What is a hero shooter?

A hero shooter is a team-based shooter where you pick a named character with a fixed set of abilities instead of building your own loadout. Each hero fills a role, like damage, support, or tank, and matches turn on how well the team's picks combine.

How a hero shooter works

You pick a hero before the match starts, and that choice locks in their weapons and abilities for the round. Switch heroes and you're changing your whole playstyle, not just swapping a gun.

Fights turn on team composition, the mix of heroes each side fields. Heroes and roles come from the MOBA genre, dropped into first- or third-person shooting.

Most hero shooters cost nothing to download and earn from in-app purchases instead. The two in our guides are no exception, and they're both free to install.

Hero shooter examples from our guides

• Apex Legends builds every fight around ability kits, which is how Respawn frames it as the next step for the hero shooter. It holds 4.07 out of 5 from 853,373 PlayStation Store ratings, the largest sample in our best PS5 shooter games guide, and it ranks again in our best PS5 multiplayer games list.
• Marvel Rivals puts six players a side, with each hero's powers combining through Team-Up skills that pair two characters for a shared ability. It rates 4.12 out of 5 from 191,528 ratings and sits seventh in that same PS5 shooter guide.

Hero shooter vs battle royale

Battle royale describes the format: dozens of players on a map that shrinks until one is left. Hero shooter describes the characters, each locked to a fixed set of abilities.

Apex Legends is both at once, a battle royale you play with hero picks. So there's no contradiction when one game wears both labels.