The seventh generation of consoles was really rough. While we did get some awesome games, there were a ton of experiments as developers struggled with rising development costs and complicated hardware technology. With the rise of HD gaming, which is games rendered in 720p or higher, there was also a struggle to evolve genres with this newfound hardware. First-person or third-person shooters struggled probably the most in this era as open-world games were evolved and, mostly, well done with games like Grand Theft Auto IV, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Skyrim, and Saints Row. Shooters were stuck in the past, gameplay-wise and design-wise. Corridor shooters with no story or interesting characters, not to mention lacking an identity, helped make up for the lack of the latter. Your favorite shooters like Doom and Quake didn’t really have a good story or characters, but they had an identity that helped them stand apart from other shooters. The look, feel, weapons, and overall design were unique to that game. This just didn’t happen with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 shooters, and if it did, it was rare. We’re going to take a look at the worst and best shooters in this generation of consoles and why the genre stalled and didn’t really evolve much until the next generation cycle.
The Outfit
A launch title for the Xbox 360 and developed by the excellent Relic Studios (Warhammer fame), it was a surprise that the game was so boring and bland and a complete flop. The game forewent realism and instead encouraged total destruction, but the campaign was repetitive and dull and overall a very forgettable experience.
Bullet Witch
I really wanted this game to be good. Not only did it have a fun female protagonist, but it had style as well. However, upon release, it was a buggy, clunky, awful mess of a game and looked really ugly and dated. I don’t know how this game wound up so badly, but even a recent re-release of the game on PC didn’t help it any. There’s a lot of potential here, and if you really want to play it, it’s possible. Sadly, the game flopped really hard despite releasing early in the HD era cycle.
Infernal: Hell’s Vengeance
This is probably one of the worst games on this list. This is “Steam Early Access” quality gaming here. The game is literally incomplete. The controls don’t work half the time, the puzzles don’t make any sense, like they were still in the planning stages, the visuals are horrendous, and the voice-acting is awful. There isn’t a single redeeming quality to this game at all. You’re better off forgetting it exists. What’s even worse is that the console version is an “updated” re-release of the PC version, and clearly nothing was fixed.
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men
Kane & Lynch really tried; they really did. While the cinematic moments are entertaining, the gunplay is weak and feels half-baked, and the story doesn’t really go anywhere. Not to mention, the game looks really dated. The sequel is much better, despite having its own flaws. While Dead Men isn’t inherently awful, you’re not missing out on much by skipping it entirely.
Iron Man
Woof, yeah. I can’t believe I’m talking about this. This was one of the worst games ever made in 2008, and it remains so. This was when superhero games were still awful, plus a movie tie-in? No thanks. Iron Man had a good sense of speed, and tearing apart things was kind of fun, but the game was ugly, bland, repetitive, and just didn’t have a drop of fun. Sadly, everyone bought it! The game sold really well, and I don’t understand why. There were much better superhero games at the time, but because of the movie, I guess people needed it in their lives. Thankfully, movie tie-in games aren’t as common these days because of the rise in development costs and the stigma surrounding them.
You know, making these lists is really depressing. I remember renting this game from Blockbuster when it was released because of the cool new terrain deformation technology that LucasArts was supposedly going to shock the world with. While it looked cool and the graphics were nice, the game was just plain boring. It’s one of the most boring shooters I’ve ever played, and this was a plaque during this time. There were so many generic, boring shooters out there that didn’t want to do anything interesting or build worlds and characters. Generic white dude with a bald head? Check. Sci-fi weapons that don’t have any meaning but mostly resemble real-world weapons? Check. The same multiplayer modes in every other shooter? Check. A single gimmick that the entire game hinges on? Check. Generic military dudes as enemies? Check. Everything is gray and looks like Gears of War, but not as interesting. Check. The list goes on.
Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon
Oh man, whoever was behind this game was a complete dick. Not only was Path of the Furon an incomplete mess, but the humor sucked and there were many racial stereotypes in the game that would make the most racist people on the planet blush. Who approved this script? Even if you look past that, the graphics are last-gen, the game crashes and breaks often, and the game just isn’t fun at all. It’s easily the only bad game in the series. Don’t even pick this up out of curiosity if you can avoid it.
SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs Confrontation
This is easily the worst game in the series. Not developed by Zipper Interactive themselves, Slant Six really screwed up here. While the game felt like a SOCOM game, they forgot everything else. Only seven maps at launch, no campaign mode (whoops), and essentially, since the servers are dead, this game is a piece of vaporware now. The animations were bad, the graphics were dated, and overall, it just wasn’t very SOCOM-y enough to garner sales. By this point, the series was waning in sales and was becoming just another yearly military shooter.
Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard
Eat Lead is a generic and boring shooter, despite its attempt at being a video game parody. The level design stinks, the characters are dumb, the gunplay feels like BB guns, and the graphics are downright hideous. This could have been an interesting game, but instead, we just get more typical shooter garbage of the era. Everything is gray, the lead protagonist is a bald white dude, and there’s no effort put into it.
Damnation
The game originally had potential. It was first entered into an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod contest and became a Total Conversion mod. The premise of an alternate American Civil War is a great idea, but they forgot to make a good game. Awful performance issues, terrible gunplay, bad voice acting, ugly visuals—the list goes on. This is probably one of the worst games of the HD era, hands-down. There’s not even enough here to bother trying out of curiosity. Even the gore and interesting-looking weapons don’t save this mess.
Terminator Salvation
Why is it so hard to make a good Terminator game? Not a single one exists. Salvation is, of course, a movie tie-in but doesn’t feature anyone from the movie. While the game looked decent, the action was repetitive, there wasn’t an interesting story, the gunplay was weak, and the game was just another gray shooter of the era. At least the Terminators looked cool, but it’s still not enough to pick this up. You can also beat the game in a few hours, and it was $60 upon release. Yikes.
Specifically for this era of gaming, Sniper Elite V2 and Sniper Elite III are what I’ll be talking about. Both games are incredibly dull. Sure, the series is known for really awesome X-ray sniper shots and exploding testicles, but that excitement ends before the first level is over. While Sniper Elite hasn’t been an inherently bad series, it’s just not very interesting. This is a generic gray and boring WWII shooter with broken stealth mechanics (somehow it has yet to be fixed), boring level design, and, of course, a pointless story. Hardcore stealth-action fans might squeeze a tiny bit of juice out of this, but most won’t.
Man, at this point, should I just do checklists? Another generic, gray, boring Gears of War rip-off shooter with a single gimmick it hinges on. Look! It guarantees the gimmick is so cool and unique they made it par to the cover art! Yeah, walking on walls doesn’t change anything here. The graphics were pretty good, but other than that, it’s a generic city. Boring weapons, a lame story, stupid characters, bad voice acting, and a complete short and forgettable experience
Army of Two Series
EA was really convinced this new IP was it. So instead of capitalizing on better original IPs like Mirror’s Edge, they took off with Army of Two. Again, another gray, generic, and boring military shooter, but the gimmick here was co-op campaigns. The game was pretty unplayable solo because of the dumb AI, and a lot of situations required quick reactions from both players. The story was dumb, and the attitudes they gave the two main characters were pretty lame. As you can see, this is a plaque from the HD era. Shooters just weren’t very good and were pumped out like candy.
This one had a lot of potential, and I was excited leading up to its release. A WWII Splinter Cell with a female protagonist? It was unheard of back then. Then the game came out, and it was a complete mess. awful level design, stupid AI, terrible controls, boring story, and the lead character had no depth. The selling point was tight clothes and lingerie. The graphics had too much bloom, looked gray and boring, and overall, it was just a bad experience.
Dark Void
This was a reboot of the classic 8-bit game, but it was considered one of the worst games of the era. Here we go again; say it with me now! generic, gray, and dull. It had no life and was just another generic shooter. The main thing that made Dark Void fun was the jetpack! So what do the developers do? Take it away during most of the game. Wow, good job, guys. You couldn’t even get the game’s main gameplay mechanic right. The enemies repeat ad nauseum, and the story is dumb too. Seeing a pattern yet?
Defiance
An MMO shooter, you say? Wow, how exciting! Yeah, not. This was another overambitious project from the start. The game was supposed to tie into a TV series, and the choices players made during the story would affect the show. Advent Rising also wanted a TV show, and look what happened there! The game was just dull, boring, glitchy, and not fun at all. You can’t even try the game now because the servers are offline, so the game makes a decent coaster.
Quantum Theory
Here we are! We made it! The ultimate Gears of War rip-off award goes to Quantum Theory. I remember playing this demo and thinking it was one of the worst games I’d ever played. The game is essentially incomplete and rushed together to capitalize on the gray, white-dude, Gears of War-looking-ass shooter trend. There’s not a single redeeming quality here outside of a few good-looking characters, but this was a Japanese-developed rip-off, so it had that weird stuck-in-the-early-2000s Japanese developer weirdness that took forever to change.
Transformers Series
While the High Moon Studios games were great, this section covers all other Transformers games released at the time. They were mostly movie-based and dreadful. Boring is the best word to describe them all. While they functioned and weren’t glitchy, they just weren’t fun at all. Incredibly short, repetitive missions, ugly graphics, terrible controls—and the list goes on. Not a single one has any redeeming values, even for the most hardcore Transformers fans out there.
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City
When Resident Evil 4 became as successful as it did, Capcom thought it was a good idea to take away tension with each new release and add more shooting. Sure, the shooting mechanic in RE4 was revolutionary, but don’t make the games just about that. ORC was a complete disaster and easily the worst game in the series. nothing but a pointless and boring corridor shooter with terrible cover mechanics, lame weapons, dumb AI, and a stupid story to boot. The game mostly focused on multiplayer, which it couldn’t do right either. The enemies were also bullet sponges. Making enemies take a stupid amount of damage doesn’t make the game more fun. That’s how shooters should be. Stay away at all costs.
The seventh generation of consoles was really rough. While we did get some awesome games, there were a ton of experiments as developers struggled with rising development costs and complicated hardware technology. With the rise of HD gaming, which is games rendered in 720p or higher, there was also a struggle to evolve genres with this newfound hardware. First-person or third-person shooters struggled probably the most in this era as open-world games were evolved and, mostly, well done with games like Grand Theft Auto IV, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Skyrim, and Saints Row. Shooters were stuck in the past, gameplay-wise and design-wise. Corridor shooters with no story or interesting characters, not to mention lacking an identity, helped make up for the lack of the latter. Your favorite shooters like Doom and Quake didn’t really have a good story or characters, but they had an identity that helped them stand apart from other shooters. The look, feel, weapons, and overall design were unique to that game. This just didn’t happen with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 shooters, and if it did, it was rare. We’re going to take a look at the worst and best shooters in this generation of consoles and why the genre stalled and didn’t really evolve much until the next generation cycle.
