Played: Spec Ops: The Line
I’ve been dithering around games for a while, trying to get past the fact that the otherwise excellent Planescape: Torment is quite dated. My pre-order of Bioshock: Infinite came with a free copy of Spec Ops: The Line, a game I hadn’t researched much (aside from knowing that it was supposedly a good manshooter). I don’t really play games that have these basic features: gruff American soldiers, a Middle East setting, gameplay that largely consists of shooting other men. I don’t play them because the “oo-rah” attitude that comes with the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor kind of disgusts me, there’s an attempt to display Middle Eastern countries as somehow backwards or uncivilised (or at least deserving of American influence), and gruff American soldiers are usually so boring. (Sorry, gruff American soldiers.)
Spec Ops: The Line was brilliant. Derivative (it borrows heavily thematically from Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now), but brilliant. It’s surprisingly pretty for a warzone, making use of the once-decadent palatial interiors of Dubai high-rises to create some impressive backdrops to the carnage unfolding in front of you, and the story - never outstaying its welcome - feels deserved. You feel bad playing this game, but in the sense that you’re learning a little about what it’s like to kill people for a living. Captain Martin Walker is an excellent depiction of the onset of madness, and it’s not just the cutscenes that get this across - by the end, what started as routine, clinical kill confirmations and target spots have become guttural roars.
The gameplay itself is… hm. Set to easy, I enjoyed it. The thing is, you don’t really want a game like this to pose a technical challenge. There’s no sense in the idea of a lightly-armoured enemy still not going down after a couple of bullets to the chest if you’re going to represent this with any degree of realism, and the fact that when it’s set to easy you can pick them off like flies hammers home the brutality of what you’re doing. There’s no happy ending to this game. There’s no fucking rock concert. There are a lot of different endings, and you lose every single time. Which is kind of daring. If The Walking Dead hadn’t come out last year, I might be thinking of it as the best story to emerge out of gaming in 2012. As it is, it’s just very, very good.