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.
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!
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 tech. With the rise of HD gaming, being games rendered in 720p or higher, there was also the 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 and design-wise. Corridor shooters with no story or interesting characters, and not to mention lacking an identity which 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 best FPS games of this generation.
TimeShift had a lot of hype leading up to its release. It looked great and seemed to have this cool sci-fi setting with some unique and cool-looking weapons. It had a suit that could shift time and allow you to solve puzzles and work your way through enemies. In the end, the game was a bore-fest corridor shooter with a few open areas. It had some cool effects like the rain and good-looking textures, but it felt like a shooter from the early-2000s. The time-shifting abilities felt like filler and the puzzles were nothing but a joke. The game enemies repeated throughout the game and the weapons, while looking cool, felt like pop-guns with no real feel or impact. I remember renting this from BlockBuster when it was released for Xbox 360 and was just utterly bored. It was so forgettable that when I replayed it last week I didn’t remember a single thing except for the rain effects.
Turning Point: Fall of Liberty
My god was this game just terrible. I rented this from BlockBuster upon release for Xbox 360 and it was supposed to be a cool World War II shooter with some sci-fi and history changes. With Nazi Germany winning the war you are a soldier stuck in the middle. Instead of having a great story and characters, the game just felt as generic as can be. The guns felt weak, the environments were ugly and boring, and the game had so many glitches and an insane amount of slowdown that it made it nearly unplayable. With the steep fall of WWII-based shooters that the industry was sick of, Turning Point needed something different and cool to make it as people were turning to realistic military shooters. The game was just so gray and ugly and didn’t have its own identity. It didn’t sell well and was panned by critics for good reason.
Another shooter with a lot of potentials. This game brought you giant mythological creatures that were taking over a city! Yes! No more boring soldiers, but they just had to screw it up. Developed by the not-so-talented Spark Unlimited, Legendary had decent graphics and cool boss designs, but the shooting itself was awful. There was no feel to them or an identity to the game. Even the story was just barely passable and entertaining enough to push you through the game. This was by far one of the worst games of this generation period. It had a horrible slowdown, glitches, and just didn’t feel good to play at all. I rented this from BlockBuster for Xbox 360 upon release as well and I don’t even think I finished it. That’s how bad it was.
Shadowrun
Shadowrun was a highly anticipated FPS online-only multiplayer game set in the Shadowrun universe. Upon release, however, it was pretty much dead on arrival. The lack of content for the full-price tag pretty much killed the game and it felt like a generic last-generation shooter. There was nothing unique about this game nor did it feel like it was in the Shadowrun universe at all. It felt like a cheap cash grab as were the majority of multiplayer-only games that kicked off in this generation cycle. The servers have long since shut down, but if you really are curious you could play with bots or someone next to you.
This was actually quite an impressive game before release. I remember being super excited about the demo. The game looked fantastic and actually next-gen. There were great lighting effects, good textures, and the guns felt okay…at first. Upon release, the game was literally just a single map with objectives thrown in it. It felt like a multiplayer setup and just didn’t belong as a single-player experience. The gimmick was that you could drop down anywhere in the map on a parachute, and it looked good doing it. Lots of gunfire below you, explosions, and the sound design were pretty good too. The weapons just didn’t feel right, they were poorly balanced, the difficulty was all over the place, and it didn’t run very well. This “open-ended level design” that EA toted was a joke. It was a lazy excuse to shoehorn multiplayer maps into a single-player experience.
Jericho had so much potential and it’s one of those games I’m really mad that never turned out well. Clive Barker only did one other game and it was fantastic. Undying is a classic. Jericho was just so good leading up to release. The atmosphere, Clive’s classic monster style, and graphics looked great, and upon release, it was an utter disaster. Switching between numerous squad members was just too clunky and you want to talk about corridor shooters? This is more like a hallway shooter. The levels were too small to move around in for the number of enemies thrown at you and the number of squad members you had to manage and switch between. The game’s difficulty was all over the place, but it was nice to look at. The game bombed hard and didn’t sell really at all and Clive Barker has yet to embark on another video game adventure again.
Hellgate: London
Hellgate was a long-anticipated MMO for PC but was surrounded by controversy. You could play the game offline, but to access new content you had to pay a monthly fee. The game was just ugly, clunky, claustrophobic, and the RPG elements just weren’t implemented well. It felt low budget despite the coverage it got and just didn’t feel finished upon release. You can still play the game today as Hellgate Global is owned by a Korean-based publisher now. It was released on Steam in 2018, but almost no one plays.
