GOL Cast: Running And Gunning In A Sandstorm In Spec Ops: The Line

It seems that Virtual Programming has been rather busy with their porting efforts. What is even more surprising is the quality of these recent eON ports. Spec Ops: The Line is one of them.

Spec Ops: The Line developed by Yager and published by 2K is a third-person cover-based shooter where you play as Captain Walker, the leader of a small delta force squad deployed to the city of Dubai, which has ended up in a state of complete isolation due to weird sandstorms. Your mission of search for survivors takes a quite horrible turn quickly though when it becomes clear that Dubai is in a state of complete chaos.

As you might be aware, I changed the video format just a bit and went with a post-commentary style instead of live commentary. This was to eliminate spoilers and to experiment with new formats. Make sure to leave your feedback and ideas in the comments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFeX2H7Er-M

At first Spec Ops: The Line seemed like a very average and very ordinary third-person shooter. The game starts with you arriving in Dubai during your mission to search for survivors. Quickly it becomes apparent that things are not right and you have to take on locals that are less than happy with your presence. You could very easily mistake this game for your regular old Americans vs the terrorist scenario but as the story progresses you will find out that things are not quite as simple. In fact the game will make you question your loyalties and presents you with choices that with no clear good option. In fact the game attempts to bring the madness and horror of warfare right to you.

The storyline of Spec Ops is just full of surprises and plot twists and it actually goes a lot deeper than it would first seem. I believe the developers wanted exactly that: make the game seem simple and quite unoriginal at first and then turn everything upside down. While the story certainly has its clichés I found it enjoyable and the ending was just something so unique and so mind bending that I can't quickly think of anything that could match it.

In the gameplay department the game doesn't really shine though. I dislike cover systems in general and I always feel like I'm being glued to a wall or a box when I need to press a button to stay in cover. I'm also not a huge fan of the third-person view and would prefer first-person any day of the week. I found the controls to be a bit clunky and I feel like they were originally designed with a controller in mind. However, I refuse to play any shooter that involves actual aiming with a controller, so I ignored the option entirely.

Spec Ops really likes its covers and is quite unforgiving if you let an enemy flank you or stay out of cover for too long. You can only take a couple of hits before you die and grenades are a bane of your existence. I can guarantee you die at least a couple of times during your campaign if you play on medium or hard difficulties. But the difficulty wasn't too much that I felt like I was stuck and couldn't progress while the game still offered me plenty of challenges to overcome.

The game also has a squad system that it often encourages you to use. It's very simple and often times not even all that useful. You can order your squad mates to focus fire on a certain enemy and in some situations throw stun grenades against enemies in cover. I quite happily skipped the squad functionality altogether and would only really use the heal ability to get my squad back on its feet. And that only to avoid failure, because you need to bring every one of your squad mates with you. Considering how often the squad AI messed up and ran at enemies instead of following me and taking cover, I would have gladly let both of my squad mates bleed out in the sand but alas it wasn't an option.

Spec Ops worked very well in eON form. The performance was all around extremely good, exceeding 100 FPS during most of the game and remained above 60 FPS all of the time. Considering that I had the game fully maxed out and running at 1080p I'd say that is quite a nice achievement. I had some visual glitches with certain shadows but it was extremely minor and didn't affect my experience at all. I did also encounter some stutter which was apparently caused by content streaming. This was however rather easy to fix. One of our commenters noticed that changing PoolSize from 140 to 256 in ~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common/SpecOps_TheLine/Engine/Config/BaseEngine.ini got rid off the stuttering and made the experience smooth again. It seems the same trick can be used with Bioshock Infinite too. Another problem was with the main menu, which for some reason got slower after each time you ran the game. I didn't notice that last time I launched the game so I guess it was either patched or it fixed itself. In any case it only affected the main menu and the problem would fix itself after a couple of minutes.

So all around eON was able to give me a nice 8 hour long game experience. I would probably go as far as to say that Spec Ops: The Line is one of the best shooters I've played recently. Of course that's mostly for the story, if I were to rate is based on the gameplay it would be really average. I'm a guy that likes stories and I often value them more than gameplay and graphics. I didn't test any of the stuff outside of the singleplayer campaign, so I don't have any experiences with the multiplayer or the co-op. It seems though that the co-op missions are separate to the main campaign, so keep that in mind if you want to play with your friends.

The overall experience was very good and the game deserves a recommendation on the GOL rating spectrum of “don't buy”, “wait” and “recommended”. Even though the gameplay might very well be the weakest part of the game, it doesn't ruin the experience and the story very much makes up for that.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.