Shooter

Lost Planet 3 is quite different from its predecessors. Opting to take a more Western approach to the series, Capcom turned to the American developers over at Spark Unlimited in an attempt to make this third installment more appealing. The franchise doesn't have a great track record, receiving low marks from both critics and gamers, so it's no surprise this game hasn't been getting much attention. It's a shame, really, since it has some pretty good stuff to offer.

Payday 2 worked incredibly well as a digital only co-op shooter, its shortcomings easily overlooked thanks to it offering far more value than its asking price. Payday 2 is bigger in scale and comes with a price boost as a result, but is it a crime gone wrong or a heist worth getting behind?

Taking on the challenge of creating Sony's own first-person shooter blockbuster, Insomniac Games released Resistance: Fall of Man as a launch title for the PlayStation 3 with two sequels following it afterwards. With a unique alternative history setting fused with science fiction and a flair for designing inventive weaponry, Insomniac created a series that offers three unique first person shooter experiences. And while it may not have reached the popularity it deserved, Resistance offers some of the most exclusive experiences of any 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.