Rating what IMHO are the top 10 difficult FPS Games

 I don't do posts like this often,but when I do I like to cover them in great detail.  I have played over 80 FPS Games, and many of them have turned out to be ones i can easily beat, but these top 10 ones are insanely hard in many ways.  This is a post ranking the top  hardest 10 FPS games I have played. 

Before I begin, I would like to say a few things. These were ranked by their easiest skill only. I didn't do this on the hardest skill, because I never really play on the hardest skill unless I want an extreme challenge, and to me ranking them on their hardest skill is not a good measuring stick compared to doing it on easy, because I find that a lot of FPS games have brutally difficult easy modes these days.  And back in 1998 or so it started to really get notice able with the release of Half Life that easy mode would not be easy anymore.

10: Quake 1

This game is NOT easy and you find that out really early in the game if you dare to play it on  The enemies do a lot more damage than in doom, are far harder, weapons are noticeably weaker than in doom, health is less common and ammo is rarer and you can't pick up as much. That sums it up. Is it fair, sure, but it's a lot harder than games before it.

9: Doom 2

Why is doom 2 on this list. Normally it should not be anywhere near a list of hardest FPS Games, but thanks to it's addon levels, which lean forward rediculous SLAUGHTERMAP gameplay, you get this on the list for it's custom maps only. Stuff like Hell Revealed, Alien Vendetta, Sunder, etc is so hard that it makes the original game look 1/50's as hard.  Massive hordes of medium strength miniboss monsters, huge numbers of revenants, limited health, archviles in big numbers, sometimes even in hordes, cyberdemons being used a lot per level, etc, these kinds of maps push this game beyond Quske 1 in difficulty, but not by much, because even they pale in comparison to the heavy hitters. What makes this only 9 is mods though, with the right mods these maps are far easier, so it is still only slightly harder than quake 1.

8: Hexen

This game is mean. It has a mean streak. Mean traps everywhere, some of them death traps, bottomless pits, crushers that are almost impossible to avoid, extremely confusing puzzles, etc. This game is actually a lot harder than the Doom Games. Heretic is not that hard but hexen sure is!

7: Descent / Descent 2.

This game is fucking hard.  Enemies are very mean, the level design is mazey as hell and gigantic, and it has this crazy "you must blow up the level and escape before the countdown runs out" mechanic. Combine that with hard enemies, limited health/shield, limited lives, and such, and you get one hard game.

Descent 2 is even harder, with nasty enemies that can navigate the mines better than you can and some steal your weapons! It is even worse when you factor in the thief bots in this game.

Weirdly, Descent III is nowhere as hard as the first 2. It is strange, as the enemies are easier to deal with, the thiefs are nerfed a lot and the end game is the only really hard part.

6: Hexen 2

This game is actually FAR harder than hexen 1. Why? Harder enemies and weaker weapons might be what you think would make this game harder, but actually the puzzles are the main reason. First 2 hubs are no harder than the first 2 hubs of Hexen 1, then it gets crazy with over the top puzzles like the tic-tac-toe puzzle and similar in hub 3. Some of these puzzles require you to find hints in other levels that are very hard to find out, or are hidden. Some don't even have a hint! Or a good one. Combine that with hard combat and you have a frustrating experience.

5:  Jedi Outcast

This sequel to Jedi Knight is brutally hard. What makes it hard. Insanely weak weapons, plus brutally difficult snipers that have no signs to tell you where they are, stealth missions, unfair gameplay, you name it.  It starts bearable, but as soon as you reach nar shaddaa it gets insanely hard instantly fast.  The damn snipers in that mission are a bitch and your sniping weapon sucks and unzooms when you try to dodge them.  And that is the only gun that works well on them to make it worse. And to make it worse, they keep on coming in bespin too, and by the time yo.u reach the cairn they are gone, only to be replaced with insanely hard force power puzzles and stealth missions. This one is brutal and unless you like extreme difficulty, avoid it.

