Over the Line! (Spec Ops the Line Review)(PS3)

        In the game industry these days there are lots of f shooters.  Some would argue too many.  I probably would agree with that statement.  But when friends began telling me how great Spec Ops the Line was; I really had a hard time taking it seriously.  I had played Spec Ops the Line way back at the first E3 that it was announced for and while it looked amazing and looked like it was doing some interesting things with sand.  I was less than thrilled at another military based third person shooter.  In fact, the modern military aspect of the game was my least favorite aspect of it going in.  With Modern Warfare, Battlefield, Sniper Elite, Arma, Medal of Honor, etc… I’m filled up on my modern military shooters, whether they come in the first or third person variety.  But that was way back in 2007.  The game has changed a lot since then.  I believe it has changed SO MUCH that if you go back and check out the footage from back then, other than art assets the game is completely different.  This is not a game about getting headshots or kill streaks.  It’s a game about conflict, military conflict and what can happen to people who are involved in such conflicts.  The game riffs off movies like Apocalypse Now and Platoon.   Joseph Conrad’s book Heart of Darkness was also an inspiration.  It takes all these themes and puts them into a modern package that is no less disturbing than those modern classics and maybe even more so.

       I played Spec Ops the Line in the worst way possible.  All in one sitting and entirely in the very early morning.  By the end I was shell shocked and even if you find this a positive review; realize that I never want to even touch this game again.  If they put out downloadable content I will not be playing it.  So, take that for what it’s worth; perhaps a slight warning.  It is very difficult to talk too much about Spec Ops the Line’s campaign without giving too much away.  But I will give it a shot.

        You play Adam Walker who is voiced with a career ultimate performance by Nolan North, the voice of Nathan Drake and many others.  Nolan North has been in many games; but this was the performance of his career.  There isn’t anything I can tell you about the performance without giving anything away except that if he doesn’t make you FEEL SOMETHING by the end.  You are well and truly dead.  Adam is the leader of a small Delta Squad who is going into a sand storm torn up future Dubai to  find a Colonel who has gone off the grid with a battalion of soldiers.  In the current US military I think if a battalion of soldiers went missing the Army might send in more than three guys to find out why.  But that’s neither here nor there.  It is important as the player that you pay a great deal of attention to the beginning of the game even though it is by far the weakest part of the whole.  Here the ground work is laid for what is to come.

         As the player you have a descent interaction with your squad, you can give them fire commands and they can pretty much take care of themselves.  Unless of course one bugs out and runs at a turret.  Which did happen to me twice in the game.  The game checkpoints you often so starting over really isn’t THAT big of a deal.  Even on the easiest setting this game is difficult.  If you want to get through it you must all ways be aware of your environment and stay in cover.  There are certainly times where you can be overrun and only realize it when the enemy is bashing you in the head.  The enemies range from insurgents to American Soldiers who have gone rogue.  Just by me telling you that I’ve probably said too much so I’ll leave it there.

        As a whole Spec Ops the Line is the best and worst possible third person shooter.  I love the story in its daring and the feats of development strength it pulls off.  As a third person cover based third person shooter it is middling at best, terrible at worst.  It’s difficulty swings even on the easiest settings are pretty severe.  This mostly has to do with controls and their lack of precision.  Perhaps putting the vault and run commands on different buttons wasn’t the way to go.  Also, some flat surfaces that should be able to be used as cover cannot be sometimes.  Also, shooting out windows should not take hundreds of shots and when those shots come from a 50 cal. probably even fewer.  I could get through even the strongest bullet proof glass with just a few shots from such a gun.  In the game I overheated the gun twice while trying to do this.  Probably fired more than 200 rounds.  I assume this was done for dramatic tension; but it was terrible.  By the end of the game you have enemy fatigue and while this DOES play into the story.  The player’s frustration/annoyance with it probably will overshadow the minimal story reason for it’s existence.

