We all want Spec Ops back : (
I want Spec Ops: THE LINE back.
Which is probably the most tragically misunderstood massacre simulator. I have never enjoyed killing so many people with such perfectly pitch-black humor and metal gravitas, and lol @ snobs who misread it as a hypocritical anti-war nonsense and scoffed.
The (proper) ending of that game sits right there with killer7ās ending for me.
I found Spec Ops: The Line incredibly boring to play, I only pushed through because I heard the ending was something special. I thought it was dopey.
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Opening fire on the evac squad sent to rescue you for no reason but consistency and finally dying in the effort was a sublime catharsis. The other endings are false.
Itās a game where every choice (and there are many, and none of them matter) is framed as whether or not to pull the trigger.
It is a game where you truly do kill everyone and everything, including even yourself if you want. And the way that is framed (shoot at your head or the mirror in front of you) is brilliant too.
It is wonderfully rich in setting and style, has the best graffiti and full-blown murals Iāve seen in any game, the best loading screens in a shooter, develops gradually and subtly in brutality and insanity throughout. A lot of the touches you might not even notice.
You really do need to love murdersims to get it, though. It is a game for pure murdersim maniacs.
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Play Dog Days.
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I did. The gimmick aesthetic is cool; the level design is fucking infuriatingly tedious bullshit that devolves into a one-sided cheese grater by the end (I played on the highest difficulty since itās an IO game and being vulnerable in cover is cool, but the level designās flaws really scream here) that gives you fuck-all cover over a veritable shooting gallery of parked cars and square columns and other banal obstacles as the identical mans flood in and flop dead.
It also does nothing mechanically to justify co-op apart from ten thousand too-heavy loading gates, and I will never erase the scarring of the part where there was only one piece of cover over a hotzone and my AI buddy was humping it.
Also pretty lame how everything is arranged on graph paper, all the trash forming barriers at neat right angles, which really strains the otherwise dead-on setting.
The combat is the dumbest of any TPS that tries and the weapons do nothing to distinguish themselves. The inaccuracy gimmick goes well with the aesthetic gimmick but those do not carry the game.
Itās been called āvisceralā but its not; itās slick. Sickly slick. The movement is weightless, the cover doesnāt snap right (you canāt even TURN THE CORNER IN COVER like every other TPS because it just detaches you), thereās no gore, really quite minimal blood outside of That One Cutscene, and the enemies have like no shot reaction. Spec Ops is properly and impressively visceral.
I mean, Iād appreciate the narrative and attitude of Dog Days more if the gameplay wasnāt so aggressively submediocre.
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how are you saying it doesnāt justify co-op when youāre right there talking about how infuriatingly tedious bullshit it is because you played on the highest difficulty without a human co-op partner. and thereās never only one piece of cover. everything is designed for co-op flanking.
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I did play the last two levels, which are the worst, with my best friend and it was mutually intolerable. It is by far better to deal with frustration alone, especially when your spastic AI buddy is invulnerable and you generally donāt have to worry about them.
What I mean by ājustifyā is that co-op is not mechanically integral to it. In Gears of War, you are frequently split up on separate routes and you have to cover each other. Gears of War actually considers the roles of each player in tandem with each other, whereas Dog Days is just āpick your cover and sprayā. The layout is too crude, flat, graph paper to allow any creativity, and the weapons are all slightly different flavors of suck.
Dog Days on the highest difficulty is a very different game from what you might have played, and I guess most people here experienced it as a movie moreso than a game by playing on a lesser mode.
kane and lynch never split up. thatās unconscionably. also you canāt wait until the last two levels to suddenly throw in a live person.
you donāt even know who youāre talking to right now pal. I am dog days.
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DID YOU PLAY THE MULTIPLAYER
WAS IT FUN
THE WORLD WILL NEVER KNOW
Plenty of games are worse-off in co-op.
DOOM.
Shmups.
Dark Souls.
I have played thousands of DOOM levels and canāt think of any that are actually designed around co-op.
Being explicitly designed around co-op is crucial for me. I donāt like just taking a singleplayer game (not saying Dog Days is here) and dumping another person in it. I mean, sure, it can be fun, anything you do with a friend is fun, but Iād rather be playing a legit co-op game with them.
I still donāt get SBās obsession with Dog Days, I thought it was TERRIBLE apart from the cool aesthetic and that bit where you get to run around naked.
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that sounds like a good justification imo
Dog Days is the one time selectbutton steered me wrong
I could never get into it
also really trying to understand what āputs storytelling in a narrativeā means lol
Co-op rules, dark souls co-op is great for hangoutitude, doom co-op as well. I dont like basically anything about kane and lynch 2 besides the aforementioned naked level.
Spec ops the line is garbage tho
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I liked how Dog Days was kind of miserable and brutal to play, just like the experience must be for Our Protagonists. I also liked the anticlimax of the very last enemy encounter of the final level It is not a fun game, and Iām honestly not sure the developers intended the excellent parallels between the Experience of Play and the Experience of Being Kane and Lynch.
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I found levels 3 and 4 (before everything goes tits up) to be a little bit of a slog that was improved measurably by co-op, but I do think the game is a massive aesthetic success and its design is very purposeful. Every level is substantially different, and itās at least a little amazing it got made with the narrative arc it did
Having shitty, inaccurate guns is actually the most significant game design conceit of mid-PS3-era big budget productions
i bought the game for 8 bucks off amazon and spent around 8 hours playing with a good friend and talking about how it felt like a (relatively) big budget cover shooter published by a big company but looked like something like a nicolas refn winding movie for my PS3 and had enough time to bullshit with my co op partner about how the game feels more than how the game plays and didnāt get too mad when it sucked (though we had to change the āshakey camā filter right at the start, that gave us a headache)
i donāt think iāll ever play it again, but it was kinda neat for when i had it. it was like one of those art games that comes out a lot now, but made by the Hitman team for some reason.