Despite all the money raked in over the past few years by certain well-known multimillion selling franchises, I see the military shooter genre as a bloated, rotting corpse with limited appeal outside of whatever multiplayer shenanigans keep the masses bunny-hopping and camping online endlessly. Granted, there have been many great advances in MP that have kept things fresh and exciting for fans, but those of us who crave deeper single player experiences have been, save for a few bright spots, left out in the cold. Granted, the story modes in the last few shooters I’ve played have been decent and well-written overall and I don’t give a hoot about how long a campaign is as long as it’s memorable. Thankfully, 505 Games and 2K Games are coming to the rescue with two fine titles that take the shooter into two different and very intriguing directions. And neither of them is a FPS…

Sniper Elite V2 is UK developer Rebellion’s follow-up to its PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC game, Sniper Elite and from what I was able to see and play, the game is going to be a nice knock to the head for anyone thinking it’s just another shooter. While the developer has made some compromises to today’s short attention span gamer crowd, the overall impression of the game to me was one where multiple playthroughs are possible for a few different reasons and some of the multiplayer modes require a purer sense of teamwork because it’s just you and one other live player needing to work together.

Spec Ops: The Line brings the popular PC game series (which also had a brief run as a budget PlayStation series that was hated by critics, but sold pretty well from what I recall) onto current-generation consoles with a story inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (!) and some amazing use of sand and wind as active hazards in the game world. The combination of stunning visuals, squad-based gameplay and what’s sounding like a deep storyline should have shooter fans hitting the books (hopefully) and perhaps even enjoying all the hard work Yager and 2K Games have put into the project.

There may be another genre flipper in Ubisoft’s upcoming Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Patriots and the sooner to be released Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, but I’ll have to dive into both at some point, as only Patriots seems to be shaking the tree when it comes to subject matter and gameplay. We shall see, as they say…