These aren’t the heavy-handed dialogue choices of a BioWare game but almost always in-game choices of whose life is less deserving and what lengths you’re prepared to go to in order to protect yourself and your men. There’s some unusually difficult moral choices to make throughout the story though, which given the game’s dark tone seem much more affecting than the video game average. This alone is worthy of huge praise, even if the fact that the game also has to work as a proper third person shooter means it’s constantly sending mixed messages. This is one of the very few military shooters that actually dares to portray war and the military in anything other than a fetishistic and sycophantic light. In fact in every way it is Dubai which is the star of the show, its gaudy extravagances playing cleverly against both the ugliness of war and the indifferent destruction of the sand.Īnd the battles in Spec Ops are ugly too. The dynamic weather system that simulates blinding sandstorms adds some extra novelty, as does the way the sand shifts and moves beneath your feet. They often make it clear they think they know what they’re doing more than you, and more than once we found them shouting at us to get a move on. Although whether they actually do it or not depends on their situation at the time. Unlike most squad-based games nowadays you’re actually given some meaningful control over your underlings, with the ability to set them specific targets, use grenades, and heal each other. The cover system is a bit too sticky at times but that’s about the worst crime you could level at the action – other than the fact that without the game’s unusual setting and storyline it would be completely unmemorable (as a result the multiplayer certainly is). The set-up is excellent but the problem is that the game underneath struggles to be anything more than a competent third person shooter. Thanks to the sandstorm Dubai itself seems to have literally sunk into hell, as the giant skyscrapers now appear to descend into the abyss rather than reaching into the skies.
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And the game’s script doesn’t pull its punches as it portrays the atrocities and madness of the situation. If you realise that Konrad is playing Marlon Brando’s role in Apocalypse’s role in Apocalypse Now then you should have a good idea of what’s going on, without us having to spoil anything for you.