I'm pretty sure the reason your squadmates keep following you is that, well, that's what soldiers are supposed to do. Follow orders. There are several scenes where one or both of them question exactly what the fuck it is you're ordering them to do, but in the end their training wins out even when they're following a crazy asshole who winds up killing thousands of people, including civilians, for absolutely no good reason. More meta-commentary on the military shooter genre, I guess. If either one of them had said "no", things would have been better.
Also, because as crazy as you may be (however crazy that is, since there's no way to be totally sure), you are still preferable to the city full of people shooting at them.
Did anyone find a way to make the button prompts actually show keyboard buttons instead of the 360 pad? It was a real pain in the ass going through the beginning having to stop every 10 seconds to check which button I should be hitting. I guess it could because I have my controller plugged in but I'll be damned if i'm gonna disconnect it every time for this one game when it should either just recognize it or at least give me a menu setting.
Unplug your USB controller?
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HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I had the mouse sensitivity issue but was saved by having custom dpi settings on my mouse. Then sometime half way through the mouse settings from the games options kicked in though. Likely bug that'll probably be fixed.
Did anyone find a way to make the button prompts actually show keyboard buttons instead of the 360 pad? It was a real pain in the ass going through the beginning having to stop every 10 seconds to check which button I should be hitting. I guess it could because I have my controller plugged in but I'll be damned if i'm gonna disconnect it every time for this one game when it should either just recognize it or at least give me a menu setting.
Unplug your USB controller?
If you read his post, that's apparently too much effort.
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HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
A really cool thing, later game spoilers.
After you start getting crazy and how that affects fighting. I was having a lot of trouble at the yacht with the heavy. Just as I was going to start raging I finally kill the heavy. And the character goes like "Aaargh... FUCKING FINALLY!"
And it was so on the point, that was exactly what I was going to shout!
Just finished this myself. Count me in the 'starts as yet another military manshooter, gets shocking in the middle, and ends with a well-earned holy shit' camp. Mechanically it's a decent and well polished shooter with competent AI, but area design skewed too heavily towards throwing waves of enemies at you rather than doing anything clever. A recurring thought was "How many guys does the 33rd even have?" It was still manageable until late in the game when attacks started coming at you from all sides, and I'm calling bullshit on the
yacht bit after you're shot down
because the cover, or lack thereof, made that far too frustrating.
Storywise, it was a brilliant satirical mindfuck. I'm not easily put off by alleged controversy in games - I didn't even blink at "No Russian" - but you are put through some truly ghastly situations that quite easily got under my skin. It really reminded me of Kane & Lynch in tone, if not in style; a long, strange trip into nihilism and despair where your mistakes have real, indelible consequences. Thankfully, Spec Ops is more conclusive in its endings. I had to stop and think about several of the choices, and it trained me to look for options that sometimes weren't there. In particular,
dealing with the crowd was, I think, the high point of the decisions: an impossibly fucked situation, exacerbated by circumstances and bad calls that couldn't be cleared up in the seconds we had, certainly not with our translator dead. How do you tell someone there were no right calls, but you had to make them? And even if you could, what if they wanted to string you up anyway?
Right up to when I fired into the air I didn't even know there was a way out. I probably deserved to die. Hell, they might all die anyway. But I just couldn't do it. Some tiny part of me was screaming, begging me to cling to some useless shred of humanity, even when there seemed to be no place left for it.
I think gameplay and story could have intersected better. The little details worked amazingly well, from your squad growing visibly (and audibly) more agitated to changes in the main menu. The personalized objectives as your mood changes were also a nice touch. But there's still a notable disconnect and the railroading sometimes crosses the line between intentional and poor design. Namely,
there really needed to be an in-game means of attempting to leave, even if it ended in failure and you had to continue on anyway. Otherwise, the impact of being told "you could have left at any time" is muted because no, I really couldn't. The white phosphorus scene had a similar problem. It's visceral and gut-wrenching even before you get to the trench, but the exit from the platform only magically appears once you're done launching. It was a tragic, horrible mistake, but once the shock wore off I didn't think much of it afterwards. Even a false choice would've helped. Mind, it worked from a story perspective, explaining where Walker started to really break, it just doesn't get far beyond that.
