Top 5 shooters to play over the Thanksgiving holiday

Happy holidays!

Thanksgiving is one of the biggest and most important holidays of the year. We celebrate our lives, appreciate our friends and family, and we get to eat a TON of food. Families gather together at the dinner table and hang out while watching football or doing fun activities, but what other activity is more fun than video games?

What better way to celebrate the beginning of what became the mass murder of Native Americans than by playing some good old video games, more specifically first-person shooters. After you finish your turkey and pie, we highly recommend you sit down with some friends and family and show them some of the great shooters 2016 has to offer. If you don’t have these games, we highly recommend that you go pick some of them up on Black Friday as there are some great deals on these brilliant games! Below we’ve ranked five of the best shooters to play this holiday season.

5. Titanfall 2 (Xbox One, PS4, PC)

Top 5 shooters to play over the Thanksgiving holiday

We’ve given pretty high praise to Titanfall 2 previously for its excellent multiplayer, riveting gameplay, and surprisingly good campaign. Titanfall 2 masters things like level design by giving players a variety of incredible campaign missions that mix unique yet simple puzzles with fast-paced action. While the story is fairly by the numbers, the actual levels are truly excellent and will never manage to bore you.

Perhaps the most memorable mission in the game sees players traversing a factory that builds artificial homes. You must ride across conveyor belts while avoiding dangerous machinery and avoiding enemy fire, move with finesse so you don’t fall to your death, and climb a sideways town. Yes, a sideways town where gravity is attempting to pull you down but you must bounce off objects to climb to the exit. It has a super unique campaign and it’s just as fun to watch as it is to play.

4. Doom (Xbox One, PS4, PC)

Top 5 shooters to play over the Thanksgiving holiday

Doom is without a doubt the most brutal game of 2016. You can chainsaw enemies in half, rip their jaws in half, or obliterate their bodies with bullets and shotgun shells. It’s a great game to just pass the controller around and let people experience one of the most fun games of 2016. It’s super accessible too so people won’t need to have too much experience with shooters in order to pick this one up. All you need to do is run and shoot!

Something I enjoy doing with friends is putting the game on the hardest difficulty which only allows you one life and seeing how long each person can last before dying! You could also find some maps to download online and play a variety of player-created game modes which provide endless hours of fun.

3. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered (Xbox One, PS4, PC, requires a copy of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare)

Top 5 shooters to play over the Thanksgiving holiday

One of the best shooters of all time re-released earlier this month to the delight of fans. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare returned on brand new consoles with a fresh coat of paint and new features! One of the best multiplayer games of the last generation is back and you can even play it in split-screen!

Dust off those extra controllers and sit down with a couple family members and load up a match of Team Deathmatch on Shipment, add in some bots to spice things up, and let the chaos begin! If you’ve got some Call of Duty veterans over, you could have a quick-scope/no-scope snipers battle to make things extra tense and fun.

2. Overwatch (Xbox One, PS4, PC)

Top 5 shooters to play over the Thanksgiving holiday

While you can’t play split-screen in Overwatch, it’s super fun just to watch. The visual style of the game pops out for most people, the game has a variety of game mechanics to keep people engaged in the action, and the unpredictable nature of the matches lead to awesome/hilarious moments.

The game is also pretty accessible to those who want to try it out as everyone pretty much has the same loadout, there’s no major advantage for being a higher level other than maybe just being more experienced. It might take some time for newcomers to find a character that fits their playstyle, but once they do they’ll be sure to enjoy themselves! The game also does a great job of making everyone feel like they’re contributing in some way either by giving you points for assisting in kills or by simply supporting players with shields or health! You don’t need to be super skilled to feel like you’re actually accomplishing something for your team.

1. Battlefield 1 (Xbox One, PS4, PC)

Top 5 shooters to play over the Thanksgiving holiday

Thanksgiving is all about being thankful, right? I think many would agree that we are pretty thankful we don’t live during the god awful time period known as The Great War (AKA World War 1). What better way to reflect that than to play a game about the brutal bloodshed and destruction that occurred during the early 20th century!

While the game is fairly brutal, it is an incredible achievement in gaming and it may help some of the non-gamers in your family appreciate gaming a bit more. The gameplay is absolutely thrilling and feels almost cinematic at times. There’s nothing more exhilarating than charging a heavily guarded objective as planes fly over unleashing hellfire on opposing forces. It’s almost slightly reminiscent of action-heavy war films like Saving Private Ryan due to the hectic nature of the matches.

In addition to that, the visuals of Battlefield 1 are nothing to scoff at. The graphics are incredible and are some of the best you’ll see on a console at the moment and should truly impress people. The character models are incredibly detailed, you can see the sweat glistening off their skin and more. The overall detail in the game is truly spectacular as well with the destruction of buildings, the ever changing landscape due to explosions creating craters on the ground, and blimps crashing into the ground and leaving a massive wreckage for players to fight in. Battlefield 1 is like watching an incredible war movie, both in its emotionally gripping campaign and intense multiplayer.

If you felt we left any games off, drop them in the comments below! We hope you have a great Thanksgiving and enjoy some great games over the holiday.