And what specifically makes it special, appealing, or interesting to you?
any arena shooter in the style of Quake, Halo, or Unreal Tournament. It’s a shame they aren’t more popular
Huh, I was under the impression there was a bit of a “boomer shooter” renaissance going on the last few years. I know I’ve seen a bunch of games that were trying to emulate the feel and sometimes even the look of that style of FPS.
The definitions of arena shooters and boomer shooters are both pretty fuzzy and have a lot of overlap.
For example, I consider Duke Nukem 3D’s multiplayer to be a great arena shooter, however when many people talk about arena shooters what they mean are early 2000s style shooters that are fully 3D rather than sprite based. Halo CE was “the” arena shooter when it came out.
It is a genre that really hasn’t made a comeback. Some people say things like Overwatch are arena shooters, but for the kinds of people wanting old fashioned shooters a big element is that all players start with the same weapons and abilities by default. It’s the imperfection of language trying to articulate a feeling.
Really? I must be out of the loop then 😂
Some notable games in the “boomer shooter” genre:
- Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal
- Warhammer 40.000 Boltgun
- Games by New Blood Interactive:
- Amid Evil
- DUSK
- Ultrakill
- Gloomwood
- Cultic
- Ion Fury
- Prodeus
- Dread Templar
- Hrot
Oh, OK! I should have been more specific that I was talking about multiplayer games like what I mentioned, my bad! I knew about some of those games. The Doom Reboot and that Warhammer Boltgun are both sick, I’ve enjoyed both of them. I’ll be looking into the others thanks!
for multiplayer I liked Splitgate a lot, but the devs seem to have mostly abandoned it right when it came out of beta.
How does the Halo Infinite arena multiplayer differ from the original Halo? I never got to play the multiplayer modes in these older shooters.
Is it that the older shooters had faster movement or simpler controls (easy to pick up, hard to master)? More like a Painkiller style of shooting? Or is that impression I have of older shooters totally off base?
Painkiller was definitely designed after the first Quake. As in, people who were playing Q1 for close to a decade because nothing else came close, loved Painkiller. If you were someone who just wanted to try out multi… Lol good luck, you lvl1 villager against lvl998 bosses.
I didn’t play much of the original three Halo games, I picked the series up when Reach came out, but yea movement and controls were simpler, there was no sprint or the special abilities they added in reach and afterwards like the jet pack and place down shield barriers. It was just you and your weapon against the other dude and their weapon.
If memory serves the original halos actually felt slower in terms of movement and time to kill than the modern ones.
Unreal was from what I remember is similar to painkiller. Imagine halo but jumping in slightly low gravity and you are always spirting.
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
It was a kinda janky 3D Action Adventure from around 2000. Back then it had really beautiful and colorful graphics. I remember playing it on my first “real” PC and being amazed by how it looked.
It also stands out to me for being actually funny and comitting to being a comedy game.
I loved this game! The humour was my favourite part - very dry and very British. A fun shooter with a lot of variety. Amazing soundtrack by Jeremy Soule. I found the game very difficult, though - I doubt I ever got close to finishing it. How about you?
You two + the screenshots on the steam page I just looked up have sold me on this. It looks, at the very least, interesting and different, which is sometimes all I want really. I’ll give it a shot.
There’s also a spiritual successor made by the same people (more or less), Armed & Dangerous.
Good luck. Let us know if it still holds up today.
When I first played it I didn’t get very far into it. But I came back to it a few years later and finished it. The Multiplayer was also suprisingly fun on LAN-parties.
Nobody can hate that game. Damn that was gold. I believe it’s well beloved, tho not widely remembered
Nobody ever says this but Halo Infinite isn’t that bad if you ignore the battlepass
It’s unfortunate that the game is designed with like 50 layers of battle pass reminder nags. And that it aggressively hated you picking only the modes you really wantes to played; becauae man, yeah, I had a lot of fun with it.
Watch_Dogs was my first platinum on PS3. Everyone was shitting all over the game due to the PC port controversy, but I really enjoyed it. Huge city, different environment, actually good on-foot movement unlike in GTA games, and toooooooons of side stuff to do.
And oh dear, all the hacking stuff was such fun. Yes it was all just one button, but everything was well implemented. The amount of personal details you could pull from phones was amazing. I kept doing it all the time and it wasn’t until near the end of the game that they started repeating.
And the trademark unique Ubisoft multiplayer. Shame it didn’t have full-blown online mode, I can see myself getting lost in it.
Yea great game. Didn’t deserve all the hate unrelated to its actual accomplishments.
The DLC… Bad Blood I think? Was even better.
I can’t emphasize enough how cool some of those VR side-missions were. Some would qualify as fun standalone indie games on their own.
I really liked Watch_Dogs. And it is the only game in which the invading player thingy clicked for me. No other game ever pulled that off again. (the new Sniper elite came close though, but it messed up the frequency of it)
Sadly the second game never clicked for me, so I didn’t tried Legions.
Ah yes, I absolutely loved Watch_Dogs! Glad I wasn’t the only one! :)
Watch dogs was really good (although I really didn’t click with the player character, he was so morose). I wanted to like the second one but I got stuck on a level and abandoned it.
I think Overwatch is the best game in it’s genre. Right now it is the most balanced has the most composition variety the game has seen since before Brigitte was added. Other games like Paladins or Gundam Evolution don’t even come close.
The scaling back of the planned PvE content was disheartening and incredibly frustrating, but it doesn’t change the fact that the game we have right now is really fun.
I actually really enjoyed playing Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex. Maybe I just first played it when I was too young to notice differences with it compared to the previous entries. Grew up loving it and didn’t learn how generally hated it was until a few years ago.
Salt and Sanctuary (more for it being unpopular vs bad hivemind).
