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What are some modern first person shooters with a classic, old-school feel?
I'm looking for more recent games that are reminiscent of the original Doom, Quake, and shooters of that era. Preferably on PC, but also on the Xbox.
I am, of course, aware of the most recent Doom games, but I gotta be honest, I'm not a big fan. They don't feel old-school to me.
1990s shooters have a simplicity that I crave.
I have no intention to play online, so a good campaign is a requirement.
Thanks!
Check out Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, from your description it sounds like it is exactly what you're looking for. Came out a few months ago, is on Steam, and is currently 20% from the summer sale.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2005010/Warhammer_40000_Boltgun/
Came here to recommend it!
My two favorites
Dusk is like a long lost Quake follow-up from 96. No being locked into an arena here and trying to kill everything, but proper bespoke level design with puzzles and enemy placement.
Cultic is like if Blood 2 had actually been good and an evolution of the original game. Again, bespoke level design and enemy placement, with interesting places to explore and heaps of secrets. Up until last year or so when Cultic (Episode 1), I'd have said Dusk is my favorite and best of the bunch, but Cultic really supplanted it to be one of my favorite FPS games of all times.
I grew up on FPS games, first playing Doom in 1994 when I was about 10, rabidly consumed the genre through the 90s. These two are a proper return, not a retro-styled FPS, but proper FPS games that feel like they could have been released in the mid 90s.
Cultic was a fun time. My only complaint is that it's rather easy. I've played a lot of FPS games but when I play DOOM etc I don't play on the hardest setting... on Cultic I played the second-highest difficulty and found it too easy, so I notched it up to the highest and still found I was pretty easily passing through.
It's possible later episodes will be tougher of course.
I just spent a few minutes with Dusk and it's delightfully silly. Love it. Thanks for the recommendation.
As far as I'm concerned, Dusk and Amid Evil are the gold standard of the current wave of boomer shooters. Dusk is heavily inspired by quake and blood, and amid evil takes more inspiration from heretic and hexen. Would highly recommend them both.
Ultrakill is a fast paced retro FPS with some modern refinements. It can be rather brutal, but you get back in to the action so fast that you get over the death pretty quickly.
It is single player and has a demo so free to check out.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1229490/ULTRAKILL/
Edit so the demo is in gog.com and not Steam:
https://www.gog.com/en/game/ultrakill_demo#:~:text=If%20you%20want%20something%20fast,yourself%20to%20try%20this%20demo.&text=Very%20fun%20game%20with%20lots,demo%20was%20a%20bit%20much.
I like the demo! I can see how this may be challenging in a satisfying way. Good tutorial. The retro filter is nice too but I'm sure I'll use it.
Every game that’s been recommended so far is great, but a lot of them miss the mark on your request that it captures the 90s simplicity (and one totally ignores the single player campaign qualification…).
With that in mind, a list in no particular order:
First, echoing that out of the previously-mentioned games, Dusk, Amid Evil, and Cultic are going to be your best bets per your qualifications.
Ion Fury is the best recent Build Engine game (a la Duke Nukem). Slightly more complicated than the original Doom games but feels absolutely great.
Project Warlock has some very mild RPG elements in the hub world, but it otherwise plays very similarly to Doom. It also has a sequel, but I haven’t played it. Heard good things, though!
Doom and its clones have a wealth of map / level packs available for free if you’re willing to do a little bit of tinkering (you may have heard the terms “MegaWAD” or “TCM / Total Conversion Mod”). There are some phenomenal entries out there that play just like old-school Doom (many are basically new maps built in the original Doom engine). I’d be happy to share out more resources on those if you’re interested!
Strafe: Gold Edition, I'm not sure why it's "Gold Edition," except maybe to differentiate EA from the release. It's a randomized Quake-style FPS. It doesn't have any of the issues that Obsidian can, and provides a nice endless experience with solid Quakey gameplay. It can get a little samey but it's still fun to jump in and bang out a few levels.
Selaco has a demo. This is a GZDoom-based game, with a vaporwavey/future vibe. It feels like its engine but not in a bad way. In fact, there are a lot of great games using GZDoom, quite a few on Steam.
Hedon is a pretty good example of old-school game with new ideas, such as platforming sections and enviornmental puzzles, and plenty of Doom-style run-and-gun goodness because. Another GZDoom-based game.
Superhot and its sequel Superhot: MIND CONTROL DELETE scratch the same itch for me, with a focus on the Doom-style ballet of dancing between enemies, turning combat into a puzzle.
