Poll: Is Spec Ops: the Line overrated?

[Ironbat92]

I thought it was good, not great. I got a chance to play it again, and while I still say that the game holds up better, I will still felt like the story just kept saying "LOOK AT YOUR, YOU'RE A MONSTER!!! A MOTHER FUCKING MONSTER!!!" It's still an interesting tale, it just keeps bang it's themes in my face too much.

 

[Zantos]

Like all games, essentially this is a question of "Do you hang around with tedious people?".

I've only occasionally heard that it's a pretty good game with a story that behaves differently to modern FPSs, and that I should definitely try it when I get the time. So no, I don't think it's overrated, that seems like a perfectly reasonable recommendation. If people you know are doing more that's a problem with them, not the game.

 

[Brotha Desmond]

It was a great game, but would be better without all the hype.

 

[Beryl77]

I commend the game for taking a different approach to military shooters than what most generic shooters do but that's pretty much the only reason why I would praise the game.

For me, the story was alright but the heavy parts, like the white phosphorus scene didn't really affect me because I didn't have a choice. When I reached that part, I knew that something really bad would happen if I used the white phosphorus. I even tried not to use it but the game would just spawn an infinite amount of enemies. At some point, it started spawning snipers on the roofs of two buildings that were to left and right from my position and whenever I killed one of them, another one popped right out of nothing and started sniping me. So I started using that weapon because that's what the game wanted me to do. When I reached the pit with all those little white dots, I knew exactly that I'd probably be killing civilians but again, I couldn't continue unless I did it.
And before some smartass quotes me, no, quiting the game isn't a viable option at all. I payed 60 bucks to finish it, I'm not just going to stop because I'll blow up some lines of code.
Of course the game tried to make me feel horrible for that but I simply didn't feel responsible for any of those actions. If it had been a choice, then I might have felt bad but I wouldn't have done it in that case of course and the games story wouldn't have worked out, the way the devs had intended.

Also, the gameplay was just bad and that's always a big negative point for a game. It depends a bit on the game but story alone won't make a video game in my book.

But I still recommend it to anyone who asks me, it's a breath of fresh air.

 

[Zen Toombs]

It was a great game, but would be better without all the hype.

For the most part, this site is the only place where this game got ANY hype at all. Most other places dismissed it as a sup-par gears of war knockoff.

 

[Dryk]

My favourite part about Spec Ops is that everyone complains about not having any real choices after playing the scene where the main character rationalises away his alternatives as not real choices. It's fascinating to watch something like that come together exactly as intended. Not only that but it's divisive and provokes discussion, which is great.

Gameplay-wise I wish more games would convey character development through changes in battle animation and dialogue

 

[TheRookie8]

Drawing from my own experience, I feel that Spec Ops: The Line deserves a notable recommendation, just because it uses gameplay as an allegory for "shooters" (or the mindset of shooters).

The degree to which the game should be praised for this feature is left to personal opinion. I consider it notable, and would recommend it to another person searching for something different in the shooter genre.

It also serves as one of "those" games that uses the concept of "gameplay" as an active narrative tool...sort of cracking the fourth wall.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

*Snip*

It's the modern FPS that was made for the sorts of people who spend their time on the internet complaining vehemently about the modern FPS.

 

[Soveru]

Specs Ops IS overrated. If you need to convey your message through loading screens, you have failed. I didn't feel even remotely affected by the white phosphorous because I was trying to figure out whose side those soldiers were on. How am I, as a player, supposed to feel bad about killing civilians if the game forces me to?

The game would have been better off allowing the player to make conscious choices that leads to the complete clusterfuck at the end. That would be have made an impact on me. Giving the player a clear choice to simply leave Dubai for example, before you screw everything up. If you want to criticise how people love CoD games when they should be really disturbed instead, they need to have the player be directly responsible for some of the consequences. What I got was a convoluted, linear story where the only option given to me by the game was forced distress.

