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.

Screnshots:

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.

Screenshots:

Doom Mod Review : Quake Style Unbound

 When it comes to randomizer mods, I thought I had found all the good ones. It turned out I was wrong. Quake style is one of the big underrated ones and it spawned 2 more - quake style zx and quake style unbound. Quake style is interesting because it brought elements from quake games and wolfenstein games into doom.  Thankfully the wolf3d elements are limited to guns only, as killing tons of nazis in uac bases would be a tad out of place. But as you can see, the concept is cool.

Quake style unbound is the newest quake style randomizer mod of the bunch. It is actually by far the best, and it's so good, that I would call it the best randomizer mod ever. I thought infernal attack was that till I played 3 mods that blew IA out of the water, Hellstorm rebirth, Quake style zx and now this.

Like hellstorm rebirth before it, quake style unbound is a class based randomizer. Unlike hellstorm rebirth however, classes do not get weapons only they can use.  They start with different guns but that is about it. The mod has a lot of new guns, many of them are from other games, but not all. There are TONS, and I mean tons in this mod.  There is even an auto double barreled shotgun, a weapon only drla had before this.  A powerhouse of a weapon so good that if you get it you can cream slaughtermaps in seconds.

The weapons are all done well and many have altfires. A nice touch, like in the similar hellstorm rebirth mod.  The altfires I have not tested yet, but I know they exist.  Not all guns get them but a lot do.

Some of The new enemies are  ones from the beastiary, but unlike hellstorm rebirth you get tons of new ones on top of the beastiary ones. Many are actually from quake and quake 2, which is great. To see them you have to turn on the spawn quake monsters feature in options, but they are there and it makes this game great.

There are a whopping 15 playerclasses to choose from, including the quake guy, the doom guy, and many more. They all have new guns to start with and are really cool. I played the doom guy most but others exist. 

The quake 1 and 2 enemies feature makes this thing the best randomizer ever because fighting quake 1 enemies in doom is something that doesn't happen often and usually it's limited to massive AEOD style randomizers that borrow 90% of their content from other games.  This is different, they are there to make doom a little bit less doomy. Zombies are handled well, you need to gib them just like in quake to kill them. It's a nice feature.

What is not so nice however, is the one downside this mod has. The level completion screen. The thing gives you a very annoying ranking system that punishes you for not finding secrets or items. When you play randomly generated levels, finding secrets is really hard to do. Many are very well hidden. To punish you for finding them is stupid. In one map I got 80% kills but it didn't matter because I found 0% secrets and they gave me a D rank of minamalist. Like I was bad at the game or something. Let me tell you something, you don't have to go for 100% to be good at a game, it's stupid that this is in the mod! If this feature was not in the mod I would give it a 10, but as it is it's an 8.5 now. It makes no sense to punish people for not getting a perfect tally. It reminds me of the stupid score sucks BS in scoredoom and frankly should not be there. 

Anyway, if you don't mind that slight issue, I would say try out quake style unbound. It's definitely better than a lot of randomizer mods, maybe not the best but definitely a contender. Quake enemies in doom is a huge huge thing that I love.

Screenshots:

(the textures come from hoover1979's ultra hidef texture pack)

Edit : I managed to cook up a little quake 1 themed texture replacer to play quake style unbound with - if you are a fan of quake 1 maps you will recognize the texture pack it uses (ikbase)

Download it here

 

here is a screenshot showing it off with randomly generated maps, make sure to generate a tech themed obaddon mapset, for it only replaces some tech textures

Doom Mod Review : Hellstorm rebirth

 I'm doing a mod review of a very good randomizer mod here.  Hellstorm rebirth (not to be confused with doom - the hellstorm), is a randomizer mod released by a guy on facebook. If you search for :"hellstorm doom mod" and find the facebook page "hellstorm: a  zdoom mod"  you can download the mod there.

Having nothing in common with the phenominal hellstorm mod I reviewed recently, or the unfinished Eric Oi/Eriance mod that was in development on doomworld in the 90's, this mod is actually a lot like Doomzone, a class  based mod that has a randomized enemy feature.  If you like randomizers and like class based gameplay where each class can use specific weapons only, this mod is for you.

