Furthermore, certain puzzle or platforming games are also sometimes categorized as first-person shooters, in spite of lacking any direct combat or shooting element, instead using a first-person perspective to help players immerse within the game and better navigate 3D environments (for example, in the case of Portal, the ‘gun’ the player character carries is used to create portals through walls rather than fire projectiles). Shattered dreams form the foundation of BioShock Infinite, the third installment in Irrational Games’ impressive saga exploring the devastating effects of isolation (and isolationism) on the human psyche. This Nazi murder sim is smarter than it sounds. You’ll shoot headcrab zombies, alien monsters, and human soldiers with an array of weapons, from a beefy shotgun to the prototype energy Gluon Gun, which melts enemies in seconds.
That’s not to say that Modern Warfare lacks cool features. You can play with a squad of friends and experience why this is one of the best multiplayer games around, but it’s always those nail-biting, stealthy solo moments that stick with me. But it’s the new additions that stand out. This is an all-time shooter masterpiece.
It is considered to be the first successful first-person shooter video game, making it a milestone for the genre. It is considered to be the first successful first-person shooter video game, making it a milestone for the genre. We’re tickled (Needler) pink Chief got the redemption act he deserves. While solo play only offers bog-standard zombie-slaying thrills, the action is oh-so elevated by a fantastic co-op mode that delivers equal measures of camaraderie and chaos.
It’s got all the familiar BF modes that we’ve grown to love, including Conquest, Rush, and Domination. Battlefield V encompasses all the hallmarks of a modern first-person shooter by including respectable singleplayer content (War Stories) and fresh takes on multiplayer gameplay (Grand Operations). No one expected Destiny 2 to be as good as it is. A first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through the eyes of the main character.
Multiplayer gaming has been an integral part of the experience, and became even more prominent with the diffusion of internet connectivity in recent years. It evolves, taking the seed of the first game’s MMOFPS idea and building a whole new, entirely richer, deeper, and broader experience around it. In the original Half-Life, the Xen locale was lifeless. Boot a dude in the balls, then kick his head off.
Cooler than Keanu in the original Matrix taking the ice bucket challenge, this effortlessly slick FPS is as much a puzzler as it is a shooter. On Bulletstorm’s surface, you’ll find a brash, knowing, don’t-give-a-fuck attitude, sitting on a layer of the most gloriously creative cursing you’ve ever heard in a video game. The guns are big, loud, and turn members of the Third Reich into bloody pulps, and the more bullets you pump out, the better. This means you won’t find games like Deathloop and Fallout 4 – which, while being excellent experiences in their own right, have the unfair advantage of incorporating action, adventure, and RPG systems to support their core mechanics.
Every round becomes a tactical, incredibly tense game of cat-and-mouse, as one team protects an objective while their opponents try to scout out danger and survive a breach. And yes, you can technically play PUBG in third-person – but good luck getting that chicken dinner if you’re not shooting in first-person. Though the Battlefield series has marched on since this entry, post-launch updates turned Battlefield 1 into something of a late bloomer after launch, to the point where it’s arguably now better than it’s ever been. Most impressive of all is the narrative.
There’s nothing like the tension that sits at the beginning of each round, as both teams secretly select their tactics and wait for them to collide with their opponents’ own gambit. Thankfully, you have an armory of inventive, upgradable weapons to keep you safe, from crossbows to revolvers. Here, Counter-Strike’s emphasis on paying attention to sounds and communicating with your allies shines. Never has a game so intelligent tried so hard to look like an idiot, or been so screamingly funny with it.
Wedding familiar gameplay elements from the preceding titles with exciting new mechanics, an engrossing story, and stunning visual design, BioShock Infinite is the culmination of the series’ aesthetic and its promise to turn a mirror on humanity by probing as deeply into the self as possible. That’s the elevator pitch for Superhot, a cerebral FPS from an independent studio out of Poland, and it’s a perfect distillation of what makes Superhot so intoxicating. If you haven’t played it since the early wave of enthusiasm, it’s time to return. And all it took was half a dozen entries.
