10 FPS Games That Totally Reinvent Themselves During Their Runtime

It is difficult to change up the formulae involved in a genre like first-person shooters. While players love these games for their multiplayer aspects, and simplicity, something enjoyable about gaming is the way it can always bring out surprises.

Some of the following FPS games understood the assignment when it came to keeping things feeling fresh. Fans have commended many of these for the way they have switched things up and given the rest of the game a new lease of life, just when players thought they knew where things were heading. The rule is to never think you know everything a game has in store.

There are HUGE spoilers ahead for any of the games you see on this list.

A Halfway Twist Out Of Nowhere

While technically a rail shooter, this Nintendo Wii version of the infamous Dead Space franchise managed to bring FPS action to a new console. This meant a different style of gameplay more befitting the Wii controls, but that wasn’t the only surprise players had in store. The game opened with Sam Caldwell as the player character. He is part of a team bringing a Marker, a sacred artefact, to the Aegis VII colony.

However, in a massive twist, at the end of the first act, Sam is forced to kill his teammates after the Marker drives them into a frenzy, and they begin attacking him. Or so it seems. Sam is then suddenly shot dead by a security team led by McNeill, who believe him to have been the one that went crazy and killed his team. This security team then become the main characters and player characters for the remainder of the game. Because it was a Wii spin-off, and because a player’s brain trains them to expect to continue with the same character throughout a game’s entire length, this twist was a massive and dark shake-up.

9 BioShock: Infinite

A Mind-Bending Multiversal Twist

The BioShock games are known for their twists, which explains the presence of multiple games from the series on this list. BioShock: Infinite sends Booker DeWitt to the city of Colombia where he attempts to save Elizabeth from the villainous Zachary Comstock, who created the city. The third act is when a massive shift occurs, revealing that Booker and Comstock are one and the same, having been split into separate people at the moment of choosing whether to accept a baptism.

Elizabeth’s reveal of the many universes where there is “always a lighthouse, a man and a city” links to the rest of the series and results in the finale, where many versions of Elizabeth drown Booker during the baptism, so neither version of him is ever created. Not only did this reveal change everything players thought they knew about the story, it also changed the context of the entire experience. While the story frustrated some players, it definitely provided a shocking experience and a massive paradigm shift deep into the game.

8 Call Of Duty: Black Ops

A Psychological Twist For The Ages

The Call of Duty franchise has seen a lot of twists. A truly great one is in the first Black Ops game. The majority was focused on Alex Mason working with Viktor Reznov to try and bring down Nikita Dragovich. However, it was later revealed that Reznov has been dead for years, and Mason is a sleeper agent programmed by Dragovich to kill JFK, which he likely did.

This revelation was the moment players realized Black Ops was something of a psychological horror game. In fact, the theme has continued over the years, with this subseries often having huge twists, psychological elements and unreliable narrators. Being nestled into a believable place as just another Call of Duty game helped with this mind-blowing moment, which I still don’t think I’ve recovered from today.

7 Star Wars: Battlefront II

Things Are Never The Same After Order 66

Just because players might be able to see a twist coming, doesn’t make the way it transforms the game any less shocking and sudden. Order 66 is a well-known moment in the Star Wars lore, but playing alongside the Jedi in the early missions of this campaign, set during the Clone Wars, made it savage to suddenly reach that moment.

The order arrives, and the player takes part in the sacking of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. At that moment, watching as your player character becomes the bad guy, the entire genre shifts from fun sci-fi action to outright horror. While the story continues to show the rise of the Empire from that point, it never recaptures the light-hearted nature of the first game, and the early parts of this one.

6 Crysis

Regular Shooter Becomes Survival Horror

The Crysis games are known for a variety of things, despite them never having received as much attention as Crytek’s development of the first Far Cry game. However, the moment in the first Crysis game, when everything flips with brutal suddenness, remains one of the better twists in modern gaming.

