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Best first-person melee combat and movement (not Mirror's Edge)

not so much the combat, but system shock 1. I admire those engine games so much. ultima underworld / system shock / terra nova strike force centauri. the feel of the movement and the attention to detail is amazing. I'm still surprised every time I go back to it, somehow I forget how much detail it has in the feel of the character. and how nice the lean/duck/look, the standstill movements feel. it also has really nice running, with marked footfalls. related to the combat, the free mouse movement in the view window, how the weapon follows the mouse around. love it.

this is a pretty good example of what the game looks like when a skilled player is playing it http://www.pixelships.com/adg/ep0010.html

forget the mouselook hack!
 
Anyone have that vid that came out a while back where the guy did Half-Life 1 with first person body animations?

I'm looking for it.
 
Breakdown, by miles. Better than Condemned, Dark Messiah, Dead Island, Mirror's Edge, and Xeno Clash, at least. Cool game.
 
Mister Wilhelm said:
Some extremely detailed graphics for the time and while the combat was clunky at times, the game was highly challenging and fun.

boxshot_us_large.jpg

This, this, this. Not only does it have a fun fighting system but the story is really decent.

God, this is such an underrated game.

Edit- Its also BC on the 360.
 
Best first-person melee is definitely down to either Breakdown or Zeno Clash.

As far as movement goes, I don't think anything is even in the same ballpark as UT2k4 and Tribes, although any game that lets you use the force from your weapons to move around, supports trick jumps, etc, is pretty damn good on that front.
 
Tain said:
Breakdown, by miles. Better than Condemned, Dark Messiah, Dead Island, Mirror's Edge, and Xeno Clash, at least. Cool game.

This was developed by a Japanese studio too right? That just about blows my mind in and of itself.
 
Riposte said:
Breakdown needed more bosses. (Boy did it get fucking hard though.)

Fighting Solus near the end took me literally 15 minutes of pure, white-knuckle, tense combat. I have a place in my videogaming heart on permanent reserve for Breakdown. I LOVED the sci-fi storyline. The ending(s) were great, the story twist was awesome, and your abilities improved as you progressed. You felt like a total badass by the end of the game.

Breakdown is backwards compatible, BTW.
 
Ryan_OXM said:
Fighting Solus near the end took me literally 15 minutes of pure, white-knuckle, tense combat. I have a place in my videogaming heart on permanent reserve for Breakdown. I LOVED the sci-fi storyline. The ending(s) were great, the story twist was awesome, and your abilities improved as you progressed. You felt like a total badass by the end of the game.

Breakdown is backwards compatible, BTW.

hmmm... is it possible to buy it somewhere? So much praise in the thread.
 
Good to see Red Steel 2 already mentioned as being awesome.

Also, for the worst first person melee, I'd have to say TF2. So janky... good thing the rest of the game is fun.
 
A shame Dark Messiah's campaign was so bad, I liked the dungeons.. but the game really showed its weakness in the village/town/castle area at the beginning. Too scripted as well.
 
Never heard of breakdown, but now I really want to play it. too bad I don't have an xbox :(

Condemned 2 would have been so sick if it was PC exclusive :{

can't say the mechanics in Dead Island are that good tho :[
 
Kuran said:
A shame Dark Messiah's campaign was so bad, I liked the dungeons.. but the game really showed its weakness in the village/town/castle area at the beginning. Too scripted as well.

it was brilliant. I didn't want to make RTTP topic to avoid reading posts like this one. You people are too fucking predictable.

also the beginning lasted like... 1 hour?? Everything after this is damn brutal especially dungeons. I almost miss handholding.
 
Shadowrun but it isn't pure first-person, even though it is a first person shooter. When you wield a katana the game shifts into third person mode, and like Metal Gear Solid games there is an awareness system. Over each person there is either a "?" or "!". A "?" means the person is unaware and a katana strike deals a mortal wound (severed artery)and the player starts to bleed out. A "!" means the opponent sees you and you just deal regular damage.

If you have Wired Reflexes your katana acts like a defensive aegis against bullets. You deflect some bullets.

Another combo is to kneel behind an object with a katana is out, so other players can't see you, then quickly switch from melee to a gun and unload.
 
Grisby said:
This, this, this. Not only does it have a fun fighting system but the story is really decent.

God, this is such an underrated game.

Edit- Its also BC on the 360.

ordred from amazon.co.uk lost my opy when i got rid of my xbox
 
I honestly prefer gamey movement in an fps. Simulating a real feeling of movement seems so odd to me, like concentrating on breathing. It's an abstraction of something I should be doing on autopilot anyway. I much prefer the Doom guy's 45 mph glide to shifting my contents every time I hit my w key.

As for combat though, definitely Dark Messiah. Love that game. And it's not just the basic punch kick slash mechanics that make it great either, it's all the little clever things you can use. Throwing a jar of oil at a ghoul, then igniting it with my fire sword and kicking all of his friends onto the smoldering corpse... hell yeah.
 
Brimstone said:
Shadowrun but it isn't pure first-person, even though it is a first person shooter. When you wield a katana the game shifts into third person mode, and like Metal Gear Solid games there is an awareness system. Over each person there is either a "?" or "!". A "?" means the person is unaware and a katana strike deals a mortal wound (severed artery)and the player starts to bleed out. A "!" means the opponent sees you and you just deal regular damage.

If you have Wired Reflexes your katana acts like a defensive aegis against bullets. You deflect some bullets.

Another combo is to kneel behind an object with a katana is out, so other players can't see you, then quickly switch from melee to a gun and unload.
I don't think Shadowrun's melee combat is very good, it is cool to use the Katana+Wired combo for avoiding damage, but I don't find it satisfying using it for dealing damage. I know plenty of players love to use katana in Public games, but I think most of them play on very high sensitivity or on PC with M+K/B. I tend to go for ranged fights with the Rifle, so my sensitivity is at medium, which isn't great for katana wielding. I do like using Katana+Shotgun sometimes, avoiding damage with Katana then switching to Shotgun and blasting them away.

The movement in Shadowrun however is awesome, it feels like Halo CE in normal player movement and jumping. But, abilities like Teleport and Glider, combined with Wired Reflexes and Gust, can make for some amazing movement combos that lead to zipping around maps quickly and skillfully. I think Shadowrun has the best movement abilities among all console shooters.

Quake 3 and Tribes are also slick moving shooters with tons of cool ways to get around quickly, skiing, rocket jumping, strafe jumping, hell even shooting yourself up and along a wall with the Plasma gun in Quake 3 is amazing. I can't really pull any of it off, because I suck at PC shooters, but it is amazing to watch.

As for melee, I loved Riddick's first person fist fights, and shanking people in the back was so satisfying in that game. It took a little while to get used to the one on one fist fights, with the camera shake and unique controls, but once you got the hang of it, the fights were brutal and rewarding. Some of the insta-kill counters were great as well, grabbing someone's gun then shooting them in the chin with it, while they are still holding it was great. Or the quick and dirty knife kills you got from countering were sick as hell to pull off.
 
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