Every year dozens of new shooters burst forth onto our PCs. Many are forgettable, some are good, but few stand out as important, memorable games that show us something we don't see every day. 2012 has certainly had its share of peaks and valleys that'll come up when we talk about shooters for years to come. Here, in chronological order, are the notable and important PC shooters (and the rest of them) of the year.
It wasn't Jackie's heart-eating demon arms that made The Darkness 2 more than just another shooter with a supernatural gimmick, but rather a surprisingly well-written story, and interesting characters.
February 8th - Gotham City Impostors
Gotham City Impostors isn't a great game, but we'll always remember how it pulled a rare post-release turnaround. Initially a $15 purchase that opened the door to tons of microtransactions and saddled with the barely tolerable Games for Windows Live multiplayer service, GCI later dropped both the cover charge and the GFWL baggage in favor of a generous free-to-play system and the smoother operation of Steamworks matchmaking when it relaunched on August 31st. It serves as an example of how a good game can be dragged down by bad technology around it, and how dramatically it can improve when those things go away.
February 20th - Syndicate
We'd crossed our fingers and hoped that Starbreeze's Syndicate reboot would turn out to be a Fallout 3-like success story of transitioning a series from isometric tactical gameplay to a first-person shooter. It wasn't. This Syndicate's legacy will be yet another reminder that slapping a beloved name on a generic FPS isn't a recipe for success.
Team Fortress 2's free-to-play transition happened last year, giving us the first shooter that was actually fun to play without paying for. But it wasn't until Tribes: Ascend kicked off its open beta (and formally launched on April 17th) that we finally got a free-to-play shooter built from the ground up that actually made sense. It also successfully restored the long-dormant Tribes series to grace, and that's important, because where else can you find this very unique style of high-speed "skiing" gameplay?
Another very strong free-to-play shooter contender, Blacklight: Retribution's open beta launch (and formal release on April 3rd) proved that TF2 and Tribes aren't just flukes, and cemented F2P as a viable option for shooter fans. Yes, you can actually play Blacklight: Retribution for free and have fun without having your pockets turned out by a punk pay-to-win business model.
March 8th - Deep Black Reloaded
How can underwater shooting be this shallow?
Like a sudden zombie attack, no one saw it coming, but the arrival of the Arma 2 mod DayZ took the PC gaming world by survival-horror-shooter storm. For months it seemed that all anyone could talk about was their latest adventure -- and how it inevitably ended in either a gruesome zombie horde attack or at the hands of another player who wanted what precious survival gear they'd managed to scrape together. Within months, DayZ had turned into a massive, million-player success story, and a stand-alone version is set to launch in 2013. We're bound to see its influence for years to come -- expect some tougher games that aren't afraid to kill you and take your stuff.
April 27th - Binary Domain
Recognized for outstanding achievement in the field of unintentional comedy.
May 1st - Sniper Elite V2
Kill Hitler! Again!
May 4th - Orion: Dino Beatdown
A buggy disaster of T-rex proportions.
May 10th - Nexuiz
Nexuiz recently announced it'd upped its maximum players to 32, which is odd, because it was already having a hard time filling a single 16-player server. Such a major failure raises major questions about the health of the arena shooter genre -- we'll be keeping a close eye on Shootmania Storm to see if it's a fluke or a trend.
Besides being an excellent, highly cinematic shooter that isn't afraid of taking Max's character in bold new (and yes, divisive) directions, Max Payne 3 is notable for its enormous 35GB install size.
June 12th - Ghost Recon: Future Soldier
Three... two... one... headshots. Repeat.
What's remarkable about Spec Ops is that, during the lulls between its typical third-person modern military action, it has the balls to depict war as nasty, bloody, and emotionally traumatic business. In that way it's an anti-Call of Duty, which is known for its heroic action-adventure romps, and that risk-taking attitude is something we'd love to see more of in shooters.
August 15th - Ghost Recon Online
Though it's not a super significant game in of itself, GRO added another game to the streak of respectable free-to-play shooters.
What's important about what's essentially a graphical update and minor tweaking of a 12-year-old shooter? It's proof that games don't need to ape Call of Duty's XP unlock system to be successful, and that old-school skill-based shooting could still stand on its own in 2012.
August 21st - Transformers: Fall of Cybertron
Peter Cullen (aka Optimus Prime) for voice actor president!
September 11th - Battlefield 3: Armored Kill
A set of large, vehicle-focused maps showcase that BF3's 64-player battles.
Black Mesa is worth the wait. The way this dedicated team of modders has brought its interpretation of the original Half-Life to a new generation of gamers who'd otherwise have passed it by due to the late-90s graphics is like playing the ultimate expression of fandom. This is as much a mod and a game as a historical restoration project to preserve a slice of PC gaming history.
Borderlands 2 would "just" be a bigger, better Borderlands if not for the presence of one of the year's best villains: Handsome Jack. An evil mastermind you love to hate, Jack's wit is almost as deadly sharp as his over-the-top methods of offing his enemies.
October 17th - Ravaged
Tons of potential, but no staying power. Ravaged's servers are now a wasteland.
What's most amazing about Warfighter is that it demonstrates how unexciting and uninspired a big-budget modern military shooter can be. Like Homefront before it, this is the kind of mediocrity that happens when a developer tries to beat Call of Duty by Call-of-Dutying harder than Call of Duty when it should be Call-of-Dutying smarter. Or not at all.
October 31st - Painkiller: Hell & Damnation
A fun trip down shooter memory lane, but the lesson is that simply reanimating a classic doesn't mean it'll recapture the magic.
This is historic! Many have tried, and many have sucked (we're looking at you, Dino D-Day and Orion: Dino Beatdown), but Primal Carnage finally succeeded in making a fun dinosaurs-vs-humans multiplayer shooter.
A handful of games have attempted the tricky RTS-multiplayer FPS mash-up, but Natural Selection 2 does it better than any we've ever seen. However, it's yet to solve the tricky issue of who gets to play as Commander in an elegant way.
Black Ops 2 is an important game because it's the first one in the Call of Duty series in years that's taken any real chances with design. RTS-like Strike Force missions, choice and branching story options, plus new multiplayer customization options gave us a reason to care about CoD again beyond it being a big seller.
There's simply nothing else out there that comes close to the scale and barely controlled chaos of PlanetSide 2's 64-square kilometer, 2000-player battles. This is a game that not only pushes the technology of PC gaming forward in ways we just don't see very often anymore, but adds to the PC's stable of genuinely impressive free-to-play shooters that don't require a dime spent to have a good time.
Far Cry 3's not just another pretty open-world shooter, it's a pretty open living world shooter. It's a dangerous place where emergent gameplay bursts forth like a leopard pouncing on its prey -- something that happens quite literally and frequently on this tropical island. It's that unpredictability, combined with another great villain in the brilliantly acted psychopath Vaas Montenegro, that makes this one of the stand-out shooters of 2012.
December 4th - Battlefield 3: Aftermath
The last piece of Battlefield 3 DLC for 2012.
December 12th - Hawken (Open Beta)
It's too early to tell if Hawken will be an important game for 2012 or not, but it does look promising!
I haven't seen a shooter haul like this since the great boom of aught-four! What's your most important PC shooter of 2012? And for that matter, what do you think is the best year in history?