TL;DR: Modern shooters give you cover mechanics, regenerating health, and a character who won't stop talking. Boomer shooters give you a shotgun, a keycard, and the respect to figure it out yourself. Start with DUSK. Go straight to Ultrakill if you want to feel like a god. Play Selaco when you're ready to see where this genre is actually heading.
Nobody planned for boomer shooters to make a comeback this hard.
For years the genre was basically dead. Cover systems took over. Regenerating health became standard. Everyone got a mini-map, a waypoint, and a character who explains the plot every five minutes like you can't read.
Then DUSK came out in 2018 and reminded everyone what they'd been missing.
The indie scene went absolutely feral after that. Now in 2025 there are more good boomer shooters than most people have time to play — which is a great problem to have.
What Even Is a Boomer Shooter?
You know how in most modern shooters you hide behind a wall, wait for your health to refill, then peek out and shoot someone?
Boomer shooters don't do that.
There's no hiding. No health regen. You pick up health packs off the floor like it's 1993. You carry every weapon you find — not just two. Enemies don't wait for you to be ready. They come at you, fast, in numbers, and the only answer is to keep moving.
The levels are full of secrets, colored keycards, and hidden rooms that reward actually stopping to look around. The whole thing runs at a pace that makes modern shooters feel like they're moving in slow motion.
The name itself came from the DUSK dev team — a joke about the kind of person who was playing Doom in 1993. It spread, stuck, and now it's an actual Steam genre tag.
We went deep on why the genre works the way it does if you want the full breakdown before diving into the list.
1. DUSK
The one that brought the genre back. If you're new to boomer shooters — start here, no debate.
You're a nameless drifter in rural Pennsylvania. Cultists everywhere. Possessed farm equipment. Darkness creeping in from the edges of every level. The game doesn't explain who you are or why any of this is happening — it just hands you weapons and lets you get on with it.
The feel is pure Quake. Heavy, fast, slightly floaty in a way that makes movement feel deliberate. Jumping onto a barrel to reach a ledge feels good. Sliding around a corner while the shotgun is still smoking feels even better.
What makes DUSK last is how the atmosphere shifts. The first episode is grimy farmland. The second goes industrial. The third gets strange in ways that are hard to describe without spoiling — just know the ending earns it.
Andrew Hulshult's soundtrack is one of the best in any shooter, full stop. The riveter is an unhinged weapon. The game respects your time and then takes more of it than you planned.
2. Ultrakill
Here's the short version — you're a robot who runs on blood, humanity is extinct, and you're descending into Hell because that's where the blood is.
The healing mechanic makes you get close to enemies to absorb their gore. There's no playing it safe. Every defensive instinct you've built from other games has to go.
Then there's the style system. Every fight is scored — D through SSS — based on how creative and varied your kills are. It completely rewires how you play. You stop just trying to survive and start trying to look good doing it.
Coin tosses that redirect your own bullets mid-air. Knocking enemy projectiles back at them. Dashing through explosions to stay airborne longer. The skill ceiling on this game is genuinely one of the highest in any FPS ever made.
Still technically in Early Access. Already one of the greatest shooters ever made. Those two facts can coexist.
3. Cultic
This is slower than DUSK. And darker than almost everything else on this list.
You're a detective who got murdered by a cult and clawed your way back. The whole game is you working through what that means — one cult compound at a time.
What Cultic does that nobody else does is the physics. Enemies aren't just damage sponges — they react. Blow one into a barrel. The barrel rolls into his friends. Light a bundle of dynamite and throw it into a room and watch the chaos sort itself out. The environment is part of your arsenal in a way most boomer shooters don't bother with.
Chapter 2 came out and made everything better. If you only play one lesser-known game on this list, make it this one.
4. Amid Evil
The weapons here fire explosive planets. That's the only pitch you need.
Everything in Amid Evil is turned up past what feels reasonable. Fantasy realms full of abstract enemies. An arsenal of enchanted weapons that each do something completely different. A system where killing enough enemies charges your weapon into a supercharged state that clears rooms in one swing.
The level design jumps between completely different worlds — floating ruins, crystalline caves, a clockwork dimension — and each one has its own visual identity. It never runs out of ideas.
From the same team that made DUSK. Essential.
5. Ion Fury
Most modern boomer shooters are inspired by the 90s.
Ion Fury was literally built on the BUILD engine — the actual technology that ran Duke Nukem 3D and Blood. The result feels different in ways that are hard to pin down until you're knee-deep in it. Toilets you can flush. Cans you can kick around. Destructible environments that react because the engine was built for exactly that kind of interactivity.
Shelly Harrison has real personality. The level design is dense and intricate. It doesn't just look retro — it is retro, while being a brand new game.
6. Turbo Overkill
Johnny Turbo has a chainsaw leg. He uses it to slide across enemies at full speed.
That sentence tells you everything about whether this game is for you.
The levels are massive neon cyberpunk playgrounds — wallrunning, grappling, chaining mid-air kills before landing and immediately going again. The speed makes everything else on this list feel like it's standing still.
