Spec Ops: The Line Review

*Contains minor thematic spoilers*

So I bought "Spec Ops: The Line" on Steam sale two days ago. It was a third-person action game I'd been lining up to get for a while.

I'll open this review by saying I'm a "Battlefield 3" person when it comes to action gaming. I love BF3, but really went off CoD after Modern Warfare 1.

Now, when I first saw Spec Ops flash up on Steam, I immediately started rolling my eyes when I saw the cover picture:

How generic does that look? It's almost like someone copy-pasted the typical "Cool CoD pose" soldier and put it on a new game.

Exactly. Because once you play Spec Ops, you realise that's just what the developers were going for. You start the game, expecting to be playing Call of Duty: America Saves The World Again and instead you get something quite different.

Quite different indeed. Because Spec Ops: The Line has much more in common with a horror game than an action shoot-'em-up.

Set in Dubai in the near future, the city has been ravaged for months by a gigantic sandstorm. The US government completely loses contact with a Colonel and his troops sent in to evacuate the populace (Colonel Konrad and his 33rd Battalion). The result is that the player (Captain Martin Walker) and his two underlings (Lugo and Adams) are sent into Dubai to assess the situation and report back.

Initial gameplay is disarmingly generic. Lugo is your typical "Sniper with a sense of humour", and wisecracks constantly. Adams is the painfully stereotypical "black guy heavy weapons specialist". As you walk towards the ruined city, you get all the usual bullshit "America, hell yeah!" nationalism spouting out, as you'd expect in CoD or even BF 3.

The first enemies are foreign insurgents. Again, so far, so "Battlefield of Duty". Then, before you know it you're killing fellow American soldiers, witnessing genuinely shocking war crimes...and even committing barbaric acts yourself.

It's as the game progresses that the tone takes this subtle but continuous dark slide, finishing up in an abyss of despair that I don't think any previous action shooter has even thought of venturing to.

This shift of mood is shown amazingly well in not only the well-acted cutscenes, but also the mannerisms and appearance of the squad and player character during actual gameplay.

Walker himself starts the game clean-shaven, macho and confident of his heroic ability to save the day. When you order Lugo and Adams to take down enemies, he's precise and efficient. By the end of the game, however, he's scarred and broken, his eyes displaying a prominent thousand-yard-stare.

The orders you give your men start to sound borderline psychotic, and even the finishing moves you perform on wounded enemies progress from mercy killings to sadistic, unhinged executions. Your own squad becomes frightened of you.

As an example: early on Walker might say: "Lugo, neutralise that sniper." This becomes: "Lugo, kill that guy." and finally morphs into an enraged gravelly scream of "Lugo, I want that motherfucker DEAD! NOW!"

But what triggers this disturbing change in personality? Well, from the moment you arrive in Dubai, it's evident things are very, very bad there. As the game progresses, the excellent story gives you some really tough choices. Almost every choice you make, regardless of your intentions, becomes a bad one; this culminates in a horrifying decision you're forced to go through with that has appalling moral consequences.

It was this particular event that actually made me pause the game with discomfort. I'd crossed the titular "line", through no real fault of my own (other than wanting to play a good game I'd paid money for), and it felt horrible in the best possible way. The game had made an emphatic moral statement, directly to me, the player.

Following on, the ending is a masterstroke: a twist revelation that heartbreakingly undermines not only your character's obsessive glory-seeking, but that of your own desire for "glory and fun" through entertainment too.

Interestingly, for me the most shocking moment of the game wasn't any particular "forced" sequence, but instead a pretty standard on-rails shooter sequence. Given the opportunity of finally leaving a huge group of hostile soldiers behind and escaping in a helicopter, your character shouts that he doesn't want to leave as you begin to fly away.

Completely confused, your pilot almost begs you to just let him fly out of there as the enemy gunfire begins to hit the chopper. "No.", Walker growls, steadying a mini-gun mounted to the fuselage. "I want to see what this gun can do!"

The following shooting sequence, which most games play for fun, suddenly becomes a drawn-out foray into needless carnage that made me more uncomfortable than even the harshest of the "scripted horrors" the game had laid out for me previously.

--
Summary:

While I've said little of actual gameplay here, I think this echoes the focus of the game. Spec Ops is primarily story-driven, and truly has a fantastic narrative that will get you thinking not only about the rights and wrongs of warfare, but also how we unthinkingly lap it up as exciting entertainment in the media these days.

The gameplay itself is reminiscent of Gears of War - if you like 3rd person shooters with cover elements, you will be happy here. It doesn't particularly innovate (there are no truly unique gameplay features), but the shooting on offer is very solid and I didn't find myself frustrated by even the most challenging segments.

Graphics are universally very good. Dubai has a bunch of varied, colourful interiors (a huge aquarium penthouse was my favourite) and the characters look fantastic. Animations are smooth too.

"The horror...the horror."