At the refugee camp where Lugo dies, I tried to just force my way through the crowd instead of gunning them down. Instead, I hit an invisible wall. If the developer forces me to shoot them to continue the story, they damn well don't have the right to sneer that what I did was a crime.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

Specs Ops IS overrated. If you need to convey your message through loading screens, you have failed. I didn't feel even remotely affected by the white phosphorous because I was trying to figure out whose side those soldiers were on. How am I, as a player, supposed to feel bad about killing civilians if the game forces me to?

People seem to get really defensive about this! The developers actually spoke on that point in an interview with RPS after the game was released. Basically, in their opinion, if you deflect blame for the white phosphorus onto the developers because they "forced" you to do it, you're making the same mistake Walker did when he blamed Konrad for "forcing" him to do it. You're shifting responsibility for your actions onto an outside party, so that you can retain your moral high ground.

I think it's funny that you wanted the game to give you the option to leave Dubai "before you screw everything up" as an alternative. It did. You can turn the game off whenever you want. Why is that so objectionable? Why do you have to play the game?

At the refugee camp where Lugo dies, I tried to just force my way through the crowd instead of gunning them down. Instead, I hit an invisible wall. If the developer forces me to shoot them to continue the story, they damn well don't have the right to sneer that what I did was a crime.

You don't have to shoot them. You can shoot in the air and it scares them off.

That's actually pretty funny. You're talking about how you can't feel responsible for crimes the game forced you to do, but you could have not done that one! You just assumed you had to shoot them to get past, didn't you? Who's responsible for that?

I think that proves Yager's point better than anything I can come up with.

 

[Lugbzurg]

I think you're missing a few key points here.

No one really praises it for the gameplay, just the story. If it were a film, it wouldn't have been able to convay its message or plot nearly as well. Being a videogame makes it a work of genius.

Also, I've seen Shindler's List. I'd say Spec Ops: The Line has it beat by multiple landslides for its story.

Far more powerful message, right there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlBrenhzMZI

 

[Frission]

It's a good game, which actually uses the fact that it's a game to pass a message. It's easy to show how evil the enemy can be and dehumanize them, but it's a different thing all together to turn the mirror on to you.

 

[predatorpulse7]

It is merely a good game, not the GOTY that so many here claim it to be.

It suffers, much like the Walking Dead, from movie-itis, which wouldn't terrible in itself if it weren't for the mind numbingly banal gameplay. You basically have a shooting gallery from behind cover with 2-3 commands that you can issue to your team-mates and you have to suffer this drudgery for 15 chapters(for me it already got old around chapter 8). The story is decent, even if it borrows quite a lot from Apocalypse now, but it only looks good because most shooters have awful or no stories, so the bar is already pretty freaking low. There are quite a handful of games that have better stories but which also don't forget that they are VIDEOGAMES and since this is a different medium that cinema, the main focus should be on having fun GAMEPLAY. Remember that word fellow Escapists, GAMEPLAY? Somewhere down the road a lot of games transformed themselves into movies-lite with 1-2 choices to give the ilussions that you are participating in what goes on on-screen and awful QTE events.

Not to mention that towards the end of the game, the pseudo-intellectual approach of "look how war has changed us, you the viewer/player are to blame" started to really wear thin. This whole "war is terrible, why are you playing this game where you are shooting so many people" would have had an effect if the whole game wasn't so linear and you actually had some quasi-meaningful choices. And please don't say that you can ALT-F4 at any time to save yourself from the "violence". No one pays 20 bucks for a game just to quit soon afterwards because they supposedly feel guilty about killing pixels. I felt that this whole approach was a lame attempt to make the game feel "deeper" since the gameplay is so weak and boring.

It's definitely the best military shooter I've played in a while but it isn't even the best in its category(shooters) for year 2012(Far Cry 3 would probably be it) and yet some people deem this the Game of the Year. Mind boggling. Personally, I think it's because boring military shooters are responsible for the biggest franchises out there and since they have little to no story(they are mostly multiplayer events), some people decided to latch on to the one military shooter that had the semblance of a story, ignoring the fact that there are games for 2012 with both better stories and better gameplay. Spec Ops the line is a hope that the modern military shooter genre might be saved so I think that's why so many people overrate it.

 

[Tharwen]

The twist at the end felt like the bad Twilight Zone episodes

OK, I'm going full spoiler in this post. Just a warning.

