When we last checked in on “Apocalypse Now,” Martin Sheen had boated across Vietnam on military orders to hunt down Marlon Brando, an ex-military hero gone mad with mystical power over locals. When we last checked in on “Apocalypse Now,”
When we last checked in on “Apocalypse Now,” Martin Sheen had boated across Vietnam on military orders to hunt down Marlon Brando, an ex-military hero gone mad with mystical power over locals.
That 1979 classic movie was a spin on Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella “Heart of Darkness,” in which the protagonist’s mission is to locate a gone-mad ivory trader in the Congo.
So now, we have a video game inspired by “Heart of Darkness” and “Apocalypse Now.” It’s called “Spec Ops: The Line,” a much less poetic title.
In “Spec Ops,” you portray Delta Op Walker. You and two military comrades trek by foot through Dubai after it has become an apocalyptic wasteland due to killer desert windstorms.
Your mission is to find a U.S. military hero named Konrad who may have gone mad with power over the few remaining locals and U.S. soldiers on site.
There are unusual and icky things about this game: 1) We portray an American soldier who shoots other American soldiers, presumably because they went to the dark side. 2) It becomes unclear if we are the good guy. What if the soldiers we are shooting are good guys? 3) We kill them anyway, sometimes with finishing moves, such as bashing their heads with a rifle.
I give the architects behind “Spec Ops” credit for turning the third-person war-shooting genre on its head. Usually, war games give us black-and-white protagonists and antagonists. Not so, here.
At times, the screen flashes a moralistic question at our gaming eyes: “Do you feel like a hero yet?”
The risk of a game like this is: If its makers had failed in their creative execution, “Spec Ops” could have felt hypocritical. We’d harp, “You are using glorified violence to make a statement about glorified violence.”
I feel terrible about decisions this game forces on me, particularly when I must launch white phosphorous burn agents on innocent locals and probably innocent soldiers.
That is gruesome. If you love that part of the game, then contemplate therapy. It seems as if that’s the game makers’ point.
Yes, they are profiting off of a rampage game. But they are also doing something rarely attempted. They are making us question why we are even playing their bloody war game or, frankly, anyone else’s.
“Spec Ops: The Line” by 2K Games retails for $60 for Xbox 360 and PS 3; $50 for PC.
Doug Elfman is an award-winning entertainment columnist who lives in Las Vegas. He blogs at http://www.lvrj.com/columnists/Doug_Elfman.html. Twitter at VegasAnonymous.
