What's a good slow paced shooter game?
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.
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.
Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but Hunt: Showdown is a pvpve experience set in a fictionalized horror-themed 1900s old west.
The guns have few shots and are very slow to reload. Often your best strategy is to move very slowly and deliberately, looking closely for any movement from other players, taking care not to make any errant noises. Every single sound you make, including right clicking to aim down sights, is audible to your opponent if they're close enough. One good shot is enough to down someone.
The result is a unique experience that can hit both extremes: agonizingly slow build up of anticipation, or a fast paced chase through the woods to cut off an escape.
Also the sound in that game is absolutely top tier. It's very easy to pinpoint a location of a sound, making noise a high priority while moving around.
Portal?
Hell Let Lose is a WW2 simulator game,
You can play it like cod and run around but all that gets you is killed by some guy who's creeping a corner or whatever.
It's best played slow and tactically following orders from your squad leader who gets orders from the match commander.
One or two bullets will kill you and half the time if you're not being careful you won't know what happened to you.
Then the slow pace is suddenly juxtaposed by a fierce fire fight defending your location while tanks shell you and artillery rains down.
I had this exact argument about Day of Defeat back before Counterstrike got assimilated by Valve. I had no respect for all the bunny hopping in CS, but enjoyed the slow(er) gameplay and strict limitations of DoD (such as running 40 meters and then panting, very realistic representation of my own fitness lmao).
I would also recommend Hell Let Loose. We recently had a game night with about 6 friends who all come from call of duty style, faster paced games. All of them mentioned how slow it felt and half of them were able to adjust to the new style and did pretty good. I would compare it to Battlefield but in a hardcore mode with less destructable environments.
Yeah that's one thing I miss about the game, not having destructible environments. I understand why though the matches go for an hour and a half fighting back and forth there would be nothing left on the map
Hunt Showdown
Escape from Tarkov checks all these boxes.
It’s by my definition dead tho, as its playerbase consists currently of highly experienced players and cheaters.
I play it but I also got close to 3000h.
Edit: It’s the polar opposite of cod, the only thing they have in common are guns.
I had quite a bit of fun on the PVE mode, but it's not as fun as PvP. I just don't have the time to commit anymore.
Escape from Tarkov has a PVE mode now, so you dont gotta deal with the sweaties of PVP. Any of the tactical looter shooters have a slow vibe. Tarkov was intense and difficult for a long time, but my bestie was my Sherpa, so to speak, and we go into maps together and I can handle myself now. It has a hideout building aspect, so your loot goes towards something. There's quests from the trade vendors, that all builds a lore to the game that has a lot of secrecy. I dunno a lot of it, but it's fun to figure out. It also has weapon building, where all the weapons are able to be taken apart and sold for parts or pieced together with the parts you want. The ammo has stats on what can penetrate armor, and the armor has a plate system so you can buy or find better plates for it. There's a durability aspect too, and weapons can jam and need to be evaluated and then clearing the malfunction. There's bosses, too. And different factions to deal with. Many are ill equiped, and some are decked out in gear with big weapons. Your character can die with one shot if there's no armor there. Or you can tank a bunch of shots if you're kitted out. There's even a flea market that's player based. So the prices can make your character rich, if you play the market or sell stuff. Like, selling a chocolate bar can net you 100k, because they're fast food during in-raid. Oh, and there's a whole water + food system. So you have to find food and water to keep that going. You have to use the right meds for the right situation; splits for fractures, bandages for light bleeds, tournequits for heavy bleeds, pain killers, injector pens for status effects and medkits to heal, after you deal with all those situations. Some medkits even cover a lot of the various things, some inject pens cover various things too.
It's pretty in-depth.
The game is based in Russia though. Your character is without a faction, despite picking one "USEC" OR "BEAR." But that's just how you got into the city; USEC was the corporations mercenary group, BEARs were the military. And it takes place after the fighting, your character sorta got out of the faction. Unless you do a scavenger (scav) run, everyone is unfriendly. Scavs all stick together except the boss and their goons might pop you.
It doesn't seem to have anything to do with real politics, far as I've seen? But the lore deals with the corporate greed, military powers, and regular scavenger people all kinda vying for survival in a war torn city of Tarkov. It's a weird lore, but interesting for a game and intense gunfights of fire, move, cover, fire, move, cover. Be wary of a clicking grenade and run.
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
"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
I highly recommend Void Bastards
Pretty much any immersive-sim, Prey, Deus Ex, Thief, Dishonored, System Shock Remake.
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.
Insurgency Sandstorm
If you can mind the obnoxious patriotic undertones, Hell Divers is actually my go to game rn. Partly hate it for the mentioned but overall, pretty decent game. I'm not a hard core gamer really (in general) but the game has grown on me and it's PvE so it's fun being able to play with others instead of being toxic.
I'd like to second what priapus said - Helldivers is actually making fun of the type of blind patriotism you find obnoxious. It's heavily inspired by Starship Troopers which is also a comedy movie making fun of that type of obnoxious patriotism. It's all very tongue in cheek, devs aren'y actually pushing the patriotism.
