And did it surpass your assumptions?
Yeah it did.
As a shooter it doesn't handle movement and firing as well as Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, enemy and ally AI can be braindead at times, enemy types are traditional and gamey, and many encounters throw so damn many bodies at you that shooter fatigue can begin to creep up pretty early on, but...
The combination of quality voicework, the breakdown of your unit's original happy-go-lucky but disciplined attitude as they are forced into darker and murkier situations, the contrast between Dubai's vibrant luxury and its savage post-apocalyptic ruin, and the mystery that starts to come together as you collect intel does have a real effect on the tone and drives you forward. Its that maddening inertia that keeps moving you from one area to the next, forced by necessity or drive to keep gunning down seemingly endless amounts of personnel until you finally reach your goal.
I wish the game had more nuance and subtlety, and gave more time and space for certain story notes to sink in, but its the nature of this war machine that you're always forced to keep moving forward, keep attacking and keep searching for what the hell is going on without reprieve, because if you stopped...
At the end of the day I don't think it accomplished exactly what the developers and writers were going for, but it was a solid attempt and a great experiment to learn from. I applaud 2K games for taking the risk here.
To quote another bit from that
Kotaku review:
It is a rare military video game that actually has something to say about war. Most games of this ilk are content to simply throw players into a simulation of battle, crank up a sniper mission, make a few blasé statements about trusting the men by your side more than any government, and call it a day. But Spec Ops: The Line is unafraid to well and truly step outside of the bounds of that traditional shooter framework. While it doesn't always nail the execution (and at times really flubs it), it is a work worthy of discussion, and worth your time. I would be glad to see more big-budget developers and publishers take risks like Yager and 2K did with this game. Hopefully at some point, "risky" games will feel actually risky, instead of merely interesting. But for now, I'll take interesting.
and
And yet when the closing credits rolled, I found myself thinking, wondering, analyzing. I wanted to talk to people about it, I was engaged and invested. For that alone, Spec Ops: The Line is worthy of your time.
If Bioshock had never come out, this game could've taken it place. But in a post-Bioshock world this is just another deconstructive riff on a genre and not necessarily one that takes us to a whole new level. But for what its worth I'm glad I took the ride, even at full price.
