YMMV / Spec Ops: The Line

• Accidental Aesop:
  • Writer Walt Williams is not terribly keen on the game being described as an "anti-war" video game: he has stated that his primary intention was to create a narrative which asked players to question why they play shooters in the first place, and the War Is Hell aspect of the game came about largely as a necessary consequence of this rather than out of any special desire to attack war in its own right. The game grapples with how such a life and state of being would be one of constant fear, endless violence and bloodshed which would take a toll on any individual's sanity.
  • The game has often been interpreted as a critique of American military interventionism or at least the mentality of "good guys saving the world" that is used to justify such actions. As above, the creators noted Spec Ops wasn't a specific criticism as such, but came out from criticizing Call of Duty, which is seen as too jingoistic.
  • There's also one common thread running throughout Walker's various blunders in-game — every instance where things went pear-shaped because of his actions, it happened when he acted with only partial information. The mortars? He didn't scout the area thoroughly enough to find the civilians. The aquarium? He didn't ask any hard questions about why the CIA was there, instead trusting that they were on the level. In other words, the story is not about war and violence being bad so much as the dangers of incompetent and self-destructive soldiers being given command on a key mission.
  • And the biggest miscommunication happened at the very beginning, when he and his group were fired upon by other US soldiers believing that Delta Squad was working with the CIA.
  • It's easy to find the game directly criticizing the player for engaging with it as being a bit sanctimonious and even hypocritical, so many prefer to ignore this angle and view the story as more a self-contained character-driven tragedy rather than a metatextual condemning of the genre itself.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Most of the major characters in the game. The subject of how sympathetic Walker is as a character is one of no small amount of debate — is he a Well-Intentioned Extremist who becomes a Fallen Hero out of a misguided desire to save the people of Dubai, or a pathetic, selfish Heroic Wannabe who only cares about improving his own stature, regardless of the consequences? (The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.) How much of Walker represents the player, and how complicit is the player in what Walker's done? Are Konrad and the 33rd really doing the right thing by staying in Dubai, or are they just as misguided as Walker himself? Was Riggs right to destroy the city's water supply? Etcetera.
  • There's really three different Konrads. There's the Konrad that Walker thought he knew, the hero who would never let the 33rd do all this stuff in Dubai. There's the Konrad that he thinks he's confronting later, the maniac he blames for everything. And then there's the actual Konrad, who seems like was once a decent man before everything spun out of control. The exact measure of the "real" Konrad is up for debate... just how much of a monster he was.
• Aluminium Christmas Trees: The fact that the insurgents and civilians mainly speak Persian might come off as incongruous with the fact that the game is set in Dubai, a Gulf Arab city. However, Iranian and Afghan expatriates/migrant workers do indeed constitute a large demographic group in the country — and given the wealth of the local Emirati Arab population, it's not unconceivable for them to fly the coop at the first sign of trouble, leaving poorer foreigners behind. Though it should be noted that the largest demographic group in the real-life UAE is, in fact, South Asians from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who together make up over half of the country's population.
• Angst Aversion: The game is War Is Hell to the limit, full of war crimes (while questioning how players manage to still go with it) and with PTSD playing a major part. It probably helped drive potential players away, as even the art director acknowledged how grim it gets:
  "You can imagine what kind of reference material you have to review. That's not fun. You're happy when you can do something else after that."
• Angst? What Angst?: After the white phosphorus incident, Adams is clearly disturbed and Lugo begins freaking out. Walker, on the other hand, has no outward reaction, which flabbergasts Adams. Key word being "outward": the guilt of it drives him to insanity and causes him to start hallucinating. And given Walker's position in the chain of command, this also makes sense. Everything he said in that calm, cold tone after the incident was completely accurate — if the group didn't move from their position, it would only be a matter of time before other forces converged on their position. Keeping on the move will also help him avoid reflecting on what he just did. Pragmatism at its most disturbing.
• Anvilicious: The New York Times specifically criticized the game for its lack of subtlety and borderline-gratuitous content.
  • The game has the Accidental Aesop of "war is horrible", as do a lot of First-Person Shooter games, but it goes deeper than just that. The game goes on length about how everyone suffers in war and there are no true heroes in war, there is only death, destruction, and trauma awaiting for anyone who engages in war or is a witness to war. This game goes the extra mile and says there is no justifiable part of war, even if you're on the so-called good side, and we should not cross the proverbial line regardless of intentions.
