Best FPS Games for PS5 & PS4

Why it's here: The 2016 reboot rebuilt the shooter around forward momentum, where standing still means dying and every staggered demon is a health pack waiting to be Glory Killed. It is the purest expression of what an FPS combat loop can be. Whether that relentless aggression exhilarates or exhausts is the only real question.

Why it's here: Respawn built a six-hour campaign around a single idea, a rifleman and a talking mech named BT, and folded in a time-travel level that shooter designers still study. The multiplayer wall-runs circles around most of the genre. The catch is a player base that fills lobbies slowly this many years on.

Why it's here: Trading the Moscow tunnels for a year-long journey across post-apocalyptic Russia, Exodus stitches survival-horror scarcity to semi-open sandboxes where weapons are cleaned by hand and storms are read from the sky. The tension between that immersion and its looser, less-directed structure is exactly what splits the room on it.

Why it's here: The sequel turns DOOM into a lethal puzzle: chainsaw for ammo, flame belch for armor, Glory Kill for health, all while platforming across arenas at a sprint. It asks more of the player's hands than almost any shooter here. Whether that constant resource-juggling is a thrill or a chore is the dividing line.

Why it's here: Three shooters bound by one idea, that a first-person gun can carry a real argument about free will, ideology and choice. Rapture and Columbia remain among the most fully realized worlds the genre has built. The combat is the least of why this collection endures, which is either the point or the compromise.

Why it's here: Two full looter-shooters, Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel, built for four-player drop-in chaos and split-screen on one couch. The bazillion-gun grind is the engine, Handsome Jack the reason to keep pulling triggers. Whether the loot treadmill hooks a squad or wears it down depends entirely on who is playing.

Why it's here: Sixty-four players in the mud of the First World War, where a zeppelin falls from the sky and a cavalry charge can turn a match. The anthology War Stories give the campaign a human scale the multiplayer never attempts. What holds up is the spectacle few shooters still stage at this size.

Why it's here: Battlefield 4 still leans on Levolution, the scripted collapse that drops a skyscraper mid-match and rewrites the map under everyone's feet. Sixty-four-player conquest across land, sea and air is the draw, not the throwaway campaign. The variable this far out is how populated the servers on offer will be.

Why it's here: The open-world FPS template that launched a decade of imitators: a tropical island of outposts to liberate, towers to climb, and Vaas, the antagonist who outshines the hero. It is a first-person shooter played as much for exploration as for gunfights. The rough edges of an older engine are the trade.

Why it's here: MachineGames rebuilt Wolfenstein as an alternate history where the Nazis won, then paired dual-wielding shotgun carnage with quiet, genuinely affecting character scenes between the shooting. It is a single-player campaign in a list crowded with multiplayer. Whether the tonal swings land or jar is a question best answered firsthand.

Why it's here: Black Ops III bolts wall-running and thruster jumps onto Call of Duty's twitch multiplayer, then packs in a co-op Zombies mode deep enough to be its own game. The competitive movement is the pull for players who want a fast, high-skill lobby. The campaign is the part most agree to skip.

Why it's here: DICE's reboot chases one thing harder than balance: the feeling of Hoth, Endor and Tatooine rendered so faithfully the AT-AT is heard before it is seen. Forty-player battles and split-screen co-op carry it; a traditional campaign is the thing it never had. Fan service is both the appeal and the ceiling.