History NintendoHard / FirstPersonShooters

** The Brutal Doom mod tweaks enemy behavior to make them smarter, stronger and more aggressive (Cacodemons can strafe quickly to dodge projeciles, Imps have faster fireballs and have a leaping slash melee attack, Cyberdemons fire five rockets instead of three, Spectres are ''completely'' invisible except for their eyes, only becoming visible when they attack.) Reloading is also added, now requiring the player to monitor how full their clips are so they don't get caught reloading at a crucial moment. Though there are some things to help make it easier as well. On top of added secondary fire for most weapons, Berserk packs now allow the player to make [[FinishingMove executions]] which, on top of being [[{{Gorn}} bloody and ultraviolent]], render the player immune to damage for the duration, and the dinky pistol is replaced with a far more useful assault rifle.

* VideoGame/{{Blood}} has even the weakest of mooks dealing ''huge'' amounts of damage even on lower difficulties (along with being rather stingy on the health pickups,) and the weakest ranged weapon in the game deals continuous damage, but still takes a while to kill anybody, requiring you to either unload more shots into the enemy (in a beginning where ammo is sparse) or just shoot once and run away until they die.

* VideoGame/{{Blood}} has even the weakest of mooks dealing ''huge'' amounts of damage even on lower difficulties, and the weakest ranged weapon in the game deals continuous damage, but still takes a while to kill anybody, requiring you to either unload more shots into the enemy (in a beginning where ammo is sparse) or just shoot once and run away until they die.

* The ''HouseOfTheDead'' series. It doesn't help that in the Wii port of ''The House of the Dead 2'', you don't get unlimited continues.
** You would think that, by being given a shotgun in ''3'' and a machine gun in ''4'', along with a supply of grenades, would make those games easier than their predecessors. How wrong you are. ''How very, '''very''' wrong you are...''
** Some players can finish 1, 2, and 4 in one credit and get the best possible endings. 3, on the other hand, would rip your spine out and snap your head off with it. It was really long, it was tough to get shots off quickly with the heavy shotgun, and there were numerous spots were you were guaranteed to take a hit if you didn't have absolutely perfect accuracy and lightning speed. And the bosses, oh, the bosses. Did ''anyone'' beat Fool without taking at least 8 hits? No surprise that this is the least popular Hot[=D=] of all and didn't even last a year in some arcades.
** Hell, just about any Sega-created arcade-style light gun game could fit this trope; there's ''TheOceanHunter'' with its slow-to-reload torpedoes and annoyingly frenetic and hard-to-kill bosses, ''LetsGoJungle'' with its swarms of enemies and irritating minigames to determine how you fare in certain forced scenarios...but the king has to be ''Brave Firefighters'', a ''TimeCrisis''-like firefighting game where ''each and every fire you're supposed to put out, '''including the "boss" fires''''' regenerate their health and spread if you don't take care of them fast enough...before throwing in a "save the hostage" scenario in ''each "boss" fire'' that - if you allow to get burned - takes time ''off''. Prepare to have your bank account emptied by this game, and try to avoid the AllDevouringBlackHoleLoanSharks, while you're at it.
** What of Typing of the Dead? The last levels will have you snap your keyboard in half after giving you carpal tunnel three times on each wrist... somehow.

** In the later stages, the [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard enemies even cheat]]. They know when you are reloading, and will rush you.

* ''VideoGame/DukeNukemForever'' has been criticized for this. It qualifies on numerous levels: very limited health and thus the ability to be killed with only a couple of direct hits; an overload of monsters in certain areas; limited ammo; and ambush attacks (for example in the level Vegas in Ruins, you find yourself attacked by a massive boss monster who can only be brought down by turrets and explosive weapons. Too bad ''there are none to be found'' if you used them all up in the battle preceding its arrival.)

* ''VideoGame/{{STALKER}}'' is unforgiving when it comes to shooting people. It's pretty realistic, but too bad you are supposed to fight groups of well-armed stalkers or some nasty mutants. Just like in real life. You want to make this game easier? Well, pick HIGHER difficulty. Yeah, higher. It makes weapons even more realistic, so you can take only few bullets before kicking the bucket, but so can your enemies. On lower difficulties, they may withstand some serious firepower. Such is life in Zone.

