Spec Ops: The Line

Spec Ops: The Line turned out to be a genuinely nice surprise, is designed for people over 18, not only by the constant shooting scenes but also for the tone, mature theme and psychologically demanding posture.

A decent tactical shooter, but the campaign is too short and too average to provide anything more than a weekend's distraction. [Issue#87, p.76]

The game is pretty much a must-play for anyone interested in videogame narrative or the debate on virtual violence, and the sheer subversiveness it brings to one of the most profitable and least nuanced of gaming genres is certain to be influential in future. But dubious mechanics, cursory multiplayer and niggling design shortfalls all weigh heavily in the other scale. Spec Ops may turn out to be less notable for what it is than for what it inspires.

In a nut shell, it has a few "neat" things but in the long run they aren't worth the $60 price tag. I recommend waiting for a price reduction or saving your hard earned money for the next "Call of Duty".

A well executed game lacking much in the way of original gameplay. Play it for the story, grind it for the interaction.

A good shooter with nice mechanics and fun multiplayer modes. It's a darn shame that the dialogue is so embarrassingly bad.

Should you buy Spec Ops: The Line? Well, it's the usual yes and no. Yes if you enjoy the setting and like the idea of a descent into the madness of a buried city, but no if you're fed up of cover-based, Unreal 3 engine-powered shooters. If you get it, you can force your way through the carnage to get to the more interesting nuggets of non-shooting. You won't be disappointed if you do stump up the cash, but neither will you be fisting the air with glee at having made an inspired purchase. It's alright, basically.

One of the most daring marriages of narrative and action game ever seen, and yet still the end result never fully satisfies as either a game or story.

It would also be an overstatement to call it profound: in any other medium such themes would hardly be revelatory, and although The Line is a thoughtful and well-intentioned game, the level of its writing is carefully engineered to be accessible to those expecting a brainless bullet exchange. Even so, it is brazen in its critique, and a rarity besides. It may not be subtle, but it engages with problems that the bellicose ilk of Modern Warfare and Medal Of Honor have yet to acknowledge.

Yager should be admired for its bravery and effort in building something different - this could so easily have been an entirely generic shooter - but it just doesn't have the fundamentals to back up its grand ideas or the confidence to go completely off the wall and truly stand out from the crowd.

The disconnect between the gameplay and the narrative elements of Spec Ops: The Line is numbing, which makes it more difficult to contemplate the murky morality of war in the way the game wants you to.

However, the overall design and experience of Spec Ops: The Line is too heartbreakingly conventional to do anything more than wander distractedly towards the general direction where new ground might be broken.

The story in Spec Ops: The Line isn't amazing, but the way that it's told really stands out and, in many ways, saves the entire project from being a complete waste of time. But that doesn't make it easy to recommend.

The kind of game we think we want. It aims to be thoughtful and mature as it ponders our recurring role as the trigger-happy mass murderer. And yet it casts us in that same spot again, making a boring job out of it and highlighting why even "stupid" games can better engage, entertain and challenge.

Yager wanted to make us live a contemporary war in the shoes of a soldier on the field. Its a success despite a too short adventure, some sequences that lack a little punch, and some hiccups in the production values. The multiplayer should compensate for its lack of durability and replayability.

While there's some genuine heart and originality in Spec Ops: The Line, the experience of playing the game is just too hit and miss for me to recommend it unreservedly.

I was quite disappointed when I realized that this is "Spec Ops" game in name only. From a gameplay perspective it's basically a throw-away of everything the franchise was about, instead opting to amalgamate it with the rest of the homogeneous military-action titles currently out there.