Shooter

There have been plenty of attempts to recreate the first-person shooter experience on handheld, many of them either missing the mark or ending in a complete disaster. Well, Sony and Guerrilla Cambridge have aimed to change all that with Killzone: Mercenary, a spin-off of their popular console franchise that puts players in the role of Arran Danner, a gun-for-hire soldier willing to take on any dirty job, as long as it pays well.

After the success of the Bioshock franchise, many have tried to look back at other games involving creator and lead writer Ken Levine. Most roads lead back to System Shock 2, a game that was obviously a deep influence for the team’s later work on Bioshock. For the first time, System Shock 2 has been made available on Steam, a chance for gamers to look back at an important part of gaming history. Despite a few crow's feet, it has managed to age very well.

The Saints Row series started out as a free-roaming criminal rampage game that was very close to Grand Theft Auto, but by the time Saints Row The Third showed up the developers had pretty much abandoned the idea of edgy crime drama and made a game where gamers could drive around on the Light Cycle from Tron, shooting people with a Shark Gun while their pal Burt Reynolds helped them beat up zombies.

If there's one thing EA loves to throw into most of their games, it would have to be cooperative multiplayer. While there are plenty of co-op games from EA to choose from, the poster child of EA's favourite gameplay style would probably have to be the Army of Two series. Even though the franchise has had mixed reviews, the third entry in the series, Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel, manages to be a fun, but forgettable, experience.

Rise of the Triad is one of those success stories that just don't happen enough in the gaming industry. Essentially a fan game, it was created by people who loved the original Rise of the Triad (released in 1994), people from across the world who worked from their homes, put money in just for the love of the project.

The words "console quality" get thrown around way too often in the mobile game-o-sphere. I've been guilty of it, too: desperately clamoring for a bar-raising iOS game, we've been all too-willing to slap a AAA-tag on whatever good-looking and somewhat entertaining title and laud it as redefining what a mobile game is. Deus Ex: The Fall is the latest game to enter this conversation, a recently-announced FPS with RPG elements that acts as a prequel to the Deus Ex: Icarus novel. Don't get me wrong: this is not some shoddily-constructed mobile cash-in: it's a ...

Painkiller: Hell and Damnation is an arena shooter not entirely unlike Unreal Tournament or Quake. It's a corner of the FPS genre that's been ignored in mainstream shooters for the vast majority of this generation, with the exception of Unreal Tournament 3, which VGChartz tells me only sold around a million units on consoles, and Serious Sam, a franchise which has evened out at around the 60-70 mark on Metacritic.

I love when great games are born from mods. Take Day Z for example, originally a mod for Arma II and is now getting its own standalone title because of its popularity. Cry of Fear is a mod of Half Life 1 but, unlike Day Z, it has its own complete style. What I mean by that is Team Psykskallar, the developers of the game, only used the Half Life source engine and basic code to make Cry of Fear. Everything else in the game (textures, sounds, models) are all made exclusively by Team Psykskallar making the game a very unique experience. If no one told me, I would ...

While I've thoroughly enjoyed playing Borderlands 2 like a fiend the last ten months, I never found myself to be fully satisfied with the game. Sure, it feels great to get all the uber-rare weapons and mods and take on all the raid bosses and whatnot - I'm talking about emotionally: if there's one way Borderlands 2 disappointed me, it was how it mostly wasted its opportunity at creating a resonant narrative: even the death of a beloved character didn't provide anything but the most particular story beats.

The Vita, when it was announced, was a machine for FPS games on the go. Although every game benefited from that second stick for camera control, being able to play a shooter without severely hampering the experience was a major plus. The first shooter to be released for the console, Resistance: Burning Skies, came out months after the Vita's launch. That was only mistake number one.