Assassin’s Creed II is by far one of the biggest sequels in video game history. When it came out, everyone was blown away by the scope and ambition put into this game. It made the first game feel like a concept demo. It felt like just the core of the first game was present, and so much was built on top of that game. The world was five times as big; there were new mission types, cinematic story missions, and tons of overall additions and improvements; however, the game did suffer on its own for various reasons.
This game starts the epic saga of Ezio Auditore de Firenze. one of the most iconic video game characters of all time. It was a surprise that Ubisoft scrapped Altair and his story so quickly, but we are greeted with 15th-century Italy and various historical characters that appeared during that time, such as Catarina Sforza, Leonardo Di Vinci, and Machiavelli. The story itself is fairly easy to follow and has a few twists, but most of all, it has a really surprising ending. Ezio works his way up as an assassin, knocking down templars, to retrieve the apple of Eden and keep it from the templar’s hands. The main villain, Rodrigo Borgia, is a nasty snake, and overall, all the characters are well written, and I wound up really liking most of them.
First off, the overall way you maneuver has been improved slightly, but more things have been added. While you can swan dive into haystacks and climb ladders, the entire game has been built with parkour free-running in mind. You can climb every building and stay off the streets by staying on the rooftops. Overall, the system was impressive back in the day, but it has a lot of quality-of-life issues. The overall parkouring feels too sticky. Ezio will jump around like a rabbit sometimes, so fine-tuning your turns makes it difficult to forget any type of mid-jump change. Once you get close to a wall or object, Ezio will climb, and quick button presses just aren’t responsive. I would start climbing a wall and then try to tap the descent button, but instead, he would just fall to the ground. Other instances had guards chasing me while I was trying to round a corner, and Ezio would cling to the wall and get stuck or jump onto the wall or object nearby instead. This can get incredibly frustrating as the system just doesn’t allow fine tuning or sudden changes.
That’s not to say the parkour system is bad. When you have a good line of sight, it works well, or you just want to climb broadly over a building. There were other instances in which precise jumping became a chore during Assassin’s Tomb missions. There is a fast walk button, and holding down the run button together allows Ezio to scale things quickly. If you are holding that run button after each jump, Ezio will just go in that direction, whether there’s something to grab on to or not. For small jumps across beams, I had to let go of the run button after each jump to re-align myself for the next jump. Quickly parkouring around just isn’t possible due to this finicky system.
Some other frustrations stem from combat. Firstly, the system is mostly the same as the first game, as it can be easy due to the whole system being a parry-fest. You can whack away at enemies, but instead, just hold the block button and parry when enemies strike, and it’s a one-hit-kill city. Once I acquired my wrist blades, I didn’t even use my sword anymore and never once used my secondary dagger weapons. This is a flaw in the combat itself and needs serious overhauling. It makes open combat boring and sometimes too easy. What is challenging and annoying is trying to lose guards and become anonymous. Sure, you can blend into crowds, benches, and haystacks, and you can now hire prostitutes or mercenaries to distract guards and get them off your tail, but the combat and finicky parkour system make losing guards incredibly frustrating. You have to lose their line of sight by rounding corners or jumping off buildings, and if you can get far enough away, it will create a search radius. You can hide in that radius or continue escaping. There is an anonymity meter, and once it’s solid red, every guard will recognize you, and it’s a frustrating mess to find a town crier to bribe and take 50% of the meter away.
With those two major things out of the way, that leaves content itself. The sad thing about all this new content is that it’s meaningless in the end. There are no rewards for any of it except for achievements or completion’s sake. There are 73 viewpoints to find that are actually fun, as most of them are climbing puzzles on their own. Now it does still feel like overkill, as each viewpoint only reveals the surrounding buildings and not much else. I felt there were just too many. There are races, assassin contracts, courier missions, and fights. These are boring and pointless, and they are just there to add filler. You can really tell this is where the Ubisoft plague of too much crap to do in a game starts. The only rewarding side content is The Truth Puzzles. There are 20 hidden glyphs throughout the game, and finding them will grant you puzzles to solve. These get increasingly hard—absurdly hard, in fact—in which the clues become obtuse and impossible to decipher. However, what’s revealed is a cool video.
