click to enlarge Having seen the game debuted during the 2009 VGA broadcast, we sat down for a live demo of 2K's Spec Ops: The Line last week at the company's Northern California headquarters. Behind the controls was Cory Davis, lead designer at Yager (developer of -- you guessed it -- Yager), who led us through a roughly 15 minute slice of the game designed to convey the uniqueness of the setting and some pleasantly surprising play mechanics that tie into its backstory. Set about 18 months after a massive sandstorm has ravaged Dubai, the game sees players entering this "no man's land" as part of an elite team sent to locate the origin of a transmission from an earlier mission that had been presumed dead, swallowed up by the sand. The demo began mid-firefight, with the player character (voiced by a decidedly all-business Nolan North) and two AI squad mates seeking cover behind remnants of an office, as unknown gunmen fired at them from a half-collapsed building nearby. What happened next was, well ... unexpected and very cool.