10 Video Games That Completely Switched Genre Halfway Through
2. Halo: Combat Evolved
The original Halo was sold as a sci-fi military shooter in which you mow down endless hordes of alien monsters on gorgeously otherworldly planets. Yet as odd as the extraterrestrial Covenant looked, they certainly weren't scary.
But the game's tone takes a sharp 180 in the iconic mid-game level "343 Guilty Spark," where Master Chief explores an Alpha Halo containment facility, only to find the fortress strangely quiet.
As it turns out, everybody inside the building has been slaughtered by a parasitic alien force, The Flood, which then makes its presence known to the player.
At this point Halo turns into an outright sci-fi horror game, as you're forced to fend off a seemingly never-ending fleet of skin-crawlingly grotesque creatures for the next few levels.
Given that players likely felt pretty safe and secure in the gameplay loop at this point, it was certainly a clever way to pull the rug out and inject some real tension into proceedings.
The Halo series has never felt more oppressively creepy than it does during these segments, which were laudably kept out of the game's marketing campaign.