Vladimir Rakhmanin
Deputy Web Editor
‘How many Americans have you killed today?’
I do a double-take, making sure that I read the loading screen correctly. Wishing to replay a previous chapter, I waited idly with controller in hand, expecting the loading screen to feature some useless tips on game controls – instead, the provocative question stares at me in the face, unflinchingly. In fact, this is a good way of describing the entirety of Spec Ops: The Line – the game asks extremely uncomfortable questions about war, and the consequences of following orders, and does not give you any easy answers that will help you sleep well at night. And while the gameplay is nothing special, and the narrative features some truly atrocious plot holes, the sheer ambition of the developers make this a shooter worth playing.
The game itself is a modern retelling of Apocalypse Now, which in itself is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s legendary Heart of Darkness – in fact, in a less-than-subtle reference, the game’s villain is named Konrad. Instead of Africa or Vietnam, however, Spec Ops is set in Dubai, which has been ravaged by massive sand storms. A commander named Konrad and his legion of troops enter the devastated city to help the survivors and, subsequently, mysteriously disappear. A certain Captain Walker and his two stereotypical generic troops enter the city to figure out what happened.
If this sounds like an ordinary contrived narrative created to let you shoot loads of dudes, then you’d be right – at first. Spec Ops lulls you into a false sense of security by making you feel like you’re just playing Brown Shooter 4: Let’s Blast Through The Campaign So I Can Start The Multiplayer, and then smacks you across the face with some genuinely shocking and unexpected events. The entire game is a deconstruction of the shooter genre on a scale that I haven’t seen since Bioshock – the further you go into the narrative, the more you begin to feel like what you’re doing is wrong, and make you question why you ever thought that murdering hundreds of people in other games seemed like acceptable behaviour. In one brilliant moment, a character asks you why you’re carrying out this sadistic massacre. He answers his own rhetorical question – ‘it’s probably the videogames’.
In a stroke of genius, Nolan North was cast in the role of the main character – he voices an enormous amount of video game characters, including Nathan Drake from the Uncharted franchise and Desmond from Assassin’s Creed. Now, the brilliance of this lies in the fact that we are familiar with the voice – it’s comforting, soothing, something we have heard before. However, the further you go into the game, you see the brutal killings that you carry out take their toll on the protagonist, with the trio swearing at each other more often and talking in harsher tones. By the end of the game, Walker is capable of only primal, animal grunts. This transformation shows what would have happened to characters like Nathan Drake in real life, if they were to face the amount of blood on their hands. Unlike so many other videogames, in Spec Ops, death is serious, and you must pay the consequences.
All of this murder is set against the backdrop of a fantastic rock soundtrack and some truly inspired locations, filtered through soft, pastel primary colours, bringing to mind the trippy atmosphere of Apocalypse Now. It’s something truly special, and one wonders how the developers achieved something like this on Unreal Engine 3.
The thing that truly brings the anti-war message home, however, are some of the moral choices you have to make over the course of your journey. It’s best that you experience these unspoiled, considering their shock factor, but they truly are moral choices, where there is no right or wrong answer – there is only wrong and wrong. You will not feel good about yourself, especially towards the end of the game, and these moments, which punctuate the violence, are phenomenally executed, with fantastic audio-visual cues.
So far I’ve been praising the game, but unfortunately there are some deep flaws here that stop it from becoming an instant classic. For instance, the ending, with its ‘wot a tweest’ final moment, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. For a lot of the moments that it clears up (in very clever ways) most of the plot remains far too ambigious for its own good. Make sure to read some interviews with the game’s scriptwriter, as he explains some interesting interpretations and details that you might have missed.
Perhaps most crucially, the gameplay is not great at all. Maybe that’s the point when the game is trying to lecture you on the evils of killing for entertainment, but it’s just not interesting. I realise that having the most generic third person shooting action works for the narrative, but it really does become tedious at times. For the last third of the game, when the plot really kicked into high gear, I switched the difficulty to the lowest setting just so I could blast through the game-y sections to get to the next cut-scene. It’s also a very short game – I finished the campaign in four hours seven minutes. And sure, there’s trophies/achievements to collect, but that’s not really the point here.
In any case, no matter how convoluted the story got, or how boring the game parts were, the story was enough for me. It’s a beautiful, broken, bloody mess, and while it’s not my game of the year so far (that honour goes to Journey) it comes very close. At one point during the game – and I’m about to spoil some plot points here, so be warned – you are forced to bomb an area with white phosphorus. When you are finished, you walk through the street, watching your screaming enemies burn to death. With horror, you realise that you bombed a civilian camp – and in one of the tents, you see a mother and her child, completely charred by the fire. The mother, as her last act on this earth, had placed her hand over the eyes of her child, to make sure that he could not see the horror that you, the player, had unleashed on these innocent people. This image remains burnt in my mind, and for this, Spec Ops: The Line remains one of the most memorable games I have ever played.
