Really A Horror Game
While I have access to GW2, WoW, and even FFXIV at the moment, I still found myself casting about for something different to play going into the weekend. In so doing, I came across a Steam-discounted Spec Ops: The Line. There are plenty of reasons I passed over that game when it came out, largely boiling down to "I'm not really that big on shooters," but I've also heard it mentioned as a game with a story that is.... hmm... let's go with remarkable in the sense of being "worthy of remarking upon." And at around $5, that seemed worthwhile.
From a mechanical standpoint, it seems to me a decent third-person shooter. I can't say I have a whole lot of experience with the genre, so I can't rate it very seriously, but I think I found more recent Mass Effect games more comfortable and fun to play from that angle alone. It wasn't bad, though. One player and two squadmates versus tons of enemies. There are three branching "choices" that I can think of before reaching the end, and none seem to make any major difference. So, standard fare without being terribly good or bad.
The catch is the story. It strikes me that this is, as far as the experience goes, a horror game in guise of a shooter. It's not a showcase of grotesque mutations and zombies or jump scares. Those things are termed "horror" in games, but no. They might be disturbing or scary, but horror? Spec Ops better embodies the term to my mind with its depictions of how easily a tense situation can slip straight into combat and how terrible warfare can be. It's a dark game.
The player takes control of someone who is... not a good guy. It'd be easy to argue he's even the bad guy by the end. The game doesn't really offer any way to step off the path that is a descent into madness and war-horror. One of the developers is quoted as saying the player has the option to quit playing, which is true, but is sort of a cop out if he envisions that as the realize how bad things are going to be because... who's going to buy a new game and immediately give up playing it? There's no in-game option to turn around.
The game is said to have taken inspiration from Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, neither of which I have clear memories of. The latter I've only seen in bits and pieces. The former... I'm not sure if I studied that in school or not at this point. So I can't judge how close any of it is to those, but there's definitely an "artistic" intent to this game, and I respect that. I think while the mechanical gameplay may be nothing outstanding, the.... experience of the game is crafted very well, however dark and depressing it may be.
Captain Walker and his two Delta Force partners venture into a post-apocalyptic Dubai shielded behind "storm walls," but still battered by sand storms. They're on a mission to find any survivors among the locals or the Army battalion that went in to evacuate them months ago and report back. Of course, at first contact things go bad. Worried about the armed locals and having to translate to talk, it doesn't take much of a misunderstanding for the first firefight to break out. Then there's a radio signal of Army survivors in trouble, so the group rushes to help. Then they follow a survivor trying to find out what is going on only to be fired upon by soldiers. And things go downhill from there. Literally - even though several goals are atop the towers of Dubai's remains, so much of the game is spent going down - surely a deliberate design choice.
At almost every step, Walker and Co. are faced with bad choices. They don't want to shoot people, but they're being shot at. They don't want to use that mortar, but it's the only way to clear through the hostile soldiers between them and the next objective. It becomes more and more clear that the body count cannot possibly be worth it, but there's only one way to go - forward. And that undercuts things a little bit when you get to the end and a cut scene helpfully points out that Walker shouldn't have done any of that - he should have gone back and reported about the survivors as soon as he found them rather than getting dragged into a battle trying to be a hero. That's... true, but the game didn't give any real choice in the matter.
So while the game seems like it might be berating the player as much as the character for the rampage of death and destruction, part of that message loses a little something. Still, there is some impact to it. It's certainly far more self-aware than countless other games that have the main character gunning down seemingly-endless opponents.
There are also some issues with placing all the blame on the protagonist of the game. Certainly he was directly involved in a lot of horrible things, but there was already a conflict going on in the city. The use of phosphorus rounds was terrible, but the Army used them first and had them available while enabled Walker to use them. So it's difficult to say things would have actually turned out much better (for those in the city) if the trio had, in fact, turned around to report immediately. It could have just brought a rescue force into the mix and made the body count even higher.
But... it's still a pretty powerful experience, and haunting in a way "horror" games generally aren't.
From a mechanical standpoint, it seems to me a decent third-person shooter. I can't say I have a whole lot of experience with the genre, so I can't rate it very seriously, but I think I found more recent Mass Effect games more comfortable and fun to play from that angle alone. It wasn't bad, though. One player and two squadmates versus tons of enemies. There are three branching "choices" that I can think of before reaching the end, and none seem to make any major difference. So, standard fare without being terribly good or bad.
The catch is the story. It strikes me that this is, as far as the experience goes, a horror game in guise of a shooter. It's not a showcase of grotesque mutations and zombies or jump scares. Those things are termed "horror" in games, but no. They might be disturbing or scary, but horror? Spec Ops better embodies the term to my mind with its depictions of how easily a tense situation can slip straight into combat and how terrible warfare can be. It's a dark game.
The player takes control of someone who is... not a good guy. It'd be easy to argue he's even the bad guy by the end. The game doesn't really offer any way to step off the path that is a descent into madness and war-horror. One of the developers is quoted as saying the player has the option to quit playing, which is true, but is sort of a cop out if he envisions that as the realize how bad things are going to be because... who's going to buy a new game and immediately give up playing it? There's no in-game option to turn around.
The game is said to have taken inspiration from Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, neither of which I have clear memories of. The latter I've only seen in bits and pieces. The former... I'm not sure if I studied that in school or not at this point. So I can't judge how close any of it is to those, but there's definitely an "artistic" intent to this game, and I respect that. I think while the mechanical gameplay may be nothing outstanding, the.... experience of the game is crafted very well, however dark and depressing it may be.
Captain Walker and his two Delta Force partners venture into a post-apocalyptic Dubai shielded behind "storm walls," but still battered by sand storms. They're on a mission to find any survivors among the locals or the Army battalion that went in to evacuate them months ago and report back. Of course, at first contact things go bad. Worried about the armed locals and having to translate to talk, it doesn't take much of a misunderstanding for the first firefight to break out. Then there's a radio signal of Army survivors in trouble, so the group rushes to help. Then they follow a survivor trying to find out what is going on only to be fired upon by soldiers. And things go downhill from there. Literally - even though several goals are atop the towers of Dubai's remains, so much of the game is spent going down - surely a deliberate design choice.
At almost every step, Walker and Co. are faced with bad choices. They don't want to shoot people, but they're being shot at. They don't want to use that mortar, but it's the only way to clear through the hostile soldiers between them and the next objective. It becomes more and more clear that the body count cannot possibly be worth it, but there's only one way to go - forward. And that undercuts things a little bit when you get to the end and a cut scene helpfully points out that Walker shouldn't have done any of that - he should have gone back and reported about the survivors as soon as he found them rather than getting dragged into a battle trying to be a hero. That's... true, but the game didn't give any real choice in the matter.
So while the game seems like it might be berating the player as much as the character for the rampage of death and destruction, part of that message loses a little something. Still, there is some impact to it. It's certainly far more self-aware than countless other games that have the main character gunning down seemingly-endless opponents.
There are also some issues with placing all the blame on the protagonist of the game. Certainly he was directly involved in a lot of horrible things, but there was already a conflict going on in the city. The use of phosphorus rounds was terrible, but the Army used them first and had them available while enabled Walker to use them. So it's difficult to say things would have actually turned out much better (for those in the city) if the trio had, in fact, turned around to report immediately. It could have just brought a rescue force into the mix and made the body count even higher.
But... it's still a pretty powerful experience, and haunting in a way "horror" games generally aren't.
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