This is a game I heard about a lot back in the day. But when I first played it on the PS3, even knowing the spoilers of some of the most important scenes (If you know, you know. I wont share any major spoilers in this review though), the whole thing still hit like a truck. The gameplay was relatively standard Gears of War third-person shooter stuff with a couple neat ideas, but it was the visuals and the story that really got me. Even the voice acting, this is without a doubt some of Nolan North's best work (And that's a pretty high bar).
Knowing what I knew, I had actually gone into the in-game options and set the colors to "vivid" mode (I wish more games had options like this) which lent the experience a dreamlike quality. Which I felt like would be the best way to experience it, and I wasn't wrong. This game is so surreal but never to the point where it doesn't feel grounded. It has just enough wrong in it to make you question your own sanity up to the point where you realize Walker (The main character) has completely broken. And even then, you still question if it's real. The endings all hit hard too. And the game takes about 10 hours to play from beginning to end, a good length for this sort of experience.
This isn't just a dumb shooter game about the horrors of war. This is, in my opinion, one of the best psychological horror games. It's up there with Silent Hill 2 for me. It's not as deep as SH2 (Says more about SH2 than The Line, really) but both had me walking away carrying the feelings it invoked with me for years to come. And I liked both games enough to buy them more than once.
Although I already own Spec Ops: The Line on PC through GOG, I want more people to have access to this game. I dont want it locked behind piracy or retro hardware or hit-&-miss backwards compatibility, just because of some licensing issue. I recommend this game to my friends all the time but because it's delisted, most of them wont play it. And that's a shame.