Once they were a vehicle for tech innovation, then everyone’s favorite storytelling medium. When we all got online, shooters were there to show us why that was exciting. Whenever the newspapers needed a moral panic, shooters were happy to provide one.
Perhaps more than any other genre, a list of the best shooters tells a story about the medium and what we wanted from it at the time. It’s shapeshifted into something athletes can devote their lives to and fill arenas through their talents, but it’s also been there to ask us uncomfortable questions about what we see on the news. At this point, its library is so rich that it can even parody itself from years past, and to great effect.
That makes picking just 17 of them a hard task. So we didn’t – instead we built a vast learning AI, made it play every FPS released since the dawn of time, and provide us an empirical ranking of their quality.
Okay, that was a lie. Look, we just chose the best 17 shooters, ok? Get off our backs. That does mean just one game from each series though – otherwise you’d be about to read a lot of Quake and Half-Life entries.
17
Halo: Combat Evolved
Swap in the later games, or even Destiny and its sequel here if you’d prefer, because what we’re really celebrating is the set of rules Bungie established in Halo. Rules that made shooters easy to master with a controller – two primaries and a pistol, swappable with the face buttons, instead of 11 weapons you cycled between using the number keys on a keyboard or your mousewheel. The combat arenas with space to plan and improvise. The vehicles. This was the blueprint that a generation of shooters used. The fact that its space opera plotline is genuinely good and its environments were stop-and-stare gorgeous at the time is almost extraneous.
16
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
What sights Call of Duty has shown us, what spectacles it’s brought before us and then exploded. At this point we’ve straight up forgotten how many helicopter crashes we’ve been in. But all those tropes began in COD’s first foray into present day combat. Before that it was more or less a walk-in Saving Private Ryan with slightly more shouting, but Modern Warfare showed us a disturbing analog of the current events of the day. A middle-Eastern setting, missions called Shock and Awe, the detachment of killing people and levelling buildings through an AC-130’s thermal camera – it was edgy, uncomfortable, and highly impactful. All Ghillied Up’s “You take the one on the right” moment is an all-timer, too.
15
Metro Exodus
Previously a linear shooter oscillating between tight spaces in Russia’s underground metro network and the vast irradiated tundra overground, Exodus saw Metro transition its slow-burning, atmospheric brand of shooter into something like an open world game. There’s no climbing towers and gathering collectibles, mercifully, replacing that repetition with a sprawl of damaged but darkly beautiful outdoor space. It’s a space that tells the story of Metro’s world just as well as Artyom’s friends on the train – and there are some serious raconteurs aboard.
14
Overwatch
Leave it to Blizzard to get us all deeply invested in the outcome of a battle between a gorilla in body armor and an E-girl piloting a mech. Overwatch’s classes are a visual feast that throws together cultures and references so diverse as to be preposterous – but also totally coherent. They’re also fiercely distinct from other class-based games, and they make for a fascinating round of Push The Thing or that other old favorite, Get Everybody On The Thing. Watching it at competitive level is like trying to parse a James Joyce book in a foreign language but the very same game feels intuitive when you load it up yourself, and that tells you how expertly its class combat has been crafted.
13
Rainbow Six Siege
“Oh, Rainbow Six is having a stab at being Counter-Strike,” we all said, didn’t we, with the naivety that only 2014 minds drunk on Miley Cyrus hits and doing the ice bucket challenge were capable of. It turned out Siege wanted to be something totally different, a new style of tactical shooter where destructible scenery, equipment and leaning were the real weapons. Also the firearms. Still pulling in the crowds years on, its genuinely specialized operators and focus on creativity make it a one-off in the landscape.
12
Dusk
The very first thing Dusk does to you is throw you in a dark room full of chainsaw-wielding men with bags over their heads. It hands you a scythe, and without a word, expects you to get on with it. There’s never a moment when it breaks character as a moody nineties shooter, explains what in the name of Carmack is happening in its world and why you’re being attacked by bulls attached to wooden carts, or interrupts your enjoyment of its nightmarish mood to alert you to the presence of nearby collectibles or control towers which unlock new objectives. No, there’s a purity of intention and execution throughout, and it makes Dusk the best new old game. Movement speed is that of a buttered whippet, weapons conjure their projectiles from the bowels of Quake, and enemies walk a perfect line between period parody and genuine unease. What a magnificent achievement it is.
