Feels like most shooter games these days are super fast paced, COD style games with 0.5 second reload times and Olympic sprinter running speeds. What are some games that have weightier gameplay mechanics and don’t make you feel like a superhuman?
RoboCop Rogue City maybe? I’ve only played like 30 min, but you are RoboCop so you move pretty slow and deliberately.
Portal?
Sniper Ghost Warrior 2.
SUPERHOT moves at your pace. Though it definitely does make you feel superhuman, just in a different way.
SUPER. HOT.
SUPER. HOT.
too bad its a very short game.
I hear this every time I scroll past it in my library. I finished it about 4 hours after my bedtime one night and the ending felt uncomfortable
the entire game feels uncomfortable. masterpiece.
SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years!
But I’m not a rapper.
Oh man, you think that was uncomfortable, try playing the VR version.
It makes you virtually kill yourself at least twice and implies mind control of the player.
Shit’s wild.
yes but it’s
SUPER
HOT
I’m still pissed I can’t elect into having the original suicide parts available for launch.
ARMA series
TheHunter: call of the wild is the slowest fps I’ve ever played, its luxuriously chill. Mostly walking through beautifully executed forests during different weather and times of day to spot a group of deer drinking at a lake and then tryna shoot em all before they bolt off. Then the rest of the time is chasing down the blood trail to confirm the kill and get money to buy new weapons. Multiplayer and single player
TBH, I might struggle to actually shoot anyhing if it’s as gorgeous as the limited gameplay videos I’ve seen are depicting it. Slow paced walking simulator where you are challenged to spot wildlife, yes please.
Ive got many hours in this game. It is a very nice and easy going game for sure. There are some bugs that come up everynow and then but overall its a very pleasant game.
Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but Hunt: Showdown is a pvpve experience set in a fictionalized horror-themed 1900s old west.
The guns have few shots and are very slow to reload. Often your best strategy is to move very slowly and deliberately, looking closely for any movement from other players, taking care not to make any errant noises. Every single sound you make, including right clicking to aim down sights, is audible to your opponent if they’re close enough. One good shot is enough to down someone.
The result is a unique experience that can hit both extremes: agonizingly slow build up of anticipation, or a fast paced chase through the woods to cut off an escape.
Also the sound in that game is absolutely top tier. It’s very easy to pinpoint a location of a sound, making noise a high priority while moving around.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R Gamma. Completely free if you don’t count the disk space and one of the funnest, and most difficult games I have played.
Running around like most other FPS games will just get you killed. The AI is written in such a way that it correctly understands actual flanking, and when it peeks a corner, it does it exactly the same way a real player would - it’s actually scary.
I snuck into some occupied buidlings and killed every enemy except one. I was in a barn which had a front entrance and a hole blown in the back wall. I knew that the last enemy was out the front, across the road, inside the window of a building there, so I went out the hole in the back of the building and around the side, intending to go behind a fence and then behind their building to get them. When I got to a place I should have been able to see them, they weren’t there. I turned around and they were behind me along the fence - I nearly shit my pants. When I had the idea to go around back, the AI apparently had the idea to run out the front of their building into the front entrance of mine, and take me from behind by complete surprise - essentially the same exact tactic I had thought of.
It was then I realized how great the AI actually was and now every time I play I live in complete fear.
Stalker games. Slow careful trudge through unforgiving environments. If you go in blasting and running, you won’t last long.
Since years I’m enjoying with The Dark Mod, a Thief like First Person stealth (FPS-, puzzle-, strategy-, adventure -, survival,-,horror-, RPG elements, depending on the mission) game (Windows, Linux, Mac), there isn’t a need of an fast gameplay. It’s 100% free and currently with 170 fan made missions, which you can download and add direct from the game menu.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/393380/Squad/
This is my favourite shooter, based on the Battlefield 2 mod Project Reality. Everything feels, looks, and sounds realistic. Matches take several hours and have a lot of coordination between specialised squads. The maps are huge and detailed. I’ve played rounds where I only fire a couple bullets and like PUBG it’s so much more thrilling than an arcade shooter with nonstop action.
Great rec. Teamwork required, easy to learn but hard to master (especially the vehicles, which also require teamwork).
Honestly squad is pretty strange for me. I’m not very fond of talking to people (SzPD at least, might be on the spectrum), but Squad does not work without teamwork and communication. Guess the difference is that I don’t really get casual communication but effective comms on Squad rely on briefness and exactness. Triple Ds, that kind of stuff.
If you do end up jumping into Squad, expect some hiccups. The game is not terribly well optimized, and the community almost always picks the same factions and divisions. The devs have shown off a UE5 upgrade that’ll be dropping in the near future, so that might be good.
In a similar vein, ArmA: Reforger is great. Completely replaced my Squad addiction. While Squad is more focused (which is good), ArmA is way more free and varied in objectives. Plus, I feel like it might be more easily moddable. WCS and RH feel almost like they were vanilla, while the most polished Squad mods feel like mods. Not a knock against the mod teams, maybe unreal is harder to mod.
Does the new ARMA have a more intuitive UI and control scheme than ARMA 2/3? That’s what keeps me from recommending it instead. Squad is much more streamlined in that regard without losing the depth, like comparing Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld.
Oh yeah. They added contextual interaction promots. The closest thing I had played before reforger was DayZ though. But Reforger is very intuitive. Most everything can be done by looking at stuff and pressing F (entering cars, bandaging wounds, taking on and off attachments on weapons, etc.).
It’s a bit more complex than Squad in the things you can do, but the approach is much more simple (like, in Squad you press f1-8 to switch seats, in ArmA you can freelook and look at the seat).
It’s a large leap forward in UI, graphics, and performance.
