Playing this for the parts that critique military shooters is like sitting thru Adam Sandler's Jack and Jill because you wanna watch an Al Pacino movie. First of all, can we all just agree that Cover Shooters are just the f**king worst? That they're just boring shooting galleries that encourage no experimentation from the player? Yes? Great. Secondly, can we agree that Cover Shooters which have some kind of system where you attach yourself to a surface with a button press are the f*cking buggy, broken nadir of an already terrible subgenre? Oh I'm so glad we're on the same page about these things. Yeah Spec Ops is a whole lot of cover shootin' for not a lot of reward. It reminds of Doki Doki Literature Club in that it spends way too much time presenting itself as the genre its trying to deconstruct before it gets to the interesting stuff. Except 1. Doki Doki, is a way shorter experience and 2. I suspect it's a much better visual novel than Spec Ops is a shooter (can't say for sure though because I'm not a weeb). I get why Yaeger wouldn't have wanted to necessarily make the game more "fun" to play, considering its a critique of an entire genre, but faaaaaackin hell, could they have found some way to make the game less tedious? There's some interesting environmental kills you can do with sand avalanches (a mechanic that's woefully underused) and ocassional attempts at surrealism but overall it's a deconstruction of bad military shooters that's... predominantly a bad military shooter? The fact that its eventual subversion of military shooters isn't threaded through the game but a "twist", something that only becomes apparent in the final hours of the game, is frankly disappointing. There's subverting our expectations and then there's just making us suffer thru mediocrity only to realize at the end that There Was Something Afoot The Whole Time. Honestly, unless you have a particular affinity for this kind of game, just watch a lets play of the key moments.
Deeply, profoundly flawed but also kind of magnificent. Yes the gameplay has been dumbed down from Bioshock 1 and 2 into a corridor shooter (which is fine with me because I'm too stupid for Immersive Sims but YMMV) and yes, Levine's insistence that there's no difference between a white supremacist zealot and the leader of a communist resistance group is the kind of insanity that you'd expect Andrew Ryan to be bellowing at you from one of The Rapture's rusty speakers. BUT I can deal with all that because Columbia is one of the most astonishing game worlds ever realized. It's gorgeous and brimming with colour (unlike 99% of other shooters) and full of tiny details that it became a much needed bit of digital tourism for me as Ireland goes through yet another lockdown. So much thought has been put into the history of Columbia and the forces that brought it into being. People say there's no environmental storytelling in this and sure, there's not really anything like OG Bioshock where you find a badly tortured corpse and an accompanying audio log. But the environments are CONSTANTLY telling the story of Columbia through its stores, its culture, its architecture. They're so packed to the rafters with information that I prolly added the better part of 4 hours to my playthru because I stopped progressing so many times just to admire the areas I found myself in. For all Infinite's many failures, it's one of the few games that truly felt like it brought me to another world (even if it's largely a horrible one), and at a time where I'm going to lose my f*ck*ng sh*t if I have to spend another day in my apartment, that is something to be dearly treasured.
