Spec Ops: The Line (2012)

SPOILERS BELOW

 I'm apparently 10/15 chapters through and it's pretty disappointing, The impression I got of it beforehand was average gameplay, good political storytelling; I agree with the former, not the latter. It starts off like any gung-ho Modern Warfare bullshit, fair enough I think, you've got to set this up to undercut it, but then it doesn't stop being that for like the first half. And even then it's just a couple of decisions of exactly how shitty a soldier to be, which considering I'm already going around stomping on people's necks to put them out of their misery doesn't feel meaningful. And it's academic, as the decisions are so badly signposted that I barely realise I'm making one, how I'm supposed to or what it is, so I accidentally ended up being a war criminal just because it was incredibly unclear how not to be. The storytelling is really unclear too, there are a bunch of characters vying for power but you never meet any of them and they all sound the same, so I had no idea which was which, what they were doing or whether they were good or bad or ambiguous. I often die because of bad communication, like it's told me to run through a sandstorm when what it means is proceed carefully through a sandstorm. There's also the annoying thing of having two weapon slots and letting you choose whether to swap your current one for any lying around but not telling you anything about them, so because I'm not a gun-humping dickhead I have no idea what these micro-decisions mean either. I know pistol/shotgun/machine gun/rocket launcher and that's it.
It's a real shame, because the whole Heart Of Darkness take sounded really interesting, but the only thing I've taken away from it really is 'shooting windows so baddies get swept away by sand is cool'. If I hadn't heard ahead of time that it was supposed to be doing commentary I don't think I even would have realised it was trying to.

Got to the end, pretty frustrating. For one thing, fucking Fight Club? Come on. And it didn't work anyway because of the aforementioned problems that I didn't know who anyone was or what was going on so the twist meant nothing to me and I couldn't follow which bits had been real, and it seemed like maybe I could have made choices to affect it but also I'm not sure when the game was being 'clever' and giving me no real choice and when it was being bad and giving me a real choice very unclearly.
I like the general concept of 'do a Bioshock to interrogate Modern Warfare type games, with a bunch of Apocalypse Now (and unfortunately another movie) thrown in', and the setting of Dubai with all the ultra-modern hotels and stuff against the harsh sand and violence was really striking, but the storytelling was muddled to say the least and the gameplay was solid but unremarkable and it got to be a trudge by the end of it on both fronts.