Spec Ops: The Line (Xbox 360) review"And as the mission continuously goes awry and takes an increasing toll on Walker's physical and mental stamina, what was once black-and-white starts to look suspiciously grey. You've personally been walking over hundreds of corpses all day, and making hundreds more. What's one more dead body?" |
See, this is why I'm not a film critic. I genuinely believe that every serious gamer should play Spec Ops: The Line, yet it's mostly for plot-related developments that players are better left to discover on their own. So if I want to express my enthusiasm for this game without spoiling anything, all I can say is, "Wow, that thing sure happened!" To make matters more complicated, as a third-person cover-based shooter, The Line is nothing special, which makes it weird that I'm recommending it as strongly as I am, and mighty difficult for you, I imagine, to take my word for it. But I'll get into that later.
The Line is one of the many works of fiction inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. That alone might be too much information, since the game shares plenty of immediate similarities with the novel's most famous adaptation, Apocalypse Now. (The soundtrack is even full of Vietnam-era rock songs, so I can't imagine that the many parallels are a coincidence.) In short, The Line studies a hardened soldier's decaying mental status in the face of nonstop warfare – the terrible things he sees, the terrible things he's forced to do, and the horrific actions carried out by people who have already traveled the road he's walking. It's heavy stuff, and plenty of films and memoirs have documented the horrors of war already, but I don't think anyone's ever done it quite like this.
Freelance review by Mike Suskie (September 04, 2012)
Mike Suskie is a freelance writer who has contributed to GamesRadar and has a blog. He can usually be found on Twitter at @MikeSuskie. |
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