The Single-Player FPS: The Definitive Review

Half Life 3 Cancelled

In between revelations that Call Of Duty Black Ops 6 would have a single player campaign that edges ever closer to a full-blown Ubi-shooter and Doom: The Dark Ages’ smoke and mirrors with a fancy shield to mask the lack of any significant step up from its previous two entries, I saw a questioning headline pop up in some social feed or other: what happened to the single player FPS? Coincidentally, my beloved speedrun explainer par excellence, Tomatoanus, released a detailed and deeply technical explanation of a modern Half Life 2 speedrun. And that left me wondering how much, if anything, had really changed for the single player FPS since Half Life 2 mishmashed its predecessor with Halo and Havok physics. In the broadest sense, Half Life 2 and its somewhat paltry additional ‘episodes’ marked the end of a particular paradigm rather than a continuation or expansion of it. It was Call Of Duty that picked up the notion of killing lots of humans as the next step for the singleplayer FPS, convolving the practice of set-piece environmental peril with combat interludes into a kind of videogaming rollercoaster ride. Call Of Duty’s heavy curation and well-disguised hand-holding nudged the FPS closer to the on-rails lightgun roots of the genre, something that the more improvisational combat of Half Life 2 had previously tried to escape¹. But Call Of Duty couldn’t keep it up, because once you’ve crossed into the realm of set piece uber alles, you will run out of good ideas eventually. There’s only so much boombast one can extract from spec-ops soldiers in combat, and the constant push to outdo the previous entry leads you either into contemptuous over-familiarity or into the realms of the silly and stupid caricature².

This isn’t to say that Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare wasn’t revelatory. It was superb in its era, but a victim of its own success to the point that after the colossal windfall, it doomed the series to a lifetime of sequels that would either chase Call Of Duty 4’s gold dust or miserably fail to escape its shadow. Right up until it stole from survival shooters, of course. But therein lies perhaps the greatest portent of doom for the singleplayer FPS - even though the campaign for Call Of Duty 4 was great, it was the multiplayer that gave the game its real cachet and longevity. And this is to the point where legitimate critical voices were asking if the singleplayer was even necessary after a few years of that proscribed annual release schedule, where the player base was more excited about multiplayer map releases than whatever stop-the-military-conspiracy plot the singleplayer campaigns hinged on. Really, the campaign had become the side content. And this was all in the absence of anything new from Half Life to serve as a kind of torchbearer. Instead, we got Valve’s pivot to Portal, which itself paved the way for the non-combat, puzzle-based FPS as a rich new seam to explore. But then it joked itself into oblivion with Portal 2, a game so keen to remind you how funny it is that it rarely stops elbowing you in the ribs to see if you’re laughing enough.

I insist that Portal is one of the most perfect videogames ever created, but only in its original, non-retconned form. It has perhaps the most precise harmony for any modern game; the narrative weaves beautifully into the environment, and the interactive challenge weaves beautifully into the narrative. In fact, the game is almost uniquely balanced in that regard. You solve portal puzzles because the point of the environment is to solve portal puzzles, with the story being a deranged AI putting you through a procedure to solve portal puzzles. There’s a very specific kind of unity there that few games can ever hope to pull off, all of which revolves around finding solutions instead of killing things where no one element oversteps the others. But perhaps more importantly, the game is wonderfully short. The compactness of Portal is absolutely one of its shining virtues, something which Portal 2 seemingly ignored. I was fatigued to the point of frustration with Portal 2 around the set of Wheatley puzzles, where I just wanted this endless fucking carousel of absurd spaces, exhaustive portalling and exuberant jokes to end. Not helped by the fact I just didn’t find Wheatley funny, Portal 2 felt like some deliberate exercise in shark-jumping wherein clearly silly and stupid ideas were actually included as official canon lore for the larger Half Life universe. It taints Half Life as a result, but thematic and conceptual stumbles aren’t the biggest problem here. It’s that overwrought length. Compared to the skippy Portal, its sequel feels lumbering and bloated, as if the writers just had so many jokes to tell, they simply must make the game feel five times longer to fit them all in³. And this reminds me of one of the shining stars in first-personing from the last decade, Alien Isolation.

