The Best First Person Shooter of 2016

Honorable Mention: Battlefield 1

It’s award season here at Twinfinite! Starting with a few runner ups, let’s look back at the best FPS games from this year and our 2016 winner!

This is a tough freaking year for first person shooters wanting to stand out among the crowd. Battlefield 1 is an awesome game, yet it’s just an honorable mention on our list of the best of 2016.

Battlefield 1 earns serious brownie points though for rolling the dice and creating a game that takes place during World War I, one of the most notoriously deadly (but also slow) wars of all time. The campaign is entertaining though at times just downright silly, but where it lacks in historical accuracy, Battlefield 1 makes up for in spades in atmosphere, sound, and visual effects. If there is a game that you would want to play in 4K with headphones, this is the one.

Battlefield 1’s multiplayer offerings continues the series’ tradition of epic battles taking place on huge maps, and ups the ante with its new mode, Operations. Operations plays out like a massive game of Conquest across several maps, with a dash of historical significance to give some meaning to what you’re doing. Attackers try to take over territory while defenders hold out as long as they can. Matches can take over an hour, and it certainly feels like a war. Victory is sweet, and defeat is super disheartening.

Second Runner Up: Doom

Doom is one of two particular FPS titles this year that helped make the single player campaign cool again. The grand daddy of the single player FPS experience came out of retirement to tell Call of Duty to get off its lawn and show the world how they used to do campaigns back in its day.

Combat is fast-paced and chaotic with a soundtrack that perfectly compliments the action. Weapons are varied, and most importantly fun to use; a crucial feather to have in your cap when your game is mostly about killing demons over and over again for hours on end. Maps have an old school feel to them, encouraging exploration instead of throwing you down a hallway filled with endless lines of enemies. Doom can get real old school on your ass, too, if you up the difficulty.

Somewhere along the line, FPS games became more about competition (which is cool too) instead of just being games you could enjoy alone. Doom reminded us that there were good FPS experiences before the internet, and you can still play one on your own today and have a good time.

First Runner Up: Overwatch

Overwatch is far and away the best class-based shooter to release since Team Fortress 2. Few games have arrived so incredibly well put together and balanced at launch. When people talk about games from the famed developer taking ages to get that “Blizzard Polish” just right, Overwatch is the end result they are referring to.

What’s extra impressive about Overwatch is that not only does it feature multiple, clearly defined and balanced roles such as Support, Defense and Offense, there’s varied gameplay options within those roles themselves, which adds a ton of depth to matches. It’s hard not to find a character/class that you fall in love with because of how perfect its play style is for you.

Also, Overwatch has an incredibly addictive ranked competitive mode that puts teamwork and winning at the forefront over personal achievement. Sure, there are still some kinks to be worked out, such as how to properly rate Support classes, but overall, there’s a foundation in place for people to compete for years to come.

It’s because of this effort on the multiplayer end that Overwatch was named our Best Multiplayer Experience of 2016. However, the next game is a title that put it together this year on both Single player and Multiplayer fronts, and edges out even the mighty Overwatch.

Winner: Titanfall 2

They really don’t make them like Titanfall 2 anymore. The rest of the games on this list nail their niche perfectly, but sometimes at the expense of another area. Titanfall 2 pulls everything off and it’s why we also nominated it for our overall Game of the Year.

Its campaign is one of the most well paced, fabulously written and voice acted FPS campaigns we’ve seen in a long time. At no point does Titanfall 2 ever wear out its welcome. Every mission adds a new quirk to make it feel different than the last, and instead of dragging anything out, it ends at just the right time.

It also has just as much replay value as the other great multiplayer games on this list. Titanfall 2 is incredibly addicting without needing a carrot on a stick… it’s simply just so much fun to play. There are a variety of game types — ones where you can play only as Pilots, or have a last mech standing Deathmatch with Titans — but Titanfall 2 shines brightest when you play the modes that have both sides interact together. Matches are whirlwinds that start out as your typical (but highly polished) twitchy, past-paced FPS experience and then evolve into a much more methodical, chess-like atmosphere once Titans start dropping on the field. Pulling off crazy moves like parkouring across half the map as a Pilot to dodge fire from massive mech, or ejecting high into the sky from a doomed Titan, just never gets old.

Read more about why Titanfall 2 was one of the most important games of 2016 right here if you so wish, but know for now that it was the most complete shooter experiences of 2016 and the winner of our Best First Person Shooter Award for 2016!