But by immersing players into the game, by handing over these hard choices to the player, The Line is able to tell a story in a way that no other medium could. There is a great deal about the game that's 'cinematic' and while it has some very murky moral choice for you and your Captain Walker to make, it's largely a linear experience. Most importantly, Spec Ops: The Line shows us how video games can tell stories in truly unique ways. What sort of writing have we come to expect? What sort of acting? What happens to these expectations when a developer comes out with a game that really raises the bar? The Line is important in the way we look, not just at violence in games or the horrors of war, but in what we expect out of our video games in the first place. But the fact that this game isn't mindless isn't just a breath of fresh air.īy the time I'd finished the game, I'd realized something else: not only was it a great game, it was an important game. These things do have their place, of course, and I enjoy the skill required to actually do well in a shooter, especially in their entirely plot-free multiplayer modes. Most shooters hew more closely to something like Call of Duty or Battlefield. Few games carve out a space the way Half-Life 2 or BioShock did, or inspire me to actually finish playing the way the first Halo inspired. I had no idea what to expect going in, and like many people expected your typical shot of adrenaline and testosterone.Ī great shooter is hard to find. It wasn't until probably about halfway through the game that I realized it was going to be great. stealth options, combined with straightforward controls that were easy to learn and utilize, makes the gameplay itself gratifying, even as the story becomes increasingly dark.and weird. The Line's combination of squad-based tactics and run-and-gun vs. I've played quite a few third-person cover-shooters at this point, and to be quite honest I find most of them lacking. Meanwhile, the actual game mechanics are extremely fluid. The buried city of Dubai, adrift in an endless sandstorm, is in turns alive with brilliant blue skies and yellow sand, and awash in the lurid crimson of the dead. Spec Ops: The Line is not merely detailed, it's bright. Shooters these days are often brown and gray, sapped of color and detail. Graphics aren't everything, but the visuals are not only stunning, they're vibrantly colorful. I realized early on that this game was going to be good. Spec Ops: The Line is very much its own story as well, with its own twists and unique commentary on war and violence and what it means to be a hero, telling its story in ways that only a video game can. Partly this is because film can tell stories in ways that novels cannot, and vice versa. Coppola's film borrowed thematically from Conrad's book and then built its story around the skeletal frame of its plot, but it remained unique - a separate and fundamentally different piece of work.

The ubiquitous Radioman dogging your footsteps throughout the game bears an uncanny resemblance to Dennis Hopper's reporter from Apocalypse Now.Īnd yet, the game is no more a remake of either of these works than Apocalypse Now was a remake of Heart of Darkness. The mysterious Colonel Konrad in Spec Ops: The Line takes his name from Joseph Conrad, and of course bears a resemblance to Heart of Darkness antagonist, Kurtz (described as a painter and a genius in the book) as well as Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. There are many allusions throughout 2K's violent third-person cover-shooter to both Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now.Ĭaptain Martin Walker shares his first name with Martin Sheen, the actor who plays Captain Benjamin Willard in the film. It's only fitting, then, that in 2012 this story would take place in the Middle East and be told in a video game. The novel became a film, and the horrors were transposed into a new medium.

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