Ion Fury, which was supposed to be a Duke3D sequel but 3DRealms lost the rights, so they used Bombshell, who was an agent in the same organization Duke was? (I don't remember). It was developed against EDuke32, which is based directly on Ken Silverman's Build engine release.
Keep an eye out for stuff from Hellforge Studios, as well. They're planning to publish a ton of GZDoom-based games of all sorts, like Absentia.
I am quite excited for Selaco. Tried the demo, and it is a fantastic game, really producing a DN-ish feeling while also feeling quite modern to play in other regards.
Prodeus might be along the lines of what you're looking for. Feels like a 90's shooter with some occasional modern sensibilities. Plus, it's on GamePass, if you have that.
Here's a short review.
Oh man, I had no idea and I've had Gamepass this whole time. And here I was eyeing its sale price on Steam. Thanks!
By the looks alone, this feels like a more visceral evolution original Doom than, well, Doom!
As the other commenter said, it definitely does retain some of the gameplay feel of 2016’s Doom, but to me it felt like something that served up both that old school feeling and the new at the same time. Maybe it’s the level design that feels late-90’s to me, I don’t know. The visual aesthetic probably goes a long way towards conveying that feeling I guess.
Anyway, I enjoyed it!
I'm not sure if OP would love Prodeus, to me it feels closer to DOOM 2016 than anything else, which it seems they weren't a huge fan of. Definitely recommend it in general though.
I hope it's not bad manners to suggest my own games but..
You might like my game Penance: https://akselmo.itch.io/penance
It's pay-what-you-want (even 0€ ) so feel free to download it and just have fun. I hope you might like it.
It's a bit rough around the edges because when I made it I wasn't that good at making games yet, but still.. I am pretty proud of it. :)
There's a short campaign and also an endless mode. Campaign has handmade levels, while endless mode creates randomized levels for you.
I made it because I wanted Quake but with levels that never end, but people liked it so much I made my own campaign levels for it too.
Nice, i like your games. They all have a nice bit of funk to them. What engine are you working with?
Thanks. :) Most of my games are made with Unity, however currently I'm making a Doom-clone with my own engine.
That is definitely okay, as a long as you don't mind excruciating comments on every detail of your game (it's not often that I can talk to an actual developer of a game I play :P).
Lol, comment away.
There's a bunch of recommendations here but I'm just going to talk about them in terms of what they're familiar to.
Classics
Just going to mention here that there's a few classics that have got re-releases with extra content, and if you haven't played that extra content you might be interested. Firstly, many FPS games from the 90s got expansions even back in the day so if you have never played them they could be worth looking up and many are included in modern re-releases.
I love battlebit but that's really not what OP is asking for.
Yeah, unfortunately I think Battlebit is exactly the kind of game that would match OP's requirements... But the no online play part completely kills that suggestion.
It's probably the best most recent option though.
How "casual" (for lack of a better word) is Battlebit? I really like the call of duty style, 5v5 TDM multi-player but I am growing incredibly tired of the gigantic file size and update schedule of CoD. So is Battlebit the kind of game I can jump into for 2 or 3 games a night and not feel like I'm dragging my team down?
I'm bad... I haven't played FPS's online in almost a decade. My K/D is bad yet my win/loss is still around 1. Its easy to blend in when there are so many players. Occasionally there's someone getting bent out of shape over how people are playing and someone usually tells them to fuck off. I'll tell them I'm just here to go blow shit up and go pew pew. Like @Plik says, if you have some good cohesive squads they could easily swing a game but one player isn't going to do it.
Keep in mind that it's way more like battlefield than COD; bullets aren't laser beams and the maps are big.
Also, I'm never worried about ducking out mid match. I do wait until I'm killed, but I never feel obligated to finish a game.
127v127 is my favourite due to all the things mentioned above about not being relevant as an individual and because it can generate wild firefights.
And its only 15 USD!
Short answer, extremely casual.
I was never much into the Battlefield series. Some players might judge me for this, but as a player you pretty much have the same effect on your team as PlanetSide 2, i.e. nothing. Cohesive squads moreso.
The game is a super small download by today's standards, maybe 2-3 GB?
The larger servers are absolute chaos. You die a lot. Part of what makes it fun is just learning how not to die. Despite very low TTK and arcadey movement, moving more strategically significantly increases your survival.
You could definitely jump into it a few games a night without feeling like you are dragging your team down. Be careful with how fast the time flies though, it's easy to play for two hours and think it was half that 😅.
