You definitely own it to yourself to finish it! Now this comes down to personal opinion, but IMHO the campaign falls into the perfect "sweet spot" of length: ~6 hours.
The newer Wolfenstein games (new order and new colossus) are both great. Totally crazy alternate history plus you get to shoot nazis. I really hope they end up making a third one.
Really? I agree that Old Blood wasn’t as good as the main games but I definitely enjoyed it as an add-on to New Order. I suppose it does go a bit off the rails with the Zombie stuff lol
I have the New Order and Old Blood combo on GOG. I played a cracked version Colossus and got bored with it. I missed somethibg 4 or 6 levels back and got stuck, I couldn't continue on, so I gave up and quit playing.
It's hard to beat the classic Half Life 2.
While it's outshined by a lot of more modern FPS games, it's still one of the most beautiful and fleshed out videogames in history.
Dishonored, all parts. It's just a great story, well written characters and absolutely fun to play. One of the very few games I never felt bored, annoyed or frustrated of.
I enjoyed Dishonored so much I went for the clean hands achievement to make myself feel like a real stealth professional. Second one I went all chaos. The abilities are so fun to chain together in the game.
One of my favorite game series is the Crysis series. I absolutely love the story, the music, and the visuals. It scores super high on the sci-fi list for me. Crysis 3 is my favorite one of the bunch. I'm still eagerly waiting for any further news on Crysis 4.
Gotta be Cyberpunk 2077 right now, for me at least. The stories are engaging, the choices you make will actually affect the game, there's so much combat variation that you can replay the game a million times and have a different style every single time, and to top it all off the eye candy is the best I've seen in any game so far.
Why do I only see people talking about the graphics but either never mention gameplay or say it's too mundane or dull and not worth the hours to get through it?
I see it a lot used as a benchmark but no or very little mention of replay value.
Personally, I adored the gameplay. I put maybe 60 hours in and still had the energy to start a second playthrough (though never got far in it). That's rare for me with such long games. Usually by the time I finish the game, I'm like "yup, I've had enough". The story is fantastic and the gameplay is super open. Can go in guns a blazing (with all sorts of weapons, including "smart guns" with target seeking bullets), be stealthy, slow time and get up close and personal, keep your distance and use hacks that can even spread from enemy to enemy, and more. The romantic interests are great and also feel realistic. The plot is dark and doesn't shy away from what I envision a dystopian sci-fi reality being like.
And yeah, it is a beautiful world, too. I found it highly immersive because of that.
It's not perfect. Civilian, police, and driving AI is by far its weakest point. The world feels vibrant and interesting, but don't expect much from civilian interactions, drivers are basically on rails, and police teleport to you. But those issues were fairly minor to me. I'd give it a 9/10. Obligatory mention that I played on PC. I've heard older consoles were buggy, but I didn't see much for bugs on PC.
(Typing this up made me wanna play it again, but I gotta wait for the DLC.)
Halflife was revolutionary when it was released. I've recently been playing through Black Mesa, which is a remake in the Source engine, with some parts changed or extended, and it;s absolutely excellent
Before that, Doom and Doom][ were the best FPSs. The 2016 remake does somehow manage to recapture some of the magic but the originals will always hold a special place in my heard
I agree on Doom and Doom 2. Sheer fun! I will say though that Doom 2016 didn't capture the original magic for me personally - it just felt too... formulaic?
Doom 2016 is certainly not the same, but it does keep the same feeling of fast and frenetic hyperviolence that you need to be right in the middle of, with minimal reliance on plot
I tried one of the Half Life games for about an hour, and the sci-fi aspect killed my interest with different creatures. I didn't care about what happened in the story.
I played a good amount of Doom reboot but I never finished it. It's a decent game. I can't get into being on Mars fighting random creatures, but that's only my thing, I don't have any criticisms. I heard the second one is excellent but I have not bothered with it.
Because it’s progression system/locks is about what you know (you, the flesh and blood person playing it) it’s really hard to explain why it’s so good without spoiling some aspect of the game
Outer Wilds is indeed a masterpiece. It's not really what I would call a "shooter", though, so it might not be what OP's after, it's more like Myst and so on. But it is absolutely excellent.
Receiver and Receiver 2 are both wonderfully strange first person shooters. They're slower paced games, with more tactics and running away than most fps games.
