Spec Ops

Another day, another blog post, another confusing weather day in Florida. Seriously, it was stupidly humid yesterday, and today it's cold and windy. It's supposed to be Spring, and yet it's colder than it was in December.

 

My whining aside, it's time for another installment of random game review! Today I'm going to cover Spec Ops: The Line, a third person shooter for the PC, PS3 and XBox 360. In the game, you follow the story of Captain Martin Walker as he and his three-man fireteam enter a destroyed Dubai - the game alludes to a massive storm that flooded Dubai with sand, effectively killing the once teeming city - in search for the 33rd Battalion and their leader, Colonel John Konrad. On the way to Konrad, you're subjected to the horrors of the ruined city and your own choices.

 

The gameplay rests heavily on the cover mechanic many shooters use these days, where if you stay out of cover for too long, you're dead. Health regens when you're not taking damage, and cover gives you the ability to remove yourself from combat long enough to regen. It's an overused mechanic, to be sure, but it works well in this game. Further adding to the difficulty, some cover is destructible, so you have to be aware of your surroundings in order to survive on the higher difficulty levels.

 

At certain points of the game, you are given choices. Aside from giving you trophies/achievements, these choices are largely cosmetic. Your choices don't effect the course of the story (aside from the final one) so they don't really matter.

 

The fights are pretty straight-forward. You have a couple stealth segments, but most of the time you're going against an army - note: far more than a battalion should - with only your fireteam for support. Luckily, you're able to utilise your fireteam by issuing squad commands - most of the time, you only have the attack command, but on occasion you can order them to throw a flashbang to disorient, or heal one of the other squadmates who took near-critical damage - which is fantastic since they seem to have infinite ammo.

 

From what I've seen, the interpretation of the story is largely left up to the player, with many conflicting theories abounding. The one I believe is that the entire game is a flashback - stemming from the most depressing of the endings - as the main character reflects on his actions since coming to Dubai. It's a bleak game, with very few happy moments, as you follow a character whose mental state clearly deteriorates over the course of it. I won't spoil the main twist of the story, but I did not see it coming from the actions of the story up to that point.

 

Spec Ops serves as an interesting addition to the shooter genre, and is worth at least a cursory playthrough if you like shooters. Spec Ops ranges from eighteen to thirty bucks, with it currently being offered as a free game through Playstation Plus. It's certainly worth the money.

Posted with Blogsy