BlackSite was a game I was personally excited for as I thought it would be an awesome reboot of the 2005 Area 51 game which was fantastic. This game turned out to be just like the other games mentioned. Dull, boring, cookie-cutter, and with no identity. It looked ugly, had lots of glitches, and slow down, and there wasn’t a single redeeming quality to the game. The guns were dumb, the story and characters were pointless, and even the aliens were boring. How could you mess up an IP like this? I remember playing the demo on Xbox 360 before release and it was a decent demo as it showed the only interesting part of the entire game.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback
While not inherently awful, Payback brushes the line between mediocrity and bad, however. The game did have decent graphics and good gore effects. So good in fact that Australia banned the game. Besides all of that, the game was generic, boring, and the weapons felt like pop-guns. There was no character to the shooting, no feeling, no weight, no nothing. The game’s trial-and-error difficulty balancing was terrible as well and not even multiplayer could save this one. The series hasn’t had the best history and mostly lives in “bad game” territory.
Turok
Turok is another game that borderlines bad and awful. Being the second reboot of the franchise, this version barely resembles the amazing Nintendo 64 games. Instead, we get a boring and generic shooter through equally dull jungles and concrete buildings and even messes up dinosaur encounters. The story is bad, the characters and voice acting are bad, and there’s not much worth playing here unless you’re a die-hard Turok fan and want to see what the hoopla was all about. Don’t get me wrong, this was a highly anticipated game because of its positive history, but this wasn’t it man.
This was a game I skipped upon release due to the terrible reviews it got. I later played in 2020 and was highly disappointed. It had a lot of potentials. The few morsels of the decent story were when the game explored the effect of the Haze serum on soldiers and how they would hallucinate in battle. The use of the serum to overload you during gameplay was a neat idea, but the game looked dated even upon release and felt dated. The weapons were boring, the enemies repeated forever, and there were a lot of game-breaking glitches and slowdown. This game wasn’t even decent or barely passable, it was downright terrible and not worth your 6 hours.
Secret Service
Oh man, this game is laughable. I doubt it sold barely anything. Not only was it a budget shooter, but it felt like something from the early 2000s. It was ugly, boring, generic as can be (white dudes in suits and sunglasses generic) and there are zero reasons to even sniff in this game’s general direction. The idea of being a secret service agent was unique at the time as there aren’t any games that did that, but instead of an interesting story with well-written characters and maybe some unique gameplay with scripted events you just get a corridor shooter mowing down bland enemies with weightless guns.
I had the honorable displeasure of finishing this game on PC years after release. While it did have a few good scenes that depicted PTSD from ‘Nam soldiers, it was just such a terrible game. All the classic signs are here: awful story and characters, stereotypes, boring and generic gunplay, guns that have no weight, ugly visuals, slowdown and glitches, and too linear. Rebellion isn’t that great of developers anyways given their pretty bad track record, but you think after how bad the first was they would tighten it up a bit. There are zero reasons to ever give this series a minute of your time other than sheer curiosity. There are much better military shooters in this era out there.
Can you tell the difference between these two? I sure can’t. Only release 2 years apart this is one of the most generic shooters ever made for the Xbox 360 and PC. It’s so boring and generic I can barely remember the game I played years ago on PC without looking it up. Everything is gray, ugly, and the weapons feel weightless and boring to use. I do remember the game has awful difficulty spikes and was a chore to play through. The multiplayer didn’t redeem the series either and the PS3 version of the first game wound up being canceled due to poor sales. The studio had such faith in the sequel that it wound up being a digital-only release.
Painkiller: Resurrection
Yes, this was a PC-only release, as the series home is on PC, but how can you screw up such a high-profile classic? Painkiller may not have been very innovative, but it had a rocking soundtrack, really fun weapons, level, and enemy variety, and just felt good to play. It was a “wave shooter” like Serious Sam and less like Doom and Quake. This sequel just didn’t work and was completely broken gameplay-wise. The levels were awful, the guns weren’t fun to use, and the graphics were incredibly dated. Just how do you mess something like this up? Sadly, the series is dead and the low sales of this game are probably why.
Rogue Warrior
Rogue Warrior wasn’t just a low-budget FPS that littered the scene in the day. This was a somewhat high-profile shooter with a retired Navy Seal helping design the game and Mickey Rourke cussing his way through the game. What we got was just a broken mess that wasn’t finished. The story and characters were lame stereotypes and used cussing as a way to make the story feel mature. The guns felt bad, the controls didn’t work right, animations were broken, there was lots of slowdown and glitches and crashes. It was just a hot mess and it was a tale as old as time back in the late ’00s.
What could probably be known as one of the most anticipated games of the seventh generation of consoles, Perfect Dark Zero had a lot of hype behind it. It was a beloved Nintendo 64 franchise debuting on a next-gen console. It looked next-gen leading up to release, but once we finally got a hold of it the game felt like it was stuck in the ’90s. Dated gameplay, boring missions, pointless story, and the stealth gameplay were pretty much ruined. I don’t understand the high scores this game got outside of people just being excited about the game or possibly being paid by Microsoft. Even the multiplayer couldn’t save this one. There’s no redeeming value in this game other than it existed on the N64 at one point.