Long story short, it's not the perfect merger of gameplay and artful storytelling that I was hoping, but it goes much, much further than I was expecting. The characters are dynamic, the setting is unique, the gunplay is good enough to not get in the way, and the story pushes the limits of what game stories are capable of. Wouldn't recommend a full price purchase, but I don't regret buying or playing it. This may not be a fun game by normal standards, but I do think it's an important one.
But there's still a notable disconnect and the railroading sometimes crosses the line between intentional and poor design. Namely,
there really needed to be an in-game means of attempting to leave, even if it ended in failure and you had to continue on anyway. Otherwise, the impact of being told "you could have left at any time" is muted because no, I really couldn't. The white phosphorus scene had a similar problem. It's visceral and gut-wrenching even before you get to the trench, but the exit from the platform only magically appears once you're done launching. It was a tragic, horrible mistake, but once the shock wore off I didn't think much of it afterwards. Even a false choice would've helped. Mind, it worked from a story perspective, explaining where Walker started to really break, it just doesn't get far beyond that.
Ending-ish, and thematic spoilers:
The player does have a choice to leave at any time.
They can stop playing.
I mean, it gets into a heavy-handed, Funny Games style critique of why military shooters are considered entertainment, but that's what I got from the whole "you could have just left" message.
There's also a loading screen message that underscores this, saying something like "killing for revenge is murder, killing for your country is heroism, killing for entertainment is harmless".
I mean, that theme also works on a couple of different levels (I mean, we're talking about a game where Americans intervene in a Middle Eastern nation and makes things worse instead of better) but I think it still works without giving the player character a chance to actually leave.
I do agree that sometimes the illusion of choice the game offers challenges the suspension of disbelief, the white phosphorous mortar scene being the most egregious example.
Did anyone find a way to make the button prompts actually show keyboard buttons instead of the 360 pad? It was a real pain in the ass going through the beginning having to stop every 10 seconds to check which button I should be hitting. I guess it could because I have my controller plugged in but I'll be damned if i'm gonna disconnect it every time for this one game when it should either just recognize it or at least give me a menu setting.
Unplug your USB controller?
If you read his post, that's apparently too much effort.
It isn't the effort, it's the fact that a game in 2012 shouldn't need to have that done to actually play with keyboard prompts instead of controller. I mean hell The Walking Dead changes prompts depending on what ever your touching at the time so I don't really think it's asking to much to at the least have a menu option. (or if there was a way outside of disconnecting the controller to do so that I missed. I was at work at the time and couldn't check myself.) I don't really feel like crawling under my desk to disconnect a controller every time I want to play the game. If you want to attribute that to to much effort and not lazy porting then, Ok I guess ya got me.
I had the mouse sensitivity issue but was saved by having custom dpi settings on my mouse. Then sometime half way through the mouse settings from the games options kicked in though. Likely bug that'll probably be fixed.
I'll probably hold off on picking this up until a first patch comes out then. I do love being a headshot machine and having wonky high sensitivity fucks me up pretty bad.
But there's still a notable disconnect and the railroading sometimes crosses the line between intentional and poor design. Namely,
there really needed to be an in-game means of attempting to leave, even if it ended in failure and you had to continue on anyway. Otherwise, the impact of being told "you could have left at any time" is muted because no, I really couldn't. The white phosphorus scene had a similar problem. It's visceral and gut-wrenching even before you get to the trench, but the exit from the platform only magically appears once you're done launching. It was a tragic, horrible mistake, but once the shock wore off I didn't think much of it afterwards. Even a false choice would've helped. Mind, it worked from a story perspective, explaining where Walker started to really break, it just doesn't get far beyond that.
