Finding the Fun in FPS Campaigns

First-person shooters once felt endlessly exciting. Doom, Half-Life, Blood, No One Lives Forever, and Duke Nukem 3D all showed different versions of what the genre could be.

Over time, many campaigns started to feel as if they were working from the same blueprints: similar combat loops, similar level structures, similar cover rhythms, and similar set-piece spectacle with only a few changes in costume.

In 2016, two games offered a useful reminder of how fun shooter campaigns can be when developers care more about frantic firefights, varied play, and strong pacing than about safe genre habits.

Doom and Titanfall 2 solve the problem differently. Doom has one of the strongest combat loops in modern shooters. Titanfall 2 has one of the sharpest senses of campaign pacing.

Every Doom encounter is a breathless scrum between demons and the Doom Slayer, who ricochets through arenas, grabs resources, and threads through enemy fire.

The game is fast not only because the movement speed is high, but because it rejects many shooter conventions that slow players down.

There is very little aim-down-sights play. Outside of a few weapons, Doom does not ask the player to stop, zoom, and creep around a corner. Accuracy remains strong while running, and strafing is fast enough to let the player orbit enemies while firing.

The combat language is built around motion. The player is supposed to fight while moving, not move between pieces of cover and then stop to fight.

Doom also leans heavily on projectile attacks instead of hitscan fire. Hitscan weapons hurt the player the instant an enemy pulls the trigger. Projectiles are physical threats that travel through the space and can be dodged.

That one choice changes the whole feel of combat. The player is not merely minimizing exposure. They are reading trajectories, sidestepping fireballs, weaving through missiles, and choosing routes through danger.

When health runs low, Doom does not ask the player to hide behind cover while a bar regenerates. The player has to seek health packs or, better yet, run toward an injured enemy and perform a glory kill.

That system pushes the player back into danger at the exact moment a more conventional shooter would teach retreat. The safest instinct becomes the wrong instinct, and the exciting behavior becomes the profitable one.

The glory kill is more than a resource dispenser. It changes how the player feels in the fight.

Because injured enemies become sources of health, the player starts to see them as opportunities. Instead of being a fragile target backing away from monsters, the player becomes a predator closing distance.

The short animation also gives the player a tiny moment to breathe, blink, and pick the next plan without fully stopping the action.

It is a smart piece of design because it solves several problems at once: health recovery, aggression, pacing, feedback, and fantasy all point in the same direction.

Doom is frantic, but it is also tactical. Its enemies work differently enough that each fight becomes a rapid prioritization problem.

A Revenant pressures the player with missiles. A Cacodemon floats close and threatens space. A charging Pinky has to be handled like a bullfight: dodge the front armor, then attack from behind.

The player constantly decides who must die first, which threats can be ignored for a few seconds, and which movement pattern will keep them alive.

That is where the speed becomes interesting. The player is not only aiming quickly. They are solving a small combat puzzle before the arena collapses around them.

Doom also refuses the modern habit of limiting the player to two weapons. The player carries a huge arsenal, accessed through a radial menu that slows the action without fully stopping it.

Different guns have different jobs. The assault rifle can needle enemies and interrupt attacks. The shotgun dominates up close. The rocket launcher is powerful but risky. The chainsaw instantly kills and produces ammunition, but depends on limited fuel.

The result is another layer of decision-making. The player is juggling weapons, enemy types, resources, range, arena position, and immediate survival.

That makes Doom's combat loop deep enough to support a lot of encounters, especially when arenas add verticality, double jumps, clambering, and opportunities to chain movement into glory kills.

Doom's weakness is that even excellent firefights can become tiring when they are repeated too often.

Between battles, the game offers exploration, platforming, secrets, collectibles, upgrades, and optional trinkets. Some players enjoy that layer, but it can also pull the intensity from eleven to zero in a jarring way.

Looking for pipes, secrets, and upgrade tokens is not the same kind of pleasure as improvising inside a demon arena. The campaign sometimes struggles to bridge those modes smoothly.