  • The game is equally unsubtle as a self-reflexive critique of the military-themed shooter genre itself. It argues that the genre more or less forces the player to become a Sociopathic Soldier with Black-and-White Insanity. Through its protagonist Cpt. Martin Walker, it demonstrates that acting like the protagonist of a shooter game in real life results not in victory but tragedy, and that such an individual would not emerge from the situation a dedicated, stoic hero, but rather an unhinged, maniacal, PTSD-ridden psychopath. All of this is demonstrated without an ounce of restraint. It also makes a point about what happens to the people and objects around a shooter protagonist. Walker's desperate drive to be the hero ends up being the reason that everyone in Dubai will die of dehydration.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: The game was advertised as a fairly standard military shooter, though it is emphatically not one, because it would be impossible to come up with an appealing way to advertise what the game really is to the people it was intended for (i.e. those who are close fans of the genre). From the dev's point of view, the advertisements were too effective at deceiving everyone; lots of players judged the game on the merits they would judge a typical war shooter, while the sort of gamer who would value its dark plot and innovative narrative style would be turned off by it looking just like every other shooter following the leader.
• Awesome Music:
  • Say what you will about The Radioman, but he has impeccable taste in music. The sheer Soundtrack Dissonance of clearing room after room of insurgents in the second chapter as "Hush" by Deep Purple plays over the loudspeakers is sublime, especially if you look at it as a deconstruction of the same type of scene playing out unironically in a normal military shooter, or as a homage to the helicopter scene in Apocalypse Now. Speaking of helicopters, there's also the part where he starts blasting "Dies Irae Verdi" as an attack chopper tries to mow Walker down.
  • Glasgow Mega-Snake by Mogwai, an instrumental post-rock piece that has visceral and hard hitting riffs that make it a perfect fit for the game's dark and brutal atmosphere.
  • Truth Revealed, a slow and somber piece that plays as Walker finally gets a reality check from his massive Sanity Slippage. It begins to pick up in intensity with guitars as Walker and the player are given the choice to shoot himself or the *Imaginary* Konrad.
• Broken Aesop:
  • The game has been criticized for its anti-violence message, which is subverted by continuing to allow the player to kill enemies with executions and live burial by sand, even after the game tries to hammer the moral home with the player/Walker mass-murdering civilians and proceeds to really rip into the player. Or course, at no point is the player obligated to execute enemies, and the times where use of sand is absolutely necessary to progress are few.
  • The achievement system in the game, along with the multiplayer mode, have also been criticized as glorifying violence, though these were included due to a publisher mandate rather than an artistic decision on the development team's part. The creators themselves have express disdain toward the multiplayer mode for this reason, along with the fact that they didn't think it was necessary to begin with. However, all these achievement icons have very non-militaristic "player" images on them to drive the irony home.
• Broken Base: After the white phosphorus incident, there are exactly and only two opinions that people seem to have.
  • You either believe that it's a masterfully executed Take That! against both the player and the shooter genre, where it forces you the player to look at the more realistic aspects of using a horrible, horrible weapon in the name of progression, with no cutaways or easy answers. In a word, it gives something that most paint-by-numbers modern military shooters don't have: consequences.
  • Or you'll see it as an act of railroading so severe and out of place that it cheapens the scene, and the fact that game goes so far to make you feel bad about doing something that it made you do and are relentlessly criticized for that it starts to feel like it's unmaking the very point that the game seems to be trying to reach. The developers anticipated this reaction and incorporated it into the plot; it's yet another point of contention how successful they were. Some critics felt that this was a copout that tried to absolve the developers of any responsibility for making the exact kind of violent video game they were supposedly criticizing.
  • Critic Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw seemed to fall into both camps at once: He "felt like shit" for his initial delight at the white phosphorus "mini-game", but at the same time compared much of the game's horror to a person mooning you then criticizing you for looking at their butt. He did still make it his Game of the Year.
• Cliché Storm: The gameplay is oft-criticized as doing everything that has already been done before in a third-person, military-focused tactical shooter without doing it in any remarkable way. The plot, however, is anything but.