The story missions themselves are mostly varied, with various tasks such as assassinations, tailing, fights, horseback riding, and the occasional scripted mission. I really liked the story and characters enough to stick around and wound up completing all viewpoints, The Truth puzzles, and finding all the codex pages that max out your health. I do need to mention the various gadgets you get, which are mostly useless. Poison darts can make enemies go berserk and attack each other, but you also have smoke bombs, throwing knives, and a pistol, and that’s about it. I mostly used the throwing knives to take out rooftop guards, and smoke bombs were great to get away from large groups of enemies and become anonymous. In fact, they’re required to reduce frustration.
The visual upgrade for the Ezio Collection is minimal. There aren’t any actual improvements outside of some draw distance gain, anti-aliasing, and texture filtering. The lighting is slightly improved as well, but not by much. The game runs incredibly well with no slowdown, but I did run into a few crashes and glitches. I wish we got a full remaster or remake, but what’s here is fine. It’s crazy how well this plays so many years later and just shows how far ahead the game was at the time. There are a lot of quality-of-life improvements that need to be made, and most of the core mechanics have frustrations you will need to forgive or work around, but the story and characters are worth sticking around for. There is also a lot of bloated side content that has no meaning or rewards, including fully upgrading your villa, which literally just generates more income and isn’t used for anything besides dying armor, buying weapons, and armor itself. The assassin and templar tombs are a lot of fun as well.
Fall of Man was a hot mess, and it showed. It was a frustrating, clunky, one-foot-stuck-in-the-last-generation game that just didn’t show off what the PS3 could really do. It almost seemed like it was being developed on PS2 and got ported over later on. Resistance 2 fixes nearly all the issues with Fall of Man, but because there were so many problems, Resistance 2 didn’t get a chance to really shine. It also holds on to some of its predecessor’s problems.
First and foremost, Resistance 2 looks miles better than Fall of Man. Even years later, the game looks great. With highly detailed textures, the scale of the game has increased tenfold. No longer are there boring .JPG mountains in the background. We get full-on battles and giant building-sized ships in the sky, giant aliens roaming the city, and more enemies on screen. The weapons look better and have moving parts; the characters look better; the Chimera has more detail; and overall, the game looks like a next-gen game should. It’s part of the upper echelon of PS3 games, graphics-wise. However, that’s about the peak here. The story still doesn’t explore the Chimera enough, their planet, or their origins. Nathan Hale has been updated with a voice and infected by the Chimera, but it doesn’t make him more interesting. He’s still a typical white-bald dude from the 2010s. The secondary characters are dumb, and their origins aren’t explored. Again, there’s no reason to care for anyone here.
With the story being a toss-away, the gameplay has improved to some extent. There are more weapons, and this time around, you only get to hold two at a time instead of all of them. This makes you strategize your needs based on the current situation. Some of the original weapons return, such as the Carbine, Bullseye I and II, Fareye, Auger, and the Rossmere. However, the Auger has been improved by letting you actually see the enemies through walls this time. There are some new interesting weapons, like the Marksman with a secondary fire that shoots a plasma ball, and the Magnum, which has explosive rounds. The weapon arsenal is better than ever, and the aiming has improved as well. The weapons have weight, and the Chimera aren’t bullet sponges. They actually have animations to show they’ve been hit, and you can interrupt their shots.
There are boss fights this time around, which are pretty cool and cinematic. Your environment is the United States this time around, and you jump from various cities such as Chicago, Louisiana, and San Francisco, just to name a few. The varied locales are a nice change of pace from the previous game, but the game changed its boring color palette from gray to brown. Everything in this game is brown, with very little color. At least we get new enemies to change things up, like big Titans; these guys rush you and have shields; there are Chameleons, which will one-hit kill you unless you shoot them down (one-shot kills them); and Mauraders, which are giant, four-legged creatures that show up a couple of times in the game. The largest problem from the last game returns, and that’s the insane difficulty. This game is so poorly balanced. It starts out easy and nice, and then about halfway through, you’re restarting areas over a dozen times because there isn’t enough ammo in the area, you don’t have the right weapons, the cover is poorly paced, or there are just too many in the area for you to take on. You die in just a couple of hits, but the health meter was axed for regenerating health, and the “red screen”
The last few levels of the game were insanely hard and unfair. The game is only about 6 hours long, but it took me over a week to finish it because of the constant deaths. The campaign isn’t worth playing again, and the multiplayer servers are shut down, but I do remember playing a demo of the multiplayer back in the day, and it wasn’t anything special. Resistance has never been a fun multiplayer game, but the co-op campaign might make it more enjoyable and less difficult. While I praise the game for fixing many of the problems, it introduces new ones and retains a few major ones.
