Walt Williams, the man behind the story of Spec Ops: The Line — the military shooter which permanently raised the bar for military shooters — has used a talk at this year’s GDC to claim that violent games are “creatively too easy” and the industry needs to try harder.

“We’re in an industry full of very intelligent, knowledgeable, and progressive people. It’s getting harder and harder for us to play these games and to look at them critically and say, ‘This is OK, this makes sense,’ especially as we get older,” he said.

“I would like to see less violent games out there. Not because they’re bad or wrong, but because I think creatively they’re too easy.”

Williams added that he was surprised by the positive reception of the first game, saying “Honestly, the game was very much an experiment. One that, to this point, I’m kind of really surprised that it ever made it to the shelves.”

Source: Gamespot

You know what I love? Unreliable narrators. I love stories where I can’t trust the storyteller. I love how such stories draw attention to the way they are presenting me information, the way they insist that I be critical and suspicious, and the way they show me that every story is presented from a particular point of view. In videogames in particular, I love how this unreliability of the narrator (usually the playable character) feeds into everything I experience in that world.

I love being forced to wonder if I am seeing this world as it really ‘is’ — or just how my character wants me to see it.

Most videogames try to make the relationship between the player and the playable character as synchronised and transparent as possible. Ideally, in most cases, you are meant to feel like you are the character. Ideally, in most cases, the character is almost meant to disappear. They are meant to just be this gateway through which the player can make their intentions tangible in the game world.

But increasingly, we are seeing more games play around with this relationship, with the inevitable distance between the player and the playable character. This is most explicit in those games where the playable character is someone who, for one reason or another, you can’t completely trust.

Unreliable narrators are a literary device that have been around for about as long as literature itself. In novels, it’s not rare to find out that the objective view you thought you were getting on the events were being skewed by the very narrator narrating them to you, that your view onto this world was partial. In films, we might discover at the end of the film that events that we took to be objective fact were figments of the protagonist’s imagination.

In videogames, this can be translated to how we understand the world around us through the playable character: through either what they tell us about the world, or simply how the world feels as we navigate the character through it. It doesn’t have to be something as simple as the character ‘lying’ to the player. Maybe the character doesn’t even know that they are lying.

Bioshock is probably the most well-known example of this, where certain things about the character are revealed halfway through the game that paint the player’s every choice made in Rapture in a different light. More recently, games like Far Cry 3, Spec Ops: The Line, and Hotline Miami call into question our character’s sanity. We aren’t just looking at a character on screen who can’t distinguish between real and fiction, we are that character. Our only window into this world is filtered through the mind and body of someone we can’t trust. The unreliability of our main character makes us question the authenticity of the world we are moving through.

Then there are the literal narrators, such as Bastion’s Rucks. In videogames, Rucks is an exception as he is the narrator but he isn’t the playable character. Often, he isn’t around while I’m off with the Kid having adventures, and I’m led to wonder if this is what ‘really’ happened, or if it is just what Rucks imagined must have happened. Indeed, towards the end of the game, Rucks’s narration doesn’t actually match what you are actually doing, and you have to wonder what else he got wrong.

Or, more recently, Max Payne 3 is played as a series of snippets of something that has happened to Max in the past tense. From his constant narration, you get the sense that everything we are going to do has already happened, that Max is telling us about this adventure after the fact. Max never lies to the player, per se, but he still withholds important information — who betrays who — for the sake of the story. In this way, Max becomes unreliable in the way any good storyteller must become unreliable. But then there is another layer of unreliability with Max, as an alcoholic and drug addict. Did these events really happen the way he is telling us they happened? Even if they did, am I approaching them in a different light because of how Max has framed them? At every point of Max Payne 3, Max has the chance to offer his excuses for the violence he commits before he/I commits them.

