Spec Ops: The Line

This review contains spoilers. I believe that in order to do a thorough examination of a game I need to be able to discuss every part of it. Be warned.

The Setup

The actual plot of the game concerns a “Heart of Darkness”-esque trek through Dubai six months after the city has been hit by a massive sandstorm. A Lt. Col. John Konrad (ey?) attempted an evacuation of the city as the storm hit. You are Capt. Martin Walker working alongside 1st Lt. Alphonso Adams and SSgt. Lugo to investigate the city when the Pentagon receives a distress call from Konrad.

Of course, things turn sour from there. The civilians still alive are being armed and led by the CIA and Konrad’s battalion has declared martial law on the city, amidst all of this a pirate radio DJ, “The Radioman”, broadcasts throughout Dubai.

Rules of Conduct

Moral choices have been a staple of modern video gaming for about a decade now, but up until some recent games this has been a rather binary affair. Codified by games like Knights of the Old Republic and Fable the "choices" have been of extremes: Do you save the kitten from the tree or burn both and laugh at its owner? Spec Ops does something far more interesting.

These were choices I had legitimate difficulty deciding. Three of them were the most memorable to me. The earliest example is perhaps a cliché, but it affected me heavily. You have a choice to either save civilians or a CIA agent held hostage. I chose the CIA agent because of the intel he could give me. I didn’t like what that said about me, I was willing to risk the life of innocent people to advance my mission. What was so powerful to me in this moment was that I wasn’t roleplaying as a soldier, I went with my gut instinct. Even my choices in games like Mass Effect felt more like I was choosing a story branch I, as a player, wanted to experience rather than really making a difficult decision. Spec Ops did. And when Lugo yelled at me for letting civilians die and failing to get anything useful from the agent, I genuinely felt bad.

The second is not a choice persé, as I did it so instinctively. At one point the squad is making its way through a refugee camp filled with lots of sheets obscuring your vision and forcing you to move through small cramped passages. After a firefight I ran through one of the hallways, sprinting forward. Suddenly I saw movement and someone came out of a tent, charging at me. With all my video game muscle memory I pressed the left and then the right trigger to dispatch the video. After firing a salvo and seeing the character drop to the ground I realized I had just shot a woman in a burqa. She was running away from the gunfire. At the risk of sounding melodramatic I had to pause the game and walk away for a few minutes. Forget Call of Duty and its contrived civilian shooting sequences, this was far more subtle and impactful. What the developers have done here is bothering on genius. They used the mechanics of the video game medium and tropes of the genre to construct an encounter to make a point about modern urban warfare. And the fact that it wasn’t some special sequence, but flowed naturally in the gameplay was darkly beautiful.

The third happens later in the game, as you and your squad are being surrounded by an angry mob of civilians. Are they angry because I accidentally shot that woman or because I failed to save the earlier hostages? I don’t know if the game branches that way and I kind of don’t want to know. Your other squad-mate is furious and asks for permission to open fire on the crowd. The crowd keeps closing in and throws rocks at you, the game prompts you to resolve the situation. Despite my earlier decisions, I was not about to gun down civilians willingly. And the game did not prompt me to do this, it did not present this as an option in the UI, but I tried firing in the air to see if the crowd would disperse. I was skeptical, not expecting the game to acknowledge this. Again, trained by video games, if it’s not explicitly labeled, it’s not an option. The crowd ran away in fear. I was able to do a natural action and it worked. Bravo, Yager.

There is another choice. Which I did not like, which I felt cheated by. It is the turning point of your character’s arc. Konrad’s battalion is holding a long stretch of road you have to cross. Nearby is a supply of white phosphor you can use to kill the enemies in a very painful and torturous way. The object for the white phosphor in the game world was not labeled clearly and I accidentally used it. After some research online I found out that this is the only way to progress further. While I understand the reality that this was required for plot reasons, compared to the natural and subtle ways the other choices were presented, I felt cheated and forced to do something I didn’t want to do. Which, as I write that last sentence I realize might be a very clever meta-play on the player.

Reaching Through the Fourth Wall

In what could be considered the third and final act of the game it starts to mess with you, the actual player more directly. The first incident is a Bioshock/Eternal Darkness-like sequence in a room lit by Lynchian strobe lights mannequins turn into enemies and vice versa. A boss enemy turns out to be a fallen squad-mate. When you are defeated by him and reload your player character looks around confused and acts as if he just awoken from a dream. The opening of the game is a flash-forward, as the story reaches that point in the normal flow your character comments that he has already done this.

And the loading screens. The standard tool tips, between giving the normal gameplay tips, challenge the player. "Do you even remember why you came here?" and "Do you feel like a hero?" are paraphrases of taunts I can remember the game throwing at me. At one point the screens no longer even show art, just static and the always haunting humming of a nursery rhyme by a child. It is all making a point: you are making all this happen. You the player, all you have to do to make it stop is to stop playing the game.

Medium is the Message

There is one big problem that Spec Ops: The Line has trying to critique and deconstruct modern action games. It itself is a mediocre third-person shooter. While the above mentioned moments are really cool and actually manage to make some interesting points, the hours of gameplay between those moments are filled with uninspiring and boring action sequences. Bog-standard “take cover and kill all the enemies until the chime plays and move to the next room,” undermines the power of the times the game is doing something interesting.

The meta-point of “stop playing the game to stop the horrible stuff from happening” is a cool device to use, if it weren’t for that fact that it’s a product you paid €60 for. The real-life investment the player has put into the game deflates its impression. When looked at it objectively it is basically a product that asks a considerable sum of money and then yells at you not to use it.

But, the developers have to be commended for trying something new and intelligent. They certainly succeed at key points and the game is not an experience I regret having. To reduce it into clichés, Spec Ops: The Line is a diamond in the rough.

(I also posted this review on my video game blog Been Playing)