Call of Juarez: The Cartel
The Call of Juarez series is a causality of the HD era. It came and went in that single generation and this game is what killed it off. The previous games were forgettable but enjoyable experiences. Quick weekend rentals and nothing more or bargain bin purchases. The Cartel was an absolute disaster and it’s sad as it had a lot of hype around it. The game was pretty much unfinished with game-breaking bugs, glitches, and slowdown. This was a by-product and a common scenario of the struggle to bring games to the HD gaming era. This game just didn’t work out and was quickly forgotten about.
The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct
This game was heavily hyped as was the whole The Walking Dead franchise. It was at its peak in the late ’00s with The Walking Dead adventure game by Telltale Games launching the franchise into the stratosphere in the video game world. With the success of that series, everyone wanted their hands in the franchise’s honey pot, but there wasn’t a single good game that came from it. Survival Instinct was dreadful. It was ugly, boring, and despite using Norman Reedus in the game his likeness wasn’t used very well. The game followed the TV series pretty closely, and instead of the tense atmosphere from that show, we got a boring arcade-like shooter.
I have never seen a game series so consistently terrible as the Sniper series. Both of the first two games were boring and generic as can be for military shooters. The game looked great on PC as it used the Crytek engine, but it ran poorly and looked pretty bad on consoles. There were some great sniper animations, but other than that the voice acting was bad, the levels were borderline free asset quality and there are zero reasons to bother playing this entire series. The series took a 4-year break before releasing Ghost Warrior 3 in 2017 and that one is barely passable.
Dead Island: Riptide
Riptide’s mistake was trying to be a sequel. It was pretty much the exact same game without any changes. This would have been better off as an expansion or DLC. The game also didn’t fix any issues from the decent first game. Lots of bugs, glitches, poor optimization on PC, and overall just not a fun experience. The open-world was void of any interesting characters and the story was just as lame. It did retain the eerie post-apocalyptic atmosphere and setting and was still enjoyable to smash zombies up and run away from them and craft weapons. If you never played the first one you can skip that and go straight for this one, but the entire Dead Island franchise has a sad history and just isn’t very good compared to similar games like Dying Light.
Alien Rage
Alien Rage is another byproduct of the era. Boring and sleep-inducing gameplay with generic aliens, weapons, and an overall feeling of low-budget cheapness. The graphics were awful and there was zero redeeming value to look in this game’s direction. Even by bad shooter standards this one fell into almost infamy of “why did they bother?” The problem is that no one wants to buy your game if it’s bad. The idea of quick cash grabs by releasing quick and dirty shooters just doesn’t work. You couldn’t even save this one with just good graphics or cool aliens. Everything about this game screams “I don’t care”.
Probably the most infamous shooter on this list Forever has a well-documented development cycle of hell that can be traced back in detail. What we got was a gross, dated, ugly, and messy game that barely felt like a Duke Nukem game. The jokes were dated, the gameplay, while varied, just wasn’t fun. The game was also poorly optimized, crashed, and glitched everywhere, and the slowdown was abundant. The hype wasn’t enough to make sales and it flopped with collector’s editions rotting on store shelves. Sadly, we haven’t seen hide nor hair of the franchise since outside of some cameos and releases. This game may have single-handedly killed the franchise forever.
Brink
Another well-documented example of the troubles HD gaming brought to the industry. What was here could have worked, but the lack of support, content, and overall polish killed what could have been one of the best multiplayer shooters of the era. The game also had average gunplay that felt generic and the overall aesthetic of the game was very bland and sterile feeling. It didn’t have an identity or rather one that was the culmination of broken or half-baked ideas. No clan support or single-player campaign didn’t help either. Poor sales led to this game’s quick demise and you can’t even play it anymore if you wanted to.
Bodycount
This is a perfect example of generic military shooters. This game tried to be arcade-like but also felt too realistic for its own good. It was boring, ugly, messy, and just wasn’t any fun to play. The first level showed you pretty much everything there was to offer. The guns had no weight, the enemies were copy/paste from other shooters, and the story and characters were pretty much in the background barely existing. Codemasters was trying to capitalize on games like Bulletstorm and Rage with fast-paced FPS action, but this just wasn’t it.
Aliens: Colonial Marines
Probably as infamous as Duke Nukem Forever, and sadly by the same publisher. Aliens was one of the worst games released of the HD era. Period. It was unfinished, rushed, lie and mess. It was so bad that there were glitches in the AI script for the aliens that users had to fix on the PC version. It was so different from what was shown in demos that Gearbox was sued. The game was boring, ugly, and didn’t feel like an Aliens game at all. Even the multiplayer couldn’t save this one. I played through the first level and never touched it again. This isn’t even a game that could have been patched up. It was rotten from its core and it shows.
Danger Close is talented in the sense they can screw up two games in a row this badly. The first game was an ugly dated mess using the Unreal Engine 3 and just felt like a game stuck in the past. Ditching WWII and trying to capitalize on the realistic military shooters and compete head-to-head with Battlefield, Medal of Honor was just a boring and generic feeling. The use of the Tier 1 operatives didn’t do anything, and the multiplayer had downgraded visuals and felt like a worse game in general. Warfighter looked much better but was a linear, scripted, and boring unoptimized mess that didn’t stand out from the crowd at all. You’re better off playing the older WWII shooters and leaving these to rot. There’s a reason why the series died after Warfighter.
