19 Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat on Xbox that you should try

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.

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.

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.

FPS with RPG elements, Bioshock invites players to experience horrors of underwater isolation in the city of Rapture, the failed project of the better future. After surviving the plane crash, the protagonist has only one way to go – to the giant lighthouse that opens a way to the underwater utopia.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.