15 Woefully Underused Single Player Gameplay Mechanics

Single player games harness specific features and gameplay mechanics that multi-player games simply cannot. Time-stretching, cheat codes, and transferrable save files rank highly as single player attributes, but there’re super-cool, sometimes innovative, mechanics surrounding anything from reloading to deep honour systems that aren’t utilised as often as they should.

Bullet time

Bullet time – as a catch-all term – simply refers to an ability to slow down time for a player to gain an advantage, and there’re a raft of notable games deploying this mechanic in varying degrees to great effect: Red Dead Redemption’s Dead Eye mechanic, Fallout’s V.A.T.S., and of course, the Max Payne series spring to mind. Sure, a handful of titles have trialled the slowing of time in multiplayer, but issues of fairness come into play – how can a single player’s ability to dodge attacks, evade bullets, and shoot with cinematic aplomb be fair on everyone else? So, this mechanic is largely kept to single player experiences, and it’d be great to see bullet time, or slomo, applied more liberally to none-FPS-adjacent titles.