Spec Ops: The Line was released in 2012, developed by Yager and published by 2K Games, that huge publisher you probably already know of (Oh come on, don't say you've never heard of BioShock, XCOM, Borderlands, or Civilization). Despite strong praise for its single-player campaign, the game never really got big. Heck, I'm one to talk, only playing this game 6 years down the line. Some reviews took points off for it's lackluster multiplayer, which frankly, is the stupidest thing you can say as a reviewer. I strongly believe that this game was not designed for multiplayer — hell, it wouldn't be crazy to say that it shouldn't have even had a multiplayer.
This is a game whose campaign stands so strongly on its own, that any multiplayer would take away from its central theme: how detached modern shooters are from the atrocity that is war. The hopelessly buggy and poorly implemented multiplayer mode has you shooting faces off other players who're trying to out-shoot you. In a game that tries so hard to make you feel bad about the senseless murder in games of this genre, this just feels regressive. The co-op missions are equally terrible. At least from what I've seen of them, they're basically the same shootfests as the solo campaign except this time you have a buddy to tag along with, but unlike the singleplayer, doesn't give you a narrative to work with. It ends up being a contradiction to the powerful message that the core game endeavoured to get across. Yager knew this, and were so opposed to having multiplayer in the game that its development had to be outsourced to Darkside Game Studios; 2K was incredibly adamant about catering to the market research. It suffices to say that hardly anyone actually played/plays the multiplayer, amounting to nothing but a waste of resources. So to anyone whose judgement of Spec Ops was brought lower by the multiplayer, please don't do that. Please don't force a game to allocate the budget for a silly feature just because that's what sells, just because that's what the reviews keep deducting points for. Our industry deserves better games.
I recently got this game for free from Humble Bundle, and what a game to have missed out on for almost 6 years. This won't be a review of the game, just my thoughts on the game, things I liked, things I didn't like, and the emotions I felt. "Well, that basically sounds like a rev—" "Shut up Hian, just get on with it."
Before I go on — spoilers ahead, you have been warned. I warned youuu.
This game is the result of a AAA games publisher taking a really risky leap of faith: competing in the same playing field as bigger-budget modern military shooters like the Call of Duty and Battlefield series. Instead of beating them at their own game, Spec Ops turned the tables a full 180° — critiquing and questioning the very essence of these games. It actively challenges the idea that games in this genre should focus on adrenaline-fueled rushes of running and gunning and Michael Bay-esque explosions. It forces you to question your actions, engaging you in your decisions rather than simply engaging you by saying "Here are a billion guns, go shoot people." While Spec Ops did get nominated for several awards (even winning Best Story for both PC and PS3 in IGN's Best of 2012 Awards), it failed to break into the market and the game never really took off among gamers. A quick look at the Steam stats for Spec Ops shows that its Steam player numbers reached its highest peak during the recent Humble Bundle giveaway. It reached 14 thousand players over a 24 hour period, 6 times higher than the previous peak in January 2013. For all of the game's strong points, that leap of faith didn't land smoothly, something that worries me about the current mindset of gamers (but that's a blog post all on its own).
Spec Ops is not a happy game. It's barely even fun. Is it the best game ever made? No, it's not. But it is a very important game for us gamers and for our culture; there's a lot to learn from it, and future games will only ever benefit from its lessons. In my 6-hour playthrough of the game, I did not have fun. I'm partly to blame; I stupidly decided to play on Hard difficulty. This, coupled with the game's clunky controls, meant that I would attempt to vault over a barrier to get behind it for cover but instead, take cover on the wrong side of said barrier. To clarify, the wrong side is where you get shot in the back before being swiftly torn to shreds by a hail of bullets. Even with the inevitable silly deaths and frustration arising from situations like this, I was never any less engaged in the story and the emotions of the game. The down-time I had while I retraced my steps from the last checkpoint allowed me to examine my actions, leading to questions of why I was fighting this war — the important questions of morality and ethics. It allowed me to explore my own morality, to put myself in an otherwise unthinkable situation and ask myself hard questions; Spec Ops engaged me, because games don't need to be fun.
