Long gone are the glory days of O.G. Rainbow Six, where players would spend hours just planning their counterterrorism team’s ingress before carefully selecting each team member’s tactical equipment and, most importantly, their weaponry – or are those days back like never before?
The first-person shooter has become arguably the greatest segment in the world of videogames, with thousands of titles proliferating the space, comprising millions of regularly active players.
But within the ballooning genre lies a broad spectrum of pure science fiction and downright tactical realism: The commitment to modeling modern gunplay as close to real life as possible. While titles like Fortnite steadfastly disregard all semblances of reality, favoring campy player skins and ACME cartoon-esque weapon dynamics, other titles seemingly seek to blur the line between casual gameplay and what might even constitute simulated training.
So, in an age filled with loot boxes, overpowered sniper rifles, comical grenade launchers, and Rambo-esque machine gunner tanks, which games get tactical gunplay right?
Ready Or Not
Ready Or Not is to the new generation of FPS gamers what Tom Clancy’s original 90s tactical shooters were for this Millennial author: The epitome of realistic counterterrorism gunplay. This 2023 entrant to the genre places you in the fictional Los Suenos, California tactical police team, itself an analog for LAPD SWAT.
Before embarking on various 1- to 2-hour missions – each requiring the careful elimination of baddies amidst drug busts, mass shootings, heists, and hostage rescues – you’ll first outfit your tactical team with rifles, sub machineguns, pistols, suppressors, sights and optics, rail attachments, body armor, ballistic shields, breaching devices, less lethal weapons, and other mission-critical gear, all designed to replicate real-world accuracy and deployment as close to 1:1 as possible.
Eschewing what some consider a plague of grindy unlockables and loot boxes, Ready Or Not provides you with all weapons and equipment at the beginning of the game – all of which you’ll certainly need to navigate each mission’s unique challenges.
Much like those 90s tactical insertion shooters, you won’t be going it alone. Ready Or Not provides you with relatively robust and controllable AI team mates in the form of “red” and “blue” team. You play the commander, ordering each team to perform individual tasks – or you can tackle stubborn objectives by commanding both elements as one “gold” unit.
The pace of Ready Or Not can only be described as deliberate suspense. Enemy AI are cunning and aggressive; they’ll frequently push back and even preempt attacks if you take too long to ingress. The gunplay feels heavy and, well, realistic. You won’t find yourself sprinting through doorways, but instead slowly carving through rooms and peaking corners with your rifle at the high-ready.
The game even accounts for the psychological stress of combat by providing a deteriorating of your team members’ mental states – including (yes, really) cognitive therapy to get them mission-ready once again. The longer and more poorly a mission is executed, the worse your teammates will become, eventually resigning.
Escape From Tarkov
If you’re the type of firearm aficionado who scoffs when a first-person shooter crudely uses a PSO-1 scope mount intended for the Dragunov series of rifles atop an AK-47 receiver, you’ll appreciate the borderline neurotic level of detail and accuracy built into extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov’s massive and modular arsenal – never mind its commitment to slow, brutal, generally unforgiving “permadeath” gunplay.
In total, Tarkov affords players with a few million possible gun combinations across a variety of eastern and western rifles, SMGs, shotguns, and handguns. Such is the accuracy between the game’s digital weapons and their real-life counterparts that many players have even taken to unlocking items in the game for no other purpose than to replicate their real-life AR15 kits and other guns in the game, matching up handguards, grips, iron sights, optics, barrels, slings, magazines, and stocks, even dust covers.
Unlike Ready Or Not, this Slavic shooter’s primarily online and, although hostile NPCs exist in each instance of the open map, the gameplay focuses on tactical cooperation between players to successfully complete PMC raids and “scav” (short for “scavenger,” or loot) raids.
Gameplay is decidedly analog, as well. Want to check your remaining rounds in your weapon? If you didn’t count every trigger pull, you’ll need to take your eyes off the battlefield, make yourself vulnerable, and manually extract the magazine to check.
Took a hit to a lower extremity? Your movement will be significantly slowed, and you’ll need to stop and bandage yourself (lest your character bleeds out). Upper extremity shot? You’ll be left spraying and praying at the low-ready ‘til the round ends.
Ricochets and bullet penetration are even modeled 1:1, meaning a stray round bouncing off some metal beam can still take out your character, and different materials provide different levels of protection when taking cover.
