10 FPS Games with Extremely Dark Final Acts

First-person shooter games are well known for often featuring immersive, action-packed experiences both in single-player and in multiplayer modes, but a few FPS games tend to pull the rug out from under players in their narrative-driven campaigns.

Some FPS games purposefully keep twists or shocking narrative turns explicitly out of their marketing to surprise players with often dark events that completely change the tone of the game and make for thrilling or horrifying final acts.

These twists don't always work and can sometimes ruin a game's story if not properly set up or teased by prior events or character actions, such as the sudden reappearance of Cortana as an imperial maniac in Halo 5: Guardians.

However, when twists and narrative turns are properly built up, they can make games all the more exciting, intriguing, and horrifying, with most twists making games that started as simple adventures into incredibly dark tales by the end.

10 Star Wars: Battlefront II

The Horror of Order 66

2005's Star Wars: Battlefront II is one of the best Star Wars games ever made due to its easy-to-understand yet addictive first and third-person gameplay, both in ground and space combat in battles seen across the original Star Wars saga.

However, one aspect of Battlefront II that doesn't get talked about too much is its campaign, which follows a Clone Trooper of the 501st Legion from the Battle of Geonosis through Order 66 and well into the reign of the Galactic Empire as a Stormtrooper.

Each level is set as the Clone Trooper reporting on his past battles, and while the early levels start as simple missions to curtail Separatist efforts in the Clone Wars, they quickly become unsettling as the Clone Trooper hints at the Clones' inevitable betrayal of the Jedi, as this was back before Clone inhibitor chips were created in Star Wars.

Despite all of the successful battles fought alongside the Jedi, the Clone still follows Order 66, taking part in Operation: Knightfall at the Jedi Temple and continues to hunt down Jedi survivors and take out any rebel forces during the reign of the Empire, from Naboo militia forces to Separatist rebel cells.

9 Killzone Shadow Fall

Vile Conspiracies

Decades after Killzone 3 ended with the near genocidal detonation of petrusite bombs called the Terracide, which caused most Helghast to die, and a few survivors were brought over to Vekta as refugees, Killzone Shadow Fall immediately begins in a Cold War-like state between Vekta forces and New Helghan forces.

Unlike the previous Killzone games, however, Shadow Fall doesn't follow soldiers in an intergalactic war but rather follows the young Shadow Marshal Lucas Kellan as he and the Vektan Security Agency seemingly attempt to maintain peace between Vektan and Helghast while eliminating Helghast terrorists.

While there are many Helghast understandably still upset about the destruction of their homeworld, Kellan begins to slowly discover a sinister conspiracy concocted by the VSA with help from the half-Helghast, half-Vektan agent Echo.

It's revealed that the VSA instigated tensions between the Helghast and Vektans to influence Helghast military remnants to build a new doomsday weapon, only for the VSA to steal the weapon, kill Kellan, and plan to use it to wipe out the Helghast once and for all.

8 Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

Monstrous Nazi Machinations

The long-running FPS series Wolfenstein is well-known for its alternate history takes on Nazi Germany and the outcome of World War II, with the Nazis in Wolfenstein often being depicted using robotic mechs and magical artifacts to defeat the Allies.

However, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood takes the series back before the Nazis took over the world and instead follows Allied agent B. J. Blazkowicz during World War II as he's sent on a covert mission to infiltrate Castle Wolfenstein to discover the location of Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse.

While that may seem like a fairly realistic, straightforward infiltration mission, it quickly becomes a chaotic nightmare with the castle's leadership using cyborg dogs, mechs, robotic drones, and even a gas that turns people into zombies to attack Blazkowicz and other nearby resistance forces.

This all culminates with Nazi archaeologist Helga von Schabbs attempting to control an ancient golem-like giant and use it to kill Blazkowicz, only for the monster to mortally wound Schabbs and force Blazkowicz to kill it before finally obtaining the location of Deathshead.

7 Far Cry 5

Prophetic Visions

Ubisoft's Far Cry series is famous for featuring some of the most shocking and brutal stories among open-world FPS games, but Far Cry 5's narrative is arguably the most shocking of the entire franchise.

Set in the fictional Hope County of Montana, Far Cry 5 follows a young, local deputy as they strive to take down Joseph Seed, a cult leader who has forcibly taken over the county with militant followers and hallucinogens, all based on the belief that Seed is a messiah born to save people from outside dangers.

Most of Far Cry 5's story is centered around the unnamed deputy recruiting local resistance forces, taking down Seed's lieutenants, and rescuing captured police, but the end of the game takes an incredibly dark turn.

If players choose to arrest Seed, nuclear bombs detonate, showcasing that Seed's prophetic doomsday visions were actually true, leading to the post-apocalyptic world of Far Cry New Dawn, although this is only one potential ending of Far Cry 5.

The Marker's Toll

EA's Dead Space franchise is primarily portrayed through third-person perspectives, but one entry is technically an FPS game, even though it's officially classified as a rail shooter, with that game being Dead Space: Extraction.

Extraction is the second DS game ever released, but it actually serves as a prequel to the first DS game, with Extraction showcasing how the crew of the USG Ishimura discovered the Red Marker on Aegis VII and seeing the chaos unfold from then on.

