Is there any shooter that meets those criteria?
- Enemies are just soldiers/rebels/gang members/humans?
- Somewhat longer TTK
- Ideally some deep gunplay like Planetside 2 (recoil patterns, bullet travel, CoF, etc)
- Ideally some rng or replay value (roguelite, random encounters, etc.)
- Not online only
I just want to launch a game and fight after work, master guns and ideally unlock shit if that’s not asking for too much. I used to get that in Planetside 2, but in my timezone, it’s not an option and I’m offline a lot. Closest I found is:
- F.E.A.R. (replayed the story over and over, but the guns feel pretty bad compared to modern games)
- Robocop (LOVE the gunplay and locational damage, but the downtime is killing me at this point)
- Brink (best example I guess…)
- Blacklight Retribution against bots
- Some CoD games like BO2
- Maximum Action
- Shadow Warrior 2 (some maps have a handful of humans but it’s mainly monsters)
- RoboQuest (my main squeeze atm, but it’s robots without blood)
- Rico
- RS Siege Terrorist Hunt
- Payday 2 (IF it was possible to have longer ttk and much fewer cops)
- CS & Insurgency with bots (but low ttk is kind of boring to me)
Thanks!
Not human NPCs but Hunt Showdown 1896 has the best gunplay in any shooter I’ve ever played, not even close.
The finals is great.
They have a bot mode
If you like r6 siege’s terrorist hunt, perhaps you will like Ready or Not.
Or you can look for older games like SWAT 4 on gog.com.
I honestly might recommend escape from tarkov, it’s just that I honestly don’t respect the devs very much. But it’s a very good game, you can play on PvE mode so no need to worry about timezones or anything like that. It has a incredibly in depth gun system since its pretty much just real gun mechanics, and I honestly love that about the game, it has taught me so much about guns and their attachments. The one thing is that it can have a low time to kill, but there’s an in depth armor mechanic to the game that can change that. On top of all that, it’s an extraction shooter, which conceptually is literally just an fps roguelite. Just a warning, it doesn’t allow Linux users if you are one, even for PvE mode, but there’s a mod you can get called SPT(single player tarkov), and it allows you to play on Linux on top of allowing you to mod it further.
Purchasing Escape from Tarkov directly supports Russia’s war in Ukraine
I didn’t say I respected the developers, in fact I specifically said I didn’t respect them, I’m just saying that its a good game with similar gameplay mechanics to what op was looking for
And I’m just providing additional context that might help them make an informed purchasing decision 👍
Find a popular multiplayer shooter that you like and play that.
You’re not going to get any sort of “deep gunplay” against bots, no matter the game. The technology just isn’t there yet. Sorry but you’re going to have to put up with humans if you want a good, deep experience that doesn’t become repetitive and predictable.
You are not wrong about bots, but by deep gunplay, I mean gun mechanics, like planetside 2’s or CS.
Things like this:
Oh okay.
Carry on, then.
Check out the Call of Juarez games, especially the first one and the second (Bound in Blood).
I don’t see Soldier of Fortune mentioned, so this is my pick. Yes, it’s old, but back in the day it had the best gun play I saw. Haven’t played it in over decade, but it can’t be that bad, can it?
I’ve replayed recently. It’s still fun 😊 But I have to admit, it’s best on a CRT monitor. Don’t try to modernise the experience.
Unreal Tournament used to be my go-to… 25 years ago. I had the bots set up just right, so if I got a good look at one, I knew what I was up against. Some were harder than others. You could customise each bot, so you really had some pretty fine control over the gameplay.
As best I can tell, the modern iteration of Unreal Tournament is called “Fortnite,” which is nice because it’s free to play, and it’s fucking gorgeous, but all the paid content, the gestures and memes, it just wears me out. I just wanna shoot. It works best when one of my little nephews is online and they wanna team up, I let them do the memes and stuff and I circle around and flank their enemies. I’m in my 40s, pair me up with a grade school kid who can play decently and we win every time. It’s funny.
As much as people dump on the game, it has the gunplay I like and it’s pretty to look at, but I wish there was just regular old Unreal Tournament still. I’m sure I could get the GOG version of UT’99 running on my Mac with Whisky; it’s obviously not gonna run on my Switch or Xbox, where I can play Fortnite (Epic doesn’t make it for the Mac anymore).
Otherwise, and when it’s just me, it’s Cyberpunk. I have it on both my Xbox and my Macs. Yes, it actually runs on a computer that’s like 7.75"x7.75"x1" (and the M4 Mac is smaller, and more capable with ray tracing). No dedicated GPU
Good news - there’s a new, officially-sanctioned macOS port of UT99.
Now I just gotta find a GOG backup of UT’99. I don’t know if GOG lost the rights to that and Deus Ex, but both are gone from my library. (I still have Unreal 1, and Deus Ex 2 and Human Revolution, though.) Shouldn’t be hard to find an archived copy out there though.
Epic pulled the game from storefronts and then released it officially on the internet archive, fully for free.
I’ll second the recommendation for Far Cry, particularly 3 and 4. Also, have you played Crysis? Later in the game it will move away from human enemies, but most of the game ought to be what you’re looking for, and it’s genuinely one of the best FPS campaigns ever.
Far Cry 5 meets the criteria too, and focuses on the strengths of mostly having the open world activities be the way you move the story forward rather than the dumbass missions these games always have for no reason.
It’s been a hot minute, but what I really liked about Far Cry 3 and 4 was that if you wanted a certain upgrade, you set your own goal as a player for a certain type of mission, and I really enjoyed that. I remember seeing in the marketing for FC5 that they changed that, and it killed my interest. I’m not sure what there is to take issue with story missions moving the story forward.