I love Metroidvanias, but combined with Souls-like elements makes for a very fun concoction. This one in particular I have so much fun exploring. The story telling and world building adds to the mystery and the fun of unraveling the story. It has a very good variety of enemies/bosses/items. It also oozes so much atmosphere. One of the better Metroidvanias (I played a fair number of them).
Another one is Dark Souls 2. I get it being disliked; can’t be helped as it had a lot of departures from the first. But out of all 3, this one I played x3 as much. I absolutely love the sheer variety of locations (it’s ridiculous); exploration is super fun and rewarding.
Is Salt and Sanctuary not a popular game? It’s one of the better and well reviewed 2D souls-likes. Salt and Sacrifice did get dunked on for being Epic exclusive and worse than Salt and Sanctuary though.
I love Metroidvanias
Give Ender Lilies a try if you didn’t play it yet by the way. Really good Metroidvania and one of my favorites (besides the obvious ones like Hollow Knight and Ori).
It’s the impression I get, I rarely hear it discussed or people just haven’t heard of it when Hollow Knight comes up.
I actually gave Ender Lilies a shot. I have to admit it didn’t grab me for some reason. I don’t remember what problem I had with it exactly. BUT it does have a phenomenal soundtrack (Awakening, North).
Have you played Aquaria? I should’ve mentioned this one instead (slipped my mind) because it feels even more obscure than Salt and Sanctuary.
Have you played Aquaria?
Nope, but I do have it in my Steam library for some reason so I’m gonna check it out soon.
Completely agree on Dark Souls 2, I’ve played almost all of the Souls games, yet I keep finding myself coming back to Dark Souls 2, I’m not sure what it is about the game, because there are definitely things I don’t like about it (Mainly adaptability and hollowfication reducing your health) but it’s still easily my most replayed Souls game. I especially love the early game, where you have 4 different paths you can take from Majula, it lets me leave if I am struggling with an area and come back to it later after playing a different path for a while
I’ve been meaning to play salt and sanctuary for a while, but haven’t done it yet. I might pick that game up next time my bank account is a bit more full, because that sounds right up my alley
I also keep wanting to come back to DS2 for the long journey with so many cool locations.
Salt and Sanctuary really holds a special place for me. The atmosphere is absolutely top notch; we’re talking Hollow Knight levels in my opinion. The map design is also phenomenal along with tons of secrets and shortcuts. Not sure if the recent patch fixed it, but the combat is kinda unbalanced from what I recall. Heavy armor is more or less useless so you might as well go fashion-souls. And 2-handed strength weapons are king.
Idk where the DS2 hate came from, before DS3 released i remember DS2 being quite well regarded, i put in well over 300 or so hours just replaying the game over and over again trying to create OP builds and beating the game as fast as i could. while DS3 felt super polished with a really impressive map design, it just wasn’t as fun as DS2 for me.
I think most of the hate was from the initial release. At this point blatant hate is undeserved and it might be a meme at this point or a bandwagon to hop on where everyone knows “DS2 bad”.
Tacoma. Incredible game, barely has any gameplay, though, and is very short if you don’t actively look for side-content, which is the main focus of the game. It’s mostly storytelling through holographic logs of an abandoned station. Your goal is to salvage previous data in there and an abandoned AI, that your company needs to reclaim.
I enjoyed Tacoma very much. Fullbright always has such great writing, characters, and settings.
When I played Obra Din, I got vibes of Tacoma and I wish someone would take another shot at that style of game in space with the depth/mystery element of Obra Din.
Have you played Outer Wilds?
I played a bit of Outer Wilds but I got lost and then stopped paying for XGP. I should pick it up next time its on sale somewhere.
I never hear anyone talk about this, but one of my favourite games as a kid was Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. It has such a unique tone, and I thought it was the peak of videogame graphics back in the day. I’m not sure if it’s necessarily disliked, but I just never hear discussion about it.
I believe Jim Sterling is a fan of that
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is my favorite game:
- Best name.
- In development since the 90s, still looks like the 90s.
- Played hundreds of hours, still never finished it (cause I’m shit).
Not quite unpopular but titanfall 2. The movement is exquisite, the chaos that unfolds when titans start dropping is incredible. There is nothing quite like getting cornered by a titan as a pilot and desperately darting through buildings with your AT weapon trying to survive.
“Not quite unpopular” is an understatement, the problem with titanfall 2 is just that it didn’t sell that well, but whenever I see it mentioned it is always universally praised.
If we’re talking unpopular as in not very well known outside of its immediate community I gotta say Ultrakill. It’s a retro shooter distilled to its most essential parts with a style meter tied into it. It’s like ballet… with shotguns and exploding demons- so not a lot like ballet. But it’s good! Buy it!
BLOOD IS FUEL… FOR MY COCK
Oh my god I love ultrakill, its such a good timesink.
Love loved loved Battleborn. Nothing like it to my knowledge other than Gigantic which also died. The combo FPS / Moba was super fun. RIP Battleborn you died before you even took off.
The Guild 2 and 3. They are so janky and absurd. Half the mechanics barely work, the dialogue is ridiculous, but the game just has charm. It’s got just enough economy mechanics to keep my math brain engaged while mostly playing it like The Sims.
Charm sure can go a long way, I find. Arguably, a lot of my favorite games just have a lot of character, more than anything, to differentiate them from similar games.
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. The game was a commercial and critical bomb, but it’s the only cover shooter I’ve ever enjoyed. It’s just such an unrelentingly visceral, disorienting, harsh game, with one of the main aesthetic gimmicks being that it emulates the look and feel of a late 2000s amateur video. It’s hard to describe without seeing it in action, but it was audacious as shit for what was meant to be a big budget, AAA title.
