Top 5 Unheard of Free First Person Shooter Games

Now you may have seen my Top 5 First Person Shooter PC Games of the 90's article and you may remember how addicted I am to gaming. Well to add to that addiction I am also cheap. It can be confirmed easily by asking my wife.

Along that thought I went looking to the internet to provide me with a few extra free games to play that were really free to play and download. Whether they were GNU open source or just free because they were older I decided to try out a bunch of them. I wanted to find a few to play from time to time in between my counter-strike addiction spells. Below is my list of the top 5 free games in terms of playability and keep-ability.

5 Urban Terror
Urban terror was originally a mod for quake 3 that I had downloaded back in the day after quake 3 was released. It was a good competitor to counter-strike. It had smooth graphics and good play styles. Fast Forward to today and the mod is now ported over to the ioquake 3 engine and is a free full game download. That keeps it in budget as you no longer have to own quake 3 to play this game. That is a win win. Only downside is the amount of people playing it. Maybe I missed the spot that everyone was going to play this game. It would have been #4 if it were not for the lack of players. It is available in windows, Linux, and mac flavors too.

4 Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
This game also started life as a mod to another game called Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Also built on the quake 3 engine. Now distributed as a free game and ported to the id tech 3,ioqauke 3 engine. Free to download and play. Lots of people still playing this game which makes it fun. The action is fast paced and the weapons are World War II style. It is a good game. Graphics are dated however which kept it out of the top 3. It is available in windows, Linux, and mac versions.

3 Open-Arena
Now to the meat of the discussion. Open-arena is a freeware remake of Quake III arena. It has single player and multiplayer levels and a large following for on-line game play. The graphics are tight and the gameplay is fast. It feels like a cross between quake III and the original unreal tournament. I liked this game. It comes in Linux, mac and windows versions too.

2 America's Army
Ahh the Army's greatest recruitment tool ever! No kidding there are a lot of people playing this game. The graphics are awesome which made it beat out Open-Arena for me. The only thing that kept AA from being the number 1 was the game-style. If you have played Tom Clancy's Rainbow six then you have played AA. At least style wise they are very similar. It is more a combat simulation than a game which bumped it back to number 2 for me. Meaning the deaths are realistic which makes it less fun as a game. Still a keeper if you have another friend that likes playing America's Army as you can squad up and have a good time as a team.

1 Warsow
OK so you are thinking that you never heard of Warsow? That is a good thing as it is a very addictive game. Take Open-Arena but make the models look cartoonish and make it more of a arcade game and you got Warsow. The coding and graphics are tight. The game-play is stellar with several modes of multi-player to choose from. There are tons of people playing it. So why is it better than Open-arena? Well since they cartooned the player models the frame rate was bumped up big time to make the game super smooth even in very high resolutions. It really is a crisp game. You can play it on Linux, mac and windows. There are tons of player made maps available and the server listing is right in the game. I still have this one loaded on my main game machine and my work laptop (that has low end video) and can enjoy it on both.

So there you have it, just a few free games but there are tons more out there. I went through over 20 free games that I found to weed down this list for you. Now it is your turn to get out there and play. Go get your game on!