In Spec Ops you play as Capt. Martin Walker, the leader of an elite three-man Delta Force squad, Lt. Adams and Sgt. Lugo being your two teammates. As you might expect from a special operations unit, each squad member has specific roles. Walker leads the team and calls the shots, while Adams takes on the role of supporting heavy machine-gunner, door-breacher and enemy identifier. Lugo, on the other hand, is an expert engineer and translator/negotiator who tends to hang back with his Scout Tactical sniper rifle. The two of them, in a metaphorical sense, represent Walker's good devil-bad angel dichotomy: Adams generally agrees with you and follows your orders, while Lugo shows a great distaste for the mission as a whole and is constantly butting heads with Adams.
(In case you're wondering if I made a mistake here, I used good devil-bad angel to illustrate morality's murky waters as depicted in this game.)
Some backstory. Colonel John Konrad and the 33rd Battalion, now known as The Damned 33rd, were ordered to abandon the sandstorm-ravaged Dubai during the evacuation of its citizens, but chose to defy these orders. Instead, he attempted a failed evacuation of the remaining survivors, leading to your Delta squad being called in to conduct reconnaissance. This was a mission that would have been a simple get in, confirm deaths, and extract kind of job, had Konrad not decided to return to Dubai after his failed extraction and declare martial law on the remaining survivors, effectively ruling as a dictator over them. The thing is: no one from the outside knows.
Setting you at the heart of this confusion, you start from a fairly easy and heavily scripted helicopter battle, meant to disorient you (this fight actually happens later in the timeline), before giving you the real beginning of the story. I believe the idea behind disorienting you so early in the game is to give the player a sense that something is wrong, that this isn't yet another CoD-like game even though it feels familiar.
The mission really begins with the Delta force entering Dubai on foot. To further add to the confusion, you go from shooting at refugees, your "run-of-the-mill Call of Duty terrorists", which feels familiar and typical, before the game jerks into reverse gear and makes you start battling US soldiers. It evolves from recon to rescuing the survivors of the Damned 33rd, then — just as abruptly — devolves into shooting the same people you were supposed to be rescuing. What's jarring is that they too, are speaking the same language as your squad, driving a wedge at your reasons for fighting in the first place; it starts feeling like you're killing your own people.
Spec Ops doesn't stop trying to disorient you with just its firefights. Instead of your typical, torn-down depiction of some Middle Eastern country without any variation, you're shown a Dubai in a state of utter desolation, the streets now engulfed in sand and rotting corpses, huge billboards advertising a lifestyle of glamour now graffitied over with gross depictions. And yet, when you enter the hotels and the skyscrapers, you're struck with such beauty, such opulence and luxury, with vibrant hues of gold and blue and red. You're then shown the polar opposite to this — the refugees' living conditions. They're forced to survive on rations and candlelight in dirty hovels. The children play with crudely-fashioned toys, and what priceless metals their parents owned now get melted down for bullets. This stark and disparate depiction of Dubai evokes a sense of fragility, both in a city that was once the jewel of the Middle East, and in you as a mere human being. It is, to put it simply, breathtaking.
I've heard this game being called an anti-war game. It is not. It's about the portrayal of war in modern shooter games. Small wordplay, big difference. War isn't a battle between political ideologies. War isn't about doing what's right. There are no winners in a war, only losers. Yeah, you may have "won" the war, but who really wins in a war? Not the innocent civilians, caught in a crossfire. Not the piles of dead soldiers, with their families still waiting for them to come home. War is death. But recent modern shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield completely throw that idea out the window. Battlefield 4 is one that I'd like to bring up for its utterly ridiculous depiction of war. How can it make sense to be able to place and explode C4 beneath a tank, causing the tank to launch high enough in the air to explode a jet with its missiles? It's gratuitous, it's ludicrous, it's what we call fun now. It is games like these that keep our industry from growing, from being seen as more than just toys for kids to play with. It is games like these that prevented Six Days in Fallujah from being made, which would have been based on the Second Battle of Fallujah during the Iraq War, inspired heavily by veterans who were actually there and lived to tell a tale. This was a game that could have given us such a raw and real representation of war. Because war is not fun. War is death.
Spec Ops embraces this but it doesn't glorify it like every other modern shooter game. It acknowledges the death and destruction, but doesn't reward you for it. It knows itself for what it is, and it wants you to know it too. In fact, the game even breaks the fourth wall just to tell you this: some loading screens towards the end of the game have text like "Do you feel like a hero now?", "The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn't real, so why should you care?", and my personal favourite, "White phosphorous is a common allotrope used in your slaughter at the Gate. It can set fire to soldiers and the innocent civilians they are trying to help."
