Despite being one of the more recognisable sub-genres in gaming, you may be surprised by just how precious few looter shooters there actually are. Putting together a list of the best of them revealed how rare a truly brilliant one is, presumably a result of how incredibly hard they are to make, and their unfortunate tendency to go the way of Anthem or Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League – cut short after failing to grab an audience. But what they lack in quantity, they more than make up for in just how many hours you can lose to them, and over the past nearly two decades I’ve spent more time with this genre than I’d care to admit.
So what qualifies as a looter shooter for the purposes of this list? Well, as the name implies they’ve got to have shooting (either first or third-person) as the primary way you interact with the world, and all those shell casings and/or laser bolts need to reward loot (almost always including randomized drops) that keeps you playing and lures you into a hard-to-resist endgame. Ongoing games like Destiny and more traditional, non-live-service games like Outriders are both eligible, so long as there’s some kind of ongoing endgame or hook to keep you playing. In essence, we’re looking for games that, one way or another, adhere to the original premise of the looter shooter genre: what if we took an ARPG like Diablo and turned it into a shooter?
If, like me, you can’t seem to get enough of shooting monsters in the face to claim glorious gear, here are our top 14 looter shooter recommendations.
One of the weirder looter shooters you can play right now is Crab Champions, a roguelike where you play as a gun-toting crab facing off against fellow crustaceans and mean-looking floating heads, claiming badass loot in the process. The fast-paced, over-the-top combat might not be as technically advanced as its peers, but what it lacks in bells and whistles it more than makes up for in pure dopey charm. Plus, it's missing the usual add-ons and microtransactions you often find in other looter shooters, and thus comes as a complete package with no hidden costs.
This one is still in active development and currently available through Steam’s early access program, but at just $10 it’s absolutely worth checking out, especially since it’s such an obvious breath of fresh air from the usual looter shooter aesthetic. I’m a sucker for goofy takes on genres I love and you’d be hard-pressed to find a sillier option out there than this one. It’s also developed by a single person, which is pretty impressive given how much fun I’ve managed to squeeze out of this one in the past year.
One of the more underrated shooters I’ve played is the Shadow Warrior series, specifically the reboot that kicked off in 2013, which continues to experiment and reinvent itself (for better or worse) with each iteration. While the first and third games are linear, story-focused adventures, the second game in the trilogy took a detour into the world of looter shooters, with semi-open-world, procedurally generated areas and an emphasis on randomized loot that puts it squarely in the same category as Borderlands.
Shadow Warrior 2 is very tongue-in-cheek, despite the fact that you spend most of your time tearing demons into pink chunks like something out of Doom, and my friends and I spent over a hundred hours giggling as we grinded for loot and enjoyed the series’ unique brand of lowbrow humor. Gunplay is nothing to write home about and the buildcrafting is definitely on the more simplistic side that makes it feel like less of an RPG than many of its peers, but it’s still quite a good time, and one of my favorite turn-you-brain-off games when I just want to whale on some ugly looking monsters.
While Borderlands 3 did a whole lot to improve the Borderlands series’ gunplay and graphics when it launched in 2019, it also exists in a very weird spot in the franchise’s history, where it felt like developer Gearbox had allowed itself to be left in the dust in a genre it itself pioneered. The gunplay was solid, but easily outclassed by games like Destiny, and the loot was awesome, but buildcrafting among its peers had already evolved beyond Borderlands 3’s somewhat shallow options. Throw in some pretty questionable decisions where comedy writing and antagonists are concerned, and you’ve got what I consider to be the weakest entry in the series.
That said, this is still a Borderlands game and that means even on a bad day it’s damn fun to play. With a really neat interplanetary campaign and an irresponsible number of weapons to hunt, I spent quite a few evenings playing this one. And thanks to that improved gunplay, if you’re looking for the Borderlands game that feels better than most of the others (excepting Borderlands 4), then this is your port of call.
People Can Fly’s foray into the looter shooter space may not have been the most original iteration, notably taking quite a few queues from the likes of The Division, but it remains one of the more memorable looter shooters on this list. As supernaturally powered warriors, you’ll run around turning raiders into gobs of meat while claiming loads of loot. One thing that sets Outriders apart from the rest of the pack is just how great its buildcrafting is, especially with the Worldslayer expansion upping its game pretty significantly. I spent a ton of time optimizing my various characters’ builds for the procedurally generated raid activity, and geeking out over various stat numbers. Looter shooters aren’t always the best at embracing the RPG side of their mechanics, but Outriders really excels in this area – it rules.
I’m also a big fan of the fact that the developers decided not to make Outriders a live-service game, instead supporting it with a single (and pretty awesome) expansion. Don’t get me wrong: I’m quite a big fan of games-as-a-service projects, but not every looter shooter needs to go down that path, and Outriders never made me feel the pressure to play more than I ever wanted to play – I got in, had a great time, and then moved on to the next game. I really appreciated that. For that reason, this is an excellent option to play with your friend group if you’re looking for more good times in the genre, but you don’t want to get wrapped up in hundreds of hours of content that threatens to devour your life.