That is where Titanfall 2 becomes the better comparison. Doom has the stronger combat loop. Titanfall 2 has the sharper campaign rhythm.

Titanfall 2 understands pacing in two ways. The first is how often a campaign introduces new ideas.

One level gives the player a tool that can turn off fans, flip platforms, and hack sentries. Another throws the player through a factory where prefabricated houses move along enormous conveyor systems. Another has wall-running across a spaceship high above a planet.

Then there is Effect and Cause, the time-travel level. The player snaps between a pristine research center in the past and a ruined version in the present.

That idea is memorable because it affects both of Titanfall 2's core strengths: combat and movement.

In combat, time travel lets the player disappear from one timeline and reappear behind enemies in another. But the present is crawling with dangerous creatures, so escaping one fight can mean dropping into another.

In platforming, the player switches timelines mid-jump to make walls, platforms, and safe spots appear beneath their feet.

The mechanic is visually striking, mechanically clear, and deeply connected to the things the game already does well.

Then, just as importantly, the campaign throws it away before the player can get bored of it. Titanfall 2 often treats a good idea as a one-level event rather than a permanent system that must be stretched thin.

The second kind of pacing is how well the game alternates between its fundamental modes.

Titanfall 2 has firefights, platforming sections, Titan battles, and story beats. These modes move at different speeds and ask for different skills.

The campaign switches between them before any one mode has time to become exhausting. The player gets bursts of speed, moments of spectacle, quieter story pauses, mech duels, and traversal challenges.

Not every pillar is equally strong. The platforming is excellent. The Titan sections are less exciting. The gunfights are good, though they do not match Doom at its best. But the arrangement keeps the campaign moving.

Titanfall 2 wants the player to move stylishly. It gives the pilot a long slide, wall-running, and enemies that can punish standing still.

But the combat systems do not always push the player forward the way Doom does. Aim-down-sights, slower strafing, hitscan weapons, regenerating health, and reloads all encourage distance, cover, and retreat.

That means the player may use Titanfall 2's movement to get away from fights rather than to fight through them.

The game contains the blueprint for a more integrated version in the Gauntlet, an obstacle course where the player jumps, slides, wall-runs, and kills enemies in one continuous motion.

The Gauntlet is laid out like a winding corridor filled with enemy pockets. It encourages zig-zag warfare: bounce between walls, fire shots, throw grenades, keep momentum, and stay expressive.

The campaign rarely builds combat spaces that support that style as clearly. Arenas are often broad boxes, while platforming sections often contain no enemies at all.

That matters because players usually take the safest path unless the game gives them a reason to do otherwise.

If a designer wants players to act aggressively, stylishly, or daringly, the game has to encourage that behavior through systems, level design, scoring, resources, enemy pressure, or some combination of them.

A shooter can include wall-running and still be played as a cover shooter if the rest of the design rewards cowering behind boxes.

Doom understands this clearly. It does not merely allow aggression; it makes aggression the practical way to survive. Titanfall 2 sometimes wants a more acrobatic combat fantasy than its encounters fully demand.

That does not erase Titanfall 2's achievement. Its campaign is imaginative, concise, and full of strong one-off ideas. It simply shows that movement mechanics need matching encounter design.

The broader lesson is that genre freshness does not come from historical set dressing or bigger explosions. It comes from questioning inherited design habits, building combat loops that support the desired emotion, and pacing campaigns so the player keeps discovering new ways to play.

Doom and Titanfall 2 are valuable because they point at two different answers to the same problem.

Doom says a shooter can be thrilling by stripping away conventions that slow the player down, then turning enemies, weapons, health, and arenas into one aggressive loop.

Titanfall 2 says a shooter campaign can stay exciting by constantly changing the scenario, rotating its pillars, and throwing away good ideas before they become stale.

Together, they are a reminder that first-person shooters do not have to run on inherited blueprints. They can still be fast, surprising, tactical, varied, and fun.