spec ops: the line
spec ops the line is a third person military shooter about you and two ai squad guys going into dubai to save some guys after the city got ass blasted by giant sandstorms. what seperates this from of call of duty action movie stuff is its about the horrors of war and how good intentions can get you into hot stuff while masquerading as a call of duty. it doesnt work as the gameplay is generic, the plot holes are cavernous, and the idiotic attempts at hard decisions and moral questionability are boring. i've been wanting to review this for a while because this is apparently some hidden masterpiece so i was immediately wary as that was how the internet described off. lifting the fog and figuring out how stuff this game is is not only tradition but a duty to all indecisive consumers who are without reliable anecdote. don't play it and tell all your friends who told you this game was a stellar brown townysis of the human psyche and other bullstuff to piss off.
i'm just going to jump right into the giant plot holes and other ridiculous stuff immediately so if you don't want your boring spoiled close the tab. right off the bat you are attacked by the remnants of the us army you are trying to save for no reason. by no reason i really mean no reason they just start shooting at you and the entire game is spent trying to find out what the deal with this army is by finding the leader. at the end it is revealed the protagonist starts to hear voices and pretends to be the leader by talking into a broken radio and neither of his two squad mates ever said anything about this despite them being extremely talkative. it is not explained why the army is trying to kill you.
for some reason the cia are also in dubai and are trying to cover something up so they destroy all the water in storage so everyone dies of thirst. what they are covering up is never explained despite it apparently being so important it can start a war with the usa. the actual excuse of "we need to cover it up" is the writer fishing for cheap drama as it is used like once to explain why the guy destroyed all the water and never brought up again except as another reason everyone hates you. also there is a massive loving aquarium filled with water in the last area that apparently didn't count because ??? despite water being specifically lifted from aquariums before. at that point hallucinations and stuff were kicking in so i dont know.
as expected of a game of this style there are a bunch of moral quandaries and too many are forced to the point of
losing all emotional impact. the white phosphorous one is notable due to it being one of those big character development scenes and the abysmal way it is handled mechanically. the only two i cared about were both unessential to the plot and were the pick which guy to die and you can execute enemies for ammo ones. the pick which guys one was nice because it was an actual choice and the execute downed people for ammo and is the only implementation of a moral grayness for buffs mechanic. also none of your choices matter in the end so have fun.
for all the plot's flaws characterization was for the most part enjoyable. you and two other soldiers, all with action hero personalities, enter the city with stereotypical sarcastic tough guy personalities and have to immediately confront the whole oh stuff gray morality thing. they have realistic looking breakdowns in cutscenes as each of them become more desensitized and hardened killers who are constantly angry at everything. i'm not entirely sure how accurate this is to real desensitization but it was okay. vocal changes not in cutscene were sort of stuff since all that changed was forget and angry yelling being added to every voice clip which was sort of grating and stupid but again i am not an actual expert on this stuff.
despite that your characters still don't have much personality. they are still generic action hero husks except now with ptsd. all of them are basically the same person who does nothing but slowly get more angry and traumatized over time without any notable characteristics. any decisions which rely on how much you care for a character are nullified by this boring homogeneity.
it is possible to have actual characterization in the genre while still remaining true to the generic action hero and it is unfortunate the writers skimped out on such a critical element.
the gameplay is boring and abysmal at conveying the narrative present in the cutscenes. perhaps to parody themselves the devs made a cover based third person shooter that plays very similar to gears of war but clunkier. most of the game is spent in cover waiting for your health to regen after you popped out to shoot a guy although i played on the second highest difficulty out of five so this might drastically change if you play something lower. either way it was a snorefest because as soon as you pop out every motherforgeter on the map is lighting your ass up so you get real good at popping out and headshooting a guy really quick as it is the only viable strategy. if you get a grenade lobbed near you you are trusting your life in gods hands as now you have to relocate to a different spot of cover, a feat only attempted by the most foolish or desperate.
the ai, despite laser accuracy, is handicapped and assists in their murders greatly by exposing their heads to your line of fire frequently even while in cover. these ai weaknesses are supposedly mitigated by there always being 10 guys trying to kill you at once which does nothing but make the game more tedious. differences between enemies is limited to weaponry with most of them being automatic and identical and a special miniboss guy who is even worse than normal enemies. he has 10 million health and slowly walks towards you while firing a minigun and you have to throw all your nades at that motherforgeter before he gets to you and its a pain in the ass whenever he shows up which is thankfully only like seven times. nothing about all of the identical combat encounters in this game is enjoyable.
the horrendous ai further impedes attempts to blend the morality and the gameplay. hundreds of soldiers are sent to methodically be torn apart by your guy without any regard for their lives and the game just assumed you will care because they are american. if i am actually fighting living breathing humans with emotions and stuff surely they would show at least the smallest amount of self-preservation in the face of the player's apparently superhuman combat skills. the enemy ai never changes its tune and stops the stupid stuff even as you lay waste to their entire batallion, going so far as to veer into self parody later in the game when enemies talk about how this is their final stand despite there being like 30 of them shooting you at once.
the game does have some intentionally over the top touches that i liked as they were actually decently juxtaposed with all the stuff going down. when you shoot an enemy in the head his head pops off and the game goes in slo-mo which does provide some excellent contrast with the setting and the genre standards. i think that was the only thing that wasnt annoying as stuff or badly implemented.
graphics and music are sound design are passable i feel obligated to include a paragraph about this stuff in every review because all the cool reviewers do it. this game sucks. don't play it unless you like being told how morally gray war is like wow no stuff.
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