I feel like this game deserves some criticism and praise both at the same time. One one hand, I think that holding gamers up to a mirror is a little unnecessary. It seemed to me that the game was trying to make me question my own actions as a gamer. "How can you enjoy this so much?:" Type thing. But I think most gamers realize that what goes on in military war games and the consequences of real war are hugely different. Though this phrase has been repeated to death, I still think it's true: gaming is escapism. The same can be said of TV and film and anything else that depicts violence flippantly. I never bought the argument enjoying something violent was an endorsement of real violence. That's not to say that art can't be improved by treating death with a sense of gravity, but it's not necessary to hammer a player over the head with the idea that what they're doing is wrong, and that they're wrong for enjoy it.

In that sense, the story got a bit annoying sometimes.

That said, my biggest beef with the Michael Bay war games is the total lack of reality that conflict is presented with. In the real world, war happens between two forces who have some reason to be upset with each other. In war games, it's some cool thing that happens between good guys and bad guys. While I don't really like players being chastised for enjoying escapism, I do take issue with the oversimplification of all people in the world as either good guys (Usually white Anglo-Saxons) or bad guys (usually brown people or Russians with funny names). And everything the good guys so is awesome and totally necessary.They're all pretty bad about it, but the biggest offender by far is Treyarch.

And in that sense, it was refreshing. All in all, I didn't enjoy the experience, but that had more to do with the game's sloppy gameplay than its unique approach to writing. The writing was a bit sloppy sometimes too, but at least it was doing something to distinguish itself. Usually, I feel like I've played every single war game before, and I didn't feel that way about Spec-Ops

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One thing I liked about the Brothers in Arms games (the third in particular), is that there is rarely gung-ho cheering for war. It's a bunch of guys who are stuck in a conflict and will do anything to get back home. Hell, the main character slowly slips into suicidal PTSD thoughts and regular, likeable characters are usually killed or maimed in realistic ways (not just puffs of dust followed by falling down in a dramatic way). When I ask for realism, I'm not asking for sims like Arma or Operation Flashpoint. I'm asking for the same immersion and believability that I get from good RPGs or adventure games.

Exactly! Death with gravity is easy to do.

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Lately, I've been enjoying Russian and Eastern European-made games. When you lose about 20 million+ civilians and soldiers in one war, followed by 40 years of crippling poverty, you kind of get a grasp on things. Maybe the facts of conflict still get to them since we're still finding human remains in the center of Volgograd. Somber feelings in American games are typically delivered by hideous, overwrought, Livejournal-style monologues with no emotional connectability, while games like Metro 2033 deliver it in moments like finding a group of refugees huddling around a guitar player, occasionally smiling and tapping their feet despite the fact that the human race is almost extinct.

I love little stuff like that too. Really, anything that makes me feel like I'm sharing a world with real people. War games shouldn't be excluded from that, although they often are.

One of the most skillfully written conflicts that I've ever seen in a game was the Civil War in Skyrim. Pick any fan board and find a topic about the conflict and you'll find a very diverse, hotly debated set of opinions on whether the Empire or Stormcloaks had the right of it. And usually, most of the arguments from both sides stand up. Nobody is entirely right or wrong, and that's what makes it good. The fact that a player can pick a side for himself or even broker a peace is just icing on the cake.