This last one is particularly powerful. It directly references a scene in which you're essentially forced into using these burn-to-the-bone missile airstrikes. What's even worse — they were used in many real-world wars, and are still being used in the ongoing war in Iraq and Syria. White phosphorus is so potent as an incendiary weapon that its only legal use is as a smokescreen. The US claims not to be using white phosphorus as a weapon and only "to suppress the enemy and provide cover for fleeing civilians", but I'm pretty sure there's some sneaky top-secret bullshittery going on in the Middle East. I mean, I'm not here to debate war tactics and espionage and all of that (get off my back CIA), I'm just here to talk about games. So back to Spec Ops. You're put in a scenario where it's basically three men up against an army of infinite soliders and tanks. After an argument with Lugo, the cutscene ends with your character saying that there isn't a choice here, which is basically the game throwing the hint at you. You could try and shoot every single enemy (believe me I've tried), but before too long you'll realise the odds are indeed insurmountable and your bullets aren't unlimited. There is no choice here, except to use the white phosphorus, and watch in horror, trying to convince yourself that this was the only way and that the ends justify the means as you rain down fire and death onto the countless lives below you. All of this is portrayed on your typical Call of Duty black-and-white airstrike monitor that you would be rewarded with for getting some killstreak, blatantly forcing the player to remember all those "sick montages" they'd tried to achieve as they gunned down countless other players, while asking you, "Do you feel like a hero now?"
Bringing you to the climax of this scene: you see a large group of people seemingly huddled together. They're not bearing arms. There's nothing you can do but incinerate them. You can try and avoid firing at them, they will burn no matter what. This entire scene is one example where forcing the player into an action creates a disconnect between the player and the action that's happening. It makes you start wondering why you weren't given a choice. This could come off as bad game design, but the way I see it, the reason why you need to disconnect is because you, as a person, are not Capt. Walker. These are not your choices, because they are Walker's.
To top it all off, as you watch the civilians burning from your airstrike monitor, which is almost all-white from the flames, you're now able to partially see your character's reflection on the screen. I love this because it feels so much like looking into a mirror and not seeing yourself — but Walker. This further demarcates the divide between the player and the character. There needs to be that distinction between you and Capt. Walker. In the following cutscene, Walker is shown to be having an internal struggle and reaching a breaking point, staring at the burnt corpse of a mother holding her baby in her arms. Almost instantly, something clicks and all that emotion just shuts off; he goes on barking orders as if it was a drill. But you, as the player, still feel those emotions, you know that what happened was wrong. A line had been crossed. Yet, you choose to continue to play. You choose to go further down the rabbit hole of madness and destruction just so that you can find some resolution to the story, to find some justification for all the atrocities you've had a hand in. But there's none. The ending doesn't resolve or justify anything. So what does that say about you?
Going a little deeper, this feeling of not being given a choice allows you to relate to soldiers fighting in a war. In war, what you've been ordered to do may not always align with your morals, or the morals of society. But you have to do it anyway, because you don't have a choice. You could play the morally righteous hero, but in most cases, that leads to a worse outcome for your people. So, you push the moral responsibility onto someone else's shoulders; the commanding officer is the one to blame. In a similar way, Walker is constantly shoving his burden of morality onto Konrad, blaming the Colonel for forcing him into such terrible acts. He refuses to accept that they were his choices. Much like how you, as the player, refuse to accept that Walker's madness is yours. Nietzsche wrote, "If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss gazes back at you."
I strongly believe that every gamer should walk along Spec Op's lines of morality at least once in their gaming lifetime. At its current $30 price point, I would say the experience you get and the things you can learn from it are very much justifiable. You may be asking, "Why should I pay $30 just so that I can feel bad about myself for playing a game?" Because it's important to understand what and why you're playing, to question yourself so that you can better understand humanity, because it's important that games don't need to be fun. Games are art. Games are supposed to make you feel something, be it good or bad; they make you experience something novel. I know all of this sounds hypocritical, coming from someone who picked the game up for free, which is why to absolve myself of this ethical war in my mind, I'll be giving away a copy of Spec Ops: The Line to whoever wants it. This will probably happen in the near future, when I figure out how a giveaway works and all of the messy logistics of one.
If you've made it this far, I'd like to sincerely say thank you. Stay tuned for my next post where I go as in-depth into the game design of Spec Ops as I can possibly fit into a blog post without boring you with walls of text (I'm assuming you're a person who likes walls of text after getting through a three-thousand word blog post).