007 Legends
Probably the single worst Bond game to date. Legends shoehorned memorable Bond moments with some of the worst Call of Duty clone shooting you can imagine. This is a perfect example of the HD-era shooters that shouldn’t have existed. This was a plague in the industry to create quick cash grabs from the Call of Duty fanbase. GoldenEye this was not.
I remember renting this at BlockBuster back when it was released. TimeShift didn’t receive the hottest reviews, but it looked good for the time. Fast forward all these years later, and I don’t remember a single thing about the game except the cool rain effects you only see at the beginning and end levels. The story is stupid and non-existent. I have no idea what’s going on. Sadly, this was an issue with many shooters during the HD era of gaming. They didn’t bring an identity like Doom, Quake, Half-Life, or other games before it. They were ugly, boring, and felt so generic. Nothing could capitalize on the success of Gears of War at the time. It was an unstoppable juggernaut, and every studio wanted a piece of that gray shooter pie, but they all failed. That’s the sad thing. Gears of War still stands as the best shooter of that generation, next to Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter.
You play as some dude in a suit that can manipulate time. Wow, that sounds great, right? It’s not. Instead of giving you enemies that require a certain strategy or an ability to defeat or even puzzles, the game haphazardly throws boring, dumb, and generic soldiers at you, and you only have to use the time abilities because you die in a few hits, and there are just way too many of them at once. You will die a lot in this game, so quick saving is a must. Running through the open levels seems promising enough. The game shows some great visuals on a technical level anyway: some giant robot creatures, lots of allies running around, and a cityscape you must navigate through. This seems not too bad at first until you’re dumped into the next area. It’s just the same boring gray levels with boring generic warehouses throughout the entire game. Even the weapons and shooting can’t save this one.
While the weapons look interesting and are designed in interesting ways, they all feel the same. There’s no weight, no recoil, and the enemies don’t really react to hits in a satisfying way. There are generic assault rifles, shotguns, pistols, and rocket launchers, but the more interesting weapons shoot plasma balls, explosive darts, a machine pistol with a flamethrower as a secondary fire, and a lightning-type gun. These just don’t feel good to shoot, and there was no reason to even use half of them. I went through most of the game with the assault rifle, shotgun, explosive dart gun, and plasma ball gun. That’s it. I didn’t need any of the others, as the game gave me no reason to need them. The enemies barely vary, with some with shields and a few with time warp abilities themselves, but they are easy if you use yours. You just mow through enemy wave after wave, flipping switches, and solve what barely qualifies as puzzles.
Some situations require you to use your time abilities to solve some puzzles, but these are little more than flipping this switch and using the reverse time ability to ride the elevator. Hit this switch, jump on the train, and reverse time back into the depot. Stop time to walk through the fan blades. Just stupid, boring stuff like that. There are a couple of missions in which you are on a turret, and you can man a turret against waves every so often, but it’s just the typical run and hide behind containers to recharge your health and time bar and jump back out and kill more baddies. It doesn’t feel fun, it doesn’t look fun, and there’s not even a cool story to make it worth playing through. The game gives you a few pre-rendered cut-scenes with a few lines of dialog going on about a scientist and a dude you must stop, and it’s so spread out and so razor thin that you won’t care.
Sadly, I even remember back in the day that multiplayer didn’t even redeem this turd. Despite a few cool guns and graphical effects, this is nothing more than a game that will waste your time. It’s a product of a bygone era of developers trying to get a grasp on HD gaming and the gameplay feel.
This is actually my third time trying to finish Overlord, believe it or not. I rented this game back when it came out on Xbox 360 and didn’t get very far. A second time on PC, and now my third on PC. This is the furthest I’ve gotten in the game, about 2/3 of the way, but as time goes on, the game ages more poorly than the last time I remember it. It was an early next-gen game for Xbox 360, so all eyes were on it, and it was graphically impressive. It still looks great today and, surprisingly, runs amazingly well on PC without needing any fixes, but the game has a lot of issues.
Firstly, the game is incredibly tedious, and the game has some very poor level design. There’s no map, no objective marker, and the levels are very linear, so even one of these things would have been so helpful. You blindly wander around these areas that all start to look the same, trying to finish objectives. Now, the objectives can all be completed in any order for any area. Your main hub is a tower that you can customize and upgrade over time as you complete the game, and from here you can fast-travel to any level you have visited. The main gameplay mechanic is using the right analog stick and controlling your horde of minions to do your deeds for you, such as carrying items around and combating. You’re very weak comparatively, so entering combat isn’t suggested unless you really need it. Again, not the worst problem.
