A witty military shooter with a compelling story.
The story of the game is inspired by Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and the movie 'Apocalypse Now'. Modern day Dubai has been struck by multiple sandstorms leading to devastation and catastrophe, ultimately rendering the affluent city uninhabitable and forcing the residents and tourists to flee if they could afford an evacuation. Sadly, not everybody managed to get out of the sand filled city, prompting a U.S Army Colonel Konrad and his squad, 'The Damned 33rd' to attempt a daring rescue in the heart of Dubai. However, all communications were lost with Konrad and his men 6 months later where a single message was intercepted from Konrad saying that the evacuation resulted in "complete failure." Ergo, a three man U.S. Delta team led by Captain Walker was sent to infiltrate the city, locate survivors, radio their superiors outside of the storm wall, and leave the city. Although, as they progress in the city and meet other people, they realize that nothing in Dubai is what it seems.
Game's mechanics are familiar to anyone who has played a third person action game. You can sprint, run to cover, and vault over obstacles and even execute the enemies that are down. Also, you can order your squad, as Walker, to either focus their fire on an individual enemy or throw a flashbang, obstructing the enemy's vision, making them easier for you to kill, although due to peculiar AI behavior which is present in both enemy and friendly NPCs, an order might not always registers appropriately or takes too long to be executed which sometimes lead to your sudden death. You can also use sand as a tactical advantage in combat. Shooting large windows with huge amount of sand behind them lets the sand to flow freely, wiping out soldiers. Throwing grenades nearby causes grains of sand to jump, distracting the enemy. To be concise, the game is nothing special in terms of mechanics, even there are a few hiccups here and there, making it more difficult to play than it really is. Visually, it is a very pretty game. Views of apocalyptical Dubai, juxtaposing the modern and beautiful architecture of the city's massive buildings with the remnants of war, pain, and misery shown on the surface, makes this devastated city believable and horrific, giving you a subtle chill while traversing through different environments. However, judging the game solely based on mechanics and gameplay is doing it injustice. Spec Ops is a game about story and characters.
Although, at first glance, even the first few levels of the game, it doesn't necessarily come off as something new in that perspective either, but rather same old generic tropes found in other similar games. Even the characters and dialogues exchanged between them are generic. Badass American soldiers being attacked by vicious foreign language speaking bad guys while making wise crack jokes and using military vernacular to show their immense capability during war. Give it a little time and after a while you'll be faced with a very captivating narrative. Every character you encounter in the game has layers that when peeled off, reveal interesting traits about them. Even the enemies are not faceless goons or terrorists or whatnot. They are people with ideas, feelings, personalities that they show once in a while. Interesting conversations take place between them when they haven't encountered you like when two snipers chat about how the city is beautiful when there's no war going on. Therefore, when you bring an enemy soldier down, you feel like you just killed a person, not a digital, pixelated, ridiculous representation of one. Making you justify it by realizing you didn't have a choice and it was you or them. This is another aspect of Spec Ops, choice.
Throughout the game, you're required to make hard choices, often determining the fate of a person or a group of people. These choices aren't handed out to you like in typical video game fashion, prompting you to push a button or choose a dialogue option to make it, but rather putting you in a very uncomfortable, difficult situation, forcing you to handle it. So, it is unclear in what situation you have a choice and in what situation, you do not. Because of this feature, you feel more connected to Walker and you sympathize with him even if you don't necessarily agree with him (something one of his squadmates makes a remark about, too). However, in later parts of the game, when you are confronted with the horrible ramifications of your decision, you can't help but to start hating yourself and feeling really bad, even not wanting to play anymore and putting the controller down. How you are drawn to some of these situations is also interesting. The game lures you in with the mechanics you're familiar with from playing previous military shooters, like turret sequences or sitting behind a laptop while controlling a certain airborne weapon, to progress through certain points of the story. However, instead of rewarding you graciously and making you feel like a hero and a badass, as mentioned above, forces you to face the horrendous consequences of your seemingly normal act and feel terrible about yourself. Also giving you pause to wonder whether you had a choice or not. So, it can't be described as a fun game where you feel really good about it afterwards, but rather a very compelling one.
Multiplayer is your run of the mill class based shooting fest. There are multiple classes to choose from the two main classes, the damned and the exiled, and you are pitted against other players to take part in various matches like deathmatch, team deathmatch and such. As you progress in any match accordingly, you level up and will have access to other perks and features for you character or weapon. Multiplayer is not the incentive to play this game, though. One reason is that because of the mechanical strains prevalent in the gameplay; you don't have enough control of your character's movements which leads to cheap deaths occurring more often than not. Another reason is the trouble you'll definitely have while matchmaking which sporadically functions properly. The main reason is that Spec Ops is primarily a single player experience and it seems like the developers didn't invest much to bring a solid multiplayer experience. This is shown in the trophy/achievement section where all of them correlate to parts of the story, not the multiplayer.
Spec Ops excels at delivering an astounding and rewarding experience that you'll remember for years because of its ingenuity. Some parts of the game may seem generic but within context, they have a different tone and a message to convey to the player. Which is war is not an event to happy about and killing is not something to be proud of, as they are shown in other military shooters. This message shows how smartly the game is designed and makes you appreciate the writers for trying something new. Therefore, various gameplay issues like the stiff movement of the characters, lack of subtle online connectivity and matchmaking, and some odd AI behavior, both friendly and enemy, are overshadowed by the great storytelling, successful character development, and delicately put somber tone that are present on Spec Ops: The Line. These traits make Spec Ops a must buy for those who want to play something different and be invested in story and characters, not those who just care about their kill death ratio in a multiplayer match.