Best FPS Games Of all Time

This is a list of my favourite FPS games. May you like it.

SO Enjoy!

25. Halo 2 (2004)

We would've wanted to put Bungie's second Halo title a bit higher here, but there's no denying that its ending—a blatant cliffhanger that was a wink-wink to the impending next game—felt like a half-hearted, over the jeans dry-hump. Still, Halo 2 was the first time gamers could play the game over Xbox Live, which of course led to the awesomeness that isHalo: Reach's online functionality. For being the game to change how we play video games online, it deserves that much respect.

24. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas (2006)

Even we were getting the stale taste of the Rainbow Six series off the roof of our mouth in the mid-aughts. The franchise was trending toward ignominy, with Critical Hour being so lowly regarded that developers canceled a port of the title to other consoles. Of course, that just means that it's time to go back to the drawing board, which Ubisoft did in releasing Vegas in 2006. The title returned to what made the series great, employing great stealth sequences amidst crossfire-heavy moments in what became a beloved multiplayer title.

23. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002)

What do this game and E.T. have in common? They both slept with Drew Barrymore. Just kidding. They were both created by Steven Spielberg. Not that that comes as a surprise to anyone, the game could have been calledSaving Private Ryan: The Game. MoH:AA was a template for some of our favorite WWII games to come, effectively simulating the grit amidst the combat trenches in the European and North African theaters. The multi-player component was also crazy ambitious, cramming up to 64 players onto a map, which often led to some epic battles-within-the-battles.

22. Borderlands (2009)

Written off by publisher 2K Games as an assumed flop, Borderlands was quietly released in October 2009 in the hopes that it might piggy back on some of the fourth quarter holiday sales. What it did was piggy back right into the cultural zeitgeist and become a monstrous success story, coining the term 'RPGFPS' or 'RPS' for brevity's sake. Gearbox's role-playing shooter took players to the highly stylized, street art inspired world of Pandora. Mad-Max meets treasure hunting in one of the most memorable titles on the list.

21. PlanetSide2 (2012)

A PC MMO shooter that is free to play—but we all know what that means. It might be free to play, but you're going to have to pay to win. Offering in-game transactions for real money is a relatively new, and some would say distasteful, development in gaming. That said, PlanetSide 2 still enjoys a huge amount of player retention for a sci-fi shooter epic. An MMOFPS (massively multi-player online first person shooter) that has maintained a tremendous amount of popularity helped make it on the list.

20. Marathon (1994)

Don't remember this one? Not much of a surprise there. Marathon was way ahead of its time and only available to the small number of Macintosh users back in the Windows '95 era. Yet, the game's legacy lives on. Bungie took what they learned from its creation to develop a small indie title you might have heard of: Halo.

Marathon takes place in the year 2794, and tasks you with surviving an alien invasion of your spaceship and nearby colonies. It's not as sexy as Master Chief's Mjolnir armor, but 1994 was a particularly un-sexy year. Like, O.J. Simpson double homicide un-sexy.

19. Deus Ex (PC, 2000; PS2, 2002)

Platform: PC, PS2

A FPS series that's flown under the radar for most console owners, Deus Ex is another action shooter that incorporates role-playing elements. Eidos Interactive's 2000 title focused on a One World Order-type dystopian future where terrorists and a deadly virus are both plaguing the U.S. Enter one JC Denton, a nano-augmented, cyborg-lite government agent sent to put an an end to both the bad guys and the super-bug. Cheesy? Maybe. But the game's widely pointed to by PC users as the high-water mark in FPS history.

18. Team Fortress 2 (2007)

We love it when an FPS adds an element of strategy to the action, and no game does it better than Valve's PC standalone Orange Box componentTeam Fortress 2. Your team of Saturday morning cartoon reject mercenaries must utilize their specialized class powers effectively to push back invading enemies. Plenty of twitchy gunplay combined with individually focused talents made TF2 a contemporary influences on dozens of clones. The overall aesthetic and tongue-in-cheek humor combine to make Valve's shooter a cherished game to this very day.

17. F.E.A.R. (2006)

Platform: 360/PC

Horror games usually sacrifice action for tone and atmosphere. A shooter that integrates horror story plot points, constructing a slow burn through a series of heightened events until you finally need to change your underwear, is rare indeed F.E.A.R. lives up to its name, delving deep into the subconscious hellscape Alma, the psychologically damaged child. The player-controlled Point Man uses all of his special ops training and weaponry—including our personal favorite, the flesh-removing particle beam—to get to the bottom of Alma's paranormal poltergeist events. A shooter that never once came across as stale or derivative thanks to the actually scary horror story has yet to be replicated.