Having three classes, the mod introduces combat against randomized demons.  Many of the demons come from the beastiary. A few are new however.  The three classes are the rifle guy, the shotgun guy, and the energy weapons guy. Each has a specialty, machineguns/rifles for the rifle guy, shotguns for the shotgun guy and energy weapons for the energy weapons guy. Not that this specification means a whole lot, as classes who don't have a specification for a certain kind of weapon can still sometimes use those weapons.

The combat is very fun, and lots of new demons fight you. Many are from the beastiary, but some are new. I saw some new ones but none of them are really  great, but the beastiary ones are fine. However, some very good ones are commented out in the spawn lists, and that is puzzling.

The weapons are great in this mod, minus 1 glaring issue which I will get to later. Each weapon has been modded a lot to add new sounds, an altfire, and more. There are weapons from many different sources, the beastiary, demon eclipse/eriguns, drla, etc.  Many have been altered to fire different projectiles however. Some have been tweaked to be less or more powerful. Many have altfires but not all.  Some are damn powerful. The default pistol rips demons to shreds in this mod with it's secondary fire which is shotgun strength.  That is nice and that will help make some maps so easy it's not funny. It could be a great mod for slaughtermaps but more testing is needed to see if that is the case.

One glaring issue remains. The game locks up the instant you try to select the redneck rampage ripsaw gun.  That cannot be fixed easily and to me the only way to really fix it is to unbind the 1 key so you don't accidentally select it. Since it's very hard to not collect it, I suggest doing this:

make a batch file to load the mod by doing this:

take the following text line and past it into a text file and save it as a txt file and rename it to a batch file (BAT) later

gzdoom -file   hellstormv6_001a.pk3 +unbind 1

always use that batch file to load the mod and be careful not to pick up the saw thrower!
It makes it so you can't use melee weapons but it's worth it!
Since weapons don't get autoselected when picked up this helps

Besides that there is no issues, I hope no more freezes happen when enemies fight eachother or such, or else this mod may be ruined

Screenshots:

(loaded with hoover1979's ultra hidef texture pack and nameless rpg lite in the screenshot)

Doom Mod Review : Alandoguns

 Alandoguns is an ancient Doom Weapon Mod I found recently that I never played ever, for some strange reason.  It is a randomizer mod, one of the first randomizer mods, with tons of new guns, and some new enemies.

This mod has the reputation of being total shittiness in the community, due to that it has bad reviews up the wazzoo on idgames.But I don't think it's quite as bad as people are saying it is, sure, it rips from known sources, like the zdoom monster resource wad, other games, weapon mods by other people, etc, but to me compilation mods like this or infernal attack are fine.

I played a set of randomly generated maps in it and right away, I liked the guns. At first my favorite was the uzi, it did tons of damage for an uzi and even though it has a small clip size, it was fun to use. The weapons in this mod are the stars of the show, many many guns exist in this mod and they all have reloading built into them, which is amazing for it's time. They range from machineguns, chainguns, uzi's, shotguns of many kinds, including the riot gun from shadow warrior (not the new shadow warrior, the old one), an ice gun, and more. You will be swamped with guns in this mod, something lots of people don't like, but I don't mind it. I didn't mind infernal attacks 200 guns and I surely don't mind a mod that has tons of guns. 

The enemies however is where this mod starts to be not quite as good. Some are cool, like the new zombies, the rocket soldier, the new imps, the robots that replace arachnotrons, but a LOT of monsters in this mod come from Heretic and Hexen and other games like Duke3d. I simply don't think they fit at all, so that takes some points away. I managed to patch out the heretic/hexen enemies, and that made it much better, but a patched version simply cannot be released due to technical reasons now (me running out of space on pcloud).

For some reason the mod contains a lot of new textures and has some new maps in it, it's no big deal if you load randomly generated maps after the mod and use a high-def texture pack, but I would avoid playing the original doom 2 game in this for that reason. Map04 and map05 are totally replaced and they should not be.

