Even by military-shooter standards, Spec Ops: The Line is an uncompromisingly bleak journey into the mouth of madness. Sharing almost nothing with its predecessors except the Spec Ops moniker, this squad-based shooter tries to make you think - sometimes successfully, sometimes not - about the lines...

+ Darkly disturbing storyline in which your choices will come back to haunt you; + The hellish meeting of gorgeous sand-swept environments and opulent Dubai

? Will we ever get a game that's more fully based on

Spec Ops: The Line might as well have been called something else, because it doesn't contain anything to tie it to any of the other games in the series. The Line: Heart of Dubai would have been a more appropriate title as the game's plot was inspired by Joseph Conrad's seminal novella Heart of...

Deeply emotional storyline; Solid gameplay; Seriously impressive voice acting; Innovative usage of sand as an environment

Some issues with the cover system; Framerate drops with very busy scenes; Occasionally vacant AI

If you thought Spec Ops: The Line would just be another military, third person cover shooter then you would be wrong. What appears on the skin as an efficient and well designed cover shooter title is, in fact, underneath a fully blown example of how to differentiate what could be a generic title...

This emotionally-charged shooter breaks the boundaries of how games like this can be made.

+ Strong; emotional narrative; + Excellent sound design; + Unpredictable action; + Tense firefights

Weird button combo; Online feels unnecessary

In my opinion, Spec Ops: The Line can hang it's hat on being worthy and accessible enough to be played through once as well as being worthy of a second playthrough due to the story it tells and the way it comes together, but that second playthrough isn't going to happen because it's just not...

At only six to seven hours, Spec Ops: The Line is a rather short experience, but the story is worth the price of admission. Anyone who has played a military shooter in the past five years will probably guess the big reveal at the end before it happens, but the way Yager and 2K drag you along until...

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.

All in all Spec Ops: The Line is a very pretty knock off. It has all the pieces of a quality third person shooter without any of the heart. The gameplay is rough and the story is predictable. Though it brings a few fun new things to the table, they are mostly short-lived.

A group of 3 "...ruggedly handsome, stone cold, delta operators..." are sent to investigate the ruined and super sandstorm ridden city of Dubai. What they will find there they don't know, all they know that the 33rd Division of the US Army was sent to help evacuate people and nothing has been heard...

Spec Ops: The Line is provocative and gripping third-person modern military shooter that challenges players' morality by putting them in the middle of unspeakable situation where unimaginable choices affecting human life must be made.