Rail Shooter

A variant of either first person or third person shooter, in a rail shooter the computer controls most of your movement and you control the shots. May or may not be a Light Gun Game. Will score very low on the Sliding Scale of Linearity vs. Openness.

Compare/Contrast No Sidepaths No Exploration No Freedom (where you control your own movement but are given only one route to follow).

First Person Rail Shooters:
 * Child of Eden, the Spiritual Successor to Rez.
 * Knife Edge Nose Gunner
 * Starblade
 * Star Wars arcade (and at least one level in the Lego prequel games)
 * Many standard first person shooters have a level or two of this type.
 * A great example of this was in the United Offensive expansion for the original Call of Duty, where a mission consisted the player shooting down German fighters with a B-17's 50. caliber turrets.
 * Deadly Tide

Third Person Rail Shooters:


 * Aces Of The Galaxy
 * After Burner series
 * Asura's Wrath switches to this during Random points in the game, certain bosses included.
 * G.I.Joe
 * Galaxy Force II
 * G-Loc (a spinoff of Afterburner)
 * Kid Icarus Uprising (half this and normal Third-Person Shooter)
 * Little Red Riding Hoods Zombie BBQ
 * Metal Gear Solid Touch
 * Night Striker
 * Novastorm
 * Panzer Dragoon
 * Paperboy
 * Space Harrier
 * Star Fox series
 * Star Fox
 * Star Fox 64, though averted this for some boss fights and a few levels.
 * Thunder Blade and its Genesis Porting Disaster, Super Thunder Blade (alternate with vertical Shoot'Em Up levels)
 * Blue Lightning
 * Omega Boost
 * Rez
 * Forbidden Forest
 * Some minigames in The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks.
 * The climactic end-boss battle in Devil May Cry.
 * Red Faction: Guerrilla has Rail Shooter missions; popping rockets off at EDF assets from the back of Jenkins' game-controlled trike-car.
 * For a very brief moment at the end of Dirge of Cerberus.
 * Tin Star, though it has some First-Person sequences.
 * Star Wars the Old Republic Uses a 3rd Person Rail shooter for its space combat system. Fan opinion on the decision not to use a free roaming system is... divided, to say the least.

Light Gun Game:


 * Alien³: The Gun
 * Carn Evil
 * Crypt Killer
 * Dead Space: Extraction
 * Deadstorm Pirates
 * Elevator Action: Death Parade
 * House of the Dead
 * Jurassic Park tie-in arcade games are these.
 * Let's Go Jungle
 * Ninja Assult
 * The Ocean Hunter
 * Pokémon Snap though it's a camera and not a gun you're shooting, which is one of the more known Better Than It Sounds Video Games stories around.
 * Sega's latest Rambo arcade game.
 * Razing Storm
 * A number of Resident Evil side games:
 * Resident Evil: Dead Aim, Dead Aim 2
 * Umbrella Chronicles
 * Darkside Chronicles
 * Revolution X
 * Sewer Shark
 * Target Terror
 * Terminator 2: The Arcade Game (which is the spiritual predecessor of Revolution X)
 * Terminator Salvation: The Arcade Game - a true successor to Terminator 2: The Arcade Game
 * Time Crisis
 * Spoony discovered several of these in the FMV mystery game Ripper.
 * Sin and Punishment switches into a rail shooter on occasion.
 * The Gummi Ship segments in the Kingdom Hearts games are a minigame version of this, as well as part of the final boss sequence of the first Devil May Cry.
 * Yoshi's Safari
 * Virtua Cop
 * BIT.TRIP FATE is a literal execution of the gameplay concept -- the game takes place on the Side View, you control your character on a "fate line" (a rail, in other words), and you aim with a cursor.