spoken attitude toward good people. Not everyone can have a happy ending or live to see a beautiful day , but the heroes among us work to make sure most of us can. An excellent sequel followed, but it was The New Order's touching final moments that cemented it on our list.

Part first-person shooter and part puzzle game, Superhot is one of the most creative games released in the last decade, and that extends to both the gameplay and the narrative structure in its campaign. In each level, time only moves when you move, enabling you to think through seemingly impossible combat situations and handle them with John Wick finesse. Grab a baseball bat, throw it at an enemy so he drops his gun, grab that gun, duck, and then fire it at a target across the room. In standard shooters, doing that is practically unfathomable, as only one bullet kills you here, but Superhot isn't a standard shooter.

Superhot would probably get a spot on our list from that action alone, but Superhot Team didn't stop there. A bizarre cyberspace story told through an IRC-like chat between several hackers drives the game forward, and it's just as interesting as blasting seven baddies before they can react. If the original isn't enough, a completely separate game called Superhot VR is available, as is the standalone expansion Superhot: Mind Control Delete.

Half-Life: Alyx

Virtual reality games have come a long way since the super-short glorified tech demonstrations we were getting just a few years ago. Valve believed very strongly in the technology, bringing Half-Life out of hibernation for a prequel game. Half-Life: Alyx is a full-fledged Half-Life game focusing on Alyx Vance, taking place between Half-Life and Half-Life 2.

Its world-building is as excellent as you'd expect from the Half-Life series, but especially with a high-end VR device like the Valve Index, it offers interactivity and immersion beyond what almost any other game has before. Despite its limited potential audience because of the PC requirement, those who have played Half-Life: Alyx are almost universally positive on it, and it managed to take home GameSpot's Game of the Year award for 2020 as a result.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)

The Call of Duty series had been gaining steam by 2007, with Call of Duty 2 in particular being a must-have game on Xbox 360. No one could have predicted how enormous it would get, however, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is the primary reason. The game's campaign mode featured a mix of all-out action and carefully paced stealth missions, with memorable characters like the mustached Captain John Price and central villain Imran Zakhaev.

There isn't a bad mission in the Modern Warfare campaign, but one stands above the rest: "All Ghillied Up." Primarily designed by Mohammad Alavi, the stealth sniping mission is a masterwork in atmosphere and "less is more" game design. Many attempts have been made to top it in the Call of Duty series over the years, but none have ever managed to do so. And at this distance, they'd also have to take the Coriolis effect into account.

Titanfall 2

Titanfall was one of the biggest early games for the Xbox One, and its mix of brilliantly smooth on-foot shooting and mech action was novel and exciting. But rather than include a real campaign mode, it attempted to tell a story using a series of multiplayer matches… to mixed results. It was obvious that with a real single-player campaign, this was a universe Respawn Entertainment could turn into something very special, and that's exactly what happened with Titanfall 2.

Somehow, despite giving players so much freedom in multiplayer, the Titanfall 2 campaign manages to keep things focused without feeling restrictive. It delivers emotional and funny story beats between its human and robotic protagonists, it has all the big explosion-heavy moments we expect from a AAA blockbuster game, and it features some surprisingly great platforming sections. Its greatest moment comes during the level "Effect and Cause," which uses creative time-travel mechanics to make morphing environments.

A "grown-up" shooter in an era when big-budget games weren't often tackling particularly complex issues, BioShock remains an absolute classic for its stunning Rapture setting as well as its excellent character work. Yes, you still play as a basically empty vessel, at least until you learn a few bombshell secrets, but it's everything happening around you that makes BioShock so masterful. Andrew Ryan (whose name is a very unsubtle take on Ayn Rand) created what was meant to be an Objectivist paradise, but it has turned into quite the opposite.

The combat itself features some neat twists in the form of Plasmids, which let you perform superhuman abilities while still firing a weapon. But BioShock isn't a game you play for the combat, and it's perfectly fine to turn that difficulty setting down if you want to get more engrossed in the world and the story.

Metroid Prime

The Metroid Prime series is a well-established classic at this point, with fans eagerly awaiting more news on the fourth game, but there was a time when it seemed like an oddity. How could you take a side-scrolling action-platformer and turn it into a first-person shooter? Was Nintendo just caving to the wider genre trends in the early 2000s to boost GameCube sales?

Of course not, because Nintendo has never really shown much interest in following the leader. Retro Studios' Metroid Prime may have switched to a first-person view, but it was still a Metroid game through and through, complete with all the exploration and discovery fans expected. It just happened to have excellent first-person combat on top of that, delivering one of Samus Aran's best adventures and yet another excellent 2D-to-3D transition for Nintendo franchises.

Metro Exodus

Metro Exodus is a wonderful single-player first-person shooter because developer 4A Games showed restraint in its world design. Rather than follow a mostly linear path like Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light, the studio set Metro Exodus in several open-ended environments with certain optional objectives and secrets to discover. It did not, however, make the game a full open world, allowing for the story to keep its pacing and the focus to stay squarely on Artyom and his band of survivors' journey through a decaying Russia.

Metro Exodus features a great mix of underground and above-ground exploration, often culminating in battles that you can just barely win with your rickety arsenal. It feels like the perfect evolution of the Metro formula, and one that cements 4A Games' place as one of the best narrative-driven shooter studios in the world.

There's an argument to be made for Far Cry 2 being included here given that Ubisoft has done the Far Cry 3 formula countless times since its release, but it's hard to deny just how good Far Cry 3's single-player story is. In what looks to be a tropical paradise, a group of privileged rich kids soon find themselves on the run from local crime lords, including the iconic Vaas Montenegro. His appearances, which are infrequent enough to keep him from overstaying his welcome, include tons of quotable lines and a knockout performance by Michael Mando.

Even without Vaas, however, Far Cry 3 remains a fantastic game because nothing ever feels like busywork. Even collecting animal skins for a new pouch is fun because bow hunting is a blast, and the story missions feature lots of big setpieces and a ripping soundtrack.

Despite feeling like a direct successor to Dishonored, which isn't really a first-person shooter despite having a gun, Deathloop fits much more squarely in the FPS category. With an arsenal of powerful sci-fi weapons, including some that transform for better tactical opportunities, Arkane Lyon's game encourages creativity in its shooting as much as it does in traversal and distracting enemies.

Deathloop lets you try nearly any combination of weaponry you want, and you'll likely try a whole bunch of them because of the game's structure--if you die, you're sent back to the beginning of the multi-day time loop and must figure out a new strategy to make it further. It doesn't feel repetitive, however, as you are almost never doing the same thing twice and eventually see a well-designed plan all come to fruition in gloriously deadly fashion.

Admittedly, this is a weird choice, but if you've played Crysis 2's campaign, perhaps you'll understand. Despite going for a less-open structure than the first game, Crysis 2 still manages to feel like a big, violent sandbox. There are almost always multiple ways to approach encounters, with the powered exosuit you wear offering stealth abilities as well as shock-and-awe power.

And for a series not known for particularly strong writing, Crysis 2 manages to offer a few twists throughout its short-but-sweet campaign runtime that each come at the perfect time. Crysis 2 certainly didn't redefine the first-person shooter campaign like some other games on our list, but it's a damn good example of how to do one well.

It's really, really hard to balance an action-packed FPS game with horror, because the danger of running out of resources and being swarmed by monsters is at the heart of so many horror games. FEAR, short for First Encounter Assault Recon, sees a team of elite operators enter a facility where a mysterious force has already murdered a previous response unit. It turns out that you can still make a situation seem scary when you load your characters to the gills with weapons if you show what happened to a previous squad who had the same gear.

What makes FEAR effective, aside from some cool slow-motion abilities and its creepy atmosphere, is that it can catch you off-guard with how weird it is. Sure, you're playing as a special operator with a bunch of guns, but this is not another corridor military shooter.

An early pioneering game in the immersive sim genre. Deus Ex is a first-person shooter that doesn't need to be a first-person shooter. Its vision of the cyberpunk future is grim, but just because you have access to guns doesn't mean that is always the best way to handle a situation. Talking it out or getting more creative can cause less collateral damage, but its emphasis on player choice means talking with your bullets is an option, too.

You can see Deus Ex's influence in numerous newer games, and not just literal successors like Human Revolution and Mankind Divided. In most of these games, it's really hard to not just go in guns blazing when things seem like they'll take longer the "smart" way, and with the huge number of weapons to choose from in the original Deus Ex, it's no exception.

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Den of Geek

30 Best First-Person Shooter Games Ever Made

The best first-person shooter games ever gave us a new perspective on what video games could be.

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Game genres go in and out of fashion all the time, but for over 30 years, first-person shooters have been one of the industry’s most reliable sources for blockbuster experiences that often help dictate the future of the medium. 

There’s no one element that makes FPS games so brilliant, and that is, ironically enough, exactly what makes them brilliant. The history of the genre is written by developers who used a certain point of view and a gun or two as the basis for a variety of experiences that continue to surprise us even after we told ourselves that we’ve seen it all. 

Those are the games we’re here to celebrate today. The best first-person shooters ever may have inspired each other, but each ultimately brings something special to the table that helps it stand out among some considerable competition. Many offer something different, but the one thing that most share is the feeling you get just from hearing their names. 

Before we dive into the list, here are a few notes about the criteria used to make these selections. 

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– Defining a first-person shooter can be tricky. An FPS must obviously have a first-person perspective and shooting, but when in doubt, we looked closely at the “shooter” part of the equation. The more a game emphasized shooting/combat as a core part of the experience, the more likely it was to be considered part of the genre. 

– How enjoyable (for whatever reason) an FPS game is ultimately determined by whether it was selected for this list and where it was ranked, but innovation, historical significance, and longevity were all used as prominent “X-factors” to determine rankings

– Single-player only and multiplayer-only FPS games were not necessarily faulted for lacking either mode. However, special consideration was given to games that did both well. 

*This list has since been updated to include entries 26-30 .

30. Rainbow Six: Vegas 2

Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 is certainly more action-focused than the early games in the Rainbow Six franchise. Yet, in some ways, I feel like Vegas 2 ‘s enhanced accessibility (relatively speaking) allows it to capture the “fantasy” of the Tom Clancy experience better than any other Rainbow Six title.

Vegas 2 features the incredible level design, wonderful visuals, and fascinating blend of team-based tactics and pulse-pounding action that made the previous game such a surprisingly refreshing take on the franchise. Like the best sequels, though, Vegas 2 just does everything a little bit better. It also features the best version of Terrorist Hunt: one of the greatest co-op modes in FPS history.

29. F.E.A.R.

First-person horror games have become far more common over the last decade or so. At the time of F.E.A.R. ‘s 2005 release, though, the idea of combining a first-person shooter and a horror title felt significantly more novel. Truth be told, F.E.A.R. still feels pretty novel to this day.

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By emphasizing first-person shooter elements more than most modern first-person horror games do, F.E.A.R. offers a pure action experience that just so happens to occasionally dive into more supernatural waters. F.E.A.R. ‘s blend of revolutionary enemy A.I. (which is surprisingly good to this day) and expertly implemented scares makes it one of the more intense titles on this list.

28. TimeSplitters: Future Perfect

The TimeSplitters franchise is a lost gem of a series, and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect is the final (and best) entry.

Each level in TimeSplitters: Future Perfect takes players on a journey through different time periods. While the story only occasionally follows the key rules of time travel, the characters are certainly memorable (and often just plain hilarious). However, the campaign is only half the journey. TimeSplitters: Future Perfect is also packed with optional challenge levels that will test your FPS skills, sometimes to the point of wanting to pull out your hair in frustration. 

27. Serious Sam: The First Encounter

Some FPS games spice up the genre formula with RPG mechanics, random loot, and explorable worlds. Serious Sam: The First Encounter doesn’t need any of those things. The game makes do with just a truckload of guns and enough eclectic alien enemies to invade a small nation, and that’s more than enough.

Serious Sam is a tough-yet-fair FPS designed to keep players pressing down the trigger for as long as possible. The game leans on its roster of enemies, bombastic personality, and head-banging soundtrack to entertain action fans everywhere. Every level feels daunting, which makes every success feel earned. This game comes in two versions: Serious Sam Classic and Serious Sam HD . Aside from the higher graphical fidelity and system requirements, they are essentially the same experience.

An often-forgotten part of Quake ‘s legacy is the fact that this game’s troubled development essentially broke apart the id Software team that basically created the FPS genre as we know it. Before they went their separate ways, though, that team kicked down the door and showed everyone the true power of that emerging form of game design.

Quake was widely praised at the time of its release for being an often-better version of Doom , though we now know it is so much more than that. The game’s exceptional multiplayer modes introduced millions to the joy of online play, while its haunting single-player campaign offered a tantalizing glimpse at the kind of campaigns this genre would eventually grow to offer. Doom may have paved the way, but Quake showed a better path forward.

25. Superhot

Superhot is one part puzzle game, one part FPS, and one part cinematic gunfight simulator. This unique shooter is built around the ability to slow down time by standing still. Taking a moment to survey the situation is the key to victory, but only speed will save you in this impossibly stylish and devilishly difficult game. 

Definitely play Superhot in VR if you ever get the chance to do so, but there’s no bad way to play one of the most creative and engaging FPS games ever made as well as one of gaming’s most potent shots of pure adrenaline. 

2018’s DUSK may be a tribute to several genre classics that came before it, but the way that this game so perfectly recreates the feeling of playing those games rather than how so many of them actually play today strangely elevates it above many of those FPS pioneers.

Even people who usually don’t like the “find the key, labyrinth levels, blistering pace” style of FPS game that DUSK pays homage to often find themselves hopelessly addicted to this game’s airtight mechanics, exceptional pacing, and how it reminds us that, above all else, game are meant to be fun. 

23. Metro 2033

Metro 2033 owes a debt to some games that came before (including S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl , which many members of the Metro 2033 team worked on), but when it comes to this style of atmospheric FPS game, it may still be the very best.

Metro 2033 embraced its survival horror concepts in a way that even the incredible entries into this series that followed were never quite able to recreate. The atmosphere in this game is so thick and intimidating that it can make you feel like your gasping for air as you play it, which makes it that much more impressive that you’ll feel consistently compelled to push forward no matter how daunting things become.

22. Borderlands 2

While I feel like the original Borderlands is honestly kind of underrated in the grand scheme of the franchise, it’s hard to deny that Borderlands 2 is when this series really found its footing and remains the game the Borderlands franchise is chasing to this day .

