Classic FPS Games That Are Painful To Play Today

FPS games have come a long way since the early days, but that doesn’t mean the classics can’t compete with the best of today. Icons like DOOM and Half-Life are still incredible experiences all these years later, yet not every game gets to age as gracefully. In fact, there are a lot of previously great games that now feel utterly painful to get through.

This is normally due to the game design showing its age. Even in the last decade or so, we have seen major strides taken towards creating the most fluid and satisfying FPS possible, leaving older games feeling sluggish. With that said, there are others that are plagued by questionable design choices that may have made sense at the time, but stick out like a sore thumb to basically every player brave enough to revisit them today.

System Shock

Revolutionary Doesn’t Mean Timeless

• Complexity that was groundbreaking at the time.
• Obtuse design and clunky controls and UI.

System Shock was extraordinarily ambitious when it was released, blending first-person shooting, RPG progression, and immersive simulation elements years before those ideas became commonplace. Unfortunately, many of the same design decisions that made it revolutionary can make the original difficult to enjoy today, especially for modern players who aren’t used to the old-school way of thinking.

I would say that the main pain point here is the interface and the movement, with the inventory management and controls feeling unnecessarily cumbersome, while the game’s labyrinthine environments provide very little of the convenience expected from modern shooters. The 2023 remake is therefore the much easier recommendation for newcomers. Although the original remains historically fascinating, appreciating its innovations can require considerable patience right from the start.

Perfect Dark

Fighting Its Own Hardware

• Outstanding mission design trapped behind dated controls.
• The N64 controller makes precision shooting difficult.

Perfect Dark was one of the most technically impressive console shooters of its era, expanding upon GoldenEye with more sophisticated missions and AI that felt like a leap ahead of the competition. Then there was the story and worldbuilding, which offered you a chance to step into a dark cyberpunk world that had just as much mystery as beauty within it.

The biggest problem with the original version is the control scheme. Trying to play the game now as someone who is accustomed to dual analog sticks is borderline impossible, and I have such a hard time aiming and moving, to the point where all the greatness feels trapped behind an awkward set of buttons. The underlying game remains excellent, yet the hardware it was designed for creates a significant barrier between us avid FPS fans and one of the N64’s greatest FPS campaigns, unless you opt for the HD version, which has a lot of the same issues.

Wolfenstein 3D

The Foundation That Crumbled Quickly

• Undeniable historical influence.
• Extremely basic level design and combat.

Shooters likely wouldn’t exist today without Wolfenstein 3D, and it deserves enormous respect for establishing many of the conventions that would define the FPS genre. However, its age is impossible to ignore. The game essentially consists of moving through simple maze-like corridors and shooting enemies, with very little of the environmental complexity that would arrive just a few years later.

That simplicity can make the original game surprisingly difficult to return to. Levels can quickly feel repetitive, enemies lack sophisticated behavior, and the visual design is extremely primitive by modern standards. If you want to revisit early boomer shooters, then play DOOM or Quake. As for this classic, I would give it a pass.

Painkiller

Brilliantly Fast, Surprisingly Dated

• Frantic combat still has considerable pace.
• Repetitive levels and dated presentation hold it back.

Painkiller was designed around an incredibly straightforward philosophy: give the player enormous weapons, throw hordes of monsters at them, and let the shooting do the talking. That philosophy still works surprisingly well, with satisfying weapons and fast movement creating some wonderfully chaotic encounters that you can imagine were incredible back in the day.

Unfortunately, almost everything surrounding the combat has aged considerably. The environments can feel repetitive, and I found that after just a few minutes, you can dial down the entire structure of the game and the enemies within it. Painkiller might be worth playing for anyone interested in the lineage of FPS games, but it increasingly feels like a product of its era and is hardly an enjoyable experience for long.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six

Tactical Shooting Without The Convenience

• The realistic approach was hugely influential.
• Complexity is overwhelming and inconvenient.

The original Rainbow Six was a bold attempt to make FPS combat genuinely tactical. You had to plan operations, and choose which equipment to use, as well as manage a team and carefully approach each mission, creating a gameplay loop that felt radically different from the run-and-gun shooters dominating the market of the era.

That realism is also what makes it painful to revisit, and I find it hard to point out a single component that doesn’t show its age. The interface is cumbersome, the planning systems can feel almost impossible to navigate, and the movement is sluggish, which, when the enemies can kill you in a matter of seconds, becomes increasingly frustrating over the course of each mission. In the end, you are fighting the systems more than terrorists, a fact that time has only made more obvious with each passing year.

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter

Trapped In History

• Fantastic idea and setting.
• Virtually every aspect of the gameplay has aged poorly.

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter had one of the most appealing concepts of its generation: sending you to a prehistoric-inspired era where dinosaurs are the biggest threat. The pitch sounded amazing, and the execution proved to be pretty good overall, and certainly provided a unique selling point that few other FPS games could match.

As cool as the game was, even a title from the past can’t avoid time itself. The original’s controls and navigation are so outdated that returning to it today is a sizable challenge that is hardly worth attempting. Shooting dinosaurs is great and all, but when you have to move through weird, sprawling levels with a janky control scheme, you end up wishing that the meteor would land sooner to end the nightmare.

GoldenEye 007

It Was Never Going To Last

• Pioneered multiplayer FPS Deathmatch games.
• Poor controls were exposed within just a few years.

GoldenEye 007 may be one of the most important FPS games ever made, yet all kings have to pass on the crown at some point. The four-player multiplayer gameplay became a mainstay in the genre, and the objective-based campaign brought with it sophisticated level designs that kept you invested across a range of settings and locations, all the way until the end credits.

With all that goodness in mind, anyone who has actually tried to play it recently will tell you that the single analog stick is the biggest point of pain and frustration. Moving and aiming simultaneously is inherently awkward, and all the more frustrating in a tiny split-screen environment. While there might be a group of diehards willing to grit their teeth through the irritation, the fun factor is all but lost.