A Heartfelt Promotion of Spec Ops: The Line

[surgeworks]

I am here today for no other reason than to gush about a game that was utterly fantastic and has gone down in history as a cult classic for a reason despite being a commercial failure. That game is Spec Ops: The Line, an emotional piece of art that existed for the sole purpose of disintegrating everything about a modern gaming trend from the roots up.

If you’re reading this and have not yet played Spec Ops: The Line, go buy it and play it. Don’t look it up, don’t read anything about it, don’t read anything past here. Spoilers wouldn’t stop you from enjoying the game, but it is the kind of game you can only play for the first time once. For the full impact, it’s best enjoyed (and agonized over) completely unspoiled. So this is your only chance.

Are you still here? Alright, moving on. Spec Ops: The Line...

As a game, it’s an illusion. Now, what with games having become so #deep and #diverse in a method that can get kind of disgusting when you observe the God of War PS4-shaped mess on the floor or, even worse, The Last of Us Part II, we don’t really have this problem anymore. But back in 2012, gaming was still a bit of a choppy market and the ‘military shooter’ genre dominated it. Call of Duty, Battlefield, and each gaming titan’s own horde of military shooter clones in their image. They were inescapable and their fanbases were sealed in with a few years’ supply of chips and Mountain Dew. And Walt Williams and Richard Pearsey decided that this was their moment, and Yager Development and 2K games set out to make Spec Ops: The Line.

Spec Ops is an actual series long established, but it was kind of aged—Playstation One era—and was never very much to talk about, just your basic army shooter that wasn’t going to be anyone’s significant childhood history. The Line having absolutely fuck-all to do with them is forgiven then, because it’s the one talked about and remembered. Anyway, the deconstructive bits.

See, military shooters, especially back in 2012, didn’t have the competition they do today, where indie games are a whole market unto themselves and people have more interest in video games as an art form than as mindless fun. That’s not to say that Call of Duty and Battlefield and their et ceteras are worthless as art, but they did garner some often-deserved accusations of racism and jingoism, what with the whole America-saves-the-day-from-Russians-with-their-camo-and-big-guns kinda thing, or worse, America-saves-the-day-from-brown-terrorists. Many also attacked them for other reasons, such as being lackluster in the plot area, too morally black and white, or just being ugly to look at because after a while, all the grey and brown with occasional green started to look the same.

Spec Ops: The Line attacks these games, and the people who play them, and the culture that developed around them by the time of 2012, on all of those bases and more.

The plot and the characters are extremely integral to it, and they are what people remember. The gameplay, admittedly, is not polished, but the people who enjoy military shooters were kind of the only ones to care on that front—it didn’t suck outright, so it wasn’t in the way of what the game did well. The dev team actually resented the shoehorned-in multiplayer that the publishers mandated to make the game sell, a feeling that’s become more and more understandable as the years wear on.

See, Spec Ops essentially did its thing with the knowledge that it would die doing it. In order to play the whole gaming world and reel them into its plot without them getting turned off by spoilers or what they perceived as a grim, overly-bleak take as basic as “war is hell”, it had to act like a basic military shooter where you’re the hero and America saves the day from terrorists yadda yadda blah blah. And to its credit, it did so perfectly. Even with the knowledge that it had to compete with resident war shooter titans who were both releasing big installments to their series at the same time, it threw itself completely into that image.

Everything plays into it, from the opening demeanors of the characters and setting (three U.S. military dudes wandering into the Middle East to un-fuck things), to the soundtrack (action-packed guitar tracks that highlight the shoot-y, bullets flying energy but with very little triumphant machismo), to even the freaking cover of the game case.

Look up an advertisement for Spec Ops: the Line from 2011 or 2012. Or hell, if you own the game, just hold the disc case at arms’ length.







It looks just like the rest, doesn’t it? Grey and brown, a generic image of some army-looking dude holding a gun in a very basic, badass pose that we’re all familiar with. We’re not looking at a character, we’re looking at a sell. That’s why all of the dudes on these covers have their faces shadowed, so we can see less of them and more of the guns.



Now look a little closer, and you see a shock of blue, eyes like ice staring right at you in a contrast that’s downright eerie.

They made the disguise itself into an art form. But this is a bit much gush even for the task I’ve set myself, so let me move on.

The game centers around Martin Walker, a captain from Delta Force leading a three-man team that consists of himself, 1^st Lieutenant Alphanso Adams, and Staff Sergeant John Lugo. Adams is your typical serious black guy, and yes, he throws grenades and gives you advice. Lugo is the wisecrack of the team, a guy in generally good cheer for his job and very emotive. They’re very endearing right off the bat. Hell, Captain Walker is Call of Duty’s wet dream right out the gate, a total professional without being uptight or aggressive, and with the respect and support of his team.

You open with a helicopter chase scene piloting a minigun that ends with a crash, before you get the plot. The plot, which is a loose adaptation of Heart of Darkness, is thus: Dubai, one of the richest and most glamorous cities in the world, has been cut off from the outside world by a six-month long series of apocalyptic sandstorms. A United States battalion, the so-called Damned 33^rd, were occupying when ordered to abandon the survivors and leave the city. John Konrad, a highly decorated and respected leader who Walker knew and admired personally, defied that order, with the 33^rd standing by him, and chose to stay to help the survivors.

Six months of silence later, a looping transmission finally makes it past the storm wall.

