Spec Ops The Line

I got it free with Bioshock infinite ages ago and i was intrigued as it had so many good reviews. I gave up after 30 minutes of playing it. Generic turd to be honest.

I think there are some decisions on who you kill to make later on in the game but to be honest i couldn't listen to the awful and embarrassing cliched voice acting anymore
 
To be honest, if you only played it for 30 minutes you didn't get very far into it. It does seem a bit generic at the start but it gets very good.
 
I finished getting the platinum trophy for it on PS3 a couple days ago - FUBAR difficulty is a little step up from whatever hard mode was called, but both were tough. The story is excellent - right up there as far as recent games go, even if the gameplay itself is generic.

You need to give it a good couple hours to reveal itself, but once it does it's much easier to stick with unless you get frustrated with the higher difficulties.
 
To be honest, if you only played it for 30 minutes you didn't get very far into it. It does seem a bit generic at the start but it gets very good.

Yeah the initial part was just like playing Rainbow 6 Vegas for me, generic bad guys hiding behind cover then popping their head out once in a while to be headshotted, and the player is a superman who can soak up loads of bullets before auto-healing.

I was intrigued by the story though, so that's what kept be playing. I started enjoying it towards the end where it ramped up, and I liked the slow-mo whenever you headshot a guy or blow him up with a grenade launcher. The voice acting was also very good IMO.

I initially suspected that Konrad was just in his head, but then I thought the game was supposed to be a lesson in how a good man can become a monster in war, so I thought Walker would find and kill him at the end and become the new warlord of Dubai.

I still don't get why Walker is supposed to be a bad guy. The 33rd were murdering civilians, hanging them and so forth and you find an idol of Konrad near the end where Walker says the soldiers were killing the civilians as part of resource management. So the 33rd were committing war crimes. The only bad thing he did was kill the civilians by mistake with the phosphor, but that was an accident.

And how did the CIA not know that Konrad had been dead for ages? They could have even seen his body on satellite images on his large balcony, besides the fact that all the soldiers would have been talking about it.
 
I finished getting the platinum trophy for it on PS3 a couple days ago - FUBAR difficulty is a little step up from whatever hard mode was called, but both were tough. The story is excellent - right up there as far as recent games go, even if the gameplay itself is generic.

You need to give it a good couple hours to reveal itself, but once it does it's much easier to stick with unless you get frustrated with the higher difficulties.

I got 90% of the cheevs for the PC, but the bit where you have to protect yer team mates with that stupid mounted machine gun messed it up for me. It's not even close to being accurate. Ended up having to lower the difficulty as my teammates were dieing before I could kill the enemies with it.

Used the pad and the kb and mouse and still couldnt do it.
 
Ofcourse the gameplay is generic. I doubt it had the budget to innovate in any major way. So instead the devs decided to make that generic style work in there favour. The banal mechanics serve to remind us that a lot of shooters treat our in game actions with zero emotional concequence.

For me, it’s the subtle things that make this game one of my favourites. Those subtle loading screen messages like “It’s all your fault...” that start to pop up after the white phosphorus incident ,as well as the way executions become more graphic. The clever alternatives for dealing with certain intense situations (the moment when you have to disperse the crowd, I chose to fire into the air which worked aswell)
But ultimately, it’s that feeling of hopelessness and guilt that the game leaves you with which makes it one of the greats. If any game, no matter how generic in gameplay, can leave you with an emotional response as strong as the one a lot of us got from completing this game, then it can be forgiven for a lot of it’s shortcomings.

"Welcome to hell, Walker..."
 
I quite enjoyed it... not the best game ever but far from the worst, I couldn't complain as it came free with Bioshock Infinite. Did find the story pretty predictable towards the end but still had fun with it. Also managed to 100% the achievements on Steam, which was nice - FUBAR was pretty tricky in places
 
Ofcourse the gameplay is generic. I doubt it had the budget to innovate in any major way. So instead the devs decided to make that generic style work in there favour. The banal mechanics serve to remind us that a lot of shooters treat our in game actions with zero emotional concequence.

For me, it’s the subtle things that make this game one of my favourites. Those subtle loading screen messages like “It’s all your fault...” that start to pop up after the white phosphorus incident ,as well as the way executions become more graphic. The clever alternatives for dealing with certain intense situations (the moment when you have to disperse the crowd, I chose to fire into the air which worked aswell)
But ultimately, it’s that feeling of hopelessness and guilt that the game leaves you with which makes it one of the greats. If any game, no matter how generic in gameplay, can leave you with an emotional response as strong as the one a lot of us got from completing this game, then it can be forgiven for a lot of it’s shortcomings.

"Welcome to hell, Walker..."

Yeah I liked those messages too. Usually they were just some tutorial kind of thing, then suddenly they started throwing out strange comments which reflected the confusion in Walker's head. But you can also read the comments as directed at the player of the game rather than Walker.

I also didn't shoot any of those people who hanged Lugo, I just shot the ground, but then later in an audio log, Walker says he killed those people to restore order or something, but I didn't actually shoot any of them :confused:

I read some comments about the gameplay being generic with swarms of soldiers and heavy music on purpose in some sort of criticism of military shooters, but I'm not sure that's true. I would think that if they wanted to mock other shooters they should have done something like in reality Walker has been captured by US forces for war crimes and in his head he is defeating all the 33rd whom he blames for his actions. Then one of his captors could ask him if 3 guys could really kill a whole battalion.

I will see if I can watch the other 3 endings I read about on Wikipedia.
 
Yeah I liked those messages too. Usually they were just some tutorial kind of thing, then suddenly they started throwing out strange comments which reflected the confusion in Walker's head.

Just before the phosphorus piece it said "It's not your fault, you're still a good person" for me. Immediately afterwards it just said "It's all your fault". Like you said, and interesting insight into what's going on in Walker's head.

I would think that if they wanted to mock other shooters they should have done something like in reality Walker has been captured by US forces for war crimes and in his head he is defeating all the 33rd whom he blames for his actions.

Not sure if you saw this ending, but if you don't commit suicide you get to a point where you're sitting outside a building in Dubai and a convoy of soldiers from a rescue mission turn up in hummvees. They approach you, and if you put down your gun you effectively get taken into custody. There's a brief comment that Walker didn't really survive as a person, and presumably you get tried for crimes afterwards as a broken man.

If you don't put down your rifle you have to kill all of the US troops and then make a flippant comment on the radio to the rest of the rescue group. I guess the point of that one is that it's the most bloodythirsty stereotypical computer game "kill everyone" option. I think that's meant to be the bigger criticism of games because you really do turn into the bad guy and deliberately murder a bunch of friendlies and just brush it off with a flippant comment: even the high and mighty FPS heroes become the villian in the end if they just go with the flow and murder everyone.
 
Last edited:
Personally, I like to go with the theory that Walker died in the heli crash towards the end of the game, and that all events from that point onwards where some kind of hellish purgatory for him in his dying moments.
 
Back
Top Bottom