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Call them what you like: retro FPS games, your dad’s shooters, boomshoots, or 3D interactive first-person combat software titles for personal computer, we all know what this niche within the shooter market provides: a heady blend of purity, nostalgia and above all, incredible gunfeel.
It’s a niche that developed during the 2010s in response to increasingly over-wrought triple-A shooters who were more concerned with kneeslides and ‘press X to further the narrative’ moments than with giving you satisfying weapons and exciting levels, and it provided indie developers a mandate for assembling shooters using simpler texture and lighting effects achievable by smaller teams.
Boomer shooters have grown into something more significant than a simple trip down memory lane though, and there’s considerable nuance and diversity out here in the weeds. So much so that the subgenre’s cream of the crop really ought to be played by anyone with an interest in shooters as a whole. These, then, are the 10 essentials to tick off and gib your way through.
Amid Evil
Release: 2019 | Developer: Indefatigable | Steam
While most of its ilk is content to simply stroke your head and coo comforting cliches about the good old days, Amid Evil manages to pay its dues to classic corridor shooters while delivering a run of inexhaustibly creative episodes that feel as fresh as they do sinister. In other words: very.
The arsenal’s a real treat here. In lieu of a rocket launcher, you have a staff that fires explosive planets at your abstract, twisted foes. (If you stop to examine it when Earth pops up, you’ll see the map is geographically accurate on it, too.) Instead of a shotgun, it hands you a mace that fires frozen shards that pin enemies to the wall like so many Combine caught by Gordon Freeman’s crossbow bolts. And as you explore new ways to ‘express’ yourself with its magical armoury, Amid Evil’s levels have a way of constantly subverting your expectations and finding new grand concept to fling at you. Remarkably gorgeous and ray-traced for a retro shooter, too.
Dusk
Release: 2018 | Developer: David Szymanski | Steam
Quite simply, the Citizen Kane of this subgenre, a titan of level design and mood-setting told via one man’s journey to a cult-ridden backwoods town. You get a hint that you might be onto something special right from the DOS parody sequence that precedes the main menu, and by the time you’ve eviscerated those first two chanting cultists with a hand scythe in gloriously brown Quake-o-vision, the deal is sealed.
Developer David Szymanski has a knack for pacing levels unmatched by anyone else in this genre. Sometimes it’s a slow escalation culminating in a final arena battle against nigh-endless waves. Other times it begins with an even bigger onslaught, just to mess with you. The only constant is that whenever you’re in a prolonged battle, the mysterious alchemy of enemy placement, weapon characteristics (the shotgun!) and sound design that provides atmospheric immersion and pertinent info all at once.
Selaco
Release: 2024 (Early Access) | Developer: Altered Orbit Studios | Steam
The GZDoom Engine is old enough to be served alcohol in many countries now, but that doesn’t stop those veteran lines of code from serving up one of the most bombastic shooters since F.E.A.R. From the second you awake on the eponymous space station and realise it’s under attack, rarely a second goes by where bullets and office papers aren’t scattered in the air, glass isn’t shattered into spectacular fragments, and you don’t grin to yourself for having pulled off something worthy of a John Woo movie.
Selaco has a real soft spot for Monolith’s aforementioned horror-shooter, but rather than simply chuck in a spooky girl periodically, developer Altered Orbit chooses to pay homage in the form of similarly tactical gunfights against smart SWAT teams with a knack for outflanking you. The levels are absolutely sprawling here, but since there always seems to be a new detail to discover (flush a toilet cleaner down a toilet and find out what we mean) it never feels like dead space.
HROT
Release: 2023 | Developer: Spytihněv | Steam
If you gave HROT no more than three seconds of attention, you’d probably have it down for a Dusk clone. Indeed, brown textures and a shared love of dour backwoods scenery exist in their Venn diagram overlap, but where Spytihněv’s truly, truly fantastic shooter discerns itself is in the setting.
An exercise in economical storytelling, HROT somehow conveys the grim deprivation of life in ‘80s Soviet-occupied Czechia without uttering a word to you. Instead, the alt-history nuclear disaster is inferred by enemies wearing gas masks, abandoned commercial districts and residential apartment blocks, and upsetting radio transmissions that seem to be drifting in from a half-remembered fever dream. Also proud owner of the most unhinged boss designs in all of shooterdom, retro or otherwise.
Graven
Release: 2024 | Developer: Slipgate Ironworks | Steam
Often in this subgenre the temptation is to ask: which old game is it cribbing from, and which era is it pretending it came from? The answer’s usually pretty obvious, but Graven’s happy to muddy the waters and proves that bit more chewy for it. It plays like a puzzle-heavy shooter-RPG hybrid with an eye on Heretic, and it looks like it was released just after the Voodoo 3, but those comforting low-poly enemy designs and retro texture work are disguising something more modern-minded.