This will be a multi-part series due to the number of games. The next feature will talk about the worst third-person games of this generation.
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter Series
Ghost Recon was one of the best FPS games for the longest time. It was one of the few good military shooters in the sixth generation of consoles and dominated the Xbox space. Advanced Warfighter was one of the few real next-gen games upon release and was one of the reasons I bought an Xbox 360. It helped introduce me to a real next-gen experience, along with Gears of War and Condemned. The Advanced Warfighter was nearly perfect. Fantastic level design, perfect gunplay, amazing visuals and animations, and somewhat interesting soldier banter. It still holds up to this day and looks great on the Xbox One X. The series went to sh*t with Future Soldier and completely changed everything.
Gears of War is probably one of the best third-person shooters of all time and by far the single best series for the seventh generation of consoles. It’s the main reason I got an Xbox 360, and I have replayed these games numerous times over the years. They are just perfect. excellent weapon design, great cover system, well-balanced difficulty, a wonderful cast of characters with depth and backstories, as well as a fascinating world to just be in. The games were also leaders in visual and graphical design at the time. Each game pushed the Xbox 360 to new limits that I didn’t think it was capable of. The first three games are gems, but Judgement lost me. Developed by the Bulletstorm guys, it just felt like an arcade shooter and pretty much ruined the flow of the original games. You aren’t missing anything by bypassing that one.
Lost Planet Series
Lost Planet was an interesting attempt at a third-person sci-fi game from Japanese developers. It felt dated and clunky, but overall, it was a fun game. It looked pretty good too, and the PC version was even better. Fighting aliens with orange-explosive blood is a blast, and the game could get downright hard. The second game was fairly decent, mostly focusing on online multiplayer, and was incredibly difficult. The third game was more story-focused but didn’t really explore its story to its full potential or gameplay mechanics. The last two games are worth playing through the campaigns, but don’t expect anything amazing.
Stranglehold
This was a game that stood out from the crowd. Directed by John Woo and starring Chow Yun Fat, the Hardboiled team took a crack at a video game, and it mostly succeeded. The game had great cinematic flair, fast-paced arcade-style gunplay, and great visuals. Sadly, it wasn’t enough to push sales, as the game mostly flopped and Midway canceled a sequel. It’s a lot of fun, if not repetitive, even today, and still looks decent. Think of this as an Eastern Max Payne.
Kane & Lynch was a promising series. The first game had a lot of ambition, and the first part of the game was mostly decent in scope, but the gunplay felt really bad, and it was just a mess. The second game was much better and was an enjoyable cinematic corridor shooter with interesting characters and much tighter gunplay. The game was graphic and a roller coaster ride of bombastic gameplay, and it was quite a fun evening despite how short it was. Sadly, these improvements weren’t enough to keep the game alive, and Square Enix quickly shuddered the series, and we haven’t seen anything since.
Does this series need explaining? It’s one of the best third-person shooter franchises of all time and one of the most consistent in terms of quality. Every single game is solid, and you can easily spend a weekend going through all three games and having a blast. While the first game feels more dated than the others, they are gorgeous games pushing the PS3 to its absolute limits and featuring memorable characters and fun adventures. The gunplay never quite felt right to me, but it’s still solid. The puzzles were fun, and the best parts are the huge vistas you get to explore. Each game feels like a new adventure, and Nathan Drake is a very lovable character.
Despite the fact that Mass Effectis an RPG, it’s mostly a third-person shooter with RPG elements. This was a juggernaut for nearly a decade when all three games were released. The first game, while clunky and having poorly implemented RPG elements and loot systems, felt vast and large in scope, with great characters and a huge system of lore and a space-fairing universe to dive into. The races, planets, and overall mythology of everything surrounding the story were fascinating and memorable. The series tightened up with Mass Effect 2and fixed a lot that was wrong with the first game, and ME3 was probably the most refined. great gunplay, tighter explorations, amazing visuals, and a great conclusion to one of the biggest franchises of all time.
The Ratchet & Clank reboot series for PS3 was just as good as the PS2 series. The games pushed the PS3 to its limits and featured the same tight gunplay, unique and zany weapons, and fantastic voice acting with a colorful and well-written cast of characters. The locales were varied, with lots of secrets to find, and the entire game was just so well balanced and well done. While there is a lot of platforming involved, there are also a lot of mini-games and various other things to do in this series. You can spend a week playing this trilogy and have a blast doing so.
Surprisingly not based on the movies, The Bourne Conspiracy was a sleeper hit low-budget title that was really good. I rented this and was surprised at just how solid it was despite its very short length. There were great animations, visuals, voice-acting, and tight controls. The story was pretty forgettable, but it was just so varied and well done that I’m surprised it never got a sequel despite the low sales. There were a lot of games like this in the HD era that were pretty good, but no one knew about them and they sold poorly. It’s such a weird license to choose and never capitalize one, as the Matt Damon films were still coming out at this time.
Another series that doesn’t need an introduction This was one of the few good horror games of the HD era and a surprising new IP from EA. I remember the first game very clearly, as it was so unique and new at the time and was a visual treat. The limb system and using power tools instead of traditional guns helped carve Dead Space into its own thing, which separated it far from other shooters and horror titles. It was tense, eerie, and had some good scares. I picked this up on day one with the strategy guide, played it straight through, and went through it again. The entire series has great replay value, but the third game is a lot to be desired. It strayed too far from the traditional ways of the series and implemented microtransactions and a weird loot system. Still decent to play, but nothing like the first two.
We’re specifically talking about RE5 and RE6 here. These were the two mainline games released during this generation. RE5 was a hotly anticipated sequel and follow-up to RE4. How can you fill those massive shoes? RE5 was pretty much the same as RE4, but a little blander and less interesting. It incorporated co-op and online play, which I wasn’t interested in. I was so excited for this game that I stood in line at midnight and picked up the collector’s edition. It was a solid game and still is, but it doesn’t hold a flame for RE4. RE6 was something that grew on me. I feel like if the game only focused on two campaigns instead of four, it would have been more focused. I hated this game at first, and it still has balance issues. It can’t decide if it wants to be a survival horror or an action game. It looked dated at launch, and the PC version is the best way to go, as the console versions just look like total crap. Still, the series introduced great new characters that are well-loved today. Revelations was ported from DS and is also a fantastic shooter, despite being more simple and linear than the mainline games. It had solid mechanics and some creepy monsters and felt more like RE4 at heart to me.
Hear me out here. This is actually a decent, if forgettable, shooter. While the first game was a huge deal because 50 Cent was one of the biggest names in the world at the time, this game fell under most people’s radar. The shooting is tight, the graphics are decent if bland, and Mr. Jackson’s terrible voice-acting is hilarious. The story is also really stupid, but you get good music, lots of explosions, and shooting action, and after a few hours, you finish the game and put it aside. It’s still a fun romp, and being endorsed by a celebrity makes it strange that it turned out halfway decent.
Despite this being an open-world game, it doesn’t quite break the rules to be on this list, as it’s very underrated and not as well known. While there is an open world, it’s still rather small, and there are a lot of linear missions in the game. While pretty clunky in most departments, Pandemic was one of the best studios when it came to open-world games, and this was one of their last games. The story was forgettable as well as the characters, but the art style was fantastic, and an open-world setting in WWII? I can’t beat that. The stealth gameplay was a lot of fun, and the missions were quite varied. There’s a good weekend here waiting for you.
While the first two games were linear FPS games, the reboot sequels were “open-world” destruction simulators that were quite entertaining if forgettable. The story and characters were pretty dumb, but Guerillafeatured a fantastic destruction system in which you can destroy every building from the outside in or reverse even. I remember playing the PC version, and the DirectX 10 version made my PC chug. It looked good, but the open-world part was barely that. It was just an excuse to extend the time between missions. Driving around on the boring Mars sand just to get to another mission was an excuse, but the gameplay was still fun. Armageddonwas better, in my opinion, as it focused more on the story, was still forgettable, and introduced new weapons and less on the open-world stuff. It’s a very interesting franchise, and sadly, we haven’t seen anything in a decade.
A lot of people consider this game to be the third Ghostbusters entry. There was a lot of skepticism around this game, and rightfully so. The franchise has always been in turmoil due to creators arguing and rights being discussed, but the game turned out great, if not forgettable. The story was pretty basic and paper-thin, but we got all the original voice actors, and they sounded good except for Bill Murray, who mostly phoned his lines in. The gameplay was fun, and you actually felt like a ghostbuster. The locales varied from the hotel to a library to a graveyard, and while it was short, it was sweet.
WET was one of the few new IPs during the HD era that never got a sequel due to poor sales. The game was a boatload of fun with varied gameplay, exciting visuals, an awesome protagonist, and a style similar to Quentin Tarintino’s films. It was brutal, looked good, and had tight controls. Sadly, the story was nonsensical, and there wasn’t anything to remember about the game after its short length. It’s still an awesome experience to this day and should be played by anyone who missed it. Sadly, it never got a PC release.
Alan Wake is one of my favorite games of all time. I picked this up on launch day and just remembered all the hype leading up to the release. It was supposed to be an open world, but then not; the story changed numerous times, and we never quite got an idea of what it was until just up until release. I have played through this game many times on both Xbox 360 and PC, and thankfully, the new remaster can be played by all. I eventually moved into the area where the film was researched. The PNW, and I’m not far from Snoqualmie, WA, where the setting was inspired. Whenever I drive around in more remote areas of where I live, I think of Alan Wake every time. It has the same atmosphere and feels like the game does, or the game captured the atmosphere here. The gameplay of Light vs. Dark is awesome and unlike any other game at the time. It has a confusing story, but after a couple of play-throughs, you catch what you missed.
I have to be very specific here. There were a lot of Transformers games released during the HD era on both consoles and handhelds, and most were trash. What I’m talking about is probably the best Transformers games ever made, and these are both developed by High Moon Studios. War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron not only looked good, but you felt like a Transformer. The controls were tight; each character was detailed and had the same weapons and abilities as in the show. The story was a bit mundane, but it kept you going. Despite how good all of this was, the game was still repetitive and got tiresome towards the end, but thankfully that’s around when the game ended. Even if you aren’t a Transformers fan, these are great mech shooters in their own right.
An open-world game, you say? You could barely call this game that. It’s an excuse to extend the game time and have driving missions. Outside of missions and going in between missions, there’s no reason to be out in the open world. It looks good, feels authentic to the time period, but is mostly pointless. The game has an entertaining story and characters, but they aren’t memorable or anything. The gunplay is tight, and the missions are varied. Overall, it’s a great Mafia crime thriller that you can kill a weekend with. The series has always been rough around the edges, but Mafia II is probably the best in the series.
