Preview: Spec Ops: The Line

When I was invited to preview third-person shooter Spec Ops: The Line, I honestly had no clue what it was about. The game had somehow managed to completely slip off my rader, so I watched a couple of trailers online and did a wee bit of reading to get my head around the game. I still can't say I was particularly excited.

"Great," I thought. "Just what the game market needs - another military shooter."

Spec Ops: The Line, it turns out, is not what I thought it was.

The Line is set in the near future in Dubai, but it's not Dubai as we know it - the area has been ravaged by sandstorms and the city all but destroyed. (As it turns out, depicting Dubai in decline gets your game an autoban in the United Arab Emirates.)

The sandstorms are ongoing, and actually have an effect on the gameplay in several places. I played through about an hour and a half of what I'm told is an eight-hour campaign, and in a couple of instances my squad was caught in storms while trying to fight battles. There are also several points where you can defeat enemies by breaking down barriers that are suppressing mountains of sand. Break a barrier, and a tidal wave of the grainy stuff wipes out all your enemies.

As you can imagine, the setting of a city covered in sand is just plain cool. Unlike most military shooters, in which everything is a dull shade of dirt brown, The Line livens up the environment with a bit of colour. Dubai is an over-the-top city - reminiscent of Las Vegas in its gaudy style - and even though it was covered in sand and no longer bustling with people, hints of its former glory regularly shone through.

Your elite squad, which consists of Martin Walker, voiced by the never-out-of-work Nolan North, and two others, is sent to find a Colonel whose battalion of American soldiers defied orders and stayed in Dubai to assist with the evacuation when the sandstorms hit. The US Government has lost track of John Konrad and his team, and it's Walker's job to find out what happened to them.

You lead your squad through massive hotels with walls made almost entirely of glass, with massive pillars and blue-green tiled floors. And then you also lead them through the vast expanse of the desert, or through the eye of a sandstorm, all orange and red, and that more sparse environment is equally stunning. Narrative is important in this game, and - without giving too much away - when I stopped playing I felt like I'd been on the verge of some great revelation in the story, and I wanted to know what happened next.

Gameplay is a little different from your average shooter, too. While you do a bit of running and gunning, you also can direct your squad at almost any time. If someone is approaching, but you're trying to take out another guy who's readying a grenade, you can 'spot' enemies and get your squad to concentrate fire while you deal with something else. It works well, and removes the 'one man army' effect that you sometimes get in other shooters, where the AI that assists you seems relatively useless and you end up doing everything yourself.

The one serious problem I had with Spec Ops: The Line is something that may be fixed by the time the game comes out in a few months (no firm date has been announced yet). The controller was hyper sensitive, and even when I turned the sensitivity down to the lowest setting, I had trouble being precise and instead had to just spray bullets in the general area of an enemy and hope to hit something. The sensitivity issues may be worked out by the time the game comes out, as the PR rep dutifully reminded me.

It's fair to say I was pleasantly surprised by Spec Ops: The Line. It's tough to create a game in an over-saturated genre and make it seem fresh, but it appears Yager Development and 2K Games might pull that off. The Line seemed almost like an interesting cross between Uncharted and Gears of War. The environments, characterisation and story are just as important as the combat, which makes for a fun, engaging experience. Colour me intrigued.

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