A million new FPS games come out every single year. OK, my math is a bit off, but shooters might be the most overcrowded gaming genre. Even as AAA publishers grew scared to release anything besides Call of Duty or Doom, indie developers picked up the slack in a big way, ensuring there’s always a new single-player FPS game waiting for you.
Due to the sheer volume of releases, certain titles will always slip through the cracks, becoming little more than a memory to those who played them at the time. Not every game can become an all-time classic or is worth revisiting years down the line, but these forgotten FPS gems deliver top-notch campaigns that hold up incredibly well.
Red Steel 2 Is The Ultimate Hack And Slash Shooter
Worth Buying A Wii Just To Play It
Thanks to the pointer’s precision, the Nintendo Wii was perfect for first-person shooters, and it’s a shame only a handful of worthwhile games were designed for the system. You should track down almost every Wii FPS project you can get your hands on, including The Conduit duology and especially the GoldenEye remake, but no other game showcases the console’s complementary nature better than Red Steel 2.
As Ubisoft’s launch title was a mess that still isn’t worth anything, nobody was particularly excited about the sequel, only to find that Red Steel 2 was the game that its predecessor should have been. Taking full advantage of the Wii MotionPlus, the shooter / slasher hybrid’s gyroscope tracking accurately reflects your movements and, more importantly, features NPCs that realistically react to them. The combat is stylish, addictive, and fairly challenging, and switching between sword and gun is pretty seamless.
Wii exclusivity and its predecessor’s negative reputation doomed Red Steel 2 to relative obscurity, but I would 100% recommend picking up the console just to play it. I mean, the Wii also has dozens, if not hundreds of other great games.
Aliens vs. Predator (2010) Has Three Great Single-Player Campaigns
You Get To Play As A Xenomorph, Predator, And A Human!
The Aliens vs. Predator games are shockingly fantastic, but Rebellion’s 2010 release tends to be overshadowed by its spiritual predecessor, 1999’s Aliens versus Predator. While that shooter was a more impressive achievement for its era, Aliens vs. Predator is the franchise’s best game to play nowadays, and it provides three campaigns for the price of one.
If you want survival horror and a more traditional shooter, you can just play as a marine and try to survive against an army of Aliens and the occasional Predator. Oh, are you in the mood for stealth? Well, in that case, you can become the Predator and stalk your prey, executing brutal kills. Want something more chaotic and unusual? The Xenomorph campaign turns you into a wall-crawling, ceiling-running monster who moves at a blistering rate.
Individually, the campaigns are fairly short but still satisfying. Taken as a whole, Aliens vs. Predator offers unbeatable variety and consistent quality. Personally, the Predator campaign is my favorite, and I never fully got used to the Xenomorph’s playstyle, but all three have more positives than negatives.
Technically, the human campaign is the only one that is truly an FPS.
Prey (2006) Might Be Better Than Prey (As A Shooter)
A Romp Through An Alien Ship
Overshadowed by Arkane’s mostly unrelated 2017 immersive sim, the original Prey doesn’t get anywhere near the attention that it deserves, a fate amplified by the fact that its Steam version was delisted in 2009. Tommy, a disgruntled Cherokee mechanic, and his girlfriend are abducted by aliens and taken aboard a massive bio-mechanical mothership. Tapping into his ancestry (and learning to astral project), Tommy goes on a mindful rampage through a complex maze filled with moving platforms, gravity switches, and deadly enemies.
After recently revisiting the game, I was really surprised by how well Prey‘s core gimmicks, mechanics, and pacing hold up. Concepts like the “Spirit Walk” and reversing gravity are consistently used for both combat and puzzles, with the game finding creative ways to recontextualize them. Although some sections look a bit too similar, the mothership has so much personality and works splendidly as a main setting.
Singularity Lets You Become A Time Lord
I Miss AA FPS Games
The late 2000s and early 2010s were a golden era for first-person shooters, as publishers dropped one experimental AA game after another. Sure, they weren’t all winners, but plenty of them were fun or at least charming. Singularity was one of the genre’s better B-tier releases from this period, and it is still readily available on Steam for anybody who wants to revisit 2010.
Set on a Soviet research island and focusing on a timeline fracture, Singularity’s selling point is the TMD (Time Manipulation Device) that elevates both gunfights and level traversal. While the shooting mechanics are very solid, the real fun comes from manipulating the physical world through quick aging (or de-aging), and that’s only one upgrade. The puzzles are relatively rudimentary (from what I remember), but they are visually interesting since the majority of them revolve around changing the environment using the TMD.
Darkwatch Is A Supernatural Western FPS Game
What More Needs Be Said?
Darkwatch
- Released
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August 16, 2005
- ESRB
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M For Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language, Sexual Themes
We rarely get games like Darkwatch anymore from big-name developers and publishers. High Moon Studios was on such a great run for about a decade, and it is a real shame the studio’s modern output consists solely of Call of Duty assist work. While I prefer the Transformers Cybertron games that came soon after, Darkwatch is a top contender for the coolest game ever, and it plays pretty well too!
You play as Jericho Cross, a cowboy train robber who becomes a vampire and is recruited by monster hunters. Darkwatch gives you a small but awesome range of weapons, all of which serve a purpose and are best used in conjunction with each other. As you can save or harvest souls, the game incorporates a morality system that lets you be good or evil, with these choices influencing the story and your abilities.
Darkwatch is the full package: stellar world-building, top-notch combat, and an unbeatable sense of style.