Hian is an amateur who really just wants to learn more about games, and finds it incredibly uncomfortable to write in third person. Please be aware that he often doesn't know what he's talking about, so if you want to point something out to him or call him out on his bullshit, there's a comments section right below! Or, if you want to get real personal and all up in his face, tweet him @hianhianhian_ <3
This is a game whose campaign stands so strongly on its own, that any multiplayer would take away from its central theme: how detached modern shooters are from the atrocity that is war. The hopelessly buggy and poorly implemented multiplayer mode has you shooting faces off other players who're trying to out-shoot you. In a game that tries so hard to make you feel bad about the senseless murder in games of this genre, this just feels regressive. The co-op missions are equally terrible. At least from what I've seen of them, they're basically the same shootfests as the solo campaign except this time you have a buddy to tag along with, but unlike the singleplayer, doesn't give you a narrative to work with. It ends up being a contradiction to the powerful message that the core game endeavoured to get across. Yager knew this, and were so opposed to having multiplayer in the game that its development had to be outsourced to Darkside Game Studios; 2K was incredibly adamant about catering to the market research. It suffices to say that hardly anyone actually played/plays the multiplayer, amounting to nothing but a waste of resources. So to anyone whose judgement of Spec Ops was brought lower by the multiplayer, please don't do that. Please don't force a game to allocate the budget for a silly feature just because that's what sells, just because that's what the reviews keep deducting points for. Our industry deserves better games.
I recently got this game for free from Humble Bundle, and what a game to have missed out on for almost 6 years. This won't be a review of the game, just my thoughts on the game, things I liked, things I didn't like, and the emotions I felt. "Well, that basically sounds like a rev—" "Shut up Hian, just get on with it."
Before I go on — spoilers ahead, you have been warned. I warned youuu.
This game is the result of a AAA games publisher taking a really risky leap of faith: competing in the same playing field as bigger-budget modern military shooters like the Call of Duty and Battlefield series. Instead of beating them at their own game, Spec Ops turned the tables a full 180° — critiquing and questioning the very essence of these games. It actively challenges the idea that games in this genre should focus on adrenaline-fueled rushes of running and gunning and Michael Bay-esque explosions. It forces you to question your actions, engaging you in your decisions rather than simply engaging you by saying "Here are a billion guns, go shoot people." While Spec Ops did get nominated for several awards (even winning Best Story for both PC and PS3 in IGN's Best of 2012 Awards), it failed to break into the market and the game never really took off among gamers. A quick look at the Steam stats for Spec Ops shows that its Steam player numbers reached its highest peak during the recent Humble Bundle giveaway. It reached 14 thousand players over a 24 hour period, 6 times higher than the previous peak in January 2013. For all of the game's strong points, that leap of faith didn't land smoothly, something that worries me about the current mindset of gamers (but that's a blog post all on its own).
Spec Ops is not a happy game. It's barely even fun. Is it the best game ever made? No, it's not. But it is a very important game for us gamers and for our culture; there's a lot to learn from it, and future games will only ever benefit from its lessons. In my 6-hour playthrough of the game, I did not have fun. I'm partly to blame; I stupidly decided to play on Hard difficulty. This, coupled with the game's clunky controls, meant that I would attempt to vault over a barrier to get behind it for cover but instead, take cover on the wrong side of said barrier. To clarify, the wrong side is where you get shot in the back before being swiftly torn to shreds by a hail of bullets. Even with the inevitable silly deaths and frustration arising from situations like this, I was never any less engaged in the story and the emotions of the game. The down-time I had while I retraced my steps from the last checkpoint allowed me to examine my actions, leading to questions of why I was fighting this war — the important questions of morality and ethics. It allowed me to explore my own morality, to put myself in an otherwise unthinkable situation and ask myself hard questions; Spec Ops engaged me, because games don't need to be fun.
In Spec Ops you play as Capt. Martin Walker, the leader of an elite three-man Delta Force squad, Lt. Adams and Sgt. Lugo being your two teammates. As you might expect from a special operations unit, each squad member has specific roles. Walker leads the team and calls the shots, while Adams takes on the role of supporting heavy machine-gunner, door-breacher and enemy identifier. Lugo, on the other hand, is an expert engineer and translator/negotiator who tends to hang back with his Scout Tactical sniper rifle. The two of them, in a metaphorical sense, represent Walker's good devil-bad angel dichotomy: Adams generally agrees with you and follows your orders, while Lugo shows a great distaste for the mission as a whole and is constantly butting heads with Adams.