Vanquish kind of came out of nowhere. Like Wet, Binary Domain, Shadows of the Damned, and many other original IPs, it just didn’t sell very well. This was an era dominated mostly by sequels. Statistically, these mostly sold the most for any publisher or franchise, and with rising development costs and an economic recession, that’s what publishers stuck to. Vanquish was a gamble, and while it has its issues like severe repetition, a short length, bad voice-acting, and a stupid story, the gameplay itself is fast-paced, frantic, and tight, and it looked decent doing it too. Sure, it looks like any other Japanese futuristic military shooter, but the sliding gameplay worked here. Platinum Games was on a roll around this time, and every game they played paid off.
Around the time this game came out, I was living on my own and moving away from my parents. Money was tight, and I could only afford to rent games for a good couple of years. Shadows of the Damned is a perfect example of a rental you play for an afternoon or evening and send back. There’s nothing memorable about it; the story was dumb, the characters were lame, but man, was the game crazy! There were a lot of good ideas here, with interesting weapons and some crazy gameplay ideas and monster designs, but the game also looked ugly and dated. Grasshopper Manufacture’s Suda51 was pumping these oddball Japanese games, and some were hit-and-miss. This is still worth a bargain bin purchase for a fun evening.
This was another original IP in which the publisher gambled it would make big bucks, but this one did not. It just didn’t look appealing, but it played very well and was highly entertaining. It looked like another generic Japanese military shooter of the time, and most people passed it up. What was here were entertaining characters, bombastic gunplay, and just an overall really fun time. This is a great evening and shouldn’t be missed.
This was a hotly anticipated sequel. The original two were from the previous generation of consoles, so what would Rockstar do to bring it up to speed? Well, not much. The game is mostly the same overall but has a much longer length. While Max himself is a treat to see and hear on screen, everyone else makes this feel like a generic drug cartel B-grade story. The gameplay is pretty thin, too. You just shoot everyone in sight, activate bullet-time, and heal. That’s all you do in this game. The weapons feel great, the cover system works well, and the production values are top-notch, but the game also looked dated on consoles and only looked really good on PC. I remember this game struggling in DirectX 11 on my gaming laptop and wouldn’t run very well. It was state-of-the-art tech-wise.
This was probably one of the biggest and bravest franchise reboots of all time, but let’s not talk about those yet. The Tomb Raider series had two reboots in the same generation cycle. Legend came out right at the tail end of the sixth-generation consoles, was later released on Xbox 360, and looked amazing. Legend had tight controls, fun puzzles, and classic Tomb Raider gameplay. Later, a remake of the first game was released as Anniversary, which played well across all platforms. The Wii had its own unique version, and the game somehow even looked good on PS2! Even the PSP version was rock-solid. Lastly, Underworld was released with larger levels, a bigger story, and improved visuals. This trilogy was awesome, but it wasn’t enough! Tomb Raider then rebooted to some chagrin. Lara Croft was a sex symbol, and when Crystal Dynamics took that away, fans revolted. They wanted Lara to be more human, more believable—a Lara that wasn’t a superhero. The reboot is one of the best games in the entire HD era of consoles. It had cinematic, bombastic gameplay, tight controls, and an awesome, semi-open-world experience.
Despite coming out at the tail end of the seventh generation cycle, the game still looked decent on PS3 and Xbox 360. I played this on PS4, but it was probably one of the few good horror titles to release on the HD consoles. While the game had awesome monster designs and was quite scary in some areas, it was poorly balanced, and I couldn’t decide if it was a survival horror game or an action game. The game felt like a chore to get through, but playing on easier difficulties would probably remedy this. It’s a memorable experience due to the awesome art design and monsters, but the story itself is a convoluted mess.
Metal Gear Solid didn’t see many releases during this time because Hideo Kojima took his time with them. MGS4 was probably one of the most anticipated games of all time and a huge PS3 seller. I remember when I picked up a slim PS3 in 2009, MGS4 was one of the games that came with me. It was absolutely fantastic in terms of visuals and production values. While the cutscenes could sometimes drag on for as long as 45 minutes, they were entertaining all the way through. The multiplayer component was hugely popular but wasn’t enough to keep the game afloat. Later on, MGS5 would also release on Xbox 360 and PS3, but it wasn’t the ideal way to play. It was pretty ugly and dated, and clearly it wasn’t meant to run on this ancient hardware. There was a fantastic HD remaster of MGS2 and MGS3 that was a blast to play through. Overall, it was a good era for the franchise, and probably the best overall.
The Splinter Cell series was a massive hit on the sixth generation of consoles, mostly a huge seller for Xbox consoles. The series debuted on Xbox 360 with Double Agent, but it didn’t sell super well. Conviction was a kind of reboot for the franchise, making it more streamlined and a little less clunky. While the story was forgettable, seeing Sam Fisher on screen is great, as he’s a powerful character. Michael Ironside does a fantastic job with him. The game was a lot of fun and paved the way for Blacklist later on, which was also solid but not as good.
The Hitman series had a reboot of sorts with Absolution, but Blood Money was an HD port of the sixth-generation game on Xbox 360 and was a pretty awesome game. I remember playing it and finishing it on PS2, and I had a blast with it. Absolution looked pretty good for the dating hardware, but I played it on PC, and I remember the DirectX 11 mode pushed my gaming laptop beyond its limits and chugged a lot. Absolution had more memorable assassinations and some awesome levels. Later on, the series would reboot again, but these were the only two Hitman games released on the HD consoles. There was an HD remaster of the first three games released, which were also quite entertaining. Overall, you got the entire Hitman package on these systems.
This was a huge surprise and a sleeper hit. The Dead to Rights series isn’t well-known for being all that great. I remember playing the original as a kid for the PS2, and only the stripper scene stood out for me. As a hormone-enraged pre-teen, I would constantly replay that level to see that scene when my parents weren’t looking. However, I totally skipped the second game, and the PSP game wasn’t all that great, but Retribution was a huge surprise. I rented it from BlockBuster, and it was super entertaining. Using your dog as a companion was awesome, and the game also looked good. While the story was pretty dumb, the game overall was super entertaining.
Another awesome sleeper hit. This was a rental for me, and I highly enjoyed it. The Glaive system in the game really stands out, and the graphics were pretty good as well. It had a nice art style and atmosphere and really sucked you in despite the forgettable story (what story wasn’t back then?) The gunplay was tight, and there were some fun environmental puzzles you had to solve with the glaive as well. This is a must-play if you missed it, and it’s just too bad the game didn’t sell well enough for a sequel. Another great shooter lost time due to poor marketing.
Have you ever wanted to play a game where you are a mail delivery woman? The answer is probably “I have no clue,” but you’re going to find out with this game. You play as Meredith Weiss, a computer programmer who lives in the big city and decides to go back home to the sleepy town of Providence Oaks, Oregon, to help out with her dad’s mail route so her parents can go on vacation. You spend two weeks in this town, and the bulk of the game is mail delivery, but there are also story choices here that decide your relationships with various townspeople.
You start the game off with a little backstory. Your mail co-worker, Frank, picks you up from the airport and drops you off at your parents’ house. You then start your delivery the next day. This is actually quite fun at first. You drive your mail truck around the small town and drop off mail at mailboxes and packages at doors. You get a map with envelope icons for mail and box icons for packages. It’s not too hard to figure out, as there are very few roads and you can’t get lost. There are certain landmarks in which story characters reside, such as Mo’s Diner, Kay’s house (a childhood best friend that you lost contact with), a lumberjack who is trying to prevent corporate apartments from being built, a potato farmer, a teenage mechanic, a general store owner, and a movie rental store owner, and you get to decide what your relationship is with these people. You can fall in love with them, ignore them, or just stay neutral. This is a story about everyday life, and while the characters aren’t very interesting, the overall bigger picture of small-town life is what can drive you in.
After the first day of mail delivery, the game becomes mundane and dull very fast. While the town looks nice to drive around in, you just drive around one big circle along the lake, maybe a few side roads for rural houses, and it’s just stopping the mail truck, getting your own, going to the back, picking the correct package, and getting back in the truck. The same four songs repeat forever on the radio, and having to do this for 12 days just gets so tedious. It’s literally filler to create a “game” in between the story choices. The delivery thing doesn’t add anything to the story at all. You could cut all that gameplay out and just have an interactive novel, and it would probably be a bit better so the developer could focus more on character development. The characters do stand out and all have unique personalities, but they don’t have enough screen time to really fill out.
Every choice leads up to an open mic night at the diner, and your choices up until this point carry out. You also get to decide whether to stay in town and keep delivering mail, run away with someone, or go back to city life and make money. I do commend the developers for capturing the small Pacific Northwest lifestyle. My mother lives in a small town in Oregon, and I also live in the PNW and just love games that capture the feeling up here. There is lots of rain, beautiful scenery, and small lifestyles in the rural areas. The game looks pretty too, but not technically speaking. There are lots of low-resolution textures and models, but the lighting and detail are really nice, but after the first hour, you just see the same scenery on repeat. You spend maybe 3–4 hours in that mail truck trying to pick the most efficient route for the dozen or so people you deliver to daily. The world is devoid of life outside of mindless NPCs that drive around or walk the streets. The town just feels dead and not alive at all.
Overall, you’re not missing anything by not playing this game. The mail delivery mechanics are unique and new, but they aren’t fleshed out enough to stay interesting. The town is too small for a gameplay loop like this, and there needs to be more variety in the 12 days of mundane mail delivery. While the characters do have unique personalities, I didn’t care about them enough to really let my choices sink in. There’s just not enough screen time with them. Just as they start to blossom, the game ends, despite the number of choices available to you to weave your own path. The game does capture the sleepy rural PNW feeling, but the small area is just devoid of any life.
I’ve always been fascinated with space and what planets on the surface look like. Weather patterns, mountain formations, various chemicals, and minerals do certain things with the weather and whatnot. This is what Exo One explores. While there’s a paper-thin story here about a spacecraft being discovered on Earth and NASA trying to use it to launch a crew to Jupiter, The vessel gets lost, I think, and you wind up bouncing around a dozen different planets trying to find your way back to Jupiter. It’s barely there, but it gives you a reason to keep going and provides an overall goal.
