10 Video Games That Completely Switched Genre Halfway Through

Spec Ops: The Line just recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and a decade on remains one of the few truly distinctive and unforgettable experiences in the military shooter genre.

The marketing for the game mounted it as a totally generic, standard fare third-person military shooter, and for the first half that seems basically on the money. It's a mechanically solid yet totally unremarkable entry into the genre.

But everything changes during the game's eighth chapter, "The Gate," where players launch a white phosphorus strike to obliterate an enemy position, only to discover that they inadvertently killed 47 civilians instead, whose remains are shown to be grotesquely melted in hideous detail.

This marks a major shift for the rest of the game, which ditches the flippant military fetishism and reinvents itself as a genuinely horrific, surreal examination of PTSD and American foreign policy.

To say that players weren't ready for it is an understatement, but the various cerebral twists and turns that follow are as clever as they are disturbing, helping Spec-Ops stand out in a genre filled with forgettable, me-too efforts.