Sure, Borderlands’ detour to the moon after the phenomenal Borderlands 2 was mostly an excuse to secure more screentime for everyone’s favorite baddie, Handsome Jack, and keep the franchise warm while we waited for a proper sequel, but it’s also a very solid shooter with a surprising amount of meat on its bones where story is concerned. The unique setting of Pandora’s moon and the low-gravity, oxygen-juggling implications of that choice are certainly controversial, but I for one never stopped loving those glorious buttslams.
Really, The Pre-Sequel’s biggest sin is that it does almost nothing to evolve the series, instead feeling more like an elaborate expansion of Borderlands 2 with low-gravity environments. But more Borderlands 2 really isn’t such a bad thing, and this one still holds up to this day.
A spinoff of the Borderlands series, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is the only (sorta, kinda) fantasy game on a list that’s dominated by sci-fi games. Taking place within a D&D-like tabletop RPG called Bunkers & Badasses (which has since become an actual tabletop RPG,) this deeply inappropriate shooter is basically Borderlands dressed in wizard robes, featuring many of the iconic characters and mechanics for which Gearbox’s looter shooter series is known. It takes a few risks here and there with things like the overworld map that helps your journey feel a bit more like a proper tabletop adventure, but otherwise plays it extremely close to the blueprint established by the mainline series.
I really enjoyed my time with Tiny Tina’s Wonderland, but it ultimately sits quite a bit below the best entries of the original series just based on how much it borrows, as well as the fact that it fails to live up to the comedy chops of the likes of Borderlands 2 (more on that later). Still, if you’re looking to sink a ton of time into a wonderfully silly shooter that sets itself apart from the rest of the pack with a unique fantasy skin, this one’s very easy to enthusiastically recommend.
Say what you want about the original Destiny (God knows I have), but it changed the looter shooter genre in too many ways to count. That might irk those who aren’t a fan of live-service games, but the idea that looter shooters were going to be big-budget, ongoing adventures that spanned years was a massive step forward for the genre. With beautiful worlds to explore, one of the best game soundtracks of all time, and first-person action that still eclipses most of its peers this one deserves its kudos, even if it’s no longer receiving new content. It also introduced World of Warcraft-like raids that have since become the gold standard for its peers, inspiring those that followed, like The Division or Outriders, to do the same. On top of all that, it’s got some fantastic PvP modes that I’ve lost thousands of hours to over the years.
Yeah, you’ve got to deal with one of the most convoluted, almost nonsensical stories in the world, plus some really questionable grinds that nearly drove me to madness of more than one occasion, but Bungie makes all that worth it with some of the best gunplay looter shooters have ever had.
As the progenitor for many of the ideas that came after, the original Borderlands game deserves its roses for being the first of its kind (or at least the first massively successful one). Now over 15 years old, it definitely has its rough edges where gameplay, environment diversity, and other bells and whistles are concerned, but Gearbox managed to pull off what no one had before: turning a first-person shooter into a Diablo-like ARPG that was actually fun to play. The four vault hunters are iconic (having passed into legend at this point) and are a lot of fun to build into, and their quaint adventure through the deserts of Pandora is one I’ll always remember fondly despite its hilariously bad ending.
And though Borderlands definitely felt like a prototype of better games to come, it also had some surprisingly good comedy writing and DLC support that kept me playing with friends years after its debut. In 2009, when expansions of this kind were rare and the looter shooter genre didn’t exist, Borderlands paved the way for everything that came after.
Now we’re getting to the real heavy hitters, starting off with one of the greats of the live-service shooter. The Division 2 is one of the best experiences to be had in this space. With tons of great loot, some of the toughest raid activities ever devised, awesome buildcrafting, and the absolutely stellar “dark zone” mechanics that add a mini extraction shooter right in the middle of your co-op game, The Division 2 built on just about everything its predecessor did well and then some.
It also fills a niche of more realistic looter shooters with its dark, post-apocalyptic world where you’re fighting other humans instead of aliens or monsters. Sometimes this results in odd things, like a guy in a hoodie surviving a dozen shotgun blasts to the head, but if you’re able to put aside just how weird that is, you’re in for a good time. Best of all, both the games in this series have a whole lot of content to dive into, much of which still has an active playerbase to engage with.
After its predecessor pioneered the live-service model, Destiny 2 expanded on those ideas and is fast approaching a decade of content. It hasn’t always been consistent in being a fun game to play, and swings wildly from incredibly compelling expansions to absolute duds that make me want to put my head through a stained glass window. That’s bound to happen when you’re developing a game for this long and putting out thousands upon thousands of hours of content though, and when Destiny 2 pulls it off it’s without question one of the best looter shooters out there by a country mile.
