I want to play an easy shooter where you feel like you’re in a flow state aiming at targets, the only time I’ve ever felt like that was in the PS2 Medal of Honour, kneecap, helmet shot, head shot or up till MW4 original.
I’ve tried the latest CoD and the cinematics and cutscenes are just overblown.
Borderlands would be a kind of turn off your brain type but they haven’t made a new game in awhile.
Helldiver had great shooting but the grind, limited levels and multiplayer means I wasn’t too invested in it after a hard days work
Deep Rock Galactic, play solo on the lower difficulties and just vibe and mine. Bosco the robot that follows you on solo missions can kill pretty much everything for you most of the time, or you can have it do the mining and tasks while you shoot everything in sight.
Rock and stone!
Is slime rancher technically a shooter game?
Is Portal technically a shooter game?
It has a gun that makes holes.
All guns make holes.
A caulk gun fills holes.
Not energy guns.
It’s a farming sim. You’re just farming with a gun
Gun/vacuum *
but are you shooting the gun? if yes then it might fit the bill
Well it’s not bullets but you do shoot objects/creatures out of it
If you shoot tarr at the other slimes, it’s kinda like bullets.
Absolutely second the recommendations of Doom and Quake here in the thread. Boomer shooters in general. Even if the movement can be really fast, playing them on your own can be extremely cozy. Just get into the rhythm of circle strafing, shooting and weaving in and out of cover and you’ll be in the zone very quickly. Bonus point, that both Doom and Quake have 30 years of EXCELLENT quality player created content that can keep you playing fresh new levels for as long as you want to. You could play them for the rest of your life, at your own pace and preferred difficulty.
The new rereleases of both games even bundle a mod browser that you can access with zero knowledge of modding, just hop on.
I’ll mention my favorite recent boomer shooter: Boltgun. Lots of blood and gore so maybe not “cozy” but it is entertaining.
Depends on what you consider “cozy”. OP listed Medal of Honor and CoD, I think Doom is super cozy. If shooting Nazis or demons is our comfort activity, anything can be cozy. I still desperately need to play Boltgun, too.
I will also add to this that there is absolutely no reason to buy the “new” re-release of Doom and Doom 2 that’s out on Steam now except to rip the IWADS out of it to put in a source port – any other source port – rather than the garbage it comes with. And only do so if you want the new Legacy of Rust episodes. Everything else is, er, readily available online. And has been for decades.
The new NEX based engine these run on now is maddeningly inferior to basically every open source Doom engine port currently available. In addition to not supporting vertical mouse look at all, “for authenticity,” (but by default it slaps a crosshair on your screen, which the original didn’t have…) it also looks like garbage on modern displays and crashes constantly which is something that baffles me. Running Doom ought to be a solved problem by now in 2024, but this fucker crashes on me more now than it did on my 486 back in 1994. It’s buggier than a trailer park mattress in a swamp.
I recommend GZDoom, personally. You can add Brutal Doom to make the gameplay experience significantly more bombastic as well, if that sort of thing appeals to you.
sigh. Not everything must be GZDoom and Brutal Doom. The new port is perfectly fine if they’re going to play mostly vanilla. There’s no need to be this angry at everything you don’t understand in the internet.
The new port is not perfectly fine if it randomly crashes to desktop all the time.
Oh, and I also forgot to mention that several of the achievements are still bugged and don’t pop, which has been a known issue since release and still hasn’t been fixed. So yeah. Bethesda is gonna do Bethesda stuff.
You can still have a “vanilla” experience using other source ports. That’s what, e.g. Chocolate Doom is for. Except it may stay running on your PC for more than eleven consecutive minutes at a time. So if that’s what turns your crank, go for it. You’re right – not everything needs to be GZDoom and Brutal. But other options definitely exist, and I recommend any of them over what was shoveled out officially. You can even have a pretty durn vanilla experience in GZDoom if you want to, while still retaining much broader support for mods than the official release. Me personally, I can’t do mouse control with no vertical look. It made me seasick in the 90’s, and it still does now. That’s a deal breaker. I was a keyboard-only player in the DOS era.
I will also add that if you are going to play the new Sigil expansions or Legacy of Rust, they’re virtually impossible on Ultra Violence and Nightmare without mouselook. These maps were clearly designed with a modern source port including mouse aim in mind, and this was apparently shitcanned later in development for some unfathomable reason. Like, why even leave the crosshair there, then?
spoiler
Like, the shoot-the-switch secret on Legacy of Rust MAP10? Forget it. Yeah, you can hit it like 3% of the time if you ride the elevator up and down and pick at it with the pistol until you get it. I’m quite certain it was intended to be shot from either of the windows left and right of the elevator, the leftmost one lining up with it perfectly, and the elevator thing is only just in case someone is playing in some kind of purist mode.
Maybe check out Roboquest? I was looking for a mindless FPS a few weeks ago (my usual go-to is UT2004, I’m old :]) and the Roboquest demo scratched the itch pretty well. Planning to pick up the full version when I see it go on sale
Roboquest actually kind of kicks ass. It’s a way better game than I expected it to be when I picked it up. I think those guys deserve more attention than they’ve been getting.
