Milly Osworth
Member
What? You cover bases. :>
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What's the best cover based shooter?
- Thread starter Thornton Reed
- Start date
What? You cover bases. :>
Well in that case, I'm going with Starcraft Brood War.
There are plenty but they do it in different ways to CoD. I would say that CoD nails the ADS type of FPS gameplay though. I don't think there is any definitive style of FPS.
OT Gears is king of cover shooting by a longshot.
And a Torque Bow
Ragnar Blackmane
Member
Sure, and Gears 1 was also not the first TPS game to use very similar cover mechanics (e.g. Killswitch). What counts is that RE4 made QTEs truly popular across the entire industry and beyond genre boundaries.
Vanquish will probably get mentioned plenty, but I don't see much reason for why. If people really looked at all the major components that go into a shooter, much less a cover-based one, maybe don't pick the game whose coolest identifiable mechanic is about getting out of cover on flat ground. Cover-based shooting by itself is a combo of mechanics, systems, controls, AI, UI...and then the art, sound and level design philosophy that exploit it to maximum utility + variety.
I still stand by Gears being the pinnacle series in this type of shooter. Unlike other games that flirt with cover or make it a main mechanic, Gears is entirely focused on it to almost every part of its design. Everything you do is built around having a gun, and going into, around, and/or between points of cover. Even the way you traverse is built around cover, both in obvious climb up from cover to more advanced wallbouncing to gain faster speed. You have numerous contextual manuevers built around cover that each entry seems to add more to. Guns like the Dropshot or Torque Bow, and enemies like the Ticker or Kantus all exploit cover and force movement around a cover-filled map. You split up during campaigns to take advantage of different positioning on the play field, that again mixes up how cover is used.
I think Gears 4 is the best in terms of AI, controls, performance and even art design...but Gears 3 is still the strongest individual game. For two reasons that never get stressed enough in these best of X type of action game discussions: enemy types and weapon types. The best shooters that stay timeless tend to have fun things to kill, and fun tools to do the killing with, from Halo to Doom. Gears 3 simply has the most varied pool of weapons and enemies in its series, and the cover-based shooting sub-genre. It's not some AK-47 in Uncharted, some generic soldier in Army of Two, but a clicking Ticker explosion, a slithering Serapede you shoot from tail to head, and you get a Digger, charging Retro Lancer, etc. to deal with it. Also, the sound design in Gears alone is more memorable and identifiable than most
I've tried pretty much every cover based shooter out there, and am still waiting for Gears 3 to be topped. Binary Domain the best Japanese attempt, and probably the most satisfying second to second feedback with crumbling robot parts.
Warablo
Member
Gears of War, The Division, Max Payne 3, Binary Domain, and Vanquish for sticky covery shooters.
Mafia 3 for a open world sim game.
TLOU for non stick cover.
I will say CoD isnt the standard anymore for fps games. It's Titanfall 1 and 2. I feel like too many fingers have touched CoD and the aiming and movement is getting worse.
Mafia 3 for a open world sim game.
TLOU for non stick cover.
I will say CoD isnt the standard anymore for fps games. It's Titanfall 1 and 2. I feel like too many fingers have touched CoD and the aiming and movement is getting worse.
NightShift
Member
Vanquish because cover is not meant to be used.
This is the right answer.
Gears of War has an amazing feel to it. The weapons and movement have so much good feeling weight and feedback.
Uncharted I think are great games and personally I think what they do with verticality is impressive but the guns feel week a lot of the time and it doesn't feel tailored for harder difficulties.
VANQUISH is the actual best across the board.
Uncharted I think are great games and personally I think what they do with verticality is impressive but the guns feel week a lot of the time and it doesn't feel tailored for harder difficulties.
VANQUISH is the actual best across the board.
Well, what I meant by that wasn't just a case of being "first". Shenmue is technically not the first use of a QTE in the form we're familiar with (I believe that may be Die Hard Arcade, though there are lots of similar system going back very far). When we're talking here about cover-based shooters and Gears, we're not simply talking about one which is the "Call of Duty" of the genre in terms of popular recognition, we're also talking about the best application of the mechanic. Shenmue's QTEs not only predate Resident Evil 4's, but they are also better used and more fleshed out than Resident Evil 4's.
In regards to making the mechanic popular across the industry, I'd argue that Shenmue has equal (if not more) claim to that as Resi 4 (and God of War) do. The mechanic already existed prior to Shenmue, but Shenmue is when people became able to describe it. Just as nobody assigned a genre name to Winback, as opposed to Gears, nobody assigned a name to the QTEs in Die Hard Arcade... but you call them Quick Time Events today, because that's what Shenmue called them.