I totally agree, though, that you can easily mess up checkpointing terribly. Bioshock is a good example that you provided. Other examples include games that have incredibly silly placements of checkpoints, where you could have checkpoints every 5 meters in a straight corridoor, but then go on with no checkpoints between big fights and a boss at the end. However, those games usually have more pressing issues, such as rather poor structure of progressing through the game, which leads to the checkpointing issue in the first place.

And the checkpoint thing has its own problems. If you regenerate and the enemy doesn’t, then you have the Bioshock problem of tedious, often boring, protracted fights where you whittle down the enemy’s health. If the enemy regenerates health (or respawn, or whatever) then you have the Borderlands problem where it’s extremely frustrating to try to get past a particularly tough boss.

Bulletstorm is far and away the best FPS I’ve played in many years, at least from a strictly mechanical standpoint. You have control over what guns you bring with you, and your ability to upgrade guns and acquire ammo is mostly about your skill at the game and not about arbitrary and artificial restrictions imposed by the developers.

Contrast this with something like Resistance: Fall of Man. That game had a pretty large assortment of often quite exotic weaponry, including a gun that could shoot through virtually any wall, a gun that shot a stream of ricocheting crystals (with enough force to knock over a car!), and more, and you could carry all of them with you at all times. Unfortunately, ammo was so scarce for most of them that you have little choice but to use the most common guns.

Because if the only reason to have regenerating health is to ensure you never ended up in an unwinnable situation, then the above approach seems to me to be a better fit in making battles challenging (and thus giving the player more engagement and tension). For single player games, anyway.

The games that have regenerating health, but only when out of combat, seem to handle this particularly well (think almost any MMO). You can’t turtle any battle because you’re not regenerating any health, but as soon as the battle is over your health will regenerate to full by the time you reach the next battle.

I guess that Halo’s big strength isn’t so much its AI, which is definitely respectable but which also has big gaps that you can exploit if you know they’re there, but rather in its ability to confront you with enemies that are tough to bring down without having the player say “This is bullshit!” Having the Elite come back with full shields is much more palatable than having a human baddie get back up *again* after you put him down for the third time in a row.

Yeah, Halo is definitely the one I enjoyed least, but Halo 3 and ODST both felt like top-notch experiences, and very different facets of Halo to boot, having their own take on the game.

Still, what interests me most now is whether Destiny will make it to PC (and it seems Bungie want to do it if resources permit). I am not sure I’m so down with the concept as such, and I would have loved to have them tackle a non-FPS again… but still worth looking it for I reckon.

Halo is also reasonably special in that it has a plausible in-universe explanation for regenerating health. I don’t think I could name a single modern FPS (except Borderlands) that rationalises the protagonist’s ability to absorb volley after volley of hot lead with no lasting ill-effects. I think Far Cry 2 made the most radical step in at least acknowledging how absurd it all was (if you stop for a moment to heal your guy will literally remove bullets from his body with pliers and snap broken limbs back into place) but otherwise it’s always rankled with me a bit that they stole the system without trying to rationalise it in the context of the game.