31 Games like Killzone: Mercenary on PlayStation that you should try

The second game returns us to the city of Rapture, on the New Year’s Eve, but this time player takes control of Subject Delta, Big Daddy, that’s been separated from his little sister and has been forced to shoot himself 2 years before the events of the first game took place.

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.

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.

With over 2 million copies sold, the new episode of the most internationally successful S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series seamlessly connects to the first part of the Shadow of Chernobyl. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

The second installment of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise is set one year before the events of Shadow of Chernobyl and serves as its prequel. You will explore the forbidden area around Chernobyl, Ukraine, after a new disaster that turned into The Zone, a post-apocalyptic wasteland full of mutants.

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.

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.

The shootdodge finally has weight behind it: bullets tear through cover, animations blend into terrain, and the last-stand mechanic keeps firefights tense. Some of the best gunfeel of its generation. It is also the most controlling — long unskippable cutscenes stitch between fights, and the linear corridors leave little room to approach an encounter your own way.

The Legacy of Star Wars Dark Forces™ and Star Wars® Jedi Knight lives on in the intense first-person action of Jedi Outcast. As Kyle Katarn, agent of the New Republic, use your Lightsaber and the full power of the Force to combat a new evil plaguing the galaxy.

The reset that pulled the series back to survival horror: first-person, confined to a single decaying Louisiana estate, with scarce ammo and a family that hunts you through it. The Baker house section is among the best horror the series has produced. After you leave it the game becomes far more scripted and linear, and the boss design is the weakest part of the package.

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.