• Critical Dissonance: Critics, by and large, were impressed with the game's story and themes (if generally finding the gameplay decidedly lacklustre — neither noticeably good nor bad), but it sold very poorly. Players who did pick up the game were divided — one camp thinks it's brilliant for opening questions that many other games conspicuously fail to acknowledge about simulated violence, power fantasies, morality, and other assumptions that come part and parcel with the genre, in the frame of an affecting and stark character study — enough that a critical examination supportive of the game was written. A second finds it pretentious, hypocritical, self-righteous about imaginary violence, and too flawed in itself to be making any criticisms (especially in relation to criticism leveled at violence of the player, while being violent itself like the White Phosphorus incident). Even the obscure, normally Twitter bot-based, website Tiny Subversion mocked Spec Ops' morality play: Video Game Morality Play and You Were Hallucinating The Whole Time. A third camp didn't care about the story and dismissed it as yet another shooter set in the tired modern military genre, with mediocre cover-based gameplay.
• Cry for the Devil: The game welcomes you to empathize with Walker himself, and ultimately lets you decide whether or not he's redeemable.
• Cult Classic: One of the most infamous examples in video game history. It was a commercial flop as it was released during a time where the video game genre was absolutely saturated in generic military FPS. However, Yager Development knew it could not compete, so instead, they gambled on the idea that their game will live on years after its release through word-of-mouth. True enough, the game's infamy meant that Spec Ops: The Line became a Cult Classic with a dedicated fanbase trying to nitpick any symbolism the game had hid throughout the years. It is telling that the game is still talked about, a decade after it came out, whereas most shooters of its time, including the likes of Modern Warfare 3, faded into relative obscurity.
• Death of the Author: Actually encouraged by lead writer Walt Williams — he noted in an interview that while he believes that the entire game is Walker's Dying Dream or "purgatory", the game is purposefully left open to interpretation.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Heavies on higher difficulties. In the normal game balance, they're a deconstruction of the Giant Mook, their firepower being kneecapped by how slow they move and how big a target they are. The Giant Mook aspect is played much straighter by the time you get to FUBAR, though. They can turn on a dime to mow you down, and they soak up so many bullets that there's a high chance you'll die before managing to bring them down. Adams and Lugo can't help much, because Heavies twist and fire on whoever is firing on them, and they'll die very quickly.
  • Bayonet Runners are also in the same position, being able to one-hit-kill you, and forcing you to take your attention off of a horde of soldiers who can already one-hit-kill you if you pop out of cover long enough to take them out.
• Difficulty Spike: Because the gameplay is so simple, going up a difficulty comes with a severe spike due to how much is affected. There are sharp differences between Walk on the Beach and Combat Op, and even sharper ones from there up. A game that can take a mere three hours on the easiest difficulty can take three weeks on FUBAR.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Naturally, being a shooter with an anti-war message. For better or for worse, it is much more successful than most.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: As is probably evident from This Very Wiki, this game's story is just about the only thing worth remembering. The gameplay itself is a standard third-person shooter with very few mechanics that let it stand out, and the multiplayer mode, which wasn't even designed by the development team behind the single-player mode, is the single worst-received part of the game.
• Escapist Character: This game, like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, deconstructs the concept of escapism. You first start the game as a generic American special forces soldier, Captain Walker; who is brave, fearless, and shoots first before asking questions. His main goal to saving hostages later turns into a sad, horrid Protagonist Journey to Villain plot. Because of Walker wanting to be the hero of his own story, he ends up killing his teammates and dooming the city of Dubai, along with all the civilians. Later on the game starts drawing comparisons between the player and Walker; that they attempt to live out power fantasies.
  Konrad:The truth is, Walker, is that you're here because you wanted to feel like something you're not: a hero.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: This is a Mind Screw of a game which did an amazing job of pretending to be a second-rate Call of Duty clone. The game's demo and press featured none of its blatantly Post Modern plot inspired by Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. The game is rife with Leaning on the Fourth Wall, What the Hell, Player?, and a "The Reason You Suck" Speech aimed at the player. The devs have stated that scenes which fade to white are hallucinations and scenes which fade to black are real — and all the endings fade to white. Fans have concluded that one of the best explanations for what happens in the game is that the protagonist is either already dead or trapped in a hellish Dying Dream to serve as his Ironic Hell. The dev's response has been a Shrug of God and stating that it's certainly a valid interpretation of events.
  Soldier: You know, Captain, we drove through this whole city to find you. We... we saw things. If you don't mind me asking, what was it like? How did you survive all this?
  Walker: Who said I did?