“This is Colonel John Konrad, United States Army. Attempted evacuation of Dubai ended in... complete failure. Death toll... too many.”

Cue Delta Force, that’s you guys, being sent in. Your mission is to look for survivors and report back your findings so help can be sent in as is appropriate. However, things quickly go belly-up.

One of your very first findings is the bodies of slain soldiers being found. The team is then forced into conflict with some local insurgents, who grow hostile when they find out that Delta was apparently sent in to aid the 33^rd. You’re forced to put them down, and Walker laments that they were sent in to rescue people, before they attempt to render aid to an Alpha Patrol team, who unfortunately don’t make it, but at least this section of gun-toting rebels is down, right?

They go in deeper, looking for survivors, the rest of the 33^rd, and hopefully Konrad. Inbetween the militarized locals and the harsh sandstorms, the search isn’t easy, but the first true hint of intrigue comes when they find an American man leading the rebels. It turns out the CIA has been here for some time, and has stirred up the locals into revolting against the 33rd’s control, which is simultaneously an awful idea, and not entirely undeserved on the 33^rd’s part, which is evident the more carcasses you come across hinting at various war crimes and a very hellish life for the citizens of Dubai. But the 33^rd, already at each other’s throats, being thrown into a war with the CIA and the locals, has created a very stressful shoot-first environment, and Delta are forced to defend themselves from people who mistake them for the ones they’re fighting.

This includes the 33^rd, many times—chiefly when they save a 33^rd infantryman named McPherson from a CIA operative who was torturing and about to kill him, only for the paranoid guy and his troops to open fire on them assuming that they, too, are CIA. Turmoil ensues over killing admittedly rogue US soldiers. More evidence mounts of the conflict between the 33^rd and the locals, with gruesome kills and executions scattered about. Delta stumble on “the Nest”, an insurgent hideout being raided by the 33^rd and the citizens hiding there rounded up, pleading and crying. Absolutely not helping the situation is the Radioman, a guy over the loudspeakers who has awesome music taste but a terrible attitude towards others, blaming the locals for bringing the current situation on themselves and generally being a cackling jackass. Delta, having already seen what the 33^rd do to hostiles, intervene, though what few citizens the 33^rd haven’t already removed are upset at the carnage and they wisely leave the area afterward.

Their next lead comes in the form of a blatant trap. The 33^rd evidently got hold of a CIA agent named Daniels and are broadcasting his torture for information, and Delta decide to try and get to him, not only to save him but to try to see what the CIA know about Konrad’s whereabouts and what the hell’s been happening. Daniels turns out to be long dead, but the agent the trap was meant for, Gould, shows up and renders assistance, wanting to meet up with Walker and hatch a plan.

Finally, someone who’s actually helpful! But even this only goes so far. Trying to follow up with Gould ends up into having to rescue him when the 33^rd just blow up a whole building to take him out, to the tune of more commentary and taunts from an increasingly dislike-able Radioman, who gets into contact with Delta but denies a request to call off the 33^rd, stating that he answers to a higher authority. Could is dragged off for interrogation, and Delta’s efforts to follow lead them through another insurgent encampment, decorated with soldiers hung from streetlamps and graffiti depicting the anger of the citizens. “willy pete wuz here” and “under the sand, the pavement” and other such messages are scrawled on the walls. Delta mow down the 33^rd in their way right in time to see the defeated remnants of an insurgent force, hobbling and retreating, bombed with white phosphorus.

For those of you who don’t know, white phosphorus is a chemical weapon from hell. It’s pyrophoric, basically meaning it ignites as soon as it’s exposed to the air. It is extremely flammable and toxic, and causes horrifying burns—in short, napalm up to eleven. Its use is heavily regulated and even outlawed depending on the situation, and Lugo rightfully states that this was unconscionable. These people were beaten and not a threat. Walker says the intention was to send a message to the rest: to not try a second time.

But at last, you’ve found Gould. He and some of the civilians he was hiding out with are being interrogated by the 33^rd, and you get a good long look at what that entails. Primarily, it’s sandboarding, a threefold form of torture. A woman is held down to the ground, and an automatic weapon is pointed at the ground right next to her face. It’s fired until its ammo clip is empty, not only causing hearing damage and inflicting the psychological torment of having bullets hitting so close to one’s head, but blasting sand through the air. Not only does said sand invade your lungs, a place sand really should not be even in miniscule amounts, but the bullets are throwing the sand with enough force to tear skin off where it hits. It’s ugly.

And after coldly telling Gould to look at what “he” put these people through, the 33rd’s interrogator tells the help to drag the civilians off and kill them while he continues to try and grill Gould for information.

It’s at this point where the first of a few segments comes along where the player gets to make a choice. They can either save Gould, a decision Lugo supports and which entails a violent firefight—but which gets the civvies killed—or save the civlians like Adams wants, at the cost of Gould’s life and any info or help he could’ve given Delta.

Even if you choose to go through it for Gould, he dies from his torture before he can really tell Delta too much, and in either case, they’re left to go on what little he wrote down that he had on him, which involves going to a place called “the Gate”.

Radioman, who’s been quite present since the second chapter, publicly announces Gould’s death and cheerfully states to his infantrymen that the men of Delta will be next. The next chapter starts up, and it turns out the Gate is a small gap between two massive towers that the 33^rd seem to be using as their base. It’s absolutely crawling with soldiers, so many so that not even Delta, who’ve proven immune to a numbers approach so far, are willing to try a head-on approach. Then they look over and notice a mortar, loaded with white phosphorus shells.