I’m surprised to not see the Sniper Elite games recommended here, if we’re talking single player. They’re definitely a bit formulaic by now, and story/dialogue is not worth paying attention to, but they’re slow, methodical, and a lot of fun!
There’s a bit of a Hitman vibe to the later ones, approaching objectives almost however you’d like, and they can absolutely get hectic if you find yourself in a compromising position.
I’d throw Sniper: Ghost Warrior in there too. (Different studio, similar generic title :P) They’re a bit like the Elite games but in first-person, and set in modern day/near future.
The spinoff games Sniper: Ghost Warrior: Contracts 1 and 2 are a bit more hitman style as well. (I got more into the Contracts games personally, as the story from the main series was kinda wack.) They’re shorter games overall but levels can get bloody difficult when your plans go inevitably wrong.
Oh I remember the original Sniper Ghost Warrior!! Fun game but I found it felt a little cack-handed, in my experience - altho it is plenty old now. What do the Contracts games feel like? I assume they’re much more modern?
Oh yeah, the Contracts games have decent game feel. Definitely not jank. They’ve been on CryEngine since Ghost Warrior 2, so they are modern enough I guess.
Oooh, might have to give them a look then. Thanks for the recommendation! 👍
Hell Let Lose is a WW2 simulator game,
You can play it like cod and run around but all that gets you is killed by some guy who’s creeping a corner or whatever.
It’s best played slow and tactically following orders from your squad leader who gets orders from the match commander.
One or two bullets will kill you and half the time if you’re not being careful you won’t know what happened to you.
Then the slow pace is suddenly juxtaposed by a fierce fire fight defending your location while tanks shell you and artillery rains down.
I had this exact argument about Day of Defeat back before Counterstrike got assimilated by Valve. I had no respect for all the bunny hopping in CS, but enjoyed the slow(er) gameplay and strict limitations of DoD (such as running 40 meters and then panting, very realistic representation of my own fitness lmao).
I would also recommend Hell Let Loose. We recently had a game night with about 6 friends who all come from call of duty style, faster paced games. All of them mentioned how slow it felt and half of them were able to adjust to the new style and did pretty good. I would compare it to Battlefield but in a hardcore mode with less destructable environments.
Yeah that’s one thing I miss about the game, not having destructible environments. I understand why though the matches go for an hour and a half fighting back and forth there would be nothing left on the map
Hunt Showdown, it’s literally a slow shooter - old, single shot weapons and similar.
Have a few thousand hours between me and my friends, its decent but someone high up in Crytek seems to be pushing for “popularization” - it’s not as fun and slow-ish as it used to be.
There is a different game coming up with possibly slow game play too, HUNGER, not much known yet though.
Yeah, Hunt Showdown was peak multiplayer for my friends and I about 2 years ago, but it’s continually gone in a direction that has erased its identity. It used to be about map knowledge and patiently waiting for opportunities to punish opponent’s mistakes. Now they’re trying to make everything more fast paced. On one hand, I get it, because it was never going to break out of its core audience of veteran players. On the other hand, that core audience was what was keeping the game alive.
What specific changes are you talking about? I know everyone hated the UI update (even though the old UI was atrocious), but the gameplay still seems pretty deliberate and slow-paced, at least until you get in a three-team firefight in one compound.
It’s honestly been a while since I’ve logged on, because my friends don’t play anymore. But some of the changes (which may be different than when I played last) that seemed like a departure in my eyes were:
- Faster burn speed – this, in my eyes, was the turning point
- Necromancer solo trait (though I’ve heard that’s been reworked since I last played)
- Adding silencers to tons of guns (on one hand I like this, but on the other hand part of Hunt Showdown was always balancing clear speed with loudness, at least in lower ranked lobbies). I understand that they have subsonic ammo now, which I imagine balances it out.
- Multiple ways to restore health chunks – it used to be that you could only restore them by killing the boss, which made it easier to make mid-match decisions on whether to push people or not
- Fast Fingers trait, while cool in its own right, homogenizes guns like the Martini Henry, Springfield, and Sparks. It used to be that when someone missed me with a sparks, I knew I had 4 seconds to push.
- Surefoot trait allows you to sprint while healing and crouchwalk faster, thus speeding up gameplay and reducing the punishment of poor positioning
- Firebeetles allow people to not only scout from a higher position, but also force enemies to go loud with guns or have one of their healthchunks torched
- Levering was made faster and more accurate for some reason
Also Bounty Clash mode, while fun, seemed like an odd decision. It sped up the gameplay quite a bit and shook up the meta in ways that made it feel like an afterthought or an experiment. Though I didn’t give it too much of a chance.
All of that being said, I still had a ton of fun with the game the last time I played it. I know others have a propensity to shit on all of the decisions that the devs make, and that’s dumb. I’m glad it’s still around and people still play it, but it’s becoming less of my cup of tea. I also put like 1200 hours into it, so maybe I’m just a little burned out.
Ah yes, the ol’ ‘ostracize the core fanbase to gain a more ephemeral one’ strategy. A popular choice these days, unfortunately.
Yeah, I put dozens of hours into Hunt with some friends. We would only be able to play every few months. So every time we logged in, they had made new mechanic changes, some of which made the game less of what we liked. I always appreciated that there were no respawns. If you killed someone, they were out, period. If I die, then i wasn’t careful enough.
And then one day we come back to play, and kill someone, only to have them pop back to life behind us. I felt like the gameplay I enjoyed had been betrayed.
Hell Let Loose
It’s a larger-scale online FPS (50v50 maps) and a single bullet will kill you even up to great distances. There is no rushing in; that will just get you killed. You need to work as a team and advance with a plan to really get a win.