If slower boomer shooters haven't clicked for you yet, try this first. It's a completely different feeling.
7. Selaco
The enemies in Selaco take cover.
They call for backup. They flank you. They communicate with each other and adapt to what you're doing. This is not scripted aggression — it's actual AI that makes fights feel genuinely unpredictable.
Built on GZDoom but it doesn't look or feel like a Doom mod. Voice acting, cutscenes, a sci-fi colony setting with real production value. It's what happens when someone takes the boomer shooter formula seriously as a foundation to build from rather than just a style to copy.
Still in Early Access. Already essential.
8. HROT
One person made this in Czechoslovakia and it shows — in the best possible way.
The setting is 1986, some kind of crisis, Soviet-era architecture everywhere. The enemies are deformed bureaucrats and malfunctioning machines. The visual style looks like Quake filtered through Cold War propaganda.
There's nothing else that looks or sounds like it in the entire genre. Short, bleak, and the kind of game that sits in your head for days after you finish it.
9. Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun
Licensed games are almost always fine at best.
Boltgun is actually great — which still surprises me every time I think about it.
You're a Space Marine. The bolter sounds like the hand of god. The heavy bolter sounds like two. Hordes of heretics and chaos demons get roughly one second before you're already moving to the next room. The pixel art over 3D environments looks exactly like what Doom would have been if it came out in the 40K universe.
If you have any connection to the lore, this thing will wreck you emotionally. If you don't, it's still just a great boomer shooter with genuinely excellent sound design.
10. Metal: Hellsinger
This one shouldn't work. It absolutely does.
You deal more damage when you shoot on the beat of the metal soundtrack. Lose the rhythm and you're playing a normal shooter. Stay locked in and the music builds around you — more instruments layering in, getting louder — until a full metal band is playing underneath your firefight.
Serj Tankian is on the soundtrack. Matt Heafy too. The songs are legitimately great.
It's shorter and more linear than most games here. Doesn't matter. Nothing else in the genre feels like this.
11. Blood (Fresh Supply)
Blood came out in 1997 and it still holds up. You play as Caleb — a gunslinger who served a dark god, got betrayed, and now wants everyone involved absolutely dead.
The voodoo doll that kills enemies by sticking pins in it. The spray can plus lighter flamethrower. A pitchfork. Dynamite you can cook to control the explosion timing. The arsenal is completely unhinged for a game this old.
Fresh Supply is the updated version that runs properly on modern hardware. If you want to understand where Cultic's whole DNA came from — this is the source.
12. Project Warlock
Medieval castles. Egyptian tombs. A futuristic space station. All in the same game.
Project Warlock doesn't pick a lane and it's better for it. You're a warlock with an expanding arsenal and a light RPG system for upgrading spells between levels. The variety keeps things moving in a way that stops it from feeling repetitive.
It's shorter and more approachable than most on this list. Good starting point if DUSK feels like a bigger commitment than you want right now. A sequel exists and it's worth playing after.
Honorable Mentions
Prodeus — Gorgeous, satisfying gunplay, active modding scene. Deserves way more attention than it gets.
Post Void — Thirty minutes long. Costs almost nothing. Hits harder than games ten times its size.
Dread Templar — Slower and more deliberate. For when you want to actually think between firefights.
Hedon Bloodrite — One developer, massive GZDoom fantasy game, completely bizarre in the best way. Dig into it once you've finished everything above.
FAQ
What is a boomer shooter? A boomer shooter is an FPS built around 90s design — fast movement, health pickups off the floor instead of regenerating health, carrying multiple weapons at once, secret-filled levels, enemies that rush you. No cover mechanics. No waypoints. The name came from the DUSK dev team as a joke about Doom players being boomers. Now it's an official Steam tag.
Is Ultrakill a boomer shooter? Yes. Fast movement, health pickup mechanic (absorbing blood from enemies), aggressive enemies, chunky weapons. The style scoring and advanced movement push it further than classic boomer shooters but the roots are the same.
Is Half-Life a boomer shooter? It's on the border. Half-Life has the fast movement and no cover system — but scripted events, slower pacing, and heavy narrative focus put it somewhere different. Most people see it as a bridge between the boomer shooter era and modern FPS rather than a pure example of either.
Is Doom 2016 a boomer shooter? Closer than Doom Eternal. Fast movement, pickups, aggressive enemies — but the glory kill system and structured arenas push it toward modern design. Most of the community calls it "boomer-shooter-adjacent." Doom Eternal goes even further from the classic formula.
What's the best boomer shooter for beginners? DUSK. Polished, well-paced, captures everything the genre does well. Project Warlock if you want something shorter. Save Ultrakill for when you're comfortable — that skill ceiling is steep.
Are boomer shooters hard? Harder than most modern shooters because resource management actually matters — no regen means every health pack counts. DUSK and Amid Evil on default difficulty are very manageable. Ultrakill and Blood on hard are a different conversation entirely.
