I think I was about thirteen when my dad, while watching the ceiling fan spin for a few curiously silent minutes announced, ‘I’ve decided on our family movie night tonight’, and disappeared off to the video store. That night we sat down and watched Martin Sheen freaking out in a Saigon hotel room to the dulcet tones of The Doors. Apocalypse Now did irrevocable damage to my young brain and it’s perception of war. That if it fails to destroy the bodies of those involved, it never fails to destroy the mind.

It’s often bothered me that despite the massive number of games focused on modern or recent warfare practises; none of them have admitted the prickly truth that war really is hell. That is, until I played Spec Ops The Line.

The first mission starts with some prickly moments that you may encounter midway in most war games, for The Line these are entrees

The Spec Ops series is an old one, the first game coming out for Windows in 1998 and over a dozen separate games since then on Playstation, PS2 and Dreamcast. The goal of the series was always to push a realistic combat experience, divorced from the arcade like army games people were used to. They were successful in that regard and garnered some positive reviews if not a lot of wide spread appeal. Yager Games, the new guys handling the license with Spec Ops: The Line, perhaps took the realism mandate a little more seriously than the previous developers.

The setting is the wealthy city of Dubai, now a post-catastrophe disaster area as the worst sand storm in history has devoured the city. Decorated war hero Colonel Konrad had gone into Dubai with his battalion to restore order and lead an evacuation.  Six months later there’s been no word other than a garbled and sorrowful radio message from Konrad that the evacuation has been a disaster with a massive death toll. A former colleage of Konrad, Captain Martin Walker, heads into Dubai with two other Delta Force operators to scout the situation and hopefully rescue Konrad and any other survivors.

You'll wear out a few pairs of gloves with all the zip lines

Things go very bad almost immediately, there’s aggressive and heavily armed locals who attack the three man team, then when they finally catch up to members of the 33^rd, Konrad’s battalion, they’re missing comrades in arms attack and try to kill them. Walker doesn’t hesitate to fight back against the rogue 33^rd and insists that the Konrad he knew wouldn’t allow this, that they have to find him to help restore order.

Things get pretty f**ked up. Then they get more **cked up. Then, and you’ll be surprised by game’s end how badly, things get about as fu**ed up as they could possibly be. But The Line succeeds to an astonishing degree in its plotting and use of the game medium to tell the same basic story that was told in Apocalypse Now, that in war there is no glory, only sorrow and madness.

The odd Bayonet guy are one hit killers, put them down fast

I should qualify that statement by mentioning that The Line is not Apocalypse Now set in the Middle East, the plots and events are very different. But the core themes from the film and the book it’s based on Heart of Darkness, the meditation on the group madness of those at war, are all over it. The game even pulls off some plot tricks, which I won’t go into for spoiler reasons, that historically are incredibly difficult to pull off and so often land with a groan. But The Line had me slapping myself in real surprise a few times. The campaign involves a few choice sections but wisely doesn’t let you know with a blinking light that you’re meant to make a choice. In addition to being subtle with its ethical choice situations, there’s no penalty or reward for whichever one you choose. Whether it’s anger or duty that informs your actions the results are usually the same. This might come across as shallow in most games, but the strength of the plot and characterisation gives every decision weight. The game mechanics are really utilised to tell the story in a way traditional media would struggle to convey.

Sand storms add a wrinkle in the otherwise familiar encounters

It’s also a game, but the gaming bits are very much in the shadow of the games stark, searing plot. It’s a third person cover shooter game ala Uncharted and Gears of War that throws in basic squad commands to issue to your two buddies Lugo and Adams. It doesn’t go much further than pointing out targets for them to focus fire on. There’s no pointing and clicking to adjust positions or ordering them to do things they should be able to work out themselves. The game presumes that they’re skilled and experience Operators and you don’t need to provide anything other than the odd ‘kill that guy’, not that they're always the most intelligent comrades. Being a cover shooter game all you really want is for the cover mechanic to be smooth and sublime. The Line is sticky in places, and often, despite being crouched right behind cover and hitting the cover button like mad, your character won’t quite make the transition, this small difference getting you killed more than a few annoying times. The iffy control issues combined with the realistic damage, as in two bullets to the body and your dead, can really kill the enjoyment of making your way through the game.

Look man, do you see it, that sand dune looks just like your mums booty

Games like this are defined by their encounter architecture. Each firefight has to chain together to be a little more interesting and innovative than the last and The Line does an okay job of creating exciting and fun shootout encounters; not as good as Gears of War, the champion of the encounter firefight, but pretty good. The Line has its strength in multiple levels, most firefights have enemies either shooting at you from multiple levels or rappelling down to strengthen ground forces.

The weakness is the enemy AI. They’re just dumb, walking straight into fire and leaving themselves open for coordinated attacks often. They also don’t adapt or behave differently if you break the script and do something nutty. If you die and reload you’ll notice the enemies do exactly the same thing every time. It’s pretty weak for a game that’s meant to be built on battlefield realism.

Technically the game is also just okay. The graphics are pretty good with a special mention to the sand physics which were impressive. Game every man (as in he literally voices every man in games) Nolan North gives a career best performance as Walker. Initially hearing North’s generic American accent yet again slaps your disbelief suspension, but by halfway through the game the distinction is gone and voice is just another part of the character of Walker.

It's a loose tooth, stop being such a baby, you'll get a dollar for it

There's also a multiplayer mode, but it's a minor afterthought and barely worth the time it'll take you to find a match.

When people talk about mature games the titles are normally pricking the moral majority through gratuitous and loud sex and violence. But The Line is a true mature game, a game interested in mortality and the long term trauma and ramifications of our actions, it doesn’t ask us to experiment with ethical decisions to see what happens for fun, like Fable or inFamous, The Line asks us to inject our own ethics into the game to make a connection. It’s not a mature game because of its content, it’s mature because it has the potential to develop your own ideologies, playing it matures you. Is it telling of the game community psyche that previous games of this type have been science fiction rather than the more logical setting of a fictional modern conflict? One wonders. Perhaps there are thousands of young teens like me having their perceptions of violence and war shattered by The Line right now the way mine were at 13 watching Apocalypse Now; I certainly so.

While the game itself is imperfect, its implications are thrilling. The Line surprised the hell out of me from start to finish and has made me a fan of Jager Games. Dear developers, more games like Spec Ops: The Line please. We are ready for them.