I don’t feel comfortable using a mouse and I have no interest in working on my mouse skills. I play all of my games with either a controller or a keyboard, and I’m looking for 3rd-person shooters I can play with a controller.
I’m mainly interested in action games. I’m OK with a world with gated areas a la metroidvanias/soulslikes, but I’m not interested in full-on open world or narrative-driven games.
Examples of 3rd-person shooters I enjoyed playing with a controller: Gungrave, Vanquish, and Evil West.
Examples of 3rd-person shooters I don’t enjoy and have no interest in: Uncharted, The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption, Dead Space, Control/Alan Wake, or GTA.
I mainly play on PC, Steam in particular, but I’ll boot up emulators if the game is worth it.
Maybe you need a controller with motion / tilt support?
I think that it’s the other way around — he’s fine with using a controller, is unhappy with the mouse.
Though if someone does want to play first-person shooters on a gamepad, I understand — I’ve never done it myself, that the preferred route by people really serious about the gamepad is the gyro-using flick stick. I understand that Steam Input plus appropriate configuration can provide support for it to games that don’t natively support it, and the WP article says that there’s some kind of direct support that went into Steam Input a few years back that I hadn’t been aware of.
My line of thinking is that games optimized for controllers will usually have sticky aim or aim assist, whereas those that maybe lack controller support won’t necessarily have those features.
Gyro adds that last little bit of precision that could potentially bridge the gap