Release date: Developer: id Software Link: Steam. This one's for all the extreme pointers and clickers out there. We recommend Doom as a warmup, an introduction to the faster pace and health-giving systems like Glory Kills that encourage aggressive, reckless play. Because Doom Eternal moves much faster, with added mobility like the dash and the ability to swing from monkey bars, and it squeezes every vital resource with an iron grip. Health, armor, and ammo deplete faster than ever—arenas are bigger and filled with more demons overall—making for a more desperate, stressful shooter than the series' past.
It's a sweatfest, one that tasks you with juggling eight guns, their multiple alternate firing modes, a chainsaw, a sword, a flamethrower, grenades, Glory Kills, Demon Punches, dashes, and more, some of which are the only means of returning those vital resources to you. You're constantly riding the edge of death, bouncing in and out of the action to get shots in and stock back up on whatever resource is hurting the most, hopefully, before it's too late.
And that's all before Eternal introduces melee enemies that force you to completely reconfigure age-old shooter habits into something like a reserved Dark Souls in the middle of a traditional arena hellstorm.
It's a lot. A lot of a good thing. This deliberately slow-paced and engaging FPS has shades of Stalker with a gorgeous sci-fi open world that's based on concept illustrations by former Rockstar artist Ian McQue. You hijack a surveyor drone, investigating the signal in the title, and fend off other robot factions as you explore the planet's surface.
Later in the game you get to command other surveyors, too, who can help you in combat. The unusual and memorable setting, combined with great sounding and feeling guns, makes this one of the more notable recent cult hits on Steam.
You don't necessarily have to play all these games with a group, but they're better that way. Buy a copy with a friend—or maybe 20 friends depending on the game—and do a bit of bonding by graciously showing them where bottles of pills are and yelling at them when the bullheadedly dash into the next room before you're ready. There's a good reason to play every Halo game, whether it's 5 or 10 or 20 years old. That reason differs from game-to-game, though there's still nothing else in the FPS world quite like Halo's big, sandboxy levels.
But each has a unique draw: in Halo 1 it's the pistol, a sublimely overpowered hand cannon and more-or-less the only weapon you need in multiplayer. And multiplayer itself is still really fun, a throwback to the LAN days of hour-long CTF matches and ridiculous vehicle physics.
In Halo Reach, the 4-player co-op campaign and wave-based survival mode Firefight are perfect with friends. Thankfully, Microsoft made the wonderful decision to bring the MCC to PC, where they'll be playable and moddable for years to come. With Halo 4 added toward the end of , the full collection is finally complete on PC.
But that doesn't mean is done improving the package. The studio is still adding maps and quality-of-life features like crossplay with PC and Xbox. Deep Rock Galactic is what happens if Left 4 Dead's zombies were giant bugs and its maps were fully destructible playgrounds. As professional mining dwarves armed to the teeth, up to four players delve deep into procedurally generated caverns to complete all sorts of mission types.
Sometimes you're mining for a specific mineral, other times you're building pump networks, but all the while the looming threat of bug hordes persists. Maybe the most surprising part of Deep Rock is how good the guns feel and how well the four classes synergize together. Bug carcasses audibly crunch under the impact of my Engineer's shotgun and bugs scream as they're lit ablaze by the Driller's flamethrower. Procedurally generated games have a habit of feeling samey after a while, but Deep Rock is the rare exception.
With a healthy variety of mission types, no shortage of goals to work toward new weapons, perks, abilities , and more post-release support in the works, it's a shining example of how to do co-op shooters right. Release date: Developer: Fatshark Link: Steam. Vermintide 2 is a fully cooperative FPS where you and three friends axe, arrow, magic, and sword your way through a variety of Warhammer baddies.
The sequel ramps things up significantly from the original with more weapon types, enemies, and a new progression system centered around fairly generous loot boxes. It's intensely satisfying melee combat on a scale you just can't get anywhere else, especially in the comfort of a four-person party with friends.
No other first-person shooter offers a simulation on this level, with such high production values. Bohemia has built on Arma 3 with the excellent Apex expansion, too, which adds Tanoa, km2 of gorgeous tropical landscape to navigate. It was one of Evan's personal favorites of , and Andy Kelly even created his own Olympics-style events in Apex using Arma 3's Zeus mode.