16. TimeSplitters 2 (2002)

Platform: GameCube/PS2/Xbox

If Back to the Future and Quantum Leap had an illegitimate game baby,TimeSplitters 2 would be that time traveling, diaper-filling shooter offspring. The game featured the requisite FPS fare like handguns, rifles, submachine guns, and grenade launchers. Which is un-remarkable, in and of itself, but combined with time travel makes the game an oft-missed classic to this day. If you jumped to the '50s, for instance, your SMG turned into a Tommy Gun. Shooter aficionados still get misty when talking about this title.

15. Perfect Dark (2000)

The year 2000 was a strange one for Nintendo: They were nearing the end of the N64 life cycle and prepping to launch the disc-based Gamecube. Rare, developer of GoldenEye 007, was itching to replicate their success, and they debuted Perfect Dark. A high-drama, plot-heavy story featuring an intergalactic war between an alien race and the humans who are in bed with them. The upside to its release was that it served as the FPS swan song of the console, delivering one of the most in-depth multi-player experiences around for a non-Internet-enabled gaming system. The downside is that gamers had to wait another five years for the fully-realized prequel to hit Xbox consoles.

18. Quake (1996)

Legendary id Software game designer John Carmack had ambitious plans for Quake during development, but the final product eventually fell short of his vision. Nevertheless, the FPS genre was inexorably altered because of the title. Centering around rogue military technology falling into the hands of an unknown enemy named Quake, the story-mode played second tier to the multi-player modes. The game's 28 levels were all distinctive, introducing environments like medieval architecture, caves, and hellish dungeons that put your arsenal of rocket launchers to good use. Carmack also implemented the first fully functional online multi-player, which became the model (shoot, die, respawn, repeat) that we all know so well.

16. Virtua Cop (1994)

Virtua Cop was the genesis of modern first person shooters. Playing it felt somewhat like a police training simulation as you would have to avoid shooting civilians in the battle to take out a slew of creepy men in black. The game started out ridiculously easy but as you progressed, it got so difficult that gamer rage became inevitable. Anger management aside,Virtua Cop is still one of the greatest to ever exist.

12. Far Cry 3 (2012)

Platform: 360/PS3/PC

God damn, this game was good for so many reasons. Chief among them is that you, as a protagonist, are not some special forces, para-miltary force of nature. You're a bro. You even get a bro-y name: Jason Brody. A wussy frat boy that is thrust into a plot that sees you grow into a relentless jungle-stalking Tarzan. Saving your friends from pirates in an open-world island that generously rewards exploration, fighting motherfucking tigers, and the introduction of an actual two dimensional villain in the form of Vaas still has us playing Far Cry 3.

11. Half-Life 2 (PC, 2004; 360/PS3, 2007)

Frankly, HL2 could have very well have been our No. 1. But we wanted to see some new faces in then top ten. All the same, Gordon Freeman's return to Black Mesa was a cultural milestone as far as video games, not just shooters, went. 39 Game of the Year awards and several Game of the Decade nods stamped the title as a permanently revered game. The physics-defying gravity gun being one of the most memorable elements of Valve's baby. It allowed Valve developers to implement puzzle aspects into the shooter's action sequences (as well as bisect headcrab zombies with circular saw blades), adding yet another level of entertainment to an already nearly spotless series.

10. Duke Nukem 3D (1996)

Is there any question that the King belongs here? Duke Nukem 3D offered the thrill of taking down alien enemies with ridiculously over-powered weapons like Duke's Hulk Hogan-esque Mighty Boot. A first-person shooter it was, but its raison d'etre (we used a French word, wanna fight about it?) was its stunning ability to flaunt all of the rules of interactive entertainment. Sure paying strippers and cursing out enemies, "I'll rip your head off and shit down your neck!" may seem tame by today's standards, but in 1996 this was the pre-pubescent equivalent to discovering Internet porn.

9. Wolfenstein 3D (1992)

Do you like shooting stuff? How about Nazis? Stifiling a yawn at the mention of both of those? You better cover you mouth and recognize. Kiss the pinky ring of id Software's trailblazing title from the Nirvana era that, arguably, put first-person shooters on the map. Hell, if that alone doesn't make you a Wolfenstein 3D supplicant, consider that you get to run around a castle and eventually have a final encounter with a quad Gatling gun-equipped Adolf Hitler. CYBORG HITLER. We must've missed that history class, but we were home-schooled. We still think WWII was a government cover up.

8. GoldenEye 007 (1997)

The James Bond franchise enjoyed nominal success on home consoles over the years, but it was this 1997 game from Rareware that brought the tuxedo wearing MI6 agent to the mainstream vernacular forever.GoldenEye's deeply fleshed out single player campaign was filled with perks like timed bonus missions and special character unlocks. But crucially, the game featured one of the most addictive and innovative multi-player components ever, resulting in weekend-long marathons of grenade tossing and Golden Gunning. Here's a fun experiment: go back and play the title now, see how quick your jaw drops at the snails-pace everyone's moving at. Good stuff, but try and think back on how many hours you burnt on this one back in the day.