Enter the game’s most acclaimed, criticized, and generally talked-about scene, featuring good ol’ Willy Pete.

Lugo objects. White phosphorus? They can’t use that, its effects are nightmarish, but Adams and Walker overrule him, stating that they don’t have a choice. The game then makes you shoot down the entire encampment, from the comfort of a camera and a guided mortar system, while the Gate puts up a pitiful fight and die screaming in agony.

Then, they make you walk down through the encampment yourself, and get a good look at the after-effects. Many soldiers are dead, but plenty more aren’t. It should be noted that this is not a moment where Walker, Adams, or Lugo are cold and unfeeling for these guys; Lugo and Adams both have been protesting the killing of American soldiers since they got here, despite being in self-defense situations. They’re very shaken by what they’ve done here, where soldiers’ skins are burning off their flesh and men are stumbling and staggering, some missing limbs, some begging for help, and some begging to be killed. It’s hideous, it’s enough to make you vomit. None of the protagonists are trying to excuse this… But it’s just the ugly reality, right?

When a nearly-dead soldier looks up at Walker in terrible pain and asks why, Walker can only solemnly tell him they brought this on themselves. But the soldier states they were helping…and then Walker looks over at the crowd of bodies at the very end of the encampment, the last ones he gave the order to fire on.

They’re not soldiers. They’re civilians.

Lugo spells it out: Gould wasn’t trying to destroy the 33^rd, he was trying to rescue the people that the CIA’s engineered rebellion had endangered. And you just fucking burned them all to death.

This scene has caused many people to have nightmares and totally rethink their ideas of the shooter genre. It had such a powerful impact that we can pretty much credit it with white phosphorus coming to be understood by the gaming community for what it is. Walker and the player have been in sync up until now, but here is where it all falls apart. Even if you could justify bombing rogue soldiers with chemical weapons, these people—the ones whose corpses are frozen in screams of agony, one of a mother trying to shield her child—these people were the ones you were absolutely not supposed to harm. There was no reason to, no justification, and you are now burdened with the knowledge that you have made a very, very grave mistake that you can’t take back.

The others ask how this is possible, and Walker correctly deduces that these were the citizens removed from the Nest. Adams denies this reality, while Lugo goes hysterical and freaks out, panicking and accusing Walker of turning them into killers. The sound becomes muffled and distorted as we pan over Walker’s stunned and unblinking face before the militaristic, captain-ly control kicks back in and he tells them that they need to move, now.

This scene drew a lot of flak for being perceived as railroading. It’s trying to make you feel guilty, they say, for doing something the game told you to do—forced you to do, without any other option. But, I think the people that say this are putting too much of themselves into it.

Remember, this isn’t OFF or its spiritual successor Undertale. The player themselves are important for what Spec Ops wants to do, yes—they’re heavily involved, not removed—but they are not actual pieces of Walker’s journey. You take the player out, and you’ll still be left with a gut-wrenching but very well-written story. But the player’s reactions are so, so important here.

Spec Ops: The Line has been a deconstructive episode the entire time leading up to this moment. This isn’t the single moment where it became one—it’s been fiddling with player perceptions from the word ‘go’, it’s just that this is the moment where the game cuts out the subtlety and is up front with it. Most of your enemies thus far have been Americans, ostensibly guys on your side, a fact picked up on more than once by your squadmates. There’s been moments, such as the attack on the Nest, where an itchy trigger finger will get you a dead civilian in the heat of the moment, and you can’t really blame the game for that because you were told up front civvies were there at the time. There’s no comment from Walker or the game when this happens, letting your own shock at your mistake speak to you on its own. Hell, at the Nest itself, in fact, Adams just assumed that the 33^rd were going to kill the civilians, forcing the need for intervention, and nobody questioned that—just as they didn’t question it when McPherson’s squad, who looked like they were about to gun down scared civvies, were firing into the air. It’s been shown from the word go that these Americans, no matter how noble their intentions going in, have become capable of evil actions, and you’re just now crashing into the fact that you’re not exempt from this...hero.

The game isn’t attacking you for throwing white phosphorus mortars at civilians. It’s attacking you for the mindset that led you to do so. For trundling along through this game with your preconceived notions about war shooters, expecting to have fun gunning down anyone in your way and swinging around your great American dick of saviorism. It’s been telling you quietly as we went along that these ideas are wrong, but you probably didn’t notice up until now, because only now has the game stopped fooling around. Now it’s saying “Well, you wanted to play a game about war—and you are. How does it feel?”

Let’s be honest, those of us who went in unspoiled fell for it hook, line, and sinker, and that’s what makes the guilt so effective even when we know the game is trying to guilt us. Yeah, we did. It’s not that people consciously ignored the warning signs, like those at the Nest and the Pit. They just didn’t even notice them, because why would they? They were busy shooting things. Sure, some of these things will be obvious on a second playthrough, but only because hindsight is twenty-twenty. And that hindsight really fucking hurts right about now.