In particular, ''Hell Revealed''[='=]s 24th level, "Post Mortem," has so many monsters (over 500!) that ''it's impossible to save your game on it'', unless you're using a source port of the game. And then you have ''Hell Revealed 2'''s super-secret level, "Playground," which has over 1,600 monsters. Even on the lowest difficulty, this map will likely cause you to tear your hair out many times over. And let's not EVEN get started on [=MAP31=].[[hottip:*:That's if you can even run the God-damn level. Even with the newest version of [=ZDoom=], [=GZDoom=], or Skulltag (which have significantly improved renderers compared to the original), the sheer amount of demons will make your computer chug.]]

* Nearly all of the ''RainbowSix'' series, due to the near-psychic enemy AI and cheap {{one hit kill}}s, as well as [[FinalDeath perma-death]] in the early games.

* DukeNukemForever has been criticized for this. It qualifies on numerous levels: very limited health and thus the ability to be killed with only a couple of direct hits; an overload of monsters in certain areas; limited ammo; and ambush attacks (for example in the level Vegas in Ruins, you find yourself attacked by a massive boss monster who can only be brought down by turrets and explosive weapons. Too bad ''there are none to be found'' if you used them all up in the battle preceding its arrival.)

* ''Wolfenstein3D''. The enemies use HitScan attacks, do tremendous damage, and can be [[ArtificialBrilliance surprisingly sneaky]], tend to be placed in ambush positions, and ''[[FriendlyFireproof shoot through each other]]''. You open a door, and there are a few [[DemonicSpiders SS]] in the room beyond. You try to fight them on equal ground and you get mown down. Reload. You open the door and try to catch them as [[ArtificialStupidity they file through the door]]. The room actually has two entrances, so one of them comes around through the other door and flanks you. Reload. This time you open the door and one of the SS [[RandomNumberGod rolls a near-instant reaction]] and [[HitboxDissonance shoots you THROUGH THE DOOR before it is fully open]]. Reload. You manage to get them through the chokepoint and kill them all. BUT! It turns out MORE guards were alerted in another part of the level and one sneaks up from behind and kills you. Hope you like SaveScumming.

** ''Red Faction Armageddon'' is a Third-Person Shooter, and for the most part is rather straightforward to finish. However, it takes inspiration from the original by dialing up the difficulty UpToEleven in the climax. The bugs respawn like crazy, there's little environment to destroy in the tight underground corridors, and the checkpoints are few and far between. Moreover, as you're approaching the Queen, Behemoths (which only one served as a separate boss) blockade your way, forcing you to deal with them and the virtually limitless enemies. When fans say the FinalBoss that follows is a BreatherLevel in comparison, you know those final few levels are going to get '''bad.'''

** ''Red Faction Armageddon'' is a Third-Person Shooter, and for the most part is rather straightforward to finish. However, it takes inspiration from the original by dialing up the difficulty UpToEleven in it's last two or three levels. The bugs respawn like crazy, there's little environment to destroy in the tight underground corridors, and the checkpoints are few and far between. Moreover, as you're approaching the Queen, Behemoths (which only one served as a separate boss) blockade your way, forcing you to deal with them and the virtually limitless enemies. When fans say the FinalBoss that follows is a BreatherLevel, you know its going to get '''bad.'''

* The original ''RedFaction'' turned from challenging to nightmarish about 2/3 through the game. The introduction of heavy machine gun wielding mooks and instant death wall-penetrating sniper railguns mooks made the game a painful affair.
** [[ItGotWorse It gets worse]]. In the later stages, the [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard enemies cheat. They know when you are reloading]], and will rush you.

* From ''{{Halo}}'', we have Mythic/L.A.S.O. difficulty. [[FunWithAcronyms Legendary: All skulls on]]. Let's see, in addition to the HarderThanHard Legendary mode, which features halved health for you, fifty percent higher health for your enemies, every enemy getting a rank up, snipers appear every two minutes and are capable of killing you with a bodyshot, we get all the following skull bonuses: no respawns, no automatic shield recharges, enemies that dodge, enemies that spam grenades, a disabled radar, reduced ammo, all enemies receiving promoted ranks, bullets dealing less damage to shields, plasma doing less damage to flesh, and doubled health for enemies.
** [[SerialEscalation Hope you're having fun, because it gets worse]]. The silver skulls cause explosions to have wider radii, explosive headshots, [[MurderArsonAndJaywalking funnier banter]] and ''[[ScrappyMechanic the inability to see your guns, health, ammo, or anything]]''.

