War, what is it good for?

 

 

I can easily start off this review of Spec Ops: The Line by saying it's nothing more then a poorly done Gears of War clone. So if your thinking of picking this game up just to have another awesome war shooter in your collection please move along because you can find better shooters out there.

This game is defiantly worth a play through for it's story, which is a rare thing to say for a war shooter these days. Spec Ops does something different, it makes you question what your doing when you shoot people, from the start of the game you can feel like something is off. You play as Walker the Captain of Delta Force with your two squad mates Lugo and Adams. Your mission is to find out what happen to a Colonel named Konrad, who was tasked with evacuating Dubai. After a catastrophic sandstorm hit it, once you get there things look very bad. The city is utterly destroyed, dead bodies are hanging from street posts and there is no one in sight. That is until you run into some insurgents. Who were civilians rebelling against the 33rd who were tasked with protecting them, yea it's kinda confusing in the beginning but it will all make sense in the end….kinda. Eventually you start fighting and killing the 33rd, this is where the game started to bother me. I was killing American soldiers, yea they attacked me first and we did what we had to do to survive but I can see things are just starting to get worst. 

What I really love about this game is that Walker and his squad mates react to whats going on around them, not only in cutscenes but as you play. You can hear it in there voices as they gun down more soldiers….this battle is taking its toll on them. One of the best moments in the game is where your forced to use a very deadly weapon to take down an army of soldiers. It really is one of the first times in a game where you see the devastation and horror you cause using a mega weapon. At this moment, I felt like I wasn't the hero, that I was just messing things up by being here. There are moments in this game where you are given moral choices and you won't have some screen of text pop up explaining your choices either. I really wished the mechanics of the game were tighter because moving from cover to cover or shooting enemies wasn't as smoothly as you would expect. The end game kinda drags on and the ending is a bit confusing but you can reload and watch it on fold again and make different choices which is cool. 

In the end Spec Ops won't be remembered for its gameplay or lackluster multiplayer, where you can pretty much run up to any body, melee them once and they are knocked to the ground to be finished off. No it's story is really something interesting, something no other military shooter has ever done. It really tries so hard to drive home the point that maybe you shouldn't be doing what your doing….but in the end when faced with extreme circumstances to survive, do we really have a choice? 

6/10