That’s due in no small part to its absolutely fantastic gunplay, which has kept me playing even through the numerous dark times and content droughts. Campaigns like The Witch Queen and The Final Shape are some of the better stories looter shooters have told, the abilities and buildcrafting options have been built up over the course of years to the point where they feel quite good and have a ton of options to choose from. Best of all, it just has so much dang content that you could play every day for a year straight and still not run out of compelling things to do. It hasn’t always excelled in its loot, is often painfully grindy (including with its most recent expansion), and is incredibly inconsistent in the quality of its storytelling, but man, you’ve gotta hand it to Bungie for keeping this game relevant for as long as they have. The industry simply wouldn’t be the same without it!
Okay, okay, technically Warframe is more of a looter slasher than a shooter, but it would feel downright weird to not include it in this list given its influence on the genre and incredible amount of overlap. Taking on the role of a space ninja that’s absolutely dripping with swagger, Warframe has eaten up a ton of my time over the years with its never-ending grind and good times with friends. It also manages to pull off the free-to-play model quite well (or at least has a fairly consistent record), which makes it a pretty easy sell to your frugal co-op teammates.
It’s also impressive just how long this thing has been going on – it actually predates even Destiny – with the caveat that to this very day Warframe’s developers still claim the game remains in open beta (yes, really). I don’t play Warframe consistently, but every time I’ve logged on in the past decade it’s had mechanics added to it that make it feel like a completely different animal, including space combat, roguelike zones, and even a time-traveling DLC with motorcycle riding and romance mechanics. I dunno, man. This game is just…insanely good.
If you haven’t yet heard the news, Borderlands 4 is out now and is one of my favorite looter shooters of all time. Even this early into its lifespan, with plenty of bugs, performance issues, and general wonkiness going on, this massive, open-world reimagining of the series represents a massive leap forward from Borderlands 3 that takes some interesting risks that overwhelmingly pay off, like a more grounded story and an entirely new setting in Kairos that steps quite far away from the familiarity and nostalgia of Pandora. It also makes some pretty stellar improvements to gunplay, specifically where mobility is concerned, and gliding and grapple hooking around with friends as you blow things up with the most ridiculous arsenal imaginable has been (and likely will continue to be) one of my favorite experiences in 2025.
Borderlands 4 might very well go on to be even higher on this list, possibly even taking the top slot once various patches and content drops address some of my nitpicks with it, but even now it’s already stolen my heart and over 60 hours of my time. The future for the Borderlands series is looking quite bright – especially considering there’s already a whole roadmap charting out the next six months of content, which includes a new playable vault hunter.
Often described as “Dark Souls with guns,” the Remnant series has an incredibly unique take by combining a smattering of soulslike mechanics and roguelike features with looter shooter goodness, and Remnant 2 absolutely nails combining the ideas of all three. I should caveat this by saying that me categorizing Remnant 2 as a looter shooter will be controversial, primarily because this is the only game on this list that doesn’t have randomized loot or a grind that requires completing the same activities a bunch of times – both hallmarks of what makes the genre what it is. Instead, you take on significantly challenging activities and once you manage to beat them once, you get guaranteed loot that removes any need to replay it again.
But it takes so many other cues from looter shooters, from gameplay, to buildcrafting, to working together with a co-op team to take down some horrifying boss to get that piece of equipment or weapon you’ve been dying to add to your build, plus has plenty of reasons to keep playing long after you’ve beaten the campaign. The fact that it bucks some of the trends found in most other looter shooters, specifically the need to grind, might actually be one of the reasons this one ranks so highly for me (Remnant 2 was one of my favorite games of 2023, after all). If you haven’t played it yet and you’re a fan of looter shooters, I cannot recommend it enough.
As much as I adore the hot, newness of Borderlands 4, it’s quite hard to contend with the series’ magnum opus: Borderlands 2. It is still hands down the best looter shooter we’ve got. With an almost unbelievable number of weapons, some of the best comedy writing in gaming history (tip of the hat to good ol’ Handsome Jack), and a story that’s surprisingly emotional right when you expect it to be silly and shallow, I spent more than a thousand hours in Borderlands 2 back when that wasn’t really a thing people ever did with games that didn’t have competitive multiplayer matches.
Obviously this game is over a decade old and so doesn’t quite hold up in certain areas like gunplay, movement, or buildcrafting, but after replaying it fairly recently I was shocked to see how well it still holds up. And where the original Borderlands game was the one that spawned all the looter shooters to come, Borderlands 2 was arguably even more influential in its impact on the genre, refining the concepts from the original and implementing new ideas that would later be iterated on by its peers, like how its endgame treadmill went on to inspire Destiny, Warframe, Outriders, and others.
And there you have it! Those are our top 14 looter shooters you can play right now. Which is your favorite? Any good ones we missed? Sound off in the comments to let us know.
