Thanks everyone for the recommendations! I’m going to print this out and troll the discount bins after work.
How did Jedi Knight escape my radar? Sheesh.
If you want a good FPS try Rainbow Six or any of the expansions for it like Urban ops and Covert Ops. The Urban ops are my favorites with some of the patchs downloaded to give a varity of weapons… Gotta love the Widdowmaker sniper rifle. It’s fun to put a bullet in a terrorist head and then watch the rest of the group try and scatter before they drop.
One of my favorite ‘realistic’ FPS games is SWAT 3. You lead a 4 man element on various missions, from serving arrest warrants to hostage situations. The AI is the best I have ever seen in a FPS, and it has a lot of replay value as the suspects will be in different positions and react differently every time you play. It’s somewhat like Rainbow 6, but I like it a lot more. The graphics and gun physics are a lot better and you don’t have the long and complicated job of plotting out your group’s plan before the mission, you just choose your point of entry and give orders on the fly through a easy-to-learn branching menu system. They enemies are a lot more realistic than in Rainbow 6 - they aren’t all expert shots and they run and hide or surrender quite often.
Deus Ex is another excellent FPS, it incorporates lots of role playing elements and there are almost always multiple ways of overcoming the obstacles in the game.
If you want something a little less cerebral than those two, try Soldier of Fortune. It should be available rather cheap by now but it’s graphics are still better than a lot of newer games. It’s got a lot of neat guns and one of the best hit location/damage modeling systems I have seen in a FPS. You can play it stealthy in a lot of sections, but you can also do well just rushing in with guns blazing. It’s a lot of fun and I keep coming back to it.
I agree that NOLF is a good game, but it has some missions that require that you aren’t detected that are very tricky, kinda like Thief.
I would recommend against getting SOF… the only real interesting part about the whole game is the GHOUL gore system, but it IS NOT as bloody as we were led to believe! I felt genuinely ripped off at how little blood there was!
Max Payne is a good game. The game goes by fast but it is seriously fun enough to want to play through on all difficulties -which I haven’t done for any game since Doom 2.
How much more bloody could SoF get??? Any more than it was and it would be ridiculously unrealistic. As it is it goes quite a bit overboard - .44 caliber pistols do a lot of damage, but I doubt they would regularly blow limbs off. And that heavy machine gun - I frequently reduced people to a headless torso by the time they hit the ground.
It had a lot of other things going for it aside from the blood and gore. The level design was excellent and varied, it had an good variety of weapons, the enemy AI was above average for a plain shoot-em-up, and the graphics are still awesome - I recently got Max Payne, and it’s character models and animation are inferior to those in SoF. The gore got all the attention, but even without it SoF would be one of the better shooters in recent years.
Max Payne is good, and it gives my new GeForce 2 a good workout, but I don’t think it lives up to it’s hype. The enemies are rather dumb and only challenging due to their extreme toughness (I haven’t even got out of the first part of the game yet and I’ve already encountered baddies that can survive a headshot from a 9mm). It’s a good game, but not particularly great.
You must have been playing an advance copy of SOF2 or something because I didn’t see any of that.
Level Design - how can you say it wasn’t excellent? It had the perfect combination of flow and realism - few of the environments ring false, yet you always can tell which way you are supposed to go next and you always come across enemies in the right number at the right time to maintain tension while giving the level a good rhythm of exploration and fighting. Take the first level, the subway station. It’s a well-done linear FPS level, yet it doesn’t look or feel like a level in a game, there’s nothing in it that says ‘This isn’t a real subway station’. Enemies still manage to show up when you aren’t expecting it despite all this. There was very little backtracking to be done on it, and a few points where you could choose two paths to get to where you were going, but you never have the problem you see in games with true realistic level design where you are wandering from room to room without knowing where to go next.
Variety and Quality of Weapons - there were 12 weapons, I believe, not counting grenades, plastic explosives, and flashbangs. ALL of them were useful, even later in the game. The knife was deadly at close range, and could be used for silent short range kills by throwing it. The 9mm had a good clip, decent rate of fire, and high accuracy. The .44 was noticeably more powerful, but slower, with a much smaller clip and less ammo available. The shotgun was as good as any other FPSs shotgun, without being too good (in early levels before the other weapons were available there were still plenty of situations where it was best to switch back to your pistol even though you had ammo for the shotgun, because the spread made it ineffective at range). The sniper rifle was powerful enough to be useful, but didn’t fall into the trap I see in other games with one, where it’s so powerful it doesn’t matter where you hit your enemy. It was also slow enough that you don’t want to use it for anything but long-range sniping. When it comes to the SMGs, there is one flaw - if you had ammo for the suppressed Uzi, there was no reason to use the less powerful one, as it was less accurate and less powerful. The only reason I used it one I had access to the Uzi was that it’s ammo was very plentiful. The HMG is perhaps too useful, as it’s powerful, fairly accurate, has a good rate of fire, and the secondary fire (phosphorus grenades) are quite useful - but you don’t get it until later and you can’t use it all the time due to the ammo requirements. I like the slugthrower a lot, it’s about the closest thing I can find in a modern game to the plasma rifle of Doom - fires a fast but not instant-hit projectile with a small splash damage radius where it hits. It’s secondary fire is a flashbang launcher, which I did use sometimes but not as often as I used the secondary fire on the HMG. It’s also almost worthless against heavily armored targets. The rocket launcher is extremely destructive with a big splash damage area, but is slow to reload - you won’t use it like the rocket launcher in Quake or similar games as a primary weapon, you have to plan it’s use. The maser is fun, the secondary fire can inflate and explode enemies in a steamy wet mess, the primary fire is good on armored targets and also has the added benefit of temporarily incapacitating opponents even if you just quickly swing it’s beam across them. All in all, there is little fault to be found in the weapons of SoF.