The controls take getting used to, and by the end of the game, I never quite cared for them. They seem overly complicated, but you essentially control the ship’s gravity and flight direction. You can roll on the ground to build up power (the orange glow in the center of the ball) and can lift off or smash down to the ground by increasing gravity. You do also have a double jump button, which comes in handy for fine-tuning your flight path. You want to stay in the air as much as possible, as this is your best form of movement. In the air, you can travel farther, as you will be traveling dozens of kilometers on each planet to get to the goal.
Each planet is completely different in the sense that some are covered in oceans, some have no ground, and some have more complicated terrain to get around. Some have little gravity, and some give your ship a bigger boost due to the increase in lightning in the area. You can boost your ship with various things, like flying into clouds, wind paths, particles, and various other boosters. These boosters are usually visible a few kilometers away, and you want to get to them. There are some instances in which navigating has become irritating and frustrating. A couple of planets have strong winds or will cut your controls completely. One planet had me just rolling along the ground for over 10 minutes, using the wind to guide me. The terrain itself seems almost randomly generated, and hills are your enemy. You want to boost downhills and release gravity, going up like a giant ramp. This is impossible in areas with strong winds, as they slow you down.
There are upgrades for your ship that are kind of spread around on some planets. These increase your glide and overall power, and they are helpful, but getting to them can mostly be a chore. Fine-tuning and aiming for a small spot is really frustrating. You can constantly turn around and try again, trying to gain just the right height to reach an upgrade. The enjoyment is the constant momentum you can create via rolling on the ground, boosters, and using clouds to gain altitude. Once you reach the goal, which will be a giant blue light in the sky, you warp to the next planet, and I love the variety. Not a single planet is the same, and soaring over large oceans or weird formations is just awesome. The visuals are fantastic, with great water effects, rain effects, and an overall amazing sense of speed.
There’s not much else to the game except to enjoy the scenery. There are no high scores, no hidden secrets, or anything of that nature. Think of this as a “walking simulator” but up in the sky. The only gameplay is maintaining your flight and fighting elements on some planets. It’s over in about two hours, but it’s a beautiful two hours. If you love exploring planets in games like Mass Effect, you’re going to enjoy this quite a bit.
Everyone has probably owned or at least used an iPad at some point in their lives. Everyone now owns a smartphone, so where do e-readers come into the mix? Everyone has heard of a Kindle before at this point. Some might even remember the tablet or e-reader race of the late 2010s by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. In the end, Amazon won, as they are the Apple of e-readers. But what makes e-readers so different from tablets? It’s the e-ink inside that makes them special. With this special display, it makes the reader only usable for a niche audience and totally limits the reader to just text and black-and-white images. This may sound like old and ancient technology, but when you’re dealing with novels, you don’t need OLED or LCD displays, as they just drain batteries.
I have pondered getting an e-reader for over a decade now. While the technology itself hasn’t changed much over that time, the Kindle now has multiple models for various types of readers and budgets. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was at the Amazon 4-Star store in our local Bellvue, WA, mall with the family, and I hadn’t seen a Kindle in person in about a decade. I picked up the Oasis and fell in love with it. While I’m a huge advocate for physical books and grew up getting lost in fantasy and sci-fi novels, I just don’t have the room for any more novels. I already own several dozen, and they take up a lot of space. I love the feeling of turning a physical page, the smell of a new book, going to Barnes & Noble and reading the backs and first few pages, and exploring for a new book. It’s an adventure that never gets old.
These days, I love the compact idea of a Kindle. a simple device that’s just for reading. No distractions are possible. I’ve tried reading books on iPads and Android tablets, and it’s just not comfortable. They’re too big and too bright, and you can easily get distracted by other apps and notifications. Again, this may sound stupid to some, but the Kindles are just for reading, and that’s it. I went straight for broke and picked up the 32GB Champagne Gold Oasis 3, the highest-end and top-end Kindle model you can get now. With ads supported, it came out to $279. The ad part is in the form of the splash screen, which shows an ad for various Kindle things. It’s not too intrusive, as you only see this screen for a few seconds a day, and it saves you $20 if that matters to you. You can always turn off ad support in your Amazon account and pay $20. This also unlocks book covers as splash screens instead, which is much nicer.
I also picked up a nice leather hard-case for the Kindle. These are expensive; mine was $50, but man, are they nice? super high-quality cases. The packaging is very minimal and only comes with a USB micro-B cable (yuck) instead of USB-C, which is pretty dumb even for a 2019 device. The device itself is incredibly sleek and lightweight, and the physical buttons on the “bump” are what attracted me. I like anything physical on a device as long as it doesn’t gimp the design itself, and these buttons are awesome. The touchscreen swiping works well enough, but you can change how the buttons turn pages by selecting which one goes forward or back. These feel perfect in the hand, especially for those like myself who have large hands. The 7″ display looks bright and crisp, and anyone who has never used e-ink before will be surprised that the screen has to “refresh” in a weird way. The entire display flashes white and then fills in black in the areas it needs. When turning pages, it won’t do a hard refresh, and you can see a faint outline of everything that showed before it, but it’s not distracting. Hard refreshes are used when doing anything else on the screen, including shopping on the Kindle Store.
The newer e-readers now have built-in WiFi (2.4 GHz) and can shop on the Kindle Store, which is really nice. Book downloads are usually in the kilobytes to a few megabytes at the most and take seconds to download. After you download what you need, you can put the Kindle in airplane mode to disable the antennas and save lots of battery life. The Oasis does have the shortest life of the three current readers available, but this is mostly due to the added LEDs on the screen to light the display. The Oasis 3 has 25 LEDs and displays 16 levels of grayscale. This better lighting will use more battery life, but it’s still nothing to scoff at. I bought this Kindle almost two weeks ago, and I am still on the first charge. I’ve already finished a novel, and I am four chapters into a new one. The batter is sitting around 40% right now as I type this review. That’s fantastic! I would have had to have charged a regular tablet a dozen times over for the same period of time. I haven’t tested using Bluetooth for audio books, but you will obviously get a much shorter battery life using these.
The Oasis 3 has some nice built-in software features for easier reading. You can adjust the font, font size, spacing, and margins, and set the display to an automatic schedule to turn on the yellow lights for less eye strain. There’s also a dark mode, so the screen is white text on black backgrounds, which I much prefer. You can also highlight text, take notes, and look up words online, but these all drain the battery, which I find unnecessary, to say the least. The warmth and brightness will mostly affect the battery if you turn everything else off, but the Oasis 3 also has a 300ppi display, and that also drains more battery compared to other models. It looks incredibly sharp—just as sharp, or maybe sharper, than an actual novel.
Overall, after reading my first novel, I have to say that I keep my Kindle with me everywhere I go because I know I will have some downtime. I bring it to bed, the bathroom, to work, and anywhere that I might have to sit in the car for a long period of time. It’s so portable and compact that it fits in your pocket or a bag, and you don’t need to bring a charger for it. You could easily bring it on a one- or two-week trip and never charge it during that time. I read the thing for about 1-2 hours per day for the last two weeks, and it was very enjoyable. While the refresh rate of e-ink displays is almost zero, navigating the Kindle Store isn’t that bad, and having a wishlist ready to go for books helps as well.
With this being the high-end model, I can only recommend it to people who want physical buttons or a much sharper and brighter display, as it’s well worth the extra price. You can even knock the price down to $250 by just getting the 8GB ad-supported model. I also recommend the excellent, high-quality cases, despite the high price point. This is for hardcore readers only as well. Don’t expect to read comics and graphic novels with this device. You’re just going to get straight-up text reading out of this, but remember that the display is built for this by design and regular tablets are not. You can read this thing for hours on end and not get any eye strain. It’s a wonderful device for all ages, and I can’t recommend it enough despite the price being too high for some. Think about this, though. After about 20 book purchases, you’ve paid for the Kindle itself and saved that much room in your house.
Game collecting is intimidating, and you have to usually wade through a sea of crap before you get what you want. Sure, you’ve got that shiny new game, but wait, what’s that? It’s the wrong kind; it’s missing something; it’s full of stickers; and the case is smashed up. Don’t fret! Not only will I help you find the exact variant or kind of game you want, but I will also give you tips on how to restore a game to look new, where to find this stuff, and even how to get pesky stickers off of plastic and cardboard.
Most guides talk about how to get the rarest games, how to do garage sales, and all that stuff that most people either don’t care about or don’t need guides for. There are some things to look out for, like reproduction carts, reproduction artwork, and reproduction manuals, but online, you really don’t have to worry about that. As long as you aren’t paying $5 for the Pokemon Green Version, you should be fine. Just be smart about all of this. Another tip is to not buy any games from China, as most of them are reproductions or fakes. If you’re buying Japanese games, the Japanese sellers are usually fairly honest, and I have never had issues outside of blurry and awful photos. I’ve bought near mint consoles from Japan, and the sellers are friendly and more than happy to offer more photos and information, again, based on my own experience.
Where do I shop and how?
Well, outside of local retro game shops, my go-to places are eBay, Mercari, and OfferUp. I avoid Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace because, for one, they usually don’t have obscure or rare titles, most people on there don’t know what they have, they charge way too much, they’re usually in awful condition, or most of the games are bundled with consoles and accessories, and they won’t let just the games go.
My only big tip when buying anywhere online is to never buy from listings with stock or generic images! These are usually disc-only copies, or something is missing. Try to find listings for the actual game you are buying, preferably showing the disc, manual, any other items it includes, and even the underside of the disc or label side of the cart. Unless the item is marked sealed and brand new, don’t look at stock images.
eBay
Filtering is key to getting the games you want for specific platforms. Let’s start with eBay.
First, make sure you are in the video games category or you will get everything from Sonic mugs to Final Fantasy knock off posters.
I always filter to Buy It Now. Why? Bidding stinks, and you usually won’t get a game cheaper than Buy It Now anyways, and it just ends up wasting time. You can try it, though, but in my experience, I’ve wound up paying more in the end. The filtering works the same on both apps, so this applies to both.
Next I will filter by Lowest Price+Shipping. Yes, you usually see the crap at the top first, however, this allows you to spot the first complete game on the list with the cheapest asking price.
I then filter by console. With these three filters I’ve usually found exactly what I want in just a couple of minutes. If a game doesn’t exist, let’s say it’s particularly rare, just save the search and eBay will also save the filters you set.
Mercari
For Mercari there are more steps that are required to filter down to exactly what you want.
The first thing, like eBay, is sort by lowest price first
Next you want to select the video games category
Then make sure to select items for sale otherwise you will see more things that are sold
After this select the platform and not the brand. This is important as most items are sorted by brand correctly and you will miss a lot.
