“You Died!” Did I? Well that explains why the little soldier I was telling to shoot things suddenly threw himself to the floor in slow motion. Cheers for the heads-up though, and especially for the exclamation mark.

Funny game, The Line. Sometimes it throws a mindblowing scene at your face, such as one of the many sandstorm battles, and other times it forces palm into face with utterly dumb dialogue and overly simplistic design.

The story’s not bad: Dubai lays battered by sandstorms and a lost regiment sent to evacuate civilians may have gone rogue, for whatever reason.

But crikey Jim and his corduroy trousers, you surely don’t need to be so goshdarn linear about it. Sure, even Call of Duty follows reasonably straight paths through rubble, but so seamless is the design that it doesn’t feel that restrictive. The Line picks you up by the undies and throws you down horribly obvious walkways carved with all the precision of a monkey with a chainsaw taped to a gammy leg.

Several very earnest and tedious conversations between soldiers later, and you’ll be lucky if you haven’t eaten your own knees just to make it interesting.

And then suddenly a sandstorm whips up and it all gets rather dramatic.

Then you pop inside again and it’s back to knee pie.

There’s a good idea for a game in here, but The Line’s execution comes straight from the big book of Non-Imaginative Soldier-Type Variants Volume 48.

Which isn’t anywhere near as good as Volume 49.