And complaining about not being given a choice is playing right into its hands, too. That’s another deconstruction happening right about now, the one of ‘moral choice’ systems that populated gaming around the same time as this was released, like the ones from Infamous or, as would happen later, Undertale. Writer Walt Williams has cited that systems like these get too black-and-white, essentially giving the player too much power over the world around them, which bends to their whim along the choice system’s paths. If you had been given the choice to avoid using the white phosphorus, sure, you would’ve taken it, and not just because you’re now very aware what the consequence was for using it. Right? ...Right?

Let’s get away from this at last and move on, but trust me, it doesn’t get prettier.

After fighting their way through a remnant of the 33^rd stationed near the Gate, Delta enter the base proper, and find a grisly sight: willy pete burns have scorched several bodies tied to chairs, which happens to be the remnants of Konrad’s direct underlings. Walker laments that he knew these men, who were evidently tortured to death in ugly fashion.

But why? And that’s when his voice enter’s Walker’s earpiece. Konrad’s voice, describing a mutiny that had to be punished, and a message that had to be sent. Yes, our villain has finally entered the scene. Walker relays that it’s Konrad who’s been in charge of the 33^rd this whole time, and it’s him to whom the blame for all of the awful things they’ve seen so far ultimately lays.

Konrad’s voice continues to appeal to and harshly critique Walker’s actions as they journey to find some means of evacuating the civilians goes on. It appears he’s given up on leaving Dubai and has tightened his grip on what’s left. Walker is presented with another choice, this time of who to shoot. Konrad describes one taped-mouth, strung-up-by-the-hands man as a civilian that stole water, a great crime in a desert city suffering from endless sandstorms. The other strung-up man is a soldier sent to apprehend him, which was accomplished at the cost of the lives of the man’s family. Konrad orders Walker to judge which man is guilty.

You can do so, and the snipers posted on the overpass will leave you alone. Or you can shoot back and start a firefight, which will also occur if you do nothing or if you try to be clever and shoot one man down by the rope—who will try to flee and then get shot. Shortly thereafter, an ambush by the 33^rd springs, and Delta have to fight their way out, while Walker fruitlessly demands Konrad call them off.

A sandstorm blows in, leading Delta to push their way through to find shelter, the silhouette of the Burj Aurora wreathed in flames in the distance. And after dragging themselves through it and some remaining soldiers, Delta hunker down inside a canister, and away from the howling wind, Walker tells Konrad over the radio that Dubai will be evacuated and he will be relieved of his position.

How so, though? Well, after moving along that night once the sandstorm quieted, they follow a distress call to a CIA agent named Riggs, begging help from attacking 33^rd forces. With no other better options in sight, Walker opts to help out, especially if it can get him closer to Konrad.

He’s irascible and rude, but Riggs does have a plan: he wants to take back the water, which the 33^rd control. A successful assault on the Aquatic Colosseum could cripple the Damned 33^rd and change the whole game. It sounds like the right thing to do, after all, and the insurgents stand by Riggs, even willing to give their lives for this mission. Despite some doubts, including those of his team, Walker sides with Riggs.

After several fights with the 33^rd, including the extremely capable infantry force called Zulu Squad, Delta’s invasion is successful. While Konrad murmurs in Walker’s ear that Riggs is lying, and that he’s not going to save anyone, they drive the trucks out of the building and onto the road. The 33^rd put up a fight, desperate to take the water back, and they get Delta and Riggs into a tight situation. But when it looks like it might come to something very bad, Riggs does something even worse: he sets the trucks on a collision course. Any delusions of putting the water back in the citizens’ hands crashes along with the trucks, which Riggs does quite on purpose.

The water’s gone, and everyone in Dubai is going to die of thirst in three, maybe four days, as Konrad so eloquently says over Walker’s prone form while he’s waking up in the spot where he landed when thrown from the crashing water truck. He stalks away before Walker can properly confront him.

A badly burnt and bruised Walker staggers over to Riggs, who is trapped under a burning truck. His plan, it turned out, was to ensure the death of every last person in Dubai, because if word got out about what Konrad and his men did here, the entire region would declare war on the USA, and the USA would lose. Walker calls him insane, and from the sound of it, he wasn’t the only one, only Gould wasn’t around to warn Delta away from this nutcase. Riggs sticks to his guns—all but one, which he slides to Walker, asking him to put him down before he can suffer too painful a death.

Here’s another choice, and this time, the player will feel, not too much of a push from the game, but perhaps too much freedom granted by it. You can shoot Riggs to kill him before the fire can overtake him… Or you can leave him to burn like the mass-murdering bastard he is, watching and listening to his steadily rising panic give way to screaming in pain and terror as he dies. I know which one I’d do, and it’s a shame the decision was so easy. But this is the last time a decision is ever easy in this game.

The real shame though, now, is that everyone is fucked. The water’s gone, and if Dubai isn’t evacuated immediately, they’re all going to dehydrate to death in three, maybe four days. What are Delta going to do?

As it happens, Radioman then chimes in—with more unwelcome criticisms, “jokes” and taunts, this time to the very immediate goal of having Delta killed by the 33^rd. Well, he has to be operating from somewhere. If they’re gonna give the citizens an evac order, a radio tower sounds like as good a place as any. But before all of that, Walker is tasked with catching up with Adams and Lugo and pulling them out of a tight spot, after which the three have to navigate their way out of a mall full of hostile and pissed-off soldiers, lending each other cover fire where possible and trying to regroup.