And that is why I love unreliable narrators: subjectivity. Our ability to move around freely in a videogame world often leads us to assume we are getting an objective view of that world, seeing it from all angles. Unreliable narrators and playable characters challenge this. They show how we are always anchored to the particular point-of-view of our character, and that we are always seeing things how they want us to see things. They force me to be critical. They force me to think and to wonder what I’m not being told, what I’m not being shown, and—most importantly in videogames—what I’m not being allowed to see.

You know what I love? Violent videogames about videogame violence. I love the trend over the past few years (and the last year especially) to examine the various ways that violence functions in videogames. I love the way that these games aren’t so much trying to claim that videogame violence is simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but the way they simply want to understand it better, the way they simply want to respect its power more.

Of course, I am talking about games like Bioshock, Spec Ops: The Line, Far Cry 2 and, more recently, Dishonored, Mark of the Ninja, Hotline Miami and the still upcoming Far Cry 3. All of these games, in their own way, ask questions about the ways violence is both depicted and deployed in videogames — the way violence is used against the player, and the way the player uses violence. They want to help us as players have richer and more nuanced understandings of just what violence is doing in these games.

What most of these games show, each in their own way, is that in videogames we will happily perform violent actions unquestioningly. Sure, we know they aren’t ‘real’, and often we’ll even acknowledge how problematic and sociopathic what we are being asked to do really is, but we’ll do it anyway because, deep down, we find it really enjoyable.

Importantly, they aren’t trying to make us feel like we shouldn’t enjoy it. Instead, they want us to realise that what we are enjoying is, truly, complicated and problematic. Not ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Just weird. Weird and complex and deserving a bit of consideration.

But a lot of people seem to disagree. Many people, such as the author of this recent post on Kill Screen seem to think that a violent videogame couldn’t possibly deliver an “anti-violence” message. A lot of people think games like Spec Ops: The Line are hypocritical for trying to say something profound about violent videogames while failing to offer a ‘solution’, for depicting the same old shoot-a-stack-of-bros gameplay.

Well, I think the problem here is, simply, that games like Spec Ops: The Line aren’t anti-violence or anti-shooter or anything like that at all. These games aren’t simply trying to say that violent videogames are ‘bad’ or a problem that requires fixing. That would indeed be hypocritical. Rather, what these games are trying to do is to simply explore what is happening in these videogames where we gun down hundreds of virtual human beings without a second thought. What is going on there? Why do we enjoy it so much?

These are really important questions for games to ask, and for us as players to ask ourselves. Not because we shouldn’t enjoy videogame violence, but because we should be more conscious and critical of what we do enjoy. It’s always nice to be intellectually challenged by the media you are consuming, and games that raise questions about just how and why we are doing the things we do in videogames are a great way to achieve this.

The player’s encounter with Andrew Ryan in Bioshock, for example, gets laughed at a lot these days by critics and players alike who are (understandably) sick of reading articles about it. But I still remember what it was like playing it. I remember just sitting there with my controller in my hands, realising I had never really made a decision in any videogame that the game had not already made for me. It totally changed the way I think about the role of my intentionality and agency in the games I play.

More recently, Spec Ops: The Line had an incredibly powerful affect on me. It didn’t make me want to stop playing shooters. That’s not the point. Instead, it made me realise just how horrific the things depicted in these shooters I enjoy really are. It made me realise that any playable character that has to gun down hundreds of men can never hope to be a ‘good guy’. To be sure, I will undoubtedly still enjoy shooters in the future, but I’ll also be thinking about them in a slightly different way, thanks to my experience with this game.

Videogames are not going to become less violent any time soon. But as players and developers alike grow more mature are critical of what they are playing and producing, it’s crucial that we have games that critique our own media form. These games can’t just pass meaningless, futile value judgements of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Such judgements are terribly boring. Instead, we need games that question and examine. Games that draw attention to the complex and paradoxic pleasures we get out of shooting virtual people in the face, and try to understand what is going on there. This understanding won’t lead to more or less violent videogames, and nor should it. Instead, these games will help videogame violence itself mature into something more meaningful, something more capable of evoking different meanings and emotions through its depiction.

