Anger Foot does for feet whatDoomdid for shotguns. Other shooters have had kicks — 2021’sDeathloophad a great one — but few have been built around kicking as a main mechanic.Anger Footreimagines an action that could be one-note as a deeply flexible ability that can be used in dozens of different ways as you speedrun to victory, and that feels like a major contribution to the FPS space.
Anger Foot’s unique contribution is making your character’s foot as customizable as Cloud’s Buster Sword inFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirth. As you complete objectives, you earn stars, filling up a meter that unlocks a new pair of shoes when maxed out. Some shoes make you more aggressive, like the one that lets you charge up and unleash a mighty room-crossing kick, or another that gives you a burst of speed and rage after kicking down a door. And some make you more defensive, potentially making you shorter and shrinking your hit box, or allowing you to hold up better under damage from fire and explosions.
An Innovative FPS Needs An Innovative Weapon
This is what a greatFPSneeds to do: introduce a new mechanic (or a fresh spin on an old one) that becomes a defining characteristic. It almost always takes the form of a weapon, though sometimes it’s a tool.
Half-Life 2, which I would still argue is the greatest shooter of all time — no nostalgia bias here either, I first played it in 2020 — had the Gravity Gun. That iconic energy weapon allowed Gordon Freeman to pick up objects in the environment with a beam of light, then hurl them wherever he pointed it. Not only is it a cool weapon, but it was introduced spectacularly, with We Don’t Go ToRavenholm, possibly the single most iconic level in the series. You get a gun that lets you manipulate gravity, and then the game instantly gives you a playground filled with deadly objects like circular saws, and zombie enemies you don’t feel the least bit bad about brutally bisecting.
Half-Life: Alyx took the Gravity Gun and repurposed it for VR, replacing the bulky weapon with sleek “Gravity Gloves” that conveniently let Alyx pick objects up from a distance.
Titanfall 2 Shows That Doohickeys Are Good, Too
Sometimes it isn’t a weapon, per se, but a powerfully innovative tool. InPrey, it was the GLOO Cannon, which was the perfect tool for an immersive sim. It allowed you to spray a marshmallow-y substance on the walls and floors, forming stairs or other useful structures, which you could use to access areas you wouldn’t otherwise unlock for hours. InTitanfall 2, the memorable addition was the time control device fromEffect and Cause. The wrist-mounted doohickey let you switch between two different timelines with the press of a button, pushing you to think four-dimensionally about how to tackle groups of enemies and complete platforming challenges. Sometimes the best way to outflank an enemy was to enter a different timeline, zip back, and shoot them from behind.
The history of shooters is a history of their guns, with the most important games making iconic contributions. Doom gave us the Super Shotgun and the Gauss Cannon. Quake gave us the Thunderbolt. Halo, the Needler. Portal, the portal gun. Dead Space, the Plasma Cutter. It might seem reductive to sketch a genre in the broad strokes of bullets, but shooters are about shooting. For an FPS to make its mark, it has to find a way to change the way we interact with the first-person space. Anger Foot has done that, and I can’t wait to play whatever game does it next.
