i’m kind of struggling to put this into words but I’ve replayed a bit of Far Cry 2 and was amazed by how much the enviroment reacts to the firefights. The fire mechanic, obviously, but even beyond that sparks fly when you hit metal, sheds or other structures get destroyed, explosions make the plants react to the shockwave and form some little craters.
Then I played Control which has very different style and pace of combat but it has the same thing going on. It’s easily legible but you can feel like there’s a lot of, like, destructive potential filling the air here currently.
Contrast this to something like even Modern Warfare 2 (pick any of the three there is, really) and while it is THE bombastic shooter it still feels flat. Yeah maybe you get a broken window and some bullet decals on the walls but outside of scripted sequences any CoD level looks basically the same at the start and once you’re through it having shot 800 rocket launchers at the place.
So I’m wondering, what other games do this sort of enviroment reaction / cinematic shooting the best, where you can really feel that a lot of very fast objects are hitting a lot of different things and breaking them?
Red Faction: Guerilla and it’s sequels are obvious, I’m thinking Stranglehold and at least Mafia 2 also did this really well. What else is there?
F.E.A.R. belongs on any list of cinematic shooters
Embarassing that this slipped my mind
Max Payne 3 is great
The first 2 Max Paynes are pretty cinematic too
indeed they are definitely deserving of a remake.
I wonder what’s happening with those remakes now that James McAffrey is dead.
It did a great job with lots of particles and shit flying around during gunfights.
most cinematic shooting
brian thompson
too, if you count that Zapruder business
Battlefield bad company 2 - it’s pretty old now, maybe the newer titles are better but that shit was my jam back in the day. The graphics were amazing and the destruction was next level (for its time obviously).
The pinnacle of the series for many reasons, one was that there was a sense of progression in the battle as the map got more and more demolished. The final few tickets of the game are always fought among rubble and the stumps of downed trees.
Good call. But also the newer titles are way worse at this specific thing for some reason
BLACK on PS2 wasn’t actually as dynamic as it appeared but it was cinematic as hell and looked incredible for it’s time.
Just a warning as someone who never played it at the time but always wanted to and had a go a few years ago. The controls are not what you’d expect from a modern console shooter. Frustrating because they could have used goldeneye style controls and m+K was well established on PC by then, but there you have it.
If you want an FPS that does that, the Battlefield Bad Company series (1 and 2) was pretty good in this regard, from what I remember.
Max Payne series
Enter the Matrix (janky, but fun)
Trepang2
cyberpunk 2077 is pretty good for this
What? How? I played through it and liked it but even standing in the middle of the heat after a firefight doesn’t tell you it happened barring the bodies laying there
could be you played an earlier version of it but when i was playing recently i noticed a lot of things like chunks being blown off pillars and walls and stuff. not great like bfbc2 or the other suggestions in here but definitely a step above CoD
Bulletstorm
