T w e n t y S i d e d

Some games are famous for their gameplay. Or their artwork. Or a big plot twist. This game might be the first one where the big selling point is the theme. Spec Ops asks the question: What would happen if your typical action-game badass lived in a world with consequences?

Think about it. Yes, the answer is obvious, but it’s still something to behold.

I would encourage you to go into the game cold, without reading this post. I can’t talk about how well this works without revealing some of the tricks it uses, and those are better if you’re surprised. Some people (Reader Krellen says this a lot) point out that spoiling stories can be good. However, I’m not talking about spoiling the story. I’m talking about the way the game uses the genre itself against you, something which is conveyed mostly in gameplay mechanics.

In this post I’m not doing story spoilers, but thematic and mechanical spoilers. From this point on. As before, white text is me. Text in gold boxes is Taliesin.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spec Ops: The Line: The Thematic Ambush”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I am not a fan of the “bro-shooter” genre. I mean, obviously. I’m sure I’ve belabored this idea in the past. Rather than just raging against each game as it comes out, I generally ignore them, unless I hear that a title is trying something different or unexpected.

I’m using the broad version of the genre, one that includes games like Call of Duty, Gears of War, Killzone, Kane & Lynch, Homefront, and Far Cry 2. Some are cover-based, some aren’t. Some are real-world, some aren’t. Some are third-person, some are first-person. The term “bro shooter” isn’t a hard-and-fast category, but a sort of generic pejorative we throw at a game once it accumulates too many symptoms of the genre. We can argue about edge cases like Mass Effect or haggle over why Half-Life doesn’t wind up in this category, but let’s just set that aside for right now and agree that some games meet these criteria and that I don’t enjoy them.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Bro Shooter”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.