I'm with you guys... and I do see that. It's just obnoxious to me, nonetheless. 🤷♂️
Interested in why you call them patriotic “undertones” lol. The patriotism is overt to the point that if you miss that it’s satire you may be missing out on half of the experience of the game
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.
I can highly recommend War Of Rights. Multiplayer only American civil war fps.
You form a long line in a field with 20 odd men facing the enemy line. It takes around 25 seconds to reload your gun, while the enemy is firing at you.
"Gentlemen, take aim, steady, steadyyy, steadyyyyyy, FIRE!"
The whole team gets penalised if you die out of line or duck for cover.
Sniper Ghost Warrior 2.
Postal 2
SUPERHOT moves at your pace. Though it definitely does make you feel superhuman, just in a different way.
SUPER. HOT.
SUPER. HOT.
too bad its a very short game.
ARMA series
TheHunter: call of the wild is the slowest fps I've ever played, its luxuriously chill. Mostly walking through beautifully executed forests during different weather and times of day to spot a group of deer drinking at a lake and then tryna shoot em all before they bolt off. Then the rest of the time is chasing down the blood trail to confirm the kill and get money to buy new weapons. Multiplayer and single player
TBH, I might struggle to actually shoot anyhing if it's as gorgeous as the limited gameplay videos I've seen are depicting it. Slow paced walking simulator where you are challenged to spot wildlife, yes please.
Ive got many hours in this game. It is a very nice and easy going game for sure. There are some bugs that come up everynow and then but overall its a very pleasant game.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R Gamma. Completely free if you don't count the disk space and one of the funnest, and most difficult games I have played.
Running around like most other FPS games will just get you killed. The AI is written in such a way that it correctly understands actual flanking, and when it peeks a corner, it does it exactly the same way a real player would - it's actually scary.
I snuck into some occupied buidlings and killed every enemy except one. I was in a barn which had a front entrance and a hole blown in the back wall. I knew that the last enemy was out the front, across the road, inside the window of a building there, so I went out the hole in the back of the building and around the side, intending to go behind a fence and then behind their building to get them. When I got to a place I should have been able to see them, they weren't there. I turned around and they were behind me along the fence - I nearly shit my pants. When I had the idea to go around back, the AI apparently had the idea to run out the front of their building into the front entrance of mine, and take me from behind by complete surprise - essentially the same exact tactic I had thought of.
It was then I realized how great the AI actually was and now every time I play I live in complete fear.
Since years I'm enjoying with The Dark Mod, a Thief like First Person stealth (FPS-, puzzle-, strategy-, adventure -, survival,-,horror-, RPG elements, depending on the mission) game (Windows, Linux, Mac), there isn't a need of an fast gameplay. It's 100% free and currently with 170 fan made missions, which you can download and add direct from the game menu.
Stalker games. Slow careful trudge through unforgiving environments. If you go in blasting and running, you won't last long.
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.
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.
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.
Selaco, with the way I play it. The enemies kick my ass all the time because I always just go guns blazing. I've had to relearn to use cover and such.
I find they kick my ass because they're often hard to see until they're already shooting at me
Due Process. 5v5 tactical shooter with (mostly) procedurally generated maps.
Hell Let Loose
It's a larger-scale online FPS (50v50 maps) and a single bullet will kill you even up to great distances. There is no rushing in; that will just get you killed. You need to work as a team and advance with a plan to really get a win.
Ready or Not has gotten to be pretty solid.
Second. Performance should probably be better (I was struggling before I upgraded), but it is great fun. Very, very dark in subject matter.
Too bad the devs are copaganda pushing alt-righters. Was looking forward to a successor to SWAT but RoN ain't it
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!
Metal Gear Solid series
Indiana Jones. Stealth and hand to hand are gonna get you to the end better than trying to one man army it
Squad
Look for single player stuff, I found the Bioshock games incredibly well paced.
Someone else mentioned Prey (2017), I'll echo that here because for my money it's the best those games ever get. Also the original System Shock holds up amazingly well.
Are you explicitly looking for competitive multiplayer games? Single player shooters like Prey, or the BioShock games, might be able to fulfill what you're looking for. I like Helldivers 2, as well. It's not slow per se, but your fighting AI and not people so insane reflexes are far from important. It's coop but very worth your time.
Cs2
Fallout games allow you to be as slow as you want with the right builds. It's never too fast tbh.
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.
The Far Cry games pretty much always allow a sniper and/or stealth option. Some of the scripted mission sequences can be fast paced, but it's largely open world. If you're not familiar with them, stick to the games with numbers in the titles for starters. Probably not 6. Maybe not 2 this day and age. 3-6 all exist with a particular style in mind.
Unless you're anti ubisoft
Arma Reforger
if you wouldn't mind 3rd person stuff then I would recommend "conflict: " game series
Virtua cop
You have to reload "manually" 😁
Generation Zero. Player power builds slowly, especially in single player.