Not everyone was a fan of this game’s humor, but that desire to go this far over the top is arguably the reason why Borderlands 2 so confidently combined the best aspects of co-op games, looter RPGs, and first-person shooters. From its base campaign to its incredible DLC, this is still one of the best FPS adventures you can share with friends.

21. Far Cry 2

As the Far Cry series (and the FPS genre) continues to “evolve,” it’s easier than ever to appreciate Far Cry 2 and how so many of the things that this game was initially criticized for now feel like a breath of fresh air.  

Far Cry 2 is a hostile game that is constantly trying to kill your through disease, often uncontrollable fires, a lack of resources, aggressive enemies, and a lingering bleakness that only grows more powerful as you begin to understand its story and world. It’s an oppressive game that forces you to think on your feet in ways that few other FPS, open-world, or survival games have ever equaled. I’d say I miss this Ubisoft , but honestly, this was a bold and brilliant experiment even for that studio’s glory days.

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20. Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus

I think the best compliment you can pay Wolfenstein 2 is to say that Wolfenstein: The New Order exceeded nearly every expectation possible and not even that game could prepare us for the places this sequel would go. 

Wolfenstein 2 is the greatest tribute to excess this side of a cocaine party on ‘80s Wall Street . Just when you think you’ve seen the most shocking thing this game will do, it finds a way to up the ante time and time again. It certainly doesn’t hurt that it also improves the surprisingly tight action mechanics that helped make its predecessor such a sleeper hit. 

19. Team Fortress 2

It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say that nobody thought Team Fortress 2 was going to be a success. Actually, many people at the time expected it to be a very good game. Yet, few were prepared for just how engaging TF 2 would be and how its growth would change the video game industry forever.

Look beyond the ways TF 2 controversially moved us towards the “games as a service” era, though, and you’ll find that it’s simply one of the most mechanically enjoyably multiplayer FPS games ever made as well as a testament to the ways that personality can turn an already great game into something magical.

What separates SWAT 4 from so many incredible tactical FPS games that came before and after? If I had to attribute this game’s brilliance to any one thing, it would have to be “level design.”

SWAT 4 uses its somewhat unusual premise (compared to other tactical FPS games) as the basis for some truly creative missions that somehow make seemingly common environments more compelling than even some of the most elaborate fantasy worlds. From infiltrating a cult leader’s camp to descending into the basement of a serial killer’s home, SWAT 4 constantly finds new ways to use its incredible tactical gameplay to surprise you.

17. The Operative: No One Lives Forever

It’s true that No One Lives Forever ’s seemingly permanent residence in licensing Hell has only amplified the voices of those who call this 2000 FPS game one of the best ever made, but that doesn’t mean that Monolith’s spy shooter doesn’t deserve all the praise it gets.

The thing that impresses me most about NOLF all these years later is that it’s actually a comedy game. While being a genuinely funny comedy game is usually an accomplishment in and of itself, NOLF goes one step further by also offering one of the most creative and engaging FPS campaigns ever crafted. This game holds up favorably under even the most discerning design analysis, but its most lasting legacy is the smile it puts on your face.

16. GoldenEye 007

Perfect Dark may technically be the better game , but if innovation, historical context, and fond memories are all tie-breaking “X” factors, then GoldenEye 007 absolutely deserves a spot on any list of the best FPS games.

A million words have rightfully been written about what GoldenEye did for console FPS games, but I don’t know if it’s possible to praise this game enough for the ways it celebrated the unique joy of local multiplayer or the surprising strength of its single-player campaign. Some at the time may have written GoldenEye off as a lesser version of the best PC FPS games, but the years have been kind to the purity of this experience.

15. Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Bad Company 2 ’s multiplayer is chaotic, creative, memorable, addictive, and all of the other things you associate with the Battlefield series’ legendary multiplayer at its very best. What separates this game from the other amazing entries in this franchise, though, is the strength of its single-player campaign.

Bad Company 2 ’s loving embrace of destructible environments is perfectly complemented by an often dark sense of humor that you rarely see in military shooters. It’s hardly a surprise that some Battlefield fans are still chasing the high they got from playing this game for the first time.

14. Halo 3 

Halo 2 was an incredible game that changed the console FPS landscape forever, but it was also a game plagued by development issues that led to an unforgivable crunch period, a campaign that fell well short of its potential, and some notable balance problems. Your fond memories of that game are well-deserved, but when it comes down to it, Halo 3 offers a more complete experience.

Halo 3 ’s incredible multiplayer is arguably the perfect version of Halo ‘s legendary multiplayer and the kind of competitive game that’s easy to miss at a time when there are so few titles that try to do what it did. This brilliant sequel’s campaign also felt like a proper send-off for the series (even if it ultimately proved not to be), while Halo 3 ’s Forge mode brought the creativity and longevity of the PC mod scene to Xbox 360 gamers everywhere. 

13. Titanfall 2

Before you decide to be too hard on those who can’t stop talking about Titanfall 2 and refuse to stop begging for a proper sequel, consider that Titanfall 2 may just be one of the most complete FPS games ever made.

Titanfall 2 ’s multiplayer arguably realizes the considerable potential of its predecessor, but it’s Titanfall 2 ’s campaign that often inspires fans to scream at you to drop everything and play this game. Few games from even the golden age of FPS campaigns rival the ambition and creativity of Titanfall 2 ’s narrative, and fewer still have nearly as much heart.

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12. BioShock

I’ll leave the “Is BioShock a first-person shooter?” debate up to you and instead focus on how BioShock used the core concepts of a first-person shooter to elevate the art of video game narratives through the often-overlooked benefits of environmental storytelling.

BioShock ’s story and world explore the dark underbelly of the entire first-person shooter concept. Are our actions our own, or have we been forced into the perspective of a largely helpless instrument? BioShock may have followed in some pretty big genre footsteps, but that strangely makes it all the more impressive that it’s often seen as the definitive experience in this particular subgenre.

11. Quake 3 Arena

Many who doubted that Quake 3 could abandon the single-player campaigns of its predecessors and sell itself based solely on the appeal of its multiplayer deathmatch modes were typically silenced the moment they played the game and experienced its exhilarating speed.

Quake 3 emphasizes speed in a way that few games before and fewer since ever dared to. Slowing down is often a death sentence, but what’s really impressive about this shooter all these years later is the surprising depth of its seemingly arcade-like gameplay and how it challenges you to master a series of mechanics that are often tragically underutilized in modern multiplayer gaming.

10. Unreal Tournament

It’s still incredible to think that Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 were released just weeks apart, and it’s even more incredible to think that Unreal Tournament arguably beat Quake 3 at what some considered to be its own game.

Putting aside that debate for the moment, let’s just come together to praise Unreal Tournament for its mechanics, visuals, modes, weapons, and, most importantly, arguably all-time great multiplayer map design. This is simply as satisfying and intense as PC multiplayer shooters get.

9. Doom (2016)

It’s easy to forget now, but there was a time when most people were expecting Doom to be one of 2016’s great disappointments. Not only was the Doom franchise on the ropes at that time, but this game’s rather disappointing multiplayer beta left some fearing the worst

Instead, Doom turned out to be arguably the best first-person shooter of its era . Even if you were an optimist who predicted the ways Doom would so successfully harken back to the breakneck pace of the best games in this series, you probably couldn’t have guessed the ways that this game’s amazing soundtrack, humor, and genuinely incredible storytelling would effectively combine the best of retro and modern FPS games while raising the bar for the genre.

8. Call of Duty

With all due respect to the Medal of Honor franchise and its many great installments and lasting innovations, it’s a testament to the quality of Call of Duty that it offered such a definitive WW2 shooter experience that you now have to remind people that Medal of Honor was even a thing. 

The Call of Duty team went for broke with this one and somehow found a way to turn the most intense moments in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault into an entire FPS campaign. Call of Duty challenged every perceived technical limit of its era and boasts level/campaign design that you could argue has never been bested.

7. Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead wasn’t the first game of its kind, but the co-op zombie shooter tapped into something that many of us never knew we wanted. Its blend of almost arcade-like action, incredible level design, cinematic presentation, and near-perfect difficulty made it an instant addiction for millions. 

Well, Left 4 Dead 2 was all of that and more. It’s certainly the best game of its kind, but in the grand history of FPS games, the thing that really sets Left 4 Dead 2 apart is how easy it is to return to it all these years later and how the desire to play this one with friends just never seems to go away.

6. Counter-Strike

Released at a time when multiplayer FPS games were supposed to be as fast as possible, Counter-Strike bucked nearly every genre trend by forcing players to embrace a methodical form of gameplay where just a couple of bullets could determine a game. It was the kind of bold experiment that could only have come from outside the industry, and it was absolutely brilliant. 

Counter-Strike is arguably the greatest competitive FPS game ever made. Even in its early stages, it was an intelligently balanced multiplayer experience that required a unique set of skills. Remarkably, though, learning the ropes in this game rarely felt like a chore. It’s one of the most important FPS games ever, and it’s certainly one of the best.

 5. Halo: Combat Evolved

It’s a shame that the “Combat Evolved” part of Halo ’s full name is so often overlooked as that’s really the thing that separated this legendary shooter from nearly every FPS game at the time. The methods you use to battle Halo ’s Covenant enemies may seem standard now, but the way this title forced you to carefully consider your combat tactics against truly intelligent A.I. opponents really did help change everything.

Then again, how can you fault anyone for mostly remembering Halo for its multiplayer? 16-player LAN matches may seem humble now, but the fact is that even the biggest online multiplayer games can’t quite match the feeling of experiencing Halo ‘s local multiplayer at its biggest and boldest.

4. Half-Life

Nobody was really looking for a game like Half-Life in 1998. Honestly, few people at that time could have envisioned such a thing. In an era where FPS games were defined by their heavy metal style, B-movie campaigns, and deathmatch multiplayer, the idea of a first-person shooter with a story to tell and a world to sell that wasn’t constantly sacrificing action for narrative seemed impossible.

Do you know what’s really impressive, though? Half-Life didn’t just use the FPS format to tell an incredible story: it did it in a way that redefined what we talk about when we talk about immersion in games. Few developers to this day are able to replicate that style of storytelling , and even if they were, fewer still would ever be able to innovate the FPS genre quite the same way that Half-Life did.

The often-cited “godfather” of FPS games really needs no introduction. There’s a reason why first-person shooters were called “ Doom clones” for years after this game’s release.

What’s truly amazing, though, is that Doom did things in 1993 that modern game developers still struggle to recreate. Even an unmodded version of Doom still has the ability to grab you by the throat and not let you go until you’ve seen the end of its brutal campaign. Doom was certainly the first in a lot of ways, but the thing that matters most may just be the ways it’s still the best.

2. Half-Life 2

It’s been said that part of the reason why Valve has hesitated to finish Half-Life 3 is that they reached a point where they felt like the expectations for the game had become unrealistic and detrimental. Well, you could argue that Half-Life 2 was released under similar circumstances. How do you make a sequel to one of the greatest, most innovative, and beloved PC games of all time? How would that game ever meet expectations?

Well, Half-Life 2 didn’t meet expectations: it exceeded them. Half-Life 2 didn’t so much blaze a path forward for the genre as it leaped into the air and landed somewhere other developers couldn’t quite see but desperately wanted to be. This is a nearly perfect single-player game that does things with pacing and level design that honestly feel even more refreshing all these years later given how many studios have strayed from the light of this title’s brilliance.

1. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

There are two eras of Call of Duty games, and each of them represents two distinct eras of FPS design. The first era (as represented by the first few Call of Duty games) was more about single-player campaigns and complimentary multiplayer options. The second era of the franchise focused on evolving a style of multiplayer that would turn this series into a global phenomenon.

Well, Call of Duty 4 is the game that bridges those two eras and somehow manages to feature arguably the best single-player campaign in FPS history and some of the best multiplayer in FPS history.

Even at a time when we were spoiled by incredible Call of Duty campaigns, Modern Warfare stunned people with its shocking story and brilliant missions (highlighted by the legendary “All Ghillied Up”). We didn’t know it at the time, but the game’s multiplayer would also go on to change competitive FPS titles forever and help turn this franchise into a multi-billion-dollar household name.

This is a complete FPS package that represents nearly everything we’ve ever wanted from this genre. It’s a true triumph that delivers in terms of multiplayer and single-player in a way that few games since have ever dreamed of attempting to replicate.

The history of the first-person shooter

From Maze Wars to Overwatch, the FPS has enjoyed decades of innovation.

This article was originally published in two parts across PC Gamer issue 309 and 310 . For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US .

Writers of videogame histories often think in terms of individuals and periods—great innovators and clear-cut ‘epochs’ in design, typically bookended by technological advances. Events or people who contradict those accounts have a tendency to get written out of the tale. According to one popular version of the medium’s evolution, the first-person shooter was formally established in 1992 with id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D, a lean, thuggish exploration of a texture-mapped Nazi citadel, and popularised in 1993 by heavy metal odyssey Doom, which sold a then-ludicrous million copies worldwide at release. The company’s later shooter, Quake, meanwhile, is often held up as the first ‘true’ 3D polygonal shooter.

Founded in 1991 by former employees of software company Softdisk, id’s contributions to what we now call the FPS is undoubtedly immense. Between them, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom brought a distinct tempo, savagery and bloodlust to first-person gaming, and programmer John Carmack’s engine technology would power many a landmark FPS in the decade following Doom’s release. But we shouldn’t view that contribution too narrowly, as simply one step along the road to a game such as Call of Duty: World War II. And nor should we neglect the games—before, during and after id’s breakthrough—that took many of the same concepts and techniques in different and equally valuable directions.

The beginning: Maze War, Spasism, WayOut

To think about the shooter’s origins is to think about labyrinths. Among the earliest pioneers of first-person videogaming is 1973’s Maze, a game cobbled together by high school students Greg Thompson, Steve Colley and Howard Palmer during a NASA work-study program, using Imlac PDS-1 and PDS-4 minicomputers. The three had been carrying out research into computational fluid dynamics for future spacecraft designs, an early show of what would become a problematic relationship between the commercial games business and the US military-industrial complex. Initially a single-plane, 16x32 tile wireframe environment for one player in which you’d turn by 90-degree increments, Maze grew to include shooting, support for a second player via serial cable, a corner-peeking functionality and indicators for which way the other player is facing. 

After completing his spell at NASA, Thompson took the game with him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With access to a more powerful mainframe, and the aid of David Lebling—who would go on to create the legendary text adventure Zork and found Infocom—he added eight-player support over the US defence department-run ARPANET, a map editor, projectile graphics, scoreboards, a spectator mode and ‘bots with dynamic difficulty’, all features that would resurface in mass-market shooters many years later. Maze War was very popular on campus—it used up so much computing resources that the MIT authorities created a ‘daemon’ program to find and shut down sessions. In one of its later forms, the maze extended along the vertical axis and players could fly, shoot and take cover in any direction.

For better and worse, first-person shooters have long seen service as military training simulators. In 1995, the US Army created its own Doom mod in a bid to cultivate such skills as ammunition discipline at a fraction of the expense of physical training, following budget cuts in the aftermath of the Cold War. Made publicly available after Doom II ’s release, the mod sees a fireteam consisting of a leader, two riflemen and a machine-gunner tackling a range of real-life scenarios, including hostage rescue. It also replaced the original’s demons with generic human aggressors. 

Marine Doom was never formally adopted as a training instrument, but paved the way for propaganda games such as the popular Unreal Engine shooter America’s Army.

If Maze War sounds like a fully-featured FPS in hindsight, it’s important to note that the category ‘first-person shooter’ is of much more recent inception—according to a 2014 study by the academic Carl Therrien, it only entered popular discussion around videogames in the late ’90s. Many studios, including id, preferred terms and slogans like ‘3-D adventure’, ‘virtual reality’ and ‘the feeling of being there’ when describing games that are played from a first-person viewpoint. Nor was the perspective exclusively, or even predominantly, associated with on-foot gunplay. There were racing games, such as Atari’s 8-bit arcade offering Night Rider, which treated the player to a dashboard view of a road made up of shifting white rectangles. There were cockpit simulators such as 1974’s Spasim (often granted dual honours with Maze War as the first-person shooter’s oldest ancestor), a 32-player space combat game in which unofficial approximations of Star Trek vessels wage war at a mighty one frame per second. 

There were dungeon-crawlers such as Richard Garriot’s Akalabeth in 1976, which combined a top-down world map with first-person dungeon segments featuring coloured wireframe graphics. Maze War spawned a number of sequels and imitators, attractively billed as ‘rat’s-eye view’ experiences by a 1981 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine. The first-person shooter genre as we understand it today arose from the artistic friction between these approaches, shaping and being shaped by them in turn. 

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Naturally, methodologies shifted as new technology became available. Among Maze War’s more intriguing descendants is Paul Allen Edelstein’s WayOut, released for the Atari 8-bit in 1982. It made use of a rendering technique known as ray casting, whereby a 3D environment is generated from a 2D layout by sending out beams from the player avatar’s eyeball and drawing a pixel where they intersect with an object’s coordinates. Where light in reality bounces off many surfaces before entering the eye, ray casting simulates a ray’s collision with an object only once. While incapable of nuanced effects such as refraction, it was also much less resource intensive than other 3D projection techniques, which allowed for faster performance on the hardware of the day. If WayOut was a potent demonstration of ray casting’s utility, it is also worth remembering for its eccentric, non-combat premise. You play a clown trapped in a maze with a spinning, sinister ‘Cleptangle’ that will steal your map and compass on contact. A wind blows through the level, its direction indicated by floating fireflies. This interferes with movement, but also helps you get your bearings should you lose your map.

Cockpit simulations were especially popular during the ’80s, beginning with Atari and Ed Rotberg’s arcade game Battlezone, a tank sim featuring wireframe vector graphics that came with a novel ‘periscope’ viewfinder (the US Army would later try, and fail, to convert the game into a Bradley tank training simulation). In 1987, Incentive Software released Driller: Space Station Oblivion—the first game to run on its proprietary Freescape engine, which allowed for complex 3D environments dotted with simple geometric objects. The game assigned a sizeable chunk of the display to your offworld rover’s dashboard, a fat slab of buttons and indicators. In part, the prevalence of cockpit games reflected the influence of Star Wars, with its lavishly realised starfighter dashboard displays. But it also arose from attempts to make often-unwieldy simulation technology more convincing by representing players at the helm of a lumbering vehicle. Among id’s subsequent achievements was to narrow the gap between the player’s body and that of the avatar, thus helping to open a space in which ‘first-person’ denotes not merely a perspective but a narrative in which the player is protagonist.

Into the '90s: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D

id’s career as a first-person developer began with Hovertank 3D in 1991. A cockpit sim brought to life with ray casting and featuring animated 2D sprites, it featured players searching for civilians to rescue and tentacular UFOs to blow up. It was followed by Catacomb 3-D—id’s first crack at a first-person character-led action game, with a visible avatar hand and portrait. Catacomb also featured texture maps, flat images attached to surfaces to create the illusion of cracked stone walls and dripping moss. In this respect, id had been strongly influenced by Blue Sky Productions’ breathtaking Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, often cited as the first ‘immersive simulation’, which offered 3D, texture-mapped environments featuring sloped surfaces, rudimentary real-time physics and the ability to look up and down.

Wolfenstein 3D and Doom—both developed after John Carmack glimpsed Ultima in action at a 1990 expo—can be considered combative responses to Ultima’s representation of the possibilities of first-person 3D, eschewing the latter’s more complex geometry and gigantic array of variables in favour of pace and immediacy. Though busier with ornaments than Catacomb 3-D’s levels, Wolfenstein’s environments are designed to run at speed—designer John Romero once planned to let players carry and hide bodies, but dropped the idea to avoid bogging players down. Where Ultima set out to make players feel like part of its world via deep, consistent systems and a wealth of lore, Wolfenstein dealt in simpler, visceral effects—the sag of your avatar’s body when you take a step forward, the gore spraying from the pixelated torso of a slain Nazi. If the game pushed violence and politically charged imagery to the fore—somewhat to the distress of its publisher, Apogee—it also harkened back to the maze games of previous decades, with secret rooms to discover behind sliding partitions.

While not especially entertaining, David A Smith’s 1987 Macintosh adventure The Colony was one of the earliest first-person games to support free real-time movement. Initially developed on a machine with only 128KB of RAM, the game casts you as a crash-landed pilot investigating an outpost infested by geometric aliens, some of which shrink to peculiar eyeball artefacts when blasted. The game featured a drivable forklift truck, teleporters, cigarettes that kill you instantly and a monolith chamber that can’t be escaped. While not widely embraced at launch—Orson Scott Card was among its detractors—The Colony stands today as an important precursor to immersive sims like Deus Ex and System Shock.

This emphasis on the avatar’s bodily presence would set the tone for many subsequent shooters—notably Call of Duty, with its blood spatter damage filter—as would id’s sense that player participation should take priority over narrative elements. When it came to Doom, there was disagreement between Carmack, Romero and id’s creative director Tom Hall over how much plot and backstory to weave into the game. Hall had planned something akin to Ultima, with large, naturalistic levels built around a hub area and a multitude of arcane props. “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie,” was John Carmack’s infamous rebuttal. “It’s expected to be there, but it’s not important.” Hall eventually resigned in 1993. In his absence, the team stripped out a number of more fanciful weapons, turned many plot items required for progression into generic keycards, and cleaned up certain environments to allow for speedier navigation. 

Loaded with taboo imagery, ultra-moddable thanks to id’s decision to store game data such as level assets separately from engine data as ‘WAD’ files, and equipped with four-player multiplayer to boot, Doom was a phenomenal success. Such was its impact that before ‘FPS’ became an accepted term, many in the development community used ‘Doom clone’ as shorthand for any first-person game involving gunplay. No game can claim to define a genre for long, however, and id’s work would attract plenty of imitators and rivals in the years to come. 

Four months before Doom’s arrival, a fledgling Chicago studio founded by Alex Seropian and Jason Jones released Pathways Into Darkness, a Wolfenstein homage with a pinch of Ultima-style item puzzling. It thrust players into the boots of a soldier fighting through a pyramid in order to nuke a sleeping god before it can bring about the apocalypse. One of the few Mac exclusives available at the time, Pathways was hailed for its colourful hand-drawn art and menacing atmosphere. It deserves mention today for the ability to commune with the ghosts of other explorers using special crystals and elusive keywords—an engaging, melancholy approach to textual backstory. The developer, Bungie, would build on this concept during work on two of the 21st century’s best-known FPS series, Halo and Destiny.

Before Halo and Destiny there was 1994’s Marathon, the series often billed as the Mac’s answer to Doom. A suspenseful sci-fi offering set aboard a hijacked colony ship, it was a more complex game than id’s offering—adding free look with the mouse and a range of terrain dynamics, such as low gravity and airless chambers. It was also a more convoluted work of fiction, which relied on players scouring its open-ended levels for narrative artefacts. In place of the souls of the slain, Marathon offered computer terminals through which you converse with various sentient AIs about the wider universe.

Its sheer brilliance aside, Doom’s pre-eminence during the ’90s owes much to id’s embrace of the modding community, with players able to create their own maps using the developer’s own editing tools.

The game’s reach was limited by its choice of platform, but it attracted a dedicated community thanks to its elusive narrative backdrop and infectious eight-player, ten-map multiplayer. 1995’s Marathon 2: Durandal added co-operative play while 1996’s Marathon Infinity introduced a ‘Forge’ level editor, two features that would become central to the studio’s projects. Just as significant, however, was Bungie’s work in the emerging real-time tactics genre. Conceived by Jason Jones in a bid to stand apart from id Software, the top-down Myth games equipped Bungie with a feel for how different unit types and variables might react together. This would yield fruit in the shape of Halo’s famous combat sandboxes. 

Its sheer brilliance aside, Doom’s pre-eminence during the ’90s owes much to id’s embrace of the modding community, with players able to create their own maps using the developer’s own editing tools (and thus, squeeze many hours of enjoyment out of the free shareware version). Fan concoctions ranged from Batman and Alien-themed conversions to trashy oddities like The Sky May Be, in which zombiemen moonwalk and the legendary BFG-9000 has a chance of conferring immortality on its target. Many up-and-coming designers cut their teeth on Doom mods, and other studios were eager to license it for commercial use. Among them was Raven Software, founded by Steve and Brian Raffel, which created the fantasy-themed shooters Shadowcaster, Hexen and Heretic using their own bespoke versions of John Carmack’s engine technology. The two companies were at one point based just down the road from each other, and formed an enduring bond—id would eventually hand Raven the keys to the Doom and Quake franchises. 

Raven’s games were eclipsed, however, by the noxious excess of 3D Realms’ Duke Nukem 3D, a celebration of B-movie tropes that occasionally resembles a postmodern satire, and occasionally the aimless, chauvinist doodlings of a 13-year-old boy. Duke Nukem 3D is an intensely antisocial game, its levels grimy parodies of real-world locales, such as movie theatres and stripclubs, guarded by porcine coppers and strewn with the corpses of cinema idols like Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker. While technically accomplished and formally inventive—it introduced jet packs, shrink rays, animated props such as arcade cabinets, physically impossible layouts and a protagonist who provides audible commentary throughout—the game is remembered today mostly for its jiggling softcore imagery. In years to come, shooter developers would spend as much time dispelling the notoriety Duke Nukem generated as they would profiting from his example.

Doom’s success also won the regard of franchise owners in other media. Maryland-based Bethesda—flush from the success of its eye-catchingly vast roleplaying effort, The Elder Scrolls: Arena—released a Terminator adaptation in 1995, endowed with lavish polygonal models. In hindsight, the game’s vast, cluttered wasteland feels almost like groundwork for the studio’s later first-person Fallout titles. In the same year, the venerable adventure game studio LucasArts shipped Dark Forces, the first Star Wars-themed FPS, inspired (and perhaps, annoyed) by the appearance of Death Star mods for Doom. LucasArts had designed a number of historical cockpit-based simulations during the late ’80s and early ’90s, but Dark Forces was a straight riff on id Software’s work. The developer’s impressive Jedi engine allowed for vertical looking, environments busy with ambient details such as ships landing on flight decks, a range of effects such as atmospheric haze, and the ability to stack chambers on top of one another.

Going 3D: Metal Head, Descent, Quake

By the mid-’90s, developers had begun to shift from so-called ‘pseudo-3D’ techniques such as ray casting to fully-polygonal worlds, capitalising on the spread of 3D hardware acceleration and the arrival of the first mass-market graphics processing units. Released for the Mega Drive’s 32X add-on in 1994, Sega’s lumbering Metal Head is often touted as the first ‘true’ 3D shooter. Pitching large, plausibly animated mechs against one another in texture-mapped urban environments, it was a handsome creation let down by repetitive missions. There was also Parallax Software’s Descent, released in the same year—an unlikely but gripping hybrid of flight sim and dungeon crawler with 360-degree movement. But the game now regarded as a byword for polygonal 3D blasting wasn’t, to begin with, a shooter at all. 

John Romero had intended Quake to be a hybrid of Sega AM2’s arcade title Virtua Fighter and a Western roleplaying fantasy. Conceived back in 1991 and named for a Dungeons & Dragons character, the game would have alternated between first-person exploration and thirdperson side-on brawling. Romero envisioned circling dragons, a hammer massive enough to send shockwaves through the earth, and events that trigger when players look in their direction, such as glowing eyes appearing in a cave mouth. By the time John Carmack neared completion of an ambitious 3D engine in 1995, however, other id Software employees were exhausted and reluctant to depart too drastically from the Doom formula. There was also tension between the two founders over Romero’s supposedly inconsistent work ethic and Carmack’s view that the studio’s engine technology took precedence over its games. Romero ultimately resigned himself to a reimagining of Doom in polygonal 3D—and resigned from id Software itself after finishing the game.

In 1996, bestselling Cold War fantasist Tom Clancy founded a studio, Red Storm Entertainment, in order to adapt his universe of global intrigue and high-tech espionage into videogames. The developer’s debut, Politika, an RTS based on the novel of the same name, was a modest hit. 1998’s Rainbow Six, however, was a phenomenon built around a simple formula: one shot, one kill. Where peers dealt in surreal landscapes and superhuman capabilities, Rainbow Six focused on real-world situations, team tactics and keeping your head down and out of harm’s way. Its impact can be traced both in how today’s shooters incorporate stealth and in the fetishising of ‘special operators’ in games, such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

As Big Robot’s Jim Rossignol has noted in a 2011 retrospective, something of this failure lingers in Quake as it stands. Though cut from the same coalface as Doom—it offered fast, brutal gunplay, levels made up of corridors and arenas, and a multitude of secret areas—the game’s aesthetic and fiction are curiously divided, at once crustily medieval and high tech. You can expect banks of computer monitors and teleporters, but also broadswords and monsters ripped from the pages of Lovecraft. In hindsight, it plays like a representation of the tipping point from avant-garde into profitable convention, the point at which the chimerical possibilities of 3D action solidified into the features expected of a modern first-person shooter. 