Walker (and by extension, the player) had been using Conrad as his excuse to do the terrible things he'd done. When Conrad was revealed to be dead, he didn't have an excuse to hide behind any more and he was forced to openly confront what he'd done.

The twist wasn't meant to be 'HAHA TRICKED YOU' like they so often are. It was more like the blindfold had suddenly been pulled off and the player was made to see the game again in an entirely different light.

 

[Teshi]

Not overrated. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it tried to do something complex and interesting, and it generally succeeded, while managing to be commercially competitive. In a market flooded with clones and sequels and bland stuff that's been focus-groupped to death I give that massive credit.

Plus, you have to kind of admire the balls required to make a game that says "fuck you for playing our game."

 

[Naeras]

It's definitely the best military shooter I've played in a while but it isn't even the best in its category(shooters) for year 2012(Far Cry 3 would probably be it) and yet some people deem this the Game of the Year. Mind boggling. Personally, I think it's because boring military shooters are responsible for the biggest franchises out there and since they have little to no story(they are mostly multiplayer events), some people decided to latch on to the one military shooter that had the semblance of a story, ignoring the fact that there are games for 2012 with both better stories and better gameplay. Spec Ops the line is a hope that the modern military shooter genre might be saved so I think that's why so many people overrate it.

Nope. I don't even like military shooters.

I consider it to be my game of the year because it was the most gripping experience I've had with a game in years(Far Cry 3, while good, wasn't even close in that regard). I don't give a crap about military shooters and haven't played through one since CoD 4, and yet here comes a military shooter with mediocre gameplay and manages to completely glue me to the screen, and how all the little details in the gameplay reinforced the narrative. I could write up all the reasons why I hold this game in such regard, but I don't actually have time for that right now. However, I can assure you that it's not merely because "it's a modern military shooter with a semblance of story". Because that already existed, and was called Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

I don't blame you, or anyone else, for not liking the game as much as I did, though. It's not for everyone. It was definitely for me, however.

 

[Phototoxin]

It has a good plot, story and character arcs. Gameplay is decent, but I wouldn't say it's revolutionary.

 

[Brotha Desmond]

It was a great game, but would be better without all the hype.

For the most part, this site is the only place where this game got ANY hype at all. Most other places dismissed it as a sup-par gears of war knockoff.

To be fair the only two places I get game info from are this site and rooster teeth.

 

[TilMorrow]

Yeah Spec Ops is a really overrated game, especially when you realise it's literally Black Ops' plot set in a single location. Plus the repetitive and annoying cover-based game play doesn't help as you start hating the game after the 5th encounter. Also I don't get this stuff about the developers sending a message. What message is it that they supposedly were trying to convey through the game? Because I was fairly certain that they intentions with this game was to create a COD competitor... As well as include battles which involved you fighting as the sand beneath you collapsed into a swirling sinkhole but they ended up not including that section at all...

 

[Karoshi]

Yeah Spec Ops is a really overrated game, especially when you realise it's literally Black Ops' plot set in a single location. Plus the repetitive and annoying cover-based game play doesn't help as you start hating the game after the 5th encounter. Also I don't get this stuff about the developers sending a message. What message is it that they supposedly were trying to convey through the game? Because I was fairly certain that they intentions with this game was to create a COD competitor... As well as include battles which involved you fighting as the sand beneath you collapsed into a swirling sinkhole but they ended up not including that section at all...

Not trying to ridicule you, but did you in fact play Spec Ops: The Line? Just how on earth do these two plots compare? I'm really curious about the parallels.

As for the message... Most players agree that it had a strong message, they just disagree what exactly it was. Was Spec Ops pointing out the flaw in the modern war shooter genre? Was it asking the question, whether the player is responsible for doing something bad in a game? Some say that it criticized war and its brutality, others say that it focuses on PTSD and the effects of war on the psyche of soldiers.

It was marketed as a competitor to COD, but never meant to be one. The tacked on multiplayer makes me irrationally angry, since those resources could have been spent much better elsewhere. It's the story which shines, not the gameplay (although I enjoyed that one too).