Most video games based on movies are notoriously terrible, and thankfully, the trend has mostly ended. With game development costs in the rough, it’s not feasible or profitable to pump out a game in six months based on the next big movie. Weapons of Fate is a rare video game-only sequel to a movie because the movie bombed. The story seems interesting at first. The voice acting is great, and many of the original cast members from the movie return, but the game is over so quickly that the story doesn’t get time to unfold. It plays out like a typical Hollywood action movie. There are lots of cool and interesting words like “The Immortal” and “The Fate of the Loom,” but they mean nothing in the end. It seems almost like an Assassin’s Creed-type storyline where you play as the child of an assassin and are trying to find the killer of your mother. There are legendary real-world assassins who are buried in special tombs, and so on.
It’s just an action sequence and a repetitive shooting sequence to the next cutscene. These are abrupt and frequent, but it’s still not enough to shell out the lore that this type of storyline needs. There’s no backstory for any character. You just get introduced with a few lines, and that’s it. Why do I want to kill these people? Who do I care about my two characters? Who cares about any of this? The game at least tries to give you interesting abilities, decent gunplay, and some scripted moments. There are even a few boss fights thrown in, for good measure. The game plays like any third-person shooter. You run around the incredibly linear and cramped levels and can take cover behind things, pop out, and shoot. This seems standard enough, but I have to give GRIN compliments for good hit feedback when you shoot enemies and they aren’t bullet sponges.
You slowly unlock a couple of abilities. There are adrenaline shots you use for bullet bending and slow-mo dodging between covers. Honestly, the bullet-bending is a really neat gameplay idea. You can pull up a line that you move around that locks onto enemies. When it’s white, the bullet will get them around the cover and corners. The downside is they can’t be moving, but if you hit them, you recover that adrenaline shot back. You can chain these together easily, but it kind of falls apart towards the end of the game. Tougher enemies get introduced and can dodge your bullets. Bullet-bending no longer becomes a one-shot that kills most enemies. Usually, they stagger out of cover, and you have to continue the kill. You still get the shot back, but it can get quite annoying because all of these enemies do become bullet sponges in the end or require melee attacks.
Bullet dodging only became useful during a couple of boss fights, and that’s it. Each level is filled with cover, and enemies use it too. There are moments where you get to use a sniper rifle, mounted machine gun, and cinematic bullet dog sequences in which the game slows down between animations and you have to kill whoever is blocking your way. They’re fun and shake things up a bit, but the repetitive level design and the constant barrage of killing enemies behind cover get tiresome towards the end, and the bullet bending loses its charm fast despite how cool it is. There are rare occasions where a shielded enemy will confront you, and you can suppress them, sneak around the sides, and flank them. This was in the main tutorial, like it was a constant thing. I ran across less than five of these guys through the whole game.
That’s all there is to the game. You just run around shooting, bullet-bending, and killing each wave as you push through the levels. Each chapter has an end boss that isn’t all that tough, but they’re there. You can eventually acquire your dad’s sub-machine pistols towards the end of the game and his suit. You go back and forth between the past and current times. The game is over in less than 4 hours, and you’re left with 4 hours you won’t get back. There’s literally no reason to play this game at all unless you’re super bored and want a decent afternoon with an HD-era shooter.
Resistance has been one of those games I have always dreaded playing. I picked the game up in 2010, many years after the game’s original release, and it felt dated, even back then, clunky, and absurdly hard. I never finished the game. I finally decided to get back into it, and my first regret was not playing this game on easy. This game is so frustrating, unbalanced, and difficult that I wanted to tear my hair out.
Let’s start with the setting and story, as Resistance has always had interesting enemies and plots, but Fall of Man does little to really show this in any way. The Chimera is an awesome foe. Similar to Locusts in Gears of War, these are the only enemies you will encounter. There are only a few types, but each type has been made carefully so you know what weapons to use in which situations. You play Nathan Hale, a typical generic white-bald dude with no voice who is somehow immune to the Chimera infection. He can regenerate health and survive situations most people can’t. The story is told in the past tense by an army officer, and the entire game takes place in England during WWII. I love WWII history, and this game had potential.
