New FPS game Wraith Ops wants to fix the worst problems in modern shooters

Especially in the wake of Call of Duty 4, we had a surfeit of gray-brown military shooters - Battlefield 3, the rebooted Medal of Honor, and of course Black Ops and the direct Modern Warfare sequels defined the mid-’00s FPS aesthetic. It got samey. But the backlash was too severe. Today’s shooters practice a banal visual maximalism, with loud colors, big shapes, and cartoon characters. Even the ostensibly more-grounded FPS games, like Counter-Strike 2, Far Cry, and present-day CoD, have strayed into neo-psychadelia. And that’s just part of the problem. Loot boxes. Microtransactions. Empty customization. Wraith Ops, a new shooter published by Hell Let Loose’s Team17, is coming to challenge it all.