Modern military shooters are in a strange place at the moment. Battlefield is licking its wounds after stepping on the landmine that was Battlefield 2042, while Call of Duty is running around like the dog that caught the car, the massive success of Warzone leaving the mainline series at a loss with what to do with itself.

It's a chaotic, uncertain time in one of multiplayer gaming's biggest spheres, and the various shenanigans of EA and Activision have left room for something new to make its mark in the genre. Enter Delta Force: Hawk Ops, which you'll be shocked to hear is not a Trauma Team-style game about performing surgery on birds of prey. Instead, it's a free-to-play military shooter in the Battlefield/CoD mould, based on the series that predates either, and it could be the shot of competence and stability that the genre sorely needs.

Currently running a month-long Alpha, Hawk Ops provides access to two of its three game modes. The first of these, Havoc Warfare, is a classic large-scale attack/defence scenario similar to Battlefield's Rush, with the attacking team trying to capture a linear sequence of control points, and the defending team attempting to hold back the tide until the attackers' collective pool of lives runs dry.

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Selaco describes itself as a first-person shooter inspired by 1993's Doom and 2005's F.E.A.R. But to be perfectly honest, I think that undersells it. This wildly ambitious retro FPS plays like a potted history of the genre's golden age, melding all manner of ideas that emerged between the two key texts it cites as inspiration. The holistic worldbuilding of System Shock. The playful interactivity of Duke Nukem 3D. The crisp set-piece design of Half-Life. Selaco blends them all into a smooth, unctuous action experience. It's already one of the best retro shooters out there, and the damn thing's only a third finished.

You play as Dawn, a Security Captain aboard the titular Selaco (which I think is pronounced Sell-a-co, but I habitually say Sil Acko because I am irredeemably northern). Selaco is a gargantuan space station designed to look, sound, and smell exactly like Earth in the year 2255, because actual Earth has been devastated by some unspecified cataclysm. Selaco is the primary home of the surviving human race, then, but now it has been struck with a disaster of its own, as it's attacked by a force of purple-blooded supersoldiers.

None of this is clear at the game's start, however, with Dawn awakening in the guts of Selaco's Pathfinder Memorial hospital (following treatment for, amusingly, a pulled hamstring), which is already under heavy assault by heavily armed goons. The abrupt and somewhat unforgiving introduction sees you scrambling through the hospital's corridors as they rattle with nearby explosions, dodging gunfire as your enemies hunt you down. After a minute or two of breathless evasion, you finally pick up a weapon, moments before the soldiers kick down the door of the room you've just crawled into.

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Three questions before we start:

1) Do you like Robert Eggers' film The Northman? 2) Do you like games that mainly involve pressing 'forward' and not much else? 3) Do you like rocks?

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As the dust settles on Fallout's first TV season, which appears to have been as universally beloved as any piece of media can be in today's world, the line that sticks with me most radiates from early in the show. As Ella Purnell's Vault Dweller Lucy sleeps beside her Scout badge-perfect campfire, she awakes to find Michael Emerson's fugitive scientist sitting nearby. All-too familiar with the perils of the Wasteland, Emerson's character urges her to return to the Vault from whence she came. This goes down with Lucy about as well as two litres of irradiated water, so instead the scientist posits a question. "Will you still want the same things, when you become a different animal altogether?"

It's an interesting question to ask in the context of Fallout itself, a series which is at once so recognisable and yet so different from its original form. On the one hand, you can trace Fallout's aesthetic all the way back to the opening cinematic of the first game, which juxtaposes a kitsch 1950s-style commercial with the blasted moonscape of post-nuclear America, all to the lilting vocals of the Ink Spots' "Maybe". It's interesting to return to now. Rare is it that a series' audiovisual identity emerges so fully formed, yet it's there in Fallout from Defcon one.

Yet the games beneath the Vault Boy iconography have changed dramatically in the last quarter-century, to the point where it remains a bone of contention within the Fallout community. There is something, the argument goes, that Interplay's isometric RPGs have which Bethesda's 3D, real-time open world games lack. Certainly, the more recent games have had their flaws. Fallout 3 arguably dialled back the colour of Fallout too much, while Fallout 4 leans heavily toward being a shooter at the cost of broader role-playing options. But these remain distinctly Fallout games in other ways, replete with that familiar visual identity, and in quests like the Gary-filled Vault 108 - as perfectly strange as the wasteland demands.

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As the dust settles on Fallout's first TV season, which appears to have been as universally beloved as any piece of media can be in today's world, the line that sticks with me most radiates from early in the show. As Ella Purnell's Vault Dweller Lucy sleeps beside her Scout badge-perfect campfire, she awakes to find Michael Emerson's fugitive scientist sitting nearby. All-too familiar with the perils of the Wasteland, Emerson's character urges her to return to the Vault from whence she came. This goes down with Lucy about as well as two litres of irradiated water, so instead the scientist posits a question. "Will you still want the same things, when you become a different animal altogether?"

