Upcoming First-Person Shooters That Will Blow You Away
First-person shooters sure are popular. Currently, in fact, they're one of the most popular game genres in terms of sales. And it's not hard to see why. Think about some of the most beloved and talked-about parts of games throughout history and you will be awash with FPS goodness.
The first time you stormed the beaches of Normandy in Medal of Honor. The time you fired that shot — having taken the coriolis effect into account — in Call of Duty 4's certified classic "All Ghillied Up" sniper mission. The time you ignored everyone's advice and went to Ravenholm in Half-Life 2. The first time you touched down on the beautiful and alien world of the Halo, and looked up to see the rest of the Halo. In Halo.
Experiencing everything through the eyes of the protagonist has made for some incredible moments in the past, and there's certainly no shortage of them heading our way in the future too. These upcoming first-person shooters will blow you away.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is a fresh entry in an old series
It's been a long time since a Call of Duty game radically departed from a forerunner. The series has generally been considered to be stagnating for a few years now, with some particularly notable low points such as touting 'fish AI' in one of the reveal trailers for Ghosts. If the best you can do to differentiate yourself from other sequels in a long running military-porn franchise is to talk about how fish swim away if you go near them, you know you're clutching at straws.
But now — and for better or worse — Black Ops 4 promises to be something genuinely different. For starters, it won't even have a single-player component. A bold move indeed for a game that built its reputation on some absolutely astonishing campaign set-pieces back in the day. This was apparently discarded to make room for the new Battle Royale mode that all the kids these days are so into. Love it or hate it, Call of Duty is always one to keep an eye on.
Get into GTFO
Remember Payday 2? A fun and frantic little shooter, so it was. Remember its backlash over microtransactions? The fans weren't so keen on that. And just when they thought things couldn't get any worse, Ulf Anderson (Payday's creator, and voice actor for loveable in-game bank robber Wolf) announced he was leaving the company for unspecified reasons.
After two years of keeping fans guessing, he finally revealed his new studio, 10 Chambers Collective, would be returning to the cooperative multiplayer scene.
GTFO — yes, as in Get The Four-Letter-Word Out, or other words to that effect — is a much darker experience than Payday's comic heist simulator, however. In some cases literally. Taking place deep underground, with only your flashlights to show the way, GTFO tasks a team of four with infiltrating the darkest recesses of cave bunkers, extracting valuable artifacts, and then, you know, getting the **** out before you're overrun by hordes of horrendous creatures. Think of a cross between Left 4 Dead and the first half an hour of the film Prometheus. Now doesn't that just sound wonderful?
Ready Or Not is coming
Ignore the fact that it's got one of the worst titles for a video game ever, and hasn't been talked about for a while. Ready Or Not is still alive, and looks like it's going to scratch an itch that gamers haven't been able to be reach since 2005's SWAT 4.
For anyone out there that has found the Rainbow Six franchise to be getting increasingly less tactical, or favoring the more bombastic, CoD-ified gameplay of competitive online shooters, Ready Or Not is definitely ready to fill the hole in your life. Lacing you into the boots of paramilitary law enforcers, you'll be tasked with getting in and defusing hostile situations by your own preferred means. There's customization, for sure, but not that kind that's going to punch your tactical immersion in the face.
Ready Or Not also promises to offer things such as a strategic planning phase — something sorely missing from Siege — and even better, non-lethal options. Tear gassing and handcuffing your way to victory is sure to add both a finer tactical edge and a greater sense achievement to proceedings, should you pull it off.
Witchfire brings guns to a walking sim
One of the finest bait-and-switches in the history of trailers, Witchfire's teaser opens by telling us that the game is being developed by the creators of pretty walking simulator The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter, before showing us some walking. Standard stuff. What it then informs us, as the player character raises a previously unseen shotgun to a creature's head, is that it was also developed by the people that made Painkiller and Bulletstorm.
Much like The Vanishing, the game appears to be something of a looker, and much like Painkiller and BulletStorm it also appears to be one hell of a frenzied, '90s-style shooting gallery, albeit set in a gothic Victorian countryside. But that just makes it even cooler.
And as well as blasting armoured skeletons with wrought iron rifles, the trailer also indicates that there'll be a variety of castable spells at your disposal too, in a similar vein to BioShock's left-handed abilities.
Everything about the game looks too good to be true. But with the pedigree of the development team, they might just be able to pull it off.
OVERKILL's The Walking Dead isn't meant to be easy on you
The Walking Dead seems like it would be a franchise that would lend itself pretty well to a first-person survival shooter. Unfortunately so far, that dream has yet to be realised, with 2013's The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct being a horrendously painful experience — the gaming equivalent of sawing your own arm off. Speaking of which, while Telltale's later story-driven effort was a much more palatable affair, a deciding-what-to-say simulator isn't really comparable.
Developer OVERKILL's attempt will see them capitalize on the formula that made Left 4 Dead so revered in the horror shooter scene. Up to four players can team up in online co-op, and scavenge for gear that will help them survive the hordes of shambling ex-humans with a craving for rare meat.