It’s at this point where it becomes very clear that the way their mission has gone so far is really, really starting to fuck with Walker’s head. There’s been hints before that the stresses and guilt are starting to get to him, but it’s in Chapter 11 that it becomes very clear, specifically during a section where Walker has to deal with a heavy trooper by himself. All of a sudden, the lights start rapidly flickering on and off, and every time Walker lands a shot, the heavy trooper flashes to a new location, a store mannequin left in its place. Walker is frustrated and scared, trying to win a firefight when something is wrong with his head, and all the while, Lugo and Adams are struggling, waiting for his help.

Radioman is very talkative throughout this entire skirmish, as it happens, and he’s very much at his most grating as he has a grand time rubbing it in Delta’s face what awful people they are and how toast they are. So grating, in fact, that when he makes fun of the victims of the white phosphorus incident (“What’s that smell? I do believe it’s BURNT BABY!”), Lugo swears to kill him as soon as he has the chance right then and there. As they finally clear out the mall, it finally occurs to Walker that Radioman has been broadcasting all over Dubai and can be heard from anywhere within the storm wall…so if they want to get the citizens’ attention to arrange an evacuation, they’ve got to find him and make use of his system. One enemy soldier who managed to surrender before getting gunned down later, and they know where to look: the tower atop the Trans-Emirates building.

The next chapter sees Delta crossing the rooftops of Dubai, and I’d like to take a break from describing the plot for a moment. Spec Ops: The Line is a deconstruction in every last aspect of itself, attacking the basic military shooter—we’ve discussed that so far. But I only briefly touched on one of the more minor deconstructions once at the beginning, which is how the game looks. Yeah, a lot of the setpieces involve a lot of orange and brown, since you are in the desert, but nonetheless, you’re playing a game set in Dubai. About half the locations in the game are utterly gorgeous, with firefights occurring in glittering super-malls, VIP gyms with whole-room windows overlooking the city, stylish hotels with resplendent lobbies and suites… And you’ll occasionally get your own panoramic vista of some shot of the city as a whole. One particularly memorable one is in Chapter 5, “The Edge”, overlooking Dubai from what seems to be the edge of a huge abyss yawning into the depths, until you realize the buildings clinging to it are the tops of skyscrapers, that you’re on a rooftop, and that that’s how insane the sandstorms were, so thoroughly burying the city that “level ground” has risen thousands of feet. Chapter 12 features yet another view, this time of the skyscrapers of Dubai peeking up through a thick layer of fog...or perhaps smoke. Bizarrely calm and peaceful. Not to mention, the citizens of Dubai have covered surfaces in every level with spray-painted street art of surprisingly good quality, depicting everything from a terrible angel of American justice to men with their eyes burnt from their skulls, and one such artistic venture hangs at the top of your ultimate location for the chapter: a huge tarp set against the Trans-Emirates building displaying a beautiful girl wearing butterflies in her hair. That’s really just the cherry on top of the cake that is this game: as a final fuck-you to all the drab military shooters that spawned it, it decided to go and be pretty as fuck, too.

Anyway, the next part of Delta’s mission. They begin crossing the rooftops, relatively quietly, braving and dispatching buildings full of snipers, until finally coming across the place they’re actually after. It’s not a totally quiet trip: a soldier is stationed at the end of a zipline and Walker doesn’t see him until it’s too late, slamming straight into him—and suddenly overcome as the soldier, speaking in Adams’ voice and with his face, asks him what the hell he’s doing. Walker panics and smashes the soldier’s face in with the butt of his gun as the real Adams zips in behind him with Lugo in tow, asking him then what the hell he did just now. Walker’s very shaken, and Radioman has not failed to take note of this occurrence, ribbing Walker for it, too.

Their journey gets them to the Trans-Emirates building soon enough, and it must be said, Radioman’s hideout kind of fucks. There’s a sun tower atop the broadcast building with satellite dishes and solar panels attached, and the soldiers defending him are doing so from a dance floor with streamers flying. Once you actually clear all of them out (with Radioman pretending to be devastated by the loss of life, despite not committing to the act of grief very well and mostly just laughing it up), you make your way up into his quarters, a trail upstairs which features some really sick wall art of marine life done in glow paint, along with neon bars decorating the stairwells.

Once you’re finally upon him, some of that bravado finally drops a bit. He waves a white flag and stammers out a weak chuckle saying that of course, those aren’t real guns pointed at him. He gains his usual demeanor back once Delta neglect to shoot him or get violent, and when Walker sets Lugo to the task of overtaking the broadcast system to arrange the evac, he’s helpful enough.

Then Lugo shoots him three times through the head point-blank.

It says a lot how stressed out this mission has made him that Lugo, a guy who has so far protested the killing of American soldiers and made a strong case for protecting lives instead of ending them, would shoot an unarmed, non-hostile guy. But it also says that Radioman was a colossal jackass who enjoyed mocking the suffering and deaths of others, so nobody really feels sorry for him. Hell, when Adams pins Lugo to the wall and yells at him for it, it seems more about him shooting without waiting for orders than killing a man. Lugo defends himself, saying that if he were allowed to live, he’d continue directing the 33^rd to trail them endlessly.

They don’t have much time to argue about it. Just after Walker gets on the radio to get in contact with the citizens and let them know what’s up, reinforcements are arriving. The tennis court that serves as a heli-pad is the only way out, but there’s a lot of hostiles inbetween them and it. They need to get back out, and Lugo stays behind to give them cover fire as they do it.