Ending-ish, and thematic spoilers:
The player does have a choice to leave at any time.
They can stop playing.
I mean, it gets into a heavy-handed, Funny Games style critique of why military shooters are considered entertainment, but that's what I got from the whole "you could have just left" message.
There's also a loading screen message that underscores this, saying something like "killing for revenge is murder, killing for your country is heroism, killing for entertainment is harmless".
I mean, that theme also works on a couple of different levels (I mean, we're talking about a game where Americans intervene in a Middle Eastern nation and makes things worse instead of better) but I think it still works without giving the player character a chance to actually leave.
I do agree that sometimes the illusion of choice the game offers challenges the suspension of disbelief, the white phosphorous mortar scene being the most egregious example.
I can see what you mean,
I just think that's basically the same trick they pulled in FNV: Lonesome Road; it felt kind of cheap there, and only slightly better here. There has to be a more creative way to poke at the player for continuing, when the only other option - quitting - requires admitting they just wasted their money. To me, that runs the risk of crossing the line between thought provoking and trolling unless it's handled very carefully.
It's more of a nitpick though, and I bring it up only because so much of the game just had me in awe. I'd never heard of this team before, but I was very impressed with the game overall.
Just wanted to say, in case anyone else has this problem, that the demo and full game wouldn't work for me at first because my monitor can't handle the game's default resolution. If you have this problem, like I did, you need to go to the folder in steam for the game, go into binaries and then win32, right-click the game's launch icon, create a shortcut, right-click the new short-cut, in the path box put a space after the " and put -windowed to launch the game in windowed mode. Then take the resolution down to whatever works for you, turn the game off, erase the -windowed from the file path and then relaunch it. Annoying but the game is really sweet on PC so it's worth it.
As previous posters have mentioned it makes you think more about the nature of a video game than any game I can think of. That it does so while presenting a fairly-straightforward "war is Hell" narrative is brilliant.
My only complaint is that the controls and combat felt disconnected. One thing Call of Duty does really well is give feedback when you've been hit, or when your shots connect. This, though, I found myself having to second-guess whether I was on target with my shots, or whether I'd been shot.
I mean maybe that's part of its meta-narrative thing, but it came across as a little sloppy rather than intentional. I also wrestled with the controls a bit, the sprint/cover system left me standing up like an idiot a lot of times when I meant to slide into cover. I died a few times to stupid stuff when the game did something other than what I wanted from it.
Despite that I would recommend it highly to anyone. I wanted desperately to keep playing despite my frustration, and that is exactly what the game wanted me to do.
Storywise, it was a brilliant satirical mindfuck. I'm not easily put off by alleged controversy in games - I didn't even blink at "No Russian" - but you are put through some truly ghastly situations that quite easily got under my skin. It really reminded me of Kane & Lynch in tone, if not in style; a long, strange trip into nihilism and despair where your mistakes have real, indelible consequences. Thankfully, Spec Ops is more conclusive in its endings. I had to stop and think about several of the choices, and it trained me to look for options that sometimes weren't there. In particular,
dealing with the crowd was, I think, the high point of the decisions: an impossibly fucked situation, exacerbated by circumstances and bad calls that couldn't be cleared up in the seconds we had, certainly not with our translator dead. How do you tell someone there were no right calls, but you had to make them? And even if you could, what if they wanted to string you up anyway?
Right up to when I fired into the air I didn't even know there was a way out. I probably deserved to die. Hell, they might all die anyway. But I just couldn't do it. Some tiny part of me was screaming, begging me to cling to some useless shred of humanity, even when there seemed to be no place left for it.
I had that same reaction to that scene:
I wasn't thinking it terms of a video game anymore. I wasn't thinking "how do i proceed through this obstacle?", I wasn't thinking "how can I solve this problem?", I was thinking "I can't shoot these people. I can't do it. I can't do it! *panic*" and fired into the air in desperation.
