Half-Life 2 is a solid game, but it's also *easily* the second most over-rated game in history behind Call of Duty 4. It's narrative was well-told through the gameplay, and the gravity gun was fun the first time around. Apart from that, though? The gameplay itself was boring, 90's FPS-affair that had already started to go obsolete by the time Half-Life 2 rolled around (and I'm sorry, fellow PC-gamers, but I NEVER found that kind of gameplay fun in the least), the story was pretty weak (though well-suited to a game), and the atmosphere of the game just never resonated with me in the way a lot of other games have.
As for my list? In no particular order:
- Portal (if we're counting this as an FPS): easily one of the most well-designed games of all time, and a blast to play through. This is one game that actually deserves the massive amount of praise it gets.
- Team Fortress 2: TF2 has been nerfed a bit because of some of the new weapons, but it remains another one of the most well-designed games ever made, and is probably the best multiplayer shooter of all time. The visual style and atmosphere are striking, the mechanics are incredibly well balanced, and (with the obvious exception of 2Fort) the map design is superb.
- Halo: Combat Evolved: the more recent installments have muddied up the franchise a bit (though I still enjoy them), but the original was a game with incredibly deep gameplay given how simple it was. The art style was imaginative, the story was engaging and nicely self-contained while containing a fair amount of back-story (think A New Hope), and it was the first time anyone made an FPS that worked as well with a controller as it did with a mouse and keyboard.
- Mirror's Edge: Another one I'm not sure you'd count as an FPS, Mirror's Edge featured a functional but mediocre story and fun but sometimes temperamental gameplay. So why did I like it so much? Because I've never played another game with such incredible atmosphere. For how short the game is (you can easily beat it in 2-3 hours if you run all the way through it), I've gotten an insane amount of replay out of it by slowing down and soaking in all the different the environments. Mirror's Edge is actually a contender for my favorite game of all time just for this reason.
- Far Cry 3: Admittedly, it might just be because I'm still addicted to post-game at the moment, but Far Cry 3 is a ton of fun. It takes everything that was fun about Far Cry 2 (which I also had a blast with) and ramps it up to 11. My only gripe was the fact that once you clear out the islands, there's very little to do, but I discovered a simple hex-edit mod which restored the islands to their pirate-infested state. That said, the fact that cleared outposts stay cleared does give a nice sense of progress that you never got in Far Cry 2, and for that I put Far Cry 3 on the list.
Honorable mentions that would probably be included in a top ten list:
- The Brothers in Arms franchise
- Half-Life 2: SMOD and all it's runty children
- Garry's Mod (just because it's so damn versatile)
- Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2
- NeoTokyo (a HL2 mod that was popular for about two months but remains one of the best mutliplayer games of all time).
