Greatest First-Person Action Games Of All Time

First-person action combat is something that video games have had trouble nailing down. It’s a hard balance to strike. First-person perspectives require players to look around to see what’s beside and behind them, which goes against the idea of a fast-paced action combat system where they need to employ lightning-fast reflexes and execute quick combos. Many games have tried to get it right, but very few have succeeded.

These next games are those very few. They are all different in their approach, but they share two things in common: they are all in first-person, and they all managed to create a combat system where the action feels both manageable and fast-paced without the camera’s perspective getting in the way. Whether players want high-speed, one-hit-kill fights or creative playgrounds where they can organically create their own choreographed action scenes, the best first-person action games of all time have got them covered.

Keep in mind, these games are not shooters. While first-person shooters could reasonably be called action games, we’re treating “first-person action” as its own genre here. While there may be a tiny bit of overlap, it’ll be clear where those games set themselves apart from the typical FPS.

Ghostrunner 2

Speed, Precision, And Intense Difficulty

• One-hit kills for both Jack and most enemies make this like cyberpunk Hotline Miami.
• There’s a motorcycle, and Jack rides it down the side of a building.

Purists might insist that the first Ghostrunner is superior from a gameplay perspective, and they have some valid points to back that up, but the expanded scope and mechanics of Ghostrunner 2 elevate it to a tier above. Players still control Jack, a Ghostrunner — basically a cyberpunk ninja — who is tasked with killing his foes as quickly as possible. They can still run on walls, grapple across giant gaps, deflect lasers back at enemies with their sword, zipline, and a whole lot more. What’s great about Ghostrunner 2 is everything that isn’t in the first game.

First off, there’s the motorcycle sequence, which starts as an insane setpiece where Jack escapes from Dharma City by riding it down the structure’s outside wall. This then leads to a semi-open-world level where players can pursue their objectives in any order, with some unreal motorcycle platforming challenges in between. The boss fights are also much improved in the sequel. Whereas The Gatekeeper was really the only standout boss fight in the first game, Ghostrunner 2 features more of them and makes better use of its gameplay mechanics during each fight. There’s even a boss fight on the motorcycle, and yes, it’s awesome.

Neon White

A Speedrunner’s Fever Dream

• Flips the first-person shooter formula on its head.
• Timing is everything, and knowing the best moment to shoot is crucial.

Speedrunning isn’t for everyone. Most players don’t enjoy any video game enough to spend the requisite hours necessary to learn how to speedrun through it. That’s where Neon White comes in. Instead of making speedrunning a separate activity for die-hard fans, it’s the primary focus, and the game is designed to both encourage and facilitate the process. As White, players battle through the many layers of Heaven, each of which has been overrun by demons. They pick up cards throughout each level that act as their weapons. Each weapon has a set amount of ammo, or they can burn the card in one go to use its special ability.

Aiming, timing, movement, and strategy all come together in perfect harmony once players get the hang of things. A first run through any level will seem like a pretty standard shooting and platforming experience. However, players will quickly start to identify ways they can make their runs quicker. Maybe they can pick off an enemy right from the starting area, allowing them to skip a portion of the level. Maybe they can use a special ability to launch over a platforming section rather than spending precious seconds on each individual jump. This is a loop that rapidly becomes addictive, but is also easily accessible, as the game is built around finding these loopholes. Shaving off just a few fractions of a second from a completion time will become an intensely rewarding gameplay success story, and competing against friends to hit the fastest time is a blast.

Superhot

Stop. Hammertime!

• A brilliant time-stop gameplay mechanic that turns every encounter into an action scene.
• Enemies go down easily, but so does the player, making each battle a puzzle to be solved.

The idea behind Superhot is so simple that it’s remarkable how effective it is in practice. In essence, whenever players aren’t moving, time stops. As soon as they move, time flows forward. Now introduce guns, bullets, swords, and the like, and the game suddenly becomes a violent ballet where the player is the most badass action star on the planet.

When the bullets start flying, stop moving and find a position where they won’t make contact. Then, pick out a target. Shoot that first enemy, now he’s down, and he dropped his gun. Players can then toss their gun at a second enemy, catch the first enemy’s gun before it hits the ground, and fire it at a third enemy, all while dodging bullets. That’s just the most basic example, but it’s easy to see why such a simple formula can be so unbelievably satisfying. Superhot is ripe for experimentation, and more often than not, that experimentation is rewarded with a glorious action sequence that’s so awesome it feels like it could have been choreographed.

