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There are some insightful parallels into Walker’s behaviour and the reaction of the typical player of the modern military shooter game, who expects to be rewarded with a happy ending after systematically slaughtering thousands of people for entertainment, but I found the general anti-war sentiment more interesting and honestly, if I started going on about player agency in interactive media then we’d never get around to Warfighter. The situation somehow gets even worse with the help of the CIA and while the game has several endings, a running theme throughout them is that Walker’s attempts to play the hero have ultimately made things worse for everyone in a manner which is retrospectively obvious. The game is paced excellently, as its protagonist, Captain Walker, starts off with the reluctant mindset of “Well, we didn’t want to shoot anyone, but some people opened fire on us and it was self-defence,” which quickly becomes “Okay, so we found some American soldiers, but it was in the middle of a gunfight and they were all so confused and trigger-happy that we had to shoot them too!” and then there’s the signature scene in which you use white phosphorus to get through a base of finger-quotes ‘enemy’ soldiers, and it turns out you also just killed a bunch of civilians that the soldiers had moved for protection. While most games in the genre are power fantasies about heroically shooting a bunch of evil foreign people until eventually you’ve shot enough to have saved the world/freed the American hostage/killed some time until the next episode of Better Call Saul, Spec Ops is a much more brutal portrayal of what would happen if a small squad of elite US special ops with mild regenerative healing abilities wandered into a very delicate situation in Dubai and tried to solve everything with their guns. Spec Ops: The Line is probably the most subversive modern military shooter game to have yet been made.
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Perhaps the key to understanding my dissatisfaction is this I went in knowing the twist. I don’t want to jump straight into Spec Ops without even touching on Medal of Honor, but the reason I ended up playing the latter is strictly because of the former, so here’s a quick recap on my experience with Spec Ops: The Line. Then I called Walt Williams’ (Spec Ops main writey bloke) home phone number a few times and pretended to be a pizza delivery guy with a funny – but wholly unindicative of any particular nationality and therefore not racist – accent. Then, because that apparently wasn’t enough, I wrote a 10,000+ word article diplomatically named ‘ The Many Pretentious Failings of Spec Ops: The Line’. On our year end round-up episode of the IndieCent podcast (check out the episode here) then I named Spec Ops: The Line the worst game I played in 2018. You might think from this introduction that I hated Medal of Honor: Warfighter and I’m a huge fan of Spec Ops: The Line, and while you probably could be more wrong, you would really have to be making an effort. It’s about another, far more interesting game, that I’ve already talked about in great detail. Straight off the bat, more than Medal of Honor: Warfighter, this is an article about Spec Ops: The Line, and I like to consider it a testament to the unparalleled meaninglessness of a game like Warfighter, that the first thing I tell you in an article ostensibly about the game is that it’s not really about the game at all.