• Friendly Fandoms: The advent of later postmodern games like Doki Doki Literature Club! has lead to this game getting much newer appreciation from fans of those games. Both are well-loved by the much of the same people for deconstructing the idea that video games are used purely to fulfill the fantasy of their players.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Some of the graffiti in Dubai says "Under the sand, the pavement," which is an inversion of famous graffiti that appeared in France during the May 1968 protests, "Sous les pavés, la plage," or "Under the pavement, the beach" where it was used as a phrase of rebellion to indicate escape from regimented life.
  • The loading screens feature two unattributed Jean-Paul Sartre quotes, one of them paraphrased.
  • Konrad's quote "Everything is teetering on the edge of everything" is a Shout-Out to poet Charles Simic, which lead writer Walt Williams included with the intent of establishing Konrad as a Wicked Cultured character. The reference was so obscure that numerous players believed it was original to the game.
  • The site of Delta's white phosphorous attack on the 33rd contains a fountain of children holding hands in a circle. This is likely a reference to the Barmaley Fountain in Volgograd which becomes famous in a 1942 photograph juxtaposing the image of children at play with the destruction caused by the war on the city, then called Stalingrad.
  • When Walker confronts !imaginary!Konrad at the end of the game, the latter has just finished a painting of the white phosphorus attack from earlier, depicting a mother and her child burning to death. After getting a good look at the painting, Walker promptly accuses Konrad of goading him into causing the attack, to which Konrad responds by stating that it was Walker's own doing. Their exchange is a direct reference to a Picasso painting which was created after Nazi bombers firebombed civilians during the Spanish Civil War. He was living in Nazi-occupied Paris at the time and it is alleged that a German officer, upon seeing a picture of the painting in his apartment, asked: "Did you do that?", to which Picasso responded: "No, you did."
• Harsher in Hindsight: With how much the shadow of The War on Terror and criticism thereof hangs heavy over this game and how many of the American characters are mentioned as having served in Afghanistan (most notably with Walker and Konrad having taken part in a mission gone wrong in Kabul), the manner in which the real life war in Afghanistan ended nearly ten years later (featuring a chaotic evacuation of Kabul and accidental killing of civilians) adds an especially bitter taste to the game.
• He Really Can Act:
  • Nolan North certainly puts to rest the idea that all he's got is Nathan Drake—rather impressively, considering this game was recorded before his fame from Uncharted but released after. His voice acting in the final section is especially powerful, the way he puts across Walker's total transformation to an utterly bloodthirsty brute while still maintaining the same pitch. Watch the transformation for yourself here or here. Emphasizing this is that North is clearly fond of his work here as well.
  • Bruce Boxleitner's work as Konrad is extremely well-done as well, especially as he uses the same voice as John Sheridan to castigate Walker throughout the game. The end confrontation has Konrad vacillate between "friendly grandfather" to "quiet menace" simply by putting the lines in contrast with events on-screen.
  • To say nothing of everyone else's voice acting chops, Omid Abtahi showed an astounding amount of emotional torque as Lugo, ranging from humorous banter to sheer rage and panic, Christopher Reid offered a surprising amount of indignation whenever he called out Walker, clearly evidenced at the end of the game, and Jake Busey wasn't just a good source of comic relief; his deflating mood when the water trucks crashed were heartbreaking to listen to.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This game's Signature Scene involves the use of white phosphorus to devastating effect as a statement on how games treat suffering in war. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), the exact kind of game that Spec Ops critiques and a series that everyone compares the game's Take That! messages to, announced that they will be using it as a kill streak reward.
• Hype Backlash: A number of critics and players feel that the game's deconstruction and story aren't as clever, well-done, and mind-blowing as the game's fandom has claimed it to be, especially critical of the White Phosphorus scene and how the player is Blamed for Being Railroaded.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: One common reviewer complaint is that this game had a full triple-A price, yet the campaign only lasts around 3-4 hours without skipping any and all of the cutscenes. In comparison, even your basic Modern Warfare or Medal of Honor campaign usually lasts at least 5-7 hours for an average player. On harder difficulties, however, the average player will take about the same amount of time as that, possibly due to dying a lot, slowing approach while engaging enemies, or trying to collect all the collectibles and one of a kind weapons in the game.
• It Was His Sled: It's become fairly common knowledge that using the white phosphorus mortar inadvertently kills a large group of civilians, and the player character isn't the rugged, noble, mentally-balanced hero you'd expect him to be, along with the game's anti-violence spiels in the form of Konrad and the mocking loading screens that verbally berate the player.
