@datarama

One of my favourite recentish games is Research and Destroy. It has a load of one star reviews because it is a first-person shooter, but it doesn’t behave like one. It’s also really fun in couch coop mode (we’ve played it all the way through four or five times now).

You control a squad of three scientists trying to eliminate the supernatural things that have taken over the world (including having to science the remains to learn more and unlock new weapons). Each game starts with a random set of three of the nine available weapons and you have to unlock and upgrade the rest.

Each of the enemies is different. Ghosts can go through walls. The vampire assassin is hard to see and teleports after she attacks you. There’s a demon that sneaks up on one member of the party. Only they can see it, but they can’t hurt it, so you need to work out where it is and have someone else shoot it. There’s a troll that turns to stone after taking damage and you have to kill it by shooting the crystal growths off it when it is in stone form. And so on. Each enemy needs different tactics and different weapons work better against them.

Although it is first person and a shooter, it’s turn based. Time doesn’t elapse unless you’re moving or aiming and elapses within a turn independently for each scientist. You can look around as each person or in a floating camera mode without elapsing time (though you can’t see the vampire assassin in floating camera mode), so you can plan your turn carefully before actually running and shooting. Each scientist gets 30s of time per turn, so you generally take about two minutes per turn (the supernaturals are computer controlled and so move faster in their turn).

All of the reviews say some variant of ‘How dare these people do something original and fun!’