The gameplay is not very good, but if you can make abstraction of that, It's worth every penny.
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LTTP: Spec Ops: The Line (I am Sick) [SPOILERS]
- Thread starter CoachKevin
- Start date
The gameplay is not very good, but if you can make abstraction of that, It's worth every penny.
Vulcano's assistant
Banned
It's 7.49 in Amazon, you get the copy in amazon downloads, but Steam also accepts the serial code. I don't know if that counts as getting it twice.
Stallion Free
Cock Encumbered
You can get it for like 2.50$ from Amazon right now with their 5$ coupons.
After thinking about my experience with the game more and more (two full playthroughs) I say that I totally disagree with you. The game is pretty fun. People will have different levels of enjoyment with Spec Ops's game play but I think it's a very fine third-person cover shooter.
Maybe we agree each other and we're just arguing semantics. But I would call the game play good, but not great. Max Payne 3 on the other hand is third-person shooting perfection.
Vasili2K38
Member
Finished an hour ago.. great game. The shooting mechanics were solid (managing ammo, YES!), the game had a decent duration (8 hours of Steam time clocked in a hard run) and the atmosphere, story and attention to detail is stunning. One of the most interesting games I've played in years :O.
Ammo management was a very good idea. Made some part in the game quite tense. The cover mechanic was not very good to me. Changing covers was sometimes a pain in the butt.
That said. I wouldn't call the gameplay bad. It's just not as good as the storytelling, but it's still very playable and yeah, sometimes quite fun.
Get it, Ami (but on Amazon). You dislike all the trappings the current gen shoves down our throats, and this is the exact opposite of that. It's a breath of fresh air.
It's the opposite of God Hand.
28 Posts Later
Member
What do you mean by this - the first game to simultaneously critique both aspects or the first to pose a political critique and separately a critique of the medium?
so glad that Spec Ops is getting some traction here on GAF, bought this Day 1 and was so thrilled with the experience, hopped on GAF after i had finished it and sadly there was no buzz.
Would love it if Yager had the opportunity to make a Sequel or spin off, this was by far the best game of 2012.
Would love it if Yager had the opportunity to make a Sequel or spin off, this was by far the best game of 2012.
Looks like Yager will be a one-hit wonder. Aren't they going down the path of the putrid Free-To-Play genre?
The former, to do both and intertwine them in a very affecting way. Also, unlike Bioshock, the subject matter is very present and part of all our current lives, which makes it twice as important.
It's also probably the first time I've seen americans calling themselves adventurous murderers, and you may agree or disagree, but it's still a very bold statement, and from a country of which I'm used to see very little self-insight.
FTP? yuck!
they earned another chance by there efforts to give it another shot on something with a single player experience, sad to see them go to waste on "cancerous" multiplayer, which imo i found Spec Ops MP to be not so bad, i surprisingly really enjoyed that portion of the game to.
What takes the gameplay, for me, to 'above average' status is how well each scenario is designed. The levels are interesting, the art is amazing, you care about the characters, the sound effects are great (standard for military games), the weapons have real "feal" and impact, headshots feel good because of the slow-mo adrenaline rush, the chatter between your three squad mates and even the enemy combines well into an exciting battle each time. The muzzle flash effects when fighting in the sandstorms are incredibly well done.
LiquidMetal14
hide your water-based mammals
There's nothing guaranteed but a game like this almost can't have a sequel.
I do hope they try and make another game, even if in another genre, that brings as much to the table as Spec Ops did.
Playing a third time, I have to say that
the white phosphorus section is still amazing. On the scene where Walker is reacting to it, it's commendable how effective his model is at conveying emotion. In-game character models are generally very robotic, but you can tell they tried to make him as nuanced as they could. You can almost kind of see the moment where he loses it.
Also, doesn't it look like his eyes kind of glaze over by the end of the game? Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/uFYrc.jpg
Also, doesn't it look like his eyes kind of glaze over by the end of the game? Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/uFYrc.jpg
I'm not sure I get this one... God Hand is awesome, so this is the anti-awesome?
Thanks guys, I purchased it but not in time to read about the Amazon deal. Still, 14.99 isn't really that bad. I'll post my thoughts when I get through some of the game
Now that you own it, stay out of the thread until you finish it!
Yeah, the look in his eyes during the last cutscene is completely different from what it was at the start.
I noticed something like that but thought it might've been the lighting or something. I guess if everyone saw it then it was there.
Yeah, 15 is not that bad, it's a quality game, with decent replayability. It's given me 20 hours of play, so it's pretty alright.