Then they dispersed in terror, and something within me bid me give chase, and over the next ten seconds I went from shaken to fucking bloodthirsty for revenge. I suddenly wished I had mowed them all down with a SAW.
And then I rounded a corner, and some woman in a burkha stepped out and threw a rock at me, and my reflex was to shoot kill shoot kill but I missed as she fled. And I spent entirely too long standing there thinking about what I had just intended to do.
I'm not sure my disbelief has been that thoroughly suspended in any game, ever.
AresProphet on
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PunkBoyThank you! And thank you again!Registered Userregular
Haven't read spoilers, but from what I've seen, would it be safe to say that this could be the Nier of military shooters? If so, I definitely need to check it out.
Steam ID:
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I honestly think the CoD series has some of the worst feedback for shooting people. It always feels like I'm shooting at cardboard cut-outs that fall right over when shot without much impact to be had. This isn't as true in multiplayer, in MP there are sound effects for head shots, numbers come across the screen telling you you did good and stuff like that. But in the campaigns? I've never understood those games being the model for shot feedback.
I honestly think the CoD series has some of the worst feedback for shooting people. It always feels like I'm shooting at cardboard cut-outs that fall right over when shot without much impact to be had. This isn't as true in multiplayer, in MP there are sound effects for head shots, numbers come across the screen telling you you did good and stuff like that. But in the campaigns? I've never understood those games being the model for shot feedback.
Well I pretty much just played CoD4 and MW2 multiplayer (besides a single run-through of each SP campaign), so I may be using a poor comparison. Might be a difference between first- and third-person, in a FPS your gun can jar when you're hit and it feels significant, in a third-person game you don't notice it as much.
In Spec Ops I found myself using way too much ammo to take down enemies a lot of the time. I was really trying to ration it once I figured out that ammo was fucking hard to come by, but I still ran totally out a few times and had to backtrack to find more. But since dropped guns seem to depop after a certain amount of time that didn't work very much so I'd just die and try to conserve more ammo on the next try. I'd sometimes empty a 30-round clip trying to down one guy, and that was later on after I'd had some practice with that gun. I never found that sweet spot that felt like I was effective.
Which is a shame, because if I felt like an efficient killing machine by the end of the game that really would have been something. As it was, I mostly felt like I'd barely limped through and didn't deserve the ending.
Maybe that works too. Fuck I can't wrap my head around this game. Gonna replay it and see what it's like on a second go.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
The gameplay is above average, I don't get that criticism. It feels solid.
I had a bit of a play of the game with a rental copy and it's pretty much bog standard shooter, I wouldn't call it "above average" as it's literally pounding "average" in the dick. To be honest, I kind of think that I want to just watch the story cutscenes condensed down without any of the actual shooting in between (which has simply failed to engage me in any way).
But what this game does with narrative? I really really hope it gets well recognized for it because from what I have seen and been reading the narrative is something special.
The gameplay is above average, I don't get that criticism. It feels solid.
I had a bit of a play of the game with a rental copy and it's pretty much bog standard shooter, I wouldn't call it "above average" as it's literally pounding "average" in the dick. To be honest, I kind of think that I want to just watch the story cutscenes condensed down without any of the actual shooting in between (which has simply failed to engage me in any way).
But what this game does with narrative? I really really hope it gets well recognized for it because from what I have seen and been reading the narrative is something special.
Yeah this isn't a "standard shooter with good story cutscenes". The combat is an integral part of the story. Certain parts more than others, but going through the experience of the game is way more important than watching it. The combat isn't bad, but I thought it lacked oomph. Plenty of tense firefights and good setpieces, and there were enough moments where I was enjoying myself to help counterbalance the frustrating bits.
It's a bog standard shooter... at first. It becomes way more than that. You simply have to play it to understand it. It does everything your average shooter does while doing something totally different at the same time.
