I just finished playing Spec Ops: The Line today. It's probably the most masterfully crafted narrative gameplay experience I ever encountered. While there are quite a few (though not many) games that tell stories as good as this one, and quite a few games that integrate that storytelling with game mechanics in traditionally complex ways such as open world games, RPGs etc, where gameplay is about the story, I have never seen any game accomplish such a complete delivery of emotionally charged narrative content through something as unexpectedly minimalistic as cover-shooter mechanics. No dialogue choices, no open world elements, none of the complex interactions commonly used to give players a sense of responsibility. It accomplishes, by shooting only, what The Witcher accomplished through dialogue - and on an infinitely more mature and culturally relevant level. It's that shooting mechanic alone (with the occasional spectrum of choice allowed by it, and _only_ by it) that Spec Ops: The Line uses to deliver one of the most mature, realistic, tragic stories of war ever told in any medium. It's not even the voice acting or the cinematics - althought they help immensely, and the game would be nothing of what it is without them - but the cover-shooter gameplay itself that allows the authors of this masterpiece to make you feel and understand what no other medium could have communicated like this: the reality of war. When I say realistic, I don't mean realism of weaponry and other war-tech - I don't know much about real-life guns and firefights but I can suppose that there's not much realism of that kind in the game, and that kind of realism would not have contributed much to the game. It stays true to the style of most single-player games of its kind, seriously overpowering the player and keeping the shooting relatively arcadey, mechanics-wise. But aesthetically, it uses video-game violence to tell one of the most engaging, empathic, yet unforgiving stories ever told.
An excellent premise. The execution however, while funny and all, is superficial. It gets boring pretty quickly, and it's a shame because more complex game mechanics, more characters and levels, a higher quality of the game's humour and a way to make online multiplayer more attractive can at any time turn this into a big hit.
Highly original, perhaps on par with titles like Braid (in the sense of making full use of gameplay as its means of artistic expression) but in a more sophisticated, less obvious way, this is an extraordinary and unique indie game that not only blurs the lines of game genre concepts and delivers a extremely satisfactory and complex experience, but does so in a way that is not at all stand-off-ish. This isn't yet another "look what heights of artistic expression indie games can reach" indie game either, nor demonstrative in any other way. It's a perfectly polished, light but deeply multi-layered work of art in its own right.
