this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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As far as cover shooters go, it was not perfect, it was awful. You pop up, you shoot a guy while the rest of the enemies shoot you, you go back to cover to regenerate health. Repeat. And occasionally you move because of a grenade. Each combat area is very simple and only filled with half-covers. If you got killed, it was usually because of ones own impatience. They could have easily improved gameplay by adding some full-height cover. And some corner firing. That way you could actually avoid getting shot back at. Give the player some tactical choices. Maybe a few flanking routes.
And about the story.. Its very predictable. Once you realise the game pretends to give you options then takes those options away, it is obvious you are being setup as the bad guy in a Apocalypse Now kinda style. And the only reason I kept playing was that Extra Credits strongly recommended it. I was kinda hoping there would be some twist at the end. But no such thing. The boss is "defeated" and you are presented with the games first and only story choice that actually matter.
Dubai covered in sand was beautiful.
But thats just my opinion. Im glad other people enjoyed the game.
I agree with almost everything except that I think the game's most clever piece is that the choices don't matter. At the time that The Line came out choices in games had taken the industry by storm, games like Heavy Rain and Mass Effect 2 were on people's minds.
The game pretends to give you choices, but the reality is that engaging and going deeper down the path the game and story lay out for you are a recipe for evil, no matter what you think you should be able to control within the game.
The true choice is whether you play the game or not. Do you continue to go through with the whole thing, commit those crimes and destroy that world, and then blame the game for not letting you stop, when the pause menu and a quit to desktop was seconds away at all times?
It's not a very mechanically unique game, there's no mechanical enjoyment pretense to justify seeing it all through, you do it through your vicarious, detached interest. Essentially whether the horrible events that occur unfold or not entirely depend on whether you allow the game to fabricate the scenarios by your implicit enabling.
I think whether that was intentional or not just heightens the intrigue of the entire thing. All that being said, it's a shit game, but its execution and moral message dovetail, intentionally or accidentally, in an extremely unique way that'll never happen again. That fragile balance of unknown intent and message will be upset if ever they were to remaster it.
I agree. Also the message of the game was way too heavy handed and frankly wrong. There's been decades of studies concluding that playing violent video games does not make the player violent or agressive.
I dont think that's not the message of the game. You can criticize portrayal of war in video games and other media regardless of their real world effects
No the point of the game was pretty obviously that you, the player, are a bad person for wanting to enjoy media that portrays something as horrible as war. It's made pretty clear toward the end with the loading screen "tips."
The game was marketed as just another military shooter in a time when the market was saturated with those and then did a bait and switch trying to shame the player for wanting to play just that. The whole point falls flat if you consider that as stated there are no real world effects of playing or enjoying violent media. It's pure moral posturing and self righteous wank.
People can make criticism of whatever they want. Calling a game that criticized the common military game a 'self righteous wank' is reductive and insulting for no reason. The whole point is to make people think about their usual war media and that's not a bad thing.
It honestly sounds like you took the tips personally and are still salty about it.
It does seem like you missed the point again. It didn't criticize the common military game it critized the players of those games. It equated the consumption of media to the actual thing i.e. If you enjoy military shooters, you enjoy actual human suffering.
This is blatantly false. The media we consume doesn't have a real world impact on our actions or character. It is the same moral grandstanding video game players have had to endure since Mortal Kombat packaged in a more artistic manner.
Also stating that anyone can criticize anything is a truism.
Of course different people can have different interpretations of the same thing, but I'd like to defend mine:
When someone says eat the rich is it that they intend to practice cannibalism or do they mean something else? Similiarly, when a video game questions the morality of its players for actions it made them do, does it intend to make the players feel bad for playing or does it have other intentions? I think they're both ways to shock people out of their preconceptions like the rich are superior or military violence is justified.
This is just false. Media, just like real world experiences, absolutely impacts how we think. It might not have a "guy plays terrorist side in a game" -> "guy decides to be a terrorist" kind of causation, but it might have a "guy stops associating terrorists with terror and instead just the people soldiers fight" type of effect. Edit: It also can't be denied that what we consume is based on who we are. One might not play Spec ops the line because they like making virtual people suffer, but they might play it because they like military aesthetic and want to experience being in a badass heroic situation. Or they might play it because sandstorm dubai looks cool. But either way it's not removed from the real world.
Spec ops the line wants to make people stop associating "solider" with "hero" and instead associate it with "hero?". What better way to do that than asking the player directly? I think putting bad npc soldiers in an ordinary video game to get the same point across would be ineffective, as it lets players disregard those soliders as pure evil. Putting the player character in that position lets them see that you don't need to be inherently evil to do bad things, but they're bad nonetheless.