Being essentially Alien Fanservice - The Game, Alien Isolation escaped me at launch but I did dig in for a hefty chunk of it eventually. Awesome alien AI and superb environmental design aside, I gave up when I realised how little of the game I’d seen after what had already felt like an unpleasantly stressful slog.  Fairly certain that I was better off watching a playthrough rather than inching my way through it, I eventually settled on an all-missions speedrun that clocked in at a somewhat staggering 2 hours 30 minutes. And this is with plenty of skipping and exploiting to shorten the playtime, combined with superior knowledge and expertise on the part of the runner. This boggled my mind and validated my choice to watch it instead of play it. I’d be trapped in this massively unpleasant hellhole for fucking weeks! As I mentioned in a previous piece, a big conceptual weakness in Alien Isolation is its desire to pluck as much as possible from Alien and make it a playable feature. Watching the speedrun, I sighed when I saw it would include a flashback to visiting the derelict. It was just so terribly deferent, so timid with its imagination. Are you a horror survival simulation based in the Alien universe, or are you a collection of recapitulations of the source material? In the context of fanservice I expect it was fucking great for Alienverse heads, but I would have been much happier being given the environments and the ability to just roam and explore at my leisure, from the game’s menu, rather than wade through hours of space-based disaster/horror porn to get to it, and then have to do slow game stuff on top. If you want to make interactive, explorable instances of movie places, then just fucking do it! Make it open, make them free to explore from boot. Don’t lock them behind hours of toil - and in Isolation’s case, hours of really quite stressful toil. Now, I wouldn’t ordinarily go after two sacred cows in a single piece, but given the question I’m pinning everything around, it seems relevant to draw the comparison and focus on that issue of length. Maybe the single-player FPS is so rare these days because expectations don’t match the best case designs, with a crazy disconnect between what the gatekeepers of the market expect and what the consumers will actually buy, or maybe it’s because we can’t yet accept that we can quantise the singleplayer action into freely-selectable chapters if we dare, just dare, to abandon the dogma of having a single narrative to span the entire play duration. I know that Half Life 2 tried this with its additional episodes and The Lost Coast but I’ll be frank - they were shit. I mean, does anyone remember anything that happened in Episode 1? Does anyone really celebrate that godawful climactic battle with the walkers and the insultingly stupid sticky bombs? Or the bumping off of beloved characters for the sake of having a tragic ending? Or wholesale ripping off Starship Troopers so we can see vortigaunts pull off a fucking Jesus move?⁴ It was at that part I knew for sure that Valve had lost any sense of real creative direction for Half Life, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that they’d spaff any respectability it had left (as a realistic dystopian near-future universe) on gags and references in Portal 1 and 2. Those episodes were a failed experiment more than anything else, and I’d level the blame at trying to manage the set-pieces within each episode at the same pacing as Half Life 2 proper. The shorter episodes needed punchier action. Maybe we just need to not be Gordon. They needed efficiency and fun where Valve seemed to inject more ponderous exposition or aimless traversal. I remember people being quite dissatisfied with Half Life 2’s additional episodes around the time of The Orange Box, and that had to have played a role in Portal’s ascendancy. And while I’m not about to give you a paragraph on why I don’t like the modern Doom titles⁵ or failed to give a shit about the recent Wolfenstein, I will happily talk about what I think Portal’s unexpected success enabled, as I think that’s far more interesting. 

In some cases, the line between rebellion in one genre and the birth of a new one is so obvious, you can pick out two titles as being a direct illustration of that relationship. In the case of Portal and The Stanley Parable, it’s blindingly obvious but I’d still hedge a bet that without Portal’s quasi-pacifistic approach and peculiar presentation, Dear Esther probably would have struggled to find funding or an audience. Of course it’s now a respected genre, but the First Person Explorable Narrative Adventure may well explain where the single-player FPS has gone. In short, it dropped the shooting. And I think it’s much better for it. Especially as this piece is being written just after the launch of Still Lies The Deep, which I will be playing very soon. I really enjoyed the idle wandering of Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, but had to stifle guffaws at the terrible plot and overbearingly histrionic ending. For all the drama and tying up of loose ends in a sloppily-contrived sci-fi plot, I would have much rather settled for unsubstantiated magical realism and a nice wander through the English countryside to eavesdrop on The Archers. I fear that Still Lies The Deep might suffer the same naffness-masked-by-grandiosity in its maritime horror milieu. But then I adore worn-in functional technology as if it’s one of the most important artistic experiences of all time, so just getting to wander around a 70s oil rig is absolutely fine by me. I found Gone Home to be far more personal and touching than anything in Rapture, frankly, and had more transcendent experiences communing with the fish of Abzu, so I do wonder if the weak link in the Walking Simulator tradition is having to thread a satisfying story through all the wandering. In a sense, for these games the story seems to exist more to ratify the experience as a product more than a valid interactive exploration of an authored space. I do look forward to someone offering up a wonderful environment to explore as the product all by itself, story not included because it’s not necessary. As I mentioned with Starfield and seen more impressively in Cyberpunk 2077, sometimes I get immense satisfaction and joy just being in a place and being free to walk around. If walking, exploring and looking can be metricised - and it obviously can - then you have the obvious mechanic to provide progression and unfolding of further spaces. Well, I reckon I could make it work for me. Though of course I’m prepared to accept that I am ultimately a grotesque freak with regards to my gaming tastes.