And that’s why I love violent videogames about videogame violence. Far from being hypocritical or pompous in passing value judgements on their own kin, they challenge us to better understand and respect just what we are doing in these games that we enjoy so much. Rather than trying to state that their fellow violent videogames are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, they show us that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are entirely incapable categories for the complex engagements we have with videogames.

There are certain moments in games that stick with you forever. They stand out and define your experience, while the rest of the game fades into history. It doesn’t matter if you’re the kind of person who only buys Call Of Duty and FIFA every year, or the kind who devours every downloadable indie game immediately upon release. If there’s one thing we can say we all have in common as people who enjoy video games, it is these moments. We all have our personal memories.

Let me share one with you.

There’s a section in Dead Space 2 when Isaac Clarke has to align a set of solar arrays on the very top of Titan Station. They are massive columns that need to be moved manually, but their location is on the very outer edge of the station’s roof. The only way to reach them is to ‘fly’, using your suits mini jet thrusters. Beyond the arrays themselves, there is nothing except the vast expanse of outer space. Before now, even in Dead Space 1, there hadn’t been a moment to interact this closely with deep space. To actually launch yourself into it with no apparent boundaries or safety nets. Prepared with my boot thrusters, I looked out over the ledge and felt a very real sense of vertigo. There was nothing out there. Above, below and beyond – just a void.

I completed the mission but during every second, I felt tense. I’m sure the game’s artificial boundaries were there somewhere and would either block me from moving any further into the blackness or start to constrict my flow of oxygen. Either way, they were hidden and hidden well. I was completely convinced that I was in some danger on a level I had not encountered before in these games.

The countless number of Necromorphs I killed are now forgotten. Every one of them joined in some hazy blur of groans, flesh and blood. But the simple task of realigning these solar arrays will always stay with me. Its impact will never fade.

Of course, we all have our own moments in countless other games. Figuring out that I need the plank of wood to defeat the Cavefish. The constant, overbearing sight of Dr. Breen’s tower in City 17. Discovering that Rikimaru can stand on the branches of trees to get a better viewpoint. My fondness of these video game moments cannot be lessened as the years pass.

Catch the hype train to Dubai

Recently I finished playing Spec Ops: The Line, which was a brutal and interesting experience. I won’t spoil any story points here, but I will say the gruesome events in Dubai and how Captain Walker and his squad react is what made this game worth playing. The gameplay itself was mostly irrelevant, something I felt I had played in numerous other third-person, cover-based shooters.

Initially, my plan was to let this game pass me by. Everything I had seen about it didn’t excite me. It looked painfully generic, bursting at the seams with Unreal Engine military types yelling while shooting and shooting while yelling. Leading up to its release however, a murmur started. People started talking about Specs Ops: The Line in surprised tones. It had quickly gone from something that spent years in development hell with mediocre showing to the press, to an absolute must-play. What was happening?

Hype. That’s what.

Early rave reviews started to flow in. People began to discuss the game’s story in great length and calling it groundbreaking. Some players were downright shocked by the events in some sections and felt it necessary to stop playing. As a result of all this attention, I had to suddenly find out what was so arresting about this game. It was here that the hype grabbed hold of me, convincing me to hand over my money and start playing.

An empty response

A little over halfway through the single-player campaign, I reached a section of the game that was quite obviously a talking point. It was indeed shocking and for a shooter, quite interesting. My actions had caused an event that rarely comes up in video games — epecially military shooters, which are typically happy to solider on (pardon the pun) with shooting wave after wave of enemies while being surrounded by totally sweet explosions.

This was the moment. The first of many in Spec Ops: The Line. In what was designed to get an emotional response from the player, and my pre-primed reaction was all set to be shock and horror. Except a strange thing happened to me.

