Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

One thing I have noticed amongst the game reviewing community (including fan reviews, not just professionals) is that there is an attitude of "if it's a third person shooter it automatically sucks". This seems a tad unfair to me. I debated it with my good friend KrimsunBarun and he said something about aiming being awkward...

Myself I quite like TPSs. Transformers: War For Cybertron, for example, is a very good, well made game with good balance in multiplayer (don't laugh, I liked it...). Fracture was another good one. And whilst I haven't played them, Gears of War and Dead Space are both third person, and they're supposed to be pretty good.

What do you think?

Not sure that's accurate as Gears was popular and Fall of Cybertron has very positive reviews.

Who the hell says Third Person shooters automatically suck?

I mean obviously every game isnt for everyone but Ive never played a 3rd person shooter that I thought would have been better as a first person...

no wait Dead Space but I have a bunch of problems with Dead Space that with a few twieks here and there I would have though the game was amazing, but currently I hate it because of that. Third Person was one of them.


I have NEVER had an issue aiming with these games.

I don't think the difference of first versus third person can say anything about the quality of the game.

What I will say is that I believe that they cater differently to different sub-types of shooters:
First person for bombastic action slugfests where you are supposed to be 100% immersed in the battlefield, reflexively ducking on your chair as a grenade explodes nearby.
Third person for deep story-laden sagas where you aren't the hero but rather control him/her on their journey, but they are a character in their own right and you watch them fight and talk like you watch a good movie.

I've encountered plenty of good 3rd Person shooters. Fall of Cybertron and War for Cybertron, Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect, all the Uncharted series, the Metal Gear Solid series....It's exactly what Lynata said, most 3rd Person Shooters are more story-driven games.

...But I will say there are some garbage ones. I played about two hours of Spec Ops: The Line....and gave it back to my friend. Total waste of time.

I prefer FPS games over third person shooters. That said, some third person shooters have caught my attention more than others-- Space Marine, Red Faction Guerrilla, Mass Effect, and such come to mind.


Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 is an interesting case, because it is probably best classified as an FPS that switches to 3PS during its cover mechanic. It's odd that so few games make use of this, considering that it is probably the greatest compromise between FPS and 3PS.

Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 is probably one of my all time favourite shooters! But if i have to say a good third person shooter i would have to say Lost Planet 2

Third person games tend to do melee quite well.
Games like Jedi Knight/Academy/Outcast, Uncharted, Space Marine, Red Faction Guerilla, etc all have a strong emphasis on melee in some form or another.

First person shooters suck too.

Also, Jedi Knight is not a shooter. Well it can be if you really, really hate yourself

Coincidentally, Dark Forces - the precursor to Jedi Knight - was an FPS.

A good example for first person melee games would probably be Mount & Blade.

 Testify wrote:
Also, Jedi Knight is not a shooter. Well it can be if you really, really hate yourself

And all this time I thought of Jedi Knight 3 as a force choke grab and drop people off ledges simulator

Some FPS's suck the proverbial though.....anyone remember 'Daikatana', or 'Fire Warrior'?

TBH I enjoy both 3rd and First person shooters equally. From the early days of 'Smash TV' and 'Gauntlet', to 'Heretic' and the daddy(s) of the FPS genre 'Doom' and 'Quake'. They all pretty much kick ass!

Oh, and I forgot 'Zombies Ate My Neighbours!'. Ok,ok so technically the aforementioned Smash TV and Gauntlet are not 3rd person shooters, but at the time they were as close as one could get. Isometric, top down shooters where the precursor's to 3rd person shooters, weren't they?

Oh damn and balls, I forgot 'Space Harrier'......

I think there is a more interesting point here. Why are all third person shooters the same?

'Over the shoulder' (RE:4) aiming, Cover mechanics, context sensitive commands, Strict weapon limits, Bullet sponge enemies, shakey cam, 'Finisher' move mini cutscenes, 'Look over here' button so you dont miss any of the cinematic moments, Regenerating health, Instant revive for 'downed' team-mates, Co-op Wave survival mode, Harsh Burn-rates on power weapons (Forcing you to rely on a couple starter weapons). There's plenty more as although it is a thorough list it is not exaustive.