Magic’s big in this world. You accumulate spells as you conquer Graven’s roguelike-like dungeons and use them in conjunction with your weapons like Bioshock plasmids, then enjoy some downtime in villages full of NPCs with written dialogue and wares to sell. There are even books! In a boomer shooter! Whatever next? It’s that contrast of frenetic side-strafing and exploring non-combat areas that keeps Graven front of mind in the boomshoot conversation.
Wrath: Aeon of Ruin
Release: 2024 | Developer: KillPixel Games | Steam
A marriage of Quake’s ethereal atmosphere with the gunfights from Quake and level design straight out of, well—Quake, Wrath: Aeon of Ruin took its sweet time to materialise as a full release after years of Early Access teasing, but rewarded our patience in the end.
Running on the old Quake engine, it’s not trying to simply mimic what id Software were doing at the time, but rather to imagine what they’d have done next, if Quake III hadn’t gone into online arena shooter territory. And the biggest praise we can give it is that more often than not, those moments of creative licensing feel absolutely plausible – the double-jumps, the odd twists on how shotguns and railguns work, you could well imagine that id would have come up with them. Like the best boomshoots, it summons an awful lot of atmosphere with those GPU-friendly retro texture assets, too.
Ion Fury
Release: 2019 | Developer: Voidpoint | Steam
Ion Fury appears to be visiting from a parallel universe in which the games industry decided never to develop another game engine after Duke Nukem 3D came out, and instead devoted itself entirely to perfecting the craft of making Build Engine levels instead.
The story, such as it is, is that transhumanist mad scientist Dr. Jadus Heskel has unleashed his cybernetically enhanced monster sprites all over Neo DC and you, a lady with many guns and a knack for quipping, must shoot them all to jam. Despite the Pulitzer committee having overlooked it, Ion Fury has a lot of fun with this premise and the interstitials that punctuate all the LMB work are genuinely enjoyable bits of action sci-fi pastiche.
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun
Release: 2023 | Developer: Auroch Digital | Steam
It’s extraordinary that nobody struck this precise deposit of gold before Auroch Digital in 2023: Warhammer 40K’s stompy marines and gloriously industrial weaponry, coexisting with ‘90s FPS principles. The devs must have felt like they’d invented a PB&J sandwich. Over three brilliantly varied chapters, Boltgun reveals an obsessive knowledge of 40K lore but never overwhelms you with it—instead, it crops up as brilliantly uncaring mission briefings from your overseer as you scour Graia for mysterious shards before they fall into the hands of (you guessed it) cultists, and unleash lore-friendly weapons like Heavy Bolters and Chainsaws against lore-friendly enemies like Plague Toads, Pink Horrors and Chaos Marines.
If you’ve got as much interest in painting miniatures as you do about performing at-home dentistry, you’ll still leave every level with your chest heaving and a grin. There’s a bit of id’s modern DOOM about the arena-style wave encounters that punctuate the levels, asking you to find pinpoint precision and resource management to ruthlessly execute vast swathes of hostile sprites, and whenever you do it you remember why you play shooters.
Remakes and Remasters
Blood: Fresh Supply
Release: 2019 | Developer: Night Dive Studios / Monolith Productions | Steam
In every sense, Blood is the ultimate boomer shooter. Its very inception in 1997 was borne of stubborn refusal to move into fully 3D polygonal worlds and instead stick with the Build Engine that Duke 3D was made in. So it was retro even upon release, over two decades before remaster maestros Night Dive worked up Fresh Supply.
What’s it like now? Like licking a battery. In the best possible way, you understand. Its wonderfully inventive arsenal includes TNT bundles, dual-wield flare guns and a voodoo doll, which gives an early clue as to how unserious and yet shockingly violent the action gets. The enemies are absolutely ruthless, too. Whatever difficulty you usually play on, dial it down two notches and watch yourself still get smeared into pâté.
Quake
Release: 2021 | Developer: Night Dive Studios / id Software | Steam
Go on then, one more Night Dive remaster for the road. We know you know about Quake. You wouldn’t have read this far down an article about boomer shooters if you hadn’t completed all its levels on every difficulty so many times that you could draw them out on graph paper. But what bears repeating is how additive Night Dive’s 2021 remaster is.
Online co-op’s easier than ever to set up thanks to Steam integration, so that’s a biggie. It’s surprising how well Romero, McGee et al’s levels work when you attack them as a duo, given that most people either went solo and then used online play for deathmatch only back in the day. Widescreen support, up to 4K resolution, enhanced lighting and textures, all lovely to have, but Night Dive knows its audience—you can also turn off all the aesthetic changes and enjoy the original just as it looked on release day.
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Kurt Indovina
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