         The real star of Spec Ops the Line was the message it was trying to send.  Not only about war, conflict, killing, and psychology.  But also about what the difference is between right and wrong.  How these kinds of matters are never black and white.  And finally that there are NO real heroes in war.  Just survivors.  The game makes much about the modern military war game and some of things that are wrong with it.  Not normally directly but indirectly.  The game is very intelligent throughout.  At least when it isn’t trying to sell you on how good of a shooter it is.  I truly enjoyed this game.  But I think it should have been half as long and probably a downloadable game for PSN/XBLA with around 10 trophies/achievements that covered just getting through the campaign.

         I did play several hours of the multiplayer for Spec Ops the Line and found it a very serviceable multiplayer game with some fun stuff taken from the campaign.  However, the disconnect from single player to multiplayer is SO STARK that they could be different games.  The multiplayer’s graphics aren’t nearly as good.  The tones of the two modes don’t fit at all and the idea of progressing to get perks and new weapons all most spits in the face of what the campaign is trying to achieve.  The multiplayer may be in there to extend the life of the game.  But on the consoles I think only the hardest of the hardcore are going to be picking this up and they are playing Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield.  So I don’t really think this was a good decision by 2K.  I would have just put out the game in the form I mentioned above.  It probably would have sold several million copies at $15-$20.  They could have positioned it as the Anti-Journey.  But my revisionist opinion aside I don’t think this game works as a multiplayer game and can’t imagine that it will have a console audience in that space by the time the game is three or more months old.

       Finally, I would like to say that I really applaud the developers of Spec Ops the Line for making such a risky game.  I think they did an excellent job overall and while many of their choices I didn’t agree with.  I think what they did do was top notch.  If not for those design choices and the choice to put in multiplayer Spec Ops the Line would probably have gotten a VERY high score.  As it stands I have to give it a 8/10 and caution to anyone who purchases this game that it has virtually no replay value and you might not feel like your getting your money’s worth from the multiplayer.  So unless you’re a PC player getting this for $25 or less, I would probably pass on buying it and rent it instead.  It is probably the high watermark for stories in games thus far this year; so you WILL want to play it.  But given it’s visceral nature, you will probably not want to play it again.

Exclusive Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Trailer! Featuring some of the Excellent Cosplay Pros of Tekken.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2

         Big props to all the ladies especially Corissa Furr who turned me on to this whole phenomenon in the first place.  Thank you for making what you do look SO EASY and cool.

Max, your such a Payne!(Max Payne 3 Review)(XBOX360)

        I want to say right out of the gate a few things about this review.  First and foremost, I did not play any of the multiplayer in Max Payne 3 in this retail version of the game.  I had a limited time with the game and was unable to have the time to complete the campaign and play Multiplayer.  Also, my comments about the game are based on the Very Easy setting in the general difficulty and the Hard Lock setting for aiming.  I did this, not because I’m a noob, but again; I had limited time with the game and I wanted to get through it as fast and as easily as I could.  In the review you will see that this was all to no avail in the end.

 

         Max Payne is one of my favorite old timey games.  Yes old timey being 2001.  It feels like a million years ago, but it was only about 11.  I was always blown away by the style of the bullet time and film noire story.  Bad stuff all ways happened to Max and that was kind of cool; because he just dealt with it and moved on.  Sure he drank too much and he was always popping pills but hey if you everyone you loved turned up dead one day and you couldn’t do anything about it, you would probably do some bad things too.  Max Payne 3 has been talked about all most since the current generation consoles had their launches way back in 2005/2006.  Many people thought that this game would never get made.  That it was just a project that would end up getting canceled after too many years in development.  There are certainly many things different about this new Max Payne.  Some good, some not so good.  But I think Rockstar definitely did right by the franchise.  Even if they probably could have made a little bit better game.

