When Spec Ops was first announced, many of us muttered "Here we go again" under our breaths and paid little attention to what we assumed would be 'yet another' modern war shooter. How wrong we were though, as Spec Ops subverted the macho, gung-ho image we've come to expect from such a game and gave us one of the most poetic, harrowing depictions of military conflict. There are several hard-hitting moments that make you seriously rethink whether you're doing 'the right thing' by shooting scores of enemy troops. The most impactful of these is the infamous White Phosphorus scene, where you bomb a group of enemy soldiers only to find out that they were trying to evacuate a group of civilians. After the bombing, you wander through the aftermath of the blast. The sight of mutilated soldiers stumbling around and dying on the battlefield is pretty standard stuff in a war shooter, but when you enter a room filled with around 50 civilians burned to death (with particular focus on a dead, horrifically burned woman holding onto her dead child), it gives the preceding carnage a whole new context. Suddenly, you regard everyone you killed up to that point in the game as a potential victim, rather than an enemy, and each subsequent kill you make is laced with an unsettling feeling that there is something deeply wrong about your hitherto unquestioned role in the game.
Gamer, Researcher of strange things.
I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.