(In case you're wondering if I made a mistake here, I used good devil-bad angel to illustrate morality's murky waters as depicted in this game.)
Some backstory. Colonel John Konrad and the 33rd Battalion, now known as The Damned 33rd, were ordered to abandon the sandstorm-ravaged Dubai during the evacuation of its citizens, but chose to defy these orders. Instead, he attempted a failed evacuation of the remaining survivors, leading to your Delta squad being called in to conduct reconnaissance. This was a mission that would have been a simple get in, confirm deaths, and extract kind of job, had Konrad not decided to return to Dubai after his failed extraction and declare martial law on the remaining survivors, effectively ruling as a dictator over them. The thing is: no one from the outside knows.
Setting you at the heart of this confusion, you start from a fairly easy and heavily scripted helicopter battle, meant to disorient you (this fight actually happens later in the timeline), before giving you the real beginning of the story. I believe the idea behind disorienting you so early in the game is to give the player a sense that something is wrong, that this isn't yet another CoD-like game even though it feels familiar.
The mission really begins with the Delta force entering Dubai on foot. To further add to the confusion, you go from shooting at refugees, your "run-of-the-mill Call of Duty terrorists", which feels familiar and typical, before the game jerks into reverse gear and makes you start battling US soldiers. It evolves from recon to rescuing the survivors of the Damned 33rd, then — just as abruptly — devolves into shooting the same people you were supposed to be rescuing. What's jarring is that they too, are speaking the same language as your squad, driving a wedge at your reasons for fighting in the first place; it starts feeling like you're killing your own people.
Spec Ops doesn't stop trying to disorient you with just its firefights. Instead of your typical, torn-down depiction of some Middle Eastern country without any variation, you're shown a Dubai in a state of utter desolation, the streets now engulfed in sand and rotting corpses, huge billboards advertising a lifestyle of glamour now graffitied over with gross depictions. And yet, when you enter the hotels and the skyscrapers, you're struck with such beauty, such opulence and luxury, with vibrant hues of gold and blue and red. You're then shown the polar opposite to this — the refugees' living conditions. They're forced to survive on rations and candlelight in dirty hovels. The children play with crudely-fashioned toys, and what priceless metals their parents owned now get melted down for bullets. This stark and disparate depiction of Dubai evokes a sense of fragility, both in a city that was once the jewel of the Middle East, and in you as a mere human being. It is, to put it simply, breathtaking.
I've heard this game being called an anti-war game. It is not. It's about the portrayal of war in modern shooter games. Small wordplay, big difference. War isn't a battle between political ideologies. War isn't about doing what's right. There are no winners in a war, only losers. Yeah, you may have "won" the war, but who really wins in a war? Not the innocent civilians, caught in a crossfire. Not the piles of dead soldiers, with their families still waiting for them to come home. War is death. But recent modern shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield completely throw that idea out the window. Battlefield 4 is one that I'd like to bring up for its utterly ridiculous depiction of war. How can it make sense to be able to place and explode C4 beneath a tank, causing the tank to launch high enough in the air to explode a jet with its missiles? It's gratuitous, it's ludicrous, it's what we call fun now. It is games like these that keep our industry from growing, from being seen as more than just toys for kids to play with. It is games like these that prevented Six Days in Fallujah from being made, which would have been based on the Second Battle of Fallujah during the Iraq War, inspired heavily by veterans who were actually there and lived to tell a tale. This was a game that could have given us such a raw and real representation of war. Because war is not fun. War is death.
Spec Ops embraces this but it doesn't glorify it like every other modern shooter game. It acknowledges the death and destruction, but doesn't reward you for it. It knows itself for what it is, and it wants you to know it too. In fact, the game even breaks the fourth wall just to tell you this: some loading screens towards the end of the game have text like "Do you feel like a hero now?", "The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn't real, so why should you care?", and my personal favourite, "White phosphorous is a common allotrope used in your slaughter at the Gate. It can set fire to soldiers and the innocent civilians they are trying to help."
