Ever since Wolfenstein and Doom, FPS games have refused to stop coming out. Even as AAA publishers moved away from non-franchise shooters in the late 2010s, indie devs stepped up to right that wrong, producing a new golden era. With competition so fierce, fantastic FPS games frequently slip through the cracks while everyone’s attention lies elsewhere (on COD or Apex Legends).
As the gaming industry moves at a blistering pace, convincing anybody to try out a forgotten shooter from 2004 is a tough task, but that won’t stop us from spotlighting these games. If you feel a bit disenchanted with the current FPS scene, a trip to the past, when publishers were willing to take risks and get weird with their games, might be in order.
I’m focusing on great games that flopped at launch and haven’t really become well-known cult classics (so, no Bulletstorm). While I would recommend all these games to anybody who enjoys old-school shooters, I’m not taking into account how well they have aged.
Clive Barker’s Undying Should Be Horror-FPS Royalty
Much Better Than The Other Clive Barker Horror-FPS Game
- A 2001 PC FPS horror game that wasn’t marketed particularly well by EA Games.
- Undying is still accessible through GOG.
While Jericho was a disappointment, Clive Barker’s name isn’t associated solely with lackluster shooters, even if you have to push past some unsurprising early-2000s jank. Undying absolutely oozes Lovecraftian gothic horror, blending fun dual-wielding mechanics with a delightfully creepy premise that involves curses, vengeful undead beings, and occult goodness.
With Barker contributing to the lore and characters, Undying showcases his signature style, and EA Los Angeles did a pretty good job of creating a solid shooter-horror hybrid around the author’s concepts. The story revolves around siblings who unleashed occult magic and became cursed to die gruesomely, and you portray a WWI vet tasked with tracking and putting them down. Just silly B-Movie horror goodness.
Although a bit rough around the edges, Undying‘s combat still shines due to its innovative implementation of dual-wielding, with one hand holding weapons and the other dedicated to spells or gestures. Besides combat, spells like the Scrye played a significant role in exploration, allowing you to see things that you would otherwise miss.
Kingpin: Life of Crime Was Blackballed Into Video Game Jail
An Ambitious Forward-Thinking FPS Game That Is Also Delightfully Gritty
- A gritty 1999 FPS that fell prey to media backlash and wasn’t even available in certain retail chains.
- Kingpin: Life of Crime is still available on Steam.
Although you never know how a gritty shooter from a relatively unknown developer will perform, Kingpin: Life of Crime would have fared much better if it hadn’t been released a few months after the Columbine High School massacre.
Unsurprisingly, the media targeted the title as part of its scapegoating campaign against video game violence, greatly limiting its reach and dooming it to instant obscurity. Kingpin deserves to be remembered as one of the Quake II engine’s crowning achievements, and as a forward-thinking project that explored mechanics that would eventually become popular in the FPS genre.
Hitboxes tied to specific body parts let players shoot enemies in the leg or arm to impact their abilities, a concept that is fairly ordinary nowadays. Although level-based, Kingpin actually gives NPCs personality and lets you adapt your approach when interacting with them, and it even features weapon modification through pawn shops during a time when that was not remotely commonplace. The Cypress Hill soundtrack matched the grimy urban environment splendidly, creating a game that felt different from everything else at the time of its release.
Tron 2.0 Continued The Franchise’s Tradition By Being A High-Quality Flop
This Disney FPS Game Should Be Played By Everyone
The developer responsible for Blood, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, F.E.A.R., and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor created a Tron FPS game. Yes, I was also caught off-guard by this tidbit, but Monolith Productions not only created Tron 2.0, but it also brought its A-game.
Serving as a sequel to the original movie, Tron 2.0 goes out of its way to faithfully recreate the world and aesthetic of its cinematic predecessor, all the while acting as a fantastic standalone shooter for anybody who doesn’t want to do any homework. Monolith designed the mechanics around the setting, creating perfect harmony between the story, environments, and combat. For instance, your inventory is represented through RAM slots, and weapons are subroutines that can have corrupted code.
Despite the Disney association, Tron 2.0 is a hardcore shooter by a master of the genre, one packed with tech jargon and light RPG mechanics. Reviews were very positive, but not all that many folks paid attention to a licensed game in an obscure franchise published by Mickey Mouse.
Breakdown Is Unlike Any Other 2004 FPS Game
Honestly, It Is Unlike Any FPS Game, Period
- A 2004 Namco game that was an Xbox exclusive. Limited NA marketing doomed this experimental genre-combo before it ever had a chance.
- Backward compatible with Xbox 360, One, and Series X/S.
Before Cyberpunk 2077 or even Mirror’s Edge, Breakdown stepped up to revolutionize first-person immersion, only to be promptly ignored by the entire world. Throughout the campaign, the game never moves away from the protagonist’s first-person perspective and takes steps to emphasize realistic interactions, despite the story and setting being over-the-top sci-fi awesomeness.
Breakdown took a shocking number of risks for both the era and developer, as Namco wasn’t known for first-person games except for arcade light-gun shooters and some obscure PS1 titles from the early ’90s. The locked POV would become relatively commonplace towards the end of the 2000s, but most subsequent games didn’t take things as far as Breakdown in recreating realistic human movement.
Combat blends melee and firearms, with the former being far more useful and developed. Breakdown functions as a first-person brawler with gunplay rather than an FPS with punches, and the player’s abilities reach absurd heights by the end of the campaign. You will be unleashing shockwaves and energy shields before you know it.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth Was Left To Die On Xbox
Still One Of The Best Lovecraftian Horror Games (And A Pretty Good FPS Game, Too)
- 6 years of development hell led to a 2005 Xbox-only release, just a month before the Xbox 360’s debut.
- Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is available on Steam, but the PC port is notoriously broken and buggy. The PC version is about as far removed from “near-perfect” as a game gets. The Xbox version is way more stable, although not free of bugs.
Resulting in Headfirst Productions’ bankruptcy, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth walked through hell to reach its finishing line, only to die a quick and silent death on the original Xbox. While preserved on PC, that port launched as a mess and has only become worse with each new operating system, making it near-impossible to recommend unless somebody is prepared to fix it themselves.
Sadly, way too many people will never get to experience one of the best Lovecraftian games, along with one of the better horror-FPS releases of the 2000s. Beating Dead Space to the punch by a couple of years, Dark Corners of the Earth adopted a HUD-less design that forces players to physically complete “simple” tasks like physically checking their remaining bullets or using realistic tools to heal injuries. Although not the first to go down this route, the game incorporated a Sanity system that could trigger hallucinations or panic attacks.
