On Goldrush one team escorts a tank up a hill to blow open a bank, then carries two crates of gold down to a truck. It takes twelve minutes when it works.
Urban Terror looks like a realism shooter. Tactical vests, iron sights, bleeding wounds, a bandage you have to apply while somebody is trying to kill you.
There is no ground in Sunkenland, and that reorganises every survival habit you have. You cannot walk somewhere to find wood or dig a hole to hide in.
You shoot a man in the arm and the arm comes off. Not a scripted animation or a special kill: you hit an arm, it is gone, and he is still standing there.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein was sold as a single-player game about an occult research programme, zombies in a crypt, and a man with a Thompson.
Good Quake III players do not shoot at people. They shoot at the floor beside them, because a rocket aimed where you will be beats one aimed where you are.
About a third of the way through Quake 4 you are captured, strapped to a conveyor belt and fed into the machine that turns prisoners into Strogg.
There is a moment in Necesse when you stop mining, because a settler you recruited and handed a pickaxe is working the seam while you are islands away.
You do not have a team of twelve in Medal of Honor: Warfighter. You have one partner, and almost everything depends on them, including where you spawn.
Breakthrough is the Medal of Honor expansion where dying puts you in a cage, and somebody on your team has to cross the map to let you out.
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault put you in a landing craft off Omaha Beach in 2002, dropped the ramp, and killed most of the men beside you in three steps.
When a human soldier dies in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the body stays. A Strogg technician can walk over and turn it into a spawn point for his team.
