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June 20, 2012
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Why I’m worried about Spec Ops: The Line

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Written by: Joe Natalzia
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Why Im worried about Spec Ops: The Line spec ops the line rainbow: six 2k games

I was excited for The Line. As a huge fan of the Rainbow Six: Vegas  series, the initial spotlight seemed to shine from that end, but with the promise of moral complexity to back it up. Our own Stephen Weaver just posted his preview the other day, and while it touches on the issue at hand, I don’t think it delves deeply enough.

I just played the demo. And I know, you can’t base a game off the demo that is released but someone needs to explain to me who they are catering to.  It feel like a mix of everything that works, with no leaps of faith. Normally, I wouldn’t care, but after press release after press release hammering on the moral choice and deterioration of a soldier on the battlefield that would be so ingrained in their game, you would think that they would have the decency to explore some of that in the demo.

Instead, what the demo is is a selection of firefights, with your standard weapons, your standard military banter, and your standard cover system. Where’s the new features here?  Where was the hook, where was the thing that would make this game stand out across such a crowded market?

Put simply, it wasn’t there. It opens with an on-rails shooting segment, where your character must use a mounted machine gun to take down enemy helicopters, and from there it gets even more bland. The most exciting part of the whole half hour was the initial encounter with the hostiles. You’re bombarded with “Shoot!” comments from your squadmates while your character tries to talk them down. Here we go. I thought, the first choice of many. But it wasn’t even a choice. In the end the only choice that you made was killing them with falling sand, or killing them with bullets. I wanted to walk the line. Unfortunately, I didn’t even get to see it.

With so many shooters on the shelves, I was really in the mood for something different. Sadly, The Line was not that something. If the reviews come back singing a different tune, I might pick it up, but as of now it seems that The Line will get buried with the likes of every other shooter on the market.





3 comments »


  • http://www.gamingblend.com/ William Usher

    Well said. I agree. The demo was tainted with all the typical BS we get in any other generic military shooter.

    The “choice” of how to approach the rebels was stupid and pointless. What was the point other than to pad the game’s play time? Everything else was basically a more generic version of Gears of War with even less gameplay mechanics (no roll, no environmental interaction, etc,. etc.)

    • http://twitter.com/jnatalzia Joe Natalzia

      It just makes me wonder how the full game is going to be if they didn’t even highlight their main selling points in the demo.

  • DoubleAron

    The demo did not do this game justice. When you play through the single player campaign, you’re treated to MANY choices that decide the outcome of the game. The story is gripping, deep, and very real in terms of what it brings to the table. Is it a generic Gears clone in terms of controls? Sure, but in my opinion that made the game easily accessible and put a great spin on the control scheme to get away from the “locusts”. I started this game and couldn’t put it down till the end, and even went back through and changed my decisions to see what the outcome would be. This game paints a portrait about the horror’s of war that has probably never been seen in gaming to date.