As someone in my 30s, I’m swiftly coming to terms with the fact that I don’t have as much time to enjoy games as I used to. I still love lengthy action-adventure games as much as anyone else, but when you only get a couple of hours a day to play, if that, it gets harder to really get into a groove, which can hinder a game’s overall impact. Thankfully, this is where tighter, more linear action games have stepped up to the plate.
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Whether it’s due to their short length or high content density, there are no empty moments in these great games.
For as much as the order of the day has become infinite replayability and live services, there are still plenty of action games that are content to tell a streamlined story and wrap up in around 15 hours or less. There’s no need for grinding or extensive character building, and if there is any side content or random distractions, they’re short, optional, or both. It makes me sincerely happy that there are still action games like this to enjoy, as it ensures I can still get my fill of strong gameplay and consistent clears even if I can’t dedicate as much time to my hobby as I used to.
10 Furi
Boss, Story, Boss
A tried and true method for keeping just about any genre of game laser-focused, action games especially, is to scrap pretty much anything that doesn’t inform the core gameplay loop. Furi, for example, is a game about defeating the jailers keeping you imprisoned, so why bother having anything in between all of that?
Furi is an action game all about getting into the zone and mastering highly-responsive combat in order to defeat its sequence of powerful bosses. You don’t really get anything in the way of new abilities or combat wrinkles after the initial tutorial battle; it’s wholly on you to master the controls and systems. After that, it’s merely a matter of putting together what each boss is about and consistently turning things around on them.
The only thing that might bother those in a rush is that the lion’s share of the game’s backstory is told through walking segments between each fight, which can take a few minutes. Though, I think if the entire game ran at its usual breakneck pace with no downtime at all, your head might explode.
9 Sifu
The Question is, Do You Respect Your Time?
I’ve heard it said that it can take a lifetime to truly master any particular craft, whether it’s art, music, or martial arts. There are some things you just can’t grasp without a bevy of experience and wisdom behind you. Of course, not everyone has time for that, especially in Sifu where you’re pursuing a decade-long vendetta, so you might need to take a few shortcuts.
Sifu is an action brawler game where you need to fight your way through a series of enclosed arenas, carefully and precisely dealing with thugs from all sides to minimize damage to yourself, all while pursuing the master combatants and assassins who wronged you. The twist is that, every time you die, you bounce back to life with years shaved off your lifespan, growing stronger and more learned, but also more fragile with age.
Putting aside the obvious metaphor that you’ll ruin yourself by spending a lifetime pursuing revenge, Sifu’s gimmick is a clever way to incentivize risk and reward. The best-case scenario is to burn through the game in one go, but you might have an easier time if you take a dive here and there.
8 I Am Your Beast
If You’re Not Moving Fast, You’re Doing it Wrong
If you want a game that you don’t have to worry about wasting time on, it’s probably a good policy to play something that already incentivizes speed. If you’re in a hurry anyway, you might as well put all that hustle toward a practical purpose, such as chucking knives at soldiers in I Am Your Beast.
I Am Your Beast is a shortform arena-based FPS in which you need to accomplish various objectives like killing all the soldiers, activating all the relays, or simply finding the escape hatch as quickly as possible. The game gives you a wide array of skills with which to do all of this, from climbing trees to insta-killing enemies with one well-placed throw of a knife or pistol. It’s a game that feels fast because it wants you to be fast, not stand around waiting for the action to come to you.
The only speedbump you might encounter in I Am Your Beast is that progression is directly tied to level performance. You need to earn high grades in order to unlock later levels, which means half-baked performances won’t cut it. If you want to feel like an unstoppable John Wick-esque monster, you have to meet the game halfway here.
7 Neon White
Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door
Speaking of speedy experiences, I’ve never tried parkour before, but it certainly looks pretty fast-paced just from a casual glance. Now, imagine regular parkour, except you’re shooting demons in Heaven, and have the ability to instantaneously launch yourself fifty feet into the air or over gigantic gaps, and you’re more or less in the ballpark of Neon White.
Neon White is a hybrid FPS and parkour platformer built with speedrunning in mind. In each level, you need to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible while also defeating every enemy in your path, which are usually laid out in such a way that they’re impossible to miss. The guns you use are, well, guns, but they can also be sacrificed for one-shot movement abilities like big jumps, air dashes, teleportation, and grappling hooks.
Rather fittingly for a game with a speedrunner’s heart, it’s all about sequencing, nailing down the precise order of operations and doing so in an efficient manner. There is some side content, specifically involving hanging around with certain NPCs, which you do need to engage with to unlock the true ending. Though, doing this also unlocks some extra levels, and trust me, you’ll want to play them for how fun they are.
6 Superhot
Time is On Your Side
By virtue of being an interactive medium, the pace of any given game is dictated largely by the whims and actions of the player, at least to an extent. What if, however, the game’s pace was completely determined by you, only moving as fast or slow as you permit it to? Well, then you’d have a game like Superhot.
Superhot is an action shooter where the primary gimmick is that time only moves when you do. As long as you’re perfectly still, so too will enemies and bullets be frozen in place. It’s a fun and easy concept to wrap your head around, and once you start to get into the groove, you’ll begin weaving around bullets and instinctively chucking spent guns at dudes at a rapid pace.
