10 Hugely Influential Video Games (That Made Everything Worse)

If I wanted to spend my life looking intently at walls, I would have become a brick layer.

Operation: Winback and Kill.Switch may have coined the mechanic, but Gears of War threw cover-based shooting into the spotlight. It reinvented the third-person shooter genre, throwing out the old "stand there and tank hits" concept with this pseudo-tactical mechanic.

Initially, it was great.

And then, it was everywhere.

Every shooter had to had a cover mechanic. Inversion, a game that let you turn gravity on its head, had one. Hunted: Demon's Forge, a fantasy adventure, had a cover mechanic shoehorned into it.

When done properly, it works. It's perfectly natural to want to hide when sharp things are trying to hurt you. Killzone was the worst offender, as cover in a first-person shooter just had you staring at walls ad nauseum. At least Rainbow Six: Vegas switched perspectives to make it more exciting.

As I say, it's not an inherently terrible concept. It's been doing the rounds before Gears popularised it. It's just that when Epic's shooter hit, everyone wanted a piece of hiding from the action.