Spoiler: Spec Ops: The Line is an OK game for the "shoot and cry" crowd
Spoiler: Spec Ops: The Line is an OK game for the "shoot and cry" crowd
You get it all in this game, white phosphorous, lynchings, gunning down protestors, etc. The only positive of this game is that you get to gun down American troops in a video game with no pretense of doing this in real life(In Minecraft).
The worst part about this game is that war crimes are framed as inevitable. I literally can't progress in the game without gunning down civilians or shooting white phosphorous at the troops™
Like, this game would be good if there was once an anti-war message sprinkled in there. The fact that this producer can spread war crime porn is disgusting.
This game was marketed as the tough choices horror show of games, and boy did it fuck that up.
As an addendum: the campaign is kind of fun to play
The worst part about this game is that war crimes are framed as inevitable. I literally can’t progress in the game without gunning down civilians or shooting white phosphorous at the troops™
The justification is "not playing the game is also a choice" which is very silly, you can't do an artistic message that involves the 4th wall like that (at least in Spec Ops' particular case; obviously just not playing the game isn't an option IRL, so it undercuts its resonance with reality).
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People talk about the WP scene, but I actually think the better one is where a mob surrounds one of your squad members. I'm not gonna lie, I absolutely fired in to the crowd before learning they disperse if you fire warning shots and felt pretty ashamed.
As someone who played it back when it released at the height of call of duty's popularity I always thought that:
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The really effective thing about the WP scene is that it kinda tricks you into doing it, quite a few of the CoD games had sequences where you fly a drone or an AC-130 and just blow away endless little white silhouettes without thinking about it. And the WP bombing plays on that expectation and makes you realize what you've been doing without thinking in all those other games.