Strife: Veteran Edition (via UZDoom)

Strife is not an immersive sim. It's an FPS that talks to you like it's an immersive sim, as if you always have other options besides combat (stealth, deception, environmental control). Getting into a firefight is never the best option you have here… but it's the only option.

God, I don't think I've ever had such an up-and-down experience wanting to quit a game and then deciding to push a little more. There's a tantalising promise, occasionally realised, that you can play smart instead of charging in guns blazing. Unfortunately, there's always something to stymie that—either the weapon design, the enemy design, the level design, or some combination, at every stage of the game there's something definably wrong. It makes me sad, because this game was clearly ambitious and the devs did realise some of those ambitions, if in jank ways, years before the release of games like Half-Life or Deus Ex. It's just a shame that it's so frustrating to play.