11
Perfect Dark
Rare was on a roll in the 90s. First came GoldenEye, a shooter so legendary people gladly put up with its obtuse controls on the N64 pad. Then for that same console, the British studio refined its super-spy shooter formula with Perfect Dark. Here was a game that went one better in every department, gadgets now more gratifying, environments demanding of crouching and slipping between laser grids, enemies… well, enemies still pretty hapless if we’re honest, but tearing them down with a laptop gun or Calisto NTG was exciting on a spiritual level. Its story veered from shady corporations to alien autopsies with relish, and even the training area was a work of art, letting you explore an amazingly detailed Carrington institute that nailed environmental storytelling before that was a buzzword.
10
Unreal Tournament
Epic Games, heir apparent of the games industry and all its inventory, began with Unreal, a game where you looked at some graphics while hurting the bad aliens. It wasn’t a revolution, but they were quite some graphics, let me tell you. Its next move was far more forward-thinking, though – a release that focused squarely on a dawning online shooter scene. Doom was the first to connect us, Quake took deathmatch further, but Unreal Tournament was the first time the deathmatch was the game. No linear campaign, precious little story, just a series of competitive matches to survive and, if all goes to plan and your flak cannon’s firing straight, dominate.
Quake III Arena came out just days later and focused in on exactly the same elements, and yes its railgun felt like holding a lightning rod, but we pay our dues to that franchise below. UT was, and will probably always be, Unreal’s high point, with a sniper rifle worth salivating over and a perfectly pitched zippiness to combat, regardless of which mode and map you found yourself circle-strafing within.
9
Titanfall 2
Do you know why people like the Mario games so much? It’s because they take a mechanic, run with it for a level or two, and do almost everything that’s possible with it before dumping it off in favor of something new. Titanfall 2 takes that same approach and applies it to a first-person shooter. It’s a game that constantly redefines itself as you play, surprising you with something new around every corner.
Effect and Cause, one of its most talked-about missions, is evidence of this. Has there ever been a better on-screen prompt than “press X to time travel”? It’s doubtful. Even outside of that brilliant campaign, Titanfall 2 defies conventional wisdom for an online shooter. Balance be damned, everyone gets a mech the size of a house and everyone can wall-run across any surface. But somehow it works, it feels balanced, despite the fact you can pull off some of the most audacious moves ever seen in a multiplayer video game.
8
Team Fortress 2
Nobody expected Team Fortress 2 to even come out, let alone to be an R-rated Pixar movie that was also genuinely impossible to stop playing and talking about. Such was Valve’s wizardry in the noughties. Its nine classes mesh so well with each other. Pyros counterspies, spies counter heavies, heavies counter engineers’ sentries, while on the control point a bunch of soldiers and demomen are having an absolute barney. There’s a sniper just quietly getting on with it and racking up 200 kills, a scout who somehow keeps meleeing you to death, and the round’s won and lost by medics and their judicious use of ÜberCharge.
More than being perfectly matched in gameplay terms, that interplay between nine distinct roles is also genuinely funny. It’s not exactly side-splitting to watch a Battlefield sniper or Rainbow Six Siege operator at work, but there’s something about the contrasts in size and the demeanors writ large in TF2’s cast that makes their every coming-together funny, even after all this time.
7
Quake
Doom showed us all what a shooter was, but Quake showed us what it might be. More than just devilishly constructed levels paced with traps, ambushes and delicious opportunities to mulch clusters of Knights and Ogres with your grenade launchers, it’s an atmosphere piece. Each of its episodes seems, even now, to transport you to another place. Somewhere whose components don’t quite make sense – whoever heard of medieval knights in space? – but which seems all the more real and transportative for it.
