Spec Ops : The Line

It's a shooter.  Room after room after room of guys to shoot and collect bullets and new weapons from.  No better or worse than anything current in that regards, it uses all the shooter standards like flashing red screens when you take a bullet, but everything heals if you don't get hit for a few moments.

So really you would have to rate Spec Ops by the story, which is told through the cutscenes between these kill rooms.

You are the leader of a squad, I think you were sent to either investigate what was going on - or communicate with some lost troop in Dubai, which was hit by the mother-of-all sandstorms.  The city is devastated, much of it buried under a mountain of sand.

As you are discovering what happened to the city - you are placed in increasing uncomfortable choice situations, like allowing civilians to be killed in order to save someone you are trying to rescue.  This is reinforced by your squadmates who occasionally bitch you out about the choices you make.  They even force you to burn a whole troop of enemies by raining mortar fire, and then show the charred civilians they made you blow up.

The connected people in Dubai knew of the impending doom of the storm, and kept it secret from the public - evacuating themselves.   A hardcore general and his faithful legions stayed to help evacuate, but got stuck and the place went all Lord of the Flies.

You fight your way through his legions and desperate bands of survivors - but when you make it to him, he is already a desiccated corpse - so presumably this all has been your descent into madness.  You invented a dark nemesis to excuse your actions, thinking back to early memories where reality flickers back and forth between what you saw.  ... "The horror!  The horror!"

This game tricked me into thinking I was going to play as a soldier, not a Marlow in some downer art project.  I never got a sense I was going crazy - I thought my buddies were losing it, and I was getting pissed off at the stuff they were making us do.  I tried and died so many times to do the right thing in this game, they force you to push terrible buttons and then guilt trip you for doing it.


If it wasn't so forced, it really could have been epic though.  Have your choices affect which of the three of you go completely nuts would have made me play this multiple times.