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?
“Ready or Not” seems not to be recommended yet. It is basically a SWAT simulator you can play single player or together with 4 people.
You can choose your loadout freely to complete the missions. I recommend going blind into the missions on a first playthrough as some have some unexpected surprises …
There’s like 3 missions where you ought to be relatively quick. It’s a good game tho
Rainbow Six: Siege
People who play it like COD are the worst players in the game. Everything is designed to reward methodical, team-focused strategy so you can get the upper hand on people who don’t pay attention and try to rush everything.
You might love and hate my answer: Titanfall 2
It’s literally both of these things. Pilots play the extremely fast, twitch-shooting superhuman game while Titans play the slow-paced boots-on-the-ground heavy-weighted gameplay.
It’s the best multiplayer shooter of all time and it survives thanks to the Northstar launcher on PC
Robocop: rogue city You have a slowmo skill in the tree right from very early game and you’re Robocop so you’re a rather slow walking tank. Great game all around.
Yeah you cannot even run/crouch
You can run, the sprint is on the clicked movement stick (on controller) like CoD. Not super fast but definitely faster than walking!
Stalker games. Slow careful trudge through unforgiving environments. If you go in blasting and running, you won’t last long.
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! 👍
Depends on if you want to play multiplayer or not. If you do, maybe give Arma: Reforger a try. It’s pretty slow and tactical most of the time, as a single well-placed bullet to the dome will kill you.
If you’re more into singleplayer games, then maybe Prey (2017)? It’s more of an immersive sim, so playing at your own pace is highly encouraged.
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.
Squad
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.
Receiver 2, my dude.
An awesomely weird firearm simulation/stealth game, with a storyline consisting of equal parts gun safety, mental health awareness, and cult reprogramming. Almost every function of the player weapon is a different key on the keyboard. Reloading a single magazine is like a 4-6 keystroke sequence. A suddenly jammed weapon is like being presented with a tiny puzzle to solve, while under fire from deadly turret drones. One shot from an enemy kills you. You can and will shoot yourself in the leg. There is fall damage. There is broken glass damage. You are not an action hero, you are a sentient range target. Every bullet matters.
Anyways, it’s very paced, tense as fuck, and a decent challenge. The voice acting and soundtrack are also lovely.
Pretty much any immersive-sim, Prey, Deus Ex, Thief, Dishonored, System Shock Remake.
Metal Gear Solid series