It may be old enough to drive and gamble a young Gordon’s student loan fees under a bus, yet despite its age, Half-Life 2 still has a touch of G. With Borderlands 2, developer Gearbox Entertainment and publisher 2K Games return to the comedy-filled warzone. It’s far bigger and feels like a completely different game. The two maps are bright and varied, with plenty of ways to help you take the high ground, and Respawn is constantly tweaking the formula with new weapons and heroes.
Sadly, we’ll probably never see such a brash, bright or commendably crude FPS like this again. But that is only the start. New additions like the Supremo Backpacks open up creative new avenues for both sneaky and explosive chaos, further enlivening Far Cry’s already intoxicating power fantasy. The genre is broad enough that almost any game where you point a gun and shoot it becomes a contender, and that makes finding what you want to play tricky.
If you played the original Borderlands, you understand how this first-person shooter operates. It was centered on online gaming and featured multiple match types still found in first-person shooter games today. It was centered on online gaming and featured multiple match types still found in first-person shooter games today. Here, it’s bursting with color, and every craggy rock and bizarre clump of plants is rebuilt from scratch.
We’ve focused on spotlighting titles that put gunplay first and foremost. Yet look past the dinky dachshund sidekicks named after a Spanish sausage and the typically assured, if samey, stealth, and you’ll find an FPS that feels like a much-needed turning point for Far Cry. Back on the train, you’ll get to know the endearing cast, who will make you genuinely care about protagonist Artyom’s fate. Beefy weapons turn enemies into a fine red mist, and you zoom through levels as if on roller skates, only pausing to line up the perfect shot.
If you want to mix things up from Battlefield 2042 or simply didn’t gel with EA’s modern shooter, this is the perfect recommendation for anyone who wants a historical shooter with a little more texture than your usual Call of Duty match. Not only is it one of the best VR games on the market, but the shooting controls make you feel like you are the star of your own action movie. The ability to dual-wield any two weapons also makes New Colossus feel different from other old-school shooters. Blast aliens, bots, and big bugs with your favorite hand cannon in these thrilling first- and third-person shooters.
All the first-person shooter games here are free to play in your web browser, with no download required. This is everything that the genre is about, distilled into one glorious roar. Even so, that leaves plenty for us to cover below – which means that if you’re ready to find your next favorite FPS, in 2025 read on. New to the game is a rewards-based morality system that ranks your ability to properly discern innocent people from legitimate threats in the singleplayer campaign.
Atari’s first-person tank shooter arcade video game Battlezone (1980), modeled closely after PLATO Panther, was released for arcades and presented using a vector graphics display, with the game designed by Ed Rotberg. It’s also a remarkably elegant experience in motion, especially for a game that makes you garrote a demon every 17 seconds. Every gun feels perfectly tuned, each level impeccably paced, while every monster dragged screaming from the depths of Hell has clearly been designed to coax just the right measure of aggression out of the Doom Slayer. Like Mario 64 or Mirror’s Edge, Eternal feels flawless when you tap into its joyous rhythm.
Whether experiencing the best second level in all of the shooters in the original Combat Evolved or blasting buddies in PvP on Halo 3’s all-time classic Guardian map at a blistering 120 frames per second on an Xbox Series X, Halo has rarely felt more essential. With an impactful arsenal that matches the Master Chief’s armory at its best, Splitgate’s frenzied free-to-player multiplayer mayhem always feels satisfying. Amazingly, it’s brilliant on pretty much every modern platform, too. Each map is meticulously crafted to allow for myriad tactics, and the lovingly modelled guns in your expansive arsenal all have minutiae in their firing rates and recoil.