• Jerkass Woobie: Walker is one of the most tragic figures in games. A character who means and intends well and so sincerely wants to do good even if he's blinded and deluded about his actions. While condemning his actions, the game makes you empathize with him, and shows him as a rounded fleshed out individual which thanks to Nolan North's performance, allows us to immerse himself in his shoes, which gives the finale its famous gut punch.
• Level Breaker:
  • Word of God says they wished achievements had not been included in the game for this very reason. Unsurprisingly, several reviews have criticized exactly this aspect of the game.
  • Several critics found that some of the more self-aware, Breaking the Fourth Wall elements of the game (such as Walker lampshading the use of In Medias Res in the helicopter sequence) took them out of the experience somewhat.
  • Under some of the loading screens is text such as "Do you feel like a hero yet?" or "To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless." When you get more and more of these messages, some being repeated multiple times, eventually having no subtlety and saying things like "This is all your fault", it stops giving you a somewhat subtle feeling of guilt, and makes it feel as though the Radioman is now mocking you for playing this game. It doesn't help that the text occasionally breaks the fourth wall.
• Magnificent Bastard: The fictionalized version of Colonel John Konrad that Captain Martin Walker made up in his head is imagined as a crafty, ruthless, yet cultured and well meaning warlord who took control of Dubai after a failed evacuation, serving as the "villain" of Walker's hero fantasy. Konrad's voice gives Walker a "test" between executing a thief or an insubordinate soldier. As Walker commits atrocities, leading his men to their deaths, Konrad repeatedly condemns Walker while ostensibly forcing his hand, leading to the deaths of his teammates. When Walker discovers the corpse of the real Konrad, the fictionalized one reveals himself to be a manifestation of Walker's conscience, which Walker blamed for his deeds. Forcing Walker to face the truth of his crimes, "Konrad" prepares Walker to kill himself as he breaks him down. Even if Walker resists this, a surviving Walker is left a miserable wreck of his former self.
• Misaimed Fandom: The game has a following among fans of classic/non-military shooters, who adore it for ripping the modern military shooter (and their players) to shreds. The game has an anti-violence message in general that applies beyond Call of Duty and its legion of spinoffs and imitators; something like the white phosphorus scene could be easily applied to a retro shooter using that genre's tropes, like Ludicrous Gibs or BFG.
• Mis-blamed:
  • Many commentators and fans have pointed to Yager Development's being based in Germany as a reason for the game's themes and message, arguing that such a profoundly subversive, anti-American game could not possibly have been made by an American studio. While Yager is based in Germany and has a multi-national staff, the game's writers and lead designer are all American.
  • The game has received a lot of flak for its mediocre multiplayer component. Yager was not responsible for this aspect of the game (and indeed had no desire to include a multiplayer component at all); it was developed by a separate studio and included at publisher's insistence, or the game wouldn't have been approved.
  • Some gamers find it hypocritical for the game to call out the player for wanting to be the hero in modern military shooters while ignoring the developers' contributions by producing such games. However, the developers' responsibility is acknowledged in game with Konrad's suicide, a point which writer Walt Williams notes wasn't picked up on by the vast majority.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The entire point of this game is playing with this trope. Walker starts out wanting to save Dubai, but progressively makes things worse; such as when he kills dozens of soldiers and civilians at a refugee camp with White Phosphorus, or when he helps to destroy Dubai's water supply. Throughout, Walker is pathologically incapable of admitting that he's crossed the line; he shifts blame onto Konrad to keep up his "hero" narrative, until he sees that Konrad's corpse and realizes the one he was talking to was a manifestation conscience. From there the player can decide how redeemable he really is, and force him to accept responsiblity for his actions. Alternatively, in the epilogue, he can deliberately slaughter the unambiguously friendly soldiers sent to pick him up. Very much not coincidentally, it's something the player will have to consciously choose to do.
  • Meta-wise, the game's achievements treats the titular line being crossed if the player chooses to shoot the civilians that lynch Lugo. Considering how much it goes against Walker's original mission statement and it is indeed a conscious choice of Video Game Cruelty Potential on the player's end, it qualifies as this trope.
  • Storywise, while Riggs had been skirting this for quite some time, he ultimately crosses it when he carries through with his plan to doom the entire population to death by dehydration by destroying the water supply trucks. Like Walker, Riggs, in his final moments, tries to justify his actions on what Konrad did, but with the later knowledge that Konrad was dead the entire time, it's clear that he was acting on his own mental issues and that this could have easily been prevented if he had been told that Konrad was dead.
