Information

Platform
Coop Players	2
Developer	Yager Development
Publisher	2K Games
Engine	Unreal Engine 3
Release	Jun 26, 2012
Genres	Action, First-Person Shooter, Third-Person Shooter

Ratings

Features

	Cooperative Campaign
	Online Multiplayer

On Steam

Error parsing store.

Spec Ops: The Line

Spec Ops: The Line is a modern military first-person shooter. Many people were impressed with its single-player storyline, but its gameplay leaves much to be desired. On its surface, it's just another Call of Duty clone. At its core however, it's a low-budget clone of Call of Duty. Supposedly the campaign is aware of that fact and makes light of it, but we didn't play the campaign. The cooperative mode only consists of four short two-player missions that mostly just involve getting from Point A to Point B with tons of random terrible army guys shooting at you. On this site, we only judge games for their cooperative experience. As good as the single-player campaign might allegedly be, the game still gets a bad rating for its sub-par, unoriginal gameplay and its unexciting, incredibly brief cooperative mode.

Ratings

Grit: The grit is pretty non-existent. While you do die pretty fast if you aren't paying attention and have to restart the mission, you can pretty much always just press spacebar to take cover, and you'll quickly regenerate back to full health. Ammo is pretty scarce, so you may find yourself needing to loot an enemy body in an unsafe location, but that's the only situation where you can't easily avoid getting shot to death.

Synergy: The synergy also leaves much to be desired. It has the generic synergy mechanic of needing to revive your teammate if he gets shot too much, so that's worth a couple points. It also gets a small nod for strategy, because firing at the enemies from two different locations can make a lot of the firefights easier, especially when you have to deal with one of the heavily-armored LMG carriers. However, that's pretty much where the synergy stops.

Implementation: All things considered, there wasn't much wrong with the game. It was short, but still relatively sweet. The AI could be stupid at times, both in your favor and their favor. Enemies shooting you accurately through a sandstorm where you can't even see them is a little questionable, but it didn't cause too much of a hindrance. The controls were pretty crappy, but once we got used to them, it wasn't that bad. There were no major bugs that we could see, but honestly it's not that hard to quality-check four 5-minute missions. In any case, the game lacked in a lot of areas, but what they did, they did fairly well.

Longevity: We beat the entire cooperative mode in just over an hour, and only about 60% of that was actual gameplay. 50% of that gameplay was us trying to figure out the game's garbage control scheme on-the-fly and figure out what we were supposed to do in each mission. We have no desire to play the game ever again. Longevity simply doesn't get lower than that.

Depth: There is no depth. Run around with whatever gun you actually have ammo for and shoot dudes in the head. There is no variance there.

Fun: All things considered, the game was mostly fun while it lasted. We definitely wanted it to go on longer, which says something. There's always something calming about mindlessly running around shooting random crappy enemies. That's why all these generic shooters are so popular.