3. Difficulty
I wouldn't go so far to say that I'm a world class gamer. I wouldn't even go so far to say that I'm terribly awesome. I play games as much as the next guy that has a job to do and a life to live, and so I figure that I'm above average. Pretty good, you could say. Regardless, Spec Ops: The Line is hard. You and your squad will be ambushed time and again by troops of enemies that won't just shoot at you from behind cover, or run blindly towards you with nothing more than becoming cannon fodder on their minds. They're smart, they're sneaky, and above all, they're as aggressive as an old man in a bar who reckons he doesn't have to queue because he's got a few more wrinkles than everybody else and the world owes him a thing or two. They'll use their numbers to flank you, to pin you down, to flush you out. You have to stay in cover because of the bullets they're raining down on your pillar, but you have to move too because the pillar's rapidly falling to bits and will be nothing but marble-dust in a second or two. But then you're out in the open, running for an upturned table, and grenades start to explode kicking up dust and sand and in your panic you get turned around and you can't quite see where you're going and then - bang! - you're dead. And that's just in Normal mode. There are several increasing difficulties included in Spec Ops: The Line, and as they go onwards and upwards - culminating in the eternally punishing FUBAR mode - things just get trickier and trickier... but it's never cheap. When you die it's because you panicked, or because you reloaded at the wrong time, or because you missed with your last, all-important, shot. That's another thing that should be mentioned. As the game gets harder it gives you less and less ammo, and by the time you hit the halfway mark in FUBAR, you're no longer cowering and pot-shotting your way to victory, you're scrambling over furniture in the hope that the pistol lying on the rug has just one measly bullet in it; you're jumping down from a roof and snapping a guys neck; and you're legging it as fast as you can to try and find a place of safety where you and your small, increasingly tested team can rest and regroup.