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2025 is going to be a hell of a year for first-person shooter fans. It’s not just that we’re getting more new shooters than you can fit in a magazine, but the sheer depth and breadth of what’s coming is already beating a quieter 2024.
So, here are the 12 FPS games I’m most excited about for 2025, in no particular order. Pour one out here for Metroid Prime 4 though, a game that I’m certain is going to be amazing but I’m equally certain it’ll never see the warm glow of your PC’s OLED monitor.
Splitgate 2
For a blissful summer in 2021, everyone was playing Splitgate. Splitgate’s sell was Halo with portals, intense arena combat that armed every player with a portal gun and set them loose for high speed murder. During that breakout season, it was easy to get a match and what incredible matches they were. Then the game vanished without a trace, played by only a fraction of that summer crowd at any time in the years that followed. 1047 Games dropped support in 2022 so they could work on something new.
Splitgate 2 is the something new, and my excitement is palpable. Splitgate was a great proof of concept but while Splitgate was made by 15 developers on a shoestring, 1047 has scaled up to nearly 100 devs for Splitgate 2, expanding its arena shooting with class-based multiplayer and revamped three-lane map designs. Splitgate 2 should feel distinct and offer a different vibe to the first game, but as long as this sequel allows me to, again, use portals to snipe from the relative safety of my own spawn I’ll be there day one.
Atomfall
“Stalker 2 but set in middle of the century England.” That’s the promise at the heart of Atomfall, and it will provide a quintessential vision of a British apocalypse, served up by Rebellion (the Sniper Elite folks). In the chunk I played at Gamescom 2024, I found that inherent Britishness went much deeper than you just finding a Cornish Pasty and visiting a pub, although that definitely features (and with a pub to rival Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture’s, no less) but you can leather a bunch of British lads with painted faces with a cricket bat, if you’re so inclined. Weapons otherwise seem to be clunky and unwieldy things, making combat feel jarring and difficult.
The Stalker comparison might seem gauche, but as that game takes inspiration from the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, Atomfall draws inspiration from the UK’s own nuclear incident, the Windscale fire. The UK government of the time heavily censured the event, and Atomfall uses that to inform its own tale: What else were they covering up?
Killing Floor 3
Killing Floor is back, and I cannot wait. Killing Floor was one of Steam’s earlier success stories, growing from an Unreal Tournament mod to a full-fledged series, and for the third instalment, Tripwire Interactive is leaning hard on its core pillars of smooth gunplay, satisfying progression and buckets of gore. Expect to get messy with this one—when I visited Tripwire’s Georgia headquarters in 2024 to take a look at the game, most of the chatter there was about the many many ways you can shred Zeds, including enemy skulls that flower and deform in a variety of different ways depending on exactly where you shoot them.
This dismemberment is tactical of course. The Zeds you’ll face in Killing Floor 3 have been augmented as the series jumps from body horror to science fiction, but the best way to make sure you aren’t killed by a hulking monster with guns for arms is to blow those arms off at the elbow. You can bring up to four players into the fray for this one, and with each character now having their own special abilities and gadgets, you’ll want to squad up to make as much carnage as possible.
Doom: The Dark Ages
No matter what type of shooter fan you are, there’s a DOOM game you’ll love, and there’s a chance each new entry will do something truly new. Me, I love the spectacle of a singleplayer FPS done right. Every Doom offers an excellent solo experience, but Doom: The Dark Ages feels like it’s going to deliver spectacle in spades.
Expect every dial in Doom: The Dark Ages to be turned up to 11, building on the success of Doom: Eternal but also taking some wild swings. Doom’s 2016 reboot set the stakes here—an arena shooter with no time for yapping and all the time in the world for brutal glory kills on the denizens of hell as you wage a one man war on the forces of chaos. Doom Eternal made things bigger and more ridiculous but with early rumours from those who saw the game at Quakecon suggesting you ride a dragon, Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel that’s going to have you going medieval on everyone’s asses.
Borderlands 4
Borderlands is incredibly popular, a co-op shooter with reams of weird weapons and an action-RPG sensibility that has you sifting for loot. We don’t know much about how Borderlands 4 will play yet, but we do know the sequel is headed to a new planet called Kairos. We’ll also get four new vault hunters, as is Borderlands tradition, and this time Gearbox is putting a special emphasis on new movement abilities.
Borderlands 4 is Gearbox’s first project since it was sold off by Embracer Group to Take-Two Interactive, the studio’s longtime publishing partner, and also the first since the Borderlands movie.
The original game was somewhat faddy, built on the promise of 17,750,000 different weapons and a deep vein of toilet humour. It’s slowly matured, and I’ve found myself quietly excited by the new game, mostly because of the writers involved. Indie developer (and former PC Gamer columnist) Xalavier Nelson, Dropout’s Ify Nwadiwe and even Miles Luna of Rooster Teeth are just some of the names doing writing for the game. Could Borderlands finally grow up a bit? It’s looking like it.
Battlefield 6
We know next to nothing about what EA has planned for its next Battlefield game, but we know two things: it’s going to be set in the modern day, and FPS visionary Vince Zampella is in the top chair to try and deliver a return to force for the series.
This one is aiming for 2025, and fans are clamouring for it too: Despite a flat reaction at launch, Battlefield 2042 was one of the best selling games of 2024 on Steam last year. However, the plan is for continued playtesting, so someone will get to play the next Battlefield this year, even if it’s not the general public.
The as-yet untitled Battlefield 6 will likely be a back-to-basics affair, with class-based multiplayer and high-tempo combined-arms warfare looking to capture an audience that’s being tempted away by free-to-play efforts like Delta Force. I’m confident that, whether Battlefield 6 is solid gold or a flawed gem, it’ll be one of the biggest multiplayer shooters of the year.
Call of Duty 2025
The other huge big-budget shooter in 2025 will be Call of Duty. The big question here is what type of Call of Duty game we’ll get. Until 2023’s Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty was in good form, but the rushed sequel’s tepid reception was enough to shake confidence in the franchise. Last year’s Black Ops 6 was well received and while I wasn’t enamoured with the campaign I did fall hard for the multiplayer which offered up fun blasting and a ridiculous amount of progression.
While it’s not going to reinvent the wheel, 2025’s Call of Duty is a bit of a mystery. The usual cycle of CoD studios would suggest that it’s Infinity Ward’s turn at the helm again. Its last game, Modern Warfare 2, was great, but the studio’s many unpopular changes to Warzone (many of which were reversed over time) will have some fans skeptical.
Judas
Set on a disintegrating spaceship, Judas is channeling Bioshock vibes but in a brand new setting. This is Ken Levine’s first release since Bioshock Infinite, and it’s exciting because Levine is exceptional at building worlds – the undersea world of Bioshock or SWAT 4’s serial killer house are classics in terms of level design, and if Judas can deliver, why wouldn’t you want to be lost in space?
Judas hews close to Bioshock in gameplay too, and it looks like you’ll have a range of weapons in addition to a few innate powers you can use to splatter your enemies and solve puzzles.
Unrecord
Unrecord is a single-player FPS where you play a police officer and view the action from the nausea-inducing angle of his body camera. It’s a strong aesthetic choice that should make the game feel different from the glut of cop shooters.
It’ll play a little differently too. Footage of the game in action makes it look tense and slow paced, and developers Drama are saying that players will need to be quick with the trigger and their brain to get to the bottom of things. Screenshots have your character picking their way through dilapidated buildings armed only with a Glock and a flashlight, so I’m hoping the pace is going to feel distinct to a lot of other games coming out this year.
Sand
Anakin Skywalker might hate Sand, but Hologryph’s PvPvE sand-’em-up just had a beta and people seem to be pretty hyped about it. Sand is an extraction shooter where you head out into the dusty wasteland of the planet Sophie to complete contracts.
Escape From Tarkov this is not, however. Sand is all about your Trampler, a giant mech that stomps across the sand as you try to tame the vicious world and the other players inhabiting it. You and your friends will man the Trampler like a Sea of Thieves vessel, although with what appears to be a whole lot more shooting. Weapons here look tactile in gameplay footage, while gunfights are filled with hulking turrets, showers of sparks and a friend running around with a spanner trying to keep the Trampler from exploding. Expect a taste of Rust on each mission as players attempt to infiltrate your mech to kill the crewmembers within.
Phantom Line
This co-op FPS puts you in the shoes of a paranormal S.W.A.T team, doing battle with creepy Control-esque anomalies while a nuclear war rages around you. Expect missions to have you infiltrating the site of anomalies while evading the warring groups and then taking care of business like the paramilitary arm of the Ghostbusters.
Gameplay also shows us Husks, artificial bodies that you can switch between at any time. Pair this up with oodles of loot to sift through and this could be a great co-op game for people who want a few scares but are left feeling helpless by something like Lethal Company.
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Kurt Indovina
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