10 Video Games Way Freakier Than You Thought
4. Call Of Duty: Black Ops III
Though the Call of Duty franchise has gone through a few makeovers over the years, you still pretty much know what you're getting where the campaigns are concerned - four or five hours of mostly on-rails cinematic action to rival a Michael Bay movie, right?
For all its faults, Black Ops III at least tried to do something different. Even with the franchise already in the midst of a sci-fi makeover, Black Ops III dove headlong into totally uncharted territory, making its campaign a deeply existential meditation on transhumanism unlike anything fans were expecting or prepared for.
To be clear, Black Ops III's campaign is only scarcely coherent at the best of times, but is at least taking a hard swing at new ideas, centered around soldiers' use of a Direct Neural Interface (DNI) to battle remotely.
Later in the story this delves into the potential for human existence to carry on beyond bodily death, but suffocated beneath reams of nonsensical exposition and the introduction of a silly AI antagonist, it feels like the last thing your average Mountain Dew-chugging teenager would really want out of the franchise.
If you dismissed Black Ops III as business-as-usual for the series, it's really anything but, both for better and worse.