I don't mind this mod, and if it weren't for one feature, I would probably call it decent to bad. But this  one feature saves it. Your max health can be upgraded! Pickups that look like heretic/hexen health vials/flasks are there, and they boost your max health at the same time as healing you. This makes this mod a great choice to play with super hard maps! This mod to me then is actually quite good, just not great.  It could have been much better if it didn't have heretic/hexen enemies in it, but besides that one issue and the map04-05 replacements  it's actually not that bad.



Screenshots:

(the textures from this screenshot are from the excellent hoover 1979 ultra hi-def texture pack)

Doom Mod Review : Doom - The Hellstorm

One thing doom really lacks is a good doom horror mod.  A mod that plays with any level and introduces horror gameplay into the game. While some people classify the original doom as horror, I don't.  The game has horror elements sure, but actual horror gameplay is not found in the original doom at all. What doom needed bad was a horror mod that introduces horror elements into the gameplay.

Well recently a doom mod entitled Doom - the hellstorm (which you can find by googling "doom hellstorm mod") was released on moddb.  This mod introduces horror elements into classic doom and does a pretty damn good job with it. After playing 2 levels that were obaddon generated with the mod, I definitely felt terror from the mod.

The first thing you will notice when playing the mod is how dark it is.  This thing is practically pitch black.  There is a flashlight, but it is not recommended to use it with obaddon maps due to the slowdown it creates.  To use the flashlight, you must unequip a gun like in doom 3 so it actually doesn't help that much.  This goes really well with the doom 3 texture replacer I found and released on the last review, the review of ultimate super doom 3.

The creepiness is brought out by the soundtrack, which is similar to the udv ambient soundtrack feature. That feature replaces the music with a quiet creepy droning in the background.  It makes the game way scarier. 

Healing is handled a lot differently than in normal doom mods. Picking up a healthkit does not automatically heal you in this mod.  You have to select the healthkit by hitting the 8 key on your keyboard and that will select it and allow you to heal, but when you heal you are totally defenseless, so choose wisely when you will try to heal yourself. It takes about 15 seconds to heal yourself from 50 health so be careful.  This adds to the horror elements.

Creepy apparitions will stalk you in this mod, not limited to an alma-like one and one from the movie scream.  Every once and awhile they show up. They don't make a noise when you see them, which would have made them scarier.  Strangely missing is youtube styled screamers in the mod, but that is a bit too scary maybe.

Adding to the horror elements are respawning monsters, throughout the levels, zombies will resurrect and demons will teleport in periodically, even in maps where they should not. It gives you a lot of tension while playing, which is great. It is also quite scary, as the chanting from doom 3 that happens when monsters teleport also is played in this mod when the same thing happens.

The mod has many guns, and all of them are original guns not found in other mods, which is a plus. They include 2 or 3 new pistols,  a magnum with a glowstick selected in the other hand to light things up, several shotguns, including the doom 3 one, the doom eternal supertshotgun with a built in grapple hook,  and an automatic one, a very good assault rifle, the plasma rifle, a chaingun, the rocket launcher and more.

The mod uses mostly beastiary enemies, and that is good and all, but the lack of doom eternal enemies kind of set it back a little bit. It isn't a huge issue but it could have made it way better if dread knights, doom hunters, marauders and carcasses were in this mod.  It actually lacks a lot of enemies from doom games besides doom 3 and 64 and custom doom ones. There are doom 3 alpha zombies, complete with their "you will not escape", "hell awaits you" screamed lines recorded by Trent Reznor, and doom 3, and doom 64 imps, but a few more from doom 2016 and eternal would have helped.

Another issue is the menu, it is TERRIBLE! You cannot see what menu item is selected at all, and have to use mouse driven menu controls, when keyboard ones are far easier to use but won't work in the mod.  It kind of sucks. At first it made me annoyed. Besides that and the lack of doom eternal enemies, this thing is actually pretty good though. If you want a good doom horror mod, you really cannot go wrong with hellstorm.


Screenshots:
(textures from the screenshot come from a doom 3 texture replacer I found on youtube, they do not come with the mod)