Alot of games these days try and move away from the cover mechanic but still retain most if not all the other things on my list. For example dead space has survival horror (I.e Scarcity) gameplay elements and No cover mechanic but still ticks many of the boxes.

I also enjoy the hybrid approach, Oddworld stranger did it best, Evasive movement/platforming/CQC in third person and shooting in first person.

Perkustin wrote:I think there is a more interesting point here. Why are all third person shooters the same?

I wouldn't call, say, Mass Effect and GTA San Andreas "the same".

The features you named sound more like a copycat checklist for developers who would want to do some game today that follows in the wake of some other successful game in the past. But really, this "recipe" mode of approach is in no way limited to third person shooters, nor even shooters in general. Any game genre suffers from it. Just look at peoples' complaints about MMOs.

 sarpedons-right-hand wrote:
Some FPS's suck the proverbial though.....anyone remember 'Daikatana', or 'Fire Warrior'?

Some FPS games suck, some TPS games suck - most games altogether suck. We just tend to forget those and remember the good ones. We only remember Daikatana and Fire Warrior because the first WAS GONNA KICK YOUR ASS JOHN ROMERO UNF UNF and the second was the first 3D 40k game so we all had a vested interest in it. I still sorta dug it the way I dig a lot of bad games though, and getting to see the 40k universe from the perspective of an infantryman (albeit one who's Master Chief's Tau cousin whose skin is made of kevlar) was kinda cool. Space Marine definitely did that better!

The bad rap for third person shooters comes from how samey they can be. The vast majority of them tend to be Gears of War style covershooters, but without mechanics anywhere near as good. Even so, that franchise has stagnated and while each game got better, they didn't change enough to keep me that interested. Decent games though. Third person covershooting even gets shoehorned into a number of other games like LA Noire, sometimes to their benefit and sometimes to their detriment.

If you want a good third person shooter though, you have to get Max Payne 3. The game is absolutely insane, the controls are smooth as butter, graphics are gorgeous, music and voice acting are excellent (the soundtrack is by HEALTH, a great noise rock band, and James McAffrey is back as Payne), and the environments are varied. The story is cool (if it has a few holes) and the game clocked in at a good 12 hours for me on hard difficulty. As a long time Max Payne fan, I was 100% satisfied with it!

That's the first good review of Max Payne 3 I've ever read.

 sarpedons-right-hand wrote:
Some FPS's suck the proverbial though.....anyone remember 'Daikatana', or 'Fire Warrior'?

I liked Fire Warrior...It was as difficult in game as it would be on the table for one fire warrior to do all of what he did.


I've only played two tps games that I really liked, Kid Icarus Uprising and Space Marine. But that's more or less because I enjoy the first person perspective more than the third person perspective in shooters.

I feel some of you may have misread me here, I don't mean all FPS games bar a few are awesome. I just picked Daikatana and Fire Warrior out for judgement because I loathe them with every fibre of my being....
Let's not forget Brink, Homefront and Duke Nukem Forever. They were all awful examples of a usually good genre..

As for TPS, ladies and gentlemen, may I present Mindjack. The cowering lump of sputum and bile, like a pus filled buboe on the face of Naomi Campbell.... A truly terrible game.....

 Melissia wrote:
That's the first good review of Max Payne 3 I've ever read.

As much as games journalism matters (it doesn't) I heard it was generally very well received. The Metacritic page has it at 86 which is pretty damn good if numbers matter to you. Everyone I know who played it loved it as much as I did; it's just a really well-crafted shooter. Funnily enough, a lot of the criticism is because the game is too hard. This is a joke, since I played it on hard and enjoyed the hell out of it, and I'm awful at videogames for someone who plays so many.

 sarpedons-right-hand wrote:

Let's not forget Brink, Homefront and Duke Nukem Forever. They were all awful examples of a usually good genre..

FPS games have pretty much the same quality to garbage ratio as any other genre. I play a large number of them and only stick through with a handful.

The criticism that I saw for MP3 wasn't for its difficulty or its gameplay, but rather, becuase of what they did to Max himself in the story.

Basically that he was a whiny, pathetic, eternally depressed loser with no sense of humor.

Then you read some crappy reviews or are veiling your own opinion.

Have you played the previous games? Max has always been whiney, so he should be. He also actually has a better sense of humour in this game, his one liners are as priceless as they ever have been.

