Reviews VideoGame / Spec Ops The Line

I think Kojima has these guys beat by a long shot in terms of pretentiousness, but regardless, I actually like that none of the other factions in the game are any better than the player\'s; the story runs on Gray and Grey Morality (or maybe just Evil vs. Evil). To me, it makes the game feel less heavy-handed and mean-spirited than it would otherwise (although it\'s still pretty bad in that regard; despite the writer\'s claims to the contrary, it does single out the player for ridicule at a few points). As a deconstruction of the shooter genre, it\'s very good, and as psychological horror, it\'s excellent, but when it tries to deconstruct games or media in general, it falls on its face. I personally can\'t stand Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and it\'s not something I think should be emulated.

I just - I feel kind of cheated by the fact that every review seems to focus solely on the story - which obviously they would, it's the most important thing that warrants the most discussion - but there isn't even an asterisk to say 'By the way! The gameplay is an absolute chore. It's just as bad as any of the Call of Duty games this is trying to deconstruct.' And I'm not sure how the reviews can be so positive when such an important aspect of the game - the one the player spends the most time on - is so bland and uninspired.

The story is interesting to say the least, but you can watch a 45 minute video on You Tube and boom, you've seen it all. And you didn't have to force yourself through a 10 hour experience that feels like trying to wade through a neverending swimming pool that's been filled waist-high with cold porridge.

Really? I liked the gameplay. Sure, Walker\'s fucking glued to the ground, and it\'s a straight Gears of War ripoff, but at least you\'re a lot less likely to get insta-killed by grenades you can barely see and can\'t clumsily backpedal away from in time.

Or, more likely, I suck at CoD so bad that this feels like a welcome change of pace.

\"Look, I\'m sorry to Spec Ops and Metal Gear Solid 2, but I have never known a game to tell players they should\'ve stopped playing in a way that didn\'t come across as smug and masturbatory. Because it\'s so obviously fake. The devs didn\'t want you to stop playing; they wanted you to keep playing so that the game could tell you that you should\'ve stopped playing so that you could act like your mind was blown.\"

You know, I never understood why some people called Undertale pretentious, but I think I kinda get the point now.

I was complaining about Spec Ops The Line on Twitter and somebody did make the point \'Oh, does that mean Undertale is pretentious for criticizing you for playing?\' and the key distinction between games is that Undertale only calls you a piece of shit responsible for killing everyone just so that you can see all of the content, if you actually make the choice to go out of your way to be a piece of shit who kills everyone just so that you can see all of the content. Which I did, because I wanted to do the Sans fight.

But Undertale presents an alternative; you can play the game and NOT kill everyone. Or anyone. It\'s great.

The devs of Spec Ops say that they present you an alternative, but that alternative is \'Stop playing the game that you\'ve paid money to play, and pretend that the story is over even though this is essentially like stopping a book you don\'t like 10 pages before it ends and pretending that the rest of it doesn\'t exist.\'

I think the game's reputation in many ways rests on critiquing the cliches of a genre when that genre was at its height. The infamous white phosphorous scene, for instance, is supposed to evoke what was then the ubiquitous cliche of the moment in a modern military shooter campaign where the gameplay breaks off and the player's perspective shifts to a drone or bomber or other vehicle's targeting software, blows the holy hell out of a bunch of wiggling dots on a map, then switches back to the player who gets to feel cool and military. It hits a lot of the same aesthetic and gameplay notes, then makes you walk through the aftermath, and it's effective because it gives you that little squirt of adrenaline and dopamine, then, assuming you go in blind, makes you feel like shit for doing something that, in the moment, felt fun and cool.

But, well, it's been more than half a decade since military shooters had turned old and tired for everyone, rather than just the burnt-out critics who had to play them all over and over, and now that the genre criticism doesn't ring quite as true in an environment where said genre is less ubiquitous, we're just left with the stale gameplay that they concocted the story to try to conceal.

Plus, well, again, a big part of the problem is that not going in blind ruins it for you. Since you already know it's going to actually be a black, tarry look at the genre rather than a straight example, the narrative doesn't creep up on you. Said Signature Scene, for instance, pretty much can't hit with the same impact if you know how it ends, since you can't go into it with the same mindset.