And I think this might be the kind of game you play again a year from now just to see the story all over again.
But yeah, stay the hell out of this thread, there are untagged spoilers all over the place.
cj_iwakura
Member
I know, right? I think he means this is a dead serious game, and not campy, but who knows.
So I just completed the game in one sitting for the single player. Took roughly 6 hours, and holy shit am I blown away.
Initially I was excited for this game way back when it was revealed at the VGA's, and even had time with its beta several years back. Then the developers went completely silent, it released, and well pretty much no one cared.
WHY NOT?!?!!?
I payed 5 bucks, but the SP portion alone merits a $30.00 price tag to me and my tastes. The single player campaign starts out a standard military shooter fair, and slowly but surely takes a turn for some brilliant events. Events you can make choices in.
The shooting (PC version) was top notch. The soundtrack was ace. Story as mentioned is brilliant. Graphically it looks quite pleasing to me all maxed out, and I ran into no glitches of any sort in my play through. I died several times as well so the game poses a strong challenge. It has varied game play segments, and unlockables to keep an eye out for.
The negatives are small:
-Linear
-Grenades can be a bit cheesy
-A lot of the environments, while looking good, do start to run together and feel samey
Initially I was excited for this game way back when it was revealed at the VGA's, and even had time with its beta several years back. Then the developers went completely silent, it released, and well pretty much no one cared.
WHY NOT?!?!!?
I payed 5 bucks, but the SP portion alone merits a $30.00 price tag to me and my tastes. The single player campaign starts out a standard military shooter fair, and slowly but surely takes a turn for some brilliant events. Events you can make choices in.
The shooting (PC version) was top notch. The soundtrack was ace. Story as mentioned is brilliant. Graphically it looks quite pleasing to me all maxed out, and I ran into no glitches of any sort in my play through. I died several times as well so the game poses a strong challenge. It has varied game play segments, and unlockables to keep an eye out for.
The negatives are small:
-Linear
-Grenades can be a bit cheesy
-A lot of the environments, while looking good, do start to run together and feel samey
LiquidMetal14
hide your water-based mammals
Your first and 3rd negatives can be said for some of the best games ever. I would argue that some of the things like the shooting and critiquing of things sort of take a back seat for me since I was so enthralled by everything happening.
I'm glad you seem to have enjoyed it though.
I'm glad you seem to have enjoyed it though.
I enjoyed the experience of playing this. I don't play very many third person shooters, but I found this fun. I'm not sure what that says about me and what the story/goal of the game was. I initially thought the game was a bit too heavy handed when it came to the different events in the story, but after watching some videos posted earlier in the thread (and taking some time to think), I'm a fan.
I really haven't played too many military shooters. I don't mind them too much as long as the games treat the material with some respect. I don't know if it was intentional, but I came away from playing CoD4 pretty disgusted. From the relentless waves of enemies that don't stop until you push forward, to the part where you provide air support and bomb so many people (along with the comments that are made), it just made me sick. The game tries to make you feel awesome for doing some horrible things. I understand that a lot of people disconnect themselves from the content and just have fun with the game. I do it with other shooters all the time. CoD4 was just too much for me, considering how popular it became.
I love that this game tackles this subject matter, and even speaks to this US obsession with the glorification of war. I do like that it can even be generalized to other games. I don't think every single game needs to be this deep though. I like that I can play some games like Bioshock and just kill bad guys and make binary surfacy moral choices. I just hope more developers look at this game and try to learn from it.
I really haven't played too many military shooters. I don't mind them too much as long as the games treat the material with some respect. I don't know if it was intentional, but I came away from playing CoD4 pretty disgusted. From the relentless waves of enemies that don't stop until you push forward, to the part where you provide air support and bomb so many people (along with the comments that are made), it just made me sick. The game tries to make you feel awesome for doing some horrible things. I understand that a lot of people disconnect themselves from the content and just have fun with the game. I do it with other shooters all the time. CoD4 was just too much for me, considering how popular it became.
I love that this game tackles this subject matter, and even speaks to this US obsession with the glorification of war. I do like that it can even be generalized to other games. I don't think every single game needs to be this deep though. I like that I can play some games like Bioshock and just kill bad guys and make binary surfacy moral choices. I just hope more developers look at this game and try to learn from it.
Huh, did you felt sick playing CoD4 after or before playing Spec Ops?
