Geekscape Games Geek Peek Review: ‘Spec Ops: The Line’

Spec Ops: The Line is suppose to pull on your emotional heart strings with the fact that you are fighting your own kind, the U.S. military. For me, there is a disconnect in what the story of Spec Ops: The Line is trying to tell me and all the killing I am doing. Just by having Nolan North and Christopher “Kid” Reid say to each other “we’re killing our own people!” doesn’t do enough to pull me into the right and wrong situation I think the story is trying to tell. Maybe I have been desensitized by all the war movies and games I’ve played in my life that the story just doesn’t hit home.

It feels like 2K Games focused more time on the sand effects and how they can manipulate the battles more so than the story. Throwing grenades or any other large explosions will cause the sand to swirl up and create a fog that makes it hard for both enemies and your team to see one another. The roaring sounds of the scripted sandstorms in the middle of a firefight added to the craziness of the action. If I was ever in a sandstorm, I think 2K Games got damn close to what it would feel like to be in one.

Feedback on shooting is excellent and the enemy AI at times seems to be pretty smart with cover, though few occasions you will see suicide like tendencies with shotgun and knife wielding enemies as they charge towards your team. Handing off multiplayer duties to Darkside Game Studios was a mistake due to how vastly different the look and feel from the campaign is.From the stiff animations to the cruddy PS2 era textures, it’s anyone’s guess why 2k Games decided to add it in the first place.

Maybe with all the cover-based shooters flooding the market for gamers, developers should draw a line in the sand and start finding a different way to tell moral stories like Spec Ops: The Line tried to.