I thought the shooting was good for a standard third-person action setup, and despite the bleak setting it was even fun at times. There was just way too much of it, especially from a plot perspective.
You kill probably a few hundred dudes from start to finish, which is enough for a small battalion. With the hardware the enemy was throwing at you, I struggle to believe they were in such dire straits that Konrad went Lord of the Flies, prompting a portion of the battalion to split off in exile. The city looks believably distressed, but with all the choppers, humvees, and strykers, it looked like the 33rd had just gotten there, instead of having been there for months or whatever. You probably kill at least a hundred or so Americans before Walker really starts cracking, so he can't be embellishing too much.
Sometimes it clicked and both gameplay and story worked together, but for the most part I think they needed fewer, smarter action sequences.
I wasn't thinking it terms of a video game anymore. I wasn't thinking "how do i proceed through this obstacle?", I wasn't thinking "how can I solve this problem?", I was thinking "I can't shoot these people. I can't do it. I can't do it! *panic*" and fired into the air in desperation.
Then they dispersed in terror, and something within me bid me give chase, and over the next ten seconds I went from shaken to fucking bloodthirsty for revenge. I suddenly wished I had mowed them all down with a SAW.
And then I rounded a corner, and some woman in a burkha stepped out and threw a rock at me, and my reflex was to shoot kill shoot kill but I missed as she fled. And I spent entirely too long standing there thinking about what I had just intended to do.
I'm not sure my disbelief has been that thoroughly suspended in any game, ever.
Yeah, that was expertly done.
I started freaking out - real, honest, "what the hell do I do here" panic - when the civilians began closing in and doing damage. That bit afterwards with Adams really hit home: "Still think these people are worth saving?" At that point it was so screwed up that saving anybody was beside the point, and even still it felt like a line that, once crossed, couldn't be uncrossed. To a point, your actions thus far could be mitigated by circumstance, horrible and tragic that some of them were. Shooting unarmed civilians, even hostile ones, felt like a true point of no return, a conscious decision to choose the darker, easier path.
More than once in this game, I had to stop and seriously think about what to do. That doesn't happen often, to say the least. For that alone I applaud these guys.
I figure a lot of the soldiers you killed are just in Walker's mind, sort of like all of his conversations with Konrad. He clearly does some fucked things that his squadmates react to, but sorting out what happened and what Walker thought happened is an impossible task. At least, that's the way it seemed in the ending I picked (shoot Konrad).
See, for me the game had an average standard third person setup with the gameplay but I felt that it was more fun than a lot of TPS I've played. The guns felt meaty with shotgun being a good example. Its one of the rare shotties in a game that works efficiently at distance too.
That said, I agree with stolls. Action bits tend to drag on sometimes.
What made the game play special for me was that it always felt like you were barely scraping by, it was constantly overwhelming to the point where I'd take breaks just to catch my breath.
I won't have a chance to actually listen to this for a few hours, but Gamespot tracked down the lead writer and had a conversation with him. Spoilers, obviously:
GOTY for me. This was spectacular, from start to finish. It seems the main criticism is the gameplay, but I can't think why - the gameplay is genuinely great, though deceptively average. I can't think of a tighter shooter. Everything else was brilliant.
While it was an adaptation of heart of darkness, the message is completely different - fairly unique to gaming, I think. Which is cool.
Got this as part of the 2k pack. The full game has properly working mouse sensitivity! Huzzah! I shall enjoy shooting mans in the face repeatedly.
I did not enjoy shooting those mans. This is not a fun game in the slightest, this is fucking art and everyone should be forced to play this. GOTY easily and one of the most important games to come out in a long time.
Having a lot of fun contemplating just how much was real and whatcwas a delusion. Well played Spec Ops, well played.
I really really want to play this game. Please Newell put it on even a slight discount for the summer sale!!
Amazon had it for 50% off for the past two weeks, which bodes well for future discounting. It's also a Steamworks game so wherever you buy it, it activates on Steam.
