In 2000, Project IGI was one of the first games to blend the freedom of approach of those tactical shooters with the one-man army stylings of more traditional shooters. They were always way too serious for that kind of tomfoolery.ĪLSO READ: I Hope Deathloop Isn't A Blueprint For Future Arkane Games Some of these games were great, but they were so committed to realism that you never got that playfulness - that cinematic 'special agent' feeling - from them. On the other side of the FPS genre were tactical shooters like Rainbow Six and Delta Force, which allowed you to tackle a level from various angles, plan your approach, and other possibilities to cater to military nuts. Yes, Half-Life had come out a couple of years earlier, showing that you could tell interesting stories within the format, but the vast majority of games in the genre were very much linear story-light affairs. There was no manual save system or mid-mission checkpoints in the game, forcing you to live with your mistakes (and the consequences of a somewhat iffy stealth system).īack in 2000, first-person shooters were yet to fully emerge from their rusted corridors and murky nether-spaces.

You'd scout a base from afar, clamber over fences and reel yourself down ziplines, then procure your objectives via stealth or all-out gunplay (or, as the case would often be, diligent stealth before all shit hits the fan and you have no choice but to shoot your way through). It did Far Cry's whole 'tackle the base how you want' thing a good few years before Far Cry even existed. Project IGI (which stands for 'I'm going in') wasn't exactly a great game, but it took some bold (as well *tsssst* bald) steps into new territory for first-person shooters.

Origins will mark a return for the IGI series after a 20-year hiatus, and got me reminiscing about the remarkably open level design and adventures of the original game's balding protagonist David Llewellyn Jones (the unabashed Welshness of his name is something that, sadly, never gets addressed). Just the other day, a gameplay trailer for a game called IGI Origins was revealed, giving me flashbacks to a more innocent time in first-person shooters.

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