Tramuzgan recommends 10 first person shooters

Being a fan of the genre, I've inevitably grown some opinions that I want to get out of my system. There doesn't seem to be any consensus on what people want from these games, so my favourites list is as good as anyone else's, but that being said, let me at least lay two ground rules to let you know what this list is specifically about:

• No multiplayer-only games
• No mixed-genre games (borderlands, far cry, deus ex...)

Sony's Call of Duty ripoff made at a time when CoD ripoffs were all the rage. I don't think that gameplay style was ever perfected, but Killzone 2 stands as one of its best examples. It's a slower, heavier, and more lumbering version of it, the heaving controls simulating the feeling of walking through a rough environment and handling heavy weapons. That's a turnoff for some people, sure, but this makes it work in the same way that say, Resi 4 made it work. The levels are varied and the difficulty is well-tuned, but the style deserves special mention. It's made to look unsanitized and filthy, bullet casings creating a mess on the floor and blood mixing with cement dust, enemies gurgling as you kill them, bullets scraping off bits of cement off the walls. It just oozes effort, and shows a commitment to an artistic impression. It's what elevates Killzone 2 above a good example of a style that's never been perfected to a straight up treat in its own right.

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I'm the Yugoslav cinema guy. I dig through garbage. I look for gems.

This is the game that bridged the CoD ripoff era with the current nu-doom ripoff ''arena shooter'' era. You have two guns and regenerating health, but also open arenas to fight enemies in, high mobility, and lots of wacky sci-fi weapons. It ends up being more its own animal than a part of either category, and it works really well. The arenas are made to feel more like real places, so when you're zipping around being all vigilant, you really feel like you're eking out a victory you had no right winning. The two guns system helps to that end: it handles it better than even Halo. You have a number of crazy weapons which allow you to do overkill, as well as standard workhorse shotguns and SMGs, so sometimes you hold on to the crazy stuff hoping to use it in the most fun situation, and trying to get as much use out of your other gun. Sometimes you're playing it safe and using two workhorse guns. Sometimes you're going for melee attacks only. It's really a replayable game in a way that Halo or CoD never quite managed to be, and the later ones never wanted to be. You step into the level and feel like the sky's the limit. It might as well, since it's a really short game, but at least every last level is interesting.

There's also the mech-piloting segments. Those are alright too, I guess.

While there are some cool story beats and artistic touches, the style overall is a little emblematic of that obama-era soyjakkery and iphoney sci-fi, so do keep that in mind.

The mother of all pleasant surprises. A PS3 game that can be thought of as a more video gamey Half-life 2 - more varied weapons, interesting enemy designs, and even minibosses! It came from the same studio as Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet and Clank, so it makes sense it's developed with more of a bing bing wahoo philosophy - a philosophy that works. It goes far above and beyond the ordinary in places where it didn't need to, such as how the regular enemies have a weak spot in the machines in their backs, and if you shoot it, you'll get a fun overheat-and-explode animation. The guns are loaded with fun and creative XP-based upgrades - for example, the revolver can evolve into a way to scatter grandes long-range, while the freeze ray can provide a defensive concussion blast.

Like Titanfall 2, this game is also very short, levels taking a fraction of what they do in hl2, but the fun factor is high enough to compensate. Besides the guns and enemies, though, this also refers to the trophies. This is one of the few games that made achievement hunting fun. It's not just ''kill 20 enemies with the revolver'' - it's a game that encourages you to goof around and see what's possible with the mechanics you're presented with.

Who doesn't remember playing Doom Eternal during the lockdowns? A sequel to a promising-ish Doom reboot from 2016, it accenuates everything that made the reboot different from the original and cleans up some of the inconsistencies, letting the rebooted series grow its own wings. Instead of the original doom's exploring of perilous mazes, you get a way more formal type of gameplay - one consisting of fighting enemies in designated arenas while making split-second decisions on which of the six million of your hyper-specific tools to use, while the electronic metal music keeps your rhythm going. What it gets right that most of its ripoffs get wrong (I'm looking at you, Fashion Police Squad) is that there is no exact enemy-to-weapon correspondence. What's there is more of a suggestion than an obligation: you're meant to take out cacodemons by lobbing grenades into their mouths, but you don't have to. You can headshot those slippery snake enemies if you want to challenge yourself, even though you're ''supposed'' to use the homing rockets.

Another advancement from doom 2016 is that enemies gib, you can take out their weapons before you kill them properly, and the damaged state of their bodies is an indication of how close they are to death. Eternal did something all triple A games should: advance its genre with features its predecessors just didn't have the technology to pull off. That alone makes it worth checking out in a time when triple A games are prone to phoning it in and doing nothing with their huge budgets.

