Spec Ops: The Line

Spec Ops: The Line is the kind of game I would normally pass over. I've never been much of a fan of relatively conventional shooters as a genre for various reasons, and indeed I'm of the opinion that modern shooters that trace their lineage back to Doom have basically completely missed everything that made Doom good and nuanced. The 'cover shooter' phenomenon actually amuses me outright, as Doom was basically a cover shooter before they had their own label, in that you ideally spend a lot of your time ducking back around walls and the like and briefly popping out to take a shot and then popping back behind the wall before the fireballs reach you.

However, I've heard a lot of praise for Spec Ops: The Line's approach to depicting war, in terms of facing you with hard decisions and it happened to be available for free recently anyway, so I snapped it up and then prioritized playing it, where usually a conventional shooter would sit on my computer as something I'll theoretically play if I get bored of literally everything else yet never actually get around to.

This post is going to cover some fairly serious spoilers of the game, incidentally. If you're hoping to experience it yourself, maybe come back later.



My early impressions were a bit mixed. The cover snap-to controls are a bit janky; when I played the Bureau it took me a couple hours to figure out how its cover snap-to mechanics worked, but once I did figure it out I didn't have issues ever again. The Line's cover snap-to mechanics kept getting me killed through no real fault of my own all the way to the end of the game. The game has mechanics for issuing orders to your squadmates, and exactly twice 'educated' me on how to do so, but I never figured out how I tell my squadmates to attack a particular target (Leading to a funny moment where one of my squadmates said 'so we're on our own?' when it was brought up that a storm would prevent radio communication. Yeah, you're on your own. As usual) and the 'stun' order only crops up if the game decides you're pinned down by enemy fire. The game mentions that every weapon has a secondary function, but it only explains, like, two of them, and it doesn't bother to clarify that there's a UI element letting you know which mode you're in and whose visuals usually provide a decent hint of what the modes are about, such as a pair of crosshairs with different x# modifiers signalling that you're modifying the zoom level on your sniper rifle when switching modes.

On the other hand, the gunplay was solid initially, and the gun variety is good. Even similar-ish guns I fairly quickly got a sense of them actually being meaningfully different, unlike eg The Darkness II. The grenades are the best-designed grenades I've seen in any shooter; I'm particularly fond of how they tend to leave behind a cloud of smoke/sand, as it makes the throwing of a grenade a complicated decision with a lot of trade-offs/secondary implications to consider. Contrast with The Bureau, where the only real complexity in the use of grenades is that you have a limited supply of them; otherwise they're just a superpowerful attack that hits multiple targets.

The game's handling of moral decisions is... iffy. I spent a long time basically jumping at shadows, waiting to see if the game would offer me a non-lethal way of handling several different encounters that really seemed like it ought to be possible to handle without just killing everyone, and eventually basically gave up; the first time the game forced me to fight American soldiers I just shotgunned the first pair that ran past before the squad could finish going through their conversation about how they didn't want to fight American soldiers but also didn't want to leave them to their business of murdering civilians.

Note that this is meant to be a big deal where you're hesitating because they're friendlies, but this game's gameplay had trained me to just casually kill anyone who was registered as a hostile. I didn't do that because I was approaching the game with a typical shooter mentality. That's rather off, coming from a game trying to make war morally murky and disturbing to think about.

When the game did finally give me a Major Moral decision ("Save the civilians OR save this guy you think is mission-critical"), it gave me zero indication how I could pick the one I wanted to pick ("Save the civilians") and I finally gave up and shot a bad guy in hopes that maybe that was the trigger? (No)

Oh, and then the 'mission-critical' fellow died anyway, as an extra 'screw you' from the game.

