Bak The 50 Best First Person Shooters Of All Time

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System Shock 2 had a bit of everything - survival horror, action, role-playing. But its core gameplay consisted of exploration and being a good old first person shooter.

The game is fondly remembered for its mix of gameplay types and for its deep story. It would later be cited as a major influence for the BioShock series.

Killer7 was Suda51's first gamer released outside Japan. It was pretty out there and very controversial, sparking debate about sex and violence in games.

While being on-rails may have made the game limiting, it is noteworthy for its strange plot, unconventional play style, and cartoony graphics, all of which made this niche game stand out. 

MAG had a vision that was ahead of its time, even as recently as the PlayStation 3.

The online-only title supported battles of up to 256 players divided into eight-person squads. The squads form larger teams. Each squad has a leader who has ran up the chain of the command by earning experience in the game.

It had its kinks, but it looked to the future. Online-only games that reach massive audiences are still coming. 

Black is about as straightforward as an FPS can be. Carry two guns and fight in Chechnya as part of black ops.

What made the game special was that back in 2006, Black was so completely destructable. If you shoot things, they blow up. Bullets leave holes. Weapons are highly detailed. These details are commonplace these days, but Black led the way.

Back in 2008, the zombie trope was just picking up. Turtle Rock Studios and Valve jumped on it with Left 4 Dead, a cooperative first-person shooter pitting four survivors against wave upon wave of infected monsters.

A cast of diverse characters and the pitch perfect use of tropes from an action/horror film made this one a hit.

Titanfall is young, but it's rejuvenating a stale genre. We've played a lot of war and we've played a lot of soldiers shooting each other up.

Respawn through in some mechs and wall-running, and suddenly it's all addictive again. Everyone is constantly at risk and every moment is action packed. Sure, the campaign is kind of tacked onto the multiplayer mode, but you came for the multiplayer anyway.

Hopefully this boosts competition and innovation in the genre. It can use some new blood.

It's possible to get through DICE's parkour runner without the gunplay (and there's an achievement for it, too), but it's difficult. Everyone else has a gun, and you have the option.

Mirror's Edge lacked a bit in its story, but excelled in its ideas for running and combat. We can't wait to see what the next one does.

Bulletstorm knows it's a violent shooter, so it takes that and runs with it. The combat is increasingly insane with more and more ridiculous ways to kill your foes. The humor is less than refined. It's a game that knows what it is and who its for, and it embraces the genre wholeheartedly.

ZombiU released along with the Wii U and defied expectations as it fused the FPS and survival horror genres.

Everytime you looked in your inventory to switch items, you have to take your eyes off of the main screen. Each search becomes more and more frantic; taking your eyes off of the screen for too long can cause you to die and start back at the beginning with a new character. 

Metro 2033 engrosses players in a deep story about apocalyptic Moscow. Following nuclear war in 2013, Russians are forced to live underground in metro stations. Down there, players struggle with mutants and soldiers.

The game also includes some moral choices that can lead to different endings. 

Time Crisis put the gun in your hands as a member of an international intelligence agency taking down a corrupt government. The game offered an innovative element as part of the arcade cabinet - a foot pedal to step on and take cover. 

The game came to PlayStation bundled with a  light gun, giving you the same fast-paced arcade experience in your own home. 

Road to Hill 30 is an historical FPS developed by the people behind Borderlands. Granted, 2005 was way before dubstep became the soundtrack of Pandora, but WWII seemed a good as place as any to set a FPS. The title set itself apart from the endless WWII shooters by focusing on utilizing squad members, rather than punching a hole through enemy defenses by sheer might. You can also write the whole thing off as an interactive history experience. Like EPCOT Center, but with Nazis.

One of the titles on this list that shows its age. Seeing footage of this game in action nowadays is only slightly less painful than being forced to watch a rerun of Friends. Set on a suspiciously generic backdrop of Mars, the game makes the list because of its comparatively robust single player campaign. Its multi-player mode was a bit shit though. Red Faction was considered a PS2 'must own', but 12 years ago what wasn't considered a must have? The game's most memorable feature was a Geo-Mod gun that allowed you to change the terrain and building infrastructure around you. We've discovered where Minecraft got its inspiration.

Counter-Strike is like the cancer of video games: If you don't get it out of your life early on, it will force you to undergo chemo and have a prolonged recovery. What we meant to say is that it will take over your life completely. Originally a mod to 1998's Half-Life, it is one of the most addictive multi-player experiences ever created. Attracting millions of players, it still has running servers for the more than a decade old title.

