Spec Ops: The Line

Spec Ops: The Line looks at first glance like just another third-person military shooter, and it counts on exactly that impression. Captain Walker leads a three-man team into Dubai, buried under sand after a series of storms, to find a missing American unit, and the game slowly turns genre conventions against the player. What begins as a heroic rescue mission becomes a descent in which it stops being clear who the enemy even is, or whether continuing makes any sense at all; the clear model was Heart of Darkness, just transplanted into luxury towers buried by dunes.

Mechanically it's a solid but otherwise unremarkable cover shooter: two squadmates who take simple commands, movement between low walls, and firefights where you can blast sand out of cracked windows and bury opponents beneath it. That very ordinariness is deliberate, because the game wants the player to do what he'd do automatically in such titles, and only then show him the consequences. The scene with white phosphorus, where targets are picked out on a monochrome monitor, is one of the most unpleasant moments of the whole generation, built precisely so that it's impossible to keep playing afterward without discomfort.

Commercially the game flopped, but critics quickly recognized what it was about, and Spec Ops: The Line became one of the most-cited examples of mainstream action commenting on its own genre. Its influence is visible in a whole wave of later games that work with the player's guilt and with the idea that the character on screen acts because the player told him to. Today it must be said that the shooting itself is average and the game hasn't aged especially well technically. Still, it remains a required stop for anyone who wants to see how far a military shooter can go content-wise. A huge part of the credit goes to the sound work and voice acting: the dialogue of the main trio gradually shifts, over the course of the game, from professional detachment into screaming and breakdown without the game ever announcing it, and radio chatter comments on the player's actions with increasingly venomous sarcasm. Dubai, with its luxury interiors buried under dunes, ranks among the best-chosen settings of the generation.