• Older Than They Think:
  • A lot of critics praised Spec Ops: The Line for deconstructing the modern military shooter (and the violence in games as a whole), but it is not the first game to do so — or even the first game in the last decade. Haze attempted it earlier, in 2008, as a deconstruction of game violence as a whole (the plot was sci-fi to attack the sci-fi FPSes of the time, but at one point, the game was to be set in Afghanistan as a modern shooter). Unlike The Line, however, it received mixed reviews for its controls, glitches, rushed development, and absurd story that removed many features and storylines and even less subtlety than in The Line.
  • Blacksite: Area 51 was also a similarly anvilicious, deconstructionist take on the modern military-themed/sci-fi shooter, but suffered the same problems as Haze. The game itself dealt with US foreign policy and has a similar You Bastard! undertone.
  • Bizarrely enough, the game that helped start the trend of Take Cover! (that Spec Ops uses as a framework), kill.switch, had a You Bastard! undertone and explored player agency. The player character was a faceless man working for a weapons corporation that profited by sending remotely controlled soldiers to start civil wars, and then selling weapons to both sides. You control one such soldier. It's further highlighted by the player character's callous dialogue and eventual death by a third party, who gives the soldier the PC had been controlling free will... and a chance to end the corporation that had been controlling him.
  • There were also plenty of jabs at games in general in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty; the player is led to expect they'll be playing as the previous game's beloved hero, and then finds they won't be; the player character seems to be an audience stand-in who reacts as the player would, but he's not, he's psychologically traumatized, regretful of his actions if he shoots a guard, and is supposedly trained on virtual reality (read: video games); the player is led to expect a standard power fantasy, then finds that much of the plot is dedicated to proving how little power/free will a player actually has; the player trusts the game, only to encounter Interface Screw, Fission Mailed, and other cracks in the fourth wall, all ending in the main character metaphorically shucking off the player's control. The main difference is that Spec Ops: The Line is more focused in genre criticism and less experimental.
  • This game is often called a rebuttal or deconstruction of the Call of Duty series. People saying this seem to think COD is a jingoistic shooter where America Saves the Day, when (at least at the time) the Modern Warfare games weren't afraid to have heavy anti-war campaigns about how War Is Hell where you don't even play as Americans a lot of the time, and America sometimes just makes things worse. ^note In fact, all of the most popular MW protagonists are British.
    • Modern Warfare had the Marine campaign both begin and end with a mission where American soldiers storm a middle-eastern city with overwhelming force only for it to be All for Nothing, and the Marine campaign ended with 30,000 soldiers dying as a nuke detonates. The player character (and a few others in the remake) crawl or shamble, shell-shocked, before dying from radiation poisoning. This game's white phosphorus scene is clearly supposed to be a deconstruction of the famous AC-130 sequence...which already focused on the Dissonant Serenity of erasing infra-red signatures from the quiet and comfort of your aircraft, and how detached the operators are.
    • Modern Warfare 2 was criticized for beating the player over the head with death quotes about excessive nationalism, and the main protagonists are British SAS fighting an American ultranationalist, and his American PMC.
    • In Modern Warfare 3, a heroic Russian helps the SAS kill the mastermind behind it all...who was a Russian ultranationalist funded by the previous American ultranationalist.
    • Black Ops explored the murky morality of the titular operations, and put the lead character's sanity and Determinator tendencies into question. And the WMD mission put the player in an observation plane directing infrared signatures on the ground, and directly contrasted it with the chaos of playing as the ground troops.
• Once Original, Now Common: Borderlands 2 writer Anthony Burch once noted that the trend of "this violent video game is about how you're a bad person for playing violent video games" had become rather excessive in the years following the release of Spec Ops: The Line, to the point the theme was starting to become obnoxious. The first person to film themselves urinating on an image of Jesus might be an artist, but the 10th person to do it is just an asshole.
• Player Punch: Several.
  • The fact that most of the enemies in the game end up being American soldiers is likely to leave American players who were expecting a conventional Middle East shooter feel uncomfortable.
  • The white phosphorus incident. The devs claim several people in their focus groups had to stop playing after that. Exactly as intended. Let's put it this way: it was so horrible, nightmarish, and downright realistic, that even someone as cynical as Yahtzee wouldn't dare to make light of the scene.
