Cover Based Shooters are a Pox

Now don't take this the wrong way, but most cover based shooters are a disease among the current generation of shooters. I'm not saying that every single one is bad or that some of them aren't put together well, but ... no wait that's exactly what I'm saying. Let's take some games, for an example of good and bad: Mass Effect, Gears of War, Spec Ops: The Line and Max Payne.

Lets start off with what I would consider, "The Bad." You can argue Gears of War up and down that it's a "great" or "amazing" game. However, you would be mistaken. Don't get me wrong, I have fun when I play this game from time to time, but the game is just not "amazing". It revolves around bricks with faces killing brown aliens while they find or make chest high walls.

Like I said, I have fun playing these games but the problem comes about when they try to give the characters some sort of depth that just shouldn't be there. I haven't played through the whole series but I here there is a section where one of the bricks finds his dead wife and goes into an emotional break down. I'm sorry but I'm pretty sure a brick can't feel emotions.

When these games are just about killing things from chest high walls it can at least keep your attention and keep you in some sort of immersion. However when you try to throw in some sort of narrative that was forever absent in the series. Luckily, from what I've played, the new installment doesn't try to throw in some obtuse story arc for some character that most of us couldn't give a damn about. If you "felt feelings" when something "sad" happened to a brick you're doing it wrong.

The next up is Max Payne 3. If you played this game you know its horrible, just horrible. They took the run and gun unrealistic shooter that everyone who played these older games loved, and turned it into a cover based shooter, and didn't even do it well.

You go from one scene to another, barely understanding what is going on or why you are killing the other guys. The narrative is completely lost in the mess of a cover based shooter. This along with the fact that half the time you are completely outnumbered and your cover can be destroyed. Immediately following is your death.

Several things are wrong with both of these games. The biggest issue I find with these games are the narrative, the story arc and how they conflict with the game or whats been previously done. When you make a game that is focused around emotionless grunts the size of refrigerators then you try to make you feel feelings for them, it's a bit of a hard sell. Or if you try to take a ridiculous over the top shooter and tone it down with realistic cover based shooting, your going to have a bad time.

Now looking at good examples of cover based shooting. First up is the Mass Effect series, mostly ME2 and ME3. This game at first glance has the same oversights as Max Payne 3, except one mine thing. They give you good pacing, powers that make it more fair and still slightly ridiculous.

The characters have good dimensions and good story arcs while simultaneously keeping you invested. Even the few characters that closely resemble bricks have the own dimensions and story arcs that don't make them seem despondent.

The fire fighting itself is intense, it keeps you in the fight and very little pulls you away from the action, except the various glitches that will annoy the piss out of you. However all of this shouldn't even need to be mentioned. If this is the point of the game you better make sure you are doing it well. (Looking at you Max Payne 3)

Now to back track a little bit, I'm not saying that Gears of War as a series is bad. The fire fights are fun and can be very intense and the do a good job keeping the fights fair and not too challenging. The downfall of this series if that they tried to give the characters some sort of depth that was never really their and shouldn't have ever been there. That and they really started to focus on multiplayer, but that's an argument for a different day.

For me the Pièce de résistance of cover based shooters is Spec Ops: The Line. This game puts every good thing I have mentioned about cover based shooters and serves it to you on a silver platter that wants you to kill yourself.

Now that might not necessarily sound like a good thing, but trust me it is. This game puts you in the shoes of a leader of a small group of US soldiers as the try to do a rescue in Dubai.

Now this may sound like a cover based shooter that is just trying to ride the "Modern Warfare" band wagon, but trust me, it's not. This game takes you through the mental break down of the Lieutenant Colonel  Martin Walker as he has to make the tough decisions between killing one person or killing a group of people with one decision and in the end it turns into a lose lose situation.

Spec Ops: The Line is the perfect balance between cover based shooter and an amazing story. If only more games could take this into an example, not too many though, this kind of thing getting over saturated into the market could damn this masterpiece.

To reiterate I would like to remind you that I do not hate this genre of games or any of the games mentioned above (maybe Max Payne 3 a little bit). However this genre of games is having fewer and fewer good games. With the brown pallets, chest high wall after chest high wall and regenerating health this genre could be in trouble. Get your shit together guys, Spec Ops and Mass Effect (yes, even Gears sometimes) proves this genre has some major potential.