How Spec Ops walks the Line

It's amazing what a bit of perspective can do. Rebooting a respected but not especially mainstream-friendly tactical action franchise? Knock the camera off its eyrie and down into the trenches, where it can appreciate how nicely you've updated the environments and honed the story. Getting slammed for your day-one, pass-restricted DLC strategy? Invite critics to consider the idea from the point of view of an MMO developer - an MMO developer that's rather out of pocket, having just got shot of a massive single player RPG.

Worried that people who enjoy shooters are by and large a desensitised, complacent bunch? Afraid that years of exposure to games like The Darkness 2 or Gears of War 3 have left your audience's morality glands all dusty and shrivelled? Give perspective a kick. Midway through Yager's Spec Ops: The Line, there's a cinematic switchback so hideous it'll leave you unwilling to meet your own eyes in a mirror. It's a reversal that hinges not simply on your deadness to depictions of bloodshed, but on the ubiquity of certain gameplay scenarios - scenarios so commonplace we risk forgetting that their purpose is to render unpalatable things palatable, for entertainment's sake. The underlying shooter mechanics have their inadequacies, but this feat alone makes The Line worth your consideration.

I've been asked not to spoil the sequence's punch-line, though the fact that this is a game modelled on Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now (and thereby, Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness) should give you some inkling. As you may recall from earlier Spec Ops previews, The Line puts you in charge of a three-man Delta squad led by one Martin Walker, sent to a storm-ruined Dubai to investigate the fate of the US Army's 33rd Battalion.

Shortly after you arrive, it becomes clear that the 33rd's disappearance owes less to the mountains of sand pressing down on the city's opulent glass furnishings, and more to the ego of its decorated commander, Colonel Konrad. Defying orders to pull out, Konrad has crowned himself king of the wasteland, seizing scarce resources and imposing a spectacularly brutal breed of justice on the civilian survivors. The news comes as a particular shock to the bleached, grizzled Walker - he and Konrad go 'way back', and as with Conrad's Kurtz and Marlowe, their relationship will surely underwrite the events that follow.

The Line doesn't always stand comparison with the film and book that inspire it. Much as Coppola sought to figure the psyche's collapse in a haze of fern and Agent Orange, so Yager's Dubai is madness made concrete, but it's a spasmodic vision which feels a tad attention-seeky. Banksy-esque wall murals look stylish, but are for that reason incongruous - they don't, at present, collapse into the urban backstory as seamlessly as those of (for instance) Bioshock.

A candle-lit lair evokes Kurtz's hideaway a little too clunkily, and your squadmates' shock at coming under fire from compatriots is somewhat laboured - or feels that way, at least, because in itself fighting friendlies is hardly breaking new ground for an action premise. Konrad's deranged radio pronouncements aren't quite as resoundingly insane as Marlon Brando's monologues, or for that matter Andrew Ryan's fireside chats.