This last one is particularly powerful. It directly references a scene in which you're essentially forced into using these burn-to-the-bone missile airstrikes. What's even worse — they were used in many real-world wars, and are still being used in the ongoing war in Iraq and Syria. White phosphorus is so potent as an incendiary weapon that its only legal use is as a smokescreen. The US claims not to be using white phosphorus as a weapon and only "to suppress the enemy and provide cover for fleeing civilians", but I'm pretty sure there's some sneaky top-secret bullshittery going on in the Middle East. I mean, I'm not here to debate war tactics and espionage and all of that (get off my back CIA), I'm just here to talk about games. So back to Spec Ops. You're put in a scenario where it's basically three men up against an army of infinite soliders and tanks. After an argument with Lugo, the cutscene ends with your character saying that there isn't a choice here, which is basically the game throwing the hint at you. You could try and shoot every single enemy (believe me I've tried), but before too long you'll realise the odds are indeed insurmountable and your bullets aren't unlimited. There is no choice here, except to use the white phosphorus, and watch in horror, trying to convince yourself that this was the only way and that the ends justify the means as you rain down fire and death onto the countless lives below you. All of this is portrayed on your typical Call of Duty black-and-white airstrike monitor that you would be rewarded with for getting some killstreak, blatantly forcing the player to remember all those "sick montages" they'd tried to achieve as they gunned down countless other players, while asking you, "Do you feel like a hero now?"
Bringing you to the climax of this scene: you see a large group of people seemingly huddled together. They're not bearing arms. There's nothing you can do but incinerate them. You can try and avoid firing at them, they will burn no matter what. This entire scene is one example where forcing the player into an action creates a disconnect between the player and the action that's happening. It makes you start wondering why you weren't given a choice. This could come off as bad game design, but the way I see it, the reason why you need to disconnect is because you, as a person, are not Capt. Walker. These are not your choices, because they are Walker's.
To top it all off, as you watch the civilians burning from your airstrike monitor, which is almost all-white from the flames, you're now able to partially see your character's reflection on the screen. I love this because it feels so much like looking into a mirror and not seeing yourself — but Walker. This further demarcates the divide between the player and the character. There needs to be that distinction between you and Capt. Walker. In the following cutscene, Walker is shown to be having an internal struggle and reaching a breaking point, staring at the burnt corpse of a mother holding her baby in her arms. Almost instantly, something clicks and all that emotion just shuts off; he goes on barking orders as if it was a drill. But you, as the player, still feel those emotions, you know that what happened was wrong. A line had been crossed. Yet, you choose to continue to play. You choose to go further down the rabbit hole of madness and destruction just so that you can find some resolution to the story, to find some justification for all the atrocities you've had a hand in. But there's none. The ending doesn't resolve or justify anything. So what does that say about you?
Going a little deeper, this feeling of not being given a choice allows you to relate to soldiers fighting in a war. In war, what you've been ordered to do may not always align with your morals, or the morals of society. But you have to do it anyway, because you don't have a choice. You could play the morally righteous hero, but in most cases, that leads to a worse outcome for your people. So, you push the moral responsibility onto someone else's shoulders; the commanding officer is the one to blame. In a similar way, Walker is constantly shoving his burden of morality onto Konrad, blaming the Colonel for forcing him into such terrible acts. He refuses to accept that they were his choices. Much like how you, as the player, refuse to accept that Walker's madness is yours. Nietzsche wrote, "If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss gazes back at you."
I strongly believe that every gamer should walk along Spec Op's lines of morality at least once in their gaming lifetime. At its current $30 price point, I would say the experience you get and the things you can learn from it are very much justifiable. You may be asking, "Why should I pay $30 just so that I can feel bad about myself for playing a game?" Because it's important to understand what and why you're playing, to question yourself so that you can better understand humanity, because it's important that games don't need to be fun. Games are art. Games are supposed to make you feel something, be it good or bad; they make you experience something novel. I know all of this sounds hypocritical, coming from someone who picked the game up for free, which is why to absolve myself of this ethical war in my mind, I'll be giving away a copy of Spec Ops: The Line to whoever wants it. This will probably happen in the near future, when I figure out how a giveaway works and all of the messy logistics of one.
If you've made it this far, I'd like to sincerely say thank you. Stay tuned for my next post where I go as in-depth into the game design of Spec Ops as I can possibly fit into a blog post without boring you with walls of text (I'm assuming you're a person who likes walls of text after getting through a three-thousand word blog post).
Hian is an amateur who really just wants to learn more about games, and finds it incredibly uncomfortable to write in third person. Please be aware that he often doesn't know what he's talking about, so if you want to point something out to him or call him out on his bullshit, there's a comments section right below! Or, if you want to get real personal and all up in his face, tweet him @hianhianhian_ <3
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