Once you tear your way through Zulu Squad with Lugo saving your ass roughly every thirty seconds, it’s time to return the favor, and cover him while he sprints for the helo. Do so successfully, and you’ll get to re-play the opening scene of the helicopter chase, with a few key differences—such as stinger missiles that need to be shot down, much more aggression from enemy helos chasing you, and the fact that Walker seems to remember doing this already, a throw-in by the game’s writer that ends up supporting his nudged-in theory that the whole game is Walker’s dying dream or Purgatory.

Anyway, the helo chase is already dire when a sandstorm starts blowing in. They can’t land for shelter with the 33^rd hot on their tail, so Walker does something incredibly ballsy, or perhaps just suicidal, and orders Adams to fly them directly into the storm.

In fairness, it’s not the storm that sends Walker and his team hurtling to the ground, but another out-of-control copter crashing straight into theirs.

When Walker wakes up, it’s to a hellish sight. Everything is bathed in a dark red light and the sand around him is flowing, falling off the edge into an abyss around him, with the twisted song "Storm" from Bjork playing. Konrad’s haunting voice tells Walker to look at what he’s done as the shadow of the Burj Aurora tower looms over him, wreathed in flames. Shadows of slain enemies stride by, denying Walker’s protests that he tried to save people and didn’t have a choice. Castavin, McPherson, Gould, Riggs, all of them. Walker sees the shadows of hundreds of civilians sinking into the sand, and closest to him, but just out of reach, is Lugo, who quietly begs for help before vanishing. Konrad’s voice asks him how many of the 5,000 people that were alive in Dubai the day before they arrived are alive now, and how many will be left after he’s gone. Konrad says, accusingly, that he was wrong to think he had to protect the city from the storm, he actually had to protect it from you. The flames burning out from the edges of the Burj Aurora fan outward, stretching to either side almost like a pair of arms welcoming you forward, bidding you closer.

And then Walker wakes up for real, the terrifying hallucination dispelled but the Burj Aurora still in the distance, so far but so very close. It turns out they’ve landed in a shipyard completely buried in sand, and they’re separated. Walker gets to Adams quickly enough, and has to cover him from enemy soldiers while he struggles to get up, injured as he is. When they succeed, they move in, and get Lugo’s voice on the radio. He’s in an even worse position—no weapon, arm broken, and barely outside the notice of a horde of pissed soldiers. Walker tells him to lay low while they fight through to get him.

Their continued push through agitates Lugo’s already-unsafe hiding spot, however, and when alerted of this, Walker orders him to find some other place to hide. Lugo makes his way to a nearby refugee camp—and this turns out to be a grave mistake.

You’re almost there, so close. You can hear Lugo panicking and yelling for the crazy fuckers to stay away from him, switching between English and Farsi, and you can hear a crowd in the background. The citizens of Dubai are pissed off, too, and it seems some of them recognize poor Lugo. But no matter how fast you run, you don’t make it in time.

By the time you’ve found the mob, they’ve already looped a rope around Lugo’s neck and hanged him. You and Adams shoot the rope and Walker begins performing CPR while Adams tries to keep the citizens away from them. He’s pumping air into Lugo’s lungs, doing the chest compressions, the civilians are drawing in and yelling threats. Adams is demanding to be given the order to fire, a demand that gets repeated with increasing desperation not as the civilians get closer, but as it becomes increasingly clear behind him that Lugo isn’t waking up.

It eventually becomes clear to Walker that the CPR just isn’t working, and he looks almost ready to cry as he closes Lugo’s eyes and folds an arm over his chest. The civilians are still there, still angry, and still guilty.

This is another one of those segments in the game where you’re made to choose what to do. Open fire, or scare them off. It helps that you’re so far in the game and so accustomed to shooting hostiles that shooting at the ground or sky might take a second to occur to you. But even once you realize there are other options, would you take them?

These are civilians. These are the people you are absolutely not supposed to harm under any circumstances, because they’re non-combatants and are, ostensibly, the people you’re trying to rescue. But does that matter anymore? This is Lugo we’re talking here—your team only consisted of three men to begin with. He was the wisecrack, the good guy who gave the atmosphere some light-hearted chuckles at the beginning, who maintained some relative cheer here and there. The one who got so broken up over Gould being tortured to death, the one who was outraged by the use of chemical weapons on civvies and sickened when he was made to press the button that killed some himself. He was, overall, a strong source of morality, heart beating in this otherwise unbearably bleak as fuck game.

And these animals just beat him and murdered him.

Does a thing like “civilian” even matter anymore? Does whose viewpoint matter? Yeah, you could remember the lines you aren’t supposed to cross when it comes to war. You could remember how these people must feel being the subject of war crime after war crime and sentenced to doom when they just wanted to live. You could sit there and work out all those details in your head and mathematically weigh your options until ‘do the right thing’ penetrates.

But why would you? That’s Lugo, dead on the ground, and those are his killers, hissing and jeering at you. Go ahead, pull the trigger.

No matter what you do here, this is where the end begins. You can find Lugo’s TAR-21 near the end of the compound just before the chapter ends, and shooting its surprisingly powerful bullets will feel like revenge. In the wake of Lugo’s death, Adams finally ends his patience with Walker, laying the blame for it all on him, and becoming very bitter and angry.

The last mission is upon you. The Burj, Konrad’s personal headquarters, is close enough to reach with one last frantic gun battle. You and Adams, no sniper to support you, throw everything you have at the gatehouse between you and it.

