A lot of games do this sort of thing now. Even in Halo you're always the blue team (as if blue/red teams were ever politically controversial).

Interesting - didn't play it long but never realised

This reminds me of the movie “The 5th Wave” (2016)

> the military have used deception and technology to convince the rescued children that the humans outside the base have been possessed. They provide military training to the children, forming them into squads to go on kill missions outside the base. Meanwhile, the military was in fact run by the aliens

It really was wild, and I think the fact that it didn't really have commercial goals allowed the developers to experiment with some pretty "out there" ideas[1] for FPS games. When I first heard of AA and imagined the US Government making a video game, I thought it was going to be kind of inauthentic, like "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?" But it actually didn't turn out to be too bad, when compared with FPS games of the time. Kind of an Operation Flashpoint but even more realistic. It was definitely not CounterStrike though and ultimately those kind of FPSs won.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/snp85x/comment/hw4mk...