4: Serious Sam

Serious Sam is the one exception to the rule on this list. All other high-tier  games on this list have insanely hard easy skills.  But Serious Sam is the one with a pathetically hard super easy skill, but as soon as you crank it up to easy it becomes insanely hard. So if you want to beat it you need to be able to get lucky. It relies on horde combat,  tons of enemies that do lots of damage in battle arenas,  mean placement of enemies, enemies spawning behind you, sniping you, etc to provide insanely hard gameplay. This one is often called brutally hard, and for good reason

3: Half Life

This game actually is the weirdest one on this list due to how easy the beginning is. The beginning before we've got hostiles is easy as pie and the aliens pose almost no threat, but as soon as the grunts show up it becomes brutally hard.  The grunts are so fucking difficult it's not funny, they are intelligent but that's not what makes them hard, it's how much damage they do! Their damage is insanely unbalanced for easy. The grunts go away for one chapter, but as soon as they come back in powerup it gets insanely hard, and then there are the two grunt fest chapters which are insane (On a Rail and Surface tension).  Good luck beating this game on easy, I did it but I got lucky.

2: Deus Ex

This game is marketed as a stealth game, and if you play it that way, it might be easy, but if you try to run and gun through it, it's insanely hard. I found a way to mostly do it and beat it that way, but it all depends on how much skill points you put into gun skills.  And it gets brutally hard later on. Around Paris it is so hard that you need to be stealthy or lucky to beat it   Don't get me started with the save tiffany mission, that is brutally hard as well.

1: STALKER : Shadow of Chernobyl

The hardest FPS I've ever played by far. This game makes Half-life and Deus Ex look easy. Mean traps and anomalies, insanely hard soldiers, limited health, guns that are a bitch and don't fire straight, enemies that can head shot kill you from a distance, etc, this thing is downright mean.  I had to reduce damage to the player to even beat it fairly.....

Quake 1 Mod Review : Small Mod Compilation (SMC)

 I thought randomizer mods for quake were rare. I was wrong. A long time ago I played the excellent quake 1.5 mod for dark places. That mod has randomizer mod features and new enemy models.  It borrows heavily from other mods however, and one of them is called SMC. SMC has the same enemies as Quake 1.5 and has the same reskinned models. The models come from a mod called Arcane Dimensions so it's not entirely original but I don't care much about that. All I know is that SMC may be the best randomzer mod for quake.

SMC requires dark places. For a while I thought I never could run it but it turns out darkplaces has a software renderer that ran fine on my machine. So I played SMC in it with the renderer on and played 7 maps to see if I would get the dreaded lockups and did not (my system cannot handle opengl rendering for some odd reason).  The mod ran fine with only some slowdown.

SMC features a lot of new enemies, some of them from the Quoth mod, others are from arcane dimensions. You will fight enforcer varieties from quoth such as defenders, pyros and eliminators plus a lot of new enemies from arcane dimensions that I am not familiar with, but most of them come from hexen 2. They randomly replace enemies in maps and that is great, and this mod works with any ID1 Compatible map, which is also great.

I tried it with ikspq5 to test out the software renderers framerate and to see if the randomizer mod would break the final room like EXQ did and it did not.  Which is a relief.  That helps this mod become a lot more fun because the maps where enemies get killed to progress will work right 100% of the time.

I recommend this mod, even if you play it in software, it's got a few nasty graphics glitches in software, but besides that it's fine.

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Quake 1 Mod Review : Execution (EXQ)

 It's not often you see gameplay mods for quake 1. Usually gameplay mods are for games that have insanely good features in their ports that allow for gameplay mods to be made, such as decorate scripting in zdoom. Without features like decorate, it's impossible to make a very good gameplay mod. Yet the author(s) of EXQ managed to do so.

