A perfect example of how the shooter genre should display the horrors of war and not glorify it as something trivial.
Then this game came into being and it was like a light shined on a dark and barren repetitive world known as the shooter genre.
But in what way does it shine a light on the genre you may ask? I'll tell you...
The story.
You see like I said earlier the shooter genre has been giving us the same story and the same atmosphere; You are a hero, you go in shoot the bad guys and you win and feel good right? In Spec Ops The Line they completely flip that over and make you realize how war is like hell and drives people to do...dark things.
The shooter genre has basically glorified war and make seem like something trivial, nothing too big, you just shoot the bad guys, and save the day. They fail to capture the feeling and just how dark it truly is to be in war. Spec Ops The Line goes and tells you just horrifying war can be by placing your character in an interesting setting. Dubai was about to be hit by a Sandstorm and Colonel John Konrad who was stationed there including with his battalion known as the Damned 33rd was ordered to evacuate immediately. The guy disobeyed orders and stayed to attempt to evacuate the populous of Dubai. Unfortunately that didn't go out well and the city was hit by the sandstorm and the military lost contact with him. 3 months later they receive a distress call from Konrad and send in a 3 man Delta Force Squad to see what happened to him. You are Captain Walker, the leader of the Delta Force, and you go in and try to see what happened to Konrad. Should go easy right? No...from there on in it gets much much much worse... and the horrors of war kick in and drive your character to question if the decisions he makes were right or wrong.
Never has a video game made feel bad with how Walker handled things....I am not going to spoil anything else beyond this point but I will say this...the story shows war in the most horrific way you can imagine and you won't feel like a hero anytime.
Gameplay wise it is pretty good. Like I said how shooters played follow the leader they used the first person view a lot but in this it is third person which is like a breath of fresh air for me after playing so many FPS's. It also implements a cover system which is really awesome and realistic on how you protect yourself from fire. You can also melee the enemy and perform executions which change over time as you see the character go more insane from the things that happen. The executions at first are like quick and easy but later they become much more brutal and prolonged which show how mad your character is really becoming. You also can command your squad to help you but most of the time it doesn't really help as sometimes they will just jump out in the middle of the gunfire and they die so I didn't use it as much.
Multiplayer is meh....the developers of the game didn't really wanted multiplayer but it was emphasized because of the whole "Modern Warfare 1 set the the whole shooter standards for games nowadays" thing. It was sent to another developer and it didn't really turn that well.
Overall this game is a MUST PLAY. The story will blow your mind away and if you are sick of first person then this will be awesome because of the third person. I definitely recommend this all the way.