However, I feel that attempting to make these points through the medium of a perfectly mediocre over-the-shoulder desert-based shooter is somewhat self-defeating, since while Spec Ops feels comfortable with critiquing military shooters like the Call of Duty franchise it never steps outside the mechanical conventions of the genre itself to show us how things could be done differently.Īs an example, while the game does differ from the usual fare in that instead of fighting whatever the American baddie de jour is (I believe these days it’s either Russians, terrorists, or Russian terrorists) you’re instead fighting the Americans themselves, these highly trained US soldiers still mimic the behaviour of your average “insurgent” baddie from any shooter made in the last decade. As things stand it still is a fairly average game, but it at least takes the opportunity to try and make some unusual points about the videogame wars we regularly experience from the comfort of our living rooms both in terms of the reality of the situation and the artificial rules of the constructed environments we find ourselves running and gunning through.
That hews pretty closely to the plot of Apocalypse Now, and if that were all there were to Spec Ops it’d be a fairly average game. Walker and his team blunder right into the middle of this shooting war, which increasingly spirals out-of-control as the body count rises and Walker and his compatriots become increasingly unhinged by the things they see and do while in the city.
The CIA also has a presence in Dubai, arming the civilians and egging them on in their resistance to further their own goals. He discovers that Konrad and his troops have gone rogue, slaughtering both the civilian population in the name of maintaining order in the cut-off city as well as members of their own unit who had the temerity to object. The player character, Martin Walker, is the leader of a three-man Delta Force team sent into the ruins of Dubai to investigate a transmission from one Colonel Konrad, who went missing during the disaster along with an entire battalion of American soldiers. Eventually I ran out of excuses (the problem with repeatedly saying “I’ll buy it when it drops below £5” is that eventually it will drop below £5) and caved, and you know what? I’m kind of glad I did.Īt first glance Spec Ops appears to be a straight ripoff of Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness. Something that prompted several people I know to repeatedly insist I buy it and play through it, even though they knew that I hate third-person cover-based shooters that don’t come with a space opera RPG attached, and that I especially hate third-person cover-based shooters about American soldiers stuck in the desert. It’s not usually the sort of game I’d go within a hundred miles of, but then there’s something rather unusual about Spec Ops. Spec Ops is a third-person cover-based military shooter set in a ruined Dubai that has been isolated and largely destroyed by titanic sandstorms.
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