** ''[[VideoGame/{{Borderlands2}} Borderlands 2's]]'' main campaign is noted to be harder than the first game's. That's also before you go into [[NewGamePlus True Vault Hunter Mode]], which ramps up the difficulty by making the enemies hit harder, have more HP, enemy types that didn't appear in the first game, and are generally more aggressive.

** The fact that it's a very non-linear game helps, though, because if you can't succeed one way you almost always have the freedom to change your tactics up and try to do it another way. Most often, there's nothing stopping you from going right around an objective and attacking it from a different angle.
** The aforementioned mission where you're the only member of your squad left? You have to really be the only survivor, with no real advantage. Also, the camera showing who killed you has a habit of panning [[ImprobableAimingSkills through a town, a forest,]] [[SerialEscalation over a hill, through another town, and up a mountain range]].

** Realism VS: A VS game where the survivor team has to play by realism rules (No auras to locate your team or to know if they been pounced on, common infected soak up more damage unless it's a head shot, and Witches kill survivors in one hit). The infected team can still see where the survivors are. Just to make things even more hard, a recent patch has made the Witch in this mode [[ItGotWorse immune to being killed instantly from a head shot!]]
** Lone Gunman: You play by yourself without anyone backing you up as you are armed only with a Magnum. You only fight common infected and Boomers, but the damage from the common infected increases greatly, to the point where if you play on Expert, one hit will instantly down you. Oh and you still have to deal with Tanks and Witches!
** Hard Eight: Special infected can now appear up to ''eight at a time'' instead of four, which means not only they are spawning faster, but you can have multiple infected that have the ability to pin someone, thus the chances of the ''whole'' team being pinned is higher!
** Special Delivery: A mode where only special infected are spawned, but their spawn timers are removed and they can come in up to ''ten'' at a time!

* Taken even further in the spiritual successor to ''OperationFlashpoint'', the ''{{ARMA}}'' series.
** The mission "Dogs of War" is perhaps the single most frustrating mission in the campaign. This, however, is not entirely intentional as the mission is considered one of the buggiest in the game. However, even saying that, you ARE looking for very three people that you have to capture that randomly spawn on a map that's over 225 square kilometres in size.
** Continued in the fourth mission of the ''Operation Arrowhead'' campaign, in Coltan Blues. There, you have to disarm a bomb via a randomly selected password, written in Arabic, on an Arabic number pad. And you have a grand total of about two or three minutes at most between when you realise there's the bomb at the mine and finding your way halfway across the compound to find the scrap of paper, make sense of it, and then make sense of the keyboard being offered, since you can't look at both the paper and panel at the same time.
** And as a general rule, if playing the Flashpoint: Takistan user-created mission, the same issues mentioned above with the kill-cam of Operation Flashpoint. This issue is not specific to the Flashpoint: Takistan map however, though in this one it is particularly accentuated given the vast expanses of barren terrain.
*** Possibly a JustifiedTrope in that many ''ARMA 2'' missions portray Special Forces units, and ''ARMA 2'' is based on the same engine the REAL military uses to train REAL soldiers - this is a selling point of the game. Special Forces soldiers train for YEARS to be able to do what they do. While gamers don't need to train for years, the mindset is very important to the game and a lot of players find they just don't know what to do at all.
* ''VideoGame/Left4Dead2'' presented several mutations (modifications to the general rules and settings of the game) that proudly rests on this trope. These mutations are:

* ''Left4Dead2'' presented several mutations (modifications to the general rules and settings of the game) that proudly rests on this trope. These mutations are:

** [[NightOfTheLivingMooks Grims]] use the ZergRush strategy, similarly to the zombies in Left4Dead. However, Grims are highly resistant to automatic weapons such as the Carbine and are only really weak against things like the [[ShortRangeShotgun shotgun]] and [[HandCannon HE .44 Magnum]], which will both have ammo in short supply.