Also, shout out to Gunfire Reborn as well, I’ve been a big fan of that one for a couple years. Similar style to Roboquest. It’s a Chinese game and some parts of it are a little poorly translated but the gameplay is very fun and solid.
Came here to say Roboquest. Replaced Destiny 2 for me when I finally ditched windows for Linux. Though I would love a harder difficulty coop PvE shooter that has similar feel to Destiny. Roboquest has coop but I will always of raiding with my team.
Doom 1 and, to some extent, 2. Honestly.
I know exactly what you are looking for and the classic Doom games are perfect for this, because they are simple, yet they still feel good to play.
Not too fast, not too slow. No jump scares, only some light puzzles if you want to hunt secrets. There is almost a rhythm to the combat, especially if you play with the shotgun. Try them.
To add over it Quake 1 and 2 are also perfect complementaries to DOOM
No cutscenes, just throw you into the game and let you go wild, while still having a progression
See also: Chex Quest
2016 too. I wouldn’t call it “cozy” though.
I’d say Eternal actually fits the bill more. Once you get all the mechanics down every encounter becomes this deadly ballet of high speed chess where you really can enter a flow state of just reacting and acting.
2016 can be like that but it’s a little bit more forgiving, funnily enough managing to keep your brain more in the foreground.
Depending on your definition of cozy 2016 could win, because it is not as taxing as Eternal. At least I could manage 2016 much better than Eternal with my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. But if you manage to stick with Eternal I think it’s more conducive to get you into a meditative state.
I played through Sigil recently and the whole time there was a gaping super shotgun sized hole in my enjoyment of it. I get that Romero fine tuned it to play without it but for me I realized that I can’t feel totally cozy playing doom without the ssg.
I really like some of the Halo games for this, especially any levels that don’t involve The Flood. The inventive hit-boxes, slow movements, the vehicles that are fun to just drive around, and the addition of gameplay modifiers, they’re pretty cathartic for me.
Hell you could even jump into a custom Firefight mode if you just want to kill waves of enemies.
I love playing reach in God mode with infinite abilities just mowing down enemies. Just remember to turn on Grunt Birthday Party.
Really not sure how to interpret ‘cozy’ here, but tbh the Farcry series are great for me in that they’re my casual shooters. I say this meaning that I do the shooting when I want to do the shooting – otherwise I’m off paragliding or picking flowers or something else low stress and soothing. To me, in that regard, they’re very cozy.
Well, as others have noted I think “cozy” is probably a loaded term in this context. However, I will throw these recommendations into the ring also: The first couple of Serious Sam games, and also Painkiller. Both of them are firmly in the “murdering tons of dudes” genre, and are significantly less tactical than the likes of Medal of Honor/Call of Duty/Battlefield.
That is to say, not at all.
There is none of that sucking your thumb to regenerate health, popping out from the chest-high walls inexplicably strewn everywhere taking potshots with your gun like a hillbilly jack-in-the-box. Rather, their gameplay loop involves herding and managing a massive horde of enemies, prioritizing your targets, and keeping yourself moving. Like a sheep dog with a chaingun.
People try to call the original Doom games a horde shooter. They really aren’t. These two, however, definitely are.
You’ve convinced me to finally play Serious Sam. I’ve had it on Steam for years.
It can be charitably described as above, and uncharitably described as “Hold down S and LMB for an hour at a time”. I kind of bounced off these. They aren’t bad games, in fact they were pretty popular but most of your gameplay loop is going to revolve around getting the attention of a horde of goons and then backpedaling while you whittle the group down from 80 dudes to none.
also, just noticed your username. Cool Eragon reference, took me a second to remember that it meant “dragon” in the elven language.
I mean, I played several other horde shooters. Firing continually while backpedaling is the most vintage of infantry tactics, after all. I get that these games are old and simpler, but their base gameplay must still be fun if they were so popular back in the day. I’ll at least give it a shot, since I already have them anyway…
Give Ultrakill and Gunfire Reborn a look.
If your looking for a shooter with a flow state, give Neon White a look. It’s a FPS platformer where you pick up gun cards and you choose if you want to use the card as a gun to shoot demons, or throw it away for a movement ability (double jump, dash, etc.) as you try to get to the end of the level as fast as possible.
If the platforming and racing doesn’t sound like it’s for you, I saw someone else brought up Ultrakill and I wanted to recommend that as well
Neon White was my suggestion as well. Ultrakill is fun but is going for a more Devil May Cry style game where score and style matter significantly.
Neon White i found a little confusing at first until I got the feel of it. Its a movement puzzle game, with some shooting. Precision and repetition are key to learning the levels and beating them quickly, and once you get into its groove, time flies by. For being a time-challenge game, I find it surprisingly relaxing and forgiving.
Can’t believe I had to scroll down this far to find Neon White but I’m glad someone mentioned it! It is pretty much the flow state shooter, should be perfect for OP.
Borderlands is like that. You can even tune the difficulty in 3 and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
I don’t play actual shooter myself, however, both Pokemon Snap games fit your description - might be worth a shot.
Warframe is my go to when I just want to blast tunes and murder everything without too much thought.
Serious Sam is mindlessly dumb in the good way.
Splatoon singleplayer maybe? Side Order is built for casually grinding out runs.