First-person shooters typically present players with a vast arsenal of weapons, which can have a large impact on how they will approach the game. Imagine if a new Tony Hawk’s game served up tricks but replaced every Ollie and kickflip with increasingly gruesome ways of mangling mutants, and you’re pretty much there. If Battlefield and Call of Duty have turned you off from shooters, Vanquish’s unique power-armor take on the genre may be the title to make you strap on your in-game guns. If you’re looking for pure action, Exodus’s careful pace might turn you off, but the cross-country travel gives you a constant sense of progress.
When it comes to sandbox shooters, few do madcap spectacle better than this FPS. Featuring colorful levels, multiple game modes and team-based synergy, and lore-drenched characters with vastly different play styles, Overwatch 2 is a thoroughly enjoyable first-person shooter that’s filled with cheer and mechanical variety. Bullet Force and Krunker are two free online FPS games that provide classic, fast-paced and competitive gameplay. You get to know more about the series’ broken hero, BJ Blazkowicz, than ever before through an origin story that’s not afraid to get dark, and a talented cast somehow manages to pull off a tale that pirouettes between the serious and the absurd.
Although custom servers allow for more casual experiences, the real draw of CS2 is its Terrorists vs. Whether you played it on a cutting-edge rig on a debuting Steam in 2004 or first sampled its City 17 delights courtesy of Valve’s brilliant Orange Box bundle, the core of Half-Life 2’s greatness remains unblemished. On the biggest maps, you might go long stretches without seeing another player, and it’s that pacing and the lethality of the realistic bullet physics that set PUBG apart from the crowd. But even if you loved the original BioShock (200 and its sequel, BioShock 2 (20 , this chapter won’t leave you with the impression your dreams have been betrayed.
A shooter that’s truly driven by its story. It’s a true test of time game. Exodus is built from the same DNA, but finds a new level of polish and ambition. Like the best old-school shooters, it’s simply bloody good fun.
It’s topped off by a metal soundtrack that refuses to let you quit. The Metro series is known for blending stealth and shooting in oppressive environments filled with ravenous mutants that want to rip your throat out. Shell Shockers is one of those games, with great maps and eggy characters that pop open and spill their yolk when you kill them. And all that slow-mo obviously helps, too.
Everything you love about Half-Life remains. Instantly making the first game look like a set of prototypes, this title improves in every area. Launch some men into orbit with an alt-fire rocket, then pick them out of the sky like they were clay pigeons. But this game adds the formidable Operations mode that takes the push and pull of war to new heights.
Since the genre’s inception, advanced 3D and pseudo-3D graphics have proven fundamental to allow a reasonable level of immersion in the game world, and this type of game helped pushing technology progressively further, challenging hardware developers worldwide to introduce numerous innovations in the field of graphics processing units. Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more A modern take on Valve’s classic Left 4 Dead, Back 4 Blood remains popular with players who want more customization between levels. In fact, the game works so well as a multiplayer shooter because of how finely it’s balanced – there’s no class, weapon, or tactic that gives an unfair advantage over others. If you haven’t played before, we’d recommend checking Half-Life 2 out to see why it was all the rage in its heyday.
Time only moves when you move. First-person shooters may be structurally composed of levels, or use the technique of a continuous narrative in which the game never leaves the first-person perspective. You conduct missions alone, and venturing from the safety of your party is nerve-wracking. This game sticks with you, and it’s hard to see this shooter going anywhere for a long time.
Whether you’re playing on an OG Xbox One, ripping Cacodemon eyes out at 120 frames per second on a cutting-edge PC, or yanking spines on the impressively assured Switch port, Doom Eternal kicks ass whatever your choice of format. You and your squadmates choose from a variety of highly skilled Operators, each with their own specialities that can complement each other for a rock-solid team comp, though your propensity for sneaking and aiming a gun are what matter most. Exquisitely designed with movement in mind, Vanquish’s kinetic, jet-powered action adds visual flair (now remastered in 4K) and a wonderful sense of movement as you wreck mechs, vehicles, enemy troops, and super-powered bosses in a near-future setting. The genius of Bulletstorm lies in its Skillshots.
