38 Games like Tunnel Rats that you should try

Columbia is the achievement — one of the most striking settings of its generation, with skyline traversal that gives fights genuine verticality. Elizabeth is well handled as a companion. Combat is narrower than the first BioShock: two weapons at a time, fewer environmental options, and the plasmid experimentation is largely gone.

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.

Oddmar struggles with life in his village and is not worthy of a place in Valhalla. He is shunned by his fellow Vikings and must redeem himself of his squandered potential. One day he is offered an opportunity to prove himself, but at a price...

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.

"Get in, get out, get paid." PAKO 2 is an arcade driving game where you explore vast cities as a getaway driver, perform robberies with your crew and shoot twin-stick style while escaping the law.

Build-engine shooting from 1997 with the sprite work and level secrets that implies: dense, maze-like maps built for exploration rather than corridors. The weapon set is inventive. Its humour is dated and often crude in ways that land badly now, and the level design assumes patience for hunting switches most modern players lack.

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.

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.

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.

In the far-distant future, far, far away in space (to be exact, a thousand light-years from the Earth), on the planet Far, Far Range, mega-corporations (they, it turns out, will be with us in the distant future!) discovered the ideal source of income, universal natural resource - Plort.

Essentially a tech demo, “Half-Life 2: Lost Coast” sole purpose was to show off the new high-dynamic-range-rendering of the Source engine, it was a welcome addition to the franchise. It’s a free addition to the game that can be downloaded through Steam by the owners of Half-Life 2.

STAR WARS - Dark Forces uses the Jedi game engine which was developed for this game exclusively. At the time the game presented new features of first person shooter genre, one of which is the ability to look up and down and also it presented the new approach to level design with multiple floors.