Something I’m sure I had experienced in other games but I felt it with surprising force in this one. When the moment finally happened, my internal monologue was supposed to be something along the lines of “Oh My God!”. It was clear as day that this was what I was meant to feel. But I didn’t. If I can explain it better, if was something more like “Oh, that’s what everyone is talking about.”

The emotional response that I was meant to have was present to be sure, but it wasn’t alone. Hell, it wasn’t even equally shared. It was overpowered by recognition of other people’s opinions. As such, the ‘shock’ of the moment was lessened. The hype of Spec Ops: The Line had crept in without me realizing and directly affected a part of the game. As I said, I’m positive this had happened on some level before, but not like this. Not to this extent.

Moving on in the story, the same thing happened throughout the rest of the campaign. Another moment was dulled. Yet another moment wasn’t as shocking as it could have been. By the time I had finished the game, it was as if I was having an out of body experience. I felt unable to correctly judge whether the story had actually been any good. To this day, I still can’t really say for sure. It is an extremely strange sensation.

The silent victims

I was a victim of hype. But unaware of just how badly it had affected me before it was too late. Do I wish I hadn’t played Specs Ops: The Line? I’m shocked to say I honestly don’t know. The more I think about it, the more confused I feel. Thinking back to when I didn’t care about the game, I know that without the word of mouth from people raving about it, I probably would never had played it. But upon playing it, that same word of mouth had a negative effect on my enjoyment of the game.

Why do we play games at all? Whether it’s for escape, simple entertainment or review, we are all subject to hype. It’s natural that we want to be part of something that other people are excited about. I have even jumped headlong into franchises and genres with no prior experience solely because of other people’s excitement. Everyone is talking about this game, so it must be something special, right? Yeah, let’s do this!

But hype can be important

Every year, the Evolution Championship Series (better known as EVO) takes place in Las Vegas. It is a fighting game tournament inviting players from around the world to compete in Street Fighter, Marvel Vs Capcom and others to see who reigns supreme in the field of dragon punches and ultra-finishers. Every year without fail, hype drives the excitement for this tournament into overdrive. Even if you aren’t present in Las Vegas, you can watch all the matches live on the internet and get caught up in the magic like everyone else.

Something else happens around this time. Thousands of people who own fighting games that may not have played them for a while, suddenly get excited for them again. They see the best-of-the-best fight each other with top-tier skills and make each and every match seem like the most thrilling event in the world. These thousands of people suddenly jump from their chairs, grab whatever copy of fighting games they own and start playing. Their eagerness to reach the dizzying heights of the greatest players in the world pushes them past any sort of apathy for these games that they previously may have had. It’s obvious their skills won’t reach these expert levels, but the fun is in just being part of it. On average, it lasts a couple of weeks. I know because I speak from experience.

This is probably the most crystal clear example of the positive effects of hype. Especially in video games, it can be a wonderful feeling that gives us exhilaration for what we already loved. It shows us just how important hype can be. You don’t have to go far to reach a colossal wall of negativity in the video game industry but no matter how high this wall might tower over us, hype breaks right through it every time. It is a powerful and essential part of video games. And that is what I’m most afraid of.

Dealing with hype

Let me put forth a hypothetical for a moment. Say someone out there is having the same experience I had with Spec Ops: The Line. The apparent shocking moments in that game were sullied by hype. Now, what if this same person had experienced it more than once? The hype has crept into their other games and dulled the impact of the moments that should otherwise be stored fondly in their memory banks. And if that’s the case, they may reach a point where most video games they play start to produce this effect. A point where no game produces the same level of excitement for them and as a result, they stop playing. Subconsciously, they are convinced video games no longer hold any allure for them and put them down forever. Considering the stark and confusing experience I have been through, I don’t think this hypothetical is too unrealistic.

When does hype begin to have an expense? Whether it be reviews, mentions on Twitter or a friend telling you “You have to play this game!”, I have realized that there may come a point where I need to wary of hype. That I need to balance it somehow. Is this even possible? Can I completely divorce myself from it?