Melee combat is surprisingly smooth, with your character 'snapping' to nearby targets if you're facing vaguely in the right direction. This stands out particularly when coming off the heels of playing The Darkness II, where melee combat was both weak and really finicky/overly precise when it came to judging whether you'd actually hit anybody or not, but really most shooters that incorporate melee combat have it fairly shaky at best. It also just plain amuses me that, where in The Darkness II I was supposed to be a melee monster powered by elemental evil, yet melee was garbage, in Spec Ops: The Line, I'm punching people as an ordinary soldier and yet it boils down to a two-hit kill on nearly every enemy in the game: only Heavies and melee guys fail to be knocked into an Executable state when punched.

On the other hand, that ties into what feels like a missed opportunity; I spent a bit in the early portion of the game wondering if maybe I was intended to get a better/more moral ending by just KOing people rather then punching holes in them with my guns? Then there was a series of encounters where that was physically impossible, and it became clear to me that the game was really just a stock shooter in terms of 'shoot to kill anytime you see a hostile' except when it springs an exception on you. Worse, the game actually rewards meleeing enemies, in that you can Execute enemies in Spec Ops: The Line if they're flailing on the ground (Usually as a result of you punching them) and you can't take their gun so long as they're still alive and in fact an Execution will generate free ammo from nothing and potentially even a free grenade from nothing to boot.

The entire setting feels weird as well; the game is pretty clearly shooting for a fairly dark and serious tone, but I pretty consistently struggled to take the game world seriously. The entire idea of Dubai being ruined by some massive sandstorm and turned into a no man's land as a result, evacuated permanently, etc is just a bit too out there, and ongoing events are overly prone to having extreme Hollywood-style moments that are wildly implausible at best, with one of the more extreme ones being when the player character falls from somewhere near the top of a skyscraper and manages to not only not die on the way down to the ground but only seems to suffer superficial damage, when the events depicted really ought to have broken at least one bone. The Dubai no man's land feels like it would make more sense in a more fantastical setting, one with literally magical superplagues or a weirdo alien invasion or something, and yet the story is clearly trying to tell a very gritty story having to do with fairly current American military policy etc. It makes it hard for me to get a real handle on the actual tone and whatnot of the story, as well as being another layer in me having trouble really getting into the story. Seriously, why is nobody using a satellite phone to call out? The skies above are clear enough this should work, even if there's some magical sandstorm swirling around the city at all hours.

The shaky-cam used in cinematics is irritating. I was okay with it initially, as the first few times it cropped up I thought the game was depicting the viewpoint of a particular individual, but no, the game just... does shaky-cam for no real reason. At best it's mildly irritating, and more often it's making it harder to track what's actually happening in a scene. It's a bad decision that detracts, rather than adding.

One of the game's weak points is that it's really bad at communication in general. There's a sequence where you use phosphorous to kill a bunch of soldiers when you're horribly outmatched, which is pretty clearly supposed to be one of those moments of your character crossing a moral line, as the game made a point of showing the enemy using phosphorous on civilians and emphasizing how appalling the results are. Then one of the dying soldiers says they were 'helping', you come across a pile of horribly dead civilians aaaand... the squad throws a fit and angsts with wording that dances around exactly what they're so bothered by.

I think the game is trying to indicate that your squad just killed all these civilians with phosphorous (And in turn that the soldiers you just slaughtered were legitimately helping), but none of them are moving (While the soldiers were still in the middle of dying as you were passing through) and the damage doesn't match what you were just seeing done to the soldiers, but does match the kind of damage you've seen done to civilians who were apparently executed en mass... and the 'villain' of the game has been talking about how the horrible things he does are to maintain order and whatnot. (Though this last point is less important in retrospect) So I'm honestly not sure if this is supposed to be the player realizing they just personally killed a bunch of non-combatants in a gruesome way or the player seeing one more layer of awful to the villainous forces' behavior. The wider internet seems to be firmly of the belief that yes, your team just killed a bunch of civilians with phosphorous, and the game straight-up cheats if you try to not use the phosphorous (Three snipers spawn in with aimbot headshot accuracy with rifles strong enough to one-shot you and your squadmates if you try to fight the force conventionally) which strongly implies it's plot-critical that your guys use the phosphorous, heavily pointing toward the 'oh god what have we done' theory... but I'm still not completely sure that's the actual intent, because the sequence is just that vague!

