Checkpoint Breached: Spec Ops: The Line: Maybe we should have just stayed home

Time to complete Dead Space 2 and make a blog post about it, one week. Amount of time to complete Spec Ops: The Line and make a blog post, less than 24 hours. Here's the first and last achievements I got.

Very start of the game

Roll credits

I did manage to sleep at some point in there but I'm still concerned about how easy it was to get lost in there.

Spec Ops: The Line is the latest in a loosely tied together series of games all with "Spec Ops" as part of their title. Most of these games flew completely under the radar picking up very little press. It's really amazing how little info there is on these games prior to the release of this one, even the wiki articles were completely bare. But apparently enough people liked them that they continued to make them. And I'm very, very glad that they did.

Spec Ops: The Line is the definition of a "sleeper hit". The game looked like a fairly generic third person shooter. Perhaps trying to ride on the coattails of other shooters at the time. The trailer is pretty par for the course.

Kind of Gears of War meets Call of Duty, but it's so much more than that.

But first I'm going to talk about the game in a mechanical sense, I'll make a break for the story at the top of it's section so keep scrolling if you don't care about how the game plays or the setting. Seriously, it's not like it will offend me and I'll bear the scars of your rejection for the rest of my life, it's fine, just go.

Are they gone? Good, I hate those guys. Anyways, Spec Ops plays almost exactly like Gears of War. You sprint between cover, peek over and pop the heads off of the baddies. It's fairly generic but it works well. The game has a good feel about it's combat. The guns work well, the AI is actually very very good and no gun is suitable for everything. Spec Ops has a range system built into it's guns. So the pistols do not work as sniper rifles and shotguns can't be effectively used from far away. There's a nice coloring system built into the cross-hairs that will tell you if you're in range or not and it actually works rather well. I mentioned a second ago that the AI is well designed which is very good because you have two with you for the duration of the game. They're actually extremely useful in combat, don't get in the way often and are very well written. It almost makes me rethink friendly AI as being a universally terrible choice in a game.

We're the three best friends....

The setting of the game is absolutely perfect. There's this really eerie juxtaposition of these lavish hotels filled with sand in a war zone.

Pretty amazing stuff

But it also establishes much more than that just from minor set pieces and subtle hints. The areas almost tell the story better than the dialogue. The progression and set design is better than pretty much anything I've seen. It's all extremely varied and keeps you exploring.

The gameplay, as I mentioned before, is generic but suitable, but not without it's faults. The aiming can be a bit finicky and a little hard to get used to. The game seems to have been designed with console auto-aim in mind because the fine aiming controls on the PC are a little difficult and aiming moves in a sort of grid pattern. The combat is fairly repetitive but the changing settings mix things up fairly nicely. The game's difficulty is a touch on the easy side. I played through on "Suicide Mission" (hard) because "FUBAR" difficulty was locked at the beginning, but it really wasn't that hard. I got a few of the, I'm assuming, more difficult achievements along the way, like these two.

I felt like the difficulty I played on should be the normal one, I shudder to think what the easiest difficulty is like. I do like that a few shots from either side is enough to put someone down and if it isn't it's because of a real reason, like the guy's wearing armor. And the combat was broken up and varried enough that it still feels okay, not great, but okay.

Who knew sandstorms were hard to fight in?

WARNING

I'm now going to talk about the story. There will not be major spoilers in this section but to get the best experience out of the game you should walk into it with as little knowledge of the story as possible.

Last chance people, I'll post a break at the end before I start random screenshots in case you want to see those.

Still here? You're sure? Okay.

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The storyline of Spec Ops is really what sells it. The game immerses you in the story right from the get go. I generally don't like support characters in games as major points of the narrative. They just seem to sit there and say and do things that makes me hate them. That said, Adams and Lugo really solidified the story. The game might focus on Walker, but the writers did not mind him sharing the spotlight. The two support characters are gritty and real and they keep their mouth shut outside of story points so I actually liked them throughout the entire game. They provide other points of views to the story events and don't sugar coat their responses, the support characters develop almost as much as Walker does.

The twists in the story are incredible and difficult to predict. To avoid spoilers I'm going to say that there's a couple of times where bad things happen. And every time I actually felt something and I knew they were coming, I played this before on the 360. Even so I still got chills or felt legitimate anger. There's a couple of choices in the game that are very well hidden, the game doesn't do that thing games normally do with "Press this to be a dick, press this to be nice", it's not so black and white. You often don't know that you actually choose a particular path, it just seemed like that's what you were supposed to do. There's a part in the game that will be completely influenced by your feelings of the story events thus far. I choose my path and it felt right and justified within the context but I felt a bit of guilt too.

No two people will get the exact same thing out of the game, different choices, the characters you end up identifying with, the only thing that seems to be universal is you will take away something. It's one of the first military games that you never feel like you want to be there. It's gritty and at times painful. The game isn't "fun" in the conventional sense but it is very compelling, you will keep playing it.