



The hills are alive with propagating fire

It's amazing to think that eight years after Crytek's Crysis (2007) came out, it's still the metric for PC performance. The game itself, like Far Cry (2004) before it, was an unextraordinary romp through a jungle archipelago that—breathtaking, graphics card-crippling visuals aside—was notable for the cool nanosuit that could make you near-invisible and for the agency you had in completing objectives however you saw fit.

The dynamic approach to jungle firefights was better implemented in the 2008 Ubisoft-developed Far Cry sequel, which sent you to modern-day Central Africa to burn some grassy hills. Far Cry 2 put you in the midst of a bloody civil war over diamonds where morality was a sliding scale. The game let you loose with the information only that you were supposed to assassinate a gun runner called The Jackal.

The game's smart AI, bumpy roads, misbehaving cars, amoral soldiers, self-surgery, degrading weapons, ambush convoys, crazy plotlines, and grazing wildlife all combined to make it one of the more believable and immersive open worlds we've yet seen. But the real highlight of Far Cry 2 was starting a fire downwind of some bad guys—accidentally or on purpose—and cackling maniacally as they fled the onrushing flames.

F.E.A.R. of acronyms

First-person shooters were flirting with horror as far back as Doom, but F.E.A.R. (2005) went ahead and married FPS to the supernatural. It used all the tricks of a good psychological horror movie—moody lighting, spooky sounds, frightening bad guys, great physicality, long claustrophobic corridors, and a creepy, ghostly little girl that kept appearing unexpectedly.

Open-world survival shooters, meanwhile, could learn much from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007), which put you in the very real, very ruined and abandoned Chernobyl and Pripyat region of Ukraine. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. didn't need horror tropes to scare you; it was terrifying just to be in its threatening, bleak world, where other people were desperate, and every environment—be it an abandoned building, a bandit camp, a lonely path, a mutant-infested hillside, or whatever else—seemed to hold painful memories of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Most of all, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was proof that first-person shooters can be slow and contemplative, beautiful and subtly horrific—a lesson that developers could still learn.

The likes of Fallout and Borderlands seem frivolous by comparison, but the growing influence of Eastern European developers may yet see S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s approach replicated. The closest so far is 4A Games' Metro series, which started in 2010 with Metro 2033. Less wild and much fiddlier than S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the Metro games nonetheless depict the post-nuclear-apocalypse with a harsh and cold bleakness—right down to the faulty gas masks and improvised bullets—that is stunning to behold—right up until you get sick of the quick-time events and annoying monsters.

Disarmed

Valve's extraordinary Portal (2007) came as a huge surprise as an addition to the Orange Box compilation that Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2 went to retail in. The gaming world was stunned and delighted by the game's puzzling promises of cake. It was all predicated upon using a neat portal-creating gun to help your character, Chell, make her way through a sequence of challenge rooms under the watchful gaze of (actually malicious) AI system GLaDOS—the only other character in the game (unless you count the companion cube). As with all successful genre innovations, Portal birthed a new puzzle-heavy first-person subgenre. And around the same time the so-called "walking simulator" genre (which is actually an exploration genre, not a real walking sim ) got its start with Half-Life 2 mod Dear Esther.

DICE's 2008 cult hit Mirror's Edge took shooter-fatigue FPS design in a rather different direction. At a time when parkour was still new to 3D video games, you guided courier Faith across walls and over rooftops to avoid the police and bad guys who were all after her. A distinct, minimalist art style heavy in reds and whites helped focus your fevered dash for safety, while Faith's forward momentum forced instinctive edge-of-your-seat choices about when to slide, climb, roll, jump, or stop and fight. The shooting was ironically the worst part of the game, which thankfully you could play for the most part unarmed.

Perhaps there was a touch of Metroid Prime (2002) influence—the celebrated first-person GameCube adventure had downplayed the shooting and instead pushed exploration and fluid acrobatic platforming as the core attraction. In any case, Mirror's Edge was a clear statement that shooters should stop worrying so much about having enough dudes to shoot in the face—the genre was always more about movement, anyway.