One extra thing you can do on Mercari that you really can’t on eBay is haggle. Always try to get the lowest price you can. Usually, this only works for items over $20. Ask for the 20% off and see what the seller comes back with. Mercari is more of a garage sale site, and they’re usually more desperate to let things go than on eBay. Seven times out of ten, the sellers accept the offer or come back just a bit higher. Just be aware that once the seller accepts the offer, your card will be charged right away. So don’t go around asking for five different offers because you may wind up with multiple copies, and backing out of a sale is much tougher than on eBay, in my experience.
OfferUp
You’re probably going to have less luck here as it’s more like Craigslist with local pickups preferred. I have found some great stuff on here, but it requires more scrolling and specific searches. For one, you can’t filter down by platform like on the other two sites.
First, you need to select the category. OfferUp isn’t as smart as the other two sites and will usually search exactly what you typed in.
Then you need to sort by price.
This is where things get janky and weird. Depending on the title of the game, you may need to search by platform as well. For example, “motogp 1 playstation,” otherwise you will get every single MotoGP game for every system. The more generic the title, the more specific you need to be in your search.
Things don’t move as fast on OfferUp, so always click the Ask button and ask if the item is still available. I’ve had a few items never ship because the item has been on the site for over a year and the seller probably forgot about it. Also, make sure you look at the posting date. The older it is, the less likely the seller will respond.
Why do variants and versions of games matter?
For most of the popular consoles from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, there are usually two separate versions of games, and one is worth more than the other. Let’s start with the PlayStation, as this is where it basically started. This will also mostly apply to NTSC or North American releases. I’m pretty sure these all applied to all regions, but I’m not 100% certain.
PlayStation games also had longbox versions during the first 18 months or so of the system’s life. These are usually worth more as they were a shorter print run or were later released in regular jewel cases. Not all long-box PS1 games are expensive, but most are. The majority of these games are made of cardboard, kind of like a gift box. There are some that are like Saturn games with the plastic jewel case, and then there are the really crappy ones with the long jewel case style but made of cardboard where there is a bit of plastic where the case can close. The top labels are usually peeling off, as these are just glued to the plastic doors and look terrible.
PlayStation had a “Greatest Hits” line with a bright green label on the manual. These games are always worth less than the “black label” variant. These Greatest Hits versions sometimes have benefits like fixed bugs, but it’s hard to tell which have these fixed and which don’t unless it was stated by the developer. The black-label versions are worth more as these are lower print runs as the game hadn’t garnered the sales it did to become a Greatest Hits title. Here’s the great thing about this: If you don’t care about having a rarer version of a game, then the Greatest Hits versions are the way to go. You can usually save a lot of money. Usually, these versions were always released at $20, and that still continues today.
Later the next generation had it on all three consoles. GameCube had “Player’s Choice” Xbox had “Platinum Hits” and PlayStation 2 had “Greatest Hits” but in red this time.
The GBA also had “Player’s Choice” but it seemed to only be on first party titles.
The DS completely skipped this and didn’t appear again until the 3DS released with “Nintendo Selects” on later print runs for first party titles only, and the PSP had the same red “Greatest Hits” banner like the PS2 games. The Vita skipped this as well due to the system’s lesser sales.
The next generation of consoles retained this as well. The Wii and Wii U had the same “Nintendo Selects” as the 3DS and was only on first party titles as well. These were also on later print runs that were sold in batches. These are still recent and can be bought new if you can find them.
The Xbox 360 kept the “Platinum Hits” line and the PS3 also had “Greatest Hits”. This was the last time Microsoft would do this. The Platinum Hits banner changes over time as Microsoft was always tweaking the Xbox 360 cover art template, but the PS3 mostly remained the same.
Sony remains the last company to still do these budget title boxes. With physical game sales dwindling there’s no need to lure shoppers to shelves of budget titles anymore. Sony changed there’s to “PlayStation Hits” with the same red banner.
The stickers…my God the stickers
These tend to be collectors’ worst nightmares. With jewel case CDs, you can just buy new jewel cases in bulk on Amazon. I buy packs of 50 for about $30. But for other cases, you can sometimes buy new PS2 or GameCube cases, but these can be expensive as they aren’t manufactured anymore. Some people will buy cheap sports games, reuse the cases, and toss the discs. Personally, there’s a special solvent you can use that I have never in my life seen a collector talk about on YouTube or otherwise, and that’s Bestine. This is a solvent that stamp collectors use to remove stamps from paper. This stuff dries incredibly fast, but it doesn’t stain, have oil, or soak through or take off paint or ink. You can buy it on Amazon, Blick, or most art stores, and it works wonders.
A lot of people suggest alcohol, WD4D, Goo Gone, and various other things, but it’s always oily, nasty, and requires further cleaning. Bestine doesn’t need any further cleaning after use, and best of all, it doesn’t need hot air on cardboard or anything like that.
Just pour some on a napkin or paper towel and get the sticker nice and saturated, and it will start to come away. For thicker stickers or even metal ones, you can wait for the soaking process to last longer. I even took rental labels off the tops of discs with this stuff. It’s a miracle in a bottle. For plastic stickers, you can get an edge up, and with a cotton swab, just rub along the edge while you pull up to dissolve the adhesive. I trust this stuff on my copy of Clock Tower II, which’s worth $450. I took the rental label off the disc and a sticker on the manual, even the front cover, and it looks like nothing happened.
For long-box games for Sega CD, Saturn, PlayStation, and 3DO, you can buy newly printed cases off Amazon for $60 for about ten. These are really expensive, and your best bet is to buy old sports games and reuse the cases. Sadly, these types of cases just aren’t really made anymore and can command a high price.
For jewel cases, you can rebuy them. Most of the early CD games came in these cases, such as Philips CD-i, Dreamcast, PlayStation, Japanese Saturn games, PC Engine, and almost every other system until the PlayStation 2. But what about the black quad-disc PlayStation games or games with two CDs inside? Thankfully, you can make a Frankenstein quad-disc CD with regular jewel cases and the black quad-CD cases you can find on eBay and Amazon. These cases don’t have a clear inside area for the art and are usually just opaque black. What a lot of people don’t know is that the outside parts of these cases are just the same jewel case bodies, minus the door. You can pop the doors off of two jewel cases and sandwich the black piece in between. Two CD jewel cases are still made these days and are easy to buy. Either with the fold-out center piece or a hinged center to get to the second CD
The HD era of gaming was rough, especially in the beginning years. Games had to transition from dated, aging hardware and design choices; they had to work around that and open up more. bigger levels, better AI, better graphics, and just overall more content. Stranglehold was a AAA blockbuster of a game due to the names attached to the game and Midway’s push to let celebrities in on this new HD era of gaming to bring Hollywood-style action to consoles.
Stranglehold is a sequel to John Woo’s Hardboiled Hong Kong cop action movie from the ’90s, starring Chow Yun Fat. Both star in this game, and Chow reprises his role as Inspector Tequila. I will say that the story is really stupid, and this has a lot to do with the 4-hour run time of the game. It’s incredibly short unless you die a million times, which can be possible. The story is lame and typical. Tequila’s daughter and ex-girlfriend get captured, and he gets stuck in the middle of two rival Hong Kong gangs, the I-9s and the Dragon Claws. One is new blood, one wants the “old ways” back, and Tequila’s daughter is the bargaining chip to get the police off their backs. The voice acting is pretty bad, even Chow’s acting is kind of phoned in. The main star of the game is the gameplay, however.
I remember when this game came out, it was pretty impressive on a technical level. We finally got an unofficial new Max Payne game. I say that because the entire game is incredibly shallow gameplay-wise. You get “Tequila Time,” which lets Chow use bullet-time just like in Max Payne. There’s a meter and everything. However, the difference here is using your environment as well. Certain objects, like rails, tables, and carts, will have a white line on them if you can mount them. This activates Tequila Time automatically but also gives you a score ranking and boosts your ability gauge. That’s as deep as this game goes. I’m not joking either. You unlock abilities during the first few levels. These allow you to sacrifice one of the four bars to heal, use a bullet cam that does extra damage, rampage mode that is a longer Tequila Time, and the last one takes four bars and eliminates all enemies in the area. These actually came in really handy for the most part. The bullet cam ability was great during boss fights, as a few of these and they were done.
The issue with all of this is the level design. It’s just too cramped and too small. After the first level, the rails become too short, the objects are scattered everywhere, and while the destructible environments are nice, the tables can be destroyed that you need as well. Because of this, I got tired of constantly finding small objects to hop on and off of. The novelty wears off after the first level anyway. I just manually activated my bullet time and ran around shooting everyone in sight. There is a cover system, but it’s a little stuff and is kind of useless in this kind of game where enemies are designed to come at you in every direction, and because of hits, you can’t really hide. So, that essentially makes the ability to rack up your ability gauge and score meter mostly pointless because it’s a chore to constantly finding objects to ride on.
When it comes to the actual shooting, it’s fine. It works. You get all of your typical weapons. pistols, sub-machine guns, assault rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers, and heavy machine guns, plus grenades. The game is very arcade-like, and every enemy has the same amount of hit points. A few shots take them down. There are trigger points to kill enemies with the environment, but these are mostly forgotten about after the first couple of levels. As for the design outside of that, it’s actually still last-gen. Enemies pop out of open doors that lead to nowhere, cramped level design, and not to mention that every level looks really bland and boring.
Overall, this was a fun weekend rental and nothing more. It had a lot of Hollywood attached to it but didn’t feel truly next-gen like Gears of War or Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter did at the time. Stranglehold has one foot in the sixth-generation door and it shows. The lame story, cramped level design, half-baked “object riding” idea, and the overall generic arcade feeling are very forgettable, but still a fun evening.
Well, here we are again. Another Halo, another semi-reboot, and after a 12-month delay, was the game worth the wait? Well, for starters, I can say yes, but the biggest change here is the new open-world, a la Far Cry style. The campaign opens up with an epic cinematic opening level that’s rather typical of Halo. Lots of explosions, exposition on what the hell you need to do on this new Halo, and the game picks up after the events of Halo 5. This is Cortana’s story, but you don’t realize that until about halfway through the campaign. Speaking of the campaign, it doesn’t really pick up until halfway through as well. Because this is an open-world game, the entire game had to be rebalanced and changed a bit, but the core of Halo is here and better than it’s ever been.
After you finish the opening sequence, which runs you about 30-45 minutes, you are spit out into the open world, or technically, a large chunk of the Halo ring. Unlike the finely nuanced corridor shooting that previous games were, campaign missions take place just like those, but you have to get to them in the open world. So, overall, the campaign itself doesn’t really take place in this open world, but instead in instances like an MMO. The open world itself is 100% filler due to the fact that it actually worked by luck, not by design.
