NOTE: This review mostly focuses on the narrative aspects of Spec Ops: The Line, and those who have mostly avoided coverage of the game should probably simply play the game. If you’ve already read too much or played Spec Ops The Line, this review is for you; while I avoid out-and-out spoilers, the themes and narrative beats are discussed for their purposes and success.
About a month ago, I finished Max Payne 3 and found myself angrier than I had ever been for finishing a video game. I’m not sure why I kept playing it; nobody I knew had especially enjoyed it, and I had known by about one-quarter through the game that I wasn’t really having any fun. I also had little interest in the story, and the game’s beautiful graphics and quality voice acting was not enough to pull me back in. I realized that I needed a break from third-person shooting, and shooting dudes in games in general.
And one month later, I’ve mostly played indie 2D platformers with quirky art styles and great soundtracks. I’ve also played a lot of Street Fighter (III and IV, mostly) and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. I guess I’m saying that games have been fun for the last month or so, without a ton of concern for the hidden depths of the medium. And yes, I have been working through TellTale’s The Walking Dead as well. But The Walking Dead isn’t so much exploring the medium, they’re more truly exploiting the mechanics developed for the Mass Effect series.
Enter Spec Ops: The Line, a game that threatens to bring weight and guilt to the shooter genre. It’s a theme lightly explored over the years by a handful of shooters. BioShock and the Bethesda Fallout games use wanton violence as a mechanic, though neither take it especially seriously and have other messages to sell first and foremost. Meanwhile, more mainstream shooters like Halo, Gears of War, and Call of Duty have been aiming to include elements of this since the hallmark atomic bomb scene from Modern Warfare, all of them including it lightly and without much seriousness. Mass Effect achieves the closest balance by very literally combining the guilt of the RPG genre (which has roots going back all the way to Final Fantasy IV) with shooter gameplay and dialogue trees.
But Spec Ops is aiming to include just as much guilt as Mass Effect without RPG mechanics, and its most effective moments actually happen when no moral choices are to be made. We’re conditioned to make moral choices at this point in games history; when one looks at a Game of the Year list for every year since ‘07, it’s stuffed with games that include them. Some of these games, like Red Dead Redemption, only include them at a very basic level, while others make them the primary focus. Spec Ops includes a few of these moments, usually asking who you wish to save and who you’ll let die. But the darkest magic in Spec Ops the line works when it gives you no choice and still tells you that you are wrong. The game plays upon your expectations, your concerns on who to trust and who to leave alone, and then it tends to force you down a road that ends with only one option. And, you know what? That option sucks. It really sucks. Spec Ops, narratively, is about playing a game you just can’t win, and it works wonders, at that. For those who have never considered the weight, guilt, and moral responsibility that your poor faceless soldier will carry for the rest of their lives, this game will probably blow your mind.
Captain Walker, your surprisingly relatable soldier stand-in (as voiced by the still-great Nolan North,) unravels quite nicely over the game. So do two squadmates, young hot-shot Sgt. Lugo and definitely-not-Ice-T Lt. Adams, who both manage to completely satisfy. They don’t necessarily get to truly live to a full breadth, but their relationships with Walker is one of the things that works best in the game. Adaptive voice acting as featured (perhaps for the first time) is an awesome feature, but knowing the details on how it works definitely reduces the magic of it a little bit. Of course, that's not mentioning the fact that Adams still feels the need to call out every dude with a shotgun the moment they appear. That is never not ridiculous. The other characters remain true to the stereotypes of their allegiances as well, though one faction explores a more believable stereotype than is usually portrayed in media.
The game makes quite a bit out of its “horrors-of-war,” offering significant gore and curses flung at your characters for being meddling Americans. Of course, due to proximity, it immediately recalls Max Payne 3. In this regard, Max Payne is more competently executed; Spec Ops enters with this, but is too distracted by a seriously underwhelming late-game story introduction to actually follow through on anything other than player guilt. However, what horrors Spec Ops does offer before its turn are well-earned and well-executed, and credit should go to the developers for successfully earning many of the game’s more intense moments.
Sadly, the narrative doesn’t answer some of the most obvious questions one must ask while playing the game. Those who have read interviews about the game probably already know about a story-twist added “recently” to the game’s development, and this twist sincerely distracts from the game’s real narrative. It’s hard to pay attention to the game’s commentary when it’s bombasting you with its poorly-executed final moments and the build-up towards them. Said time would have been better-spent addressing certain obvious ludonarrative dissonances.
As for the video game itself, I find it a bit less frustrating than Max Payne 3 and a bit more entertaining. There’s a shocking amount of encounter variety in the game, and the standard cadre of baddies is mixed up often enough that each moment really can keep you on your toes. The squad command elements are fairly easy to use, and a glimpse at the demo will be enough to tell you whether or not you want to play the game on easy mode or not. The controls for the cover and sprint mechanics can be a bit wonky at times, but otherwise it plays fairly standard for a shooter. Checkpointing can be a bit frustrating, but it’s significantly better than what’s in Max Payne 3. A ramp in difficulty towards the end of the game is absolutely unwelcome, roughly forcing me to switch down to the game’s “easy” difficulty to keep the narrative arc flowing. Much has been made of the game’s graphics not being up to standard, but I think they serve the art style relatively well. It’s no Max Payne in terms of graphics; hell, it’s no Alan Wake or Call of Duty, either, but people are making it out to sound like the game looks like Amy or Deadly Premonition, and that’s certainly not the case.
One might raise the point that perhaps Spec Ops shouldn’t be fun, that entertainment is a form of ludonarrative dissonance with the game’s major themes. But Spec Ops wouldn’t function if it were never fun; the proper response would be to say that “this sucks and I’m done.” It’s exactly the response many people have with the joyless horrors of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and it’s the response I had to last year’s clunky hit RPG The Witcher 2. Without the “sin” and temptation of entertainment, the player would simply quit, or worse, ignore the narrative as easily as they ignore a depressing documentary or essay.
But you can probably guess that I don’t really care about Spec Ops: The Line as a mechanical piece of content. Though certainly playable (and, perhaps surprisingly, even enjoyable,) it’s more interesting for the way it tells its story and the ideas portrayed throughout. Spec Ops doesn’t just speak to its players, or force them to speak to each other; Spec Ops actually boasts conversation with just about every shooter, and it mostly succeeds in this vein. Narratively and thematically, it has some extremely strong moments and a few disappointingly weak ones. It’s not exactly what I’d call a unique little snowflake; Mass Effect and Max Payne 3 approach and raise dialogue about similar issues with their own successes and failures, and the darkness of The Witcher 2 actively caused me to stop playing the game. But it’s worth playing for the sake of discussion, and its successes do ultimately outweigh its faults for one looking for something with true depth.
And, if nothing else, it made the time I spent with Max Payne 3 feel like something of significance.