Beneath, you’ll find one of the densest, most detailed, widest-branching FPS systems ever devised. Holster the best FPS games to play in 2025, from Far Cry 6 to Borderlands 3 When talking about the best FPS games, the competition can be fierce. In a squad of three, which is how it was designed to be played, you can combine these abilities inventively to outfox enemy teams. At the E3 game show in 1999, Bungie unveiled a real-time strategy game called Halo; aka Halo CE at the following E3, an overhauled third-person shooter version was displayed.
Like most shooter games, first-person shooters involve an avatar, one or more ranged weapons, and a varying number of enemies. That said, the best FPS games are iconic because they offer a range of shooter experiences. Yet it’s the additions of those portals that add a layer of strategy and bristling chaos to what’s already becoming an iconic FPS. This genre shares multiple common traits with other shooter games, and in turn falls under the action games category.
Few other shooters before or since show such a level of masterly pacing. From Moscow, you take a train through the Russian wilderness, stopping off in desert towns, snowy tundras, and military bases, each filled with secrets to find and enemies to blow to bits. Modern Warfare has the tactical single-player and robust multiplayer modes one expects from a Call of Duty title, but successfully strips away all superfluous elements.
What is mean by first-person shooter games?
The most popular type of game to employ a first-person perspective today is the first-person shooter (FPS), which allows player-guided navigation through a three-dimensional space. First-person shooters are a type of shooter game that relies on a first-person point of view with which the player experiences the action through the eyes of the character. Games with a first-person perspective are usually avatar-based, wherein the game displays what the player’s avatar would see with the avatar’s own eyes. So, what’s the future of first-person shooting? The genre has come a long way since those early days, and technology lets us pursue unmatched realism or go in the opposite direction and create shooting experiences that are artful and surreal.
Shooting gallery games, which evolved from early-21st-century electro-mechanical games and in turn late-20th-century carnival games, typically employ a first-person perspective where players aim at moving targets on a stationary screen. Warframe was one of the first truly successful “games as a service or GaaS shooter titles and paved the way for one of the most popular online shooters of all time – Destiny – made by the same folks who made Halo. While it is primarily an FPS game, it also falls under the categories of Hero Shooter and Battle Royale. In addition, development studio Nightdive has made a solid business for themselves remastering classic shooters like Turok, Quake, and Blood.
Halo was then revamped and released as a first-person shooter; it was one of the launch titles for the Xbox console. That same year, EA released Mirror’s Edge, which was ostensibly a first-person shooter but one that prioritized movement over gunplay. It is one of two perspectives used in the vast majority of video games, with the other being third-person, the graphical perspective from outside of any character (but possibly focused on a character); some games such as interactive fiction do not belong to either format. There’s a long relationship between videogames and alternative music, from early first-person shooter Doom to games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Guitar Hero.
The work became a maze game presented to the player in the first-person, and later included support for a second player and the ability to shoot the other player to win the game. A first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a first-person perspective A first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through the eyes of the main character. Although, like third-person shooters (TPS), the term has come to define a specific subgenre of shooter games rather than any using the perspective, with several shooter games, while belonging to other subgenres, using a first person perspective, such as, traditionally, light gun shooters, rail shooters, and shooting gallery games. In video games, first-person (also spelled first person) is any graphical perspective rendered from the viewpoint of the player character, or from the inside of a device or vehicle controlled by the player character.
What is the best FPS game right now?
The community still has lots of valid complaints, but a buttery smooth Halo game with problems still rates pretty high. While the opinions of the latest System Shock spiritual installments (BioShock 2, BioShock Infinite) are all over the place, Bethesda’s take does the Shock family and first-person shooter genre justice with its fast-paced, body-morphing gameplay set in Art Deco-flavored environments. Battlefield V doesn’t drastically alter the first-person-shooter field, but what’s in this package is quite good. Modern Warfare has the tactical single-player and robust multiplayer modes one expects from a Call of Duty title, but successfully strips away all superfluous elements.
