Is there any shooter that meets those criteria?
- Enemies are just soldiers/rebels/gang members/humans?
- Somewhat longer TTK
- Ideally some deep gunplay like Planetside 2 (recoil patterns, bullet travel, CoF, etc)
- Ideally some rng or replay value (roguelite, random encounters, etc.)
- Not online only
I just want to launch a game and fight after work, master guns and ideally unlock shit if that’s not asking for too much. I used to get that in Planetside 2, but in my timezone, it’s not an option and I’m offline a lot. Closest I found is:
- F.E.A.R. (replayed the story over and over, but the guns feel pretty bad compared to modern games)
- Robocop (LOVE the gunplay and locational damage, but the downtime is killing me at this point)
- Brink (best example I guess…)
- Blacklight Retribution against bots
- Some CoD games like BO2
- Maximum Action
- Shadow Warrior 2 (some maps have a handful of humans but it’s mainly monsters)
- RoboQuest (my main squeeze atm, but it’s robots without blood)
- Rico
- RS Siege Terrorist Hunt
- Payday 2 (IF it was possible to have longer ttk and much fewer cops)
- CS & Insurgency with bots (but low ttk is kind of boring to me)
Thanks!
I’m going to suggest a funny little game I’ve recently been completely obsessed with; HOLE. I don’t really know how to explain it. It’s a PvE only “extraction-lite” shooter. You drop into a procedurally generated map and kill your way through waves of dudes in suits. As the waves drag on, they’ll start showing up in body armor with better guns. You have to find your exfil point and charge it before leaving, kind of like Risk of Rain. Protip if you do end up trying this game out, you can pre-charge the exfil as soon as you find it, then leave it and keep going on the level. Just don’t get lost.
The loot you’re looking for is mostly currency; this comes in the form of dollars and data. You can use these to purchase upgrades for your base, and eventually your weapons. If you go “MIA” (get perforated by a Red Boss’s flechette slinging shotgun or cut to ribbons by the Blueberry), you lose 90% of these currencies. Some special things must be successfully extracted. Some things (namely weapon/upgrade blueprints) are permanently collected once you pick them up, even if you don’t make it out. I feel like they pulled a nice balance between creating a challenging experience but not making it frustrating.
Some things are “soft”; ammo is infinite, bullets are hitscan. There are “crunchy” bits, too. Your gun will occasionally jam. Your barrel will heat up, and getting it too hot will cause more malfunctions. The malfunction will always be an FTE/stovepipe, and you clear it by racking the slide or pulling the bolt. These malfunctions are less for realism, and more for inducing stress, but it’s a nice touch along with the backrooms-esque spooky vibes. The reports of the guns actually sound really spot on. Suppressors sound correct, and there’s even subsonic ammo to make them even better.
I think what this game really works on is the vibes. This game instills a very specific kind of stress no other shooter I’ve played does. It’s SUPERHOT without the gimmick. It’s John Wick the game. It’s SCP Mobile Task Force simulator. It’s quiet and spooky, then loud and angry, and back again. It’s listening for footsteps and voices, creeping up behind them, and getting away scot-free. Or maybe turning around and being face to face with a Yellow Elite in body armor and a juggernaut helmet. It’s mentally screaming “where the hell is the exfil??” at yourself while the chatter of gunfire closes in on you desperately trying to get a fresh mag in and clear the jam before they’re on you.
All in all, I seriously recommend it. It’s $5, and I’ve gotten 10x my money’s worth out of it.
Battlefield 2 perhaps? It has bots, which are admittedly not great, and a somewhat active online community as well
Soldier of Fortune 2: Double Helix
A first-person Red Dead Redemption 2 playthrough, some fun gun progression and random encounters
Gonna lob The Forever Winter in, even if it is still in early access. In a future where AI are stuck conducting a war after the national leaders are long gone, directing human and cyborg (human-adjacent?) soldiers to control locations.
Gameplay is an extraction shooter that can be solo or co-op, and what load out you choose will dictate how the NPCs react to your presence.
I think bullet drop, bullet travel, and recoil patterns are a thing, but I’m usually just trying to not be stepped on by a mech or spotted by Mother Courage 😫
I know it’s not what you asked for but i think you would enjoy the doom games, specifically eternal but 2016 is also great.
It has great campaign, great music, arguably the best combat system in a shooter game, it’s highly replayable, 20€ with all the dlcs when on sale and when played on higher difficulties it becomes extremly technical.
It also has a multiplayer mode but i don’t know too much about it
Oh, don’t worry, I think 2016 and DE are the best boomer shooters ever made, and play most other shooters to their music (I’ve been a fan of djent since Chaosphere).
I’ve been a fan of djent since Chaosphere
Wasn’t expecting to see this here, but same! I got into Meshuggah shortly after Chaosphere came out, and they’re my favorite band of all time over 25 years later.
Not human NPCs but Hunt Showdown 1896 has the best gunplay in any shooter I’ve ever played, not even close.
Oh yeah? Interesting!
That’s PvPvE only right, or is there offline PvE for loners too?
nah unfortunately but i still recommend, game is a rush
The finals is great.
They have a bot mode
You don’t say! Online only tho right?
Yeah, seems like the bot part if only in a practice arena for now. Rest of the game is online PvP
But it’s very fun
If you like r6 siege’s terrorist hunt, perhaps you will like Ready or Not.
Or you can look for older games like SWAT 4 on gog.com.
I’ll second the recommendation for Far Cry, particularly 3 and 4. Also, have you played Crysis? Later in the game it will move away from human enemies, but most of the game ought to be what you’re looking for, and it’s genuinely one of the best FPS campaigns ever.
Far Cry 5 meets the criteria too, and focuses on the strengths of mostly having the open world activities be the way you move the story forward rather than the dumbass missions these games always have for no reason.
It’s been a hot minute, but what I really liked about Far Cry 3 and 4 was that if you wanted a certain upgrade, you set your own goal as a player for a certain type of mission, and I really enjoyed that. I remember seeing in the marketing for FC5 that they changed that, and it killed my interest. I’m not sure what there is to take issue with story missions moving the story forward.
The grand arch-sin of Ubisoft games is that they miss their own point almost entirely and are afraid to be fun.
The simple thing is that most of the game should be the most fun bit of the game.
E.g. if an FPS with good gunplay as a central element has 51% of game time spent in hacking mini games, that’s probably gonna get pretty irritating, right?
In the case of Far Cry 3-5: most fun bit is the outposts. Therefore most of the game should just be approaching, assaulting and solving various outpost combat sandboxes of increasing complexity.
Blood Dragon still has the best scope and scale in that respect, the whole design around a basic linear mission structure feels like it’s out of sync with the fact the fun is elsewhere, so you just end up in a situation like you already having liberated every single outpost, but technically you’re in the beginning of the game at like mission 2, it just doesn’t gel together.
Far Cry 5 has planes and helicopters and outpost-esque or adjacent activities and it’s the only game in the series where it’s those that actually move the story forward.
It’s the same shit with assassin’s creed. The most fun bit is y’know, stabbing people with the thing in historical settings. So it should be most of the game. Instead most of the game is anything and everything but that.
Heck, watch dogs legion even severely limited the amount and variety of hacking in the game when that’s like the whole thing and what made the second game in the series shine.
As for the upgrade and crafting systems I would honestly toss the whole thing out, RPG mechanics don’t belong in action games. A shop at most with all guns and everything unlocked at the start and money made through open world activities would fit Far Cry just right.
I liked the story missions for being one-off unique challenges and set pieces. I liked the outposts a lot, so I did as many of them as I wanted to, which may or may not have been all of them. As far as rising and falling action goes, I didn’t see outposts as a great way to support that, so it made plenty of sense to me to structure the game the way they did. That said, I didn’t play FC5, so OP can feel free to check that one out on your recommendation as well.
I’d recommend checking out the Far Cry games, from Far Cry 2 onwards.
Also, while not necessarily exactly the thing you’re looking for, the Sniper Ghost Warrior series offers a lot of good stuff. especially SGW3 and later are really fun and have pretty decent gunplay and the games can be played pretty nicely without focusing on the sniper aspect.
And if you feel like doing even more snipering, Sniper Elite gives you some NICE slow-mo X-ray closeups of your bullets destroying your enemies, but the gunplay besides Snipers isn’t that fun.
I think you might enjoy Trepang2. It is heavily inspired by the combat in F.E.A.R., has unlockables and arena modes for some replayability. There is a demo and a sale on GOG.
Somehow I’d forgotten about Trepang2, thanks for the reminder! I might wait for an even deeper sale due to the length of my backlog but definitely wishlisted.
I have it, but for some reason, it does not do it for me. If I play it the way they want, it’s like Selaco or Titanfall, or borderline Quake, but when going at it with a pistol and being a bit slower, the survival mod feels more like a horde shooter than anything FEAR.
I give it a shot one in a while, but I’m sad to say it does not scratch my itch. It’s a me problem here. On paper tho, it’s indeed a very good recommendation!
Re-re-reinstalling it ;)
Fair, maybe this time it’ll stick.
I don’t see Soldier of Fortune mentioned, so this is my pick. Yes, it’s old, but back in the day it had the best gun play I saw. Haven’t played it in over decade, but it can’t be that bad, can it?
I’ve replayed recently. It’s still fun 😊 But I have to admit, it’s best on a CRT monitor. Don’t try to modernise the experience.
I would say Division 2 But that is online only, stupid Ubisoft.
Another option would be Escape from Tarkov while using the Fika PvE mod.Purchasing Escape from Tarkov directly supports Russia’s war in Ukraine
I never said to buy it. There are alternative means of acquisition.
Tarkov now comes with PvE mode. But if you don’t feel like paying extra there’s SPT (single player Tarkov) with a wide range of mods. Fika is now used only to turn SPT into coop Tarkov (and Fika isn’t officially supported by SPT devs).
Is the inbuilt pve any good? Last I played it was only scavs and you didn’t keep what you found.
I think you played the “offline” mode which doesn’t keep any progress. That is not the PvE mode. I haven’t played official PvE because I’ve jumped to Linux and the anticheat kinda kills the possibility of playing EFT. In PvE most maps are run locally so I could play most of the game in PVE but Streets of Tarkov still boots up a BSG server and I imagine anticheat kicks you out of the server which means I can’t play all of Tarkov. Also PvE cost extra money and I see no reason to pay when SPT is arguably the better PVE experience.
That said I’ve heard good stuff about the official PvE. For many people it’s the de facto way to play Tarkov because no cheaters. But I swear by SPT because SPT mods let you customize Tarkov to your liking. Don’t like the AI? There’s SAIN to replace the AI logic. Want more realistic night vision? There’s a mod for that. Don’t like how some of the weapon sights are fucked up by BSG? There’s a mod to fix sights. Want to turn Tarkov into a rogue-lite? There’s a mod for that. Don’t like getting lucky with keys? There’s mod that puts more keys in traders or a mod that let’s you shoot locks on locked door. Don’t like having to nudge your character into weird positions just to get the crosshair in the right position to loot something? There’s a mod for that. If there’s anything you want Tarkov to be it’s very likely there’s a SPT mod for it.
Sniper: Elite? The first 4 games go on sale on steam fairly regularly. I played the 5th one with GamePass and I actually really liked that one. The levels are huge and can take you anywhere from thirty minutes to a few hours, however you want to play.
In the 5th one, there are also settings to make it ultra-realistic. I haven’t played with those, but I’ve seen gameplay and it’s almost like a different game.
