From Borderlands 4 to Battlefield 6, the best FPS games of 2025 are high-octane, frenetic experiences

2025 has been a bumper year for FPS games – the kind of year that makes you look at your backlog, sigh deeply, and accept that you're just never finishing anything ever again. It's been a year where even the weird experimental shooters have been good, and long-running franchises have come good after years in the wilderness. Our list of best FPS games for 2025 stretches in every direction: tighter, faster arena shooters; big-budget bombast; extraction shooters refining their brutal little loops; and narrative blasters that hit harder than you expect.

These are the five FPS games that defined 2025; the ones that stuck with us. They're smart, sharp, messy, stylish, occasionally infuriating, but always compelling. These games that understand the fantasy at the heart of the FPS: pointing something that goes bang at something that needs to fall over, and somehow turning that simple loop into comforting video game junk food.

5: Metal Eden

Developer: Reikon Games
Platform(s): PS5, PC, Xbox Series X

From the developers behind 2017's Ruiner, Metal Eden is a razor-sharp arena FPS that feels like a love letter to the glory days of twitch shooters. It's fast, stylish, and brutal in a way most modern games are too polite to be. Movement is snappy, guns hit hard, and every arena feels built to make you sweat. The arena shooting here reminds me of 2016's Doom, and at five hours long it's a tightly placed slice of fun that is the perfect palate cleanser between some of the other FPS games on this list. The story and world is couched in sci-fi nonsense, but it's pulpy fun if you can tolerate all the talk of floating cities, COREs, and hyper units.

Movement is pleasingly fluid and you get a double-jump, air and ground dashes and even a jetpack to make your fights feel three-dimensional. The guns are phenomenal, with your default weapon being a full-auto submachine gun that can chew through enemies without a problem. When you get access to the game's pistol, traditionally a lame starter-weapon in most FPS games, the high-damage blasts that turn enemies into chunks is a revelation.

4: RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business

Developer: Teyon
Platform(s): PS5, PC, Xbox Series X

RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business feels like a magic trick: while it's technically a standalone DLC for Rogue City, it's actually a whole new game in DLC clothing. Unfinished Business doubles down on the fantasy of being a legally sanctioned fridge with a gun, but this time you get to play as regular made-of-meat Alex Murphy, but also you can play as a much-bigger-fridge-with-a-gun, the ED209.

Unfinished Business strips away a lot of the open-world Deus Ex-ish bits of Rogue City and instead chucks you into the bottom floor of an OCP skyscraper, the Omnitower, occupied by mercenaries and tasks you with fighting your way to the top. At its core, it's the same game as Rogue City, but the pacing is cleaner, there's an all-new cryo cannon and you can even fight those ridiculous ninja robocops from Robocop 3 if that's something you've been craving for some reason.

3: Borderlands 4

Developer: Gearbox Software
Platform(s): PS5, Switch 2, Xbox Series X, PC

Borderlands 4 is big dumb fun from a franchise known for it, but with less of the juvenile annoyances I've seen in its prequels. It's a smart reinvention of what works and what doesn't – Gearbox has doubled down on the chaotic blasting and jokes, making a shooter that's nonsensical fun without just being Claptrap and Tiny Tina warbling on for hours.

Don't worry: it's still loud, still crass, still drenched in loot colors, but there's a clarity to Borderlands 4 that makes it feel like the best the series has been since the original. Gunplay feels punchier and more physical. Enemies react properly when hit, elemental effects chain together in satisfying ways, and the game's new "modular perks" system means guns don't feel disposable after 10 minutes – you build around them, tweak them, and keep favorites for hours. It's still Borderlands, but it's sharper, better-paced, and confident.

2: Escape From Tarkov

Developer: Battlestate Games
Platform(s): PC

Yes, Escape From Tarkov has been "around forever." Yes, it technically launched in some form back in 2016. And yes, its community has fought more civil wars than most countries. But 2025 is the year Tarkov finally clicked into its final form – a unified, stable, terrifying monster of a game that rewards obsession and punishes complacency like no other shooter on the market. Every firefight is a panic attack in slow motion: bullets snap past your ears, armor gets blown to pieces, grenades roll under rusty shelving, and somehow you escape bleeding, limping, and exhilarated.

Tarkov is still absurdly complicated. Loading a mag with ammo might require a spreadsheet, quests feel like hazing rituals, and the menus might actually be haunted. But when you commit – really commit – it becomes one of the most rewarding FPS experiences available. 2025's 1.0 release may not have been groundbreaking, but in shedding its early access label, I can officially recommend the game I've played much more than anything else to a whole new audience. It's not for everyone; it doesn't want to be. But if you want pure, high-stakes firefight adrenaline, nothing else comes close.

1: Battlefield 6

Developer: Battlefield Studios
Platform(s): PS5, PC, Xbox Series X

Battlefield 6 is fast and frenetic fun, a mix of urban long-range combat that is less about individual skill and more about working as a team to blow up as much stuff as possible. A varied arsenal and interesting map design come together to create a multiplayer shooter that's truly memorable, solidifying its status as one of the best Battlefield games of all time – let alone the best FPS of 2025.

Battlefield 6 delivers on EA's vision: make a version of Battlefield 3 for the modern age, a modern Battlefield game that was less controversial than pretty much everything released since Battlefield 4 released all the way back in 2013. In doing so, it has proved that great design is eternal, as new smart additions like dragging your teammates to cover while reviving them, tactical ladders, and even hopping on a UAV and then hitting it with a sledgehammer to fly yourself into low-orbit (RIP) combine to create intense, memorable gunfights. It's not perfect, but it's so much fun you won't notice.

Battlefield 6 is also one of the best games of 2025 in a more general sense, and we've ranked the others for you.