7 Video Games That Aren't About What You Think
4. Spec Ops: The Line Isn't A By-The-Numbers Military Shooter
Spec Ops: The Line didn't make much of a splash back during its 2012 launch, but it's continued to grow in appreciation in the years since, mainly due to a phenomenal story that compensates for some slightly unimpressive gameplay.
It's the gameplay that makes Spec Ops look like a standard third-person military shooter, with the player stepping into the war-torn shoes of Captain Martin Walker, a man on a reconnaissance mission in the sand-covered city of Dubai.
It's a fairly trite setup that seems like it's heading in a straightforward direction, and as you shoot your way through wave after wave of enemies, there's no reason to suspect that Spec Ops will do anything notable to differentiate itself from the countless other military shooters available on the market.
But in actual fact, Spec Ops is anything but standard, and its conventional, Call Of Duty-esque skin hides a dark truth: this is a game about the horrors of war, about the toll that violence and death can take on a soldier - in this case, Walker himself.
In the end, we learn that Walker has been in a state of mental distress for the majority of the game, and that he's been communicating with a hallucination of Colonel Konrad, whom Walker uses to try and justify some of his own horrific actions - namely, killing loads of innocent civilians with a white phosphorus strike.
Spec Ops definitely looks quite generic from the outside, but it's actually a brilliant deconstruction of the shoot-em-up power fantasy that most other games in this genre embrace with open arms.