Think about it. The building blocks for an open-world game were already in place. Halo has excellent balancing already. The weapons, enemies, recharging shield, and a few abilities and vehicles already exist in the franchise. Just take all those and tweak them a bit and throw them into a big open space, which technically Halo also already did, and it just works out of sheer luck. The only reason, and I repeat, the only reason, why this open world exists is for unlockables. Mjolnir armor for multiplayer skins and upgrades for the five abilities you get, which are mostly useless by the way. You get your recharging shield, which you can upgrade. Again, this is an excuse to upgrade cores. Then you get the biggest change to the game, which is the grapple. This allows you to traverse vertically as well as horizontally and is awesome to use. After this, you get a shield, which is useful, of course, but the two abilities I never used were a sonar enemy detector and a dash ability. In the heat of battle, I don’t need to dash. I can just use the grapple and get much further away, or use the shield to regenerate my own.
You can also unlock superweapons, which are higher-powered versions of every weapon in the game and show up red. You unlock these by doing bounties. As the game progresses and you unlock more of the world to explore, you will, of course, get more vehicles as well. All are here from the past, but you can also fast-travel to the FOB that you must liberate to unlock vehicle stations. The last activity is liberating squads spread throughout the area, and then there are large installations that house tons of enemies. That’s pretty much it. If you stripped all of that away, there would be no reason to have this world to explore. You can just blow through the campaign missions without upgrading or doing any side missions, but I do recommend at least upgrading the shields and the grapple. These are handicapped from the start, unlike past games, and the game gets brutally hard later on in the game.
Once you finish the campaign, you can go back and unlock more stuff or dive into multiplayer. At this point, do we need so many Halo games online at once? The Master Chief Collection is still alive and well, and so is Halo 5. Literally, the entire Halo franchise is available to play online, so what’s the difference here? Well, not much, really. There are three different types of weapon classes. Hardlight, regular ammo, and energy ammo also go for the campaign. To me, the entire online experience blends and blurs together. I can’t tell the difference between this suite and Halo 1. Call me an idiot, but my favorite part about Halo has always been the campaigns and the story. The multiplayer is fun. The maps are well done, and the modes are all here, except we now get a stupid battle pass just like Call of Duty does. This just locks away cosmetics for your Spartan, but I also never cared about customizing one anyway.
The visuals are really good. While not groundbreaking, the open world looks great, albeit the same throughout. It’s just dirt and trees throughout the entire game. There are good-looking textures and nice lighting effects, and the game seems well optimized even for lower-end hardware. The Xbox Series X version looks mostly like the PC but with slightly lower graphics settings, as you would expect. The game does look dated on Xbox One, pretty horribly, and Xbox One X is passable. The best way to play is on a Series X or PC, for sure. However, no matter which console you are on, you will have a smooth experience.
Overall, the campaign’s story is decent, but nothing special. Finding out what happened to Cortana after going rampant is interesting, but the new antagonist is just a typical dumb Brute with nothing special going on with him. I love the Halo universe and story, but it’s better explored in the novels and comics if you want to dive deeper into the lore. The world is a complete filler and just works by luck rather than by design. They took everything that already worked in the game and just plopped it into this open world. I will admit that I had a lot of fun doing the activities. You only get a few, and it keeps it nice and simple, unlike Ubisoft open-world games.
The seventh generation of consoles was really rough. While we did get some awesome games, there were a ton of experiments as developers struggled with rising development costs and complicated hardware technology. With the rise of HD gaming, which is games rendered in 720p or higher, there was also a struggle to evolve genres with this newfound hardware. First-person or third-person shooters struggled probably the most in this era as open-world games were evolved and, mostly, well done with games like Grand Theft Auto IV, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Skyrim, and Saints Row. Shooters were stuck in the past, gameplay-wise and design-wise. Corridor shooters with no story or interesting characters, not to mention lacking an identity, helped make up for the lack of the latter. Your favorite shooters like Doom and Quake didn’t really have a good story or characters, but they had an identity that helped them stand apart from other shooters. The look, feel, weapons, and overall design were unique to that game. This just didn’t happen with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 shooters, and if it did, it was rare. We’re going to take a look at the worst and best shooters in this generation of consoles and why the genre stalled and didn’t really evolve much until the next generation cycle.
This will be a multi-part series due to the number of games. The next feature will talk about the worst FPS games of this generation.
Call of Duty was at its peak when it was released as a launch title for the Xbox 360. This was a huge console seller, and despite the “2” in its name, this wasn’t the second game. A few console-exclusive releases came before this one, but this was a true follow-up to the original PC game. While not quite as good, it was still cinematic, and it felt like there was some thought and love put into it, unlike future sequels. Call of Duty 2 looked amazing on Xbox 360 and was one of the best online shooters for a good year or so.
Prey
The development hell this game went through has been well documented and is one of the most tragic video game franchises of all time. Prey was a fantastic shooter that had its own identity among so many clones and boring games stuck in the past. The interesting use of portals, fun weapons, and a creepy alien atmosphere and setting were a lot of fun. Prey is so good; it has a high replay value, and I replay this game every few years; it’s so enjoyable. It was one of the first games to introduce me to the HD era of gaming on Xbox 360, and I have fond memories of this one.
The Call of Juarez series is forgettable yet enjoyable. It’s a fine shooter series, minus The Cartel, with varied themes and overall solid gunplay. The story and characters are absolute trash, but this has fun gameplay that makes up for that. Bound in Blood is set during the American Civil War, where you play two brothers on a mission for something. Gunslinger is based on the Wild West era in the late 1800s. Both can be bought for cheap, and Gunslinger even found its way over to the Switch. They are fun enough to even be worth playing through again every once in a while.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas Series
I remember this being the first reboot of the Rainbow Six franchise for quite some time. I rented both games when they came out, and I quite enjoyed the campaigns. They looked fantastic and had some great, bombastic set pieces. The multiplayer wasn’t half bad either, and I really wish the series would go back to this style of tactical gameplay. The games are worth playing today for a fun weekend shooter, and I don’t have much to complain about other than weird difficulty spikes.
Battlefield 2142
Battlefield was already a huge franchise before debuting on consoles with Modern Combat. 2142 was a long-awaited sequel to 1942 that was set with a realistic military theme rather than WWII. The same gameplay proceeded, but with the power of PCs at the time, we got massive maps, more modes, vehicles, and just classic Battlefield gameplay. While it did have a rough launch, the game was eventually smoothed out, and there are still people playing today.
While the third sequel was released after everyone was sick of WWII shooters and during a console transition, it was still a solid, if forgettable, experience. At this point, these games were being phoned in but still had an AAA quality to them that made them worth playing. Call of Duty 3 feels very dated compared to today’s shooters, and it was the last WWII shooter the series would dip its toes in for many years. The online multiplayer was fun for a while, but the game suffered from needing to be ported to last-gen consoles. Your typical WWII shooter stuff is here, like planting charges, moving up waves of enemies, grenades that bounce around like rubber, and incredibly linear levels.
by far some of the finest shooting you’ll play during the HD era of gaming. The Resistance series was helmed by Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet & Clank creators, Insomniac Games. Originally teased as I8 during E3 2006, the series had tons of hype. It looked next-gen and felt like it upon release with Fall of Man. The series has a decent story, but the classic Insomniac weapons are what make the game so fun. Each weapon has a unique alt-fire, and each weapon is carefully crafted to be needed for certain situations, so you’re always switching up your weapons, which is one of the most important things for shooters that almost no one seems to understand. The games look absolutely fantastic, even by today’s standards. This is a trilogy that every shooter fan must play.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Series
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series was never released on consoles, but it has a huge following on PC. The sequels, Call of Pripyat and Clear Skies, just improved the game more. The series is a hard-core survival shooter where you must preserve every bullet and item for healing. Running and gunning will get you killed, and it can be very daunting and intimidating to play. It’s for the hardcore only. The game released a buggy mess, but over time players have modded the game to near perfection, and it is one of the best post-apocalyptic open-world games to date. Some of the developers later went on to form 4A Games and create the Metro series.
The Darkness is based on the comic of the same name. The original game is one of my favorite shooters of all time. The atmosphere, story, characters, graphics, and the ability to use your demons on your shoulders to command minions and mutilate people were so much fun. The sequel was good but felt more arcade-like, had less of a slower-paced haunting atmosphere, and didn’t feel as bleak. The sequel is still tons of fun and retains the same great voice acting, but has a less memorable story.
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Metroid Prime 3 was a huge juggernaut for the Wii upon release and was one of the few really good shooters that the system got that wasn’t a port of some sort. Improved graphics, great use of the motion controls, and overall just classic Metroid gameplay are clearly the best in the series. Corruption was a big system seller and is easily one of the best shooters of the HD era of gaming. Even though the Wii lacked the horsepower of the PS3 and Xbox 360, Corruption still looked fantastic on the aging hardware.
The Halo series peaked with the Xbox 360. Halo 3, Halo 4, Reach, ODST, and Combat Evolved: Anniversary were great games. While I don’t really care for ODST or Halo 4, the series reached its best with Halo 3 and remains one of the best shooters of that era. The games still pushed the 360 to its limits graphically and remained the top multiplayer game through its entire life cycle. The series hasn’t seen this many releases since, but you can now play these games remastered on PC and Xbox One, which is awesome. It is still fun to play on the original hardware just to see what it was like back in the day. When a Halo game launched, it sold out on consoles big time, and everyone played Halo at least once during this time.
Team Fortress 2 was a huge deal on consoles. Despite never receiving updates and being shut down and abandoned, the game had lots of players. I played this game for many hours on the Xbox 360. I would come home on my lunch breaks from work just to get a few rounds in. The game looked good and ran very smoothly on consoles, but I just wish it had the features or some maps that the PC version had for at least a couple of years. While I wouldn’t bother playing on consoles these days, the PC version is still alive and well and is one of the most played multiplayer games to date.
While originally only released for PC, The Orange Box was a huge hit, giving console gamers Valve’s best work for one cheap price. The games ran and looked great on the dating hardware, and I was a huge fan of The Orange Box. Upon release, I didn’t have a PC that could play these games, and I was so excited when this was finally released. I did play Half-Life 2 on an older computer as well as Episode One and loved them to death, but they didn’t look great. With achievements, there was a ton of replay value here, and it’s still worth a pick-up if you don’t play PC games.