Load it up now, with all your experience of the intervening two decades’ shooters, and you’ll be reminded how clever level design can be in its best moments. id Software’s toying with you, joking and terrorizing at every step, to a standard that nobody else has ever met.
6
Wolfenstein 2: New Colossus
A modern single-player shooter that cares just as much about painting vivid characters as it does making its every weapon feel like a heavy, greasy Victorian factory – Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, what a unique treat you are in the modern games industry. Instead of a battle pass we get dual-wielding machinenpistole while navigating a wheelchair around the corridors of a zeppelin. Instead of legendary rarity hats, we have dialogue that flits between social commentary around breastfeeding and sincere examination of horrific childhood trauma. This is why people lament the scarcity of solo shooters – because in their rarest moments, they can be this.
5
Half-Life
Before Valve had a go at the FPS, here’s how you told a story in the genre. Show musclebound man on box, write brief bio in game manual, eg ‘Brian Gunn is an ex-cop with a score to settle with his new alien overlords’, commence the shooting. We didn’t have a visual or mechanical language for creating scripted cinematic moments yet, nor did creators at the time establish the mundane world and its rules before introducing the extraordinary.
That’s why it felt so captivating to go on that train ride in the beginning of Half-Life, why its NPC scientists lent a sense of context that made the experiment going awry feel so heartbreaking and disturbing. And it’s why every subsequent puzzle and linear scripted sequence had us all gripped. Games just weren’t laid out like this before Gordon’s fateful shift in the test chamber.
4
Doom
The reason you’re rolling your eyes right now is because everybody already knows exactly, precisely, on a molecular level, how good Doom is. You can hear that song playing in your head at its very mention, and you can walk around E1M1 in your mind’s eye.
So what are we going to do with a game that culturally indelible, not put it on a list of the best shooters? Give up its slot to Doom 2016 instead? Well, actually that wouldn’t be so bad. Doom’s latter day games have been extraordinary, finding a way to translate the pace and savagery of id’s original vision to fully 3D polygonal worlds where brutal melee animations happen every 0.7 seconds. But the fact is, the 1993 original is actually still wonderful to play now, and not just for the sprite-laden nostalgia hit. It’s just one of those once in a lifetime, perfect games and we’ll never stop celebrating it.
3
Apex Legends
Apex Legends is the game that just keeps growing. It took the template of Titanfall 2, stripped the movement mechanics down fairly significantly, and made it into a strong ground-based battle royale game. Shields are high and time-to-kill is too, but that means in Apex Legends you will be undertaking some extreme battles that could last several minutes as you use all of your collected resources to overtake enemy teams. Right now there is no better battle royale to play than Apex Legends.
2
Destiny 2
If you want to get into a lengthy multiplayer campaign with friends right now, Destiny 2 is the best place to go. Yes, there are PVP battle arenas, but the campaign and multiple expansions are where the main game rests. If you can get a team of three friends together you’ll have loads of fun exploring the world of Destiny 2.
1
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
It’s been 21 years since Counter-Strike first popped up as a Half-Life mod and found an audience. But what’s really striking, beyond the longevity itself, is how little the game’s changed since then. The sun bounces off reflective surfaces and casts complex shadows over Dust II now in CSGO, but it’s still Dust II. You can adorn your AK47 in a skin that costs as much as a decent used car, but it feels like the AK47 you defended Aztec with in 1.6. It’s simply a killer premise, and it’s yet to be exhausted.
The economy of each round adds another wrinkle to what’s already a tactical game. You’re not just planting a bomb or extracting hostages, but doing it while thinking two rounds ahead, knowing that if you win them both the other team will be forced to eco pistol. And all the while, a unique language of callouts is being exchanged with an efficiency that would impress an air traffic controller. And despite all that strategy, it’s still the best raw aim shooter around. A perfect marriage of mechanics and masterminding.
Want more tips on great games to play? Check out our ranking of the best RPGs of all time.
Written by Phil Iwaniuk and Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.
