It can be sometimes easy to forget that shooters weren’t always the sort of bloated budget, cinematic driven and linear offerings that they largely are now. Eschewing such recent genre conceits as regenerating health and sticking to cover like an OCD afflicted barnacle, there has thankfully been a movement of sorts to get ‘boomer’ shooters (well, retro shooters – not a fan of the boomer shooter descriptor, but I’m old so what do you expect?) onto contemporary gaming hardware once more.
Tracking the finest old-fashioned genre entries from DOOM all the way through to Quake, DUSK and Amid Evil, these are the best Boomer Shooters and retro FPS games you can get in 2023.
The Best Boomer Shooters you can play in 2023
Amid Evil
A spiritual successor to Heretic (think DOOM but replace the setting with dark fantasy and buckets of magic and monsters), Amid Evil is a sprawling, non-linear shooter that tasks players with retrieving a bunch of sacred weapons to save the universe, so no pressure. Awash with a range of colour infused vibrant settings in which players must murder their way through an increasingly bizzare legion of cosmic horrors with lightning wands, fireball ejecting staves and more besides, Amid Evil is the sort of furiously stylish throwback to Heretic that we’ve been waiting for.
Blood: Fresh Supply
Thank Crom the lovely folks at Nightdive Studios decided to remaster 90s shooter Blood, because the oft forgotten genre entry is still every bit the hoot now that it was nearly thirty years ago. Putting players into the boots of a vengeful warrior, Blood: Fresh Supply tasks players with taking down a dark cosmic entity known as Tchernobog and clearly the best way to do this is to tear your way through an apparently endless throng of cultists and demons with guns, dynamite and even a pitch fork. Gleefully dark, Blood: Fresh Supply also boasts some wonderfully creative deaths, such as immolating a cultist with a flare gun and watching them run around in a circle whilst they shout that they are, in fact, on fire.
DOOM (Classic)
Rightly regarded as the godfather of the FPS genre, DOOM was the first game to plonk a shotgun and a chainsaw in your hand and send you off to carve up seemingly endless legions of demonic beasties. With a campaign that stretches from Martian moon bases to the depths of Hell itself, ably supported by tremendously smart level design and an increasingly horrific range of monstrous foes to eviscerate, classic DOOM still holds up especially today as a shining example of just how compelling traditional, non-linear FPS design can be.
Buy DOOM Classic Complete here.
DUSK
Self-described as a modern love letter to the likes of Blood, DOOM and Quake, DUSK’s premise is beautifully straightforward. Quite simply, the player is a murderous engine that must eradicate an army of corrupted militants, backwater cultists and cosmic horrors as they attempt to root out an insidious and ancient evil. In truth, such a premise is just a thinly veiled excuse to basically kill everything in sight against the backdrop of a gothic backwater American town and the horrors that lurk beneath. Get DUSK played if you haven’t already.
Duke Nukem 3D
Building upon the violent shenanigans of DOOM with the Build Engine (sorry), Duke Nukem 3D gave the otherwise po-faced first-person shooter genre the sort of outrageous swagger and charisma that it had long craved. Casting players as the titular, attitude stuffed protagonist who comes across as a mixture of Johnny Lawrence and Big Arnie, Duke Nukem 3D freshens up the shopworn repel-the-alien-invasion premise with aplomb. From a glorious dose of humour to some wonderfully wacky weaponry including a shrink-ray that lets players reduce their foes down to mere inches in height before squishing them with a well-placed boot, Duke Nukem 3D arguably deserves as much credit for infusing the FPS genre with personality as id Software’s DOOM does for laying down the fundamentals of its design.
Buy Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour here.
Ion Fury
Though it might be a touch reductive to refer to Ion Fury as a female-led Duke Nukem 3D, on initial glance there are certainly more similarities than differences between Ion Fury and 3D Realms classic shooter. Casting players as a silver tongued, gun-toting protagonist and leveraging the same Build Engine that powers Duke Nukem 3D, Ion Fury arguably pulls off some flattering mimicry to the escapades of Señor Nukem. However, developer Voidpoint goes a step further with Ion Fury in a number of ways. Not only presenting its blissfully violent shooter delights in a neat cyberpunk setting, Ion Fury also pushes what the Build Engine was capable of with locational damage and seamless level transitions too.
Powerslave Exhumed
Look, Powerslave Exhumed is basically brilliant alright? Whisking players off into the dusty Egyptian desert to deal with an invading alien force that has resurrected and corrupted the legendary monsters and deities of Egyptian mythology, Powerslave Exhumed is much more than a retro FPS with a spicy location. In addition to having players lay waste to their enemies with a mixture of conventional and magical weaponry, Powerlsave Exhumed also dabbles a bit in the Metroidvania side of things, requiring players to scoop up valuable trinkets that will permit them entry to previously inaccessible locations. See? Told you.
Prodeus
Marrying the compellingly grungy veneer of older first-person shooters with recent advances in rendering technology, Prodeus is something of a unique prospect to say the least. Boasting a dark sci-fi campaign that takes in all manner of alien planets, derelict ship husks and abandoned tech bases, Prodeus massively enhances the notion of classic boomer shooters with highly detailed, full three-dimensional environments, a range of hugely satisfying weaponry and some gnarly gore effects work that quite literally allow the player to splatter enemy innards across walls, floors and ceilings.
Quake
With the foot-tapping thrum of its Trent Reznor scored soundtrack complimenting the bloody on-screen carnage, fully three-dimensional worlds stuffed with danger at every turn and nightmare inducing Eldritch terrors, Quake was every bit the sort of quantum leap the FPS genre needed when it originally released back in 1996. Seeing something of a resurgence thanks to its recent remaster, console release and ray-tracing upgrade, Quake has long felt like the true heir apparent to DOOM’s throne as the godfather of the genre, even though somewhat sadly, it only enjoys a mere fraction of its fame and recognition.
Star Wars: Dark Forces
Taking the Star Wars setting and embedding it in a DOOM style first-person shooter template seems like such an obvious thing to do in retrospect, yet it didn’t seem that way back in 1995. As cult Star Wars hero Kyle Katarn, players must blast their way through the interiors of Star Destroyers, Imperial bases, research labs and more as they seek to shutdown an experimental program to create the Dark Trooper – a new breed of Stormtrooper that can actually shoot and hit things. With its solid level design and evocative Star Wars setting, I’m utterly baffled why the House of Mouse hasn’t commissioned a shiny remaster for this gem.
