You were just as likely to score a kill hurtling through the air as you were running on the ground.
Games like 1999’s Unreal Tournament were a touch quicker than their forebears, and featured maps which stretched upwards as well as sideways. But just as nostalgia seems to work in waves, now developers are paying homage to the shooters that arrived at the tail end of the ‘90s and beginning of the millennium. Take Devil Daggers, released the same year as Superhot, and 2018’s Dusk, indie titles that mechanically and visually echo the early-to-mid 1990s entries of the Doom and Quake franchises respectively. But the clean, futuristic lines of that game is a relative rarity - game makers seem to be more interested in digging up the aesthetics of the past to evoke the classic FPS genre. Developers have been mining the genre for a while now, none more popular than 2016’s Superhot.
The arena shooter’s resurgence is not new. Even Ubisoft, a company synonymous with open world environments is leaning into it with DefiantX. From the just-released Boomerang X, an acrobatic shooter available on PC and Nintendo Switch, to the upcoming Severed Steel whose bullet-time action genuinely earns the adjective “balletic,” developers are reviving the genre typified by tight maps, an absence of story, and, most importantly, frenetic ballistic action. And yet, if it felt like the arena shooter’s time had come to an end, that its elemental take on violence was consigned to the annals of gaming history (OK, the mid-naughties), I’m thrilled to report the once ailing genre is undergoing something of a renaissance. Happiness, it seems, isn’t just found in a warm gun but the ancillary activities that surround pulling the trigger.
Point, shoot, and revel in the exploded virtual matter.Īmidst increasingly elaborate stories, a move towards gigantic maps, and RPG elements like loot and leveling-up, the shooter’s emphasis on pure action has arguably gone missing in recent years. In all these titles, no matter what your avatar resembles - a spaceship, marine, whatever - functionally, you’re a gun. This defining principle draws a line from the genre classics of the 1990s like the aptly-named Quake 3: Arena, to foundational shoot-em-ups of decades prior - games such as 1978’s Space Invaders where there was literally nothing to do but clear the screen of oncoming enemies. One straightforward rule trumps all in the arena shooter: kill everything.
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