Similarly, there's a gimmick sequence where you're semi-separated from your squad, helping them from opposite sides of a mall, and at one point a squadmate is scripted to go down and require resuscitation, while the other one is 'pinned down' and can't help until you do... something. There was a mounted gun, and I dealt with that, and nothing doing, even though it was the only thing actually firing on them. I actually had to kill everyone in my little area for the scripting to go ahead and save him.

The poor communication combines badly with the game's tendency to shake up the gameplay with various brief gimmick sequences it, again, doesn't explain at all. The sequence where the player is using phosphorous rounds, for example, in no way clarifies that the way to do what is expected of you is to approach the laptop and press your context-button. Worse, even though that was my initial intuition on what I needed to do, my initial attempt to approach it provided no prompt, leaving me thinking I'd missed something.

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Now, the above is what I wrote as I went along, with a few exceptions. Overall I was pretty positive on the game for the first... 50% of it?

Unfortunately, two issues came up as I got deeper in.

First of all, the gameplay.

I'd actually deliberately set my expectations of the gameplay low going in: my interest in this game was spurred on by what I'd heard of its storytelling, not of its gameplay, and so I had no particular expectation it would have great gameplay and in fact had a bit of an expectation its gameplay would probably be forgettable at best, in part because I'd never heard anything suggesting people were all that impressed by the gameplay. The lack of praise didn't necessarily mean its gameplay was bad, but it was suggestive, and it wasn't the primary impetus in my interest so I didn't really care.

Unfortunately, while the gameplay was fairly okay overall for a decent chunk of the game, later sequences were severely hampered by serious flaws. The difficulty of the last 20% or so of the game is fairly high, which would be fine except technical problems were the cause of more than half of all my deaths. Objects that seemed like reasonable cover weren't usable at all. Empty space I should have been able to walk through was actually an invisible wall. The button you use to melee enemies is the same button you use to vault over cover, which led to several deaths where I was trying to punch someone who had gotten in my face and instead my character went hurling himself out into the open to be shot to death. (This hadn't cropped up earlier because enemies mostly just didn't get in your face in early fights, and even if they did there wasn't enough firepower being tossed around to kill you if such a slip-up happened) It made playing through the game increasingly an infuriating chore.

Second of all is the plot, and here's where the serious spoilers start.

The basics of the story as we're initially presented them go like this: Dubai was wrecked by a magical super-sandstorm several months ago. An American force was sent in to evacuate people, and they weren't heard from. Six months later, our three guys are sent in to search for and evacuate any survivors, whether we're talking Americans or Dubai locals. Upon arrival, it turns out there's Dubai locals who are hostile to Americans on sight, and as things move forward it becomes apparent that the American soldiers have been brutalizing the local population for reasons unclear, hence why the Dubai locals with firearms went straight to hostilities just because our team is American. Also there's some vague plots involving the CIA, but while I'm not particularly a fan of those elements they don't matter to the reason I'm laying out all this stuff.

Unfortunately, when you get to the end of the game, it turns out the narrative that's been spun to you is pretty heavily a lie, and a bizarre, nonsensical one that undermines the game's themes. Throughout the game the top American officer has been talking to our protagonist, laying out how he's been doing all kinds of awful things because harsh circumstances drove him to do it etc: the story seems to be laying out how war is ugly and pushes people to be ugly and whatnot. That's all well fine and good, except it turns out said top American officer was dead before the story ever started, and the protagonist has been hallucinating these conversations the entire time. These hallucinatory conversations were a large fraction of 'establishing' the horrible things the American forces were doing to Dubai civilians, and it was all in the protagonist's imagination.

Now, described the way I'm presenting it, one could be forgiven for thinking this is a switch from 'war is ugly and awful' in the form of 'people doing awful things because of ugly circumstances' to 'war is ugly and awful' in the form of 'war does terrible things to the mind'. I personally think that would be a worse theme, but it would be a coherent one, and I'd be grudgingly okay with it since it's pretty obvious the game really wants it's twist ending.

