The best FPS games of 2024
2024 was a stellar year for shooters, here's a few for your playlist
Hey, welcome to 2025! Hopefully, you all had a restful end of the year. I poked at the new Tarkov wipe, but I've still been playing Dota 2 a whole lot, which is a pain because it's not a shooter and there's not much I can say about it other than how the hell have I poured 3000 hours into this game since 2012?
Luckily, I don't have to write a newsletter about new shooters this week because it's a time for reflection, and 2024 has been exciting not just because there's been a glut of excellent shooters, but also because several of the games on this list—and more that aren't— feel like they've moved the genre forwards. I want to see the next generation of shooters inspired by games we've seen this year, and I'm genuinely excited for what 2025 can bring. I've chosen just four games here, because I understand it's difficult to find time to play anything these days, let alone a huge list of games.
Helldivers 2
Helldivers 2 is one of the best co-op games ever made. Arrowhead Studios have been making deliberately chaotic games for years but this is the one that's hit the big time, a sophisticated third-person shooter that hides its best tricks beneath a mess of team killing and high explosives.
It's been a tricky year for Arrowhead Studios, as Helldivers 2 has launched from relative obscurity and quickly became the year's biggest game. This double-edged sword of popularity has meant that Helldivers 2's community has clashed with the developers as it grappled publicly with weapon balancing, difficulty and even the recent introduction of paid crossover skins with its recent Killzone crossover.
Throughout this though, it's been hard not to respect Arrowhead's open communication and almost infectious enthusiasm.
More importantly, Helldivers 2 is just great fun. The weapons feel satisfying, quickly tapping your WASD keys to drop high ordnance on your friends and enemies is both tense and easy to pick up and each of the three enemy factions are intricately designed and fun.
I don't enjoy Helldivers 2 much solo, but as a co-op game it feels like the most pivotal co-op shooter since Left 4 Dead, and if it doesn't cause a paradigm shift in the genre it'll be a crying shame.
I Am Your Beast
I Am Your Beast is a first-person shooter that asks you to move at breakneck pace while you're er, breaking necks. I Am Your Beast owes a debt to Hotline Miami, and nearly every mission in the game will be won or lost in under 60 seconds. There's more nuance than that, I Am Your Beast is a cutback shooter that brings out the best in the genre and lets anyone get to the good stuff in short 30-second chunks. And honestly, more games should weaponise bees.
You play as pulpy antihero Alphonse Harding, trying to enjoy his retirement from his job as a killer for the US military until the military decides they want him back. Harding is broken, as animalistic as the wildlife in the formerly quiet forest that has served until now as Harding's own fortress of solitude. Your enemy has numbers, weaponry and freaking helicopters. But they don't have Alphonse Harding, a murder tornado that will be the last person standing after everyone else has hit the ground.
Harding has a home turf advantage, and his mobility to scale trees, leap through branches and even turn the enemies bear traps and mines against them all serve to share that advantage with the player. You'll need this, because when things go hard you'll have to move fast and work really hard to stay alive.
Disclaimer: Xalavier Nelson Jr and Dan Pearce are friends of mine, but I get no financial benefit or recompense for recommending I Am Your Beast here.
STRAFTAT
Straftat is a middle finger to modern first-person shooter design, a 1v1 shooter that asks you to triumph in kill-or-be-killed matches against your opponent. Each round is a best-of-three throwdown, and the winner of a few of these matches (six by default), gets the prize.
I love Straftat, but I've written so damn much about it I don't know if I have it in me to write anymore. Here's the PC Gamer team (and myself) talking about why it's PC Gamer's best FPS of 2024, but I also adore Rick Lane's review over at RPS.
It's free to download on Steam, so there's basically no reason you shouldn't try it out for yourself. That the Lemaitre Bros managed to make a game this tightly designed and interesting and then gave it away for free in the middle of the capitalist hellscape that 2024 became is incredulous.
Echo Point Nova
Echo Point Nova is equal parts Tribes and Crackdown, a first-person shooter where you rocket between floating arenas and mess up all of the enemies within them, slowly accumulating extra skills and new weapons with each victory.
There's a story, but it largely passed me by: you're an explorer who's crashed on an island full of mercenaries. The mercenaries are murderous because of course they are. But I mashed my keyboard during every dialogue screen so that I could get back to rocketing around the place on a hoverboard, rocketing around at roughly 1,000MPH, using the floaty physics to bounce through arenas, skid along the top of gargantuan enemies and pull off cool tricks.
If you can remember Crackdown, Echo Point Nova even has floaty agility orbs that will allow you to stay airborne for longer as you collect more and more of them. You can play the game in co-op or single-player, but I think it's the perfect game to play with a friend as you both dart through arenas, blowing stuff up and occasionally blasting past each other at lightspeed while giggling.
Gibs
- Honourable mentions for games that I liked that I didn't quite make the cut: Anger Foot, Wild Bastards, Mullet Madjack, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, Children of the Sun.
- My favourite movie this year was probably Rebel Ridge.
- The best album was probably Charli XCX's Brat, but Hinds' Viva Hinds was exceptional.
- A couple of newsletters I've really enjoyed this year were Ryan Rigney's Push To Talk and Rick Lane's Demo Disc