I’ve never been a big fan of military titles, maybe because my hippie parents wouldn’t let me play with toy guns as a young lad. But also because many war games seem morally reprehensible.  Do I really want to spend my leisure hours slaughtering realistic people? But after succumbing to Call of Duty 4 and being, well, blown away by its sheer awesomeness and impeccably put-together gameplay, I decided to try out some of the other military shooters currtently clogging up store shelves this spring.

The best of the bunch is also the most odious—EA’s Army of Two, a rare co-op shooter in the Gears of War vein that is not actually about the army at all but about private military contractors, those Blackwater-style mercenaries who kill for pay not patriotism. In case that doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable enough, you arethen sent off to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims wearing explosives strapped to their chests.

It’s hard to reconcile this neocon fever dream but the intense action should help you shoot through the guilt as will the unintentional homoerotic undertones of the main characters. That said, it would have been nice if the developers at EA Montreal had delved a little deeper into what the privitization of war really means—to society, the army and the occupied territories—as opposed to using it mostly as macho window-dressing.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 offers a more easily digested storyline—after all, who wouldn’t want to protect the city of sin from assloads of terrorists. It’s got very tight tactical gameplay, too, but the real treat here is the familiar Vegas setting which has been recreated down to the last neon sign and ostentatious casino. It doesn’t add too much new to the equation—especially if you played the original which ended on a "to be continued" cliffhanger—but you will deeply appreciate Clancy’s competence after spending a few hours with Turning Point: Fall of Liberty.

To illustrate its awfulness, does that run-of-the-mill name even give you a hint that it boasts an extremely promising yet criminally squandered premise? Turning Point posits that Winston Churchill was killed, not injured, by a New York taxicab in 1931. So in this game’s alternate-history, Britain loses to the *** who eventually invade 1950s NYC. You play a construction worker—building those classic skyscrapers, natch—who joins the resistance movement. And yet despite this potential, it delivers a clunky, buggy, shoot-by-numbers game which simply pales in comparison to the competition.

Maybe they should have hired private contractors?