A while ago, I wrote in complaint that the modern AAA videogame is obsessed with being a movie, but a very particular genre of movie - the action flick. And it’s perhaps no surprise that there aren’t many action flicks that are longer than two hours. And those that do stretch their lengths tend to fill that time with talking or scenery rather than non-stop action. You can see where I’m going here - the way to rejuvenate the single-player FPS is to shorten it down. Put every bit of set-piece knowledge and panache into a single 20-minute screamer of a run, but make it the most thrilling, exciting, adaptable 20 minutes possible. I’d much rather blast through one giant motherfucker of a dynamic Halo set-piece than start the long march of Halo Infinite. Likewise, I put plenty of hours into Titanfall 2 and failed to see the magic amongst the weeds of the game’s drawn-out busywork and left it behind out of boredom. I think if it had launched me right into the thick of its biggest battle and had me figure it out, Day After Tomorrow style, I would have been much more captivated. Being a hearty Musou fan, I look at things like Doom: Dark Ages with derision. Are you still trying to upset me with single-digit enemy counts? Amateurs⁶. Look at any top Danmaku shmup - it’s going at nine nines from the off and then gets harder. Much like Titanfall, Doom Eternal took far too long to get going in any sense at all to capture my interest, let alone hold it, and funky execution mechanics are little more than a pain in the arse for me. I want it to DoDonPachi my face off, immediately. Give me fucking hundreds of enemies to blast through, and don’t be timid in dropping me into action I cannot handle, for if you structure it correctly, I will learn to survive and feel the thrill of making it. And I think that’s where the single player FPS falls. Into the trap of trying to ease a general audience into what is really a fairly elitist, niche pursuit. But then so were Soulsbournes once upon a time, and now everyone is weeping at the majesty of Elden Ring as a game that all gamers must play. It’s still sad to me that we never got an official Half Life 3⁷ but given Valve’s track record, I don’t think it would have offered much more than Half Life 2 did. Do go and watch the speedrun, though. Between the heavy tech skips and glitches are some astonishing feats of videogame control. Vast leaps that, if formalised correctly, would actually make for a genuinely fun game. And pay attention to its duration - 38 minutes. If you remember your first playthrough of Half Life 2, just give a little thought to what you’d pick out of the game’s content to make a 38 minute run the most fun it could be. I bet it’d be a fucking blast.

[21]

1. The thing that warrants the most praise in Half Life 2 is the way it enlarges the player's repertoire of violence as it increases the scope for that repertoire to be used. By the time you're at Nova Prospekt, you have a full suite to improvise with and sufficiently open combat challenges to really flex. It was in dancing between Antlion lures, the SMG and grav-gun launches that the twitch gameplay really came alive. Gloriously chaotic fun in the real heat of the moment.

2. I think you can argue Call Of Duty reached this by Modern Warfare 2's No Russian, which must be the nadir for tasteless ostentation that's oblivious to its own tawdry moral degradation. In so many ways, we are paying a price for accepting the moral baseline that No Russian defined.

3. I have this sense of Portal being the geeky quiet kid at school that writes some script for a short sketch in a talent show that's so funny, everyone is amazed and the geeky kid is asked back to do a whole performance. The second time round,  overconfidence leads to a one-person all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza with a monorail musical number and pirouetting ballerina elephants. Seems they forgot that brevity is the soul of wit.

4. Hear me out - Half Life 2 fucked the whole series by turning Freeman into Jesus. He escapes the city into the wilderness to return as a saviour for the people FFS. I mean, Judaeo-Christian religiosity fills the game, alongside a strong anti-science streak that carries over into Portal. It’s kinda sinister when you see it through that evangelical lens.

5. I mentioned it in my Doom piece. They're not Doom. They're Quake in Doom clothes.

6. Currently running on TikTok is a Doom: Dark Ages teaser that starts with classic ASMR kinetic sand chopping with the caption "Satisfying?", before swapping to metal-soundtracked footage from the Dark Ages trailer of the player getting a kind of weedy machine gun that kind of hurts around eight or so enemies. It's actually pathetic. The sand is way more satisfying, thank you very much.

7. I mean, Alyx was blatantly Half Life 3, wasn't it? Come on. It fucking was and you know it.