It also cleaned up some of the more iphoney aspects of doom 2016's art style and sound design, bringing it to a pretty good level. The stuffiness of the core game sadly remains. There's very little in the way of ''just for the lulz'' - there's no toilet humour like in Shadow Warrior, no incoherent pseudo-latin like in Blood, no giant robots giving a thumbs up like in Titanfall 2. It's nothing but a meticulously designed machine - albeit a very enjoyable machine.

Who was honestly playing Titanfall 2 for the story mode though?

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An indisputable classic. Half-life was the first of the story-driven shooters, and is still well-known for its hands-off approach, letting you experience the game all by yourself and not forcing you to pay attention to the story. What sets apart HL1 from the story-driven games that came later is its level of confidence. Many will claim they're going for the same style, but just can't help themselves from interpreting the story for you and suggesting when and what you should feel - or God forbid, taking the control away from your hands (I'm looking at you, every japanese game ever made). Not half-life. You can do what you usually do in video games - let loose every venal instinct and spend 12 hours killing virtual dudes, and if that's all you want to do, there's nothing stopping you. The only game I can think of that outdoes HL in this is Crackdown 1, and coming from me, any comparison to Crackdown 1 is high praise. (No, not Dark Souls. Dark Souls doesn't have a story. It has a lore that you're not part of. That's not the same.)

While HL does still have something I find egregious about early 3d shooters - low enemy counts - it makes up for it by both its fast pace and its sky-high variety. It's a set piece machine - one moment, you're fighting tactically adept soldiers, the other you're playing ''the floor is lava'' in a flooded laboratory, then later on you're dashing through a crossfire between soldiers and aliens. That's well and good, but there's still an area where HL exceeds where its successors don't, and it's tying the set pieces into a coherent whole that feels like it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Games like Resistance 3 or Vladik Brutal are fun for a while, then they just stop - Half-Life concludes. I know I'm in the minority for liking Xen, but what better way to wrap up a game about being a guy caught up in a conflict way bigger than what you could ever understand? What could be better than being stranded in an alien dimension where the rules make no sense?

Finally, HL1 has some of the best atmosphere and sound design in the industry. The piercing metallic clangs and the echo make you feel like you're really there. I'll never forget when I first played it, when I was done with the sewer level, and I went to wash my hands. That's a mark of a game one should be proud of.

I was. I don't play multiplayer games.

Think of a rail shooter where you have to push along the rails yourself, and you have CoJ: Gunslinger. It's an extremely linear series of wild west-themed shooting galleries, where you're not expected to move much and it's somewhat pre-determined where you'll be shooting from. It keeps the gameplay fresh with upgrades bought with points scored by pulling off hard shots (Bulletstorm-style). The campaign is short and the low budget can be seen in the simple animations and non-existent cutscenes, but it doesn't matter. CoJ: Gunslinger is art.

Despite its simplicity, the test of skill is always on point. Pulling off headshots is not easy, and you're always looking to do consistently well, just to get a hold of that next upgrade. The difficulty escalates well enough and no upgrade makes the game too easy, and there's some boss fights to keep things interesting. It's a solid, entertaining shooter, but what pushes it from solid to great is its style and sense of humour.

The visuals, OST, voice acting, and sound design pay homage to the westerns of Sergio Leone, complete with the bullet ricochet sound and even sun rays shining through bullet holes. The story is framed through the main character's narration, and you can imagine how entertaining that gets. They even put in a young Dwight Eisenhower as one of the co-narrators. They even make jokes about the Dalton Brothers' extended family and how much drama they get in. Where else do you get that kind of imagination?

The pinnacle of the game is during the mineshaft level, where you're lead down a path and fall to your death, then the narrator says ''Which is what I would have done, if I was stupid!''. Then the last 10 minutes play backwards and you're made to play down a different path. If the entire game was just this one joke, I still would have put it on this list.

Blood is a Build Engine game, which is to say it's Doom but the levels are made to look like real places. In terms of artistry and level design, Blood is the best of the bunch by a country mile - it took the basics laid by Duke Nukem 3d (also recommended) and went to town with them. The levels are so lovingly made and intricate, teeming with secrets and begging you to turn every stone and look behind every door. Remember being a little kid and thinking there's a secret room in your school that contains dragons? That's what it feels like to play Blood.

The guns and enemies are the same way. Many have elemental weaknesses, and your guns cover them. The secondary fire gives them more to do than just their basic work-a-day function, and some trigger special death animations. An enemy's skeleton showing when you hit him with the tesla rifle is a gag that'll never leave me. It's all depicted in gorgeous pixel art, and backed by some of the most flavourful sound design in the industry. Crudox Cruo!