Arma III
If extraction gunplay with loot mechanics isn’t your thing, maybe the most realistic mil-sim shooter every made (probably) is up your alley. America’s Army III – known to most simply as “Arma 3” – holds that title as of late 2024, as it has since 2013. This squad-based online FPS simulator takes every aspect of realism to the extreme.
You can certainly “lone wolf” your way through online matches, but the gameplay mechanics practically demand real teamwork. The scale of the core Arma III map – an island conspicuously similar in size and shape to one of Greece’s territories – dictates heavy use of crewed land and air vehicles. Play as a pilot or sit in the co-pilot’s seat of any helicopter or jet and control various weapon systems.
Teammates on the ground can also paint targets, provide grid coordinates, and request indirect fire, at which point you’ll have to the answer the call with some appropriate placed mortar rounds.
Gunplay, especially the interaction between live rounds and the environment around you, is highly realistic. Bullet drop closely replicates the real-life performance of all Arma weapons’ calibers. Hard surfaces, including vehicles, provide a realistic level of coverage, too – few surfaces and barriers are truly impenetrable.
A sufficiently large rifle round will punch through concrete and vehicle doors, wounding or killing your character. Sheet metal and standard building walls provides virtually no cover – though rounds fired at thin, hard surfaces at a sufficient angle will ricochet.
Rounds also lose velocity when penetrating surfaces, and the thickness of the material dictates just how much velocity is lost. These mechanics make close quarters combat in buildings more complex. If the enemy knows which room you’re in, the drywall and furniture within won’t protect you.
Player mechanics are generally described by Arma veterans as slow and deliberate. Your player’s run speed won’t allow for much evasion in direct fire, though advanced crouch, prone, and crawl mechanics allow for plenty of maneuvering behind cover.
Bodycam
If replicating real life tactical gameplay to such an extent that it’s practically indistinguishable from, well, real life, then Bodycam is the only game you’ll want to play. This Unreal Engine 5-based FPS provides what most players are describing as close quarters tactical gunplay that can genuinely be mistaken for police or counterterrorism bodycam footage.
With shot reports, recoil, true-to-life optics and iron sight fields of view, and most of all, player movement that feels like you’re remote-controlling another human being, Bodycam demands absolute concentration as you slice the pie through occupied rooms, and push through kill zones in contested hallways and tunnels.
Bodycam’s maps take full advantage of UE5’s photogrammetry textures and path-traced lighting to produce damp, cold, and dimly lit environments that are downright frightening to navigate, with many gameplay clips often tricking viewers into thinking the footage is simply real combat captured by some paramilitary force.
Bodycam has an arsenal that doesn’t disappoint, either. Although still in early access, the game affords players with a generous selection of current “in vogue” tactical hardware, including GLOCKs, submachine guns like the UMP45, popular assault rifles like the AKM, FN, and M4 series, and designated marksman rifles like the SVD Dragunov.
Weapons are admittedly limited in their customization, but their default loadouts provide the necessary accoutrements, like tac lights and holographic optics. Current game modes emphasize player-on-player combat with classic Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and “Body Bomb” – a plant-and-diffuse game mode shamelessly inspired by Counterstrike – providing the current lineup.
Hell Let Loose
Miss the glory days of original Call of Duty? Medal of Honor? Wish they were just a tad more realistic back when you were battling your friends on those rifles-only Deathmatch games? Hell Let Loose is the answer. This modern take on WWII first person shooters is equal parts commitment to history and tactical accuracy.
With combat focusing on platoon cooperation and battles allowing up to 100 players, you’re in for extensive action across large maps that demand cohesive efforts between infantry, artillery, and armor.
Hell Let Loose does come with a somewhat challenging learning curve – some have even likened it to the technical pedantry found in Arma – but the payoff’s worth it (and this writer opines it is not, in fact, as technically challenging as Arma).
Combat’s fast and furious, and weaponry of the era’s true to its actual power. Take a single round from a Mauser, or an M1 Garand, and it’s lights out. Injuries will slow you down, too. As the frontline shifts, you’ll need to leverage armor and mortars to push back enemies in defilade. It’s a frighteningly honest rendition of the brutality of WWII that handily fits our list of the list of the most realistic first person shooters.