The story is weak but not for the reasons you cite. Max is given a political agenda and it jars, it jars bad. Also the story is not as astute and self aware as it thinks both in script/themes and cinematography/direction.

The game is punishing and rather miserly with it's checkpoints so can be frustrating, especially if you go for the shootdodges from 1 and 2. Which annoyingly are beautifully animated. Which means you have to go for stop and pop headshots much like GTA4 which can get a bit tedious. It also has alot of old-school 'monster closets' which means insta-death and hindsight exploits.

I wouldn't say the checkpoints or monster closets were an issue; I can think of two specific points in the game where I opened a door and there was a badguy behind it, and one of those times the guy missed with both barrels! The difficulty is fair but forgiving; if you would die and still have painkillers left, you have a shot to kill the guy who shot you to get back up. Also, if you die so many times in a row on one part, you're given extra painkillers, just in case you used them all up earlier or something. I didn't have to stop and pop that much, but I definitely had to use cover. I'd usually take cover and shootdodge out of it once the guys were reloading or in the open, which frankly you'd do in MP1+2 anyway, just by physically standing behind something instead of sticky cover.

As for the story, it didn't have the same personal aspect to it that I wanted, but I still thought it was alright. Max as a character was excellent, and I really loved his syrupy, convoluted noir dialogue. Some great one liners for sure! The cinematography was really cool if you ask me too. Dying and getting kills were even framed in an interesting way that was pretty cool.

Brink wasn't bad in the sense that it was an "awful example of the genre".

It tried to deliver on huge promises, and failed to live up to them.
It tried to be innovative, and managed to do it in some ways but not enough.

It also was not helped by the fact that they tried to do a "MP only" game and added a campaign to it rather than polish the MP more.

Where did you hear that about TPS games?
On average they are better than FPS series, compare for example Gears of War to Call of Duty.

Yeah, Brink isn't bad. It's just sort of... okay. But it SHOULD have been better.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Daemonhammer wrote:
Where did you hear that about TPS games?

From me, probably-- although I wouldn't sway that they're bad, just that most 3ps games do not make good use of the medium. For my part, most of the time the third person perspective isn't that useful, especially for shooters. Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 is probably the best example of third person perspective in my view.

 Daemonhammer wrote:
Where did you hear that about TPS games?
On average they are better than FPS series, compare for example Gears of War to Call of Duty.

Whether Gears is better than Call of Duty is not only subjective but depends on the game. Call of Duty 1, United Offensive, 2, and 4 were all incredibly good games that built on the last in new and interesting ways. MW2 built on CoD4 in good ways, but then the series utterly stagnated. If you said any of the Gears games were better than something as tight as CoD4 I wouldn't agree, but I'd agree they're all better than Black Ops or whatever. On average third person shooters are no better than first person shooters, you just might prefer one to the other.

 Brother SRM wrote:

 Daemonhammer wrote:
Where did you hear that about TPS games?
On average they are better than FPS series, compare for example Gears of War to Call of Duty.

Whether Gears is better than Call of Duty is not only subjective but depends on the game. Call of Duty 1, United Offensive, 2, and 4 were all incredibly good games that built on the last in new and interesting ways. MW2 built on CoD4 in good ways, but then the series utterly stagnated. If you said any of the Gears games were better than something as tight as CoD4 I wouldn't agree, but I'd agree they're all better than Black Ops or whatever. On average third person shooters are no better than first person shooters, you just might prefer one to the other.

I was referring to the series as whole, sure i agree that cod 1,2 and 4 were good, but the rest were mostly ''meh same thing again''. GoW series on the other hand did a good job every time (so far), Improving in many ways each time.
Also its worth mentioning CoD Bo 2 will be the 9th cod game and MW4 is rumored to be in making.

I'm not surprised one bit that MW4 is in development. The series is going to keep getting milked until Activision can find a new franchise to bleed dry. Even so, I can't let the newer games tarnish my memories of the series up through MW2!

I've also had Gears 3 lying around for months; I started it in October but it just didn't grab me. I'll finish it eventually, when I clear through my backlog some more.

Don't worry, Gears will also probably get a fourth.

Gears already is getting a fourth.

Gears of War: Judgement.
It's a prequel, focusing upon Baird and Cole.