It's not easy for a first-person shooter to innovate on the genre's established mechanics. First-person games generally have a lot of ways to innovate, but once you throw the "shooter" element into the pot, there are expectations that have to be met, which also limit the amount of creativity a developer can display. Even though the genre is a tried-and-true hit every single year, that doesn't mean that it's rewriting the formula each time.

That's why it's so exciting when an upcoming FPS shows off some impressive new mechanics that have the potential to shake up the established norms. These mechanics don't even have to be unique; they just need to change things in a way that keeps the shooting aspect feeling fresh. That's what these upcoming shooters are trying to do. They've got some cool ideas that either push their franchise forward or introduce something new to the genre that we haven't seen before. With any luck, they'll be the most popular FPS games of the next couple of years.

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

There's Movement, And Then There's Movement Like This

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 already introduced a hefty reinvention of the series' movement mechanics with its controversial Omnimovement system. Many of these changes, such as directional sprinting, were criticized by long-term players, especially console players, for their negative effects on the game's competitive scene.

2026's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 is taking action to fix this narrative. Some features, such as slide-to-supine mechanics, will remain, while directional sprinting is gone. The biggest change, though, is the ability to vault over objects and vehicles without losing momentum. It may seem small in theory, but in practice, it already visibly changes the way Call of Duty looks in gameplay. It almost feels like Titanfall 2's movement, with how fast you can move through the map. Giving players a more tactile connection to the environment is never a bad thing, and it looks like MW4 is heavily focused on that mission.

Ill

Brutal Visible Damage To Enemy Models

Ill is one of those games that looked a little too good to be true when it was first re-revealed, but now that we've seen a second trailer at Sony's most recent State of Play, it seems like the game may be very real. If that's the case, then it's also very gory, to a degree that we have never really seen in a video game before.

The main thing here is the unbelievably visceral damage that enemies take depending on where you shoot them, and with what firearm. Shown in the first trailer was an enemy getting its arm blown off with a shotgun, but things got even more brutal in the 2026 trailer. Legs and heads are removed with reckless abandon, and the way that the enemies react to that damage is astounding, not only moving differently afterwards, but looking at where their severed limb used to be. It's so organic and believable that it makes the violence that much more stomach-churning. Whether or not that translates across the full game won't be known until 2027, but it's hard to deny at this point that Ill is trying to do something really special here.

Valor Mortis

A Soulslike Shooter In First-Person

Developer One More Level is best known for the Ghostrunner games, a duology of first-person action platformers with demanding combat that punishes even the slightest mistake. They're tough, fast-paced games that have garnered a well-deserved audience. The studio's next game, Valor Mortis, is a departure from that in some regards, while adhering to the developer's strengths in others.

For example, Valor Mortis is a self-professed soulslike, despite being a first-person shooter with some swordplay thrown in the mix. That alone presents a unique mechanical challenge, as there aren't many soulslikes that have tackled the first-person perspective, and certainly none from a developer of this pedigree. There's also some BioShock thrown into things with what look like supernatural abilities that you can cast from your left hand, as well as some difficult platforming that proves the studio hasn't totally moved on from its cyberpunk ninja roots.

The CUBE

An Ever-Changing Environment

The CUBE is another project being published by Mundfish, alongside the aforementioned Ill, but in this case, we're looking at an online PvE shooter rather than a single-player survival horror game, and one set in the publisher's "Atomic Heart universe" no less. It features a giant, perfectly symmetrical cube as its setting, and players need to venture in, explore, and try to discover the cube's true nature in the hopes of eventually "solving" it.

Easier said than done. After every expedition, the cube will rearrange itself, changing environments, enemies, and the items you'll find along the way. It features RPG elements that let you permanently upgrade your character and equipment, and even the option to play solo if you so choose. It's sort of like a blend of an MMORPG and an extraction shooter, but with the focus solely on PvE rather than alternating between PvE and PvP. The shifting environments are the real star here, as the game can supposedly shift its environments in real time as you're playing, not just between missions.

Project Spectrum

A PvEvP Horror Shooter Where You Can Also Play The Monster

Remember Evolve, the 4v1 hero shooter from 2014 that let one person play as the monster while four others banded together to try and take the monster down? It seems like Project Spectrum is taking a lot of influence from Turtle Rock's ambitious but flawed game, and that's great news, because this is a niche that hasn't been filled since. The twist here is that the player-controlled monster is not the main focus of the team of players exploring each area. Much like Hunt: Showdown, they're instead scouring the map for the area boss so they can cleanse the region.

There's some Phasmophobia in there too, with the use of a camera to dispel the horrors after they're defeated, and of course, some subtle nods to Ghostbusters, but the main draw is absolutely the player-controlled monster. The idea of making them a side challenge as opposed to the main focus is a clever twist that will hopefully mitigate Evolve's shortcomings. It allows the monster-player to be sneakier and use the element of surprise, rather than having the entire enemy team know that you're there and letting them set up for you. Plus, there are also standard monster enemies to take down, which make for dangerous distractions when something bigger is lurking in the shadows. Project Spectrum is taking a lot of familiar ideas and putting smart spins on them, and it could result in one of the standout shooters of the year if it sticks to its 2026 launch window.