My main gaming computer died before Receiver 2 came out, but I still play the hell out of the first game. (on minimum settings...) It mostly plays like a first person shooter, but you start with a random gun, and then have to load and reload it with various button presses.
The limited ammo and somewhat deadly enemies turn it into more of a stealth game with massive skill requirements for shooting accuracy.
The world is empty except for turrets and flying gun drones, which somehow makes it rather creepy.
Overall, it's a great game, and I wish I had the time and money to rebuild my main rig so that I could play the sequel.
I'm assuming you're looking for emphasis on shooters, so I'm excluding games like Fallout, which are heavily RPG.
All the Metro games are fantastic. Not too long, interesting setting, and fun gameplay.
Far Cry is probably my favourite, specifically Far Cry 5 but really all except the first one (New Dawn is super RPGy and 6 is a fair bit, too). Some of its games get a bit more RPG heavy, but 5 and earlier are more heavily shooters in open world sandboxes. Despite that, some of them have really great character driven stories. The villains are always the highlight in this series.
I think my favourite fps campaign is Modern Warfare 2 (2009). I also liked the campaign in the other Call of Duty games (at least the games that came before Ghost, Ghost was the last game played)
Doom Eternal is one of the best I have ever played. Outer Worlds is great if you are a Fallout style game fan, and Destiny 2 kept me occupied for hours.
For single player campaigns, what comes to mind immediately are the classic CoD Modern Warfare 1 and 2 campaigns. Maybe 3 as well if you want to finish the story, but it was weaker than the other two. I've played the campaign of the new MW 2019 but while it was cool, I don't feel like it was much to write home about and I barely remember the characters now.
Other than that, I MUST recommend the STALKER games, Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat are masterpieces of slav jank, and super iconic for a reason. Immerse yourself in the depressive atmosphere of a hostile and dying Zone, where everything is trying to kill you. The many mods and standalone games based on them are also amazing, shoutouts to Anomaly. And the sequel should be coming out soon.
Other than that... My favorite single player FPS experiences are boomer shootets, of which there are many. The classics Doom and Quake, and their modern versions, are all great. Blood, Dusk, Hexen, Amid Evil, Ultrakill, Prodeus, Boltgun. So many good games.
Metal Hdllsinger has a very good concent. I prefer a different style of metal, the game seems to favour commercial metal, the bigger names. It sounds like a lot of metalcore, hardcore, and melodic works.
I played through Prey again recently and it holds up incredibly well. It's like a more polished Dishonored imo. Your story choices had more impact, the abilities feel smoother, and lots of really funny moments and character interactions.
Easy to forget as it's difficult to get it in... prime condition for PC, but Metroid: Prime is my favorite.
Starts off like any game should - cool dramatic overview of your character and then immediate control. Shooting got better on the wii and enhanced to perfection with PC mods!
In a weird way, it's like a more chill Doom.
... Morph ball doesn't count as third-person, does it? :)
I am hugely into the 2D Metroid games and bought the new Metroid Prime remake on switch and I just could not get into it.
I played it for about half an hour and then died, and there were no save points along the way anywhere, so I'm forced to restart a game I didn't enjoy from scratch knowing I need to last even longer than that in my next playthrough before I can just save the game.
I really want to like it but my god this game is asking a lot
That's a shame. What do you think you're struggling with in Prime? Do you play a lot of FPS games?
I recognize that losing 30 minutes of progress is frustrating, but generally when the game is exciting it drags you back in regardless so I'm curious what was missing from your perspective to give it that spark especially as a Metroid fan.
Prodeus is such a trip, I think the first playthrough of that map where you navigate down with a boss behind glass and into the arena full of blue imps was absolute boomer shooter nirvana
Just started playing Trepang2 and so far it's really cool. It's a retro game, but aiming at the early 2000's games like FEAR instead of old raycasting games. It's a lot of fun so far, though i've only finished the first "real" mission, plus a side mission.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1164940/?snr=1_5_9__205
S.T.A.L.K.E.R Anamoly is free and a great single player fps with a great vibe to it. Doesn't quite fit your criteria though as I wouldn't say there is much of a campaign. Very interesting dynamic world and AI system though.
Edit. Highly recommend the GAMMA version. Get installation files @ their discord.
I probably wouldn't think so if I tried to go back and play them now, but going by my memories, Half Life 2 and Deus Ex. More for the epic stories than the gameplay tho.