All I know is that if I want more memories like Dead Space 2 and others, I need to keep a close eye on the cost of hype.

Many people including us here at games.on.net have praised Spec Ops: The Line for a gripping, morally grey single-player campaign, but the game’s lead designer has come out swinging against publisher 2K for what he calls a “relentless” approach in forcing them to have “tacked-on multiplayer” that was “basically a low-quality Call of Duty clone in third-person”.

“There’s no doubt that it’s an overall failure,” said lead designer Cory Davis. “It sheds a negative light on all of the meaningful things we did in the single-player experience. I don’t even feel like it’s part of the overall package – it’s another game rammed onto the disk like a cancerous growth, threatening to destroy the best things about the experience that the team at Yager put their heart and souls into creating.”

“It was literally a check box that the financial predictions said we needed, and 2K was relentless in making sure that it happened – even at the detriment of the overall project and the perception of the game”, he said. The multiplayer side of the game was developer externally by Darkside Studios for inclusion into the title, not by Yager themselves. Still, Davis praised 2K for taking a gamble on their game: “They took a hell of a lot of risk with the project that other publishers would not have had the balls to take,” Davis concluded.

Source: Polygon

It’s always great when developers just randomly decide to hand out free new stuff, and Spec Ops: The Line is the latest to receive this treatment. 2K have just announced a series of four new two-player co-op missions available to all owners of the game on all platforms.

“The two players must work together to fight through waves of enemies and blinding sandstorms to complete their objectives,” writes the press release, “emphasizing teamwork and utilizing a variety of weapons and explosives”. That sounds about the size of it.

For more on Spec Ops and why so many are captivated by its gritty, morally grey storyline, why not read this excellent piece?

Source: Press Release

After playing Spec Ops: The Line, I was pleasingly taken aback: Here’s a game that acknowledges the absolute horror of killin’ folk. Later, in particularly candid conversation with Far Cry 3’s lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem – a conversation wherein he almost seemed on the verge of tears at one point, oh yeah, it was that candid – he let fly with FC3’s overarching mission statement: “We wanted to make a game that’s about shooting, and about killing, and what that means for the protagonist.”

Because we’ve all been killin’ folk willy-nilly for years now and nobody’s said a damn thing. Back up: The art of gaming itself hasn’t said a damn thing. The fact that games are now starting to metatextually refer to this is really something, even if it does feel slightly overdue. If you were to add up your entire time spent playing shooters of all stripes, how many living, breathing people do you think you’ve actually killed? It’d be a big number that ends in a lot of zeroes. Gamers are mass murderers of the most casual variety.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t my reasonable Black Ops killscore or Battlefield K/D that first made me stop and think about exactly what Yohalem is hoping to explore within the context of FC3’s narrative. It was Uncharted.

It was Uncharted because Uncharted isn’t really a shooter per se, even though its cover-based antics play a large part in the experience. Drake is just such an ordinary guy, albeit one whose parkour wizardry is so potent as to be ludicrous. He’s also an insatiable killbot, and though he might comically balk at the presence of a live grenade rolling by his boots, he never says a damn word about the random goon he just capped in the forehead on his way to some sweet loot.

When Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty came out, Japanese players were able to enter some kinda competition where, if they won, their individual names could then be found in-game on a guard’s body should you have elected to horribly kill said guard. A friend of mine who elected to horribly kill just about everyone when playing this game sat back once and told me, “It made me think about their families.” Arguably, this was Hideo’s typically esoteric way of addressing this issue – if, indeed, it even is an issue.

It’s not. Not really. That there is a whole ‘nother argument that I don’t give two steaming craps about. What I am interested in is the concept of gamer guilt on an emotionally responsive level. I’d never accuse anyone who felt differently of sociopathic tendencies, but the more I think about it, the less and less inclined I am to pull the trigger on my fellow non-man. Multiplayer friendly-fire, especially, makes my chest heavy. It speaks volumes to gaming’s continuing ascent towards… something. Maybe not “art”, not yet – but the kind of thing those more academic of gamers often write whole tomes about in great spires of academia.