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Superhot is not a very long game, to the point that, skill permitting, you could probably finish the whole thing in just one or two sittings. Even if it does take you longer, it’s hard to shake the addictive appeal of having the entire flow of the world under your thumb. If that’s not “respecting your time,” I don’t know what you’d call it.
5 Pizza Tower
30 Minutes or it’s Free
I don’t think I’ve ever had a pizza place make good on the whole “30 minutes, or it’s free” thing, and not for lack of trying. Assuming any place I ordered from even had that guarantee, they always made it with time to spare. I have to assume that, when delivering, every pizza guy is possessed by the hyperkinetic spirit of Pizza Tower’s Peppino Spaghetti, gaining his uncanny speed in the process.
Pizza Tower is an action platformer heavily reminiscent of the Wario Land games, albeit with a much greater emphasis on speed and precision. The rating you get at the end of every level is heavily influenced by how quickly you managed to scurry your way through the whole thing, so you’ll probably make it through the whole game at a steady clip more or less by default. That’s not even mentioning the fact that every level ends with a mad dash all the way back to the beginning before time runs out.
There is some incentive to play levels over again or otherwise be a little more methodical in your exploration, but the side content this unlocks only really affects the final rating you get at the end of the game. It’s nothing to lose sleep over unless you really, really care what Peppino thinks of you.
4 Cuphead
Pure Progress in Action
Older console games like Gunstar Heroes tended to be pretty concise by default, as games were still heavily influenced by the arcade mindset back then. It stands to reason, then, that a game like Cuphead, which draws a lot of inspiration from that era, would have a similar degree of brevity to it, provided that you can pick up what it’s putting down.
Cuphead is a sidescrolling action platformer with some eight-directional shooting mixed in. What differentiates it from similar games is that, barring a handful of traditional platformer levels, most of the game’s content is found within its boss fights. Granted, those boss fights are not easy, and make no attempt to pretend to be, so unless you’re exceptionally competent, it’ll probably take you a bit to puzzle them out.
But that’s part of the magic of Cuphead, the pure progress of banging your head against the proverbial wall until you start to see cracks, learning all of a boss’s patterns and phases until you’ve got them down to a science. As long as you’re willing to invest the brain power, Cuphead is consistently rewarding.
3 The Wonderful 101
Like a Season of Saturday Morning Cartoons
If you’re in the market for action games that respect your time, the entire character action subgenre is a good place to look. Games like Bayonetta and Devil May Cry always know how to pack a lot of action into a concise package. Really, any of Platinum’s best works qualify, and if they’re all on the table, I think I’ll take the opportunity to shill for The Wonderful 101.
The Wonderful 101 is about a team of 100 world-saving Sentai-style superheroes who can link up into gigantic constructs like fists, swords, and guns, all for the express purpose of beating back a massive alien invasion. Like Platinum’s other works, the game’s progression is effectively a straight line from point A to point B, with a lot of punching and blasting in between and a climactic boss setpiece to cap off each stage.
The game does technically have some side content and unlockables; additional members of the team are occasionally hidden behind puzzles or out-of-the-way spots, and there are secret challenges to uncover, but neither will impact your overall ability to complete the story.
2 Batman: Arkham Asylum
The Dark Knight Works Smarter, Not Harder
You wouldn’t think a dude in a bat costume with no superpowers would be so adept at quickly dismantling criminal activities, but that’s how Batman always surprises people. You don’t need superpowers to bust punks with mechanical efficiency, and nowhere is that clearer than the very first game in the Arkham series, Batman: Arkham Asylum.
Compared to the games that came after, particularly Arkham City and Arkham Knight, Arkham Asylum is a much more streamlined affair. While you are technically free to explore the grounds of the Asylum as you progress, there’s not really any reason to do so besides hunting down Riddler Trophies, if you’re even into that. If you’re content to ignore Nygma’s nonsense, you can just march your way into each subsequent puzzle, combat, and predator encounter.
The combat and predator sections in particular are a great illustration of what made this game so popular when it first came out. Whether you’re sequentially breaking jaws and countering haymakers or methodically picking off stragglers from the rafters, it all goes by much faster than you’d expect it to, which helps you get to the really cool encounters faster.
1 Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy
Shorter Than Watching All the Movies
I haven’t watched any Marvel Cinematic Universe stuff in years, partially because I just can’t be bothered anymore, but also because the movies just keep on getting longer and longer. As much as I like Marvel stuff, I don’t have infinite time to watch 20 movies worth of backstory. If you want a Marvel story that keeps things relatively concise while also being a fun action game, try Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
Guardians of the Galaxy is a self-contained tale about the titular band of puckish space rogues traveling the stars, meeting friends, and making enemies, and battling against a burgeoning intergalactic cult. The game is a strictly linear affair; while there are some little branching paths and points of interest here and there, the focus stays mostly on action and story the whole way through, which is good for keeping you engaged with the game’s best qualities.
The game does have a bit of a habit of making you walk slowly while characters banter at each other, but these instances are relatively infrequent, and the dialogue is amusing enough as to not be annoying.
10 JRPGs That Respect Your Time (No Grinding Required)
If you don’t have time to grind JRPG boss fights, check out our grinding-free list of JRPGs to try instead.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
