![]() It is not the kind of game that any triple-A publisher would ever greenlight (especially not in 2022, when games can take half a decade to develop). While mainstream shooters have to be big and crowd-pleasing, indie FPS games can take aim at more niche markets.Ĭruelty Squad, for example, is one of the most abrasive games I’ve ever played, a toxic waste-colored fever dream where your character can eat the corpses of your enemies for health and swing from the ceiling on a length of intestine. Both are excellent and inventive games, and they point to the strengths which the indie space has cultivated in the shadows of triple-A behemoths. Umurangi Generation, similarly, swaps out a gun for a camera, and has you snap pictures in a dystopian future. 1 is a wonderful adventure game that uses the mechanics of a first-person shooter to have your character shoot pictures with a camera, fling toppings on a pizza, and more. Those last two games aren’t shooters, but actually points to the larger point I want to make. Even Halo Infinite, which includes both modes, split them up at launch, offering the multiplayer early and free, while charging $60 for the campaign. ![]() Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Warzone, and Valorant are all free and massively successful, which means that there’s less incentive for triple-A developers to split their resources working on both multiplayer and single player components for a singular release. ![]() That’s the path that most big shooters are taking now, multiplayer-only and, typically, free-to-play. Battlefield 2042 was a mess on the multiplayer side, and didn’t include a single-player campaign at all. Call of Duty has put out a series of meh campaigns - for my money, the last great one was WWII in 2017 - and I’m already tired just thinking about the series’ reported upcoming foray into the Iraq War. But when I think of the biggest shooter franchises, I just feel bored. Half-Life: Alyx was great, and Doom Eternal, Halo Infinite, and Deathloop were all pretty good. In the past couple years, we’ve seen a few good shooters from triple-A developers. The publisher made a name for itself in 2018, with the ridiculously fast Dusk, and has continued to put out retro shooters since, with Amid Evil and Ultrakill. Gloomwood emerged from New Blood Interactive’s stable of throwback FPSes, and looks like it could have been released in 1999. Neon White looks great, but its world is (intentionally) minimally textured its shining marble and glassy oceans suggest that its Heaven is entirely composed of surfaces you should traverse in slippy stockinged feet, Risky Business-style. While they look and play very differently, both games prioritize gameplay over graphical fidelity. ![]()
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