The fact that, after every game of FC3 multi, the winning team can choose either to execute the captive losers or set them free was an interesting stop during the journey of this effervescent morality train. Nine times out of ten, the guys playing at this early session would set them free.

Plenty has already been written about Spec Ops: The Line. It would be wasteful to tread over some of the obvious points – primarily, that it’s perhaps one of the most engaging and fascinating pieces of commentary not only on games, but gamers themselves.

But there’s something missing from this commentary. We’ve successfully identified the message Spec Ops is trying to portray, and we’ve debated back and forth over what exactly it means. But so far, the next step in this puzzle hasn’t been put into place.

All the commentary seems to be pointing in a clear and obvious direction: that we should cease spending any more money on shooters that don’t do anything.

In fact, let’s go further. We should not even acknowledge their existence. The category is just too saturated, too filled with poor-quality emulators, that we’re doing the medium a disservice by even giving them the time of day.

That’s not so say there isn’t a place for objective entertainment. Battlefield, for example, is a fine game. And it’s a fine game because it doesn’t try to make any sort of point about the futility of war – it’s not remotely interested in doing so.

But what we shouldn’t tolerate any more is the notion that games can offer some sort of commentary on the futile nature of war, and then allow us to bask in that same war’s glory for six-to-ten hours. They are pretending to be something they are not – and we are perpetuating that system by buying them.

We’re at a turning point. The reaction to Spec Ops can either set us on a path to more measured commentary, or risk making the genre worse than it is now.

You are a killer, and you must be made to feel it

I wrote an article in April about how the “death quotes” in Call of Duty clearly show how the series has moved from lamenting war to actually glorifying it. And yet, when you compare those quotes to Spec Ops’ dynamic loading screens – which show different messages based on your decisions in the game – they feel like child’s play.

There is a key difference between using your game to make a political statement, and actually weaving that statement into the very fabric of the game itself.

One key moment in Spec Ops encapsulates this better than any other. The player takes control of a mortar filled with white phosphorus, reigning fire on enemy troops. The team justifies their actions after having watched these same troops seemingly kill dozens of innocent civilians.

But the most dramatic moment isn’t in the aftermath, when you discover it’s actually you and your team who have killed the bystanders. It’s when you take control of the mortar via a computer screen – and you see your reflection.

It’s a clear dig at the Modern Warfare level controlling the AC130, and the coldness of that same mission. This time, you hear the screams – and you see your face staring right back at you as people die. It’s the ultimate reminder of your humanity.

We shouldn’t just dismiss this as a casual design decision. The developers could have simply allowed you to just blow your victims to pieces without any sort of repercussion. But instead, they’ve chosen to do something extra, and actually weave a startling warning through the gameplay.

It’s difficult to take this decision without context. There are few games actually seizing on this type of opportunity.

The competition, or lack thereof

The obvious target is Black Ops II, the most anticipated shooter of the year. Based on the series past performance, we shouldn’t expect any type of measured commentary or analysis, even with the added setting of drone warfare – a topic ripe for bold discussion and exploration.

After all, the first Black Ops game was set during the Cold War. You even run into JFK himself, and for what? What kind of message does it send? Absolutely nothing. If anything, the game could be seen as a type of propaganda.

It’s because of all this we need to be extremely careful with our gaming habits, or we’ll continue to watch the genre be bogged down even further.

Black Ops would have us believe that setting the game in the middle of a drone war would substantiate measured commentary. We know it probably won’t contain any – the previous version had none, and so we have no reason to believe this will either.

The inevitable protest to this call is to suggest the game’s just a bit of fun, that we shouldn’t give up on shooters just because Spec Ops happens to raise some interesting points.

To which I say: rubbish.

