Genre tropes are a tricky beast. Recall Gears of War and its then-innovative take on combat: how it introduced an extreme reliance on cover, the ability (and necessity) to blind-fire for area suppression, and how it underlined the need for players to flank enemy positions wherever possible. Gears of War was quite a fun cover shooter, but for each solid entry in this then-newfangled sub-genre, we got at least three bad ones to boot. Without pointing fingers, these were dull and uninspired games which took the ‘cover is your god’ mantra far too literally, using it as a crutch for about 95% of total gameplay.

While repetitive by nature, video games shouldn’t tire their players out in a matter of minutes. Problem is that this is not hard to do at all if your game consists mostly of kneeling behind waist-high walls and poking your gun out to pepper some rounds into beefcake monsters. While some games, such as Max Payne 3, use cover shooting as a strength to consolidate their trademark features, others eschew cover completely. Here, we’ll be taking a short look at a few of the very best examples of games with acrobatic gunplay, so if you’re in the market for such a game, read on.

Max Payne 3 is, to this day and age, one of the very best cover shooters ever made, if we’re looking at gameplay and gameplay alone. The unique combination of traditional cover mechanics with Max’s bullet-time abilities, as well as the amount of care and polish that went into Max’s third big adventure made for something truly special. Though Max Payne 3 can be approached as a traditional cover shooter, this won’t get you very far. Instead, where Gears of War emphasises its core gameplay mechanics through making you slow and cumbersome, Max Payne 3’s version of Max is as agile and limber as they come.

Here, you’ll be leaping in and out of cover in the blink of an eye, and the explosive set-pieces keep things interesting even when you’re not engaging the core gameplay loop. As far as cover shooters go, Max Payne 3 is the most acrobatic one by far, and it’s pretty damn amazing.

Doom might not be something you’d have expected to see on this list, but how else would you describe its hyper-aggressive gameplay mechanics if not - acrobatic. The 2016 reboot of the legendary game series broke bank by letting players go ham on its wide variety of demons and demon-wannabes, and this is accomplished through a curious combination of gadgets, weapons, and traditional movement abilities.

Traversal across levels is, then, accomplished not only through movement itself, but also through slaughtering enemies by using extremely fast and extremely satisfying finisher moves. It doesn’t take long for players to get into the groove and start chaining double-jumps with finishers left and right, and then combine that with various weapon quirks such as, say, rocket jumping to keep themselves mobile. Doom is as vicious and speedy as first-person shooters can possibly get, and this works wonders for one’s acrobatic tendencies.

Warframe is, arguably, the very best acrobatic shooter on the market, and a quality release overall, even though it might be a free-to-play title at its core. In Warframe, moving fast is the name of the game, and the fact that you’re able to freely chain and link virtually every single maneuver with one another makes for a gameplay experience that is as hectic as it is mind-blowing. It does take a while to get a firm grasp of Warframe’s core movement features, but by the time it’s muscle memory, you’ll find yourself attempting to bullet-jump in every other game, too.

The potential trouble here is that Warframe is also fairly obtuse, and doesn’t lend itself well to people who desire a more casual gaming experience. Having said that, since the game is completely free-to-play, everyone should at the very least kickstart Warframe at least once and see what it’s all about. You’ll have no qualms about forgiving the game’s jankiness when you start coming to terms with the insane movement abilities it offers.

Slightly different from the rest of the games we’re discussing here in that it’s a side-scroller, My Friend Pedro shares a fair bit of DNA with them all the same. This indie release takes a portion of Max Payne’s skillset and then combines it with a simple projectile ricochet and some physics to create something we’ve never had the chance to experience before. This can perhaps best be explained through an example, however.

My Friend Pedro lets you kick a frying pan directly into the air and ricochet bullets off of it to great effect. You can tag enemies freely so as to fire at two or more of them at the same time in slow motion, all the while hanging upside-down from some electric cables. The game seems to be about combining your rather varied skills in unique ways in order to complete shooting puzzles at ridiculous speeds, and it may well be the best indie example of this article’s subject matter yet. We’ll see when it comes out, though.