As video games have become over-saturated with first person shooters and third person cover based shooters, it’s hard to find a niche to make your game stand out. Spec Ops, attempts to step out of the shadow of games before it, and manages to do several things really well, in spite of itself.
Title: Spec Ops: The Line
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Yager Entertainment
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Genre: Third-person, cover-based, shooter
Release Date: June 26, 2012
Price: $59.99
Rating: M
Spec Ops: The Line places you, the player, in the boots of Captain Martin Walker (voiced by Nolan North) of the US army’s Delta Force. Walker along with two other soldiers, Alphanso Adams (voiced by Christopher “Kid” Reid) and John Lugo (voiced by Omid Abtahi) are sent into Dubai to investigate the whereabouts of Colonel Konrad (voiced by Bruce Boxleitner). In this fictional representation of Dubai, severe and almost cataclysmic sand storms have torn the city apart. The entire UAE is a ghost town, or rather it is supposed to be. Upon further investigation, Captain Walker and his men discover they are in fact not alone at all, and they are walking into a world full of hostile “survivors” and choices that are anything but black and white.
Spec Ops is one of those reviews that I really struggle with writing and not just because of my loose grasp on the English language. Spec Ops at it’s best moments is chilling and very thought provoking, at its worst, it is nothing more than mediocre. In this review I will do my best to do little to destroy or spoil the story for any other would-be players, while best describing my personal experiences with the single player story line.
I sat down and tried to think of the best way that I could describe Spec Ops: The Line to a potential player in the shortest amount of time. Spec Ops is like a filet mignon that has been battered and deep fried. At its core, it is a wonderful and surprisingly rich game, but it’s wrapped in a drab and boring shooter that does little to allude to the good stuff inside.
Spec Ops much to it’s detriment is a third person, cover-based, military shooter. As far as how you play Spec Ops: The Line, the majority of it is in a state of “been there done that.” Graphically I don’t think it looks very good. Mostly because of the setting in Spec Ops, the environments all look the same and very “grainy”. I know, sand, but still. It almost looks like it is a filter that needs to be turned off. I adjusted the resolution in the options to be “vivid” and that helped a bit but it was still brown and kinda boring. As I said, the setting of the game has much to do with this. There probably aren’t many ways to dress up yet another building half-buried in sand. However all the locations that were a change from this post “sand-pocalypse” were a welcomed break, visually.
Aside from the story points in missions (which I will get into later) the bulk of the game is spent going from cover point to cover point and taking out dudes. The weapons and tactics used in the game are all things that are done in every other game in the same genre. The lone difference being that you can order your squad to engage a target so that you can try to flank said target. However, I found it easier to just shoot everyone that I could because the AI isn’t all that intelligent. There are a few points where you can interact with the environment to take out the opposing forces, but it feels more scripted than discovery.
What Spec Ops: The Line does really well is story. Captain Walker, Adams and Lugo are highly trained, hardened, and focused killing machines. That’s not to say they are some meat-headed “space marine” style character that doesn’t have any depth. It’s just a statement that tells more of who they are not what they are inside. From the outset of the game, you and your men work well together, get along and generally know why they are there and what they have to do. As the game wears on, decisions are made, and things happen that break down the structure of the team. This is made obvious to the player through dialog, as well as actions and reactions to things happening on the battlefield. Your team falls apart by the end. Training goes out the window when emotions, lack of rest, and provisions win over common sense.
“To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless.”
There aren’t many third person shooters on the market that handle story beats as well as Spec Ops does, and that’s a shame. Many present day, war focused games try to bring you into the role of the soldier, but most go the route of trying to make the player feel like an unstoppable bad-ass than making them feel like a human. Choices made in Spec Ops are never as easy as black and white. Many times I found myself pausing the game and mulling over how I personally would approach a situation, and proceeding accordingly. Spec Ops does a wonderful job of not only forcing you to choose, but making you live with your choices. Once one of these moral choices is made you are immediately “check pointed” into being stuck with that choice. No going back. I absolutely loved this aspect of the game. For the first time playing a game with multiple pathways I felt no compulsion to go back and “game” the rest of the achievements out of it. The choices I made at pivotal moments tell what kind of person I am in real life, and I am completely fine with that.
The guys on the Giant Bombcast said it perfectly when they said that Spec Ops: The Line will be one of those games that people look back on as the start of something future games take for granted. I can’t think of a game prior to this that was able to convey the raw emotion of being a soldier in a war you shouldn’t even be in. In the beginning of Spec Ops you are precise and lethal, but by the end characters start becoming more cold-blooded and vicious. Close to the end of Spec Ops the load screens carry as much weight, if not more, than all of Call of Duty’s most shocking moments. Load screens that normally show game-play tips start evolving and changing showing things like the quote above. They also attempt to bring out real life feelings in the player. Saying things like “Do you feel like a hero yet?” and “You’re still a good person.” It’s the sort of thing that when you read in the context of the game, it makes you kinda question what you have done (in game) over the past several hours. That’s not something that is easily pulled off in a military shooter.
In the end, Spec Ops: The Line is much like a summer action blockbuster. It probably won’t win any awards but it’s good enough to sit down and run through for the experience of the story. Set the game to the easy (or leave it on normal, it’s not that hard) difficulty and just watch. It’s a great story that really isn’t fleshed out by the monotonous action, but more in the quieter more introspective silences. After playing Spec Ops, rather than feeling like I can take on the world single handedly, I feel like I need to talk to the real troops that protect our country. There were no fist bumps and bro-hugs in any of the four possible endings. Spec Ops: The Line forces the player to think about what it’s like to live with issues like PTSD and dissociative disorder. In this respect, Spec Ops may actually be the most realistic shooter out there. It’s just a shame that such a well done story is shoved behind a run-of-the-mill shooter that’s been all but played out.
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