In at least one respect, though, Quake was transformative—it introduced a thrilling element of verticality, with players dashing through the air above opponents rather than simply strafing or corner-camping. This quality proved an asset in the emerging field of online multiplayer: by the late ’90s, Ethernet connections and modems had become ubiquitous and internet usage was rocketing. Quake’s multiplayer was initially designed for high bandwidth, low latency local area networks—it would check with a server before showing players the result of an action, which led to jerky performance online when there was a build-up of server requests. id swiftly released an update, titled QuakeWorld, which added client-side prediction. The result can be held up as the original esports shooter—software company Intergraph sponsored a US-wide tournament, Red Annihilation, in May 1997, which attracted around 2,000 participants. 

As with Doom, Quake’s modding tools made it an attractive platform for amateur developers—its community gave the world Team Fortress, which would later flower into a standalone shooter, along with early specimens of machinima, including an epic known as The Seal of Nehahra. Its greatest descendent, however, would prove to be a shooter from a developer founded by Microsoft alumni Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. 

Created using a modified version of the Quake engine, Valve Software’s 1998 epic Half-Life remains extraordinary for how it reconciles the abstractions of game design with narrative tactics redolent of a novel (the game’s tale of secret government research and alien invasion was, in fact, written by a novelist, Mike Laidlaw). Its achievement versus earlier shooters can be summed up as the creation of temporal unity: almost everything is experienced in real time from the lead character’s perspective, with no arbitrary level breaks. In place of cutscenes, Valve weaves its tale through in-game dialogue and scripted events such as enemies smashing through doors—a tactic that both gives the player some control over the tempo and avoids jerking you out of the world. The game also sells the impression of a larger, unseen universe not via gobbets of textual backstory, but through the detail, responsiveness and consistency of its environment. The intro sees Gordon Freeman riding a monorail through Black Mesa, gleaning information about the location and your character from PA announcements and the sight of other employees at work. Following a disastrous experiment, you’re asked to backtrack through the same areas, now fallen into chaos.

Half-Life created a blueprint many FPS campaign developers would adopt in the new millennium. In particular, its seamless, naturalistic design would guide studios looking to explore realistic settings, such as the ‘World War’ periods. But it also introduced a note of unreality in the shape of Gordon Freeman’s murky reflection, the besuited G-Man—a personification of the game designer who sits a little outside Half-Life’s fiction. Together with the all-seeing, omnipresent AI manipulators of Marathon and the acclaimed cyberpunk RPG System Shock, the G-Man betrays a genre becoming increasingly aware of itself, and eager to turn its own structural constraints into a source of drama.

A new millennium: Unreal, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty

One of the greatest influences on first-person shooters at the turn of the millennium wasn’t a game, but a film: Steven Spielberg’s World War 2 epic, Saving Private Ryan. The movie’s thunderous portrayal of the D-Day landings would find echoes decades later in videogames like Killzone and Titanfall. Spielberg himself also has a robust association with game development: he co-founded DreamWorks Interactive with Microsoft in 1995 to work on adaptations of movies like Small Soldiers. Seeking a way to teach younger people about the war after wrapping up production on Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg asked DWI to develop a shooter, Medal of Honor, for Sony’s trendy new PlayStation platform. 

Launched in 1999 to strong sales, the game was a watershed moment in several respects. On the one hand, its more earnest, grounded approach opened the genre up to players put off by the lurid sci-fi or pulp comic settings of games like Doom and Wolfenstein. On the other, it facilitated tense discussions about the right of videogame developers to depict such events, and the possibility that violent games spark violent behaviour. Medal of Honor released a few months after the Columbine massacre in Colorado, an atrocity that gave rise to a moral panic over videogame violence. Fearful of a backlash, DreamWorks Interactive removed all blood from the game before launch. It also attracted a heated reaction from the US Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and its president voiced his concerns to Spielberg in person. The game’s release, in spite of all this, created a precedent for other studios to comment openly on history and society. 

The close of the ’90s also saw the release of the gorgeous Unreal, sparking a decade-long rivalry between creator Epic MegaGames and id Software. Conceived as a sort of ‘magic carpet’ experience where you fly through caverns dotted with robots, the game evolved into a bona fide Quake killer, running on a proprietary technology capable of 16-bit colour and ambient effects, such as volumetric fog. Like Quake, the game was designed to be modded easily and extensively. Also like Quake, its multiplayer left something to be desired at launch. Epic released a deathmatch-oriented standalone expansion, Unreal Tournament, in 1999, narrowly ahead of the arrival of id’s Quake III: Arena. A brace of colourful alternate fire options aside, it was notable for including both more competitive ‘hardcore’ and relatively playful ‘theme’ maps, such as levels floating in Earth’s orbit. The franchise found a dedicated following online, but the bedrock of Epic’s business would prove to be founder Tim Sweeney’s Unreal Engine, a highly modular entity designed for continual improvement. It would power games as diverse as Ion Storm’s legendary immersive sim Deus Ex and EA’s adaptations of the Harry Potter movies.

A collaboration between DigiPen Institute of Technology students and Valve, 2007’s Portal isn’t strictly speaking a shooter, but its outlandish physics puzzles and sense of level design and scripting as a form of coercion make it feel like a critique of Half-Life – a parallel the game’s wonderfully funny ending sequence plays up to. Based on the DigiPen game Narbacular Drop, Portal casts you as a human lab rat armed with a gun that creates portals, lost in a shifting mechanical labyrinth run by a malicious, yet utterly inept, AI. The Portal Gun itself is every bit as fun to mess around with as Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun but the game’s unquestioned star is your nemesis, GlaDOS, a carnival mirror image of the AI antagonists from System Shock and Marathon.

Where Quake and Unreal Tournament dealt in cartoon bazookas and evaporating torsos, another 1999 release, Counter-Strike, set its sights on military realism. A Half-Life mod created by attic developers Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, it saw teams of terrorists and counter-terrorists struggling to arm or defuse bombs and rescue or maintain custody of VIPs, customising their loadouts with currency earned at the end of each round. The mod wasn’t a landmark success to begin with, but Valve’s designers knew a killer formula when they smelled it and scooped up Le and Cliffe along with the intellectual property rights in 2000. Counter-Strike became an enduring phenomenon, buoyed up by thousands of user-created maps (including David Johnston’s legendary Middle Eastern levels Dust and Dust 2) and a community as resistant to fundamental rule changes as any diehard fan of football. Perhaps the definitive esport shooter, its objective-based modes and tactics-driven design are integral to the DNA of competitive multiplayer today. 

2000 was also the year that Microsoft acquired Bungie, thereby depriving Apple’s Mac of one of its more coveted games, a science fiction odyssey called Halo. The game had begun life as an open world exploration affair, running on Bungie’s Myth engine, and something of that luxuriant scale remains in the completed Halo: Combat Evolved, which was an enormous hit when it launched on Microsoft’s first Xbox console in 2001. Halo’s environments were bright, rangy and colourful, where other shooters were claustrophobic and dingy, and they were lent an intense overarching unity by the silhouette of the Halo ringworld itself, stretching up through each skybox. Its crowded encounters were far more open-ended than in most competitors, woven around delightful AI variables like Grunt footsoldiers kamikaze-rushing the player after you kill their leader. Its weapons retained something of Quake and Unreal’s excess—overcharging an energy pistol to strip an opponent’s shield in one go would become a standard multiplayer tactic—but its blend of finite player health and recharging overshields imposed a more studied, back-and-forth rhythm on firefights. Halo also showed off Bungie’s knack for world-building: the fascination of its wider universe would help cement its status as Microsoft’s flagship series. 

Halo would be eclipsed, however, by another World War 2 shooter, created using id Software’s Quake III engine by Infinity Ward—a studio founded by veterans of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault with startup money from Activision . Released in 2003, Call of Duty was among the first shooters to let players aim down a weapon’s sights—a gambit that created a sense of fearful claustrophobia, narrowing your attention to the gun roaring in your hands, even as the game’s sprawling levels and battalions of AI troopers courted comparison with Allied Assault. It was a little overshadowed by Medal of Honor on PC, but Call of Duty’s popularity caught the eye of Microsoft, who asked Activision to develop an Xbox 360 port of the sequel. With Halo 3 still a couple of years away, Call of Duty 2 was a bestseller at the console’s 2005 launch. Mindful of the risks of hanging an entire series on a single developer, Activision brought on Spider-Man studio Treyarch to design Call of Duty 3 using the second game’s engine, giving Infinity Ward an extra year at the coalface. It was the beginning of a yearly alternation that, together with the franchise’s all-year-round multiplayer appeal, would allow Call of Duty to bury competitors and exert an out-sized influence on the genre at large.

Among Infinity Ward’s more ferocious competitors was a multiplayer-centric WW2 game created by Swedish developer DICE. Battlefield: 1942 saw up to 64 players tussling for capture points on enormous, open maps. Where Call of Duty’s own multiplayer came to prioritise pace and lone wolf virtuosity, Battlefield emphasised squad composition, the canny use of strategic resources such as vehicles, and above all, depth of simulation. The developer’s Refractor engine allowed for such crude feats of real-time physics as using TNT to launch a jeep across a bay onto an aircraft carrier’s deck. Though never quite a trendsetter in the increasingly lucrative console market, in large part die to its anaemic campaign options, Battlefield’s scale and freedom were a tonic for armchair generals weary of vanilla deathmatch. 

Crytek’s Far Cry had a similar appeal. It began life as a glorified tech demo, the catchily titled X-Isle: Dinosaur Island, but flowered with Ubisoft ’s backing into the first open world FPS in the current sense of the term. Where other shooters taught players to keep pushing forward, Far Cry allowed you to run amok in a vast tropical environment, using the undergrowth for cover while tracking unsuspecting soldiers through your binoculars. The series would go onto enjoy a symbiotic relationship with Ubisoft’s third-person Assassin’s Creed games, each experimenting with new ways to structure and diversify an open world. 

Half-Life 2, CoD4: Modern Warfare, Bioshock, Crysis

If Far Cry was one of 2004’s highlights, it and every other game that year was utterly dwarfed by Valve’s Half-Life 2. While not as transformative in terms of storytelling craft as its predecessor, the new game’s post-alien invasion dystopia was a work of unprecedented delicacy. Where older shooters looked to B-movies for inspiration, Half-Life 2’s incompletely terraformed city compares to mid-20th century Communist eastern Europe (the game’s art director, Viktor Antonov, hails from Bulgaria)—at once grand and ground down, alternating steely megaliths with trash-strewn riverbeds and grubby prisons. Its principle opponents aren’t bug-eyed monsters but masked enforcers wielding batons and carbines, their presence given away by indecipherable radio chatter. It’s also, for all its linearity, a celebration of player agency, handing you a Gravity Gun that allows you to pluck and hurl sawblades at enemies, solve slightly goofy seesaw puzzles and pile up objects at whim. The game was widely imitated, within the first-person shooter genre and without, but arguably its greatest legacy is Steam, Valve’s now-globe-straddling desktop games store. It’s hard to imagine players embracing the clunky 2004 version of Steam quite so readily, were it not required to play Half-Life 2.

If Valve’s offering set the standard for FPS design (in terms of its campaign, at least) it was Call of Duty that swallowed up most of the limelight during the ’00s, the critical year being 2007. Weary of World War 2 and conscious of the need to differentiate its offering from Treyarch’s, Infinity Ward decided to transport the series to the present day. The result, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, unlocked a brand-new vocabulary for the first-person shooter. It traded the mud and everyman heroics of WW2 experiences for a slick, cheerfully amoral celebration of western military hardware and urban combat tactics—arming the player with laser sights, ghillie suits, Stinger launchers and drones. It also courted topicality where games like Medal of Honor had tried to distance themselves from the headlines—one level sees you living out the final moments of a country’s deposed president, while another puts you at the controls of an AC-130 gunship, in scenes familiar from news footage of the Iraq War. But what it is mostly remembered for today is the multiplayer. Infinity Ward’s decision to introduce a levelling and unlocks system derived from roleplaying games is the most influential sea change in shooter design during the past decade. Its notion of an online career, whereby players kept plugging away for small rewards rather than just enjoyment, also helped popularise the emerging concept of the game as ‘service’.

Bioshock's combat, which married chunky period firearms with pseudo-magical powers or ‘Plasmids’, would prove its weakest element. More intriguing was the universe of cruelty and hubris it sketched.

Call of Duty 4 wasn’t the only game to do a little genre-splicing in 2007. Irrational’s BioShock began life as a spiritual follow-up to the System Shock series—its creative director, the soon-to-be-famous Ken Levine, was a designer on System Shock 2—but over time it became more of a shooter than an immersive simulation or RPG. It casts the player as an airplane crash survivor exploring a disintegrating undersea ‘utopia’ created by a renegade industrialist, in a thinly disguised meditation on the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The game’s combat, which married chunky period firearms with pseudo-magical powers or ‘Plasmids’, would prove its weakest element. More intriguing was the universe of cruelty and hubris it sketched, a labyrinth of leaking glass tunnels and domed Art Deco plazas.

Building on Half-Life 2’s example, Irrational left much of Rapture’s backstory for players to discover in the form of audio diaries, graffiti and random bric-a-brac. Its environmental storytelling would attract legions of imitators across several genres, from Raven Software’s unfairly overlooked 2010 shooter Singularity through body-horror masterpiece Dead Space to so-called ‘walking simulators’ like Gone Home. It also formed part of an ongoing conversation about games as a means of rousing empathy or exploring moral quandaries. BioShock’s signature characters are the Little Sisters, mutated little girls who collect genetic material from corpses under the eye of their powerful guardians, the Big Daddies. Having disposed of the latter, you can either spare Little Sisters or kill them to harvest their ‘ADAM’, a resource you can use to upgrade your own powers. 