Also, I agree on the Undertale thing. There are a few subtle moments where the game lets the player not do bad things if they're creative, like firing in the air to disperse would-be rioters or saving both hanging victims, but I mostly agree with your thesis that the game essentially pushes the player into doing bad things, then scolds them for it by insisting the winning move is to turn the game off. Cleansed of the gloss of "yeah, this sucks, but is it that different from every other military shooter?" it does come across as preachy and lacking in substance.

...Hope this was coherent. I've just realized I'm rambling, and ha look at the size of this comment. I really should just write my own review at this point.

I guess, as a summary, I think it's fair to say that the game probably worked when it came out, and that it's not necessarily a true failure just because it captured a moment of zeitgeist rather than going on to become a timeless classic. Dated is different from outright bad.

... That\'s an interesting way of looking at it. I absolutely hate to say this, but I think that in order to fully understand this game, I\'m going to have to pick up and play some of the generic shooters that were around at the time, just so that I can see what Spec Ops was trying to deconstruct. Luckily, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Gears of War and Medal of Honor: Warfighter are all about 99p each now.

I\'ve gone into plenty of games with the surprises ruined for me and managed to have fun because, well... the games are fun, but I can see how a game with such a heavy focus on unexpected narrative changes would be devalued by prior knowledge.

And I wouldn\'t worry about rambling, there\'s a reason my reviews are always 3,000 characters. I usually get to about 4,000 and then spend an hour narrowing it down.

I guess one reason I took to it (even though I\'m indifferent to, at best, and hostile to, at worst, \"games about games\") is that I didn\'t view it as a deconstruction so much as a character study or psychological drama along the lines of Silent Hill 2. In terms of military media, I thought it had a lot more in common with The Hurt Locker than Apocalypse Now, the latter of which I\'ve admittedly never seen. It\'s impressive, because Walker, Lugo, and Adams have next to nothing in terms of actual backstory. Their characters are entirely defined and developed by how they interact with each other in the game itself.

That being said, one other, more personal reason I love it as much as I do is that it, perhaps unintentionally, has one of the most brutal and soul-crushingly accurate depictions of how it feels to be suicidal in its finale. It\'s not a game about suicide or suicidal ideation, and it doesn\'t really have suicide as a theme, but its portrayal of that mindset, and the nihilistic, hellishly isolated atmosphere that helps that mindset flourish, hit me harder than it was probably ever meant to.

Maybe that means that it\'s a game that only works if you come into it already feeling a certain way and willing read more into than there is, but regardless, it meant something to me.

Good points Robotnik. I would be going way easier on the story if it was simply a story about Walker and his actions and their consequences, without all that stuff from the devs about player agency and \'games about games\' and so on. A more solid, fleshed out character study of Walker would be more interesting to me than what Spec Ops: The Line turned out to be.

Its depiction of suicidal feelings in the ending is... I like that they tried, but I preferred the crushingly depressing and down to Earth \'Actual Sunlight\' portrayal of it; this one feels kind of weird, the way you have to shoot imaginary Konrad or you seemingly shoot yourself without control. When I got that ending, it didn\'t feel like Walker was suicidal to me, more like he was possessed by something that made him shoot himself without wanting to. Which I guess is a kind of suicidal, but... yeah, interesting but didn\'t work for me.

Well, you can shoot yourself if you want. You just have to turn and aim at Walker\'s reflection, first. I was referring more to the ending where he shoots the reflection, but opens fire on the relief force in the epilogue and goes down shooting, basically committing Suicide by Cop. That was my first ending, and the one I prefer.

I think what pisses me off the most is that the 33rd fired on you first. My first time playing I killed the 33rd soldier cause I knew he was gonna rat me and my teammates out. Walker was right to defend himself and his team.

Also: people like to claim that the white phosphorous scene was solely Walker when the 33rd was hiding behind civilians basically. It’s equal parts their fault.

If I were to write SOTL, I\'d just stick to being a deconstruction of the shooter genre, make it longer, make the gameplay more refreshing and remove all the meta elements of its story entirely. Simple. That\'s how I could make it work.