After the arcade version of Sniper Scope hit it big in 1999, it was ported to the Sega Dreamcast where it was just as tense and exciting as its coin-operated daddy. The only thing missing was the fixed sniper rifle but that didn't stop it from being one of the sickest first person shooters ever made. Instead of just walking around shooting at enemies, players were put into a number of high pressure situations, one of them a mission where you had to take out the bad guys from a moving helicopter. There was a version of the video game that came with a light gun but for the most part, the controller was enough to handle any terrorists to raise their ugly heads. If you've never played Silent Scope it's definitely worth picking up a used Dreamcast just for it.

Serious Sam is a light and tight homage to the weightier shooters of yesteryear like Quake and Doom. The main chracter's name is Sam Stone? What, was Max Granite already taken? Sounds more like an out of work pornstar from the Valley than a galactic protector. Still, the series was hugely successful and influential; spawning multiple sequels and an eventual release on Xbox Live Arcade.

With the introduction of widespread broadband connections in the mid-aughts, developers were able to rethink how they approached multiplayer modes in video games. Single-player campaigns become an afterthought as developers began building games around online modes almost exclusively. Battlefield 2 was one of those games, all but requiring players to look like telemarketers by wearing headsets for a strategic edge. It won numerous awards for being the best PC game of 2005, and has spawned multiple sequels.

If you enjoy the Team Fortresses of the world, then you've gotta to get your hands on its spiritual successor, Starsiege: Tribes. The multi-player-only game was set in the 40th century (yes, that's 19 centuries from now) and allowed players to control one of four major tribes battling for control of the Great Human Empire. Heavy on story, the game also featured eight distinct weapons with which to blast an enemy's face off, including the Stormhammer, which shot a disc projectile that could stop someone in their tracks. One of the first titles that flirted with MMOFPS elements, it's still pointed to as an influential precursor to many of today's shooters.

PS3 exclusives not titled God of War don't get as much respect as they should. Resistance was an early launch title for the console, but has never gained the same traction as other franchises. What did help it make the list was then inclusion of a 40 player multi-player mode and custom weapon crafting.

Remember those franchises that spawned so many sequels it's like someone fed a Gremlin after midnight? Yeah, this is one of those. Bad Company is indicative of the the current gaming landscape. We think we enjoy the fan YouTube videos more than the actual game, but the game is still considered one of the best.

Unlike many (any, really) of the games you'll find on this list, Descent 3 is a first-person shooter that put you in the cockpit of a spaceship exploring deep space mines. Developers at Interplay impressed many with their lighting techniques and improved graphics, and put serious effort into remedying the anemic storytelling of earlier Descent games. Moreover, the game was mod-friendly enough to give the fan community level creation powers. Dong-shaped mining colonies for all!

This is the one that started it all. Before examining the fictional world of Middle Eastern terrorism and CIA mind control, the Call of Duty series was firmly established as the premier World War 2 franchise. The first Call of Duty reinvented the genre through its introduction of in-squad warfare, surrounding you with actual teammates instead of forcing you to go at it alone as in games like Medal of Honor. Aside from building Activision's complimentary yacht/mansion program for executives, it was the first WWII title that let you see the war from the eyes of British and Soviet troops.

It's not often that a development company is able to invest in a new proprietary engine and deliver a compelling experience, but that's what Crytek did in 2004. Far Cry was an amazing FPS for its time, making similar titles look and feel like a last-generation dumpster fire. The game's plot is hilariously non-existent—seriously, another ex-Special Forces protagonist?—but misgivings fade away once the feeling of being stranded on a deserted archipelago sets in and the action starts.

Blending two wildly popular genres, the massive multiplayer online role playing game and the first-person shooter, Firefall hopes to succeed where other attempts at this marriage have failed. Developed in secret for many years, the title is in beta testing with a street release set for later this fall. It makes the list because all the hype and secrecy surrounding the title have given the whole damn thing an air of the second coming. If it turns out to tank, we'll be the first to let you know.

The game's title may be unnecessarily long-winded, but there's little doubt that Ubisoft's take on warfare adds a nice wrinkle not found in the Modern Warfares of the world: the ability to control squad-mates and position them for effective strategy. GRAW also takes war south of the US border, which provides a nice change from the brown and beige rubbled tenements of the Middle East to...the brown and beige rubbled tenements of Mexico.

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 is Halo: Reach's online functionality. For being the game to change how we play video games online, it deserves that much respect.

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.

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 called Saving 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 component Team 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There had been so many permutations of video games depicting war over the years that the genre inevitably began to seem stale...at least when Modern 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.

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. 

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).

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.

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.

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.