Shallow and Pedantic - Episode 1: In the Zipline of Duty
2024-08-03に共有
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Admittedly, I didn't go into this playthrough with the best of intentions. Spec Ops: The Line was always more of a curiosity to me than something I actually legitimately wanted to play. I'd always heard more press about the game with regards to its story than its gameplay. Being a high watermark for the Spec Ops series isn't exactly shining praise: most people weren't even aware of the earlier games' existence when The Line launched literally a decade after the last release in the series. And the older games were the kinds of games that would easily get 7/10s in every gaming magazine... and we all know what that means.
Needless to say, if the title of this particular series didn't give it away, I was expecting to go into this game simply to mock it. So, the gameplay being as good as it was actually came across as a bit of surprise. At this point in time, I definitely prefer FPSes over their third-person counterparts. Part of that might just be due to the fact that I feel more in control when playing the former with a mouse and keyboard... while I tend to default to a controller for the latter. I've always considering trying my usual FPS playstyle with third-person games, but I've always chickened out. Spec Ops: The Line has been no exception to that trend.
Surprisingly, despite how little anyone ever discussed the gameplay, this might actually go down as the best third-person shooter I've played in years. And as a Platinum Games fan who once streamed Vanquish, I'm trying to be as guarded with that statement as humanly possible -- since it borders on blasphemy. How could a video game that is best known for making a toothless statement like "the military industrial complex is bad" be more appealing to me than something from a developer that prides itself on gameplay? The mind boggles.
By the looks of things, I think this will end up taking me three sessions in total to beat. According to what Dari told me, I'm just shy of halfway through the game -- but that really doesn't account for any difficulty spikes. Pile on the fact that Sunday nights tend to leave me with less time to play in general and hopefully, you can understand just why I'm making such a conservative estimate. Needless to say, I'm juggling some alternative ideas for my yearly "Hallow-streams", but I think I might have stumbled upon a real winner...