Just like how Halo: Combat Evolved made a sudden pivot to the Flood, turning into something of a horror game in the process, Halo 2 made an even bigger change by introducing the Arbiter as a playable character. Halo 2 succeeds the way almost all great FPS campaigns do: subverting expectations. That's astounding when you consider that a huge chunk of the game had to be cut in order to get it out by the end of 2004, leading to a cliffhanger ending that became a running joke-of course, the sequel is available now, making it significantly less frustrating. Picking just one Halo campaign to include on this list? Were it so easy… but Halo 2 remains a masterpiece close to two decades after it released. These, in no particular order, are the best FPS campaigns of all time. There have been a lot of great first-person shooter campaigns over the years, but only a select few rose to the top.
Sure, multiplayer is great too, but playing through a story through the eyes of a badass shotgun-wielding hero is tough to beat. From Wolfenstein 3D to newer games like Deathloop, first-person shooters have seen enormous success, and for many of them, that comes down to a great single-player campaign. It was an oddity in an industry dominated by platforming and role-playing games, and no one could have predicted just how much things were about to change.
The first-person shooter barely existed before the early '90s.
