The best shooters of 2021 are flexible, imaginative, and satisfying to have locked and loaded in your gaming platform of choice. There's something truly captivating about these games, which combine stylish action with fresh twists on familiar gameplay mechanics to stand apart from the pack. We crunched the numbers and came up with a list of the best shooter games of 2021 based on aggregate review scores. We used Game Spot's sister site met a critic to determine this list. It's worth noting here that we excluded DLC from these rankings, but remasters were eligible.
Back 4 Blood is a surprisingly fun apocalypse to spend some time with, provided that you don't mind dealing with a few legions of ravenous infected humans looking to feast on your flesh. Society may have fallen, but weapons aren't in short supply, and Back 4 Blood nails a satisfying middle-ground between thinning the viral hordes thrown at you and wielding a satisfying collection of real-world weapons. Everything just feels great, from classic bolt-action rifles to pay 'n spray machine guns, and you'll never have to worry about running out of targets in this post-apocalyptic hell's cap.
As Returned and Deathloop have demonstrated, being stuck in a perpetual cycle of life, death, and rebirth is surprisingly awesome material for a video game to build on. Lemons Gate is another title to add to this year's time loop fixation, but unlike the strong single-player offerings of the two previously-mentioned titles, it takes place within an old-school arena shooter frame and adds a novel twist to its design.
Each of the five rounds within a match are breathtaking short, but the real magic here is seeing each of those encounters are layered on top of each other. You're not only chasing your opponent across a variety of modes, you're running after ghosts from the past and seeing the repercussions of your actions. It's an ambitious idea that's well-executed, a quantum leap of time travel and foresight that turns Lemons Gate into a tactical game of striking back from beyond the temporal grave.
Massive multiplayer games aren't exactly a new concept in this day and age, but He'll Let Loose takes that idea of large-scale warfare and applies a surprisingly thoughtful and strategic met a game to its core. All of this tactical action takes place on gigantic maps, 1:1 scale replicas of actual World War II battlefields. Call of Duty and Battlefield may have the market cornered on energetic run 'n gun gameplay set in that era, but He'll Let Loose approaches the terrifying topic of being a soldier during humanity's biggest war with care, historical accuracy, and absolutely tense moments of conflict.
A good Far Cry game mixes action, exploration, and a treasure trove of diversions together into a package that lasts for dozens of hours, and Far Cry 6 is no exception. The big difference in this year's edition of the long-running series is an expanded focus on weapons, and while the effectiveness of each gun you discover in the island nation of Yarn may be up for debate, their spectacular handling certainly isn't. While an assortment of pistols, sniper rifles, and grenade launchers provide a gleeful number of methods for transforming a dictatorship into nothing but burning rubble, it's the Resolver class of weapons that truly makes the game's arsenal stand out.
Essentially homemade tools of anarchy, Resolver gear ranges from overpowered nail guns to a crossbow that fire actual harpoons, a sniper rifle that can deliver pinpoint explosive carnage, and even a CD-player that can make heads roll with a well-placed Mac arena disc to the noggin. That unique appetite for destruction turns Far Cry 6 into a sadistic sandbox, but when you're wiping out military forces with weaponized crocodiles and a fireworks display that has been turned into a mobile rocket-launcher, you'll be having too much fun to think about the consequences.
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