The third of the Build Engine Trio that ended up just a little underappreciated, being sandwiched between the more important Duke Nukem and the better Blood. It falls behind both in terms of style, humour, and level design, but what it has is the best combat out of any classic shooter. Call it a ''Glass Cannon Doom'' - you're armed with ludicrous overpowered weapons, but the enemies are the same way. Milliseconds matter in who's gonna live and who's gonna die, and you need to learn how to keep your cool while the enemies are throwing their fast and wide-reaching attacks. The game doesn't hesitate to make dick moves, so neither can you. You gotta take the combat seriously. I have a feeling that when people say old shooters are loud and crazy, they're referring to this first and Doom second. Doom has its BFG, sure, but Shadow Warrior has a nuke. You launch it and you have a millisecond to take cover before it instakills everything in line of sight. Action doesn't get more over the top than that.

Yes, that's just one point of praise, but it does it so well and consistently, and it's built on the already great foundation of Duke Nukem, so it's enough to make Shadow Warrior one of the genre's best.

There is a bit of Croatian bias here. It's a relic from the short period when my country had something resembling a real culture, so of course it'll matter to me. But even if it doesn't conjure up distant images of Dino Dvornik, A Wonderful Night in Split, Laku Noć Hrvatska, Čokolino, Turbo Limač, TBF, Edo Maajka, Žutokljunac, and cartoon dubs with exaggerated albanian or bosnian dialects, it's still a great game.

Unlike Doom which was part combat and part exploration, Serious Sam is almost entirely combat, bringing it equally close to those arcade games like Streets of Rage as to Doom. For some context, 3d shooters before Sam all dealt with the same issue of small enemy numbers. Since 3d models are more taxing on the system than 2d sprites, 3d shooters like Half-life and Unreal, while great games in their own right, just couldn't reach the same level of mayhem as Doom or Shadow Warrior. Serious Sam was the first game that could. So naturally, it focused entirely on that - the enemy waves are gigantic, and the levels that house them are the same way. Every battle feels grandiose and important, and you feel like a real one-man army.

There is something to be said about how Sam differentiates itself from its inferior ripoffs, and even inferior sequels. Games like Serious Sam 2 or Painkiller are happy to give you a haunted house ride where you shoot dudes, but they don't have the same consideration for how their enemies work with each other. You have the harpies that harass you from the sky, the bulls that provide you with an urgent target, the rocket walkers that are dangerous but can be ignored for a short while, the annoying skeletons that soak up damage for others... they're all cogs in a satisfying machine. A pick-and-mix. They can provide you with a whole game's worth of varied encounters, playing off the simple level design. It has this in common with Doom and (love it or hate it) Halo. You see this enemy and that enemy, you recognize what they do, the equation on how this exact combination will work clicks together, you work your way through it.

Its style and sense of humour also give it major points. It's a bright and colourful game. Sam is more outwardly goofy than his obvious inspiration, Duke Nukem. The secrets and gameplay gags are just incredibly lively, letting on that you're playing a game that runs on cartoon logic. Discovering a movie set where the final boss of First Encounter is being reenacted with miniatures, stumbling onto a portal in a random bush that takes you to a level where the big enemies are small and the small enemies are big. That bit in the ice level where Jingle Bells stars playing. A lesser game would not have bothered with that.

Finally, Damjan Mravunac's music is incredible. Give it a listen on youtube. He's my favourite video game composer.

Vanilla Doom and Doom 2 would have made the list by themselves. They're the rudimentary FPS on which every other good FPS is based on, in the same way that every modern epic fantasy novel is based on Lord of the Rings. The enemy roster and their synergy, the wepaon pool which is no bigger or smaller than it needs to be, the flexible gameplay loop of killing, exploring, and ammo management. You'll have a ball with Duke Nukem or Half-Life for all the improvements they made, but the airtight simplicity of Doom ensures that it can never go obsolete.

So imagine how good it is with the Brutal Doom mod.

It's one of those Rise of the Reds-style mods, one that keeps everything that made the original game good and just expands it. There's more of everything - more weapons, more complex enemy behavior, more modes, more gibs, more screams, more difficulty. If you're in the mood for more of the original playstyle, it has that, but you can also choose to play with modernized controls and a ''tactical mode'' which adds ADS, recoil, and doubles damage to both you and the enemies. The weapon roster is violently self-indulgent: you have the pistol and the minigun n stuff, but also an SMG, a flamethrower, a BFG 10000 as well as a 9000, a railgun, a magazine-loaded shotgun, a grenade launcher, an MG-42, anything you can think of. And they're all useful! There's always a situation where one of those weapons just happens to be the best tool for the job. It's clearly made by someone who understood why the original works and loved it for that, and exactly that. A modder that wouldn't have had the original any other way. Mods like that should always come up first when discussing any given game (I'm looking at you, Warcraft 3 fans. Dota this, dota that. Give me some RTS or go away.)