It's an essential add-on. Release date: Developer: Bungie Link: Steam. Bungie proved its talent for weapon and encounter design in the Halo series, but Destiny 2 fits those guns into a dazzling new sci-fi setting with RPG elements and a strong reliance on fighting for fresh loot.
The community has struggled to get on board with Destiny 2's new seasonal structure, but if you're a new player there are hundreds of hours of great missions, much of which you can access for free. Competitive PvP is fairly decent, but Destiny 2's very best missions ask six players to come together in meticulously designed raids—part puzzles, part shooting challenges. As you earn power levels, you earn a huge collection of beautiful sci-fi guns, many with pages of backstory attached.
Destiny 2 still needs to prove itself as a long term prospect as a living game for really devoted hobbyists but, moment to moment, it's a beautifully designed FPS that still feels amazing a thousand hours in.
We've should know; several PC Gamer staffers have spent more time than that shooting aliens across the solar system. SWAT 4 is finally available digitally, too, after a wait of years. You can pick it up for a reasonable price from GOG. To celebrate its re-release, Andy took another look at it in With the ideas that drove its predecessor validated by strong sales, Gearbox had the resources to pour production value into the second coming of its silly, more-is-more approach to a grindy FPS.
Bandits scream, limp, kamikaze, and sputter last words. The Goliath subverts your years of training, counter-intuitively going into Hulk mode when you headshot it. Mutated pests swoop, leap, burrow, and shield their vulnerable spots. Polished, playful, and our favorite antidote to military shooters that take themselves too seriously.
Borderlands 3 may be newer and shinier, but we preferred the romp across Pandora in Borderlands 2, and it has the advantages of being cheaper and playable on any modern PC. For many years, gaming at 30 FPS was more than enough for anybody.
However, as technology advanced, gamers and developers sought to make the most of it. Soon, 60 FPS became the new standard for single-player games , while or higher became the standard for multiplayer games , particularly for first-person shooters. The old standard of 30 FPS is still enough to make a game playable. Anything below that can often appear unstable and most players will find it hard to enjoy their games at a lower frame rate.
In modern cinematography and animation, the standard is 24 FPS. PC gamers, however, are more accustomed to this frame rate, having played their games at 60 FPS for over a decade. For most people, 60 FPS is the best frame rate to play at. At FPS , things look different. Many players have a tough time seeing the difference between and 60 FPS, which makes it harder to present a strong case for wanting to game at FPS.
Even so, considering that higher framerates reduce input lag considerably , especially in multiplayer games, more is definitely better. Overwatch is easy to pick up and play and only has a few game modes to choose from, but the overall experience is so satisfying — particularly with a group of coordinated friends coming together to secure a win — that you could easily find yourself losing hundreds of hours to it.
Call Of Duty: Warzone. Credit: Activision Blizzard. Warzone is the bigger and better of the two games in almost every way, with player lobbies, a larger and more thoughtfully constructed map, an ultra-streamlined inventory management system, and a totally reworked armor system. One of the most intriguing elements of Warzone is the Gulag — a prison players are sent to when killed. Once there, players compete in intense 1v1 matches, and the winner is respawned back in Verdansk.
Add in the familiar Call of Duty gunplay and a substantial weapon customization system, and Warzone stands out as one of the most polished and fully-realised battle royale experiences available today. Battlefield 4. Players familiar with newer installments may miss some absent quality-of-life changes such as vaulting over high walls or reviving fallen squadmates, but those omissions do little to detract from the fact that Battlefield 4 is the best large-scale, team-based FPS game on the market with remote-controlled blowtorch robots you can use to kill your enemies.
Doom Eternal. Credit: id Software. Series favorite weapons like the super shotgun, the chaingun, and the rocket launcher all return — but instead of being simply different means to kill demons, each weapon in DOOM Eternal is designed to be very good at one or two specific things. For example, the super shotgun can be upgraded with a grappling hook attachment to close the gap between the player and enemies, while the heavy cannon can be used to pick away at distant enemies or weak points found on bigger baddies.
It would be a huge oversight to talk about either of the modern DOOM games without mentioning the disgustingly heavy, djent, industrial, and thrash-inspired soundtracks found in both.
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