Sometimes, an FPS really is better with a controller

Greetings from a post-Thanksgiving stupor, FPS enjoyers. I had a nice AFK holiday with family, but in the back of my mind I was riding the high of the night before, when my friends managed to assemble a party of nine Master Chief Collection owners (shout out to the $10 Steam sale) to play classic Halo 3 custom games.

It was a blast, and if you have any fondness for early Forge creations like Halo Jenga (seen below), I can't recommend it enough.

The good times got me thinking about a PC gaming maxim that says an FPS is always better with mouse and keyboard. I was diehard about this for a long time—plenty of shooters feel fine on a controller, but I couldn't imagine a scenario where the precision of a mouse isn't a demonstrably better experience than thumbsticks.

Recently, I've loosened my grip on that perspective. Yes, the mouse reigns supreme when speed and precision are major factors in a shooter, and that is often the case. Echo Point Nova, my favorite FPS of 2024 about trickshotting robots while riding a hoverboard at 80 mph, is a "mouse game" at a molecular level that plays straight up bad with sticks. Doom Eternal is a spiritual experience on a mouse, but a fiddly mess on controller.

But take it from me that when you approach every FPS with a mouse default, you sometimes fail to realize that you've made it less fun for yourself by showing up to the lawn mower race in a Ferrari.

Halo is the ultimate example: A few years back, I replayed all the Master Chief Collection games co-op on mouse and keyboard. We barreled through the Bungie stories on Legendary, pistol-popping waves of grunts before they even noticed us and no-scoping distant jackals with Halo's delightful hip-accurate sniper rifle. It was fun, but not often stimulating. I wasn't magnetized to the action the way I was when I played the series on Xbox, and it got me thinking that maybe those campaigns don't hold up as well as I remembered.

Then this month, I returned to the series again with an Xbox controller, and it was like watching the last piece of a puzzle snap into place. Gunfights felt heavier and more deliberate on thumbsticks, which turns out is extremely important for selling Master Chief as a weighty, powerful super soldier in first-person.

That deliberate sluggishness is what Halo's enemies are built around: the well-rounded brigade of Covenant offer up thick, softer targets in grunts and jackals that are intentionally hard to miss. Armored Elites, tall and slender but still bulkier than Chief himself, force you to take your right stick off cruise control if you want to nail that plasma pistol/magnum combo. Halo enemies are more interesting to fight on a gamepad because it's just that much harder to track Flood crawlers with the assault rifle or pinpoint the hand slot on a cowering jackal's shield.

For a far more recent and PvP-focused example, I've also been seesawing between mouse and controller in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. I've been a staunch mouse guy for years with CoD multiplayer, as have all of my friends who play it, but I have to admit Blops 7 is more comfortable with sticks, and that's by Activision's design.

Activision has settled into a flat, simplistic map philosophy that accommodates sticks better than any other FPS, and its default settings for turn speed and camera acceleration represent literal decades of work to make sudden 180-degree turns easy and natural. That neat "sprint anywhere" mechanic introduced last year also feels nicer with analog movement.

Of course, heavy aim assist is effective at cementing an unavoidable skill gap with mouse users. I expected that overboard assist to make controller gunfights boring, but so many aspects of CoD's gunplay already make every engagement nearly automatic (huge hotboxes, flat maps, snap-targeting in ADS, few long angles) that the input method doesn't change much.

I'm not just talking about the obvious "designed for controller" shooters, either: the FPS I least expected to prefer with thumbsticks is the original Doom, which I completed for the first time in 2025.

I've dabbled with the first two Dooms over the years, but controlling an FPS without the Y-axis on a peripheral as unrestricted as the mouse made me feel like an animal clawing at the walls of my cage. So instead, I gave that recent spruced-up Doom collection a shot on my Steam Deck, and suddenly I couldn't put it down. Chunky enemies, close-quarters fights, minimal inputs, no precision required—did id accidentally make a perfectly comfortable controller FPS back in 1993? Probably an old observation at this point. Next I need to play Doom 64.

Do you have an FPS that most people play with mouse and keyboard, but you absolutely swear by on controller? Let's hear it.