This also leads me to the game’s art design. It’s so gray and dull. While the Chimera infrastructure designs are really cool, the overall tone of the game is very boring. The graphics are also really dated. This is another HD-era game that still had one foot in the previous generation. There are also only two other main characters, and they aren’t explored; there’s no backstory. Who is Nathan Hale? Why should we care about him? Nothing.
Fall of Man’s other strength is Insomniac’s signature awesome weapon design that was carried over from Ratchet & Clank. Each weapon is well crafted and has a unique alt-fire mode. Now that I said the weapons were well designed, I didn’t say they were fun to use. The game’s aim is awful. Incredibly squirrely, a terrible zoom mechanic in which the camera just snaps to the iron sights. This is an example of last-generation design. You can move the camera fluidly or have the gun pulled up to your eyes. The PS3 can handle it, I promise. Now the weapons themselves are fun.
There’s a generic carbine assault rifle that’s the only accurate machine gun in the game. Its alt-fire is a grenade launcher (okay, that one isn’t unique). The other assault rifle is the Chimera Bullseye, which has a homing tag you can place on enemies, and the bullets will fly to them no matter where you aim. The issue with this weapon’s tagging system is the awful aiming! It’s so difficult to get a tag on an enemy. The next weapon is a pump-action trench gun. Its alt-fire is a double shot (okay, again, not very original), but there’s a stupid delay after using it for the animation to stop, so I didn’t even bother. The next weapon is a giant nail gun of sorts called the Hailstorm. It shoots nails or can launch a needling ball and slowly fire them at enemies like a turret. There’s a blob mine gun (every Insomniac shooter has a form of a blob gun) with an alt-fire to just remotely detonate them. There’s a rocket launcher with an interesting pressure-sensitive speed adjustment as an alt-fire mode. There’s a sniper rifle that can slow down time, an infamous auger that can shoot through walls, and an alt-fire that puts up a shield. While this is a cool gun for the player, the enemies make it a living nightmare. It’s impossible to hide or get away from these bullets, so you need to take down these enemies first.
There are also a couple of grenade types, like the hedgehog grenade, which shoots out spikes, and an incendiary and explosive grenade. So with the weapons out of the way and explaining how awful it is to shoot them, the overall gameplay is insanely difficult, frustrating, and unfair. The checkpoint system is ridiculously unfair. Some levels only had a single checkpoint, and the game gets insanely hard fast. Some later levels I repeated about a dozen times until I remembered every enemy placement and knew exactly what weapons to use when. I also hate how the Chimera is just a bullet sponge. No one likes bullet-sponge enemies. This also leads to awful hit feedback from the enemies. Gears of War did this the best at the time. Animations that show the enemy is hit. The Chimera just stands there, and you have no idea if your bullets are connecting. Sometimes I would lay hundreds of rounds into one enemy, and it doesn’t help that all the guns are stupidly inaccurate, but the Chimera can hit you from across the map with no problem.
There are only a few moments where you control another vehicle and get a breather. The constant barrage of unbalanced difficulty and awful aiming, coupled with inaccurate weapons, just leads to a mostly unfun and unfair experience. There’s literally no reason to play this unless you want to complete the entire Resistance trilogy for some reason. There are other Insomniac staples, like skill points, you can acquire but do an undetermined thing that unlocks multiplayer skins. The servers are long shut down, but I did play when they were up years ago, and it’s nothing to write home about. The terrible hit detection carries over, as do the inaccurate weapons. It’s nothing to miss, honestly.
Overall, Resistance is a good start to a series but falls short in a lot of ways. Dated visuals (even at release), gameplay that has one foot in the previous generation, terribly unbalanced difficulty, no-hit feedback from enemies, insanely inaccurate weapons, terrible aiming, bullet sponge enemies, and boring multiplayer. The story isn’t even worth anything to ponder. Resistance has a lot of negatives going for it, but the few redeeming factors are the unique weapons, well-designed enemies, and some interesting interior levels, and the vehicle sections are pretty cool.
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.
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.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.