In case the sands of time have made you forget what long-dormant third-person shooter Spec Ops: The Line was all about, here’s a refresher: as Delta Force unit leader Captain Walker (who looks like he could be a cousin of Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard), you lead your three-man squad into the heart of the Middle Eastern jewel of Dubai after a series of catastrophic climate events have left the city literally buried in sand. Allied forces, including decorated war hero John Konrad, have been working tirelessly to extract stranded civilians. Konrad, in fact, defies orders in the face of more inclement weather to go back into the city to try and save more people. When he disappears, it’s your job to go in and rescue him.

But that’s as black-and-white as anything ever gets in The Line. The game boasts a dramatic, adult-themed storyline that starts raising questions as soon as fellow Americans start shooting at you upon entering the city. What’s going on here? Is there anyone left to save? Where is Konrad? Is all of this one big setup? The premise could find a comfortable home on an HBO TV series.

Developer Yager says they’ve been inspired not by the bombastic spectacle of modern Michael Bay movies, but rather of the harder, edgier military films of the 1970s and early ‘80s such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon. Backing that up are gameplay sequences that present difficult and morally ambiguous options. For example, near the end of our five-chapter playtest (which skipped around to various parts of the single-player campaign), we came to two men — both prisoners of the 33rd Infantry, an Allied unit that vacillates between being your friend and foe — strung up in the middle of a sand-blown road. Surrounding us from high on the sand-dune ridges were upwards of a dozen armed soldiers. A voice called out to us over an intercom, telling us that one of the two captives was a civilian, arrested for stealing water in violation of Dubai’s new martial law. The other was the soldier who, instead of following protocol and bringing the criminal to his superiors, instead took the “law” into his own hands and killed the accused man’s family. 

It now fell to us to play jury and, potentially, executioner. “You have to choose,” the disembodied voice implored us. “You can’t just walk away.” Faced with the seemingly no-win decision, we killed the soldier, explaining to Yager afterward that, to us, at least the soldier had signed up for these dangers. Color us surprised, then, when the Yager team told us we had more than two choices; we could’ve in fact just refused to pull the trigger and walked away. Or we might have opened fire on the soldiers around us despite being outnumbered. We could have even shot the ropes to try and free the prisoners!

All of these choices, mind you, will add up and lead to multiple endings, though we couldn’t wrestle any more than that out of Yager. Meanwhile, the nuts-and-bolts of the gameplay are reminiscent of a cross between the look, feel, and lightly tactical elements of Ghost Recon and the pacing and cover-based focus of Gears of War. Everything Spec Ops has to offer, though, will hinge on its ability to make you fear the grains of sand slipping through the hourglass, beckoning you to choose your path.

PUBLISHER: 2K Games  •  DEVELOPER: Yager Development  •  MULTIPLAYER: Yes  •  RELEASE DATE: Spring 2012  •  FOR FANS OF: Ghost Recon, Gears of War, sand