The main difference is that in this case, each of the four characters will bring something different to the table, rather than just being the same player vehicle with a different voice actor. Some will offer their muscles and go in heavy with blunt instruments, where another may be better suited to a stealth approach. Combine that with individual skill-trees, crafting and weapon mods, and the ability to sets traps around your camp, and you have something that looks like the game Left 4 Dead 3 could have been.
Doom Eternal is Hell on Earth
What can be said about Doom that hasn't already been said about the Mona Lisa? Everyone has seen it, and everyone knows it's a timeless work of genius. What more do you need?
There was once, however, a time when Doom wasn't looking quite so enticing. A brief time during 2012, when we saw the never-released Doom 4 looking entirely un-Doom-like in early trailers, where all the heart and soul of the visceral shooter had been replaced by the then-standard brown filters over brown buildings and generic brown space marines. There was one nugget of interest, though: it was set on Earth.
Doom 4 died and was reborn as the beautiful reboot we were given in 2016. Now imagine if we could somehow combine this blissful new franchise entry with the concept of literal Hell on Earth that they previously toyed with.
It's happening. From the moment the new E3 trailer for Eternal revealed a skeleton impaled on a stake underneath a distinctly US-looking traffic light, we knew our prayers had been answered.
Metro: Exodus leaves the station
The Metro series has always been a lore-heavy game with a world begging to be explored. For a time, that world was simply the titular set of interconnected railways, and that was perfectly fine. Developer 4A Games crafted a beautifully detailed set of environments in Metro 2033, and the tease of making your way out to the above-ground post-apocalypse was expanded upon further in the fantastic sequel, Last Light.
And now it looks like the concept will be fully realized. The developers have confirmed that the semi-open world game will largely take place above ground, and feature both a day/night cycle and dynamic weather systems, which will affect how the game is played. It goes without saying that some of the nastier beasties will only come out at night, for example. As if creeping around a decimated Russian nuclear wasteland in a broken gas mask weren't tense enough.
The game also features the ability to go to sleep to pass the time, so if a nighttime section is simply too terrifying and difficult to make it though, you can just run away, go to bed, and wait until the sun comes up before tackling it again — just like you would in real life!
V is for Victory in Battlefield V
A controversial initial reveal doesn't quite seemed to have completely dampened the spirits of the dedicated Battlefield veterans. Despite the world premier trailer looking like a cross between Overwatch and a sort of steampunk Braveheart, developer DICE promises they'll be offering us a game so fun we won't care about the inaccuracies. "Fun over authentic," they proudly proclaim.
And it's not like they don't have precedent. No Battlefield game has ever been particularly authentic, and that's not why people play them anyway. They play them because they can jump out of a plane, pull out a sniper rifle and take out an enemy on the horizon, then land on a horse and gallop over to capture a base from under the nose of a tank. Battlefield is utter madness, and that's the way it should stay.
It goes without saying that DICE has also opted to jump on the Battle Royale bandwagon, though they're remaining curiously tight-lipped about just how they're going to implement it. There's no doubt the Frostbite engine is capable of some unbelievably impressive things, but can it really handle it with 100 players running around on a map the size of Normandy? With the beta on the horizon, time will soon tell.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood is the next generation of Nazi-slaying
One of 2017's most controversial titles, Wolfenstein has never shied away from its reveling in the bombastic dismantling of the retro-futurist Nazi regime, and it doesn't look like that's about to change any time soon.
One thing that is changing, however, is the protagonist. After 25 years of blowing the heads off of radical nationalists as B.J. Blazkowicz, the point of view will finally be making a switch to ... his own daughters. The twins his wife Anya was pregnant with during the last game are all grown up now, and it seems that they've got the same hankering for Nazi punching as their old man did. He must be so proud.
The game will take place almost 20 years after the liberation of America that bookended The New Colossus, and the player will now be tasked with taking down the remainder of the Nazi's regime that marches on in Europe. And because Blazkowicz has two daughters, another first for the series will be that the entire campaign is available in co-op. As if that weren't enough, Machine Games have also announced a further expansion, called Cyberpilot, designed specifically as a VR experience.
Halo: Infinite returns to the ring
The new trailer for Halo: Infinite walks the line perfectly between intriguing new ideas, fan service, and all out mystery. It certainly looks the part too, with a graphical fidelity that has led some to speculate that this installment could even be the launch title for the next generation of Xbox. 343i is using this trailer to demonstrate their new Slipspace game engine, after all.
Either way, Master Chief looks like he's on the way to receiving the game he's always deserved. A beautiful and active new environment, a return to the literal Halo rings of the title, and the subtle callbacks to Halos of old — and even Halos that never existed. The stampeding wildlife, for example, hasn't been seen since the first ever Halo demo, which was so long ago it was on an Apple Mac. And then there's the symbolism: there are more circles in this two-minute trailer than there are in an entire book of color blindness tests. It could be picked apart for days.
343 Industries has made some very good Halo games previously, but they have yet to make a great one. Halo: Infinite feels like they might be about to hit their stride and create something truly remarkable.