Hey everyone.

I'm currently thinking through some aspects of a hypothetical game. The game is intended to be an isometric 2D game with real-time combats which involve firearms. The problem I'm facing is that the loss of the third dimension makes the gameplay in combat radically different and less authentic. I already have some ideas how to compensate the loss of mechanics and still emulate aspects of 3D shooters, however some of these ideas would however also affect parts of the game which I probably wouldn't like to see changing.

So I was interested into whether or not some 2D games already came up with interesting and sophisticated combat mechanics for firearms which would be worth to take look at.

Crusader: No Remorse perhaps? Its hard to tell what exactly you're looking for as examples of mechanics. Cover-shooting? Crosshairs / Aiming?

You say that gunplay in an isometric shooter is less authentic than in a 3D shooter--how so? What is it that you feel is lost, and reduces the authenticity of the experience by its loss? The effect of recoil? The perspective of first-person aiming? Vertical aiming? In short, what mechanics do you want to replace?

Are Alien Swarm, Alien Shooters, Alien Breed, Subject 9, Crimsonland, RIP, Counter Strike 2D, Survivor Squad, worth to look at?
But then again I don't know what are you looking for.

Thank you so far for the games mentioned. To be more specific: Mechanics which compensate for the lack of recoil as well as hide and cover mechanics.

I suppose that one could implement recoil through cursor movement--shift the cursor a little with each shot--but I'm not sure that it would be terribly enjoyable to play. It might be worth experimenting with, however (it might be less objectionable if the enemy hit-boxes were fairly large, for one thing).

"Hide-and-cover" mechanics could be implemented, I think: use a line-of-sight algorithm to black out areas that are out of the player's visibility and limit the AI's awareness; use simple 2D-with-height collisions to stop bullets and allow the player to crouch behind objects.

Yea, there are already some very simple approaches to include some of the mechanics into a 2D environment. Recoil could be implemented by lowering the damage of a weapon the longer it is shot. For the game I'm concepting, this would even allow a nice addition of a roleplay mechanic where I could invest my skill points into a better handling of recoil . Hide-and-cover mechanics with sight cones have to be rethought in my context, since my hypothetical game has free-roaming sections with NPCs which are neither hostile nor friendly.

Anyways, I'm more interested into whether or not some predecessor gave the simple mechanics one can think of an interesting spin. So if you know some good examples for 2D games with recoil / aiming mechanics or hide-and-cover mechanics, just keep the names dropping. I haven't watched all of the gameplay footage from the games mentioned above yet, but so far most of them seem to rather emphasize in combat fast aiming and skillful movement .