The twist in question happens as the team approaches the North Korean installation they’ve been sent to assault. This is when they begin to encounter aliens, the real enemies of the game. From there, Nomad and his team of super-soldiers are involved in an almost horror-like sci-fi shooter instead of the standard military fare that the game pretended to be when it began. Frankly, it made for a fascinating and very different idea we all heavily enjoyed, making for an easy franchise idea.

5 Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

Soldier Becomes Cyborg Super Soldier

The Wolfenstein games have never been afraid to engage in some baffling and amusing story decisions. However, by far the strangest and most shocking choice in the franchise’s nearly forty-year history is killing the protagonist halfway through the game. BJ Blazkowicz’s public beheading was a stunning moment, but his friends quickly save his head and attach it to a Nazi super-soldier's body, in a stunning, very sci-fi-focused twist.

Of course, this wasn’t just a bizarre moment, it also changed the gameplay. Blazkowicz gains abilities as a cyborg that significantly change the gameplay. He’s also stronger than he was early in the game, much of which he was physically weakened to keep up the difficulty. One of the least believable and most disturbing moments I’ve seen in a game before, this nevertheless fit in with the Wolfenstein style of bizarre grind house madness.

4 Far Cry 2

A Surprisingly Wholesome, Yet Depressing, Twist

The Far Cry series is known for alternate endings and some surprising twists, and this is far from the most radical of those. While not directly affecting the gameplay, this twist does change how players think about themselves and their character as the game goes on. Near the end, the arms dealer the player has been sent to kill, called The Jackal, is revealed to be far less evil than originally thought. He is actually trying to save millions of civilians by helping them flee the central conflict.

While this makes for a relatively depressing finale where the player character dies no matter what they choose, it can be taken as a more hopeful message, or at least a clear anti-war message. The game is trying to say that in war, things aren’t as black and white as they appear, and the player’s own character has caused a great deal of pain via his mission. The entire nature of this game shifted in a single moment.

3 Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare II

A Betrayal So Shocking It Changed Everything

Killing several of the main characters, including the primary player character, right before the final act of a game, is nuts. Players assumed they were heading for a final collision with Makarov, the ultranationalist Russian who framed America with a horrific act to start a war earlier in the story.

However, General Shepherd instead betrayed Task Force 141, killing Ghost and Roach, the latter of whom was the main player character throughout the game. This game changed themes multiple times, from suddenly bringing the conflict to American soil, to making players care much more about killing Shepherd than they ever did Makarov. The more recent take on Modern Warfare II had its own version of this twist, but this one still stands out as a horrific, unbelievable moment.

2 Halo: Combat Evolved

Sci-Fi Action Suddenly Turns To Horror

The first Halo game worked so well because players assumed it would be straightforward, the same reason Call of Duty twists worked so well in earlier stories. Master Chief went from crashing onto a Halo and trying to save his men to being trapped in a brutal survival horror situation when humans unwittingly release the alien parasite known as The Flood.

These entities consume life, and there are several twists as it is revealed the Halo ring was made by the Forerunners to contain the Flood, and as a potential weapon that could wipe out millions in order to starve them of food. This sudden horror element, which felt like it changed the gameplay irrevocably, is still one of the best twists in gaming.

1 Bioshock

The Best Twist In Gaming?

There have been many twists in gaming history, but the first BioShock might outdo them all. Throughout the game, Jack has been trying to help a mysterious man called Atlas, who has been encouraging Jack to kill the “little sisters” he finds around Rapture. The player can choose whether or not to listen to these requests. But in the end, the whole nature of the story and game is revealed as Atlas turns out to be a villain, called Fontaine.

Not only this, the little sisters are revealed not to be evil, and if the player has not harmed any of them throughout the game, they will get a positive ending where Jack adopts five of them as daughters after they help him. If the player has harvested them for ADAM throughout the game, they will do so in the finale as well, and Jack will be condemned either in a sad or outright angry ending narration.

This choice, which players might not even have known was wrong when they first made it, is a heartbreaking one that can absolutely ruin you. After you know the twist, you’re forced to either deal with being weaker and having less ADAM, or aiming for the good ending, totally changing how most players tackle the game.