The grand arch-sin of Ubisoft games is that they miss their own point almost entirely and are afraid to be fun.
The simple thing is that most of the game should be the most fun bit of the game.
E.g. if an FPS with good gunplay as a central element has 51% of game time spent in hacking mini games, that’s probably gonna get pretty irritating, right?
In the case of Far Cry 3-5: most fun bit is the outposts. Therefore most of the game should just be approaching, assaulting and solving various outpost combat sandboxes of increasing complexity.
Blood Dragon still has the best scope and scale in that respect, the whole design around a basic linear mission structure feels like it’s out of sync with the fact the fun is elsewhere, so you just end up in a situation like you already having liberated every single outpost, but technically you’re in the beginning of the game at like mission 2, it just doesn’t gel together.
Far Cry 5 has planes and helicopters and outpost-esque or adjacent activities and it’s the only game in the series where it’s those that actually move the story forward.
It’s the same shit with assassin’s creed. The most fun bit is y’know, stabbing people with the thing in historical settings. So it should be most of the game. Instead most of the game is anything and everything but that.
Heck, watch dogs legion even severely limited the amount and variety of hacking in the game when that’s like the whole thing and what made the second game in the series shine.
As for the upgrade and crafting systems I would honestly toss the whole thing out, RPG mechanics don’t belong in action games. A shop at most with all guns and everything unlocked at the start and money made through open world activities would fit Far Cry just right.
I liked the story missions for being one-off unique challenges and set pieces. I liked the outposts a lot, so I did as many of them as I wanted to, which may or may not have been all of them. As far as rising and falling action goes, I didn’t see outposts as a great way to support that, so it made plenty of sense to me to structure the game the way they did. That said, I didn’t play FC5, so OP can feel free to check that one out on your recommendation as well.
Escape From Tarkov.
It’s been in beta for 10 years but 1.0 is coming out 15/11/2025
90% sure you will be able to buy it on steam when that happens
Sniper: Elite? The first 4 games go on sale on steam fairly regularly. I played the 5th one with GamePass and I actually really liked that one. The levels are huge and can take you anywhere from thirty minutes to a few hours, however you want to play.
In the 5th one, there are also settings to make it ultra-realistic. I haven’t played with those, but I’ve seen gameplay and it’s almost like a different game.
I’d recommend checking out the Far Cry games, from Far Cry 2 onwards.
Also, while not necessarily exactly the thing you’re looking for, the Sniper Ghost Warrior series offers a lot of good stuff. especially SGW3 and later are really fun and have pretty decent gunplay and the games can be played pretty nicely without focusing on the sniper aspect.
And if you feel like doing even more snipering, Sniper Elite gives you some NICE slow-mo X-ray closeups of your bullets destroying your enemies, but the gunplay besides Snipers isn’t that fun.
I think you might enjoy Trepang2. It is heavily inspired by the combat in F.E.A.R., has unlockables and arena modes for some replayability. There is a demo and a sale on GOG.
Somehow I’d forgotten about Trepang2, thanks for the reminder! I might wait for an even deeper sale due to the length of my backlog but definitely wishlisted.
I have it, but for some reason, it does not do it for me. If I play it the way they want, it’s like Selaco or Titanfall, or borderline Quake, but when going at it with a pistol and being a bit slower, the survival mod feels more like a horde shooter than anything FEAR.
I give it a shot one in a while, but I’m sad to say it does not scratch my itch. It’s a me problem here. On paper tho, it’s indeed a very good recommendation!
Re-re-reinstalling it ;)
Fair, maybe this time it’ll stick.
I would say Division 2 But that is online only, stupid Ubisoft.
Another option would be Escape from Tarkov while using the Fika PvE mod.Purchasing Escape from Tarkov directly supports Russia’s war in Ukraine
I never said to buy it. There are alternative means of acquisition.
Tarkov now comes with PvE mode. But if you don’t feel like paying extra there’s SPT (single player Tarkov) with a wide range of mods. Fika is now used only to turn SPT into coop Tarkov (and Fika isn’t officially supported by SPT devs).
Is the inbuilt pve any good? Last I played it was only scavs and you didn’t keep what you found.
I think you played the “offline” mode which doesn’t keep any progress. That is not the PvE mode. I haven’t played official PvE because I’ve jumped to Linux and the anticheat kinda kills the possibility of playing EFT. In PvE most maps are run locally so I could play most of the game in PVE but Streets of Tarkov still boots up a BSG server and I imagine anticheat kicks you out of the server which means I can’t play all of Tarkov. Also PvE cost extra money and I see no reason to pay when SPT is arguably the better PVE experience.
That said I’ve heard good stuff about the official PvE. For many people it’s the de facto way to play Tarkov because no cheaters. But I swear by SPT because SPT mods let you customize Tarkov to your liking. Don’t like the AI? There’s SAIN to replace the AI logic. Want more realistic night vision? There’s a mod for that. Don’t like how some of the weapon sights are fucked up by BSG? There’s a mod to fix sights. Want to turn Tarkov into a rogue-lite? There’s a mod for that. Don’t like getting lucky with keys? There’s mod that puts more keys in traders or a mod that let’s you shoot locks on locked door. Don’t like having to nudge your character into weird positions just to get the crosshair in the right position to loot something? There’s a mod for that. If there’s anything you want Tarkov to be it’s very likely there’s a SPT mod for it.
I know I can recommend Operation Harsh Doorstop by Drakeling Labs. Neigsendoig (my producer) had played it, and he seriously liked it big time.