Execution (which I will call exq from now on) is a randomizer mod for Quake 1. Yes that's right, Quake finally has a randomizer mod.  It's not the first technically, as the excellent mod Quake 1.5 had randomizer gameplay too, but it's the first one that is well balanced and doesn't require a monster sourceport like dark places. That means a lot for me, as I cannot even run opengl games anymore without breaking my system. And since my Randomizer mod  that I made was made was so unbalanced that it could not be beaten on easy, it doesn't count.

Execution has 2 difficulty settings. On easy no enemies but dogs get replaced by enemies, which makes it useless. Hard makes  every enemy get replaced by the hardest enemy it can possibly be replaced by in all instances, making it insanely hard (we're talking about hordes of mega enforcers in e1m1 here). That means medium is the only difficulty you should play in this, as it has the most fair replacers put in.

Throughout the game enemies will get replaced by new enemy types randomly.  Some are common, some are not. Each Enemy can be replaced by at least 2 new enemies.  Grunts get replaced by enforcers and fast moving grenade grunts, enforcers get replaced by mega enforcers from Zerstorer, Scrags get replaced by green scrags taken from Soul of Evil and super OP versions of them that shoot spike mines at you (!), Ogres get replaced by super OP cluster grenade shooting flaming ogres, Knights get replaced by very OP statue knights that require nails to kill and are totally impervious to shotguns, that makes this mod harder than normal quake by far.  You end up saving up a lot more nail ammo due to it. Death Knights get replaced by this super OP death knight varient that shoots nails at you. So far that's all I have seen in the mod. I have not seen the new fiend variant, or the new shambler yet. Nor have I seen the cyberdemon that shows up.

The mod has a very quirky weapon system. The default shotgun is replaced by an infinite ammo super shotgun, and the nailgun wastes no ammo until you upgrade it. I don't know how to find such upgrades but I assume picking up weapon pickups MIGHT trigger the upgrades, as picking up the Riot Controller (Super Shotgun Replacement) might gave me an upgrade before.  Once you get an upgrade for either one of these weapons it does more damage, but starts to waste ammo too. Other guns get upgrades as well. Many Guns are replaced with new ones in this mod. The supernailgun is gone and replaced with a plasma rifle that looks kind of like the thunderbolt. There ia a chaingun you can get when you pick up the nailgun that looks like the zerstorer one but fires less accurately and fires exploding rounds. The supershotgun can shoot explosive shells with an upgrade too.  The rocket launcher has an upgrade to turn into a multi rocket launcher, the grenade launcher has a cluster grenade upgrade, and there is a super bad looking "FAT" Lightning gun ripoff that shoots what looks like a big ball of light. I think that is supposed to be a BFG as it's fireballs death frame looks like a bfg hit from doom.  Besides that one gun the rest are fine.  I like how you can upgrade guns.

The one flaw this mod has is difficulty. It's balanced well but it's balanced like Complex Doom for Doom. It's hard as hell. Even on medium you will take TONS of damage.  It feels like complex doom done in quake. It's hard as hell and I had to use cheats to beat several maps because I could not handle the difficulty. If the easy skill would allow for enemy replacement, this mod would be better, but as it stands it needs to be improved a little in the balance department.

There are some bugs with this mod however. Gibbing enemies can sometimes prevent them from triggering death targets that must be triggered to progress, like the enforcer in that little room just beyond the gold key door in e2m1 that has a death target that opens the way to the silver key door.  In that map, I accidentally blew him up and the death target didn't fire right. Also in IKSPQ5 the death targets for at least one enforcer didn't fire right in the room that requires a group of grunts to be killed to progress to the exit teleporter.  That one however seems more like a map bug as it also happened in my Ill-fated randomizer mod too. That is a pretty serious bug and can leave levels broken bad. But besides that I could not find a bug with the mod at all. It's worth playing. Just make sure to use a fitzquake variant like MarkV or quakespasm to play this as winquake is not good enough, and dark places might run it but I can't test that now.

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