10 Times Video Games Made You Feel
3. Call Of Duty: Black Ops Brutalises Us With Its Prison Level
Call of Duty: Black Ops brought the series a maturity and depth of storyline it has lacked before or since. Particularly memorable is its sequence set in the Soviet gulag of Vorkuta, where hero Alex Mason takes part in a mass breakout orchestrated by mad Russian inmate Victor Reznov.
Vorkuta is a cruel and savage place, and it only gets worse when the breakout begins. Reznov's manic exhortations drive dozens of prisoners into the guards' machine guns, and the prisoners are no less brutal with their butchering of the soldiers who try to contain the breakout. A gigantic prisoner named Sergei Kosin hurls guards around as others club them to death on the ground.
The intensity and fury of the breakout reaches it climax as Mason gatling guns his way through the prison gates. The scale of the death, and the implication of how valueless life is in the gulags, is exhausting and affecting.
By the end of the level, the player is exhausted by what they have witnessed.