Fresh from the ovens of 2K Games at this year’s E3 is a fifteen minute or so demonstration o f their new squad-based, third-person shooter. I thought I had an idea of the game going into the demonstration, but walked away with a sense of awe and hope that perhaps Spec Ops: The Line may actually be able to avoid being dragged into a pool of mediocrity.

Produced by Yager, a company based in Berlin, The Line is heavy on the action and highly ambitious in storytelling.  The Line takes place in the near future, in the country of Dubai. A series of calamitous sandstorms have laid waste to the land, rendering much of it uninhabitable. In the game’s timeframe shown here, Captain Walker and his squad have been sent to locate a Colonel Conrad, but also discover, in the process, a series of underground buildings with ornately decorated interiors. At this point in the game, they don’t know what function they serve or how these majestic tombs lost their place on humanity’s surface in the first place, but their primary objective is to save their superior.

The demo started off with one of the squad members injured—from what I am not certain, but I can only surmise that he was hurt earlier by the collapsed building rubble. At first, the visuals take on incredibly dark textures to depict the gravity of the situation and, of course, the absence of light in the crumbled building. Not too much later, Captain Walker and co. march on to one of the entombed, grandiose building interiors, and soon I get a good duality of the visuals in this game. The initial darkness transformed into a brighter setting that painted the city of Dubai to be a vast and desolate land covered almost entirely in sand.

The graphics in this game—to put it quite simply—rock. The environment brims with attention to detail and exhibits a tranquil calm that is outrageously deceiving once the action catches up. The graffiti of post-apocalyptic propaganda and the morbid scene of hanging corpses further underscores the dark and haunting overtones.

2K made it quite apparent that the player will be thrown a number of moral issues against his or her will and must decide between what is morally right and what is best for survival right then and there. It was made clear by the developers that whatever choice the player makes is reflected in the gameplay and has some bearing on outcomes later on, but these choices really become more of a question of whether the player would be able to live with the consequences. This sense of narrative depth may be what differentiates The Line from other squad-based shooters of the same vein.

Aside from  the deep narrative, the game looks and feels like any standard squad-based shooter. As the leader of your fireteam, you coordinate with your squad members to respond to the rapidly changing battle conditions. You can issue orders to your two squad members and command them to set up position or shoot while you take cover to sneak behind enemies or engage them head-on. The game’s presentation seems pretty solid overall. The interface was bare-bones minimum, so I couldn’t see exactly how these commands or anything really played out. But one thing of note is that Gregory Kasavin, one of the game’s producers, promises us that the ubiquitous sand in the environment can be used against enemies, which becomes very useful and perhaps even crucial to weighing in tactical considerations.

Kasavin also reveals that there will be a single-player only campaign mode and a separate cooperative mode. He confides that a multiplayer beta will become available soon on Xbox Live, but remains pretty tight-lipped about any of its details. Only time will begin to reveal what multiplayer has in store for us, but definitely keep an eye out for this title that’s scheduled to be released in 2011.