The gameplay grows a bit repetitive as the story progresses, but if you want to sneakily kill lots and lots of enemies, Gears of War 4 is a worthy pickup. The third-person shooter was already a great game when it debuted a decade ago on Xbox 360, but this updated title adds 4K resolution, unlocked frame rates, and content that was once paid DLC. Featuring gory, frantic, demon-blasting gameplay and a blood-pumping heavy metal soundtrack, the id Software-crafted Doom blends old-school design with modern know-how to form a satisfying, unholy concoction. Plenty of modern FPS games capture the feeling of playing Quake or Doom for the first time, but Dusk is the smoothest, the fastest, the goriest.
Id got to sit down and reimagine what Doom is in the modern age, and it came up with a buttery smooth, highly acrobatic FPS that celebrates gratuitous indulgence while demanding discipline through HP-recovering glory kills. If you find yourself itching to replay it, or if you never had the chance to do so before, consider the game a fantastic buy. Battlefield V encompasses all the hallmarks of a modern first-person shooter by including respectable singleplayer content (War Stories) and fresh takes on multiplayer gameplay (Grand Operations). The EA DICE-developed game features a gorgeous World War II scenario and lightning-fast gameplay that’ll keep you running and shooting for hours on end.
That meaning also perfectly summarizes Platinum Games wildly creative Vanquish, a third-person shooter in which static play means a quick death. Blast aliens, bots, and big bugs with your favorite hand cannon in these thrilling first- and third-person shooters.
What was the first first-person shooter game?
Developed by Atari and available on the Atari 8-bit computer series, Star Raiders blended first-person space combat with strategic gameplay elements like resource management and navigation. Another early pioneer was Spasim, which featured first-person spaceship combat and came out during the period of Maze War’s ongoing development. It was centered on online gaming and featured multiple match types still found in first-person shooter games today. The first real attempt at an FPS game was in 1973 with Maze War being installed at the NASA Ames Research Center.
Whether it was the standout cel-shaded art, amazingly fun music, great shooter mechanics, and of course, the wacky fun loot available, it was the first successful looter-shooter and paved the way for the genre. For those who enjoy the thrill of shooting guns and immersing themselves in a virtual battleground, First-Person Shooters are where it’s at. They combine long-term character growth and the satisfaction of upgrading your gear along with intense high-adrenaline shooter gameplay. The game was a rudimentary space flight simulator for up to 32 players, featuring a first-person perspective.
The first-person shooter may be considered a distinct genre itself, or a type of shooter game, in turn a subgenre of the wider action game genre. Over half a century since the original first-person shooter Maze War introduced the concept to the world, FPS games have conquered the gaming industry. Star Ship, developed by Atari, emerged as an early arcade machine release and introduced players to the thrilling world of first-person space combat. The First-person Shooter or FPS is a subgenre of action-packed shooter video games typically centered on combat involving guns and other weapons that fire projectiles from a first-person perspective.
While the former was the first game to call itself a hero shooter, Overwatch was a resounding success. Id Software, the developer behind DOOM, Quake, and Wolfenstein, is regularly credited with creating the first-person shooter, as those games are seen as the granddaddies of the genre. As a dark fantasy first-person shooter with dungeon navigation, spellcasting, and monster fighting, Catacomb 3-D added a layer of immersion by making the character’s fully animated hands visible. Players could move through a 3D maze slowly, while also shooting other players who appeared as eyeballs.
After all, throughout the 1990s, first-person shooters were known as DOOM Clones rather than entries within a larger genre, and the id Tech 1 engine that powered DOOM served as the backbone for many other titles. Released on the Imlac PDS-1 computer system, Maze War introduced players to the revolutionary concept of first-person shooting within a maze-like environment where they could hunt each other.
