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The moment in question sees Walker and his team stumble into what looks like a high-rise upper floor lobby, full of shot, burned, and mutilated corpses. But there is one moment in particular indicative of the struggles that Yager is facing to make a game that deals not just with 'mature' subject matter, but serious, literary messages. It's not 'No Russian,' or a contrived American vacation in the UK a la Modern Warfare 3. It's clear that the story of Spec Ops focuses at least in part on the madness of Konrad and the atrocities commited by the 33rd in his name, in the name of order, but I didn't have enough of a chance to get a solid grasp on how it's going to be handled. The Line lingers on some fairly horrific imagery in ways that other war games have avoided. I played through one well designed combat scenario after another, each with an interesting layout that offered numerous tactical options.Ĭivilian death and non-combat fatalities are all around in Spec Ops. Even more unusual is the breadth of what I played, which included significant portions selected from the first half of the game. It's uncommon for a developer to let a member of the press play for as uninterrupted a stretch as Yager allowed me last week. More importantly, Spec Ops: The Line has solid design chops. Spec Ops is striking in ways it wasn't before, its desert landscape full of vibrant blues and reds and purples in addition to the expected oranges and yellows. In that time, Yager has retooled the engine to support the enhancements seen in Unreal Engine 3 in the last year, particularly obvious in the new lighting system. In a quest for a literary sort of statement and message, Spec Ops: The Line has the baggage of the entire medium to overcome.%Gallery-140044%That isn't to say Spec Ops is in a bad position as it stands now. But now that The Line seems well on its way to relevancy as a game, developer Yager faces what might be an even bigger obstacle.

Now, 18 months later, I've played more than an hour of a Spec Ops that feels solid and functional - current, even. But even then, it was clear that Spec Ops: The Line had a long way to go.

It was an unofficial session, as previews were limited to eyes-on impressions, so I won't go into too much detail about it. In fact, I'm one of the few people to have played Spec Ops, back at a pre-E3 event in Los Angeles in 2010. It's been more than a year since I've seen Spec Ops: The Line.

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