The 16 Great Linear Shooters That Have Lengthy Campaigns

Wolfenstein: The New Order – 11+ Hours

Things that B.J. Blazkowicz did against thousands of bad Nazis are pretty much the same, right? Well, this new version of the show jumps ahead a lot of years and shows a different past where the Nazis won World War II and ruled the whole world.

Id Software and Bethesda really outdid themselves with this game and its follow-up. The gameplay is very different from the new Doom games, and the story makes it easy for the player to kill all the baddies. Great graphics and an interesting plot made The New Order the reboot that the series needed, especially after the lackluster 2009 movie.

Resistance: Fall Of Man – 11+ Hours

The first book in Insomniac’s Resistance series was the best, which may explain why the franchise didn’t last long. Resistance: Fall of Man was the best PS3 game when it first came out. It’s a tight first-person shooter with a big story that takes place in a devastated United Kingdom.

Resistance: Fall of Man has great single-player story as well as good multiplayer. Insomniac made a great shooter with a story that makes every second count. It has memorable set pieces and enemies that are at least somewhat smart. You should still play this game in 2021.

BioShock – 12+ Hours

The first book in this series is the best place to start. Columbia is beautiful at times in BioShock: Infinite, but the underwater city of Rapture is both scary and beautiful at the same time. The player sees that the city is not right, even though everything looks lovely.

BioShock is a great start to the series that keeps players interested from start to finish. It combines abilities with gunplay. The secret, the way the world looks, and the way you play all work together to make an unforgettable experience.

Shadow Warrior (2013) – 12+ Hours

Even though the sequel added some RPG features and extra side content, Shadow Warrior (2013) has by far the better main story. Flying Wild Hog is a fun throwback to old-school shooters that is based on a reboot of the 1997 classic shooter of the same name. It has a good sense of humor, enjoyable close combat, and a good arsenal of weapons.

Shadow Warrior pretty much stays around too long, that much is clear. But sometimes nothing works better than cutting demons in half with a blade or turning them into mush while holding two submachine guns at the same time.

Half-Life 2 – 13+ Hours

Few games have been able to top Valve’s first-person shooter, which created a whole new genre. Half-Life 2 came out in 2004 and moved away from the first game’s limited setting. Gordon Freeman went on a cross-country trip full of story twists, cool weapons, and strange vehicles.

With its road trip-like structure and constant drive to improve, Half-Life 2 always feels new, even if the gameplay can’t be called anything more than average these days. There’s a reason why Half-Life 2 is a classic.

Metroid Prime – 13+ Hours

One of the best FPS trilogys ever comes from what is arguably the best side-scrolling shooter series of all time. Metroid Prime is the shortest of the three games, but since they build on each other, the 2002 original will be emphasized instead of Echoes or Corruption. It’s also out on the Nintendo Switch, so people who are new to the game can play it. In any case, they are all great.

Even though the view changes, Metroid Prime still has all the standard elements of a Metroidvania: puzzles, power-ups that let you get into new areas, and tight controls. The game also does a great job with guns, both in the GameCube version and the Switch remake.

The Operative: No One Lives Forever – 13+ Hours

The Operative: No One Lives Forever is a classic that belongs with movies like Perfect Dark and TimeSplitters. It’s like a love letter to spy shows and movies from the 1960s. No One Lives Forever, along with its well-reviewed follow-up and the Blood games, helped Monolith Productions become known.

These spy shooters have held up pretty well over the years thanks to their good gunplay, fun gadgets, memorable soundtracks, and interesting stories full of memorable characters, especially Cate Archer, the charming main character.

Doom Eternal – 14+ Hours

There aren’t many “mediocre” Doom games, and most of them are made to be played again and again. So, the average length of a single playthrough doesn’t always show how long the whole thing is, since it’s more fun to try to complete tasks on harder settings. Having said that, Doom Eternal has an unusually long storyline compared to other games in the same license.

Building on the great Doom from 2016, Eternal isn’t just more of the same. Id Software took some risks when they added more movement options to the Doom Slayer. This choice caused some people to disagree. The difficulty level in Doom Eternal is very high, and the player must always be on point if they want to survive. The 15-hour campaign goes by quickly because of this level of focus, but every moment is important.

Painkiller: Hell Wars – 14+ Hours

In Hell Wars, Daniel Garner fights Lucifer’s forces in a bloody war that is a mix of 2004’s Painkiller and its follow-up, Battle Out of Hell. PaintKiller: Hell Wars is a crazy first-person shooter with more than 20 stages spread out over five parts. It reminds me of old games like Doom and Blood.