The late ’00s saw the rise of the open world shooter, with Crytek’s fearsome Crysis swaddling the player in power armour in order to battle aliens on yet another overgrown island wilderness. The game was sold as an exercise in technological masochism, its detail, lighting and plethora of effects ‘melting’ all but the most expensive PC hardware. But its real trump card was the ability to enhance your Nanosuit’s agility, strength or endurance on the fly by drawing power from a finite reservoir, making it an engaging risk-reward system. It was soon eclipsed, however, by the Far Cry series, which Crytek had by now sold to Ubisoft. That’s both in spite of and thanks to Far Cry 2, an astonishing, bruising shooter stretched across 50 kilometres of African brush. Drawing on his experiences with the Splinter Cell games, designer Clint Hocking set out to create a brutal, Heart of Darkness-esque sandbox in which players fought malaria, self-propagating fire and bullets simultaneously. The results were arresting, but also frustrating, thanks to a patchy narrative, alternately dim or eagle-eyed AI and an unfair enemy respawning system.

From Doom onwards, the FPS has enjoyed a fruitful rapport with horror games. Most of the biggest names include a level or two that takes inspiration from the likes of Resident Evil. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has its spooky hoverbike trip through a quarantined Detroit, Half-Life 2 has its legendary Ravenholm level and Far Cry includes fever dreams where the designers are free to invoke the paranormal. A number of studios also work across genres. Monolith’s FEAR games are a captivating marriage of heavy ordnance and poltergeist activity. 4A’s Metro games, meanwhile, pack all the narrative texture of the Stalker series into a series of half-collapsed tunnels—though light on jump scares, the first instalment is one of the eeriest games you’ll play.

2012's widely acclaimed Far Cry 3 removed much of the frustration, and a little of the sophistication. It opened out the terrain, fine-tuned the AI to be more predictable, and put capturing enemy outposts—each a potted stealth-combat puzzle, inspired by the Borgia towers in Assassin’s Creed 2—at the heart of exploring the map. It also created a combo system, with players chaining melee executions into ranged takedowns, reflecting a growing interest across the industry in fluid first-person animations, epitomised by DICE’s 2008 parkour game Mirror’s Edge. Less positively, it traded the second game’s understated, callous portrayal of a perpetual civil war for a farcical story about whiny, kidnapped backpackers wrestling with the definition of insanity. 

Players unconvinced by Far Cry or Crysis had a number of rival open world shooters to choose from. One of them was the Stalker series, inaugurated by Ukrainian developer GSC Game World in 2007, in which scavengers pick their way through radioactive ruins while keeping a look out for monstrous creatures and invisible, fatal anomalies. Stalker’s supporting systems were remarkable—at one point, the AI was allegedly capable of completing the game by itself—but its punishing survival simulation ethic limited its audience. 

Gearbox's RPG-shooter Borderlands took a friendlier, trashier tack. Released in 2009, it saw you touring an anarchic, comic book-style planet as one of four classes, hoovering up procedurally generated (often borderline-unusable) weapons. Part of Borderlands' success, the novelty of its arsenal aside, was its humour—a rare quality in an often po-faced genre. 

The turn of the decade saw a number of long-running FPS series beginning to lose momentum. Most obviously, the Medal of Honor series underwent an abortive attempt at reinvention in 2010, with publisher EA looking to fill gaps in the schedule between Battlefield instalments. In jumping forward from WW2 to present-day Afghanistan, the once-proud series merely left itself open to unflattering comparisons with 2009’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. id Software's properties were also at low ebb. Though an accomplished horror experience, 2007's Doom 3 lost out to Half-Life 2, while Quake had all but evaporated following Quake 4's muted reception in 2005. Raven Software's 2009 Wolfenstein reboot doubleddown on the paranormal aspects of the series backstory, to mixed effect. Following a similarly lukewarm response to Singularity, parent company Activision retasked the studio to help out with the Call of Duty series. RAGE—id's only new IP during these years save mobile game Orcs & Elves—proved a visual extravaganza and a gratifyingly hefty, Mad Max-ish shooter, but all too often felt like it was playing second fiddle to its own graphics technology. id’s old foe Epic, meanwhile, was increasingly dedicated to the third-person Gears of War series and its flourishing Unreal Engine business.

Call of Duty continued to reign supreme, though it attracted increasingly stiff competition from EA’s Battlefield—a franchise increasingly (and a little unfairly) pitched as a freeform "thinking man’s shooter", more respectful of player agency than the linear, attrition-driven Call of Duty. After experimenting with a lighter, buddy-comedy vibe in the Bad Company spin-offs, DICE amped up the grandeur with Battlefield 3, a multiple perspective tale of abducted nuclear weapons set partly in Iran (the bestselling instalment until DICE's journey into WW1 with Battlefield 1). The series had become famous for its Frostbite engine technology, which among other things allowed for real-time terrain destruction in multiplayer: participants could do everything from blasting out spyholes in walls to levelling buildings.

The modern era: Titanfall, Destiny, Overwatch

Call of Duty's greatest existential threats, however, were a mixture of internal discord and external market pressures. In March 2010, Activision—now by far the industry’s largest publisher, following a mega-merger with Vivendi and its subsidiary Blizzard—fired Infinity Ward cofounders Jason West and Vince Zampella over alleged insubordination. A few weeks later, West and Zampella announced the foundation of new studio Respawn Entertainment. A wave of lawsuits and countersuits followed, alongside a mass exodus of staff from Infinity Ward to Respawn. Activision was forced to call upon the recently founded Sledgehammer Games to help the depleted Infinity Ward finish Modern Warfare 3. 

While the series weathered this crisis—thanks largely to Treyarch's pop-savvy, hallucinogen-crazed Black Ops subfranchise—Activision and other publishers also had to manage a problem of budget versus expectation. Scripted corridor campaigns in the Half-Life vein were proving increasingly expensive, thanks largely to the cost of HD art assets, and telemetry showed that players spent the bulk of their time in multiplayer. However, attempts to remove singleplayer from the package led to an outcry. Among the teams that struggled with this problem was Respawn. The EA-published debut Titanfall pioneered the concept of campaign multiplayer, with narrative elements, such as picture-in-picture cinematics, dropped into rounds of team deathmatches. The game was enthusiastically received—a mixture of towering mech combat and nimble parkour duelling, it restored something of Quake and Unreal Tournament’s agility to a genre that had become bogged down in cover combat. Its audience tailed off swiftly, however—many first-person shooter enthusiasts found the mechs-and-pilots premise to be more of a novelty than a game-changing fixture, though the larger problem was perhaps that, on consoles, Titanfall was exclusive to the Xbox brand.

Other shooter developers ‘rediscovered’ mobility during this decade—Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Black Ops III dabbled at length with powered exosuits, while Halo 5: Guardians added boost slides, double-jumps and ground-pounds to Master Chief’s moveset. But the game that brought it all together was 2014’s Destiny, the work of erstwhile Halo developer Bungie, now free from producing games solely for Microsoft. It was a mixture of MMO-style looting and Titanfall-esque acrobatics, all bundled up in an aesthetic that is reminiscent of the ’70s space race and classic sci-fi book cover illustrations. 

Destiny is in some ways quite a soulless game: it's as grindy as Borderlands and far less self-deprecating, but its ruined yet sumptuous environments have an irresistible mystique. It also feels tremendous in the hands, with some beautifully judged weapon designs and class abilities. 

Destiny has become one of Activision's flagship shooters, as has Blizzard's joyful arena shooter Overwatch, released in 2016. Overwatch is a lovely game to end on because it is essentially an interactive genre history, a celebration of its triumphs, foibles and even failures. It doesn't merely reach out to weapons, gadgets and abilities from other shooters, but also their quirks, exploits and the antics of their communities—Quake's rocket jumping, aimbots from Counter-Strike and internet edgelords in general. Its heroes are love letters to 30-odd years of genre history. Pro-gaming celeb turned mech pilot D.Va is both a potted Titanfall and a parody of the noxious "gamer girl" stereotype, for instance. Soldier 76, meanwhile, is Call of Duty man. 

Even as it pays tribute, however, Overwatch also points to the future—be it in the effortless way it folds in concepts from fighting games and MOBAs, or in how it extends the FPS cast-list well beyond the muscular, dudebro protagonists beloved of so many rivals. It speaks to the enormous range of concepts that make up the modern FPS, for all its myriad hang-ups—a genre that has always been about so much more than firing a gun.

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10 Gimmick Shooters From The Early 2000s You Might Not Remember

Why just shoot a gun when you can shatter the laws of time and space as well.

In the late ‘00s, before every game became a MOBA and then pivoted to become a battle royale, it seemed like every other game was a shooter with some sort of gimmick to make it stand out from the Calls of Duty and Battlefields . From gravity manipulation to doing drugs, here’s a bunch of the oddball gimmicks developers came up with to sell us on their mid-budget manshoots.

The mid-to-late aughts were a great time for shooter fans, with new ways to kill a whole bunch of samey enemies dropping on a regular basis. It seemed like publishers were pushing through anything with fast-paced gunplay. To really shine, a game had to either be incredibly good or embrace some sort of eye-catching hook. Since the Entertainment Software Ratings Board frowns on eye-catching hooks, many games implemented unique or not-so-unique gimmicks instead. Despite the flashy stunts games like TimeShift and Fracture employed, many of you are probably considering looking up TimeShift and Fracture on Wikipedia right now. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

With that said, let’s shoot some guns, do some drugs, and completely break the laws of space and time.

Haze : The One With All The Drugs

We start with a game so forgettable that by the time you reach the end of this article you’ll have to come back for a refresher. Developer Free Radical Design is best known for the delightful time-traveling TimeSplitters series, but towards the end of its run it teamed with Ubisoft for 2008’s Haze , a game about doing drugs and shooting guns. Haze takes place in a dystopian future where soldiers are enhanced by a chemical substance called Nova-Keto-Thyrazine, better known as Nectar. Taking Nectar gives soldiers a power boost but also applies a hallucinogenic effect, transforming battlefields into painless, idyllic environments.

What an amazing concept. Imagine fighting through a battle without knowing it, only to have your drug injector fail and reveal the ugly truth in shocking fashion. Handled correctly, that sounds like a concept that would make for an outstanding video game. It was not handled correctly, and now Haze is remembered as that one game with the yellow helmet on the cover, when it’s remembered at all.

TimeShift: The One That Actually Shifted Through Time

Originally slated for release from Atari in early 2006, publishing rights to Saber Interactive’s TimeShift switched to Sierra in April of that year and was delayed multiple times. By the time the game was released in late 2007, Sierra had been bought by Vivendi and the shooter fans that had been eagerly anticipating TimeShift a year earlier had all but forgotten it existed, which is for the best, as the game was completely overhauled following the poor reception of its 2006 demo. Saber announced the overhaul in April of 2007, yet somehow the game still managed to come out a few months later. Weird.

As if the name didn’t make it clear, TimeShift ’s big gimmick is the ability to slow, stop, and rewind time. You achieve this with a special suit, because as Crysis taught us, special suits are cool. Also cool is the idea of tossing a time grenade into a group of enemies and then firing bullets into the bubble that hangs in the air until the time-stopping effect fades. So yes, the idea was cool. In practice, the whole game was just kind of okay. The best thing to come of TimeShift was this spooky trailer for a much more exciting game:

Fracture : The One With The Movable Terrain

Day 1 Studio’s 2008 third-person shooter Fracture has one of the coolest gimmicks on this list. The ability to raise and lower terrain more-or-less at will using a variety of high-tech weaponry is super cool. Digging into the ground to escape a sticky situation, creating your own barricades via technologically-enabled Earthbending, and using these terrain-transforming powers to solve puzzles is a blast. If my badly broken review is any indication, I had a great time with all of those special abilities.

Unfortunately, Fracture also had repetitive enemies, a bland story, and main character named Jet Brody whose bald head should be in the generic shooter hero hall of fame. Despite its cool gimmick, it was quickly forgotten.

Singularity : The One With The Time Manipulation Device

One of my favorite games on the list, Raven Software’s 2010 Singularity is a tasty bite of Cold War-era espionage with a time-travel twist. A helicopter carrying a group of U.S. Marines is hit by a mysterious energy wave, causing it to crash land on an island once held by the former Soviet Union. Surviving the crash, Captain Nathaniel Renko begins to phase between modern day and 1955. During one of these trips he saves a Soviet scientist, only to return to the present to find that scientist has taken over the world. Using a special TMD (Time Manipulation Device), Renko must jump back and forth between timelines to set things straight.

The TMD lets Renko manipulate the temporal state of living creatures (unless they’re wearing armor) or physical objects that have come into contact with an element called E-99. During his adventure Renko discovers power stations that boost the TMD, allowing him to affect larger objects, making the game sort of a Metroidvania where paths are blocked until you reach certain power levels.

Singularity ’s a great game with a neat gimmick that was released with hardly any marketing and has since been pretty much forgotten. I recall it fondly when I recall it at all.

Inversion : The One Where You Manipulate Gravity

One of the latest games on this list, Inversion was released in 2012 by Bandai Namco and Saber Interactive, the same development studio behind TimeShift . It seems like Saber really wanted gimmicky shooters to be its thing, and so we got the generic-feeling third-person cover shooter that’s not technically a cover shooter. The aliens invading Earth in Inversion have the power to manipulate gravity, a power that falls into the hands of completely forgettable police officer Davis Russell. The newly empowered Davis can create areas of anti-gravity, making his enemies float out of cover where they’re easier to shoot. He can also enhance gravity, bringing floating obstacles crashing down on foes’ heads.

It’s basically like Gears of War , only much easier because Davis can make enemies float. Aside from trying to make you dizzy by having you fight on the sides of buildings or on ceilings, Inversion didn’t do a lot with what it had, and now Saber Interactive mainly does ports and remasters of other developers’ games.

The Darkness: The One With The Tentacles, Demons, And Feelings

Starbreeze Studios’ The Darkness , based on the Top Cow comic series of the same name, is one of the best first-person shooters ever made. As an FPS it’s as proficient as they come, with powerful, impactful gunplay. Its story features one of the most beautiful scenes in gaming, in which protagonist Jackie Estacado sits on a couch and watches the movie To Kill a Mockingbird while his girlfriend falls asleep with her head on his shoulder. If The Darkness were just a normal shooty game with its powerful story beats, it still would have been a memorable experience.

