In the game world, I’ve built up quite a shooter body count, back from Wolfenstein 3D’s pixelated Nazis right up to the present-day equivalents. The toll in Serious Sam alone was probably enough to populate a town. Granted, it’d be one of the worst towns ever to visit, what with all the headless kamikazes running around and yelling, but the point is, those statistics are crazy.
Now I’ve defended violence in video games for quite a long while as being cathartic, but getting into ‘game mode’ does require that you become a bit of a sociopath.
While I’ve always strived to be a gentleman mobster in games like GTA, keeping innocent bystander casualties to a minimum, that restraint goes out of the window when playing something more over-the-top like Saint’s Row, or even gung-ho shooters like Call of Duty.
And I’ve never really questioned any of those actions — at least, until I played Spec Ops: The Line. This game is a subversive take on the shooter genre, and unfortunately, even stating that fact is a bit of a spoiler.
The game leads you to believe that it is a mediocre third-person shooter, all the while dropping hints here and there that something is not quite right. To add some background, this game is based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness and set in a sandstorm-ravaged Dubai.
So, those of you who’ve read the book, or watched the film adaptation Apocalypse Now, ought to have some idea of how it’s set up. Basically, your team is sent into Dubai to give a situation update, after contact is lost with the armed force stationed in the city, who were tasked with evacuating the residents after the sandstorm hit.
After you ignore orders to stand back from the action, things get heated up pretty fast; you are attacked by armed locals and eventually are somehow forced to trade fire with the 33rd Infantry, the very unit that you’re supposed to make contact with.
Turning on your own countrymen is only the start of a descent, both figuratively and literally, into a dark place. It’s quite a bold step, since most American military shooters pit you against soft targets like WW2-era Nazis and Japanese, Cold War-era Russians, and present-day Middle-Eastern terrorists. Here, all semblance of jingoism is destroyed as you retaliate against members of your own army in an escalating scale. This is one of the few games which takes pains to drive a wall between the player and the player character because there comes a point where I can’t justify what he’s doing any more.
But since it’s a game, and progress has to be made, we soldier on together. The relationship between the protagonist and his teammates is another thing that changes as the game goes on, their attitude to combat is also affected, and even their appearance changes to reflect the damage that their actions are doing to them.
By the time the game ends, where in other games you’d be feeling that familiar sense of victory, this one just sticks a knife in and then twists. There are several hints leading to the conclusion of what is actually going on in the warzone, so you might not be totally flabbergasted by the reveal, but it’s a hard pill to swallow.
And unlike most modern games, many of the choices you make you might not even realise since they aren’t presented to you as multiple choice options.
The gameplay itself is actually a bit dated, just another cover shooter with linear progress and waves of enemies in different areas.
However, since the game seems to want to subvert the stereotype of modern action games, forcing the player to plow through a multitude of foes could even be their intention, to give the end of the game more impact.
It’s a tricky one — can I endorse a product which makes you invest time and money and then guilts you about your choices of entertainment? Either way, I’m definitely glad I played Spec Ops: The Line, even if it means I’ll be burned out on military shooters for a little while.