Shooter Bucket List

The Second World War again, with fortifications you build mid-match and no premium pass.

The series seen down the barrel: a first-person shooter inside a GDI base, vehicles and all.

The retail release with a bot ladder and Deleted Scenes, a single-player campaign cut from another studio’s version.

Baird and Cole on trial for the mission the game is telling in flashback, with a star rating on every fight.

JD Fenix, twenty-five years on, against windflares and a swarm that turns out to be old news.

Emergence Day itself: Marcus and Dom on the first day of the Locust war, fourteen years before the original.

One hundred and twenty-eight players, tornadoes crossing the map, and the specialists nobody wanted.

Levolution: a skyscraper you can drop into the map, and the multiplayer the series was fixed on for years.

A squad of four deserting for a truckload of gold, and destructible walls made the point of the game.

The version that made the game an esport and the skin economy that came with it.

The 2004 port to the Half-Life 2 engine: physics, ragdolls and an argument about de_dust2 that lasted a decade.

The far-future one: mechs, an airship called the Titan and a squad system built around it.

Huey helicopters, tunnels and a radio playing Fortunate Son over the whole map.

Kait’s game, and the first with open areas, a skiff on the ice and a choice at the end you cannot undo.

The 2025 return to classes, destruction and a modern setting, made by four studios at once.

Objective-based Strogg against humans on large maps, with vehicles and deployable turrets.

Rogue add turrets, tesla mines and a gravity well; the harder of the two Quake II packs.

Onslaught adds vehicles and power nodes to maps built for them, on top of the 1999 bot ladder.

Hipnotic add three episodes, a Mjolnir that arcs lightning and a proximity mine launcher; the first mission pack.

Rogue send you back to ancient Rome and forward again across two episodes; the second mission pack.

A story campaign between the deathmatches, and a Necris hoverboard to cross the Warfare maps on.

MachineGames build a new episode for the twentieth anniversary in 2016 and give it away.

Valve remake the Quake mod on the Half-Life engine in 1999, nine classes and concrete bases intact.

Kane is captured and turned into a Strogg halfway through, and keeps fighting; Raven Software continue Quake II.

A prison ship crashes on Na Pali and the Skaarj hunt you out of it; the 1998 engine that ran for twenty years.

Xatrix drop a second marine on Stroggos with an Ion Ripper and a Phalanx cannon.

The episode that shipped inside the 2021 remaster, built out of lava and clockwork by MachineGames.