The problem is the story directly undermines the idea that war screwed up the protagonist. While the exact timeline is irritatingly muddy in the end (How did these characters even get to Dubai if it's surrounded by an impenetrable magical death sandstorm, anyway? The game never explains this, which isn't necessarily obvious when you're first playing, due to the game doing a cold open that ultimately turns out to be a hallucination), it's made clear that this is completely impossible. The man came in, desperately wanted to be a 'hero', so desperately that he hallucinated about a ridiculous supervillain so he could spin a narrative in which he goes out and slays a metaphorical dragon. This happened before any gunfire happened, and the game never bothers to suggest that the protagonist issues stem from his prior experiences in war.

This shifts the entire framework from 'war is ugly and awful as an intrinsic fact' to 'crazy people are dangerous and stupid'. Much of the ugly and horrible things that happen over the course of the game, particularly the things the game tries to guilt trip the player/protagonist over, are things that would never have happened if our protagonist wasn't so disconnected from reality he's having serious hallucinations with no awareness of anything being wrong.

Then there's the intersection of gameplay and story. The very first hallucination a player might notice is an infuriating cheap shot combat sequence where the lights are flickering on and off in an utterly unnatural way that primarily serves to obscure the fact that the first several times you shoot a Heavy in the room they teleport somewhere else and leave a mannequin behind. I died to this sequence twelve times before I parsed what kind of bull I was dealing with, and the last checkpoint is actually placed so I had to also re-do a fairly challenging fight before I could even make another attempt at this infuriating sequence. I'd consider it clever and well-done as far as presenting the dangers of hallucinations, except it's just a cheap shot at the player's expense they might not even realize is going on that never comes up again.

Even more egregious is how almost every single 'choice' you can make doesn't actually matter. The plot is fixed. It is on rails. Characters will say different things, but they won't matter: there's one character you can kill or let go, and if you let them go one of your buddies blames a later ambush on the fact that you let that guy go... oh, but if you kill him the ambush happens anyway, and you still get blamed for your decision. The only decisions that actually 'matter' are the ones right at the very end of the game. I'd originally intended to play through the game at least twice and see how different decisions had things play out, but between how frustrating the game became to play and the complete lack of consequence to your decisions... no.

More subtle is how the game can't make up its mind about... I'm not even sure what to call it. Regardless, most of the time the game seems to be running with the idea that your team is operating on the outer edge of realism: there really are figures in history like the Red Baron who performed well in excess of what seems at all reasonable, so three people cutting through dozens of enemies over the course of a series of skirmishes is... really unlikely, but not completely outside of reality. (Though you'll need to gloss over how your AI allies achieve this primarily through being fairly ridiculous bullet sponges who can be put right back into the fight if they 'die' by sticking a syringe in them. The AI just isn't competent enough to get by on, you know, competency) This lets the game have its vaguely realistic modern real world sort of aesthetic/story while still conforming to stock shooter tropes where you single-handedly cut down many times your own number over the course of the game. But then there's scenes where the game suddenly has your characters acting like something that really isn't all that unreasonable an accomplishment for three people is just off the table, and it's this huge whiplash. Is the team hyper-competent and know it, or not? It's particularly jarring because the game basically ramps up both ends up this, with the ending actually implying that literally every single opposing American was killed by your efforts.

I went into Spec Ops: The Line on the idea that this was a game that takes a stab at a mature handling of the very serious and unpleasant topic of war, and while it's probably truthful to say it tried, I don't think it really succeeded.

It doesn't help that the opposing American forces come across as cartoonishly evil, even when you discount the parts we later learn are the protagonist's hallucinations. It undermines the idea that war is ugly and awful when you make one side cacklingly evil and the other a crazy guy and his two overly-loyal buddies.

I'm genuinely disheartened, honestly. I thought I'd like the game, going by what I'd heard. I really, genuinely did.

In the end, though... I'm just disappointed.