Crysis is famous for being a go-to benchmark game for PC hardware. I remember seeing this game for the first time at E3 2006, and it blew me away. The textures, lighting, physics, and everything else that went into this game were truly ahead of their time. So much so that Crytek had to demo the game running in SLI mode with two graphics cards to get it running. There wasn’t a single GPU that could run the game at 60FPS maxed out at the time. I remember when I got my first real gaming computer in 2010, I was blown away. I could finally run Crysis. Even then, it pushed my laptop to its limits, and I still couldn’t run it at maxed-out settings. The second game was highly anticipated, and my laptop couldn’t run it above 30FPS maxed out. Crysis 3? Forget it, but I did end up playing the game at 20FPS. These games didn’t have a great story or characters but instead had incredibly tight gunplay, fantastic visuals, and decent weapons.
Unreal Tournament 3
There’s no coincidence that UT3 looks exactly like Gears of War. It has the same color palette and even a similar character design. UT3 wasn’t nearly as popular as UT2004. I remember I just couldn’t get into it as much as I did in UT2004. Something felt off about the way the game felt. I didn’t have a PC that could run this game at the time, so I picked it up for PS3 years after its release, and it was mostly dead then. The game just felt so far away from Unreal Tournament that I couldn’t play it, but it was still a solid multiplayer shooter for PS3 and PC at the time and was solid despite feeling different.
The series is by far one of the best that graced the HD era of consoles. Quality shooters at this level were rare, and I remember just how hyped I was for the game upon release. I remember getting so excited and counting down the minutes for the demo to drop on Xbox LIVE. I bought this on launch day, and it was one of the most memorable gaming experiences I ever had. I was also hyped for BioShock 2, but it wasn’t as memorable. It was a good game, but it was too safe. Infinite got me as hyped as the first game, if not more, and I even went to the midnight launch at GameStop for it. This is an incredible series, and thankfully, they have all been re-released on newer consoles.
Frontlines: Fuel of War
I remember seeing this one at BlockBuster along with other generic-looking military shooters at the time. I passed it up numerous times, despite the decent reviews. At first glance, it looks dull and boring, but it has great gunplay and fun multiplayer. While the former no longer exists, there’s still a fun weekend campaign here, and you can pick up the game at bargain bin prices these days. There’s no reason not to pick this one up. Just don’t expect a deep story or any type of character development.
Bad Company was a smart departure from the series and helped reboot the series for consoles. The two games actually featured fun and interesting characters with witty dialog, and of course, the gameplay was tight and tons of fun. Both games also featured impeccable sound design, with the sound of bullets changing inside buildings and somewhat destructible environments. The multiplayer portion was insanely popular and a lot of fun. especially the Conquest mode. Servers are gone now, but you have two entertaining campaigns here worth playing over the weekend.
The third and final installment in this highly anticipated series Brothers in Arms was considered the “grown-up” WWII franchise as it wasn’t as arcade-like as the other games. It required strategy and a bit of thinking, and you could command your squad. It was also the only WWII shooter that had gore in it. Hell’s Highway had a mostly forgettable experience, but it sure was fun and a blast to play through. It really stands out from the crowd at a time when WWII shooters were waning and becoming a flea on the industry’s hide. Well worth a weekend playthrough despite the servers being shut down.
Specifically, Far Cry 2, 3, and Blood Dragon were released during the seventh generation of consoles. I didn’t care for Far Cry 2. I bought a bargain bin as BlockBuster was shutting down and found it dull and boring. However, in hindsight, it’s not quite that bad. Far Cry 3 is by far the best game in the series, as Vaas is a strong antagonist and remains so to this day. Blood Dragon is one of the most fun and unique spin-offs ever. Being a love letter to 80’s sci-fi action movies like Terminator, Robocop, and Blade Runner, you can shoot T-Rex’s, and everything has a Tron/Cyberpunk feel to it. It’s very short, but it has witty dialogue and is just so unique. Some consider it the best game in the franchise. These Far Cry games were the peak of the series, and it has been falling fast ever since.
Every once in a while, we get a decent Bond game. Quantum of Solace, based off of the same movie, was a sleeper hit and was surprisingly entertaining despite how forgettable it was. It felt like a bonding game. It was fast-paced, had great-feeling weapons, and didn’t overstay its welcome. This is probably the best Bond game of the HD era, as Blood Stone was a borefest. Well worth a bargain bin purchase for a fun evening.
Cryostasis isn’t an action-packed shooter. It’s more of an adventure game where you unravel a mystery on a derelict ship. The game has a haunting atmosphere, and you must really use your bullets wisely here. It was a graphical powerhouse when it was released and pushed PCs to their limits. I remember that my gaming laptop at the time struggled to run this game. It used, at the time, brand new DirectX 11 visuals, which made it look “next-gen” and beyond anything the PS3 or Xbox 360 could muster up. Sadly, it’s been pulled from Steam for some time now, but keys do exist online at various retailers. It’s worth a playthrough for something more unique and interesting.
While the first game was released during the sixth generation of consoles on PC (PS2/Xbox), it did get an “HD” release on PS3 and Xbox 360 but wasn’t nearly as good as the PC version due to lowered graphics and framerate issues. However, F.E.A.R. 2 and 3 were made with these consoles in mind. While the story of the series is convoluted and pointless, the second game had quite a few excellent cinematic moments and some creepy segments. While mostly forgettable, it was fun. The third game had solid gunplay but pretty much took out the creep factor entirely. The first game remains the best in the series and is a classic. It pushed PC hardware to its limits and made me want a gaming PC at the time.
Killzone is a strange beast. It’s not exactly the most polished shooter out there. The first game on PS2 was an absolute technical mess, despite trying new things like long, realistic reload times and pushing that poor system beyond what it could do. Killzone 2 was pretty much the biggest hype around the PS3, with the questionable pre-rendered demo shown at E3 2006 and being pretty impressive upon release. I remember it was a reason I wanted and bought a PS3 in 2009. The game looks great even today and has fantastic gunplay, despite a forgettable and pointless story. The third game was more polished but felt more forgettable due to bland-level design and a continued pointless story with lame characters (I really can’t stand Rico), and it had a great multiplayer suite. The first game got an HD release in the Killzone Trilogy. Some of the best shooting you’ll play during this console cycle
While Dark Athena isn’t quite as memorable or impactful as Escape from Butcher Bay, the former game was included as an HD version with this game. Dark Athena was mostly more of the same, but with less memorable locales, and it didn’t do enough that was new to make it stand out more. Still, the Riddick games remain some of the most interesting shooters of that generation and are worth a playthrough, whether you like the movies or not. They have a great atmosphere, fun gunplay, and stealth mechanics.
The Conduit Series
A very hyped FPS series on the Wii, The Conduit was a fun sci-fi shooter with interesting guns, but it was pretty run-of-the-mill as shooters go. We didn’t get many non-on-rails shooters on the Wii, so when they came along, they were a big deal. The Conduit was fun to play as it used the Wii hardware well and looked good too. It was nice to not get another military shooter, and that’s probably why the game stood out from the crowd.
Originally released for Wii and then later on PS3 using the Move controller, Extraction was a sleeper hit and considered one of the best games in the series. Sure, it was another Wii on-rails shooter, but it had atmosphere, had some great scenes (cutting off your hand in space, for example), and just felt tight and fast-paced. I picked this up when it came out and replayed it a few times. It has a high replay value thanks to its short length and entertaining shooting and scenes.
ARMA Series
The ARMA series is a PC-exclusive military simulator and probably one of the most realistic out there. There is a huge mod community behind all three games, and they look fantastic. When I talk about simulators, I mean it. A single bullet could kill you, and the maps are large and expansive; there’s no handholding here. You must cooperate with your squad, and everything from physics to not knowing where the hell enemy fire is coming from exists here. It’s some of the most rewarding cooperative squad-based gameplay in existence, and it can only be experienced on PC.
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising
similar to ARMA, but with a little more user-friendly and arcade-like gameplay thrown in. It’s a long-running franchise, and it still requires tight cooperation with squadmates. I picked this up at a bargain bin for PC, but I didn’t realize how much was involved and never got past the first mission. I appreciated the visuals and the realism, but none of my friends are gamers, so I was stuck playing solo, and it wasn’t very fun.
Borderlands was a game no one saw coming. It pretty much created the “looter-shooter” genre that is so popular today. I picked up the first game when it was released and played it solo. It was a lot of fun and had a lot of character, but later games were pretty much the exact same. If you played one Borderlands, you played them all. These games are best played with a friend, but the interesting NPCs and weapons keep you coming back, despite the dull environments and visuals. The pre-sequel is one I couldn’t get through, but it’s not bad. There is also the Telltale Games adventure Tales from theBorderlands, which is fantastic and worth a playthrough.
Who would have thought this would be one of the best-selling shooters of all time and continue on for over a decade? Who thought that it would be the most-played multiplayer game for that long as well? The first two games in the series were fantastic. bombastic and well-designed campaigns and revolutionary multiplayer for the time. Both games had impeccably designed maps, and the ranking and unlocking systems became addictive. Tight gunplay, clans, and state-of-the-art visuals helped sell these games. Modern Warfare 3 was just more of the same, and people were starting to tire of the series by this point. Surprisingly, the Wii and DS had decent ports as well that were tailored for the hardware.
The first Black Ops game is still the best. The different setting of the Cold War was a nice change of pace, and the multiplayer and zombies introductions made it stand out from the crowd. The second game was decent but had the best zombie mode. Black Ops is an interesting experimental side series of the main Modern Warfare series. It was darker, grittier, and had more of a government conspiracy theme to it. There are also great ports for Wii and DS as well. The series has been all over the place since, and to be honest, it feels redundant at this point.
I remember picking this up shortly after its release. Despite being a co-op shooter, you really don’t need to communicate with people to enjoy it. I didn’t have a PC that could run either game at the time, so Xbox 360 it was. It played and looked great on the system and had some of the most realistic-looking zombies at the time. Each character felt unique, and you really had to pick a way to play, and that included the weapons. The maps were well laid out, and the fast-paced horde shooter stood out from games like Dead Rising and Resident Evil.
MAG
The now-defunct Zipper Interactive developers of the mega-blockbuster SOCOM series decided to take advantage of the PS3 hardware and pit 256 players against each other in a realistic military shooter. The idea was sound on paper, but what we got was a buggy mess. This is about as generic as shooters get. Despite the occasional fun moment running into dozens of enemies in a game that was mostly unheard of outside of PC space, the game just flopped. The level-up system was clever, but the game didn’t sell enough to iron out all the bugs, glitches, and sloppy animations. If the game had more time in the oven, it could have been bigger than Call of Duty.
I remember being so hyped for this game. While it wasn’t as good as AVP2, it looked amazing—in fact, one of the best-looking games at the time, taking full advantage of DirectX 10 on PC—and had a pretty sweet triple campaign all around. The multiplayer was pretty boring, but you felt like the Predator and Alien, but sadly, the Marine campaign was the worst of the three. It’s worth a play-through today.