But it also has the titular Darkness, an evil supernatural force that possesses Jackie, allowing him to spawn writhing tentacles capable of grabbing enemies and devouring their hearts, or summon imps to take out bad guys in his stead. The game perfectly balances its gunplay and tentacle play (perhaps the wrong term), but I’m still going to call the tentacles a gimmick because it means I get to mention The Darkness .

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition: The Cold One

Capcom’s 2006 sci-fi shooter Lost Planet: Extreme Condition features the most annoying gimmick on this list: freezing to death. In the distant future, after ruining Earth with pollution and global warming, humanity seeks to colonize a planet called E.D.N. III. Unfortunately, E.D.N. III is already inhabited by the insectoid Akrid. It is also in the grips of a brutal ice age.

The Akrid aren’t that much of an issue. The bigger ones have large glowing orange weak points for protagonist Wayne Holden to aim at. The problem is the cold, and how it makes you have to constantly seek out something called T-Eng in order to keep from freezing to death. It’s a pointless, annoying gimmick that had barely any bearing on the rest of the gameplay. When Lost Planet 2 came out in 2010, the T-Eng malarky was nowhere to be found. Good riddance. I only like warm gimmick shooters.

Army of Two : The One With Best Friends Forever

While most shooters tend to be built around making you an army of one, 2008’s Army of Two is all about friendship and cooperation between a pair of soldiers who really should have been romantically involved. Elliot Salem and Tyson Rios deeply need each other. Sometimes they need each other to open heavy doors, or flank enemies, or provide cover. During particularly romantic situations the pair can go back-to-back, which doesn’t really seem like it would help much in a situation where two people were surrounded by enemies with guns, but somehow it did.

Were Army of Two ’s co-op play a mere suggestion, it wouldn’t be on this list. But buddy action is the core gameplay mechanic here. You have to be friends, whether with another live player or the AI, to get through the game. I think it’s kind of sweet, really.

Area 51 : The One With The Alien Mutation

Not to be confused with its loosely related follow-up, Blacksite: Area 51 , 2005’s Area 51 is a first-person shooter that is itself loosely based on the 1995 arcade light-gun shooter of the same name . Area 51 ’s gimmick is not its confusing pedigree. Partway through the game protagonist Ethan Cole is infected with an alien mutagen, granting him the ability to temporarily transform into a mutant himself. As a low-key monstrosity, Cole gains increased stamina, the power to easily spot cloaked enemies, health-enhancing parasites he can fire at enemies, and other fun alien stuff.

Ethan’s coolest power, however, was that his voice sounded just like actor David Duchovny, due to his being voiced by actor David Duchovny.

Wet : The Slippery One

No list of gimmick shooters is complete without a visit to Bethesda Softworks and Behaviour Interactive’s 2009 grindhouse bloodfest, Wet . Buffy ’s Eliza Dushku stars as Rubi Malone, a completely unlikable mercenary who cuts a bloody path through the forces of a powerful drug lord with her sword and dual pistols. Basically, she really wants to be Dante from Devil May Cry . At times her battles get so bloody that Rubi launches into a berserker rage. The screen goes white, black, and red as she becomes faster and stronger. But the wetter she gets, the deader her enemies get. I cannot believe I just wrote that.

The whole blood thing isn’t Wet’ s only gimmick. This is an acrobatic shooter, which means Rubi can run, jump off walls, and slide everywhere, firing her guns all the while. If you don’t take the game too seriously, it’s a slippery good time.

Best FPS Games Of All Time: Top 50 First-Person Shooters

Written by 

Tarran Stockton

Published 

20th Dec 2021 12:32

If there's one genre that has undoubtedly ruled over video games for the past few decades, it's the first-person shooter (FPS). From its beginnings with Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM , 30 years ago, the FPS has evolved significantly thanks to landmark titles like Quake , Half-Life , Halo Combat Evolved , COD 4 Modern Warfare , and much, much more. Its domination has also been remarkably consistent, with the Call of Duty franchise reigning supreme in the AAA space for ten years, and recurring franchises such as Halo and Battlefield following behind.

Even in the realm of single-player experiences, the FPS has a permanent foothold thanks to series like Far Cry , Fallout , and DOOM . There's something incredibly immersive about the first-person perspective, allowing it to put you directly into the shoes of your character and connect to them. There's also the advantage of 3D spacial awareness and traversal, which comes intuitively enough thanks to us living in first-person. 

Considering the FPS' constant presence in the gaming world, and as there are no signs of the genre slowing its domination, we thought we'd look back through gamings storied history and pick the best ever FPS games. There are plenty of old and new ones to choose from, and our list is a great display of how the genre has evolved and changes over the past 30 years.

Best FPS Games: Devil Daggers (#50)

If you're the type to chase the feeling of reaching a high score, and find satisfaction in incrementally improving with each run, then Devil Daggers is certainly one for you. Survival is the name of the game, as you fight as long as possible against increasingly more strange and demonic forces - by shooting daggers from your bloody fingers. 

It apes classic 90s shooters technically, with low-res unfiltered textures and polygonal jitter, while also matching their raw speed and intensity. This makes the experience a test of your mechanical skill, especially movement, as any contact with an enemy will instantly end the run. Devil Dagger's frantic pace and limited space, gives it the feel of a bullet hell game with a perspective shift, and it's an addictive combination.

Best FPS Games: SWAT 4 (#49)

In the realm of single player tactical shooters, Irrational Game's SWAT 4 takes the cake, taking players on a gritty trip into the lives of Special Weapons and Tactics operators. It didn't quite for aim for simulation levels of realism, gamifying much of the experience, but it was for the overall betterment of the title.

There's a great variety to the operations you take part in, letting players deal with hostage situations, barricaded suspects, and high-risk suspects with warrants out. It emphasised playing a SWAT operator by the book, even in the tense multiplayer mode that let players compete as SWAT members or suspects. The slow pace was a welcome element too, which added to the feeling of inhabiting a SWAT operator.

Best FPS Games: The Operative: No One Lives Forever (#48)

It feels like there aren't enough big games that focus on being funny anymore, but the 1960s spy-themed romp, No One Lives Forever makes for a frequently inventive and hilarious experience. Immensely stylish and often irreverent, it presents a fully realised, satirical take on the clandestine operations of an omnipresent government agency.  

The gameplay was surprisingly varied for the time, allowing for most missions to be solved in multiple ways, from clever use of your gadgets and stealth, to full on murder hobo simulation as you take everyone out. It also built on the statistic screen shown at the end of many classic shooters of the time, by adding medals and increasing various statistics for high ranks. Ultimately, No One Lives Forever is a convincing evocation of 1960s spy media, with a triple dose of levity thrown in for good measure.

Best FPS Games: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (#47)

PUBG  arguably changed the industry overnight, sparking the AAA fascination with the Battle Royale genre and inspiring many games to echo its formula. You know the deal. One-hundred players are dropped onto an island in a free-for-all - alone or with a team - and asked to scavenge for supplies and weapons to kill other players.

Over time, everyone is forced into smaller areas and the fights become more tense as you can only imagine where other players are hiding. It may have been bettered by newcomers to the genre, but PUBG set the benchmark, and few games could replicate its emergent moments of tension and chaos.

Best FPS Games: The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay (#46)

Good games based on film properties are few and far between, and great ones are even rarer, but in 2004, legendary FPS studio Starbreeze gifted us the greatest movie tie-in of all time with The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay . Serving as a prequel to Pitch Black , it put us in the boots of Riddick as he becomes incarcerated in the galaxies most brutal and infamous prison.

Its stealth gameplay was a huge highlight, and the physical presence of Riddick was felt throughout, furthered by quality first-person animations. Between your escape attempts that mixed stealth and pulse-pounding action, there were moments to just explore, taking time to talk to inmates and plan your route to freedom.

Best FPS Games: Deathloop (#45)

As a AAA game, Deathloop is quite surprising, combining immersive sim and roguelite mechanics into one giant combat puzzle that slowly unravels over a playthrough. You play as Colt, who awakens on a beach with amnesia, before discovering he's trapped on an island and caught in a time loop caused by something called the AEON program. 

The premise is rather simple, as you're tasked with killing all the AEON leaders in one day, by replaying the day over and over to learn their locations and the best method of eliminating them all in succession. For those who have played Dishonored , much of the gameplay feels similar, expect you're encouraged to fully utilise your arsenal and go loud. It's a great example of innovating and trying new things in the AAA space, and while it doesn't all pan out successfully, it still makes for an excellent FPS title.

Best FPS Games: Perfect Dark (#44)

During Rare's golden age, they put out some major classics, but one of their best cult titles is Perfect Dark . It was a spiritual successor to Goldeneye 007, featuring much of the same gameplay but expanded with more experience and a new engine. Turns out Perfect Dark is also kind of a spy game, except set in a sci-fi near-future, featuring a female protagonist, and aliens. 

For a console FPS at the time, it was pretty much unrivalled, with extensive features such as multiplayer and a co-op mode. The artificial intelligence was also highly notable, which made it a fairly challenging experience that forced players to utilise all their gadgets and the levels to their full capacity. With a new title on the way from Xbox, we can only hope it lives up to the pedigree of the first.

Best FPS Games: F.E.A.R (#43)

The combination of survival horror gameplay and kinetic, cinema inspired first-person gunplay is a curious one, but F.E.A.R combines them effortlessly for a both strikingly scary and bombastic shooting experience. You take up the role as the point man for a fictional special forces squad, as you attempt to capture the rogue commander of an experimental clone army. 

F.E.A.R is highly regarded for its advanced AI system - that to this day is still rarely bettered - as it allowed the enemy soldiers to communicate and strategise to take out the protagonist. This meant they could interact with the environment by vaulting walls and making impromptu cover, or flank and lay down suppressing fire while advancing. The integration of psychological J-horror also meant you never had much room to breathe, as even between fights, you would struggle with paranormal visions.

Best FPS Games: ULTRAKILL (#42)

Maybe it's cheating to put a game in early access on this list, but ULTRAKILL in its current form is already one of the most inventive and stylish FPS games of all time. It combines the fast-paced movement and crazy weaponry of boomer shooters, with the combat scenarios, style metre, and challenge of a character action game. The gameplay has the potential to be as wild as it sounds, but there is a steep difficulty curve in the way.

You'll need to be attentive to stay mobile and keep your aim focused throughout - especially in the boss fights. These can get intense, and will test your every ability, from parrying, to hot-swapping and dashing. The story about a machine descending through layers of hell also allows for some great aesthetics, making for some bold and varied levels.

Best FPS Games: Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (#41)

Return to Castle Wolfenstein comes in two forms, the single-player, which was an above average attempt at rebooting the franchise, and the multiplayer - titled Wolfenstein: Enemy territory - which took mid-2000s PC gaming by storm. It blended objective-based game modes, tasking players with attacking or defending set points based on their team.

There were also classes to choose from who specialised into certain roles, which made teamwork imperative to victory. It's important to note, it did this before Battlefield 1942 came on the scene, but with a bigger focus on the intensity of arcade shooting gameplay.

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Best FPS Games: ARMA 3 (#40)

ARMA 3 is the premiere military simulation game, prioritising realism in its weapons handling, movement, and health mechanics, that makes for a cerebral tactical shooter. There are a multitude of ways to play ARMA , though it has a single-player campaign, the multiplayer and cooperative games modes are where it truly shines. 

It's still holding out after several years with a strong and dedicated community, receiving constant updates and even official DLC developed by the community. For players who enjoy role playing servers, this is ARMA 3's bread and butter, with whole swathes of players dedicated to playing out military simulation fantasies.

Best FPS Games: Half-Life: Alyx (#39)

The only virtual reality game on this list, Half-Life: Alyx isn't just a top tier shooter, it's the best VR game available on the market, and the first killer app that displayed the platform's AAA potential. It follows fan-favourite NPC Alyx Vance, from Half-Life 2 - taking place between the previous entries - as Alyx aims to seize a superweapon held by the Combine. 

Considering it took the series into previously uncharted waters with the VR technology, there were hurdles to work through, but they managed to retain the fun shooting and physics puzzles of the previous game, heightened by the new ways of interactivity that VR allowed. It also added elements of survival horror, which greatly heightened the atmosphere and tension of the experience. Sadly, it's not very easy to play considering the high entry cost of VR, but as prices lessen and the hardware becomes more accessible, it's certain to stay as a landmark title.

Best FPS Games: Black Mesa (#38)

Some people may wonder why we have put in Black Mesa over the original Half-Life - a title which has a fair shake at being considered the most influential FPS of all time - and it's because Black Mesa is simply the best way of playing it these days. Originally a mod that Valve allowed to become a full release, it is a full remake of Half-Life in the Source engine.

It modernises the game in a litany of ways, remaking the textures and improving the geometry of many levels, refining it to compliment Half-Life's narrative experience. It's a perfect remake in many ways, enhancing and building on the original, while also altering aspects that didn't quite work. Furthermore, it offers gamers a chance to experience one of the most formative titles in the FPS genre, but modernised.

Best FPS Games: BLACK (#37)

The FPS genre had been booming long before the release of BLACK , but surprisingly none had ever really focused on the guns themselves. They were typically extensions of the character you play, a tool to progress, but BLACK sought to make them the star of the show. It achieved these aims with a blinding spectacle of bullets, that's considered a cult classic and an influential title in immersive sound design.

BLACK drew inspiration from the heavily stylised action of cinema, giving the gunplay a viscerally physical feel. It added to this with a large focus on the sound quality of the weaponry, creating a choral harmony of bangs, blams, and pows, and detailed in-game destruction full to supplement the violence. Ultimately, it's a simple game, but makes for one of the rawest shooters available.

Best FPS Games: Timesplitters 2 (#36)

TimeSplitters 2  wears its  GoldenEye 007  inspiration on its sleeve: similar aesthetics and graphical styles, some developers worked on both games, heck, both titles even start on Siberian dams. While  GoldenEye 007  doesn't quite play as well today thanks to the clunky controls,  TimeSplitters 2  felt like a spiritual sequel or spin-off that improved upon pretty much everything  GoldenEye  laid down.

As you can see from the screenshot above however,  TimeSplitters 2  gets certifiably ridiculous. You'll go from 1930s Chicago to 300 years in the future fighting aliens, then back in time again to fight zombies. One of the most interesting things about this game however is the aiming mechanic; when you aim down the sights, you can control the crosshair with the analog stick individually. It makes for tricky aiming, but when you get the hang of it, it feels incredibly satisfying.

