The Best Shooters Of 2024

Last year I said we were leaving the golden era of modern shooters. But, as it turns out, I might have spoken too soon! 2024 provided a huge list of great third- and first-person shooters across console and PC, from devs both big and small. This year had so many awesome games that deciding which shooters to recognize here and which to leave aside was a painful process.

As before, this list is split into two sections. First, we’ll look at seven fantastic new shooters that arrived this year. Then, we’ll look at a few older shooters that received updates and continued support in 2024. Let’s begin!

Space Marine 2

Image: Saber Interactive

While I was excited to play Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2 because I’m a big fan of the original game, I didn’t expect it to be much more than another fine third-person shooter with big guns. I was wrong! Space Marine 2 is a really great shooter with a bombastic campaign, solid PvP options, and co-op missions featuring a separate (and deep) progression system. A nice surprise in 2024!

It’s been a while since a Call of Duty game has got its claws into me. I think the last one I actively played and enjoyed was Advanced Warfare. However, Black Ops 6 has turned me into a CoD sicko all over again.

The multiplayer alone in BLOPS6 is worth the price of admission, with so many modes, guns, upgrades, and maps, as well as new features like the game-changing omnidirectional movement. Toss in CoD’s usual tight gunplay, perfect performance, a full campaign, and an excellent Zombies mode, and you have one of the best FPS experiences of the year.

If I was handing out an award for the weirdest FPS of the year, it would probably go to Echo Point Nova. That’s not a criticism, either. Echo Point Nova is a weird, sometimes lonely open-world shooter set in a large, dream-like map made up of floating islands and infested with evil mercenaries.

Most of the game is spent swinging, hopping, sliding, and shooting all over this massive map, and it’s some of the most fun I’ve had in a first-person shooter in a long time. If you long for Titanfall 3, you should stop reading this and play Echo Point Nova.

Is this a shooter? Many characters in the game, like Punisher and Black Widow, use guns, and others, like Hela, use ranged magic attacks. But then still others, like Hulk and Wolverine, are strictly melee. Personally, I think there are enough shooter-y vibes and gameplay elements in Rivals for it to make the list.

What I love about Marvel Rivals is how powerful characters feel. Jumping into a group of enemy players as Venom, taking most of them out, and then hopping away feels good. On the flip side, when I see a Venom try to do that and I’m playing as Black Widow, I just smile and snipe that gooey bastard from afar. Everyone is powerful. Everyone feels dangerous in the right hands. Is this balanced? Probably not. But that’s why it’s so much fun!

Fortnite

Image: Epic Games

Last year, I suggested that Fortnite might not make it on a future “Best Shooters” list because the game had become so much more than a third-person battle royale. Fast forward 12 months and here’s Fortnite on the list. Why? Well, because Epic has greatly expanded the shooty-shooty bang-bang bits of Fortnite, helping it secure a spot here one more time.

In the last 12 months, Epic has added Fortnite OG, Reload, and Ballistic to the game. The first is a stripped-down battle royale experience based on the game’s first year. Reload is a fast-paced battle royale with respawning. And then there’s Ballistic, a first-person shooter built in Fortnite that plays light Counter-Strike. It’s wild that so many really good shooters live in one game, but I’m not complaining.

2024 was supposed to be a victory lap for Destiny 2, with a big expansion paying off a decade of live-service storytelling. And Bungie did end up landing the ship, but it was a bumpy ride and it’s now far from clear if the thing will ever be able to fly again.

Still, The Final Shape offered some of the best missions the game has ever seen, and delivering the epic conclusion fans have been waiting for. Other additions, like the horde mode Onslaught, showed Destiny 2 is still at its best when friends are just shooting tons of aliens together and collecting tons of loot for doing so. Fans got a great raid this year and another great dungeon, and while updates are buggier and Destiny 2's future more up in the air than ever, the bones of this shooter are still some of the best around. - Ethan Gach

Technically, this is a new game, but it’s also a remaster of an old classic, so I’ve placed it here. Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster is exactly what you want it to be: Dark Forces, the classic ‘90s Star Wars FPS, but now it looks nicer and plays better on modern hardware. And as a bonus, it’s now playable on consoles, too.

If you’ve never played Dark Forces, you should pick up the remaster and experience this Doom-like spin on ‘90s-era Star Wars. And if you have played Dark Forces, well, odds are you already know about the remaster. So let’s sit here and nod in agreement for a few minutes about how good it is.

Why is Half-Life 2 here? Well, earlier this year, Valve updated the classic FPS to celebrate the game’s 20th anniversary. The big update fixed a ton of bugs, added workshop support and modern gamepad controls, and imported all the Episodes into one big package.

It’s now easier than ever to play Half-Life 2 and many of its best mods. And there are so many. If you’ve never really dabbled in Half-Life 2 or Source mods, go grab Half-Life 2 and check out its ever-growing Steam Workshop. You’ll have plenty of stuff to play.

And here are a few games that just missed making it on here, but are still good and worth checking out: Fallen Aces, Stalker 2, I Am Your Beast, and Blue Shift (a Black Mesa mod).

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