 

Final word:
If you want an interesting shooter with varied environments that will give you scope to make your own decisions (and live with the consequences), give Spec Ops a try. Even if you don't typically like 3rd Person Shooters, it's worth a look for the mature and compelling story.

Just be aware that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Score: 5/5
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Prison Architect: First Impressions

Down below in the courtyard, the inmates are tiny orange specks to my omniscient eye-in-the-sky. Their chunky jump-suited bodies mill around, the pleasant hum-drum of conversation bubbling through my headphones.

My guards, meanwhile, are ambling along the perimeter. Ever watchful, their cute cartoonish eyes are all narrowed slightly, as if inherently suspicious.

But at present, the atmosphere remains totally calm. I continue watching my workers, as they lay a strip of cabling to the small brick building being constructed at the edge of the facility. The execution room.

This mission, the first and only mission the game currently has (more of a tutorial, really), has you tasked with building an electric chair inside an established prison.

When the cabling is complete, my view is suddenly drawn away from my colourful guards and prisoners, to one small cell. Inside this cell, the condemned man, Edward, awaits his death sentence. A Priest appears to comfort him.

In a sort of stationary storyboard cutscene, a hand drawn (and much more realistic) picture of Edward and the Priest in the cell appears, the holy man laying a forgiving hand on Edward's head. The goofy visuals the game usually sports contrast sharply with the stark detail of the adult-comic style presentation of this "cutscene".

Intrigued, I watch Edward's last walk to the execution room I built myself. Along the way, the prison guards recount his story.

Suddenly we're inside Edward's mind. We see a cutesy-graphics representation of his house, to which he is returning...with a gun. Completely dissonant with the graphics, cries of lustful pleasure fill the speakers, and sinister music builds in the background. Edward walks to his bedroom door, and the screen is again peppered with hand-drawn pictures. This time they show his wife, and the man she's cheating with, caught in the middle of sex. A distraught Edward raises the gun and mercilessly kills both.

In the "cutesy" graphics display of the scene, the two naked (but undetailed) characters are suddenly smeared with pools of ugly red blood. The words "DEAD" flash above them, over and over again.

Jesus.

For a moment I stare, surprised...shocked, even, that the cutesy game I was playing could convey such adult sentiment.

--

In just this one scene (and the rather depressing execution that follows), we are offered a powerful and unexpected look into the rights, wrongs and grey areas of the death penalty.

Now admittedly, when I first heard of Prison Architect, I wasn't interested. I thought it'd be another shitty "Prison Tycoon" game.

Then I saw it was by Introversion, the same developer that made Defcon and Uplink, two of my favourite games, competent for not only having deep game mechanics but also in exploring greater moral themes relevant to reality through gameplay.

Uplink explores the freedom of information, corporate society and whether it's morally right to even have personal information databases if skilled people can hack into them and misuse our data. Defcon is like a playable simulation of the detached horror of nuclear war.

So that sold it to me. I bought into the paid Alpha of the game.

--

Sure enough, Prison Architect has everything you'd expect from a management game, but even in this early stage of development it shows a really interesting psychological angle even outside of the story scenes already in the game.

Take my first prison: I tried to build it as a medium-security installation, in which I'd keep the prisoners happy and well entertained, ruling them through respect rather than force and deterrent.

To that end I built a spacious yard, larger cells, a sanitary shower and a nice entertainment room. Prisoners were allowed family visits, and all seemed to be happy.

Within a few days, they decided to smash it all up.

Oddly, I actually found myself feeling slightly annoyed - which I then realised is the brilliance of the game. I'd tried my best to cater to the needs of these people, to keep them at least comfortable in their place of incarceration. They'd all been listed as "happy".

They'd repaid me by ruining the equipment I provided to them in a fit of meaningless violence.

I watched with dismay as my guards began brawling with them. The inmates beat the prison's Chef unconscious, badly hurt a builder and before it was all over a prisoner had been stabbed to death in the shower block with a knife lifted from the Kitchen; the blood stubbornly staining the floor was a damning indictment of my failure.

Without the money for a Janitor (it was all spent on repairs), that blood stayed there for days afterwards, the floors and walls around it turning grimy from lack of cleaning. With each in-game day representing around a year, that means that dried blood simply stayed on that floor for a good 5 years, a stubborn reminder of that horrible incident.

Faced with a lack of Recreation (thanks to the fun stuff being broken), the prisoners started fighting again. And the vicious circle continued.

My latest prisons have learned: more guards, less focus on appeasing the prisoners, more on containing and controlling them.

Cells are built to house maximum numbers of prisoners, not to comfort them. Entrances are barred with multiple checkpoints. The relaxation rooms are patrolled by guards.

Then you start thinking of your prisoners as enemies, not people entrusted to you. You start seeing them as vicious bastards that will happily murder you, your staff and even each other.

So yeah...I've only just started playing, but already it's providing an interesting comment (and perhaps even insight, if accurate) on the mind-set of those who actually run these large federal institutions.