Steam has it for a whopping 10% off now, so I'm hoping it gets a nice daily/flash deal so I can gift the crap out of it.
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KlykaDO you have anySPARE BATTERIES?Registered Userregular
God dammit... this will probably have to be my next game purchase. All the reactions to the end in this thread make me feel like I should play this. Played the demo, and it seemed like a serviceable enough TPS. You guys better not let me down, or else!
Or else I'll be all like "Aw man, you guys let me down."
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
Posts
Also, because as crazy as you may be (however crazy that is, since there's no way to be totally sure), you are still preferable to the city full of people shooting at them.
Unplug your USB controller?
If you read his post, that's apparently too much effort.
And it was so on the point, that was exactly what I was going to shout!
Storywise, it was a brilliant satirical mindfuck. I'm not easily put off by alleged controversy in games - I didn't even blink at "No Russian" - but you are put through some truly ghastly situations that quite easily got under my skin. It really reminded me of Kane & Lynch in tone, if not in style; a long, strange trip into nihilism and despair where your mistakes have real, indelible consequences. Thankfully, Spec Ops is more conclusive in its endings. I had to stop and think about several of the choices, and it trained me to look for options that sometimes weren't there. In particular,
Right up to when I fired into the air I didn't even know there was a way out. I probably deserved to die. Hell, they might all die anyway. But I just couldn't do it. Some tiny part of me was screaming, begging me to cling to some useless shred of humanity, even when there seemed to be no place left for it.
I think gameplay and story could have intersected better. The little details worked amazingly well, from your squad growing visibly (and audibly) more agitated to changes in the main menu. The personalized objectives as your mood changes were also a nice touch. But there's still a notable disconnect and the railroading sometimes crosses the line between intentional and poor design. Namely,
Long story short, it's not the perfect merger of gameplay and artful storytelling that I was hoping, but it goes much, much further than I was expecting. The characters are dynamic, the setting is unique, the gunplay is good enough to not get in the way, and the story pushes the limits of what game stories are capable of. Wouldn't recommend a full price purchase, but I don't regret buying or playing it. This may not be a fun game by normal standards, but I do think it's an important one.
Nowhere to ruuuuun, nowhere to hiiiiide :whistle:
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
Ending-ish, and thematic spoilers:
They can stop playing.
I mean, it gets into a heavy-handed, Funny Games style critique of why military shooters are considered entertainment, but that's what I got from the whole "you could have just left" message.
There's also a loading screen message that underscores this, saying something like "killing for revenge is murder, killing for your country is heroism, killing for entertainment is harmless".
I mean, that theme also works on a couple of different levels (I mean, we're talking about a game where Americans intervene in a Middle Eastern nation and makes things worse instead of better) but I think it still works without giving the player character a chance to actually leave.
I do agree that sometimes the illusion of choice the game offers challenges the suspension of disbelief, the white phosphorous mortar scene being the most egregious example.
It isn't the effort, it's the fact that a game in 2012 shouldn't need to have that done to actually play with keyboard prompts instead of controller. I mean hell The Walking Dead changes prompts depending on what ever your touching at the time so I don't really think it's asking to much to at the least have a menu option. (or if there was a way outside of disconnecting the controller to do so that I missed. I was at work at the time and couldn't check myself.) I don't really feel like crawling under my desk to disconnect a controller every time I want to play the game. If you want to attribute that to to much effort and not lazy porting then, Ok I guess ya got me.
I'll probably hold off on picking this up until a first patch comes out then. I do love being a headshot machine and having wonky high sensitivity fucks me up pretty bad.
I can see what you mean,
It's more of a nitpick though, and I bring it up only because so much of the game just had me in awe. I'd never heard of this team before, but I was very impressed with the game overall.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
Yup, the stuff like
As previous posters have mentioned it makes you think more about the nature of a video game than any game I can think of. That it does so while presenting a fairly-straightforward "war is Hell" narrative is brilliant.