AI - enemies don’t just stand there when you shoot their buddies, and if you make enough noise they will come running from rooms away - the game will actually spawn more enemies nearby if you make enough noise on the harder difficulty levels, which is something I usually don’t like, but it kept me from being too noisy even when I was sure I had cleared out all the areas behind me. Enemies dodge, take cover, flee when wounded, surrender if disarmed.
Graphics and Animation - enemies are animated fluidly and realistically, and react naturally to being shot in various parts of their bodies. The character design is varied and well done, with high poly-counts. The enemies look a lot better than the ones in more recent games like Max Payne, and they move a LOT better (the character animation in Max Payne is one of it’s worst features). Levels are colorful, weapon effects are impressive, fogging is used on some levels for looks and tactical effects, not to reduce what has to be drawn, The weapon models are beautiful, when I first got the game I would sometimes just hold the knife and turn around to see how the light played off of it. The levels are NOT as detailed as newer games like Max Payne, but the game is two years old. They are definitely better than the environments in Deus Ex, though not as interactive (and this is no slam on Deus Ex, which is one of my favorite games). I was amazed with what they were able to accomplish with the Quake 2 engine.
All in all, SoF is one of the best FPSs out there. It has struck a perfect balance between realism and run-and-gun gameplay.
These are now sold in an Uber-Bundle together. You get Unreal, Unreal Return to Na-Pali, and Unreal Tournament GOTY Edition. Fairly cheap, I think.
Well I didn’t play SOF until only a few months ago, so I can’t really consider its merits relativee to when it did come out. But when I played it I still wasn’t intrigued by it. It was perfectly okay, and I did bother to finish the game, but after that I didn’t really have any interest.
Max Payne is new and it does pretty much everything you like about SOF, plus it is at times hilarious and always pretty as hell. The enemies may possibly not look any better than SOF, but I’m usually never close enough to notice.
Realism. Soldier of Fortune. Heh heh. I assume you think that perfect balance is 100% “run-and-gun”?
Another vote for Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament also for Half-Life. These three games represent the core of first person-shooters I play. I also play a lot of games on MAME, which stands for Multi Arcade Machine Emulator and enables me to play all the old classics (well, 3123 different games). MAME is an open-source project and is free for download on the internet. I highly recommend it. I’ve been playing more with old arcade classics on MAME than with the other newer games I own.
I also recommend Sacrifice if you’re into RTS-style army manipulations and RPG-style character developpement, all delivered with amazing graphics.
I said it was balanced between realism and ‘run-and-gun’, which implies it has an equal share of both. It’s not a totally realistic game at all, but it’s considerably more realistic than most FPSs. The game was not 100% run-and-gun, on the harder difficulty levels if you just run through the levels shooting everything that moves you WILL die quickly. You basically have to be cautious and check out what you are up against from a position of relative safety, and then devise the best means to attack. In some cases, running in with guns blazing will work, in others you have to be considerably more careful.
Take that Siberian level…if you just run into any of the areas with a turret, you are going to be cut down in the time it takes the turret to face you + 3/4 of a second or so, even if you are at full health and armor. The great thing about the game is that if you are playing on easy you can play it as a dumb shooter and do OK, but if you want something more realistic, crank up that difficulty - same thing with Deus Ex - on easier difficulty levels you don’t need to be stealthy if you choose the right implants and skills, but on ‘Realistic’ you WILL have to be careful, even if you choose a lot of destructive skills.
This one can be hard to find, but it’s pretty old and can be had pretty cheap: LucasArts’ Outlaws
Every software company making FPS’ should be forced to play this game through, with the instructions “THIS is how you put atmosphere into a game.”
And the direct3d patch from LucasArts finally came out a month or two ago. Weird.
Not so. I had the Direct3D patch a couple of years ago, and played the game when I had a Voodoo 1 video card. IIRC, it did take LucasArts awhile to come out with the patch (the game was already fairly old when I bought it), but not nearly as late as you suggest.
Now that’s odd. I wonder why all the news sites made such a big point out of the patch then? Was it a newer version?
When it comes to senseless violence, there’s one game that’s really just made for it.
Grand Theft Auto 2. This game is designed perfectly. You can play seriously if you want, and try to gain gang respect, or if you’re in the mood for carnage, grab the kill frenzys or a truck and start mowing 'em down.
I would like to also vouch for Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines and Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty.
The idea is you control military special operatives through World War 2 covert missions. Pretty damn fun.
Oh, if you do get Half-Life and like it, you should also nab Opposing Force. I liked it more than the original. But for the love of god don’t buy Blue Shift!