9 First-Person Shooters Only Hardcore Gamers Can Play

First-person shooters aren't all about cackling like a maniac while riddling your enemies with bullets, and neither are they all about crouching behind a waist-high wall and waiting for your injuries to magically go away.

As one of the first FPS titles to really break away from these formulae, Operation Flashpoint presents a whole new species of difficulty and immersion within the genre.

Put simply, it's not going to hold your hand, and if you want to push ahead with your objectives, careful forward planning is an absolute necessity. The game's realistic ballistics mechanics mean that a shot to the head is, just like in real life, an instant death, and getting shot anywhere else can result in you bleeding out if left untreated.

Each difficulty level to the game also adds far more player inconvenience to tighten up the already brutal experience. On the lowest setting, ammo, health and inventory are all displayed on the UI, but each subsequent difficulty takes one of those things away from you, leaving you with little else to help you but the cogs in your own head.

Lastly, you can say goodbye to liberally placed checkpoints. After all, you don't get those in real life, do you?