I always just regarded CoD games as Tom Clancy patroitic paranoid fascist bullshit so it was kinda easy to disengage myself from their content (even though I felt pretty offended at killing Fidel Castro in Blops1, since really I feel it's pretty bad taste to simulate murdering an actual living human being, specially since it's not a figure regarded 100% as evil, like Hitler or something), so I never actually felt sick playing them.
it should have been in bad taste to be glorifying violence through patriotism in the first place but Sniper Elite V2 got gif'd to oblivion and it took Spec Ops: The Line's complete lack of subtlety and complexity to get people to start thinking like well-adjusted adults
you're also sort of saying it's okay to kill people in videogames which is completely missing the point of spec ops
along with those who want a sequel
*praise*
28 Posts Later
Member
I don't agree with that - it may not be Spec Op's levels of masochist but there's a strong anti-war theme running through CoD4 [that was lost in the sequel], from the sequence in which your character dies after spending too long playing the hero [a move that was initially described as "chilling" and "risky" from journalists - as was the helicopter section many now criticize whilst using Spec Op's as an alternative] to the ultimate death of basically everyone involved in the core narrative; sure it was over-the-top in a fun way and didn't attempt the more heavy handed style of Spec Op's when dealing with these themes [because they're not all encompassing or ultimately the aim of the game to express], but to dismiss the game as purely vapid fun is unfair.
A player can fully appreciate the message of the game whilst disagreeing with it.
AkimbO_Arcana
Banned
A friend of mine just started streaming his first playthrough of the game:
http://www.twitch.tv/the_long_road
He doesn't know anything about the game, this gonna be fun
http://www.twitch.tv/the_long_road
He doesn't know anything about the game, this gonna be fun
If you can, I'd suggest you to go into the game with the mindset that it's just another run-of-the-mill military shooter, a mindless war game that doesn't do anything that hasn't been done countless times before.
Oh yeah, and the story sucks big time. That's the perfect way of approaching this game.
I feel dirty for writing this. The game is fucking great.
It's driving me nuts how he's playing it like an FPS, barely seeking cover. lolA friend of mine just started streaming his first playthrough of the game:
http://www.twitch.tv/the_long_road
He doesn't know anything about the game, this gonna be fun
AkimbO_Arcana
Banned
I know
He also runs past all the intel, but I don't want to talk into his play style right now. It also looks like it would be better played with a pad than m/k to me.toastyToast
Member
I know
I found aiming horribly inaccurate using the pad. Once I switched to M/KB it was gravy
AkimbO_Arcana
Banned
Aiming isn't the problem. It's all the environmental interaction that looks cumbersome to me, granted I haven't played on PC for years, so it might be fine.
Nah, the game plays a lot better with mouse and keyboard. It's twice as enjoyable to me that way. The controller aiming is just a handicap.I know
Not at all. You can hold shift and space as you're running and aiming and shooting at the same time. Can't do it with the controller since you have to take your finger off the right stick.
Acquiescence
Member
I had no qualms with the aiming once I turned the sensitivity all the way down to 1. Anything higher felt too twitchy.
Watching the stream now ( anyone know the name of this lvl ? ) ,where he just shot the glass and you hear the distraught civilians, I was struck by something that I never mentioned in this thread.
First of all, it's not a secret that this game is filled with a wonderful attention to detail which isn't really something people come to expect from modern military shooters. The few times you interact with civilians or non US combatants you can hear they speak their own native tongue.
Now that's obviously not amazing in and of itself, the language they speak the majority of the time ( I think I caught some arabic in there as well, don't exactly remember who it was ) in the game is Persian, or what sounds like Dari Farsi the version of Persian that is spoken in parts of Iran and Afghanistan .
While they enemies have expected barks like "I'm reloading please cover me" or "help me I'm shot" what the civilians said in the part I mentioned at the top of the post really surprised me.
Here you are as Walker and crew just having "rescued" the hostage civilians by eliminating the 33rd, standing at the bottom of the building gazing up your ( the players/Walkers) eyes see the civilians in apparent distress whom you just liberated. The civilians say something that none of the guys in Delta understand, as noticed by the confusion by Walker going something along the lines of "what is she saying?". The perplexed way Walker phrases it hits home that he really doesn't understand why the civilians aren't hailing them as liberators.
What the women and men were shouting were things like :
"Please leave"
"We don't want YOU here"
"You have caused nothing but destruction"/"You have destroyed enough please stop"
Which in retrospect was confusing even for me at the time, even as someone who understands the language but was as a player equally bewildered as Walker thinking "But... I just saved you?". Which was absolutely amazing because at this point you still have no firm idea of any kind of "twist" or the mental state of Walker.
God I love this game.
