Particularly well-realised are the game's sandstorms, and the one outstanding gameplay moment of the title comes when you have to press through a blinding sandstorm whilst fighting off an enemy attack. Graphically the game is not very advanced, but its art direction is astonishing, depicting Dubai as a sort of actually-existing Rapture (from BioShock), a defiant technological challenge against nature. There's also the tradition profusion of cut scenes every 5 minutes or so of gameplay, although the point of the game is more found in the narrative than the gameplay, so this time around it actually works. It also does that weird thing of limiting you to just two guns at a time, but then throwing 50,000 enemies at you to kill and then loot, so the attempts to limit your choices of gun and ammo really come to nothing and the game goes to some lengths to ensure there's just the right gun for the job conveniently lying around when you need it. It has a typically badly-designed cover system which sticks you to walls and can be fussy letting you go (especially when a grenade's just landed by your feet). Giving you real choice and real consequences for those choices would have been the more powerful option.but would have made the game far more difficult to make for the developers, and diluted their point if you simply chose the white hat option throughout the game.Īs far as the gameplay goes, Spec Ops is a fairly mediocre shooter. Normally in a game this isn't a problem - linear action games are a perfectly fine thing to play and enjoy - but here it jars badly with the game's focus on choice and consequence as a major theme. You have no choice, you simply have to experience Walker's story and its consequences. Walker is the character you are directing through the game, but you aren't really playing him (aside from telling him to shoot Dude A before Dude D in a firefight). You are constantly told that it is your choice, your decision which has brought about disaster, but it isn't. The problem is that the game also does not offer any choice outside of its linear story (aside from a few different endings, which can be replayed easily enough) despite choice being the cornerstone of the entire game's philosophy. On this basis, the game is successful because it sets out to do something different and thought-provoking, and does it. If we are to accept that games are art, then games which are 'difficult' to conceptually 'get' are as valid as any 'difficult', art or theme-fuelled film or album is. Good, because games which challenge and subverts expectations and makes the player incredibly uncomfortable about what's happening are few and far between. At every stage of the game, your character, Walker, makes what appears to be the right decision, but the consequences are almost always shown to be disastrous.
#HOW TO SWITCH WEAPONS ON SPEC OPS THE LINE PC MOVIE#
The game borrows a lot of its atmosphere and tone from the movie Apocalypse Now (and the novel it is based on, Heart of Darkness), but also brings in contemporary imagery from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly those incidents where well-meaning soldiers inadvertently bring about the death of innocent people.
Some of the most harrowing scenes I've ever seen in a video game are present here: the scene where your soldiers deploy white phosphorus on an enemy position only to hit a load of sheltering refugees is going to be one of those watershed moments in gaming which people are talking about for years to come (a bit like the 'No Russian' bit of Modern Warfare 2, only not so gratuitous). Spec Ops: The Line is an incredibly grim, hard-going game which does not relent on the action or the reflection on the death and slaughter afterwards. The degree to which this works is up for debate. Much more than this, the game very deliberately makes itself often uncomfortable to play, to the point where the player may not be having any fun and may want to turn the game off (and, incredibly, the developers have said this is something they deliberately wanted to happen).
It's essentially a subversive take on games which apparently seek to glorify war, like the Call of Duty franchise, and instead argues that war is not a cartoon game. The second is a meditation on the soul-destroying nature of war and the psychological trauma that exposure to long periods of violence and mayhem can cause. The first is a fairly standard, cover-based action shooter, in which grim men shoot other grim men in the head with a variety of lethal weapons.
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