    • Possibly made even more effective by the way it's preceded by a scene that's a combination Moment of Awesome and Funny Moments. (Radioman "singing" along to Dies Irae whilst a gunship rips apart the side of a building you're desperately running through to try to get to safety), followed by scenes of said helicopter crashing into a building just across from a wall, your first "boss" fight, drama within the squad and the opportunity to be a hero by saving civilians. By this time the player will be playing this like a high octane war shooter, which carries over into the next chapter.
  • Riggs crashing the water trucks, thereby dooming the Dubai refugees to death of thirst.
  • Lugo shooting the unarmed Radioman to death.
  • The refugees forming a lynch mob and killing Lugo, followed immediately by giving the player the option to gun down the lynch mob in retribution.
  • The reveal that the Konrad that Walker talks to is part of his conscious, therefore Walker himself is deluding himself the entire game. Walker himself doesn't take this well either, especially given that, if the player doesn't intervene, he is Driven to Suicide.
• Realism-Induced Horror: The whole game sprints on this, basically, which is why it manages to be such an effective deconstruction. The horrors of war are depicted here in visceral detail, complete with not only true-to-life representations of the senseless destruction and violence that war leaves on its wake, but also how those participating in it end up becoming broken people should they survive to it.
• Sequel Displacement: Most gamers probably aren't aware that there was an actual series beforehand, though the game is rather different from them anyway.
• Signature Scene:
  • The first hint that the game is going in a new direction is when you wander around Dubai and suddenly you hear Deep Purple's "Hush" blare through the sands, mostly because the song's style and music is so unexpected and atypical for a setting and genre like this.
  • The white phosphorus incident is pretty much the defining moment of the game, mainly because of being a massive Player Punch and the moment where the Genre Shift and the real point of the story (that the guy you are playing is pretending to be someone he is not, a hero...and so are you) lights up.
  • The ending of the game, particularly when the now-revealed-to-be-imaginary Konrad holds Walker at gunpoint as the latter pleads for mercy.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The early parts of the game (presumably intentionally) seem like a generic, somewhat unpolished, modern military shooter. As it progresses, the story begins to play with and subvert the expected tropes, creating a more engaging experience.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • Several critics noted that, despite the developers claiming to having based the narrative on Heart of Darkness, the game arguably has more in common with Apocalypse Now, another loose adaptation of the former: it shares Apocalypse Now's wartime setting and critique of American interventionism, among other things.
  • Could be considered one for Shutter Island book and film, both are about a protagonist with a pathological need of a heroic narrative to cope with their growing insanity, and post-traumatic stress.
  • Others have compared it to Fight Club for being a vicious deconstruction of machismo, violence, and pointless human aggression which ends with the revelation that the villain was just a hallucination of the protagonist.
  • In terms of themes and characterization, it also has a number of striking similarities with The Hurt Locker.
  • If you've been disappointed with the latest games of the Silent Hill series, this will definitely scratch that itch.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The other games weren't exactly the most well-received titles, but this installment is the most acclaimed and most well known in the series.
• That One Boss: That Heavy Trooper with the strobe light and the ability to teleport. Walker is hallucinating, but in most other cases, "dying" at the hands of a hallucination will just lead to a reload from the last checkpoint and the hallucinatory element vanishing. Not this guy. He'll kill you over and over again until he stops being atmospheric and starts being frustrating.
• That One Level:
  • Play Chapter 6 on FUBAR difficulty. You have no backup, all your guns are gone, you are surrounded by enemy soldiers who can and will flank you any time you are not looking, and three shots from any gun kills you stone dead.
  • Chapter 14, in particular, expects you to push uphill to a guardhouse despite being up against two entrenched turrets. And while Adams himself says that "charging head-on is suicide", that's more or less what the game forces you to do against one of the bunkers…at very close range, with little cover, while well-armored, grenade-throwing enemies vault over the sandbags and melee you. You don't have many options other than bum-rushing the bunker and hoping you last long enough for Adams to help you take it.
  • Chapter 13: "Adams", on any difficulty. Notably, there's one part early on where Adams is injured and immobile, and you both are being fired at by the 33rd from every angle. The combined fire can kill you very quickly as soon as you come out of cover. Then an elite comes in at the end, by which point you're likely low on ammo.
  • A turret section about a third of the way through the game makes you Hold the Line while seemingly at least a platoon of American soldiers come at you. And they have RPG's, which can instantly kill you on any difficulty level. And there's too many guys appearing all around your screen for you to keep them at bay.
  • The ending of the mall can be infuriating. You're given a Timed Mission to storm past some soldiers and take control of a turret, which then turns to you having to protect your allies while they try to get over to you. And if you fail, you have to start over from the beginning.
  • The radio tower level is a pain from start to finish. It begins with a prolonged sniper battle where you are heavily outnumbered and all your cover is destructible. After you storm the place, you have to leave the way you came, right through a fresh helicopter full of Elite Mooks and fresh troops. Then you use the helicopter's mounted gun to cover one of your teammates as he makes his way to you. Then you have to defend the helicopter as you make a victory lap and destroy the radio tower.
  • Pretty much everything after the helicopter crash. While Spec Ops was never generous with ammunition before, here it really gets strict and starts only allotting ammunition in quantities normally reserved for post-apocalyptic Survival Horror games like Metro 2033. The rest of the game is nothing but a Drought Level of Doom. Oh, and upon waking after the crash, you have only a handgun with 20 rounds of ammunition. And you are immediately beset upon by a dozen soldiers. You can kill them for more weapons, but they themselves hardly have any ammunition unless you execute them, which is very hard to do with how many enemies the game throws at you at once. And you are going to face more of them than ever before.
  • The yacht section combines all these problems with being attacked from every angle, enemies throwing grenades in confined spaces, and then having to deal with a frigging SANDSTORM.
  • The enemy's Last Stand is suitably brutal. You are just two guys on foot with nothing but personal small arms and grenades trying to attack a fortified position on foot, going uphill. Every single shot counts. It can take an hour to gradually grind your way up through the damn thing. And afterwards, you have to fight the toughest heavy in the game at very short range while he has a fully automatic shotgun.
  • Fighting to the final objective is difficult. Try as you might, you're pretty much going to have to change guns on just about every single fight as you deplete their scarce ammunition. And the resident tough guys are at their most plentiful.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A meta example with the achievements. As the devs didn't want to include them but were forced to by Executive Meddling, you'd think this would be a perfect case of achievements being way too easy and a mockery of them, or way too hard and grindy to mock anyone who would go after them, right? Nope, they're all generic achievements that don't require you to do anything special beyond a second playthrough.
• Vindicated by History: Predicted by writer Walt Williams, who noted in an interview that the game's Audience-Alienating Premise meant it was unlikely to ever be the sort of game with mass appeal but that word of mouth will eventually give the game the respect it deserves. It had enough of a following amongst certain gamers —usually those who seethe at the current trend of modern military shooters — enough to have a book written on it. At the end of the 7th Console generation and while still controversial, the game has become acknowledged as a classic of that era and is considered to have one of the best story campaigns for any mainstream game, with some of the richest characterization, and it shows up in lists of best games ever due to its storytelling. The game even has a dedicated and enthusiastic fanbase who continue to theorize about the story and the game's messages to this day, and even created their own mods for the game.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The sheer amounts of Scenery Porn are inspiring. It's no wonder Yahtzee likes the game so much. It has its share of grays and browns, but the base palette largely consists of bright oranges and yellows, the sky is regularly visible and bright blue, and the interiors of the lavish buildings that line Dubai are gorgeous, with vivid colors in both warm and cool shades applied to obscenely wealthy but ruined villas and Banksy-style artistic renderings by the locals. Real doesn't have to be brown, even in gritty war shooters.
• The Woobie: The citizens of Dubai, once you think about it. Trapped within their own collapsing city and abandoned by the government of Dubai, the citizens struggle to survive until the Damned 33rd come along. But then the situation worsens, and their would be heroes turn into abusive tyrants. And then a schism occurs within the Damned 33rd, creating a civil war that causes a significant amount of crossfire victims for the civilians. Then the CIA come up to exacerbate the civil war. And then Delta Squad shows up, kills several of the Damned 33rd in swathes, proceeds to do the same to the civilians through numerous atrocities and ultimately doom them all to a slow and agonizing death. The one time they get their hands on revenge on one of their tormentors (ie., the lynch mob hanging Lugo for basically condemning them to death) and it can end up with them being totally massacred. They pretty much undeservedly suffer throughout the entire story just for existing. At least there’s a rainstorm for them at the end of the story...

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