I want to play an easy shooter where you feel like you’re in a flow state aiming at targets, the only time I’ve ever felt like that was in the PS2 Medal of Honour, kneecap, helmet shot, head shot or up till MW4 original.
I’ve tried the latest CoD and the cinematics and cutscenes are just overblown.
Borderlands would be a kind of turn off your brain type but they haven’t made a new game in awhile.
Helldiver had great shooting but the grind, limited levels and multiplayer means I wasn’t too invested in it after a hard days work
Risk of Rain 2
I’ve been enjoying the flow state I get into while playing Space Marine II. It is a mix of melee and shooting, but the melee aspect is very simple - no memorizing combos and the timing of parries is fairly forgiving. It’s all very satisfying once you get the feel for it. Cinematics are skippable, you can change the difficulty level to your liking, and you can set your lobbies to private if you don’t wanna play with others
Hedon would be an option. It has actually calm moments, is cut scene free and gives you time to explore, whil still having cool combat moments.
It although has a pretty good difficulty mode.
The original Sniper Ghost Warrior games were really chill. More about stealth than action
Might be cozy because of the nostalgia more than anything else, but I’ve been cruising through the Turok remasters
Give Ultrakill and Gunfire Reborn a look.
I’ve been feeling this with Cyberpunk a bit. But you may think it’s too quest driven to be considered.
I don’t know if it counts as “cozy,” but Metal:Hellsinger is an extremely vibey shooter, as you can kind of just zone out, bop your head to the music, and vibe to the music in flow state while playing. Kind of zen, actually.
This !
If your looking for a shooter with a flow state, give Neon White a look. It’s a FPS platformer where you pick up gun cards and you choose if you want to use the card as a gun to shoot demons, or throw it away for a movement ability (double jump, dash, etc.) as you try to get to the end of the level as fast as possible.
If the platforming and racing doesn’t sound like it’s for you, I saw someone else brought up Ultrakill and I wanted to recommend that as well
Can’t believe I had to scroll down this far to find Neon White but I’m glad someone mentioned it! It is pretty much the flow state shooter, should be perfect for OP.
Neon White was my suggestion as well. Ultrakill is fun but is going for a more Devil May Cry style game where score and style matter significantly.
Neon White i found a little confusing at first until I got the feel of it. Its a movement puzzle game, with some shooting. Precision and repetition are key to learning the levels and beating them quickly, and once you get into its groove, time flies by. For being a time-challenge game, I find it surprisingly relaxing and forgiving.
Absolutely second the recommendations of Doom and Quake here in the thread. Boomer shooters in general. Even if the movement can be really fast, playing them on your own can be extremely cozy. Just get into the rhythm of circle strafing, shooting and weaving in and out of cover and you’ll be in the zone very quickly. Bonus point, that both Doom and Quake have 30 years of EXCELLENT quality player created content that can keep you playing fresh new levels for as long as you want to. You could play them for the rest of your life, at your own pace and preferred difficulty.
The new rereleases of both games even bundle a mod browser that you can access with zero knowledge of modding, just hop on.
I’ll mention my favorite recent boomer shooter: Boltgun. Lots of blood and gore so maybe not “cozy” but it is entertaining.
Depends on what you consider “cozy”. OP listed Medal of Honor and CoD, I think Doom is super cozy. If shooting Nazis or demons is our comfort activity, anything can be cozy. I still desperately need to play Boltgun, too.
I will also add to this that there is absolutely no reason to buy the “new” re-release of Doom and Doom 2 that’s out on Steam now except to rip the IWADS out of it to put in a source port – any other source port – rather than the garbage it comes with. And only do so if you want the new Legacy of Rust episodes. Everything else is, er, readily available online. And has been for decades.
The new NEX based engine these run on now is maddeningly inferior to basically every open source Doom engine port currently available. In addition to not supporting vertical mouse look at all, “for authenticity,” (but by default it slaps a crosshair on your screen, which the original didn’t have…) it also looks like garbage on modern displays and crashes constantly which is something that baffles me. Running Doom ought to be a solved problem by now in 2024, but this fucker crashes on me more now than it did on my 486 back in 1994. It’s buggier than a trailer park mattress in a swamp.
I recommend GZDoom, personally. You can add Brutal Doom to make the gameplay experience significantly more bombastic as well, if that sort of thing appeals to you.
sigh. Not everything must be GZDoom and Brutal Doom. The new port is perfectly fine if they’re going to play mostly vanilla. There’s no need to be this angry at everything you don’t understand in the internet.
The new port is not perfectly fine if it randomly crashes to desktop all the time.
Oh, and I also forgot to mention that several of the achievements are still bugged and don’t pop, which has been a known issue since release and still hasn’t been fixed. So yeah. Bethesda is gonna do Bethesda stuff.
You can still have a “vanilla” experience using other source ports. That’s what, e.g. Chocolate Doom is for. Except it may stay running on your PC for more than eleven consecutive minutes at a time. So if that’s what turns your crank, go for it. You’re right – not everything needs to be GZDoom and Brutal. But other options definitely exist, and I recommend any of them over what was shoveled out officially. You can even have a pretty durn vanilla experience in GZDoom if you want to, while still retaining much broader support for mods than the official release. Me personally, I can’t do mouse control with no vertical look. It made me seasick in the 90’s, and it still does now. That’s a deal breaker. I was a keyboard-only player in the DOS era.
I will also add that if you are going to play the new Sigil expansions or Legacy of Rust, they’re virtually impossible on Ultra Violence and Nightmare without mouselook. These maps were clearly designed with a modern source port including mouse aim in mind, and this was apparently shitcanned later in development for some unfathomable reason. Like, why even leave the crosshair there, then?
spoiler
Like, the shoot-the-switch secret on Legacy of Rust MAP10? Forget it. Yeah, you can hit it like 3% of the time if you ride the elevator up and down and pick at it with the pistol until you get it. I’m quite certain it was intended to be shot from either of the windows left and right of the elevator, the leftmost one lining up with it perfectly, and the elevator thing is only just in case someone is playing in some kind of purist mode.
Left4Dead 2
Great flow game
What about Extraneum? It’s cute as a button and very chill with plenty of things to shoot. It feels a bit like a modern wolfenstein since there aren’t any stairs. Gunplay feels nice and the secrets are rewarding. Plus between levels there are funny data discs to read.
I do have a recommendation for a cozy FPS: The Signal from Tolva.
Basically you’re a robot in an old robot battlefield planet and you’ve got to shoot other robots, sometimes team up with other robots and go around getting upgrades.
The coziness comes from the environment, which has some strong outworldliness vibe and it feels slightly lonely but in a “journey” way. Plus the guns feel good and it’s probably really cheap right now.
The cons is that the game doesn’t feel finished, after a while it gets repetitive and then it just ends.
If I had to describe it, I would say it’s an FPS+walking simulator.
“Generation Zero” would be my second recommendation, which is a mixture of Red Dawn, Swedish 80s and big robots.
Note: I haven’t played them except for the 2nd entry, but the Far Cry series feels like it is a mixture between FPS and holiday island.
Maybe Destiny 2? The gunplay is unmatched and popping alien heads off in an explosion of alien blood or exploding robots in an explosion of robot blood is very satisfying.
Some parts are free to play too.
Earth Defence Force: nothing better than blowing up 5 million bugs a minute after a tough working day
