The tragic beauty lies in what comes before. Willard and his crew before things go south, and it makes the sampan river boat massacre scene all the more harrowing for it. Coppola spends a good solid hour letting us get to know main character Benjamin L. Spec Ops relies too much on assumed patriotism in order to make the player feel uneasy, with only a few lines of bad dialog said by guards caught unaware to try and make the waves of enemies feel like anything more than guns attached to American uniforms. In particular, I found the lack of humanization of secondary characters to be a big problem.
In many ways, this game falls short of the standard set by Francis Ford Coppola's war epic. The creators of Spec Ops have said repeatedly that this game is inspired by Apocalypse Now, so no one can be faulted for comparing the quality of the two works.