Mirror’s Edge

Sprinting Never Felt So Good

• Some of the best freerunning in any video game.
• Combat is there, but isn’t necessary; escape is just as viable.

For some reason, very few video games have tried to recapture what made Mirror’s Edge so special. It’s a first-person freerunning game where players control Faith, a Runner who delivers packages and information across a futuristic dystopian metropolis. Runners are independent couriers, and as such, are illegal, meaning that Faith has to contend with not just the dangers of leaping across tall buildings, but also any security she might encounter along the way.

First-person freerunning has never felt this good in any other video game. The closest might be Dying Light, but even it can’t match the speed and fluidity of Mirror’s Edge. Jumping, climbing, sliding, swinging, and balancing across the mile-high rooftops is as smooth as butter, and chaining together extended runs is endlessly satisfying. There is combat if Faith encounters the aforementioned security, but it’s not mandatory, and is mostly just there to get her out of a sticky situation before she can start running again. Still, throwing a kick to the head of a security guard, wall-running over to another and stomping them into the ground, and then taking off on another run is a damn fine experience, and one that very few video games can match.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2

Beat Back The Rats

• Endless hordes of Skaven give players plenty of opportunities to experiment.
• Co-op makes things both more enjoyable and more tactical.

There’s something to be said for laying a beatdown on a seemingly endless swarm of nasty baddies. Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is exactly that. Players choose from one of five different characters, each of whom can take at least three out of 20 different careers depending on how many DLCs the player invests in. Each career has different abilities, skills, and weapons, making things consistently replayable.

While the gameplay here isn’t exactly deep, it is very satisfying. Enemies, for the most part, go down easily, but there are so many of them that they still feel constantly threatening. It’s an exquisitely fine balance between making the player feel powerful and vulnerable all at once. There are, of course, bigger enemies that require more coordination to take down, which is when playing in co-op comes in handy. A well-balanced squad of four friends can lose hours in Vermintide 2, slaughtering Skaven, collecting loot, leveling up characters, and then doing it all again to see how many rat-men that newly-unlocked skill can pulverize at once.

Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic

A Kick In The Right Direction

• Physics-based combat makes each swing feel hefty.
• Combat is not easy, meaning players must pick a specialization, stick with it, and master it if they want to succeed.

While it is showing its age a bit today, there is still plenty of fun to be had in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. This RPG is still touted as one of the prime examples of first-person melee combat, and it doesn’t take long to see why. There are plenty of specializations that players can build their character around — magic, stealth, range, or melee combat — but with combat this unforgiving, they need to get very comfortable with their character build if they want to progress.

Since we’re talking action here, let’s focus on the melee combat, which is arguably the hardest character type to play as. Enemies are strong, defend themselves well, and will often gang up on the player. Because of this, environmental hazards become critical in combat. This is coupled with what is arguably the best kick ability in any video game ever made. Booting an enemy into a spike wall, off a cliff, or into an open flame is gratifying in a way that is hard to describe. It will, quite frankly, become most melee characters’ primary combat method. That may sound dumb, but just give it a try. It feels amazing, and given how brutal these enemies are to fight, they deserve it.

Dishonored 2

Stay Quiet Or Get Very, Very Loud

• While it’s renowned for its stealth mechanics, the action side of things is equally fun.
• Combat abilities range from guns to possession to summoning rats.

When most people think of Dishonored 2, they think about it as a stealth game, and fair enough. The stealth in this game is fantastic. It’s incredibly well-designed, offers dozens of paths to explore, and the abilities associated with it are both fun and very effective. That said, the option to “go loud” is always present and never discouraged, and if players take that route, they’re in for a very different kind of game, one that is jaw-dropping in its precision.

Between Corvo and Emily’s speedy movement and their otherworldly abilities, the action side of combat can turn into an action fan’s dream in the right hands. Tossing bombs, shooting guns, summoning rats, or chaining a bunch of enemies together so that when one dies, the rest do too; it’s a playground of death, one that’s begging for players to mix their traversal of the environment with their abilities and weapons to create some truly special moments. The more comfortable players become, the better the combat gets. Rather than getting stale, players will start to imagine new tricks for using the tools at their disposal. Dishonored 2 rewards thinking creatively in this way, and those ideas that pop into the player’s head mid-battle will almost always work out in spectacular fashion.