Wonderful! This was exactly what I was hoping to hear. Thank you.
No problem. Do be aware it is still alpha/beta, and balance is out of whack.
SMGs are wayyy better than other games, and work well at ranges you would never expect. Don't feel guilty about switching to them if the Kriss Vector crutchers keep getting you.
Vector, Groza, Scorpion, and FAL are the best weapons by TTK right now.
OP said:
Last line of the post
Devil Daggers. Dead simple yet challenging arcade-style FPS where the main goal is to last as long as possible in a small arena swarmed by waves of demons. Surviving 500 seconds gets you the sole Steam achievement. Fun and precise Quake-style movement with really great aesthetics and sound design.
Is it cheating to suggest Black Mesa? Or is HL1 even too new for what you're after?
The issue with Black Mesa is not that it is too new, but rather that Half-Life is a different kind of game. It's more of a sophisticated narrative with shooting mechanics than a straight shooter like Doom or Quake.
I'll add a lesser known roguelike boomer shooter that I've been finding very fun to play: Nightmare Reaper
It has that new wave of boomer shooter feel to it with a unique spin utilizing roguelike elements in a smart and not pasted-on way.
Why people call it "boomer shooter". Are fans of these games really between 59 and 77 years of age? :P
Rogue likes are great, that sounds like a great combination. Thanks!
I think its just a reference to the generation that made them popular.
Also, if you like roguelikes, Enter The Gungeon is a 3rd person one with fantastic replayability and is a bullet hell too. I'm not sure if I'd class it as a boomer shooter but it might scratch your itch for that in another way
It could also be that use of "boomer" pretty quickly shifted from meaning "someone of the baby boomer generation" to "someone old" once kids started using it. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool millennial who grew up playing Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, but if I talked to my students about those ancient dated games, they'd call me a boomer not because I enjoyed "boomer shooters" growing up but because "boomer" essentially just means "out-of-touch adult" to them at this point.
I think the genre name is just a cheeky and sticky way of saying "old/retro FPS". I like it.
I personally thought it was about the generation that made them big.
I'm a millennial as well and I grew up playing these games and loving them. But the early entries in the series that most people think of when they talk about boomer shooter (like Wolf3D and DOOM)... those games became huge sellers because of boomers. I loved playing DOOM as a kid, but I didn't buy it, my dad (who is a boomer) did. Those games were violent and 'mature' for the time, which appealed to older gamers in a way many other games didn't.
Everything already mentioned is great, I think no one had mentioned Boltgun yet?
A few others to add to the pile that I haven't see mentioned yet:
HROT
This one reminded me of a soviet-inspired version of DUSK.
Wrack
This one hit the scene well before the "boomer shooter" renaissance, so I don't know how it plays now in comparison, but I really liked it when it came out. Takes the DOOM formula and adds a time-based combo system that encourages you to go fast.
Hands of Necromancy
I haven't played this one yet, but it's a Heretic-inspired game built in the GZDoom engine.
Supplice
Also haven't played this one. Normally I wouldn't talk about games I haven't played, but like the above game, this one is also built in GZDoom, and I figure being made in a DOOM source port is enough to automatically qualify something to be included in a list of boomer shooters.
Surprised no one has mentioned Ashes 2063 yet, it's a completely free doom total conversion that you'll feel bad not having paid for, it's that good.
Some of their games have already been mentioned but check out Nightdive Studios games, they remastered a number of old games to work flawlessly on modern systems. And the System Shock remake is great, feels very old-school while looking modern.
I second Ashes 2063. It's great and I even submitted a post on Tildes about it just a few days ago.
It's primarily multiplayer in design, but look into Mega Man 8 Bit Deathmatch. It's pretty much what the name says, an arena game where you shoot at other players (or bots) with the default buster, or (better) any boss weapon pickups spawned through the stage, using classic Mega Man sprites and tiles in classic DOOM fashion. The characters themselves are just cosmetic, but there's a large selection of them and weapons.
Prodeus is extremely, extremely good if you specifically want something like Doom.
It evokes classic FPS aesthetic while looking quite good as a modern version of it.
[EDIT] Of course someone mentioned. Oh well, then I'm just here to reinforce that it's very very good.
Immortal Redneck is on Steam and Xbox I believe. No real "story" but it's a roguelike so it has a lot of replayability and meta progression. No multiplayer to speak of. Enter a big room, doors lock, kill everything in it, then move to a new room. It's not tactical modern gameplay but more akin to fast paced run and gun gameplay of older games.