First of all, it's not a secret that this game is filled with a wonderful attention to detail which isn't really something people come to expect from modern military shooters. The few times you interact with civilians or non US combatants you can hear they speak their own native tongue.
Now that's obviously not amazing in and of itself, the language they speak the majority of the time ( I think I caught some arabic in there as well, don't exactly remember who it was ) in the game is Persian, or what sounds like Dari Farsi the version of Persian that is spoken in parts of Iran and Afghanistan .
While they enemies have expected barks like "I'm reloading please cover me" or "help me I'm shot" what the civilians said in the part I mentioned at the top of the post really surprised me.
Here you are as Walker and crew just having "rescued" the hostage civilians by eliminating the 33rd, standing at the bottom of the building gazing up your ( the players/Walkers) eyes see the civilians in apparent distress whom you just liberated. The civilians say something that none of the guys in Delta understand, as noticed by the confusion by Walker going something along the lines of "what is she saying?". The perplexed way Walker phrases it hits home that he really doesn't understand why the civilians aren't hailing them as liberators.
What the women and men were shouting were things like :
"Please leave"
"We don't want YOU here"
"You have caused nothing but destruction"/"You have destroyed enough please stop"
Which in retrospect was confusing even for me at the time, even as someone who understands the language but was as a player equally bewildered as Walker thinking "But... I just saved you?". Which was absolutely amazing because at this point you still have no firm idea of any kind of "twist" or the mental state of Walker.
God I love this game.
AkimbO_Arcana
Banned
It's also amazing to watch this after you've played it and see how the squad shouts change over time from standard stuff over more agressive to frantic/insane
AkimbO_Arcana
Banned
Pointing a camera on the face of the person who's playing during the white phosphorus scene is pretty heavy stuff lol. The horror...
The helicopter sequence in COD4 always left me feeling vaguely sick in a way that the shooting at ground level never did. Seeing the tiny white figures sprinting desperately away while the gunner blew them to bits callously with sardonic muttered quips like 'Kaboom' was repulsive. I mean I get power fantasies but that sequence was more like glorying in acting like a kid stomping on ants except y'know with humans in the place of the ants. I didn't detect any commentary in that portion of the game at all, unlike the nuke sequence or the initial execution scene.
When Spec Ops the Line turned that gunner sequence on its head (first by making the targets American soldiers rather than generic foreign bad men, and second by.. well you know) I felt like the makers of the game understood my revulsion exactly and managed to communicate it to others in a perfect way.
I played CoD4 before Spec Ops. There's nothing necessarily wrong with enjoying CoD4. I just hope people can put things into a bit more context and think about it a little more while playing. I haven't played Blops, but I kind of feel a more generalized version of what you felt there.
I'm just going to quote Azih because it's a bit better than what I wrote:
One last thing. I won't completely dismiss CoD4 because that that nuke scene was fairly bold. The problem with the game is the context. Spec Ops gets away with a lot because of the meta commentary, and how the gameplay meshes with the message. CoD4 feels more like it's saying "See? War is hell. Now go have some more fun shooting people".
28 Posts Later
Member
Here's footage from a AC130 Gunship in Iraq
Here's that Call of Duty level
They're almost identical, and that includes the "sardonic muttered quips". You can interpret that as a 'power fantasy' or as giving the player the chance to decide if such an act is repulsive or not. The game isn't as heavy handed as Spec Op's with this theme but even in that level it's definitely a potencial interpretation.
I agree, CoD4's message is muddled in part because the game doesn't fully commit to those themes but to deny their existence is unfair.
when the message runs counter to how much you're supposed to be enjoying yourself then no, that excuse doesn't work
28 Posts Later
Member
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. The only way you can appreciate Spec Op's message is if you don't enjoy playing it? Sure, I assume most felt that, because of the way the game presents the context of killing within those systems.
Is that suddenly going to make me feel like a monster whilst playing, say, Just Cause 2? Not really, because Just Cause 2 presents violence in a comical way and the points scored for "chaos" encourages that kind of gameplay. Because despite enjoying the game and understanding its meaning perfectly I don't personally agree with Spec Op's perception that interactive violence is a terrible thing when presented in the proper context.
WAIT SO YOU THINK THIS GAME IS NOT SUBTLE AT ALL?
holy shit dude you're more repetitive than fucking assassins cred 1
LiquidMetal14
hide your water-based mammals
Disregard this post as I have fixed the SSAA in a later post.
i think it's pretty gross that you have established a cap on how evil someone needs to be before we can kill them in a videogame
but what can i expect from those who cherish young-adult fiction this much