The top 5 games of summer 2012

Summer is at an end and with it the so called "gaming drought" the season is usually tagged as. I contest that claim this year, seeing as how the summer has been filled with incredible titles, some we'll all be talking about as potential game of the year material a few months from now. To celebrate the changing of the seasons and into the massive holiday season release schedule, we've compiled a list of the greatest games of the summer along with our own personal list. If you haven't played some of these games, you'd better get moving!

Spec Ops: The Line review (with video review)

If you're looking for a new game to sate your thirst for something seminal, you'd surely laugh at the notion of a third-person military shooter being pushed toward you - I know I would. Yager Development's Spec Ops: The Line is a game that looks and feels like the competition, but instead of following the safe and derivative path that's usually carved out for the genre, forges its own dark and gritty route that contemporary games hardly use. If, by year's end, people still aren't talking about the narrative this game yields, some of the magic of the gaming industry will have surely faded.

Spec Ops: The Line interview

Military shooters are a tough business. Not because they're hard to make or incredibly rare to find - it's quite the opposite. The conflict at hand is that there are so many it's difficult to become seminal in a largely derivative format. Spec Ops: The Line hopes to destroy that trend being a third-person military shooter with an emphasis on, wait for it... the narrative. Crazy as that might sound, Spec Ops is coming together beautifully and you'd do well to spend some time with it.