We have to lift our standards

It’s exactly because Spec Ops raises interesting points that we shouldn’t tolerate anything less. The game is hardly perfect, but it at least generates discussion. And with a category so filled with garbage – first person shooters are still incredibly popular – we just can’t afford to keep that going any longer.

We’re constantly talking about how games can be the next great storytelling medium, that we have something to add as an art form. But at the same time, we also constantly say how we’re still awaiting our “Citizen Kane” of games. That game that will transform the medium into something to be taken seriously.

If we ignore Spec Ops, and continue to eat up pure entertainment for entertainment’s sake, then we risk missing out on that game ever coming along.

There can be no middle ground any more. Spec Ops has raised the bar too high. Shooters either need to stay away from providing any sort of commentary at all, or make it their sole focus. They’ve been proven capable of doing so.

Spec Ops is not perfect. Far from it. But it should give us pause if we find ourselves finishing it and yet still waiting eagerly for the next Call of Duty. If so, we’ve completely missed the point.

There is an element of cognitive dissonance that comes with Spec Ops: The Line. Throughout the play time you’ll kill hundreds, maybe thousands of enemies utilising the uninspired but functionally enjoyable cover shooting mechanics, whilst simultaneously being asked to feel bad for doing the same. Sometimes it works. Sometimes war really is hell and the moral ambiguity or killing another person over differing ideals really hits home.

Other times, usually when the game becomes more mechanical and noticeably “gamey”, like an on rails vehicle sequences, brightly glowing collectibles or the occasional extra tough enemy who requires far more bullets than any human could possibly survive, it kind of falls apart. As a result, Spec Ops can be a bit of a muddled affair.

Set six months after a cataclysmic sandstorm has wiped the Emirate of Dubai off the map, Spec Ops: The Line tells the story of Delta Force Captain Martin Walker and his men, sent to the gutted city to uncover the fate of the refugees and the Damned 33rd, the army brigade that took it upon themselves to help the civilians rather than follow orders to pull out.

Expecting to find some refugees and soldiers, Walker and his men instead stumble into a miniature civil war, with the Damned 33rd, a splinter faction known as the Exiles, and the refugees all fighting to stay alive.

There is a sense of urgency and lethality to Spec Ops that isn’t usually seen in most AAA shooters. The level design constantly funnels the player forward, ushering you from one horror of war to the next, never really giving you enough time to catch your breath and become acclimated to the atrocities that have seemingly become commonplace in Dubai.

The post-apocalyptic Dubai setting adds to this feeling of breathlessness thanks to the omnipresence of sand. In much the same way water was a low level but constant background threat in BioShock, sand plays a similar role in Spec Ops. Sometimes you can use it to your advantage, shooting out windows to bury enemies under tonnes of sand. Others it works against you, with ferocious sandstorms obscuring your vision and ruining your accuracy, or the ground falling away as it settles further into the buried city.

Whilst the stop and pop shooting mechanics are fairly run of the mill, the guns have a level of lethality a lot of players won’t be used to. Enemies only take a few bullets to put down, heads explode, limbs are ripped off by bullets or explosions and melee execution attacks are swift and brutal. This goes for the player as well. Death comes easily in Spec Ops, sometimes frustratingly so thanks to the short supply of checkpoints.

Ammunition is also in short supply in Dubai, so scouring the bodies of fallen enemies for clips is a must. In a clever twist, not every enemy who is taken out of combat is killed outright, but instead are reduced to writhing, screaming wrecks screaming wrecks that haven’t dropped ammunition yet. To get the precious bounty necessary for survival you are essentially forced to execute defenceless enemies, further muddying the already very murky moral waters.

The shooting may be a little generic and occasionally frustrating but this is more than made up for by the excellent narrative and voice work. Martin Walker (voiced by the ubiquitous Nolan North, a man who seems contractually obliged to be in every game ever made) provides the bulk of the exposition, but proves to be a fascinatingly unreliable narrator thanks to his personal history with Colonel Konrad (not the only Heart of Darkness reference you’ll encounter in the game), the commander of the Damned 33rd. Even when the action becomes a little too formulaic or sudden difficulty spikes send you back to the last checkpoint, the story and characters are compelling enough to keep you going. Spec Ops: The Line may not be the best shooter on the market at the moment, but it certainly is the most interesting.