I'm including both Doom 1 and 2 under this entry, since the mod encapsulates them both, and both games are similar enough and so easy to attain that I don't see any point in splitting them up in this day and age. As with the implied recommendation of Vanilla Doom, Hexen and Marathon also go without saying.

Play Doom 2: The Plutonia Experiment on tactical mode for a true excercise in video game evil.

An addendum:

DUSK

DUSK is best explained as doing for shooters what Shovel Knight did for platformers. A ''greatest hits'' package that takes the best aspects of all the classics to create a sort of definitive first person shooter. The leading inspiration is obviously Quake, but the action-horror style resembles Blood and Painkiller just as much, the level design has a bit of Unreal in it, and it pays attention to story coherence like Half-Life. That makes sense, but HROT, AMID EVIL, and Ion Fury paid homage to the past in a similar way, so why bring up DUSK in particular?

The reason is this: DUSK makes you feel something that no other game does. It achieves this with how it rearranges the pieces it's given: like Blood, it's a horror-themed game, but in Blood that's nothing more than exquisite set dressing. It could get more mileage out of it if there was more story coherence, like, say, in Half-life. Half-life is an atmospheric and cohesive story-driven game about being involved in an affair way bigger than you, and so is DUSK, but don't you see the potential in Half-life to be a little more terrifying? For all its merits, it never made you shirk in front of the sheer scope of your undertaking. Quake influence could help there. Quake is an abstract and video-gamey game, and those qualities along with its low-poly graphics lent it an otherworldliness which was lost after Unreal went more concrete with its setting. DUSK manages what few games after Quake did: to put you in a sort of dream state while playing. It's got the best of both worlds - the hypnotic quality of a pre-Unreal shooter and the artistic vision of a post-Unreal shooter. It's an easy fit for its story of a mad lovecraftian descent - the slow level-to-level deterioration of the laws of physics. It's an electrifying feeling. Going from shooting klansmen in rural america, to exploring bizzarre underground labs, and ending up careening down in sideways gravity across floating islands, landing on the walls of your childhood home. The fabric of reality has unraveled, and you get to stare down God. That's what DUSK feels like.

It should go without saying that it learned the right lesson from Half-life, in that it doesn't overexplain itself. It trusts your intelligence that you can observe, and you can feel. Hell, there's barely any dialogue at all, and not even that many environmental story cues. It's not about creating a story that can be explained with words, it's about creating a feeling, an artistic impression. Like in HL, you can care about it. but you don't have to. DUSK is easily one of the best students of the Doom school of FPS.

77p Egg: Eggwife

Come on, this game is hysterical. How could I not put it on here?

It's far from the only neo-boomer shooter with an ironic, humourous theme. Slayerz X: Terminal Aftermath and White Hell are the same way, but my point isn't even that Eggwife is funnier, it's that it's more fresh.

There's a lot of talk about ''games as art'', which usually boils down to tedious subversions of video game conventions, 9 times out of 10 to a tedious, pedestrian end. Nier automata, undertale, and (I'm sorry, but it's true) Shadow of the Colossus are well-known culprits. Instead of getting your normal video game where you fight enemies and save n stuff, you get different dialogue if you savescum, and that's like a metaphor for the human condition dude, also like uhh buy a body pillow of the main character, look you can dress her up as a pikachu. Petty, piddling stuff. On that note, the only games that convinced me of games as art were those that played the gameplay straight and built the artistic impression around it rather than inbetween its pieces. Fallout 1, Supreme Commander, DUSK, and even Ico. No serious art worth its salt will ever be founded on the idea of subversion, but lots of good comedy will. Enter 77p Egg: Eggwife.

Eggwife is a functional, satisfactory, and even somewhat inventive first-person shooter at its core, but every last nook and cranny has been modified to be obnoxiously, aneurysm-inducingly stupid. No, not pussy-stupid where you still expect the player to buy the funko pop of the main character afterwards. I mean the kind of pervasive stupid that'll give you menus that looks like this.



Where it'll open on the developer's logo careening towards the screen and breaking before you get to read it. Where the level end screen is barely legible and is accompanied by a jingle of fart noises. Where urine and feces are their own on-screen meters, and are tracked on your status screen under the entries ''piss pissed'' and ''shit shat''. Where you can exit the game through the main menu and you'll be met with the yes or no prompt, but instead of ''no'' it'll say ''no i dont wanna exit i just clicked on the exit button for fun''. Sure, there's an occasional lazy meme, but still, it's hard to find a game that's this pervasively, thoroughly, and committedly retarded. You have to try it. It's an absolute spectacle.