25 Games like Call of Duty® on Xbox that you should try

A first-person puzzle game structured like a metroidvania: a small sandbox where new tools retroactively open earlier areas, and almost every corner hides something. Puzzle design is genuinely clever. Combat is the weak part — enemies are simple damage sponges that interrupt the puzzling — and the art style is plain enough to look cheap.

id's follow-up to Doom, and the first with true 3D movement — rocket jumps, full vertical aim, and a Lovecraftian gloom scored by Nine Inch Nails. The movement still feels quicker than most modern shooters. Long-time players tend to prefer a source port to the official re-release, which quietly altered difficulty tuning and is treated as a compromised preservation job.

Everything the first game did plus melee weapons, daylight campaigns and special infected that force the team apart rather than just damage it. The AI Director still shapes every run. It absorbed the original so completely that the community split never healed, and the campaigns lean on finale set pieces that become rote once you know the safe corners.

Gordon Freeman became the most popular nameless and voiceless protagonist in gaming history. He is painted as the most famous scientist and a hero within the world of Half-Life, and for a good reason.

A short follow-up focused almost entirely on Alyx as a companion — the AI and dialogue work is what it was really testing, and it holds up. Roughly four hours. It is the slightest of the three: much of it is dark corridors and elevator sequences, and it functions more as a bridge than as a game in its own right.

Its enemy AI is still the reference point twenty years on: soldiers flank, suppress and call out movements, so firefights unfold differently each time. Slow-motion makes that legible instead of trivial. The horror sections have not aged as well — the same office corridors repeat for hours, and the scares telegraph themselves long before they land.

The strongest of the Half-Life 2 releases: open forest driving, the best encounter design in the series, and a Hunter fight that remains a high point of enemy AI. Roughly six hours. It ends on the cliffhanger that was never resolved, which for many is harder to sit with now than it was in 2007.

Gunslinger is the fourth installment of the Call of Juarez series of western-inspired games. The frame story, told in cutscenes, begins in 1910, in Kansas, where Silas, a patron in the pub, brags about his adventures in the Wild West.

Time manipulation applied to objects rather than the whole world: you age a crate to dust or restore a collapsed staircase, and it is used cleverly in traversal and combat. A tight, short campaign. It borrows heavily and openly from BioShock and Half-Life 2, and the shooting itself is unremarkable once the time device stops surprising you.

Wider environments and better lighting than the original, with the slow-motion shooting mostly intact and a mech section that breaks up the pacing. The AI is noticeably less sharp than in the first game, though, and the horror leans on jump scares rather than the dread the original built. Competent, rarely surprising.

A conventional military shooter wearing Quake's skin: corridor combat with heavy weapons, at its best in the mid-game once the Strogg conversion sequence gives it a hook. Level design is repetitive metal hallways for long stretches, and the squadmates who accompany you do little beyond soaking damage and opening doors.

A class-based arena shooter with genuinely inventive movement — roller skates, grappling hooks, gliders — that gives it a mobility profile nothing else has. Loadout customisation is deep for a free game. Its problem is population: matchmaking depends entirely on how many people are playing, and the tutorial does little to explain its many systems.

Portal 2 is a first-person puzzle game developed by Valve Corporation and released on April 19, 2011 on Steam, PS3 and Xbox 360. It was published by Valve Corporation in digital form and by Electronic Arts in physical form.

The AI Director is the whole design: it places hordes and items based on how well you are doing, so no two runs of a campaign play the same and tension stays authored without being scripted. Four campaigns only, which is thin, and the sequel superseded it so completely that finding populated servers now takes patience.