Let me guess, because postmodernism is an example of moral relativism that inspires a broader cultural nihilism that\'s destroying American culture?

I understood at least 60% of the words in that sentence.

Now, MrMallard, postmodernism is not that. Rather, SOTL fails because deep down its meta elements lies a venomous stereotype: that all people who enjoy shooters of any kind are automatically awful people, when that's NOT the case. While it succeeds in deconstructing the Third Person Shooter genre and is great as a Psychological Horror game, it uses postmodernism in the most awful manner, trying to use it as an excuse to justify a stereotype that has constantly propagated the evil known as Moral Guardians. And whatever questions it raises at the player are the game just trying to justify the fallacies of its dumb, pretentious logic.

MSG2 is very guilty of this, too, but at least was experimental, so one can just brush that off if just for a tiny little bit. Drakengard has gameplay that leaves something to be desired, but it excels in pretty much everything else, especially in deconstructing the Eastern RPG genre and, if not for this game, we wouldn't have the masterpiece that is Nier Automata.

SOTL, meanwhile, is a flat-out hate crime, because all about its meta elements is just the writer, Walt Williams, doing a whiny tirade on why people who enjoy shooters are the worst people on Earth, and evidence can be found on his bizarre, downright depraved Twitter posts and, when reading "The Many Pretentious Failings of Spec Ops: The Line", there were captions of certain parts of Walt's self-published book that show evidence of his horrific prejudice against people who enjoy shooters, even calling them 'crybabies' at one point, showing how hideously narcissistic and hypocritical he really is. Now, I'm sorry if I'm rambling at this point, but all the crap Walt Williams has done really annoyed me upon discovering it.

No joke, I applaud the game for the risks it takes, but its argument that the shooter genre is only enjoyed by evil people is complete bullcrap, because if we go by this logic, then people who enjoy any video game with even the slightest amount of violence against someone, be they human or not, is automatically horrible. All in all, it's the kind of stuff that you can except from the Chick Tracts, a work that is pure, unadultered hate propaganda and was made by an evil Christian fundamentalist whose prejudice against anyone who didn't match his twisted beliefs made him nothing short of the unholy offspring of Judge Claude Frollo and the second coming of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. And apologies for my usage of the Godwins Law here.

I've softened greatly on Spec Ops since writing this, and since writing something a bit longer named 'The Many Pretentious Failings of Spec Ops: The Line', and now I'm kind of in two minds about it. On the one hand, it is truly a shame that no other designers with such a bold and incisive vision are allowed to take the risk that Walt Williams did, and for all of its flaws, Spec Ops at least tries to say something, which is more than can be said for... basically any other shooter game released in the last 20 years. And I also don't think that the game is strictly saying that people who enjoy shooters are evil, it's more of a "We want you to think more deeply about this!" which is admirable.

... Unfortunately, what they want you to think more deeply about it still kind of a load of wank. If the story had just been about Walker, this would be a tragic masterpiece showing the downfall of a guy who wants to be a hero so badly that he involves himself where he doesn't need to and makes things worse for everyone. And you could definitely tie that in to the attitude that the player has during the game as well. But the over-the-top "the good ending is to turn the console off and stop playing!" is the most insincere, faux-artsy bullshit imaginable. It's not unreasonable of me that I don't want to pay $40 for a repetitive and mechanically very basic, mundane shooter which ends with the developer telling me that I shouldn't have bothered, and I'm supposed to say "Wow, so deep!" and not "I was never having fun in the first place so this isn't subversive or anything, I guess this was just a colossal waste of my time."

I think I agree with both \"Spec Ops: The Line would have been better as JUST a Walker character study\" and \" Undertale does the What the Hell, Player? stuff better by letting you make an ingame choice to not be a dick\". As it stands, The Line is pretty much just Blamed for Being Railroaded, The Game. It\'s not very interesting to me as a result.

As a whole, Elmo3000, that's what my point is all about. The risks the game takes are something to behold, but the meta elements are nothing but the delusions of someone just shy away from being one of the closest things of a Real Life Straw Hypocrite, all being preached in a way that would give Dave Sim a run for his money in spades. But at least Walt Williams is not some misogynistic pig promoting violence against women like Dave Sim is.