On the normal difficulty level you can be killed by only a few shots, and while the standard wait until your health recharges approach still works, smart or heavily armed enemies make aggressive play a risky business. For a start, it’s played from a third-person viewpoint, and cover is a major issue. It does, however, give the game a coherence and a style that sets it apart from your straight Call of Duty clones.īut then The Line doesn’t play like a straight Call of Duty clone. In terms of gameplay the effects are limited, with the occasional sandstorm forcing you to run for cover, or clearly marked points where you can blast out a window to bury a group of hostiles in several tonnes of sand. The setting is surreal, with vast dunes piled against the side of epic skyscrapers, and the most ostentatious signs of wealth and luxury buried by the invading dust. The Line is the tale of three US Delta Force operatives, sent to find an army regiment lost during the evacuation of a Dubai hit by an apocalyptic sandstorm. It also helps that it has a more imaginative premise and a more spectacular setting than your average action game. It’s a game that wants you to think about what your enemies are doing and what you are doing, and maybe feel a little bad about it all. It’s not that Spec Ops: The Line is in any way a realistic depiction of the horrors of war, but it has an edge to it and a desire to look behind the normal Call of Duty stuff. However, there was always something cartoony about the morality of those games, with their cackling villains and crazy premises – it wasn’t something you could relate in any way to the real world.
It’s not as if the genre hasn’t flirted with darker subject matter – Call of Duty: Black Ops was a fairly twisted conspiracy myth, while Homefront had its concentration camps and mass burials. Sure, it plays like the bastard child of Call of Duty and Gears of War, but the style and story could not be any more different. Spec-Ops: The Line is not your ordinary military shooter.
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