The game actually begins with players embodying a miner called Sam Caldwell as he sets out to help excavate the Marker, which he believes to be just a simple rock, only for the Marker to cause Caldwell's crewmates to go crazy, forcing him to defend himself but get shot dead by security forces, mistaking him for a cold-blooded murderer.

From here, Extraction has people play as five other characters who all struggle to survive the Necromorph outbreak, though many survivors begin to go crazy themselves or sabotage escape plans in order to help get the Marker to crazed Unitologists.

5 Call of Duty: Black Ops

Haunting Numbers and Revelations

The Call of Duty series isn't especially known for its dramatic or thought-provoking campaigns, but Call of Duty: Black Ops breaks the mold by featuring a story full of twists and eerie cliffhangers that has kept players pondering about its end for over a decade.

Black Ops opens up with CIA agent Alex Mason strapped to a chair and tortured about mysterious numbers by unknown forces, leading him to explain his past during the Cold War with the failed attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro, leading to his imprisonment by the Soviet Union.

From here, Mason befriends fellow inmate and Red Army veteran Viktor Reznov as they stage a breakout from the Soviet prison and meet up multiple times years later during Mason's attempts to hunt down Soviet leaders Friedrich Steiner and Nikita Dragovich and stop them from deploying the deadly Nova 6 gas on the U.S.

However, it's eventually revealed that Reznov never escaped the Soviet prison and has instead been appearing as hallucinations after Mason was brainwashed by Dragovich to assassinate President John F. Kennedy, and then being brainwashed again by Reznov to kill Dragovich and Steiner.

4 F.E.A.R.

More Than Meets the Eye

If players unfamiliar with F.E.A.R. were to initially look at its gameplay with no context for its story, they may think it's just another run-of-the-mill, tactical FPS game, but in reality, F.E.A.R. is a deeply disturbing horror game hidden by over-the-top gunplay and slow-motion reflex time.

F.E.A.R. follows First Encounter Assault Recon Sergeant Point Man as he and his squad are deployed to an Armacham Technology Corporation facility to take down a rogue psychic agent called Fettel, who took control of an army of military clones and killed everyone else in the facility.

As Point Man hunts down Fettel and takes out his clone army, he begins to see horrifying visions and objects move throughout the air, connected to a mysterious little girl with even deadlier psychic abilities than Fettel.

It's eventually revealed that Point Man and Fettel are not only brothers but psychic weapon prototypes born from the girl Alma, who had naturally powerful psychic abilities and was put into a coma to be experimented on, but was still able to psychically link with Fettel to seek revenge for their abuse by ATC.

3 BioShock Infinite

Who Is Booker DeWitt?

The BioShock series is arguably as famous for its shocking twists as it is for its hauntingly beautiful environments, but the entry that actually has the most surprising revelations has got to be BioShock Infinite.

Infinite begins with a man called Booker DeWitt being rowed to a mysterious lighthouse to take a girl called Elizabeth from the floating country of Columbia to New York to clear a debt.

While the floating city of Columbia is as fantastical with its architecture and design as it is terrifying with its prejudices, this mission remains fairly straightforward for a while until DeWitt actually meets Elizabeth, who is revealed to have multidimensional powers.

After eventually defeating Columbia's founder, Comstock, Elizabeth reveals to DeWitt that he is actually Comstock and the father of Elizabeth and that their cycle of violence is spread throughout the multiverse, forcing multiple Elizabeths to drown DeWitt early in his life to stop the spread of his violent madness and their own lives.

2 Singularity

An Island of Fate

Being a title from Raven Software, a developer best known today as being a COD support studio, many gamers may look at Singularity and think it may just be another action-packed FPS, and while it does have its fair share of action, it has one of the most surprising and underrated stories of the seventh console generation.

Singularity begins with U.S. Marine Captain Nathaniel Renko and his small squad as they investigate a mysterious radiation spike in 2010 on the abandoned Russian island called Kartoga-12.

After being separated from his time by an EMP, Renko is suddenly and mysteriously sent back in time to 1955, where he unknowingly saves Soviet scientist Nikolai Demichev from dying in a fire, changing history so that the Soviet Union under Demichev's command has taken over the world.

Over the course of the game, Renko ultimately has three choices, which all result in the world being conquered by tyrannical dictators: Renko either killing his past self but allowing Soviet scientist Viktor Barisov to rule, Renko killing Barisov and joining Demichev, or Renko killing them both to rule the world by himself.

1 Halo: Combat Evolved

Ancient Yet Familiar Horrors

One of the best games to completely change in tone roughly halfway through its runtime is, without a doubt, Xbox's flagship game, Halo: Combat Evolved.

CE begins with a fairly common concept for sci-fi games, with the relatively small and underpowered UNSC military force struggling to defeat the genocidal, technologically superior alien conglomerate known as the Covenant.

Despite gaining control of the mysterious Halo ring's control room midway through, the game quickly shifts from a pure action game to an action horror game with the unleashing of the ancient parasitic organism known as the Flood, which consumes and reanimates any and all life in the galaxy.

That alone makes the Flood terrifying, but what makes them even more terrifying is when Cortana and 343 Guilty Spark reveal that the Flood have already consumed most of all life in the galaxy before, and not even the Forerunners, the creators of the Halo rings, could stop them entirely, making the Flood a near-invincible threat.