What It Is: A third-person shooter from 2K Games released in 2012, in which an elite Delta Force squad gets sent into an abandoned, sand-blasted Dubai on a reconnaissance mission. Why It's Great: What starts off as a pretty generic third-person shooter turns into one of the darkest, most powerful video game stories ever, particularly in the modern shooter genre. While the gunplay is yeah-OK, the game is most memorable for its harrowing imagery and situations you find yourself in - which are among video games' best attempts to date at exploring the horrors of war (by way of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, from which Spec Ops takes its inspirations). Why You'll Never Play It Again: Spec Ops is an odd combination of an incredible story with very ordinary gameplay. The harrowing plot is already likely to divide people about whether they really want to play through it again (excellent though it may be), but what will deter you is the prospect of running through small, homogeneous desert environments, shooting the same old people with the same old arsenal of standard military weapons. There are some truly outstanding gameplay moments along the way, but their grim nature is of the sort that many people will be quite content with having experienced just the once.