Good:

• Excellent, morally ambiguous narrative
• Good voice acting
• Compelling level design
• Some great set-pieces

Bad:

• Poorly spaced checkpoints
• Some frustrating difficulty spikes
• Uninspired stop and pop mechanics
• Sometimes breaks its own reality by being too overtly “gamey”

Brown military shooters are definitely in vogue at the moment – and Spec Ops: The Line is browner than retirement home corduroy. That’s pretty brown, but ironically enough it’s the uniqueness of its setting that makes it look samey. Dubai’s your battlefield, and it’s not just an easy alternative to Afghanistan in this case. The fact that this gleaming jewel of the Middle East is super-sandy and thus prone to hellacious sandstorms plays into the third-person shootiness as often as you’d care to take advantage of it. Piff a grenade onto a dune, for instance, and the resultant blast won’t just send corpses flying – the sand kicked up by its impact will also blind anyone who survives.

Just like the city itself, it can go bigger, though. Dubai’s not what it used to be in The Line’s world, and the windows of immense fallen skyscrapers will often be holding back a mountain of its finest terrain. Save a few bullets and aim for said windows, and you just might unleash a torrent of the stuff, thereby washing away any resistance still holding out underneath. Sometimes, it’ll even radically deconstruct the level, cleverly segueing into the next bit of carnage.

The Line isn’t just a day at the desiccated beach, though. Its narrative is clearly and supremely influenced by high fiction, that being Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and, by extension, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (one of the achievements is even called “The Horror”).

You are Nolan North er, Captain Martin Walker, leader of a trio of Delta Force bravo operatives sent into Dubai to retrieve vaunted US Army Colonel, John Konrad (see what they did there?). Reportedly, he remained behind against orders with his unit in order to help citizens flee the troubled city. Or did he? As you go along, all is not what it seems, with everybody from the CIA to US Army partisans colliding in what’s actually quite an effective homage to Joseph Conrad’s Congolese exploration of the potential for realised evil in every man.

Readily acknowledging this, The Line provides quite abrupt moral dilemmas that aren’t, thankfully, ever signposted. Rather, they occur extremely naturally, and you’re left only with the inkling that whatever situation you’re currently in could go either way depending on you. For instance, early on you liberate what you reasonably believe is a member of Konrad’s unit from the violent caress of brutal torture. The man’s jilted, unsure of who you are, and after using your diversion to turn his torturer’s gun on himself, he points it at you.

Things get tense, there’s a lot of yelling; he wants you to lower your weapons before he does. You can, if you want. I didn’t. I peppered this guy with Uzi rounds and then ate a goddamn ham sandwich. I did it expressly to experience the “negative” side of The Line’s moral coin, and true enough, my two squadmates were not at all pleased with my decision. This man had sensitive information on him, too. Maybe he could’ve led us straight to Konrad. Thus my game branched off in another direction, and while these moments won’t affect the ending, they do decide the nuances of this harrowing boat you’re on with semi-regularity. The Line, however, is not as cut and dry as all that. Later it became apparent that gunning that guy down might’ve actually been the right thing to do, as unbeknownst to me at the time as it was.

As a third-person shooter, The Line is pretty rote. You run, you take cover, you shoot with one of your two weapons, you throw grenades and crap. It doesn’t even have a roll mechanic, but it’s still a lot more workable than something like Binary Domain. Its wrapping is the most alluring thing about it, and while that sounds like a backhanded compliment, it’s really not. The strength of it is enough to keep you here ‘til the end, easy – especially because the inter-squad banter is just reminiscent of Bad Company’s enough that things don’t become mired in serious business 100% of the time.