Hands On: Spec Ops: The Line

Let’s get the negatives out of the way. First up, Nolan North is on lead vocals again. Now I love Mr. North as much as the next man, and I’m sure his bank manager is pleased with all the work he is getting, but when you are playing a generic looking marine the last thing you want is a voice that is becoming more ubiquitous than the aforementioned marine.

That’s right, he’s in full ‘Nolan North’ mode here, rather than one of the various accents we saw from him last year.

Secondly, to get to Windsor I had to spend almost half an hour in Slough on the coldest day of the year so far, a location that isn’t exactly the cheeriest of places on a summer’s day. In sub zero temperatures and surrounded by American tourists trying to locate ‘Sloo’ I was sorely tempted to say good by cruel world there and then. Thankfully I had Station Jim, the mangy stuffed dog for company. But enough of my woes, let’s talk about Spec Ops: The Line.

[drop2]Playing as Captain Martin Walker (North) and accompanied by two members of a Delta Force bravo team, Spec Ops: The Line is a third person shooter with a tactical element. Your team members will help out in firefights and you can command them to attack a certain enemy, move to a certain location or sweep ahead to perform a ‘sitrep’.

These squad commands are sent by holding a shoulder button and aiming at where your team should go or who they should attack; it’s quick and precise to use during battles. Likewise the cover system works well and you can dive between walls and bollards with ease.

The game begins with Captain Walker and chums landing on the outskirts of Dubai to discover that the previously wealthy resort has succumbed to catastrophic sandstorms, with many parts of the city now crumbling and buried. We’ve seen disaster struck cityscapes before (Enslaved springs to mind) and we’ve seen sand before (Uncharted: Drake’s Deception being a recent example) but I think this is the first game that has used sand as a destructive force.

Lead characters aside, visually the game looks rather unique and the sand is a key element in gameplay.

Roaring dust storms occur during battles, reducing visibility to near zero and devastating the already wrecked landscape. Windows blow out and buildings crumble as the wind tears through the structures. Once inside the buildings you can use the sand to your advantage, such as shooting out a window to let tons of desert to flow in and bury your enemies.

Although it may be almost blasphemous to say, Spec Ops does sand better than Uncharted 3.  The desert in Uncharted: Drakes Deception is of a cinematic quality, it looks beautiful rather than dangerous. Even the sandstorm battle in the Naughty Dog title seems quite serene compared to the screaming winds and flying glass in Spec Ops.  Here the storms show nature at its worst; the desert is a dangerous place to be rather than somewhere to stumble through during a pace setting cut scene.

Talking of which, Spec Ops has its fair share of cut scenes. However, like Uncharted some of the largest events in the game happen whilst you’re in control of your character. Helicopters smash in to buildings which then crumble to the ground, sink holes open underneath your feet and frightened locals run towards your gun as you attack the enemy.

The lighting is harsh and bright, which brings out the wonderful contrast between the orange sand and the tall silver-blue skyscrapers. It looks exactly how you would expect a sand blasted Dubai to look, from the expansive shopping malls to a ruined highway packed full of expensive cars that the desert is slowly consuming.

The impressively large buildings are complemented by a myriad of little touches; cash is buried in the sand, discarded as the citizens made a desperate attempt to escape. Adverts and shop fronts are all cleverly designed to resemble premium stores, something that will probably pass many by but it’s nice to see that level of detail. It’s not just static set-dressing either; I was impressed when an enemy with a shotgun took a shot at me and a pile of discarded papers exploded into a shower of confetti.

The sound design is good too, with punchy, sharp weapons fire and plenty of incidental sound effects. The voice acting does get a little annoying during fire fights though, with every character on both sides shouting exactly what they are doing: “I’m reloading!”, “I’m going to hide behind this barrel”, “Shotgun guy coming right at us”. I have never been in a fight to death against armed bad guys in the middle of  sand blasted Dubai, but I’m pretty sure if I was a bad guy I wouldn’t shout ‘Find him!’ all the time, telegraphing my position to the enemy.

A nice touch in the HUD is an indicator which gives you an idea how much damage your bullets are doing. Attack from close range and the indicator will be bright red, whereas firing at an enemy in the distance will see the indicator to fade to a paler hue as your bullets cause less destruction.

The enemies are animated particularly well and headshots cause blood to fly and faces to explode.  If you wound rather than kill an enemy they will continue to fight for life, crawling across the desert. Get close to the wounded and there are a number of violent executions you can perform to finish them off.

So that’s the fun stuff but you will not be punching the air and whooping at the end of the level.  This isn’t Modern Warfare, there is no ‘Hoo-rah!’, no chest bumping and no victory celebrations. Despite the slightly fantastical setting Spec Ops: The Line has a weighty, serious story to tell.

[drop]Near the start of the game a rogue radio station starts blasting music across a wrecked bar and the tone of the song combined with gunfire made me think of two things. The first was the TV show ‘Tour of Duty’, a drama set in the Vietnam conflict that used to be shown on ITV at 2am in the morning back in the 1990s.

As I moved further in to the game the classic movie ‘Apocalypse Now’ sprang to mind and it was only when I sat down to write up the game I discovered that Spec Ops: The Line has been inspired by Joseph Conrad’s 1903 novella Heart of Darkness – the same novella that Francis Ford Copella used for his 1979 motion picture Apocalypse Now.

Of course this being the middle of the desert there is no Congo river to travel up, so the game doesn’t follow the plot of the novella as such, but as you play you begin to feel that something is not quite right. Why has Colonel John Konrad (a reference to the author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad) remained in Dubai? Why have the local militia teamed up with his troops?

I’ve been trying to think of a way of explaining the most effective moment in the game without giving anything away and sadly I can’t.  Suffice to say the story makes a bold turn, a move that is pretty ballsy for a game that has just spent the last few hours making you shoot people in the face. I emerged from the play through feeling rather shell shocked. ‘It’s a bit much to take in all in one go,’ commented the 2K PR bear-cub, knowing the last sequence is particularly harrowing.

The shooter genre is very crowded, and the butch marine vs generic Arabian nations’ is even more so. However, with The Heart of Darkness seeping through the plot, 2K may have created something quite special here.