Hell Wars is a simple shooter that loves bloodshed with all its heart. It’s nice that the stages are different enough to keep things interesting, and shooting is fun.

Metro Exodus – 15+ Hours

Metro Exodus is a unique case because it has some parts that are almost open-world and have material that you can choose not to play. At the same time, the mission is still pretty linear, and there are only a few chances to go in a very different direction. Because of this, most people will probably need about the same amount of time to finish a game.

Metro Exodus is the third game in 4A Games’ trilogy. It is a first-person shooter with horror, stealth, and survival themes that moves more slowly. Metro Exodus takes place in a world after the end of the world, where people have mostly been confined to underground tunnels. It changes things up by having long parts set on the surface world.

Chrome – 15+ Hours

Techland has really made a name for itself in the shooting genre with games like Dead Island, Call of Juarez, and Dying Light. One of the studio’s first big hits was Chrome, a mission-based first-person shooter with some RPG elements.

When it first came out, Chrome was a pretty unique game because it preferred open levels to hallways and put a lot of emphasis on being precise with your gun. Techland’s game has changed a lot over the years, but Chrome is still a great game almost twenty years after it came out.

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End – 15+ Hours

The Uncharted series from Naughty Dog has adventures that take place all over the world, like those in Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End has the most substantial plot yet, both in terms of quantity and quality. It is likely the last chapter in Nathan Drake’s story.

Uncharted 4 badly wants to be seen as an epic adventure, even though it’s almost twice as long as the other games in the series. And most of the time, it works. The shooting galleries are still some of the worst parts of this game, but Uncharted 4’s gunplay is a lot better than the games that came before it.

Resident Evil 4 (2023) – 16+ Hours

Since it came out 20 years ago, Resident Evil has gone back and forth between action games and survival horror games. The 2005 game Resident Evil 4 is a near-perfect mix of the two styles, and the 2023 remake keeps most of the things that made the original game such a landmark. The 2019 remake of Resident Evil 2 is also nothing short of fantastic. Like that game, Capcom chose not to just repeat the same mistakes when they made this new version.

The remake isn’t very different from the original, but it has enough changes to make the campaign feel new to people who have already played Leon’s journey a few times. Most of the time, RE4 plays like a normal third-person shooter, albeit one that moves more slowly than most new games. However, the game’s scary and aggressive monsters show that it comes from the survival horror genre. Even though it’s hard, the game is still fair.

Outriders – 16+ Hours

Outriders is going away very quickly. As of July 2023, the game is having trouble getting 300 people at the same time on Steam, which is a clear sign of a “failure” for a live-service project. If Outriders were a typical book in this field, that is what it would mean. But that is not really the case. People didn’t know what to expect from the game because of the confusing pre-launch promotion cycle. As a result, a pretty linear shooter was held to the same high standards of constant development as games like The Division 2 and Destiny 2. Basket Random is a game that can be played alone or with other people, and it has a pretty long storyline. If someone likes that ride, there will be more material after the game.

People Can Fly’s game is a good third-person shooter with RPG features that let you build different kinds of armies. Outriders tries to tell a satisfying story full of world-building, but it might not be successful all the way through. These days, the game isn’t suggested for multiplayer play outside of streaming services like PS Plus Extra, but it might be a good choice for people who want to play a third-person shooter by themselves.

While Outriders is an RPG shooter, the “shooter” part is better than the “RPG” part.

Returnal – 19+ Hours

Because Returnal is a roguelike, the amount of time it takes to play will change a lot from person to person. There are times when it might take someone more than 50 hours to finish a game, and times when it might only take someone 10 hours.

In terms of length, Returnal is a lot longer than most roguelikes. One should still be able to finish a run in two hours, even after getting used to the biomes and beating a few bosses.

Earth Defense Force 5 – 28+ Hours

Earth Defense Force, which came out in the early 2000s, is a video game series that tries to capture the appeal of bad movies better than any other. In general, the games are about killing waves of aliens that look like insects. The fifth game in the series has more than one hundred single-player tasks.

The gunplay is fun, but not very deep. The minute-to-minute action feels like it’s from an arcade game. Earth Defense Force 5 has great fighting, but it also has a great class system, a lot of weapons, and enemies that you have to think about how to beat.