7. Portal (360/PS3, 2007; PC, 2008)

The cake may be a lie, but Portal is all truth. Another one of Valve's near perfect titles, it was first released on their console compilation The Orange Box, but took the long view when it came to first-person shooters. Arming players with a simple, but now iconic, portal-creating gun; the game challenged us like nothing before it. Maneuvering through space and physics, deadly turrets, fire pits, and solving mind-bending physics puzzles all made us want to shake Gabe Newell's hand personally. The game has never come close to having a poseur bite its style. The result is one of the most unique FPSes ever created. A title blending macabre humor, incredible voice acting (thanks to Ellen McLain as the inimitable GLaDOS), and an awe-inspiring climax left us hungry for more.

6. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)

There had been so many permutations of video games depicting war over the years that the genre inevitably began to seem stale...at least whenModern Warfare arrived and inspired the imaginations (or at least the profanity-filled tirades) of millions of gamers on Internet-enabled consoles. The fourth Call of Duty ditched the World War II setting of previous iterations and went Fox News blunt in Middle Eastern politics. Concocting a completely fictional international crisis that taught millions of young gamers that winning a war is as simple as getting a killstreak and calling in an airstrike.

5. BioShock (2007)

Word to Ken Levine, BioShock's enthralling story—about a man who finds himself fighting his way through a beautifully creepy underwater dystopia while saving (or for more malevolent-minded players, harvesting) little girls for chemical currency called ADAM—blew the doors open. Not just on FPS mechanics, but also, with regards to how storytelling can alter the impact of a video game, and especially, a first-person shooter with a voiceless protagonist. Of course, adding 40s-era guns and combat-altering Plasmids helped enormously. What's more fun than shocking your enemies with lightening? Blasting them with water to electrocute them as you do it. The moral, religious, social, and Ayn Rand-infused political components all added to the weight and heft of this now classic title. 

4. Doom (1993)

Doom appeared seemingly out of nowhere as the spiritual successor to id Software's Wolfenstein 3D title a year earlier. Instead of going around killing Nazis, however, you were a space marine looking to save your cadets from a mysterious alien uprising...from hell. Yes: Hell. And sure, Dead Space may have cribbed some of its plot from this classic, but imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, especially in video games, where the technology grows, but the fundamentals stay the same. Of course, it's a case of suffering from success: Doom's effect on the industry was wide-reaching, goading a whole new subculture within the industry to begin churning out similar games cut from the same cloth. The series has fallen on rocky times in recent history, and hopefully, they can find a way to reclaim their former glory in the near future (lest the next generation of gamers need to ask you what 'BFG' stands for).

3. Unreal Tournament (1999)

The game that brought us 'Boom, Headshot!', yes, Unreal Tournament is our pick for the third-best first-person shooter ever. The game combined twitch fueled gun play with some of the most well-designed artificial intelligence bots created at the time (something crucial back when Internet connections ran at 56K speeds). Canonizing much of the terminology that we bandy around when we speak of FPS, the game has been undeniably influential. Old dial-up modems weren't able to handle the massive Call of Duty server loads of today, so multiplayer matches were much more intimate affairs. Whether you were a well-hidden sniper or a flak cannon surgeon, UT was innovative beyond measure for the era. It was also one of the first FPS to be played competitively at the World Cyber Games in 2001, helping usher in the age of eSports.

2. Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)

One could make the case that the first Halo title was the first game to truly usher in drama-based, narrative-driven FPS action. Orchestral scores, massive firefights, environments that dwarfed players, alongside 3D graphics converged to form a completely defining experience. Bungie went all in with the original Xbox's launch title, introducing Master Chief as the face of next-generation gaming and creating a fully realized and addictive multiplayer component that had us schlepping consoles to friends' houses for system-link LAN parties for weeks, then months, then years on end. Need proof? Try the multitude of titles since the original game's release, and the unrelenting hype between releases as evidence of the game's long-lasting legacy that isn't going away any time soon.

1. Half-Life (PC, 1998; PS2, 2001)

Gordon Freeman taught millions of gamers what one can do with a crowbar, and it's a lesson they've taken in stride. Try, for example: Fighting off an invading alien horde teleported into the Black Mesa compound, while also holding off black-ops soldiers attempting to cover up government secrets with a tool that's usually used for opening shipping crates. Impressive, no? Not bad for a simple lever. Half-Life is considered one of the best titles in all of gaming history. We can argue the finer points of Katamari Damacy later. The title received more than 50 Game of the Year awards and helped make horn-rimmed glasses the de facto eyewear of alien-killer-cum-scientist aspirants.