Best FPS Games: System Shock 2 (#35)

Very few games have ever blended the role-playing and horror genres together as well as System Shock 2. Taking the role as a lone survivor on a spaceship, you'll roam the halls and explore the aftermath of the events that saw parasitic mutants take hold of the crew. Oh and you're also being manipulated and haunted by an omniscient A.I. called Shodan, who still remains one of the most horrifying inventions in video gaming. 

It allows for a solid variety of gameplay, which is reinforced from the very start as you choose a class, and continuously throughout, from upgrading your character and playing your way.

Best FPS Games: Crysis (#34)

For years, buying a new PC and bragging about its capabilities would get you the uniform response of "ahhh, but can it run Crysis ?" And for good reason, no PC at the time of its release could run the game at its max settings, and to this day even the best modern computers will struggle. It pushed the graphical potential for video games forward, and gave us a hint at the future of photorealism in the medium. 

Of course, it's also a pretty good FPS. It put you in the shoes of Nomad- a US super-soldier with a super-suit and super abilities - and tasked you with exploring an almost paradisal island home to North Korean troops and extra-terrestrials. The games' super suit is where the real fun comes from, letting you turn invisible, gain super speed, temporary invulnerability, and super strength, which can be combined to great effect to tear through the enemies.

Best FPS Games: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (#33)

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R series blends many genres together, forming a FPS survival horror RPG with some of the most involving atmospheres in gaming. It's set in an alternate reality, where a second disaster at Chernobyl caused the fallout to create strange anomalies and happenings around the nearby exlusion zone. Throw in a dose of depressing Russian sci-fi like Roadside Picnic and Stalker, and you get the cauldron for a S.T.A.L.K.E.R title.

There's a grand sense of open-endedness to Shadow of Chernobyl, with a non-linear story and lots of optional content to interact with, creating reams of depth to the gameplay. This unrivalled gameplay has created legions of fans, and a tight modding community across the whole franchise. With a new game on the way next year, it sure is an exciting time for hardcore S.T.A.L.K.E.R fans.

Best FPS Games: Metroid Prime (#32)

Nintendo may refer to Metroid Prime as a first-person adventure over a shooter, but you do more than enough first-person shooting to make this list. Like the original Metroid games, it follows the metroidvania formula where you explore a map, collecting various upgrades that allow access to new areas and contextualise previous ones. Along the way, you'll battle smaller enemies, to larger bosses in over-the-top showdowns that can sometimes rival spectacle fighters. 

It also retains the puzzle gameplay elements of the series, frequently balancing the heavily visual action with the slower moments, so that the player is never worn out or bored with doing the same thing. Accompanying this gameplay structure is the intensely moody atmosphere, punctuated by the score that features motifs of the older games soundtracks. Prime was a monumental occasion in reinventing the Metroid series, expertly blending a new perspective with the tight metroidvania design.

Best FPS Games: Medal of Honor (#31)

The Second World War has been a highly regurgitated setting in video games, with the globe-spanning conflict home to many fronts of warfare and battles that make for easily replicable spectacle. 1999s Medal of Honor was by no means the first WWII game, but it was the one that made the setting popular, and effectively captured the tension on-screen.

It was renown at the time for its immersive gameplay and varied missions, where players could rescue an American pilot behind enemy lines, go undercover to destroy a U-boat, recover stolen artwork, and generally sabotage the Nazis. There was also the excellent soundtrack that complimented each scenario, whether they were epic battles or the more covert expeditions.

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Best FPS Games: Metro Exodus (#30)

Bigger being better has been disproven plenty of times, but Metro Exodus is a perfect example of a game that evolved by its decision to forgo the consistent linearity of the previous games in the series. Set in post-apocalyptic Russia over one year, Exodus sees protagonist Artyom, his friends, and family set out on an odyssey to find home in a scorched world. 

Its immersive qualities are unparalleled due to the developer's choice to make many of the UI and HUD elements diegetic, furthered by playing on the ranger difficulty, which turns it into a tense survival experience. The beautifully realised locations are also well worth exploring every inch of, from the rustic Volga, to the sparse dried-up Caspian Sea.

Best FPS Games: Battlefield 1942 (#29)

Before Battlefield , the idea of large-scale multiplayer warfare in gaming seemed far-fetched. The majority of shooters focused on the small-scale, especially in the prevailing arena shooters of the time. But DICE set out to innovate with huge chaotic battles - that while arcade-like in nature - aimed to ape the real conflicts of WWII, allowing players to fight across the Pacific and European fronts. 

It gave players set roles they could specialise into, like the Scout, Medic, or Engineer for example, which equipped them with specific weapons and equipment to perform tasks. Scouts could spot enemies and use snipers, Medics could revive and heal, and Engineers could repair vehicles, just to name a few. Battlefield was all-out warfare, with large groups of players, a plethora of vehicles, and sprawling maps to fight across.

Best FPS Games: SUPERHOT (#28)

While the first-person shooter is fun in its own right, recent years have seen the genre grow all too comfortable with its own niches and ideas. It's not often that the genre sees any sincere innovation - which is why the arrival of   SUPERHOT  was such a delight. The game's brilliant concept helped to make such a simple idea into a tool to make shooters into puzzlers, with every step you take and every shot you make creating a real risk of failure.

SUPERHOT 's simplicity in both concept and presentation allows you to focus entirely on the brilliant puzzling action with a focus on hyperviolence that pays off with hugely sped-up killcams, that make you feel just about as badass as they do clever. It's clear that visuals and realism can only take a game so far, and with   SUPERHOT , it's clear that even in first-person shooters, brains are more important that brawn could ever be.

Best FPS Games: Duke Nukem 3D (#27)

Duke Nukem 3D was another 90s title that helped to popularise the FPS genre early on. It took inspiration from much of what made DOOM great but carved out its own style, punctuated by the adult humour of the titular character and the dark, seedy world you explore throughout the levels. It also took environmental interactivity much further than DOOM , utilising the brand-new Build engine, which was top tier at the time. 

Duke primarily acts as a satirical take on Hollywood action heroes, obsessed with his 'babes' and dedicated to regurgitating cheesy one-liners when the moment calls for it. It's fair to point out that the games' representation of women hasn't exactly held up over time, but overall it still stands near the peak of 90s shooters.

Best FPS Games: Destiny 2 (#26)

The original Destiny was a highly ambitious online looter shooter that didn't quite reach the heights that were expected of a developer like Bungie. However, they seemed to turn it around for the sequel, focusing in more on the story, and improving on the exploration and combat aspects. 

Set in a science-fantasy future, you take the role of a Guardian who are the last bastions of hope for protecting humanity from the threat of alien species. Whether alone, with groups of friends, or random players during encounters, there are many ways to play and things to do in Destiny 2 . It's also ever-evolving, with new expansions and content being released regularly.

Best FPS Games: Team Fortress 2 (#25)

Continuing Valve's tradition of innovating in every space they enter, Team Fortress 2 ended up designing the blueprint for the hero shooter genre. Its creative character classes stood out for their differing personalities, distinct looks, and unique playstyles - creating the bedrock for an outrageously fun shooter. Plus the advent of new weapons and items, further expanded on the ways for gamers to play.

It never took itself too seriously either, with comedic death animations, a cartoon graphics style, and hilarious voice lines.  Team Fortress 2  rarely got too intense and while there were a few bad apples, you could always rely on a fun time when compared to shooters like  Counter-Strike  or  Call of Duty . We've not seen anything quite like  Team Fortress 2  since.

Best FPS Games: Wolfenstein: The New Order (#24)

While it didn't go as far as DOOM in recreating the mechanics of retro shooters, 2014's Wolfenstein reboot was a breadth of fresh air that managed to brilliantly ride the line of contemporary and classic game design. It felt like a shooter rejuvenated, with a stunning variation in combat set-pieces, and an over-the-top sensibility that somehow meshed perfectly with the gritty narrative.

The characters were also rich in personality, shaped by the traumas of Nazi rule and its communicated well throughout the story, contrasting the bloodthirsty action. This is best shown in protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz, who looks and plays like a classic action hero, but monologues poetically about his inner feelings - developing a profound relatability for a Nazi killing simulator.

Best FPS Games: Borderlands 2 (#23)

Crazy, stupid, and larger-than-life are the only appropriate ways of describing the Borderlands series, and Borderlands 2 is perhaps the game that perfected the tone and wild gameplay. It's a looter shooter/RPG hybrid where you play as vault hunters on the lawless planet of Pandora. Throughout, you'll fight a rogue's gallery of insane monsters, robots and psychos, while collecting increasingly out-there guns. 

The antagonist, Handsome Jack, also made for one of the best villains of the past decade, as a power-hungry megalomaniac seeking to tyrannically rule Pandora. Borderlands 2's often juvenile and dirty humour is a constant aspect of the experience, reinforcing the silly tone of the world and the characters. While it may drag the experience to some, we think as part of the game's core identity, it ties all of Borderlands ' curated insanity together, to make one of the best co-op shooters of all time.

Best FPS Games: Fallout 4 (#22)

It's safe to say  Fallout 4  didn't quite have the reception Bethesda was hoping for on release, because it stripped away a lot of the RPG elements that made the series popular. It wasn't all doom and gloom for the game however, because one area it improved on massively was the combat. While V.A.T.S remained a staple of the  Fallout  universe, real-time combat was actually possible and with such a wide world to explore, no two fights were ever the same.

Guns felt weighty and each one was unique, ranging from your standard rifles to outrageous weaponry like the Fat Man. From huge, alpha deathclaws to raiders and mirelurks, every battle required a different strategy, especially given the varied terrain across the Commonwealth. Sure,  Fallout 4  doesn't excel when it comes to being an RPG and is unlikely to be the favourite game in the series for many, but it is certainly an outstanding FPS game.

Best FPS Games: Goldeneye 007 (#21)

Consider us shaken (and stirred) by the legacy of Rare’s  GoldenEye 007 , and what is one of THE defining first-person shooters. With the James Bond series facing a revamp on the silver screen in 1995,  GoldenEye 007  capitalised on the success of Pierce Brosnan’s martini-swilling spy just two years later. 

Not just capturing the aesthetic of the blockbusting movie,  GoldenEye 007  broke the wheel of the FPS genre - and proved its viability for home consoles. The N64 had too many great games to count, with  GoldenEye  sitting alongside  Ocarina  and  Mario 64 . Much more than just sitting in its own league,  GoldenEye ’s success led to Rare’s  Perfect Dark  (which is due to return as an Xbox exclusive).

While we’ve had a remake on the Wii U, Microsoft’s plans for an Xbox 360 revamp fell through. Still, barely a year goes by that Nintendo, Microsoft, or even both aren’t rumoured to be working on a revival. Mr. Bond, we’ve been expecting you.

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Best FPS Games: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (#20)

While the single-player component of  Black Ops 2  was nothing to write home about, the multiplayer is where this game truly shone. To this day,  Black Ops 2  is widely considered to be the pinnacle of  Call of Duty  esports, with numerous pro players looking back fondly at the iconic maps, balanced weapons, and fast-paced yet still strategic gameplay.

Whether it's the M8A1 assault rifle holding down an anchor position on the map or the MP7 shredding through enemies in close quarters, Treyarch were onto a winning formula with  Black Ops 2 . Titles like Modern Warfare  may have paved the way for  Call of Duty , but esports found its king in 2012.

Best FPS Games: Unreal Tournament (#19)

The extreme pace of many 90s shooters caused many to wonder how it would translate to a multiplayer setting, which earlier Quakes took advantage of. However, it was Unreal Tournament that really popularised the arena shooter and displayed its potential. It retained the speed and fury of its single player inspirations, but the fiercely competitive nature of the multiplayer turned it into an even more frantic sh*t show.

The level design was outstanding due to the variation of environments and geometry, the weapons were punchy and satisfying to use, and the number of modes added reams of depth and replayability. It went on to spawn in iconic series of arena shooters, and kicked off a zeitgeist that ruled the PC multiplayer FPS scene of the early noughties.

Best FPS Games: VALORANT (#18)

Counterstrike pioneered the tactical shooter, but VALORANT provided a different dynamic to it, blending the heavily mechanical gameplay with hero shooter design, with characters called agent. It plays very similar to CS , with an attacking side attempting to plant a bomb at set sites, as defenders try to stop them. 

The hero design adds a lot to the game's meta, allowing for numerous combinations of character abilities. This also makes for a quicker pace than most tactical shooters, as activation for many abilities is snappy, and they're all relatively simple to follow. Consequently, VALORANT has a pronounced style to it, both in gameplay and graphics, and it will always have you coming back for more.

Best FPS Games: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege (#17)

After a few years of a stagnating Rainbow Six franchise, Ubisoft reignited with the surprise hit of Siege . It's a multiplayer tactical shooter that plays with all the militarised mechanics of previous Rainbow Six titles, like repelling down walls and breaching doors thoughtfully. However, it's mixed with some hero shooter elements, creating a cast of operatives to choose from worldwide special forces. 

It's a deeply intelligent title, and the room for strategy is enormous, creating a playground for cerebral warfare. The 'games as a service model also managed to keep it fresh, rotating in new ideas and content with the new seasons. Siege is directly true to its name, creating the perfect situations for rewarding tactical gameplay in literal siege scenarios, that really tests your physical and metal reaction time.

Best FPS Games: Half-Life 2 (#16)

The Half-Life series may be the only franchise in gaming where each title was revolutionary to the industry in some form. Despite the haunting prospect of following up the original game, Half-Life 2 delivered a deeply immersive dystopian sci-fi experience, once again putting us in the shoes of Gordon Freeman to seemingly take on the world. 

One of the most notable aspects of Half-Life 2 was the Source engine. At the time, it had an unrivalled level of interactivity due to its robust physics systems that played heavily into the combat and puzzle gameplay. On top of that, no game looked as good as Half-Life 2 , with incredibly detailed character models and faces, that allowed us to connect to the NPCs we encountered throughout the unbroken narrative.

Best FPS Games: Left 4 Dead 2 (#15)

Zombies and video games go together like peanut butter and jam, and there are few things as satisfying as mowing down hordes of the undead with guns and melee weapons. This is the Left 4 Dead series bread and butter, and Left 4 Dead 2 is undoubtedly the best, especially considering you can just play all the first game's campaigns in the sequel. 