It's an interesting question to ask in the context of Fallout itself, a series which is at once so recognisable and yet so different from its original form. On the one hand, you can trace Fallout's aesthetic all the way back to the opening cinematic of the first game, which juxtaposes a kitsch 1950s-style commercial with the blasted moonscape of post-nuclear America, all to the lilting vocals of the Ink Spots' "Maybe". It's interesting to return to now. Rare is it that a series' audiovisual identity emerges so fully formed, yet it's there in Fallout from Defcon one.

Yet the games beneath the Vault Boy iconography have changed dramatically in the last quarter-century, to the point where it remains a bone of contention within the Fallout community. There is something, the argument goes, that Interplay's isometric RPGs have which Bethesda's 3D, real-time open world games lack. Certainly, the more recent games have had their flaws. Fallout 3 arguably dialled back the colour of Fallout too much, while Fallout 4 leans heavily toward being a shooter at the cost of broader role-playing options. But these remain distinctly Fallout games in other ways, replete with that familiar visual identity, and in quests like the Gary-filled Vault 108 - as perfectly strange as the wasteland demands.

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I'm beginning to think we should bury Vampire: The Masquerade back in the forsaken graveyard where it was originally dug up, or at least banish the toothy reprobate back to its pen & paper castle. I don't know how White Wolf's RPG is viewed in the land of table tops these days, but here in computerville it has delivered exactly one good video game in the last 25 years (and don't come gibbering to me about 2022's Swansong, it wasn't fit to polish Bloodlines' fangs). Sure, Bloodlines 2 might prove a winner, but given years of delays and a developer change, I'll believe it when I see it.

Which brings us to Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice, the beleaguered series' first prowl through the rain-slick streets of VR. In theory, this should be exactly my cup of haemoglobin; a gothic, linear stealth game where you use your vampire powers to sneak across the rooftops of Venice. In its mechanics and design, Justice aspires to be a cut down version of Dishonored. Unfortunately, it's in the cutting down where most of its problems arise. It's too cramped, too basic, and too fuzzy around the edges, and the whole experience ends up being a bit mid.

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As someone who finds games about cars wot go fast only intermittently interesting, I'd expect a game about cars wot go slow to be positively soporific. Speed is, ultimately, the modus operandi of a car. It gets you where you need to go faster than a horse, and doesn't do annoying things like pooing on your patio or dying (also, potentially, on your patio). Surely, then, playing a game about cars moving at the speed of a dead patio horse defeats the point, like playing a first-person shooter where all the guns fire backwards.

Expeditions: A Mudrunner Game demonstrates this not to be the case. This bouncy, slimy off-roading simulator is the most fun I've had with an imaginary car since 2018's Jalopy. This is partly because it is as much a physics puzzler filled with limitless conundrums as it is a game about driving, but also because, like Jalopy, it envisions the car as something more than a way to boost egos by doing a big circle.

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Dark Forces emerges from Nightdive's bacta tank refreshed and ready for action, combining classic FPS mayhem with thrilling espionage-themed missions.

"This is too easy" quips Kyle Katarn as he snatches the Death Star plans in Dark Forces' opening mission. What took Rogue One two-and-a-half ponderous hours to unspool, LucasArts' shooter pulls off in ten thrilling minutes. For Katarn, a cocky mercenary in tentative accord with the Rebel Alliance, stealing the Death Star plans is just another contract. In, out, job done.

Katarn's confidence and competence is echoed both in Dark Forces at large and Nightdive's work restoring it. The remaster is a consummately professional overhaul, making the game look just how you remember it in a way that belies the work involved to get it to this stage. In doing so, Nightdive reveals a shooter that hits the brief like a proton torpedo, a Doom clone elevated by its vivid, imaginative expansion upon the Star Wars universe.

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Like a demon summoned by fresh blood on its altar, Wrath: Aeon of Ruin first arose at the height of the retro-shooter revival. Developed in a modified Quake engine with levels designed by contributors to mods like Arcane Dimensions, it looked set to conquer all in its path when it arrived in 2019. Its Early Access showcased amazing weapons, splattering enemies, a knotty, secret-filled hubworld, and maps you'd sell your soul for.

Then it went back to sleep for five years. In 2021, developer KillPixel admitted the project had been sorely hindered by the Covid 19 pandemic. But the full game would be out in Summer 2022. That became Spring 2023, which then became February 2024. In that time the retro shooter continued to evolve, giving us its Doom (Prodeus), its Duke Nukem (Ion Fury) and its Hexen (AMID EVIL). All the while Wrath's presence faded, looking less like a spiritual successor to Quake, and more like a rerun of Daikatana.

Now though, Wrath is finished, and unlike John Romero's white elephant, you can see why it took so long. This isn't so much a first-person shooter as it is an ode to 3D level design, a dimension-hopping adventure of colossal scale and variety that bends the Quake engine into frankly obscene positions. Sadly, this is as much a criticism as it is a compliment, for in its strive to provide the grandest shooting galleries in existence, the shooting itself gets a little lost along the way.

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