2024 is a great year to look back on the PlayStation brand as a whole. That’s because the PS1 is turning thirty since it launched in Japan in 1994 before coming over here in 1995. The consoles have offered everything under the sun in terms of genres like platformers, RPGs, puzzle games, and so on.
There have even been shooters published by Sony too. Most of the individual games and franchises have been in the third-person perspective though includingSyphon Filter,SOCOM,The Order: 1886, and more. Has Sony produced any first-person shooters of note? The numbers are thin but let’s take a look at some of the most challenging.
7Project Horned Owl
GameFAQs Difficulty: 3/5
Project Horned Owlis technically not that hard of a first-person shooter as there are difficulty options. However, even on the easiest setting players may have trouble.On-rails shooters canbe some of the most challenging games around as bullets often fly from all directions and they can be hard to dodge since players don’t have a lot of agency.
That’s a major reason whyProject Horned Owlcan be hard as mechs will fly in from all over. Another reason is that players have to manage their ammo offscreen and an empty chamber means players are more vulnerable to attacks. It’s a tricky balance that can be mastered with practice, but it can still be easy to die.
Marvel’s Spider-Manwasnot Sony’s first Marvel game that they published exclusively for their consoles. Way before that there wasThe Punisher: No Mercywhich was a first-person shooter for the PS3. There was a single-player campaign but it ultimately boiled down to matches in the multiplayer maps against bots.
The AI for the enemies ranged from genius as they could gun down Frank Castle as if they had golden guns or they could be silly and run into walls or out of existence. It was not a well-put-together game on most levels, including the controls, which added to the challenge and led to some abysmal reviews. There’s no way to play it properly anymore since the PS3 is long past dead nor is there any real reason to try and go back to this game.
Resistance: Fall of Manwas a launch title for the PS3 and by all accounts, it was well-liked. First-person shooters that took place during World War 2 were a dime a dozen back in 2006, but this game put a spin on it. Players instead fought aliens as they invaded during this time instead of Nazis.
What made the game hard was that most levels took place on large battlefields wherein clusters of these aliens rained hell on players. As the game was various shades of black and brown, it was hard to see where the aliens were sometimes too as they blended in and that made it more difficult to take them down quickly. It’s the hardest game in the series as Insomniac eased up on the cheap deaths in the future.
4Kileak: The DNA Imperative
GameFAQs Difficulty: 4/5
There were not a lot of first-person shooters on the PS1 either from Sony’s side or other publishers.Kileak: The DNAImperative was one of the few and it had a genuinely interesting hook and decent presentation level. Players got to hop into abig mech suitand went into various spaceships that acted like dungeons in RPGs.
Hallways were narrow and mobility was virtually nonexistent meaning that the only defense players had were guns. Most of the time enemies could shoot faster or were in higher numbers though which made it easy to die. There were ways to regain health but items were in few supply. With little in the range of checkpoints or navigation markers, this game could indeed be a struggle on the PS1 not to mention the controller setup.
3Crime Crackers
GameFAQs Difficulty: 4/5 Stars
Crime Crackerswas a game that never left Japan but that certainly didn’t stop PS1 fans from importing it at the time or since. It was made by Media.Vision which is good to note because they developed another Sony exclusive franchise,Wild Arms. InCrime Crackers, players traversed dungeons looking for treasure in space. Players were set up with three characters who had different guns and they could swap between them on the fly.
It was an RPG adjacent to an action shooter as characters could upgrade their stats through items and equip gear in the game. Managing the health of one character was hard enough but three was even wilder. As is the case with a lot of early first-person games, the controls were just not up to snuff to make dodging enemy blasts a viable option. Even with three characters, it was easy to get aGame Over screen. For those interested in an even greater challenge, there was also a sequel released only in Japan.
It’s hard to believe but Sony did indeed help publishPayday: The Heist. What started as an interesting idea for a multiplayer shooter transformed into a phenomenon that has now spawned two sequels. The concept is an easy one to get behind as everyone played some version of cops and robbers as kids.
It was a hard game because it stayed close to reality. It’s not easy robbing a bank even with a fully loaded crew. Every player had to work together to pull offthe perfect heistand getting a reliable team online could sometimes prove to be a miracle.
Dust 514was an ambitious shooter that Sony co-published alongside the developer, CCP Games. It was a spinoff to their massive PC game,Eve Online, which turned the gameplay from a simulation adventure to a shooter. Conflicts started inEve Onlinecould be resolved with on-ground battles inDust 514.
That was the basic pitch, but fora PS3 gamein 2013, it was way too ahead of its time. It had a litany of problems besides the wild concept that didn’t always work including weird controls. It was also a grind to get anywhere, making it a challenge to keep going after hundreds of deaths in a row with little to show for the effort unless one forked over real cash.