It's about as simple a zombie game you can have, as you and your three AI companions (or friends, we recommend friends) fight your way through American locales to escape the hordes. There are even the special infected, who all have functions designed to separate the group and pick off stragglers. With tonnes of replayability, a hilarious and dedicated modding scene, and the multiplayer modes that make for a whole different way of play, Left 4 Dead 2 still shows its quality to this day.

Best FPS Games: Far Cry 3 (#14)

The title that launched the Far Cry franchise into the mainstream, Far Cry 3 has become one of Ubisoft's most formative titles, and for good reason. It defined the open-world and content structure that the franchise has followed since, along with literally every other Ubisoft game  - but that's for another time. 

It gave players great freedom to explore the Rook Islands as protagonist Jason, who is captured by pirates along with his friends during a holiday gone wrong. The primary antagonist you'll encounter is the twisted Vaas, who hunts Jason throughout, and gives one of the most chilling monologues in video game history. It was a breath of fresh air for the time, and the dynamic open-world added a lot to the experience.

Best FPS Games: Halo Reach (#13)

For some people, Halo Reach signalled the beginning of Halo's dark age, and while there is some truth to that considering the titles that followed, Reach is still one of the best entries. Firstly, it humanised the conflict a little, providing a prequel story before Master Chief's saga that saw the final defence of the key planet Reach in the Human-Covenant War, along with how the inhabitants responded. 

It also contained an addictive multiplayer and the most robust Forge mode Halo had seen at the time. With a wide array of multiplayer modes to select, there was so to take part in, and the potential of custom matches made for some legendary community creations like Duck Hunt. To top it off, the comprehensive armour customisation allowed you to field a Spartan that looked like no other.

Best FPS Games: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (#12)

For better or worse, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is one of the most influential shooters of all time, and brought in an influx of modern military shooters trying to capture the zeitgeist that it initiated. Its story was highly notable, immersing players in a contemporary conflict centred around the constant tension in the Middle East and the rise of ultra-nationalism. 

The most celebrated aspect is the game's multiplayer, which managed to enrapture an entire generation, and set the formula for which the series would follow over the next decade. The arcade shooting mechanics were tightly designed, complemented by some of the best map design the series has seen. We'd be remiss without mentioning the addictive feedback mechanics, such as the flash of XP you'd gain from kills and the music that appears when levelling up. From its varied and memorable campaign, to the bombastic multiplayer, COD 4 is a marvel of contemporary game design, and set a high benchmark that others are still trying to reach years later.

Best FPS Games: DOOM (#11)

The original, king of the FPS, the grand-daddy of them all. DOOM can claim many titles, and even 30 years on, it's still an easy contender for the most influential FPS (if not game) of all time. You take on the role of Doomguy, a space marine caught in the middle of a demonic invasion on Mars, who must fight his way out of the horror. 

It doesn't have much of a narrative structure, delivering little snippets of text before each of the three episodes. What DOOM did though, was define the gameplay of the burgeoning FPS genre at the time, inspiring a whole plethora of DOOM clones we now know as boomer shooters. Its enduring popularity and high regard has seen it ported dozens of times, and it still remains as a constant in the wider gaming discourse to this day.

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Best FPS Games: Battlefield Bad Company 2 (#10)

Battlefield Bad Company 2 featured the trademark large-scale battles the series is known for, but refined the formula into the best entry yet. It had an unprecedented level of detail and heavily destructible environments, that added to the dizzying bedlam of the multiplayer. DICE also took inspiration from the progression systems of contemporary multiplayer shooters, adding unlocks for the classes that allowed them to specialise even more. 

It featured a single-player campaign, which overall was nothing to write home about but featured likeable characters with great banter that personalised them. Bad Company 2 is still one of the highest regarded entries, and was a signifier of the future potential of multiplayer gaming.

Best FPS Games: Overwatch (#9)

Despite a now-flagging fanbase and being inexorably tethered to grim actions that have taken place behind the curtains at Activision Blizzard,  Overwatch  still stands as the prime example of how a hero shooter should play. It took some balancing, but the final product of laborious re-balancing is a chipper and riveting team game that's packed to the brim with characters that each have their own playstyles, characteristics and ways to storm the objective.

There's something in Overwatch  for everyone, and with such a diverse roster of characters, it's immensely satisfying to find your main and collapse into the infectious gameplay loop. It might have dropped off, but the simple playfulness of matches tied with the game's inherent competitive intensity made it absolutely electric to play, and even more exciting to master.

Best FPS Games: Halo 3 (#8)

Ah, Master Chief. While  Halo Infinite  seems to have commenced a return to form, nothing quite beats the days of  Halo 3 . An iconic campaign that sees our green suited hero fight back against enemies like Grunts, Brutes, the parasitic Flood, Elites, and more. It's one of the best human vs aliens video games of all time, with numerous memorable levels and missions, and somehow manages to make players feel and care for a character with just an orange visor for a face.

When it comes to the multiplayer, something about the  Halo 3  formula just  worked . Maps were symmetrical and balanced, the time-to-kill was high enough that camping was never a problem and you always stood a chance of winning the fight even if you were shot in the back. Power weapons added another dynamic unlike anything in other multiplayer shooters at the time, and there were plenty of modes available. Forge was the cherry on top, allowing players to create their own maps and modes to play with friends and share with the community. Ah, the memories.

Best FPS Games: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (#7)

The first  Modern Warfare  may have set the bar at a ridiculous height for the  Call of Duty  franchise with its iconic single player campaign and game-changing multiplayer mechanics, but  Modern Warfare 2  took everything one step further. While the campaign didn't have quite as many memorable missions, No Russian absolutely rivalled All Ghillied Up for one of the most tense experiences in a  Call of Duty  campaign to date.

On the multiplayer side of things, the balancing wasn't quite right with weapons like the UMP-45 and ACR running rampant, not to mention "One Man Army noob tubes", but the enjoyment factor was off the scale. The fluidity of gameplay and how crisp it felt connecting shots made for the one multiplayer shooter everyone looks back on incredibly fondly.

Best FPS Games: Bioshock (#6)

At this point, there's not much to say about Bioshock that hasn’t already been stated. It's not only one of the best FPS games, but one of the best games ever made, and one that demonstrated that video games are an art form to be taken seriously. Bioshock featured role-playing elements and some basic morality choices in the gameplay, along with a combination of weapons and unique powers for the combat.

The story is where Bioshock really shines though, both deconstructing the role of the player in video game stories, and critiquing the idea of Objectivism. It revelled in the dystopian and utopian philosophies of the 20th centuries most outspoken thinkers, contrasting various ideas that informed the setting of Rapture and the character of Andrew Ryan. Bioshock had ambitious narrative aims, and frankly delivered with one of the best stories to grace video games. 

Best FPS Games: Apex Legends (#5)

After the huge success of the battle royale genre due to PUBG , it seemed like every developer was trying to get in on the action. There were some honestly good attempts, but Apex Legends has perhaps cemented itself as the best FPS battle royale. After a stealthy three-year development cycle, the game shadow dropped out of nowhere in early 2019.

It changed up the BR formula slightly by letting players select individual characters with their own skills and abilities, called 'legends.' It also had fewer players in a game, with 20 teams of three, or 30 teams of two, which in tandem with the hero shooter formula, made it feel more squad-focused. To top it off, the varied but tight map design adds a lot to the game, with it focused around characters skill and verticality.

Best FPS Games: DOOM (2016) (#4)

There was a lot of apprehension upon the announcement of DOOM (2016) . At the time, the idea of successfully recreating what made the original special seemed impossible, but they did it, the mad men actually did it. Acting as a sort of reboot/remake, DOOM (2016) put you in the shoes of a more seasoned Doomguy, who had previously rampaged through the hordes of hell, ripping and tearing until they had to drop a damn cathedral on top of him and imprison him. 

Fast-forward and Doomguy awakens on Mars again, with that familiar premise of a demonic invasion hanging over his head. They refined the gameplay for this entry, drawing from 30 years of game evolution, while still harkening back to the spirit of the original. It featured a pulse-pounding soundtrack from Mick Gordon that spurred the action forward, and intense combat supplemented by a cast of weapons, speed, and innovative mechanics like the glory kill system. It's undoubtedly one of the best reboots of all time, and helped launch the renaissance of boomer shooters.

Best FPS Games: Quake (#3)

The peak of the 90s shooter no doubt came with Quake . As the successor to DOOM , it built on the frenetic action with more speed, intensity, and utter mayhem, supplementing it with full 3D rendering to bring the amalgamation of sci-fi, Gothic medieval, and Lovecraftian aesthetics to life. The eclectic mash-up of styles worked wonders, giving it a pronounced look, and it stood as an example of excellent art design even with a limited colour palette to work from.

The impeccably sinister soundtrack from Trent Reznor also bolstered the experience tenfold, creating industrial soundscapes and a constant whirling ambience that built on the uneasiness. All these elements sought to heighten the tight shooting and movement, which contained a previously unseen fluidity and momentum. All in all, it's a hallmark of boomer shooter design, that's been echoed for generations of gaming.

Best FPS Games: Titanfall 2 (#2)

If this was a list of the best FPS single player games,  Titanfall 2  would run away with the crown. An impeccable narrative and missions that blow the mind of anyone playing through it for the first time, nary a bad word can be said about this incredible successor to a series that wasn't afraid to push the boat out and try new things. If you've never played  Titanfall 2  before and you like first-person shooters, you must immediately give it a go after reading this list. Especially the Effect and Cause level.

The multiplayer wasn't half bad either, with myriad titans to choose from and clean, responsive shooting mechanics that so clearly took inspiration from  Call of Duty . Which makes sense, since  Titanfall 2  was developed by Respawn Entertainment, a company founded by ex-Infinity Ward developers, who created the  Modern Warfare  series.  Titanfall 2  is so easy to pick up and play but it will take some serious grinding to become a master of one of the greatest ever first-person shooters, because that wallrunning is some serious business.

Best FPS Games: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (#1)

Counterstrike is without a doubt the greatest multiplayer tactical shooter series ever created. The core idea is simple, pitting two teams - Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists - against each other, with the Ts attempting to plant a bomb in various points on the map while the CTs stop them. As the latest entry, Counterstrike: Global Offensive has become an esport goliath, and the most concentrated entry, distilling the CS core into its most potent outing.

Despite the simple premise, the gameplay is full of depth, with tonnes of elements to master such as shooting, movement, economy, and equipment usage. Counterstrike is principally a test of your raw mechanical skill, with an extremely high skill ceiling to boot. It's also worth mentioning the legendary staying power of the maps, some of which have been mainstays in the competitive scene since CS 1.6 , which is frankly down to their excellent design that allows the tactical battles to play out.

Now you've got to the end of our best FPS games list, why don't you check out this list of the best free PC games ?

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FPS: First Person Shooter

The largest ensemble of gaming icons ever assembled on screen, FPS: First Person Shooter is a documentary that takes fans on a nostalgic journey through the creation some of the greatest vid... Read all The largest ensemble of gaming icons ever assembled on screen, FPS: First Person Shooter is a documentary that takes fans on a nostalgic journey through the creation some of the greatest videogames ever made. The largest ensemble of gaming icons ever assembled on screen, FPS: First Person Shooter is a documentary that takes fans on a nostalgic journey through the creation some of the greatest videogames ever made.

• David L. Craddock
• Christopher Stratton
• Richard Moss
• Greg Thompson
• Dave Lebling
• Rebecca Ann Heineman
• 3 User reviews
• 5 Critic reviews

• Self - Co-Creator, Maze War

• Self - Programmer, Interplay
• (as Rebecca Heineman)

• Self - Creator, The Colony

• Self - Co-Creator of Xbox

• Self - Level Designer, Quake (Series)

• Self - Marketing, ID Software

• Self - Co-Founder, id Software

• Self - Co-Founder, Apogee Software …

• Self - Author, Masters of Doom

• Self - CEO, Gearbox Entertainment

• Self - Creator, Cinemassacre, Angry Video Game Nerd

• Self - Co-Creator, Unreal, Unreal Tournament

• Self - CEO, New Blood Interactive

• Self - Level Designer, 3D Realms
• (as Richard 'Levelord' Gray)
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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Goofs Ay 00:05:22 the photo of "J. C. R. Licklider" is actually Sir Michael Caine.

James Rolfe : [about "Doom"] I just remember the first time I heard about the BFG, my friend's dad who installed it on his computer and he said, "Oh, there's this gun in the game that just obliterates everything. It's called the BFG." And then the dad goes, "You know what that stands for?" And we're like, "What?"

John Romero : Big Fucking Gun.

James Rolfe : And we're like, "Oh shit! Your dad's cool!"

• Connections Features The Guns of Navarone (1961)

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• Nuclear-Atom
• Sep 17, 2023
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• September 2, 2023 (United States)
• United Kingdom
• Official Site
• FPS: First Person Shooter the Definitive FPS Documentary
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• Runtime 4 hours 35 minutes

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Man Claims to Have Caught 'Time Traveler' Using His Shed in Wild Video

Alleged 'time traveler' fl man sneaks into shed comes out way older day later.

One guy claims to have captured a real-life Marty McFly on camera at his Florida Airbnb -- posting a video that certainly seems to suggest time travel is real ... if you buy this, that is.

A dude named Alec Schaal posted a series of videos this week that has the internet equally mesmerized and stumped -- because it shows what appears to be a dude sneaking onto his property, going into a shed ... and coming out a day later looking way different.

By that, we mean the man purported to be a "time traveler" emerges several years older.

Take a look and you'll see what we mean. Alec says he's got a home in Florida that he rents out as an Airbnb -- and there's a security camera system that alerts him to activity when he's not there. He got pinged to some movement, and says he saw something incredible.

Check it out ... the video appears to show a random young dude wandering onto Alec's property off the street and he moseys around aimlessly before popping into a shed, seemingly for no reason. Alec calls the cops, who come to check it out -- but can't find the guy in there ... even though you never actually see him leave the space. A day later, a big update.

Alec posted footage that seems to show a totally different person exiting the shed out of nowhere -- only this man is elderly ... although, he looks awfully familiar, at least to Alec.

Long story short ... Alec thinks he's got a time traveler on his hands -- and he insists there's no trickery or pranks afoot on his end. Some believe it, others are a bit more incredulous.

Alec says there are no tunnels in his shed, and he's going to the house soon to inspect what could possibly explain this. On its face, however ... you could call it 'Back to the Future,'-ish.

For more viral news check out TMZ Verified , available on all podcast platforms.

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