Fallout 3 was one of the most played games of all time for me. I spent nearly 100 hours between the main game and all four DLCs. The best character in the game was the world. Everything told a story. A skeleton in a washer, text on a computer, a note left on a desk in an empty vault There was so much detail crammed into this game that you could get lost exploring for dozens of hours without completing a single mission. The guns felt good, and the game looked mostly decent at the time, but it was a super buggy mess in general. New Vegas was even better with a crafting and ammo system, and it had a better story and characters to boot. New Vegas looked incredibly dated when it launched and was also a buggy disaster, but eventually got patched, and the modding community is insane. It’s one of the most modded games of all time and is a must for anyone playing on a PC. Both of these games are full of life and character, and if you like RPGs or just great storytelling, you must play them.
Bulletstorm was made by the guys behind the excellent cult classic Painkiller series and some developers from Gears of War. What we got was a bombastic and crazy shooter that wanted combos of carnage to rack up a score and kill streak. It was so fun using your lasso, tossing people up in the air, shooting them down, and even kicking them into environmental death traps. The story and characters were stupid, but it didn’t matter. The game looked fantastic using an advanced version of Unreal Engine 3 and tapped both consoles max power. This is a must-play, and the newly remastered version is the best way to go.
Homefront isn’t just another Call of Duty clone. This one tried to create a story with characters and mostly succeeded. Set in an alternate timeline where North Korea basically takes over the world, you are a rebel group trying to stop them. The beginning scene is one of the most memorable in gaming history. Seeing soldiers execute people and having your bus crash The cinematic gameplay is tons of fun while it lasts. There’s a lot of humanity pumped into the game, so it’s not just another game of Whack-a-Mole. The multiplayer wasn’t good enough to keep the game alive, but the campaign is one entertaining evening.
This was probably one of the most anticipated games of the HD generation. Warren Specter’s return to one of the most popular PC games of all time was a huge welcome. Despite major technical issues, this was one of the first games to use DirectX 11 on PCs, and I remember that my poor gaming laptop just couldn’t do it. The game looked dated and pretty awful on consoles, but it gave us tons of choices to approach various situations. Stealth, non-lethal, guns blazing, hacking to get more info to make conversations go your way. It was all up to you. Despite a bland story and uninteresting characters, there was enough here to keep you moving along.
This was kind of a sleeper hit. Despite having an awful story that was almost non-existent and stupid characters, the crafting system and overall open world of killing zombies were a blast. It looked great too at the time and had decent gunplay. Despite the game being a lot of fun while playing it, you won’t remember any of it after a while. It’s a very forgettable experience, but it’s not a bad game. There is a clunkiness to the game and lots of bugs and glitches even after a few patches, but it’s one of the only good open-world zombie games out there. Totally skip the “sequel.”
Hard Reset didn’t make it to consoles, but it is a sleeper hit hardcore FPS on PC. The story is lame and pointless, but the cyberpunk graphics, weapons, enemies, and overall atmosphere were fantastic. The ads on the streets trying to sell you products, the weird, nearly broken server bots, and the overall color palette of the game are amazing. Sadly, it’s still a linear corridor shooter and can be downright brutal difficulty-wise, even on normal. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Red Orchestra Series
Red Orchestra is a multiplayer-only WWII simulator that a lot of people don’t know about because it was never released on consoles. In 2006, Ostfront 41–45 was a major hit on PC with fantastic visuals and realistic gameplay. Get into a tank with several other players and coordinate each part of the tank, just like in real life. Weapons fire so accurately that you even have bullet drops, and weapons would jam. It was an amazing experience, and it only got better with Red Orchestra 2, released in 2011. RO2 had a single-player campaign, but it was plagued with crashes and bugs, and sadly, the series has never been as big as Call of Duty despite the care and effort that went into it.
Payday Series
The Payday series is fairly popular as a fun co-op heist game. It’s addictive and can get quite involved, and there’s plenty of DLC. The first game wasn’t as good as the second and felt a lot more low-budget and amateurish compared to how great Payday 2 is. The game won’t blow you away visually, but there’s a lot of fun here with tightly made maps, well-balanced classes, and tons of maps to play. If you want a co-op shooter to play with friends, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Serious Sam 3 was a long-awaited and highly anticipated game. While it’s mostly well known in the PC and Xbox space, this was the first game to grace Nintendo and Sony consoles. The game had state-of-the-art tech for PCs and pushed my poor gaming laptop beyond its limits upon release. It looked great and was a lot of fun during the first play-through. Sadly, Serious Sam games are incredibly repetitive wave shooters, and they get old fast. There’s a lot of humor, though, and it still looks great today.
Syndicate
Barely related to the series before, Syndicate went from a tactical strategy game to a fast-paced first-person shooter by EA. The game had a lame story and wasn’t very memorable, but it was a lot of fun to play. It had quick gunplay, tight controls, and looked pretty damn good to boot. Sadly, it drowned in the plethora of shooters in the early ’10s, was quickly forgotten, and never sold well. Thus, knowing EA and IPs, I chucked it in the bin to be forgotten forever. It was also one of the last games developed by Starbreeze Studios.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
One of the few times Counter-Strike has been released on consoles, Global Offensive, is still played to this day and is the latest version of Counter-Strike. There are still worldwide championships and eSports tournaments, and overall toxicity in the community is high. Despite lawsuits, arrests, and SWATTING, Global Offensive is still one of Valve’s juggernaut franchises going strong. There’s a reason for this. It has impeccable map design, solid gunplay that’s well balanced, and the newer loot box system is addictive to those who can’t keep their wallets closed. There are constant updates made to the game, and if you haven’t jumped in yet, don’t worry; the servers are alive and active with hundreds of thousands of players daily.
Stealth-action games aren’t released very often, and Dishonored was a fantastic mix of stealth and FPS gunplay. The fantastical abilities of Blink and the use of various pistols and knives made the game a ton of fun. The interesting story and characters also helped, but the freedom was awesome too. You could stealth your way through everything or blast your way. The choice was yours. You can also choose to knock out or kill your enemies. There’s also a loot system, so you can buy upgrades, ammo, and various healing items. The game was dated visually when it was released, but it still had a wonderful art style.
Metro is one of my favorite game series of all time. It was developed by ex-S.T.A.L.K.E.R. creators, and they built an amazing atmosphere and weapons system. While the first game’s stealth was flawed and frustrating, it still told a chilling tale and had a haunting atmosphere and creepy monster designs. The weapons felt clunky, unreliable, and home-built like they might in a post-apocalyptic setting. The game looked and ran best on PC, but the Xbox 360 version was adequate and was the first I played upon release. Later, Last Light pushed my gaming laptop to its limits and didn’t run very well, but it looked absolutely stunning. It looked really dated on the PS3 and Xbox 360, but at least it was running well. These are some of the most original shooters for this generation, as they weren’t straight-up Call of Duty clones and had no multiplayer!
Supermassive Games have the ability to tell great stories and present scary atmospheres and settings. Until Dawn is one of the best PS4 games to date and I loved it. It seems that either their budget is lower, or they’re not taking enough time to finely craft these Dark Picturesstories because thus far they are B-grade horror at best that you quickly forget after the credits roll and House of Ashes is no better. There’s so much left open and unexplored in this paper-thin story that chugs at a snail’s pace until the last hour of the game.
I understand that adventure games like this need time to simmer and do a lot of story building. Life is Strange is a great series that does this very well without feeling boring. House of Ashes is mostly boring. The game drags the pointless story scenario by scenario without anything happening. You keep expecting something to be explained or some backstory to unfold or characters to grow and expand, but that never happens even once here. You play as a group of stereotypical U.S. Marines who are sent down into an ancient temple in Iraq to find some sort of superweapon. Immediately the characters start off unlikeable. Stereotypical Marines of every flavor here. The hard-ass who is rude and has a foul mouth, the jealous couple, the science nerd, the sensitive nerd with glasses who wears a helmet, and the voice acting that accompanies this is pretty bad as well. The guy who plays Jason sounds like he’s faking a mid-western Texas accent and it just sounds so cringy. Everyone sounds like they’re whispering at a high school play recital and it just feels so off.
It takes forever for the team to actually get down into the temple and start their mission. There are just tons of standing around and lots of backhanded comments to each other. The only plot within the group is that Rachel was married to Eric (the leader) and is now secretly dating Nick. Okay? And why do I care? There’s no backstory here, no history, nothing. The game just throws you into these characters’ lives like we already know them. They don’t have strong enough personalities to make you really become attached during the game and I just didn’t care or route for anyone. The vampires you fight take forever to show themselves and become revealed. There are few action sequences and when you do get into them laughably easy with just simple quick-time events and nothing more. This isn’t really a game, but an interactive movie at best.
Failing these quick-time events (you’d have to not be paying attention to fail them) is how most choices and paths change in the story. Sometimes there are dialog choices and I have to hand it to Supermassive for making these choices mean something every single time. They don’t waste a single one. There are choices I made at the very beginning of the game that affects the team all the way through the end and it makes me think back and regret those choices. This is a good thing as it means their choices and path system isn’t useless like most “choose your own adventure” type adventure games are (looking at you David Cage and your games). There are flashing points when you can control a character for all of 10 seconds that are collectible that you can find to unlock interview videos (yawn) and achievements. I tried to make an effort, but despite how little you control characters I still missed stuff. However, the story isn’t interesting enough and takes so long to pick up that I didn’t want to go back ever again. There’s nothing to care about enough here.
The visuals are actually quite good, however, the engine is poorly optimized even for high-end PCs, but again, it looks great. The monster designs are awesome too, it’s just too bad the characters look weird and ugly. I also don’t like that there’s no mystery here. Why are the vampires here? The beginning of the game shows a chapter of ancient people who worship or are trying to stop these vampires, but it’s never explained why or how. There are no explanations here. Even the few collectibles don’t tell of much that’s going on. Just, “Evil scary vampires, and we must stop them”. This game’s story is something you’d see on in the early 2000s on the Sci-Fi channel at 2AM and just watch it out of sheer boredom. Lots of shooting stuff, no one runs out of ammo, their packs hold infinite items, crowbars magically attach to their backs, and so on. It’s so hoaky I couldn’t help but shake my head or laugh at certain scenes.
Overall, House of Ashesis probably a fun entertaining game to look at and play with a partner or friend for an evening, but that’s it. You won’t get anything out of this game, and it’s not even really scary. The vampires look cool and so do some of the human vampires, but that’s it. Military stereotypes, unrealistic events, forgettable and boring characters, and a story that doesn’t go anywhere at all.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !