boomer shooter recommends:
Ion Fury (60%) +
Aftershock (35%) - basically the Duke Nukem 4 we never got. actually made on the original Build Engine (with some modifications). best one-liners in the genre. THIS MAN HAS NO DICK!
Prodeus (40%) - really punchy shooter with some platforming mixed in. great combat and secret hunting.
Selaco (35%) - actually the best shooter you can buy right now, I will never stop shilling for this game. a FEAR-style tactical shooter with advanced enemy AI, built in GZDoom. masterclass level design, fantastic combat, great soundtrack. despite being early access, the one chapter that's available already represents around 15 hours of gameplay and feels like a complete game by itself. chapter 2 is launching in a couple of months - which will more than double the amount of content in the game - along with a revamp of the existing content. buy it now, bitch.
AMID EVIL (65%) +
The Black Labyrinth (50%) - sort of like Heretic/HeXen by way of Quake. has a Quake-style hub world with portals to each world, which can be done in any order. every world has a totally different look/feel along with a unique roster of enemies. really great visual design, tons of content, just tons of fun all around.
DUSK (66%) - David Szymanski's classic, plays like a super trippy Quake mod with a lot of fun ideas.
INCISION (40%) - the meat shooter. a little hard to describe, doesn't immediately stand out in any particular way, but I found it to be greater than the sum of its parts, especially in its map design.
Supplice (40%) - very traditional but masterfully made GZDoom game. the devs are all giants in the Doom modding community (Mechadon, Pillowblaster, Esselfortium, Jimmy Paddock) and it shows. the weapons, enemies, and levels are all excellent. this is the closest you'll get to an actually professionally made Doom mod with a budget. currently in early access but is almost complete - 1.0 launches in September.
Shadow Warrior 2013 (90%) - a remake that actually understood the assignment. great sword combat, and great guns also. loops exploration and secret hunting into an upgrade system that gives you spells, special attacks, and new functionality for your guns. the story is also surprisingly good, IMO.
Shadow Warrior 2 (90%) - more of the first game, but it's co-op this time! also has lots of new weapons.
Serious Sam 3 (90%) - the peak of the Serious Sam series IMO. for $3 this is a no-brainer.
Turbo Overkill (70%) - spazzy cyberpunk shooter from the Total Chaos guy. its star feature is letting you gib enemies by powersliding through them. game journalists loved this game, you've probably heard about it already.
Overload (80%) - the only good Descent clone ever made. a zero-G shooter - what used to be referred to as 6DOF or "six degrees of freedom" - with excellent combat and level design. not having a consistent "up" really changes shooter combat more than you'd think.
remasters:
Return to Castle Wolfenstein (60%) +
RealRTCW (Free) - RealRTCW is an excellent fan-made remaster. RTCW still kicks ass, the mod makes it pop even harder. disable the Malta intermissions, they're kind of lame IMO. literally $2 for the definitive edition of one of the greatest shooters of the early 2000s.
Heretic + Hexen (33%) - Nightdive's excellent remaster of the classics. comes with new episodes for both games.
Quake (60%) and
Quake II (60%) - 'nuff said. Quake II comes with an excellent new campaign by the MachineGames guys.
Doom 3 (60%) +
dhewm3 (Free) +
D3HDP (Free) - yeah this one is cheating a bit. the BFG Edition sucks dick, play Doom 3 the way it was meant to be. D3HDP is a community-made revamp of all the game assets. use the
kickstart-my-hertz branch of dhewm3 for 120 FPS gameplay (the Doom 3 engine is hard locked to 60 FPS by default).
non-boomer shooter recommend:
Witchfire (20%) - I hate this comparison, but this is essentially a Souls FPS. and I don't mean it in the rote sense, where it just absently cribs a bunch of Souls game mechanics. it has that exact apocalypse dark fantasy feel, of an empty world where only monsters and angry spirits remain, which only reveals itself to you with effort. has a more extraction shooter type structure, where gameplay consists of deploying to a chosen zone, and you only get to keep whatever you pick up during that run if you make it back to base alive (although you can retrieve everything you dropped on your last death by revisiting the site). there are a lot of upgrades to grind through, but most of it does not feel incremental, especially the gun progression; every gun has unique gameplay-defining properties that build out in fun ways as you use them. it's still in early access, but they just released the final major update before 1.0; it's content-complete except for the story.