What really starts to bore me is that sweeping your minions around works well enough, minus some control issues when you have a straggler. The game favors the majority of the horde you end up controlling, and stragglers sometimes won’t join their brethren, making things frustrating. You end up controlling four different minions. Reds, Blues, Greens, and Browns. Browns are your main grunt, do the most combat damage, and have the most defense. Blues can enter the water but can also revive minions. Reds can throw fireballs at a distance and put out fires. Greens can be sneaky and climb up larger enemies, and they are also immune to gases and poisons. You end up spending almost half the game acquiring the three hives needed for the minions to open up new areas in each level. I constantly ran into roadblocks, requiring me to backtrack and wander around a level until I ran into a new area I hadn’t discovered. When I say the level design is bad, I mean piss poor. There are no memorable landmarks, just linear pathways that loop around, and turning around can literally look like two other directions you came from.
While navigation is a serious chore, the use of minions is limited. There are no puzzles to be solved; just destroy everything in their path, and make sure you use certain colors for certain enemies if need be. There are boss fights that are quite challenging, but then another major issue cropped up. You must horde and resource orbs to summon these minions; they aren’t free. Certain enemy types will give you different orbs, but browns are the most needed. I constantly had to go back to a level or two that had easy-to-mine sheep that gave me yellow orbs. I then had to exit the level and reload for the sheep to respawn, just to get enough Browns to defeat a boss. If you’re left in an area with no minions left, you’re pretty much screwed. You are never powerful enough to take out tough enemies alone, and some bosses can only be defeated by minions. There are mana and health fonts you can sacrifice minions into, but they are far and few between, so you really have to watch your health. Minions can loot stuff and find potions to help out a little, and this is the best way to acquire gold in the game to upgrade your weapons and armor.
Once you get used to the controls and gameplay loop, you will really start to see how much aimless wandering you do when you aren’t doing anything at all. I had to always keep a mental note of where a certain area was blocked and by what element, so I could go back and progress and complete another mission. Progressing was somewhat satisfying, but I spent 75% of my playtime wandering around these levels, trying to remember where to go and figure out what part I hadn’t discovered yet. Another issue I would run into is not having the right minions, so I would then need to backtrack back to a spawn hole and get the right minion, but it doesn’t end there. Let’s say you have 20 Browns but now need 5 Blues because an object is in water. I would backtrack to a blue spawn point, I remember, but you can’t send back Browns to a blue spawn point. I then had to go all the way back to the beginning of the area just to send the Browns back. This is stupid and tedious, and there are so many quality-of-life issues that could have improved the game. Let me send back any minion to any spawn point. Also, why spawn points? They’re so far and few between; let me just summon them from the ground, anywhere. I already have a limited amount based on the orbs I collect.
All said, the game might be worth a look if you really love the humor in games like Fable or from the mid-2000s fantasy era. I also felt that despite the game-toting being evil, I never felt truly evil. You can save people for rewards or kill them, but it doesn’t seem evil. The game never went above and beyond this, so I just felt like a misunderstood good guy the entire way. What? The visuals hold up, the control is cumbersome but doable, and the gameplay is unique, but the constant aimless wandering, lack of a map or compass, and poor level design lead to tedium and make the game just plain boring.
For starters, I’m not a Buffy buff. I never watched the show growing up, nor did I as an adult. That’s okay, though, as there are many great video games based on movies and TV shows that are fun without needing to watch the material they are based on. Buffy seemed like this kind of game at first. While it’s clearly geared toward fans of the show, I have no idea what’s going on in the story. You are basically trying to stop some evil vampire spirit from ending the world. That’s literally it. You chase him around as he possesses various characters from the show. It’s dull and rather uninteresting, and the game is also poorly written. Buffy’s one-liners get old as all five of them repeat constantly throughout the game, and so do the one-liners from the enemies.
That’s just the beginning. Buffy has an array of acrobatic moves, and they are actually quite good for such an early 64-bit era game. The animations are well done, and the combat, when it does work, is pretty awesome. Buffy can punch, kick, and execute enemies with a wooden stake. She also has Slayer Power, which allows her to add on some powerful moves at the end of combo chains. This, again, seems great on paper, but it’s poorly executed. While the animations are nice, there’s constant knockback, and you can’t interrupt the enemies’ attacks. This is the key flaw in the entire combat system. There’s no dodge button, no parry, and no way to counter attacks at all. You just have to take it and fall down and get back up, but some enemies will stomp you, and then multiple enemies join in, and you end up dying and losing health over cheap gameplay mechanics. The game is just very cheap all around.
Another issue revolved around this is the terrible jumping and extreme distance you get knocked back at. This leads to cheap deaths off cliffs as some of the fighting areas are tiny and are not designed around how far Buffy can be thrown. I would make it to the end of a level and die just because I got picked up and thrown off a cliff due to the poor level design. It’s everywhere in this game, including platforming segments that shouldn’t exist here. I never finished the game due to the second-to-last level having so many cliffs of death, tiny arenas, and platforming woes that after the 7th time dying from a cheap death, I put the disc back in the box and shelved it. I’m not missing out on much anyway.
