Endless waves of repetitive enemies? Locations that all serve the same purpose? Characters who can inexplicably only carry two guns at once? Chest-high walls to crouch against in every combat situation? Slowly regenerating health so that your squad of three can feasibly kill dozens of enemies at once? You know every negative stereotype about generic first/third-person shooters? Let’s go over some of them. Since the focus is on the story, the gameplay is rarely, if ever, covered in any detail in reviews of the game, and if it is, it’s briefly glided over with a few forgiving sentences like ‘It’s nothing special’ or ‘It gets the job done and that’s about it.Īnd I’m here to say the gameplay in Spec Ops: The Line is fucking atrocious. That sentence actually goes a long way to explaining my issue with the game. I figured I would start by discussing the gameplay because that’s the least important part of the game. And since I have a captive audience, at least until you switch to a new tab, let’s explore why. Actually I think there’s some Jimi Hendrix there, so… okay, I hate almost every element of it. Every element of it the gameplay, the story, the meta story, the design, the… I don’t know, the soundtrack. I really, really thoroughly hate Spec Ops: The Line. Someone has to be held responsible for those bomb defusal levels. Up there with the PS2 port of Just Cause, Mario VS Donkey Kong 2 on the DS, and the first Spider-Man movie game. It’s also one of the few (less than 10) games that I absolutely fucking hate. The game sold poorly but was critically acclaimed for its story, which was both critical of the unchallenging nature of the generic first-person shooters of the time, and also the industry itself for catering to the whims of the people who are easily entertained by repeatedly throwing frag grenades at infinitely respawning waves of specifically not-white people, by creating a game in which you constantly make things worse and eventually the game itself calls out the desire of Walker and the player to be seen as heroes for ‘pow pow bang bang dakadakadakadakadakadaka thwip now throw me a parade for saving the world’. But due to some horrific luck, unforeseen circumstances, and Walker’s well-meaning but ultimately quite selfish desire to be a hero, he just keeps making things worse for everyone and alienating those around him, which isn’t that surprising when his chief method of solving a problem is finding someone nearby who he can point an assault rifle at. ![]() In Spec Ops: The Line, you play as a man named Walker who leads a small team into Dubai following a failed evacuation attempt by the military, with the simple goal of finding out what happened and/or if there are any survivors, and then leaving to report your findings and call in help. A brutal no-holds-barred deconstruction of the generic Call of Duty/Medal of Honor style first or third-person shooters in which your average everyman protagonist whose personality – if he has one at all – can be summarized as smartass, badass and jerkass, somehow saves the world by shooting an indiscriminate number (usually in the thousands) of people from non-USA countries named something like Saudi Irania or Afghaliban in order to prevent the release of a virus/execution of several high-profile hostages/attempted sabotage of a badminton tournament, etc. Spec Ops: The Line is, from an artistic point of view, one of the most important games released in the last decade.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |