In the last three days, I’ve played one good first-person shooter, one that’s aggressively mediocre, and one I want to kill with fire. Funny thing is, they’re all basically the same game.

I’m not joking. I see a gun sticking out of the lower right corner, a white reticule center-screen, and gun stats. When something moves, I zero on it and unload until it dies. I’ve fought in a war-torn America conquered by aliens, a war-torn America conquered by communists, and a war-torn African nation that’s just not a very nice vacation spot unless you’re a Babylonian god of war. Which, conveniently, I am.

We are ugly! Kill us!

The FPS hasn’t fundamentally changed since Doom but our expectations have. So when word broke that Ryan Payton, a creative director working on Halo 4, quit because Halo just couldn't excite him anymore, you know something’s gone wrong. It’s time to take a hard look at gaming’s money genre, figure out what happened, and how to make it right.

Let's start with how nearly every FPS desperately tries to be Modern Warfare, and the stragglers try like hell to be Halo. Put another way, they lack their own personality. Nobody seems to get that iron-sights aiming, a grim story, and glossy graphics won't translate to an instant smash success. More often, games that blindly follow that pattern just drown in an ocean of sameness. Last year's Medal of Honor could've been a Call of Duty expansion pack. Homefront -- the mediocre game mentioned above -- paints a fairly harrowing picture of occupied America during a few static cut scenes, but that's the problem. It's static. I'm watching when I should be experiencing.

Developer Infinity Ward pulled off a very good trick that made Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare into a singular experience. They built a very convincing, very intense reality and then put you right in the middle of it. Firefights felt much bigger than your small corner of the battlefield. You got a real sense of danger while creeping behind enemy lines. The palpable hopelessness of your situation really sunk in as you crawled, dying, just far enough to see what a nuclear detonation can do to the world. And then the radiation killed you.

Excepting the infamous "No Russian" level in Modern Warfare 2, more recent Call of Duty iterations don't go for the gut like that, and nobody else comes close. Indeed, Bodycount -- the kill-with-fire candidate -- goes full cartoon. Blast a tribal warrior at point-blank range and watch them fly thirty feet just like in a '90s action flick...and with the graphics to match. Nobody put any forethought into the encounters, either. Baddies just run at you from wherever, guns blazing. Somebody decided that was good enough. It's not.

You'll believe a man can fly.

Look, I'm not tired of shooters, but I don't have any patience left for lazy shooters, and a lot of them lately give off a faint air of cluelessness. Don't give me a glorified version of Duck Hunt. Don't make me feel like I'm pushing buttons at Kinko's. Don't rely entirely on multiplayer to redeem the game. Don't pimp the umpteenth round of weapon balancing as a key feature. And for the love of Benji, don't steal from the best when you don't really understand why they're the best.

Do this instead: Rethink. Question. Empathize.

Dump anything to do with Call of Duty. Even Activision's bungled their formula lately by playing it safe, and "crap +1" is not a blueprint for success. Different gets noticed. Different and awesome becomes the next Call of Duty/Halo. BioShock, for example, took a more tactical route with limited ammo and offensive mutations (also with limited ammo). Combining the two made combat fluid and flexible at the same time. Others (Fallout 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution among them) add RPG elements to the mix.

Take a look at the things every shooter does and don't do them. I'm sick of walking into an area, watching the doors lock, then waiting for waves of enemies to drop in on one side of the box, then the other, then another until -- amazing! -- the doors unlock again. That's the new monster closet. A great shooter presents you with an interesting problem to solve...albeit with a whole lot of bullets and a few grenades. Enemy placements, weapons, and tactics should create specific challenges, and those challenges should evolve. I always refer back to assaulting Al-Assad's TV station in Modern Warfare or The Silent Cartographer level in Halo as premiere examples of how to build a superior shooting gallery. Make every encounter count.

Swamp Thing goes tactical.

Also, give me a context I care about. Bodycount's "kill people to help the world!" plot couldn't be more generic if you'd bought it on sale at Safeway. Whereas Resistance 3 -- the good one out of the three -- gets a lot of juice out of its conquered-Earth scenario. You get a real sense that humanity is going out swinging. More to the point, your mission isn't to exterminate the alien hordes or free Earth, but to save your wife and child. That's why we fight. Personalize the motivation beyond "make bad thing die." Keep an eye on Bioshock: Infinite for this very reason.
 
And while Resistance 3 does fall back on those closed-area siege scenarios a lot, it also shakes up the rote pistol/assault rifle/sniper rifle/shotty loadout every FPS use. The revolver fires delayed-detonation bullets. The rifle has a tracking feature. Then you get crazy guns (developer Insomniac's trademark) that shoot through walls.

Most of all, make a shooter that feels different. Trust me, I've killed them all -- aliens, zombies, mutants, terrorists, Nazis, militants, bugs, and at least one chicken. I've used every gun on this planet and several others. So instead of concentrating on window dressing, give me an experience that singles itself out from all the games I've played, FPS or not. Do something I'm going to remember.

First-person shooting is just a simple mechanism. The game around it needs to bullseye a target, too.