5/19/2023 0 Comments Spec ops the line dubaiRecently, strange radio signals have started crackling out from the centre of this extravagant, battered metropolis. His hero, Colonel John Konrad, was meant to be leading an evacuation, but the storms got worse and he hasn't been heard of for months. Walker's the head of a three-man team, and he's been sent to explore Dubai after it's been swallowed by the desert in a series of freak sandstorms. You're all set for a matinee hero and you don't expect a lead with a little more substance to him. You're so used to his breezy, knockabout presence that you're gently wrong-footed as his character slowly comes into focus. North's in everything these days, of course, but that ubiquity actually works in Spec Ops' favour. The Marlowe stand-in is Captain Martin Walker: Nolan North with a wrinkle in his brow and the past playing on his mind. Graffiti was a smart plot device in Left 4 Dead - here, there's just too much of it. Hopefully the writing's on the wall for writing on the wall in games. Far Cry 2 was a sandbox and Spec Ops is a corridor: it's a cover-based blaster in which you clear rooms of enemies, cast weapons aside to pick up new ones, and occasionally sit back to watch a set-piece unfold. This isn't the first shooter to draw from Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, of course, but compare it to Ubisoft's attempt in the brilliant, uncompromising and frequently infuriating Far Cry 2 and you won't find too many elements in common. Spec Ops: The Line is a game divided, and that isn't a criticism at all. Yager's latest is trying to have it both ways, perhaps - Gears-flavoured stop-and-pop action one minute, The horror, the horror, the next - but the end result is interesting in its internal conflicts, and bold in its willingness to embrace its own confusion. Look again, though, and you'll see the setting's quietly fantastical, and the two-man squad under your command seem unusually tense - worn down, twitchy, even a little shell-shocked. At first glance, Spec Ops: The Line looks like so many other military shooters, built of sand dunes and dusty fatigues and filled with the flash and sparkle of a thousand rifles glinting in the sun. So much of it comes down to a question of influences: Conrad, not Clancy BioShock, not Call of Duty.
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