SPEC OPS THE LINE WINDOWS
There are only two occasions when Walker seriously grapples with the concept of the storm – when it puts him in immediate danger, or to use it as a weapon, shooting out windows and glass ceilings to bury enemies in sand. The 33rd have consigned themselves to doom in Dubai, and as Walker’s humanity drains with every bullet he fires, his initial determination increasingly turns to resignation. The problem is that all parties have already decided the storm is an impossible problem to solve. It isn’t like Walker and the 33rd are unaware of the danger the storm poses. Instead, the remaining factions in the city squabble over what little control they can wrest from the chaos, unable to let go of their mutual suspicion of one another, and fighting to the death over the city’s dwindling supplies of food and water. But this is never treated as a realistic solution, despite being the only way that everyone has a chance of getting out alive, to avoid falling victim to an unprecedented natural disaster. The sensible thing for Walker and the 33rd to do would be to work together to fathom a way out of Dubai. Every problem that Konrad, the 33rd and Walker face is a consequence of the storm. It’s the storm that slowly chokes Dubai’s remaining populace, burying both the city and its people under mountains of dust. It’s the storm that isolates Dubai, which prevents radio signals from going out, and food and water from coming in. It also serves as an allegory for human-made climate change.įrom the moment that Walker sets foot in Dubai, it’s clear that the storm is the biggest threat to everyone in the city. But the vast storm that surrounds and entraps the inhabitants of Dubai, is not solely used for scene-setting. Seeing towering avenues of skyscrapers turned into desert gorges by vast piles of sand makes it all the more visually striking, lending Spec Ops an otherworldly feel that complements the increasingly surreal nature of the story. Dubai is already a city of extremes, a metropolis vast in both scale and wealth surrounded by an incredibly inhospitable landscape. The storm acts both as a useful narrative device for Spec Ops, the plot of which borrows heavily from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, and also as a way to enhance the game’s setting. Not only have the storms completely cut off Dubai from the rest of the world, they’ve also buried its glittering skyscrapers and curated oases in mountains of sand. 33rd Infantry Battalion, which volunteered to provide relief to the citizens of Dubai following a sequence of massive dust storms, but themselves became trapped in the city by those same storms. Walker’s mission in Spec Ops: The Line is to determine the fate of the U.S. It is the storm itself, and what it represents. It is the entire reason the game’s story takes place, the elephant in Dubai. Yet there’s another side to Spec Ops: The Line that has not only withstood the test of time, but has grown more urgent in the last decade. READ MORE: “It’s the year of worker power” – why unionisation in gaming is here to stayĪ decade on, Spec Ops‘ critique of war and how video games represent it has lost little of its power, despite exhaustive discussion and analysis of the topic.Most infamously, he uses White Phosphorous mortars – a chemical weapon prohibited by the Geneva Convention – to target a unit of rogue American soldiers, accidentally killing dozens of civilians in the process.
Throughout his journey, Walker’s unyielding commitment to the mission leads him to commit ever more atrocious acts. Whereas most military shooters at the time either handwaved or outright glorified issues like military interventionism and American exceptionalism, The Line was unafraid to portray its protagonist, Sergeant Martin Walker, as complicit in the horrors that unfold in sandstorm-wracked Dubai.
When Spec Ops: The Line launched in 2012, it was lauded for its unvarnished and unheroic portrayal of war.
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