If that isn’t painful enough, the level design is boring and trite. You walk down boring brown or gray hallways, fight a few enemies, flip a switch, and move on. The level design is just bad, and every location is so uninteresting. A foundry, a high school, a sunken church—all just blandly designed. At least the character models look decent, and the voice acting is all right. This also leads to healing and other items, which leads to the biggest flaw this entire game has, and what I think completely breaks it. All these other things would be done if you didn’t have to execute every enemy with a stake. You can knock them down to no health, and they won’t die until you execute them. This leads to more cheap deaths, as instead of them dying when their health is down, you then have to break through their constant blocking, get knocked around more, and lose more health, just to get in an execution. They will not die unless you have a stake or a glaive. Enemies block every single move you make, making combat take way longer than necessary, and they also shouldn’t take so long to die. For a beat ’em up, enemies should have more balanced health bars.
There are also items like holy water, hellfire, and a super soaker that contains both. This is a completely useless tool as it depletes within seconds and requires fonts to replenish, and only a few levels have them. It’s mostly used to take down certain force fields. Seriously, what a waste of time and effort! And that’s pretty much all Buffy has to offer. Some decent combat and animations are all the game has to go for it, but it is horrendously broken with terrible gameplay mechanics throughout the entire game.
I honestly can’t recommend this to anyone unless you are a Buffy fan, and even then, you aren’t missing out on much at all. The story is boring, the level design is uninspired and bland, and the game is nearly broken thanks to poor design decisions.
Max Payne 2 was released a little over a year after the original, and a surprising amount of fat was cut from the original. It’s the same game, but more refined and updated, and it feels more tightly woven than its predecessor. A lot of problems were fixed, but new ones arose as well. The narrative continues right after the first game, with Max still trying to avenge the deaths of his wife and child, still trying to get to the bottom of The Inner Circle, and a new love blooms: Mona Sax.
The game starts off similarly to the first game; we get some weird, trippy dream sequences, but they aren’t nearly as awful with zero platforming this time. Once you are in control of Max, you can instantly feel the difference. He has more weight, his animations are smoother, and the gunplay overall just feels punchier and sharper. More weapons were introduced, with many old ones coming back. The new M4 and Kalashnikov weapons are a great addition, but unnecessary. One assault rifle is good enough, as is the addition of the HP5, but the Ingrams do just fine for a submachine gun. While the older weapons pack more of a punch, the new weapons just feel like they were added just to add to the weapon count; less would have been fine. A new dedicated projectile button has been added, so you can throw grenades and molotovs without equipping them.
Bullet Time has been refined and fixed as well. Max can now spin around in a 360-degree motion while dodging, the bullets impact harder, and there’s less of a delay when you shoot. There is also better feedback on enemies when hit, as they stumble more and drop their weapons, so you know they’re dead in bullet time. Max can also stay lying down while continuing to empty a clip, so the delay in getting up doesn’t make you completely vulnerable as the first game did. The difficulty has been dialed way back, and I died a lot less than in the first game. All these great fixes and additions make Max Payne 2 the better of the two games already.
When it comes to level design, Max Payne 2 has more interesting levels like a creepy funhouse, a sprawling mansion, a construction site, and some apartment slums, but there’s a lot of backtracking, and I feel the overall scope of the game feels claustrophobic. The variety is better, but you explore those few areas longer, and I just feel like I wanted to see more of New York inside this noir world Max lives in. Also, gone are the boss fights, so the game feels better paced, and I felt a tempo of gameplay going that the first didn’t have. However, the game is much shorter, clocking in at 4-5 hours. There aren’t any collectibles or anything like that, so once you fly through the game, it’s over, and there’s no reason to ever go back, honestly.
Max Payne 2 is a memorable ride. The story is still told in those awesome comic strips, and I feel that at the end of the game, we get to know Max and Mona well enough to understand their characters and want them on screen more. Their love story is a great centerpiece for this Mafia revenge tale, and it makes Max and Mona feel more human. There’s still a cliffhanger at the end of the story, and a third Max Payne game didn’t come until a decade later, but what we get is one of the best single-player shooters of the PS2/Xbox era. It’s tightly compacted and solid, and while it’s short, sometimes that means quality, and that is rare even to this day.
Bullet time. While The Matrix made it popular in pop culture, Max Payne started it all in the video game realm. You play a cop, Max Payne, who is framed for the murder of another NYPD cop. Your wife and newborn child were also murdered, and you are trying to get revenge on the people who did it. The story isn’t anything amazing, but Max Payne’s voice actor and the well-done writing keep you hooked long enough to find out what happened behind the scenes. The game is told in a comic noir graphic-novel style, and it suits the game well. The cut scenes are imaginative and different, and they don’t look cheap or like the developers were trying to take shortcuts.
