28 Melee games like Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders that you should try

While you were battling the evil forces of D'Sparil, the other Serpent Riders were busy sowing the seeds of destruction in other dimensions. One such dimension is the decaying world where Hexen takes place.

Iron Grip: Warlord invigorates tower defense with first-person shooter elements to give a new twist to the genre. It puts you in the heat of the battle, fighting off hordes of AI-controlled invaders. Play alone or with friends, in a diverse and challenging struggle to save all of Atelia.

DOOM 3 is a first-person shooter, the third installment in the series, serving as a reboot to the previous games. ###Plot As the game is set in a science fiction universe, the events span accordingly.

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.

A hunting simulator far more patient than its arcade cousins: animals track scent and sound, and a session can be hours of walking before a single shot. That deliberate pace is the entire point. It is also free-to-play with most maps and weapons behind purchases, and the pacing will bore anyone expecting a shooter.

Three separate campaigns — Marine, Alien and Predator — each rebuilding the game around a different body: the Marine's motion tracker and dread, the Alien's wall-crawling, the Predator's cloak and vision modes. The Marine campaign is the one that holds up. The other two are short and thin by comparison, and the multiplayer that carried it in 2010 is long dead.

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.

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 Four campaigns only, which is thin, and the sequel superseded it so completely that finding populated servers now takes patience.

A co-op horde shooter whose swarm tech is the draw: hundreds of zombies climb over each other into structures, and the class system rewards coordinating rather than scattering. Levels are short and replayable. The shooting itself is functional but unremarkable, and the campaign chapters are thin connective tissue between the set-piece swarm moments.

Wave-based co-op against slow, heavy specimens, built around a between-round shop and perks that level by playstyle rather than by menu. Weapon feedback is meaty. It shows its origins as a mod — level design is functional rather than crafted, and later waves come down to holding one corridor while a friend welds the door behind you.

Shadowgrounds breathes fresh air into the action genre with explosive combat sequences, an innovative weapon upgrade system, and an intriguing storyline.

The Expendabros is a crossover game based on Broforce gameplay and featuring characters from The Expendables 3 movie. In the basis of both games lays the roast of the 90s movie cliches about unstoppable warriors, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and the others.

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.

The Quake-era original: nine classes, grenades for everyone, and rocket and concussion jumping that turned movement into a skill ceiling of its own. Far more lethal and less forgiving than TF2. It is visually and mechanically ancient, the population is tiny, and nothing explains the movement tech that separates competent players from everyone else.