       Max Payne 3 has some excellent things going for it.  In the opening moments of the game’s campaign which are cinematics, I was blown away by and continued to be blown away by James McCaffrey as Max Payne(even if he sounds like Kiefer Sutherland).  But the voice acting in general was pretty excellent; there were a few minor annoyances but in general everyone was excellent.  I mention this right off the bat, because the game can be summed up pretty much in the same way.  Max Payne 3 is NOT an excellent game.  It is a good game with some EXCELLENT ideas.  The idea, for instance, that the main character is so toasted most of the time he can’t tell up from down; is great.  The bad part is that, the same guy can kill 5 enemies with a handgun in less than a minute.  But there is no really good way to explain bullet time and Max Payne 3 doesn’t even try.  That doesn’t really bother me that much.  But what did bother me is how “gamey” Max Payne 3 was throughout.  Sure we have some wonderful story scenes where Max contemplates suicide or the meaning of life.  But then we just fall into playing whack a mole with the bad guys as fast as we can so they don’t come around from behind and start shooting us in the back.  For a game set on it’s easiest most casual settings Max Payne 3 is a pretty hard game.  I’ve played plenty of shooters and I’ve beaten many on their hardest settings.  But this game just seems like it’s more interested in wearing you out or frustrating you than actually challenging you.  Another words, its difficult for difficulty’s sake; not because it makes sense or because it makes it challenging.  I’m not saying Max Payne 3 is a bad game, no not at all.  But if they had just toned down the number of guys in each area and maybe cut the game’s length a little.  The game would have been AMAZING.

       The biggest testimony to this is that probably by the end of Chapter 3(about a half hour or so into the game).   I was really interested in the story; but the more combat sequences they threw at me the more I just wanted to give up.  I hated the fact that I had to know where all the enemy A.I. were in every area; even with bullet time.  I did like the scaled down HUD, but I think some players might have trouble knowing when they can use bullet time or how many bullets they have left or how many shots they can take.  Most of this was fine for me, but I can see someone who isn’t as familiar with shooters having some trouble.  Also, every now and then having a guy come up behind you and spray you with a shotgun, is just not cool.  Sorry…  And then, the thing that got me the most, the one thing that the more I go over it in my head the less sense it makes comes from one particular scene about 4 hours or so into the game.  Where Max Payne and Passos are dropping a ransom off at a stadium.  They are alone and under siege by paramilitary guys.  This scene begins when Passos runs out of sniper rifle ammo and Max, on the other side of the stadium must cover him so he can escape.  Problem is that with every guy Max shoots Passos gets more agitated that there is this endless streams of guys coming from all angles.

         He even points out, “Where are all these guys coming from?”

         “NO shit!” The player wants to cry out.

        This fact alone is enough to break a suspension of disbelief; I have thought that perhaps this was done in a satirical way or perhaps to break the third wall, because Passos was that kind of character.  So I could give it that; but THEN you notice that with every guy Max shoots, the enemies drop their guns.  So the unarmed Passos could simply pick up a gun and shoot these guys himself.  Passos is a badass ex-cop who has been doing bodyguard work for years; so he can take care of himself.  Except when the game wants you to play a sniper scene that is.  The whole scene is WAY TOO LONG and made me wish that Passos would just shut up and pick a gun all ready.  I do have to say however, that in the scenes where Max and Passos are talking back and forth; usually in the same place or near each other there is some gold.  I really loved just about all their actual one on one interactions.  But most of the stuff over radios could have been completely gutted.  All most all of it just served to annoy the player further in what was usually an incredibly annoying situation to begin with.  Although in the beginning of the game Max DOES kind of infer that Passos is a bossy and annoying guy.  So maybe that was their point, well made Rockstar. I guess…

       The sound and graphics throughout the game were pretty descent and while on the XBOX 360 the game didn’t look great; and in some cases some of the character models looked terrible(see anywhere in the beginning of the game where there are more than 3 people in the room).  I felt the overall story made up for this.  Based on the single player game alone it is very hard for me to recommend this game to anyone.  It has a lot of issues and unless you like your third person shooters with a sprinkle of Call of Duty you will probably want to avoid this game completely.  I’ve seen the multiplayer at events and have certainly been impressed by its different modes and interesting choices.  But at least for the console game this one is a pretty hard sale to me.  I did really love the story and voice acting, which for some people will probably make this game a “must buy”or a “must rent”  But if I had to give an opinion, I would have to say to wait for some price cuts.  $60 is just a little too much to pay for this game as is.  6.5/10….