Outside of the story, the gameplay is all about shooting, because that’s literally it. Max runs around with various weapons, such as Barrettas, Ingrams, shotguns, grenade launchers, Molotov cocktails, grenades, and assault rifles, to mow down the Mafia and corrupt cops. Bullet time is the main gameplay element here, and when activated, Max does a jump dodge in the direction you move, and you can see him dodging bullets in real-time. This is actually a mechanic you must master, as most situations require you to use it to stay alive. You can’t stand in one spot, or you will be dead in a few hits, and there’s no cover system. I had to quicksave every 2-3 minutes as well because the game is so difficult. It’s cool to jump dodge around a corner, but once Max lands, there’s a delay in him getting up, and you are completely vulnerable to gunfire. I had to make sure I jump dodged behind cover or across a hallway so I wouldn’t die the second the bullet time finished. You can also activate bullet time and just run your meter down so you can run and gun with it too.
There are very few scenarios in which you do more than press buttons. One scene has Max driving a crate crane around an area, but it’s nothing special, and there are some interactive objects that trigger comic-cut scenes, but 95% of the game is just shooting. The weapons themselves feel good, and I felt I had to switch up weapons depending on the situation to make my life easier. The locales are varied, but they are a bit too stale and boring for my taste. They don’t quite capture the noir feeling of the comic-cut scenes, but there is one level early on called Ragna Rock, which was a gothic cult house that reminded me a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, so that’s a good thing. The game really does feel like a first-generation PS2/Xbox game, but it’s very polished. The game flows nicely, but the difficulty is all over the place; you will die dozens and dozens of times in this game.
The visuals are clean and look nice even 20 years later. I installed a texture upgrade patch and some other things to make the game upscale to 4K nicely and play on modern hardware, and it looks pretty good. Even in the original, the facial textures are nice and very realistic, and the aesthetic of the game stands out over most shooters of its time. The voice acting is great, and I finished the game in about 7 hours. After you finish it, there’s literally nothing else to do, as the multiplayer mode was scrapped. It’s a fantastic single-player game that holds up well even today, despite its insane difficulty and unbalanced gameplay. The story isn’t anything special, but Max is a great character to dive into, and it makes for a fun evening.
America loves to romanticize the police. Despite the political environment we are in, the only way we can really satisfy our lust for crime and murder mysteries is to put ourselves in the shoes of the police. L.A. Noire is set in an almost historically accurate 1940s Los Angeles, right after WWII ended. You play as war veteran/detective Cole Phelps, solving a drug mystery and many murder mysteries within.
The game starts out like any typical open-world game by slowly introducing gameplay elements to you before opening the world up. You are Cole, a beat cop who is called to a murder scene. You chase down a suspect, investigate some clues in an alley, and you’re so good at what you do that you magically get promoted to traffic detective. L.A. Noire has a few core elements, and it mostly sticks to these throughout the game ad nauseum. The first element is crime-solving. This is done by picking up various objects in an area, examining them, and moving on. This sounds interesting in theory, but 90% of all objects in this game are completely useless and really don’t need to be picked up and examined. There are maybe one or two objects that are puzzle boxes and a couple of documents that require you to tap on certain information. It’s cool the first time you do all of this, but after that, it’s boring and feels pointless. Make the objects I’m holding more interesting, or allow Cole to do more than twirl them around.
The next core element is interrogations, and this implements Team Bondi’s groundbreaking motion capture technology that actually makes facial animations lifelike, but in a creepy, uncanny valley type of way. Sure, you see neck muscles move, eyebrows twitch, and it all looks nice, but on hardware that couldn’t run the engine very well, these realistic life-like faces look odd on low-textured and poly-counted characters. The whole point of an investigation is to use these facial expressions to determine whether someone is lying or telling the truth, and it never works as intended. There is no set thing that the game gives you to look for, and it always becomes a guessing game or a crapshoot. Most of the time, the logic never makes sense based on what the game wants or is hyper-specific. A certain question may seem like selecting Good Cop would be a good idea because that’s what your guts tell you, but instead, you were to accuse the suspect and pick a piece of evidence that you never would have guessed. The interrogations are an awful guessing game, and I never felt engaged like the developers wanted.
The next part of L.A. Noire is about exploring and gunplay. Firefights are mundane and feel pretty lifeless. There is a cover system, and the weapons shoot, but they all feel the same, and there’s no feedback or satisfaction from firing these WWII-era weapons. Each firefight is a whack-a-mole-style shooting gallery of enemies popping their heads above cover. When you’re not shooting, you’re chasing people or driving around. Driving is one of the worst parts of the game as compared to Rockstar’s other offerings; it feels stiff, slow, and lifeless, and I had no fun driving around the city. Sure, Los Angeles looks pretty good with some great landmarks, but having a piece of a fence bring my car to a complete stop is nonsense. I can ram through a fire hydrant, but a wooden fence will stop my car dead in its tracks. The driving is inconsistent, and even car chases are no fun.
