Game Review: Spec Ops: The Line (the campaign)

Spec Ops: The Line is set within the destroyed city of Dubai. The city was hit by huge sandstorms leaving Dubai half buried under a desert. Although most people made it out of the city before the storms hit, this is Dubai and there were always going to be people who were too impoverished and incapable of finding their way out of the city. U.S. Army Colonel Konrad and his infantry battalion The 33^rd were tasked with the evacuation of Dubai and when ordered to leave the city before it was too late, Colonel Konrad and his men disobeyed and chose to stay in an attempt to help those civilians left behind.

Six months later and the world now assumes that Dubai is nothing more than a ghost city with its inhabitance fled or dead. That is until a distress signal is received, sent from Colonel Konrad requesting an evacuation. This is where you come into it. You play Captain Walker of the U.S. Army Delta Force and it is your squad’s mission to enter Dubai and simply search for any survivors and particularly Colonel Konrad.  

 

When you first start playing the game it just appears to be a bog standard third person shooter, all be it with a pretty original back story. After a chapter or two you start to realise that Dubai is far from uninhabited and you find yourself killing people all over the place to rock music. And the music isn’t just random, because Dubai has its own radio DJ. This comes across as quite strange at first and the story doesn’t seem to be going anywhere for a few chapters.

Then all of a sudden about half way through the game you are given choices to make To start with this just feels like an afterthought from a developer that has just finished playing Mass Effect. But by the end you see that it really isn’t an afterthought and that the person who wrote this game is a bit of a psychological genius. The difference is that with other games the choices you make are clear cut and will result in good and bad things happening. In Spec Ops you don’t have that luxury; you just have to do what you have to do to survive and hope that that is enough whilst you search for the truth and maintaining your sanity.  

You also have two NPC team mates with you and again at first Spec Ops seems to be trying to get you to feel for these guys but you just can’t because they are the generic soldier characters that you get in most action games. But very slowly as the game progresses you start to build some sort of respect for them and you almost feel like you need them as their own character profiles develop.

There are also collectables in Spec Ops which for a change actually fit into a game really well. The collectables come in the form of ‘evidence’ and each piece gives you a bit more information about what is going on and slightly more insight into some of the characters.

The game itself has lots of different locations, from desert wastelands to the hotels that were once only for the very wealthy. Usually when a game tries to do this the levels seem very forced together, making cut sense appear to be just a tool used to move locations. But in Spec Ops this isn’t the case and pretty much all of the cut scenes seem to be telling an important part of the story whilst also moulding the chapters together.  

The environment is also used very well. With most of it destructible you can shoot windows out to make sand fall in on people and you can take out things that people where stood on to make them fall to their deaths. You can even blind your enemies with sand that has been thrown up from an exploding grenade. You also have to make every shot count because ammo is few and far between, meaning that you will almost definitely have to pick up new weapons in each chapter.

The A.I is quite intelligent in this game as well, for both the enemy and your team mates. You can even tell your squad to target someone and they will actually do it, and from behind cover as well. The game controls are a bit scratchy at times though and you’ll quite often find that you’ll melee a wall instead of jumping over it, and then you’ll run up to cover but not actually hide behind it.

THE VERDICT

Spec Ops: The Line seems very generic to start with and things happen throughout the campaign that make you question why the developers thought it was a good idea to put these things in at all. But half way through things start to get interesting. If you play the game all the way through all will be explained, and you will not be disappointed when you find out the truth about Dubai and the secrets that it holds. 

LHSRAting for Spec Ops: The Line – 7.6/10 (Xbox 360)

-Ayden

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