My only complaint is that the controls and combat felt disconnected. One thing Call of Duty does really well is give feedback when you've been hit, or when your shots connect. This, though, I found myself having to second-guess whether I was on target with my shots, or whether I'd been shot.
I mean maybe that's part of its meta-narrative thing, but it came across as a little sloppy rather than intentional. I also wrestled with the controls a bit, the sprint/cover system left me standing up like an idiot a lot of times when I meant to slide into cover. I died a few times to stupid stuff when the game did something other than what I wanted from it.
Despite that I would recommend it highly to anyone. I wanted desperately to keep playing despite my frustration, and that is exactly what the game wanted me to do.
I had that same reaction to that scene:
Then they dispersed in terror, and something within me bid me give chase, and over the next ten seconds I went from shaken to fucking bloodthirsty for revenge. I suddenly wished I had mowed them all down with a SAW.
And then I rounded a corner, and some woman in a burkha stepped out and threw a rock at me, and my reflex was to shoot kill shoot kill but I missed as she fled. And I spent entirely too long standing there thinking about what I had just intended to do.
I'm not sure my disbelief has been that thoroughly suspended in any game, ever.
Well I pretty much just played CoD4 and MW2 multiplayer (besides a single run-through of each SP campaign), so I may be using a poor comparison. Might be a difference between first- and third-person, in a FPS your gun can jar when you're hit and it feels significant, in a third-person game you don't notice it as much.
In Spec Ops I found myself using way too much ammo to take down enemies a lot of the time. I was really trying to ration it once I figured out that ammo was fucking hard to come by, but I still ran totally out a few times and had to backtrack to find more. But since dropped guns seem to depop after a certain amount of time that didn't work very much so I'd just die and try to conserve more ammo on the next try. I'd sometimes empty a 30-round clip trying to down one guy, and that was later on after I'd had some practice with that gun. I never found that sweet spot that felt like I was effective.
Which is a shame, because if I felt like an efficient killing machine by the end of the game that really would have been something. As it was, I mostly felt like I'd barely limped through and didn't deserve the ending.
Maybe that works too. Fuck I can't wrap my head around this game. Gonna replay it and see what it's like on a second go.
But what this game does with narrative? I really really hope it gets well recognized for it because from what I have seen and been reading the narrative is something special.
Yeah this isn't a "standard shooter with good story cutscenes". The combat is an integral part of the story. Certain parts more than others, but going through the experience of the game is way more important than watching it. The combat isn't bad, but I thought it lacked oomph. Plenty of tense firefights and good setpieces, and there were enough moments where I was enjoying myself to help counterbalance the frustrating bits.
It's a bog standard shooter... at first. It becomes way more than that. You simply have to play it to understand it. It does everything your average shooter does while doing something totally different at the same time.
Sometimes it clicked and both gameplay and story worked together, but for the most part I think they needed fewer, smarter action sequences.
Edit:
Yeah, that was expertly done.
More than once in this game, I had to stop and seriously think about what to do. That doesn't happen often, to say the least. For that alone I applaud these guys.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
That said, I agree with stolls. Action bits tend to drag on sometimes.
http://www.gamespot.com/features/gamespot-gameplay-special-edition-spoilercast-spec-ops-the-line-6386587/
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Steam // Secret Satan
It is awesome in the fact that after a while you hate yourself.
Thread title should really be "Feeling like a hero yet?". Sums it up so well.
Fucking this perfectly describes the Spec Ops experience.
Amazon had it for 50% off for the past two weeks, which bodes well for future discounting. It's also a Steamworks game so wherever you buy it, it activates on Steam.
Steam has it for a whopping 10% off now, so I'm hoping it gets a nice daily/flash deal so I can gift the crap out of it.
WTF. This was pretty damn amazing.
Or else I'll be all like "Aw man, you guys let me down."