It starts out badly. The 33^rd, panicking on realizing Delta are nearby, try to mortar them with white phosphorus. The shot just barely misses them, and Walker is overtaken in another hallucination, seeing the world and dozens of people up in flames, shooting wildly and screaming as fiery wraiths grab him and set him alight right before flashing back to reality.

They shoot a rocket at the mortar to keep it from firing again, and then drag themselves through more hails of gunfire until they can take a turret and rout the rest of the oncoming forces. “No Values”, aka “Walk the Line” is a somber guitar track that almost can’t be called rock music. It was playing the entire time you stormed the gatehouse, but you probably didn’t notice amidst the firefights. You’ll hear it loud and clear now when faced with only one hostile, but what a hostile it is. When all the soldiers but for Walker and Adams are dead, the haunting music stops, leaving everything quiet, but for a cricket that still has the gall to chirp.

So they proceed… and then a heavy trooper with Lugo’s face busts down the door and opens fire.

Walker panics as the player tries to adjust for this, pleading that he tried to save him, as the Lugo heavy accuses him of leaving him to die, of playing hero, and of not being able to save anyone. When the very, very sturdy trooper falls, Lugo’s voice finally tells Walker that the only villain here is him.

Of course, that’s assuming you win the fight. Fail the fight, and something utterly creepy happens—you get a blurred-out shot of the mother and child from the white phopshorus scene wavering in front of you as a muffled “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is hummed. Then it fades and you “re-wind” to just before the heavy trooper, with Walker holding his head, and the Lugo heavy replaced by a normal heavy thereafter.

The 33^rd isn’t finished yet, though. The very last of them have surrounded the gatehouse just before the path leading into the tower, and there’s clearly no way they’re fighting through all of them. A voice from a hovering helicopter demands their surrender. Walker wants to, citing it as the only way inside the tower, but Adams furiously refuses, stating he didn’t come this far to surrender. It’s clear Adams is at the end of the rope as he demands the enemy soldiers just shoot him already, before throwing Walker off the edge of a barricade and telling him to “Run, motherfucker!”

You do exactly that, storming the tower all by yourself as fire rains down behind you, Adams now having almost certainly gone the same way as Lugo. All that’s left is you and Konrad.

Silence reigns again as you finally enter the Burj Aurora. The remnants of the Damned 33^rd, as the leader of about twelve men declares them to be, formally surrenders. When Walker asks where Konrad is…

“Upstairs, sir, where he’s always been.”

Walker gets in the elevator and goes up to the top floor—one of the only times he actually ascends in the game as opposed to going downward. He finally enters Konrad’s suite, and Konrad congratulates him on doing what the storm couldn’t and destroying the Damned 33^rd. He asks if Walker thought he was a madman, when he entered the city and found what he did. Walker answers in the affirmative as he finally happens on the man himself.

Amidst a marine aquarium full of sea life and a lovely little deck, Konrad looks almost painfully normal. A somewhat older guy, in jeans and a black shirt...painting a picture of the White Phosphorus attack on a wide canvas.

Walker doesn’t take this well, calling it Konrad’s fault, but Konrad corrects him. It was his orders that killed 47 innocent people, and he says Walker’s eyes are opening for the first time. Someone has to pay for his crimes, he says, and he asks who it will be.

Konrad moves behind the painting and the player is handed control again for a brief moment, ready to move closer. A lounge chair lies against a wall-length window, showing Dubai in flames and ruin.

“John? Is that you…?”

It’s the first and only time Walker addresses Konrad by first name. I like to think that, when he sees the lounge chair at the end of the deck, some part of his brain realizes the truth before the rest of it catches up.

And however disconnected from Walker the player may feel up until now, there is a guarantee that when he turns the chair around and discovers Konrad’s long-dead corpse, they are thinking the exact same thing he is: No, this can’t be real.

Konrad was the one behind it all. He’s the reason we kept playing, the reason Walker kept marching. We went through all of this to get to him. We trudged through every misfortune, every grim responsibility, every act of violence for this. We lost Lugo for this, we lost Adams for this! Konrad has to be alive, there has to be a villain. There has to be a villain!

And yet, even as that wave of no, no, no hits, we can’t refute it. Our denial is so powerful, but crumbles from within as we realize that, much as we don’t want to see it, things are falling into place.

Konrad never spoke to anyone but Walker throughout the game, nor did anyone else ever hear him, with Adams and Lugo simply trusting that his voice really was there in Walker’s headset as much as Walker himself did. Whenever he was mentioned by other characters, it was always in the past tense. There’s been no evidence whatsoever that Konrad was actually present that didn’t come from Walker’s own head. No one ever actually told Walker that Konrad was alive, he simply took a rumor from Gould at face value.

I said that the game’s soundtrack, while loud, actionized and rocking, has very little heroic anthem to it. There is one, and only one, exception, and true to form, just like everything about Spec Ops: The Line, it’s a painful twist on what you’d expect. It’s climactic, alright, in a horribly final and yet appropriate way.

