9. Captain Martin Walker - Spec Ops: The Line
Spec Ops: The Line was a game unfortunate enough to suffer from poor marketing, being touted as yet another dull and generic - if good-looking - shooter, when in fact it was much, much more than that. The Line was a thoughtful video game that forced the player to consider the warping consequences of war, presenting us with a protagonist, Captain Martin Walker, who enters his mission as a relatively adjusted, competent soldier, and emerges out of it as something completely different. This game is an odyssey not-unlike Coppola's Apocalypse Now - and truly enough, borrows a lot from Joseph Conrad's original novel Heart of Darkness - in that it weaves a bleak, trippy existential journey that cements the devastatingly transformative power of war. Though the specifics of the end-game rely on your actions throughout the game, what's key is that much of what the player has been experiencing has actually been a dis-associative hallucination that Walker's mind has concocted in order to cope with the atrocities that he and his men have committed. At the gams's end, we're seriously asked to consider some of the more questionable activities we've engaged in throughout the game in arresting style, making Walker one of the most fascinatingly tortured video game protagonists in years.