There are 40 side missions called “Streets of LA,” but these are just various car chases, shooting galleries, or on-foot chases that repeat and become stale and annoying. Thankfully, there’s a fast travel system that allows your partner to drive to the next destination to skip all the boring driving. I understand this is a realistic game, but Mafia did it much better. There are 95 different cars in the game, but they honestly all drive the same, and it just becomes no fun after the first hour of the game is over. There are other side objectives, like finding hidden badges, all the landmarks, and trophies, but why bother? Anything outside of the story cases is just completely boring and stiff; there’s a layer of polish that’s seriously missing.
Lastly, we come to the story and characters. Nearly every character is completely unlikeable in the sense that they are just plain boring. Cole Phelps is a goodie-two-shoes who can do no wrong and has zero character flaws, which makes him very unlikable. His partners on the four desks you work on are also just as poorly written. I hated them, but not because they were written so well that I wanted to hate them. They were just so average, too, Mary Sue. One partner was just a lazy asshole cop and never budged from that stereotype; another was just corrupt, and the issue is that there was no development. There is no back story to any of these characters, and Phelps’ flashbacks to WWII did nothing to make you care for him, as he acted just as stubborn and perfect as he did as a cop. For the game being a noire, there is zero character build-up or any reason to care. The overarching story doesn’t actually pick up speed until the last few cases, as each and every case drones on and on and is exactly the same as the last, just in different orders. I never once felt interested in or attached to any one case. Give me fewer cases and build up the victims within so I can feel like the boring twists are worthwhile.
And that’s where I conclude with L.A. Noire. It’s just “okay.” Each of the many cases feels rudimentary in the end and mundane, and I felt like I was just checking off boxes (literally) and had no reason to care for the first or last murder case. The driving is painfully stiff and slow, and despite 1940s Los Angeles looking nice, it’s stale and boring with nothing going on inside. You can’t even shop for clothes or buy weapons. It’s just a giant hub to get from point A to point B. Streets of L.A. side missions are just randomized gameplay loops of chasing, shooting, and driving, with neither of the three being particularly interesting in their own right. So, is L.A. Noire worth playing? Sure, it’s a fun game, and some of the cases are decent, and I did want to see what happened to Phelps in the end, but just barely. After getting so far in the game, I felt like I had to finish it, hoping it would pick up in the next case. The game plays and looks great on Switch, but it has performance issues and bugs that require game restarts. The framerate can dip into single digits in certain spots, but it’s still very playable.
It was a brave move to move the Halo franchise away from Master Chief’s point of view. After the success of ODST, Bungie continued this move with a prequel to the original game and how Cortana was discovered. You play as a ragtag team of elite soldiers, and you play as the Noble Six. The funny thing about Noble Six is that he is basically a nobody, and you witness the deaths and heroisms of your fellow squadmates and search for the last hope of humanity.
The game plays and feels exactly like Halo 3, which is a good thing. The game has many of the same weapons and power-ups as Halo 3 as well. The game has a decent length of nine levels, and the progression is well done. Each level takes place in a new area, so I never felt bored like I did in ODST. From outdoor areas with sweeping vistas to tight and controlled corridors, The game is fast-paced, hectic, and a lot of fun. I felt it was less difficult than previous games and much more balanced. I was able to quickly get a feel for my favorite weapons and the ebb and flow of the gunplay and enemies.
Again, the same enemies in Halo 3 exist here, and with the introduction of the Brutes from Halo 3, they make for a formidable foe and some of the toughest in the game. There are a few flying creatures, and I found there was less vehicle combat in this game than in any others in the series. Most of the game is on foot, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Most objectives will require you to activate or defend something, and this was typical for FPS games back in the day, but it never felt old. Halo has this magical formula of great AI, enemy balance, and knowing when and where to use each weapon. You know what situations call for which weapons, and when you see the weapon, you go for it, and when the situation flips, you know when to drop it and go for another. I know in tight corridors I want a shotgun, so I drop the pistol and pick up an energy rifle, as a scoped weapon is useless. When I run out of ammo, I know there is an alien equivalent lying around, which is great.
Reach just really isn’t much different than Halo 3 or any game before or after it. It’s a solid game with one of the better campaigns in the series, and the multiplayer is rock solid. With this being a spin-off, you’re expected to see asset flips and familiar gameplay, but the shift from Master Chief is what makes it feel a little fresh. With the update for The Master Chief Collection, the game has better visuals, runs at 60+ FPS, and supports ultrawide screens, mice, keyboards, and current-generation hardware. It looks dated, but clean, and feels like a modern shooter does on a PC. I didn’t run into any crashes or major glitches, so it’s a solid port.
I don’t have much else to say other than that it’s a good Halo game. The ending is solid, albeit sad, and sets you up for the main trilogy. I loved Halo 3, so being able to get back into that era of Halo was great, and the upgrades make this a no-brainer for any Halo or FPS fan. If you don’t like Halo, this game will not change your mind at all, as it’s about as rudimentary for the series as it gets, and the story is a little on the light side compared to other games in the series. I didn’t care for any of the characters, and if you aren’t familiar with the future timeline, it won’t make much sense to you.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yeah, it's pretty damn awful. Notoriously one of the worst games on the PSP. A 4 was actually being generous.…