The second that the camera pans over Konrad’s corpse, long since lifeless by his own hand, we feel an intense rush of emotions all at once, and again, they are very likely identical to the ones felt by Walker himself. First is a wave of confusion, and then raw denial. The somber opening of “Truth Revealed” communicate exactly that, and the sheer drop of understanding we feel is cemented when we hit the earth, crashing and shattering into a million pieces. You get completely broken, and that’s what those initial guitar strums in the soundtrack sing in your ear exactly: broken-ness. A game that has so far brutally punched you in the gut every last time you thought you’d recovered has finally ended in the most horrifying and depressing way possible, with the hero realizing that his whole journey has been for nothing.

Konrad hasn’t left Walker’s consciousness yet. He is, as he himself explains, a manifestation. Something borne of Walker’s extreme guilt over his actions and desire to reconcile them with his good intentions, someone to blame all the evil on that he could finally eliminate to make all the suffering worth it. The cello hums in as we flash back to several moments across Walker’s story, and each critical turn within it, revealing that he’s been hallucinating for quite a while, since the White Phosphorus incident or earlier—and handily reminding him that his original orders weren’t rescue, just recon for survivors and then calling in backup.

“It takes a strong man to deny what’s in front of him. And if the truth is undeniable, you create your own.”

They can’t live this lie forever, he says, and he pulls out a gun and threatens to shoot Walker dead at the count of five. Walker insists that this isn’t real, and Konrad tauntingly asks if he’s sure, as he begins to count. Walker raises his own gun, angrily insisting it was Konrad’s doing. If that’s what he believes, then shoot, Konrad says. Walker finally, quietly stammers, almost pleads that he didn’t mean to hurt anybody, and Konrad coldly tells him that no one ever does.

A game that ends with the suicide of the main character can be a hard sell, it’s got to be the deepest fucking thing since the Marianas Trench or it’s going to look really fucked. But thankfully, Spec Ops is. Allowing Konrad to shoot Walker—or aiming at Walker’s own reflection—will cause Walker, in reality, to shoot himself in the head. And shooting Konrad before his countdown finishes will shatter the mirror and let Walker, at least for the moment, face reality and go through with his evac orders. By now you don’t need me to tell you that this decision comes to each player after a good bit of hesitation. We’ve seen what Walker’s done, the chaos and suffering he’s caused. We’ve seen how his justifications have been torn down, and we’ve seen that his mission has been rendered hollow. It’s up to you to judge for yourself if a man like that deserves to live—if living, even, is itself a punishment for him at this point. Should his good intentions spare him in the end? Should he accept full responsibility in the manner most appropriate, with a bullet? Should he finally end his own torment, or be forced to carry it for the rest of his days?

Those guitar riffs come in when Konrad aims the gun and carry you through the end of the game. “Truth Revealed” has shown you the way: you want a villain to blame all the evil on? You want someone you can punish for all the spilled blood? Go ahead. He’s standing right in front of you. Pull the trigger.

It’s not necessarily the final decision, either. Walker dies, if you shoot his reflection or allow Konrad to shoot, but he can also live, if you choose to shoot Konrad. But who’s to say what happens to the poor man’s mind after this revelation? An unknown period of time later, with nothing said as to the ultimate fates of the rest of those stuck in Dubai, a troop of soldiers arrives, presumably the evac force he called for. Only, Walker’s got a beard, a hollow thousand-yard stare, and a weapon.

Does Walker have what it takes to lay down his weapon and go home? Does he feel like he can, let alone should? How do you feel about it? Is it possible that his mind is so broken that he can’t perceive any options that don’t involve shooting and killing anymore? If he opens fire, is it because he’s now a bloodthirsty hound who can’t perceive others as non-hostiles anymore, or does he simply do so because he wants to die now that he understands the weight of his crimes? And if he lays down his weapon, why does he do it? Is it because he finally had the strength to stop fighting and submit, and go home a broken but still-living man, or because he’s so tired and drained from the stress of Dubai that he no longer has it in him to fight anymore?

The game lets you decide that for yourself, and that any of these are plausible options speaks to how well it’s been written up to this end.

This game is so, so powerful, and so very detailed. Play it again, a second time, and you’ll notice so many things you never did in the first run. You’ll see how assumptions are made, how opportunities to retreat or surrender go passed up. You’ll see how there ultimately never was a villain, just angry, scared people driven to their worst by what was happening around them. You’ll see the slow fracturing of Walker’s mind in high-definition, actually see the white phosphorus incident finally breaking him, watch him throw himself into a new mission in a desperation to avoid reality. Walker treats himself as a good person, with the best of intentions, and we believe it as we watch that good person crumble into a wreck as he fails to make an awful situation anything but worse.

Nowadays, Spec Ops: The Line maintains a cult following, with the internet sharply eyeing every career move Walt Williams makes. The game has in recent years gained a slight bump as people invite contrasts between it and The Last of Us: Part II, a game full of diversity against The Line’s cast exclusively full of macho dudes, yet falling short of the depth it was apparently aiming for in contrast to The Line’s utterly excellent writing and examination of humans and their tendencies under stress. It’s still the gold standard among war shooters, which following it occasionally tried to emulate its “war is hell” theme with varying success.

Hell, it sent Yahtzee Croshaw into a spiral of pathos. That should attest enough to its quality.

If you didn’t heed my warnings and still haven’t played Spec Ops: the Line as of reading this, it’s still not too late. It’s such a strong game that it can resonate even if you’re spoiled, and there’s plenty of stuff I didn’t mention here. It’s definitely worth however much you pay to play it.

And I leave you with the sounds of bullets and guitars still playing in my head, and hopefully soon in yours.