Spec Ops: The Line is a first-person shooter video game, developed by Treyarch and published by Activision (Square Enix for Japan). Spec Ops: The Line is the ninth game in the Call of Duty franchise of video games and a sequel to the 2010 game Call of Duty: Black Ops. The game was launched at 16,000 stores worldwide at midnight on November 13, 2012.

Spec Ops: The Line is the first game in the Call of Duty franchise to feature future warfare technology and the first to present branching storylines driven by player choice. It also offers a 3D display option. A corresponding game, Spec Ops:The Line: Declassified, was released simultaneously on the PlayStation Vita. Within 24 hours of going on sale, the game grossed over $500 million, beating 2011's Modern Warfare 3 to become the biggest entertainment launch of all time. It went on to sell 7.5 million copies in the U.S. in November 2012, making it the highest grossing game of the month.

The single-player campaign features two connected storylines, with the first set from 1986 to 1989 during the final years of the first Cold War, and the other set in 2025 during a second Cold War. The protagonist of Black Ops, Alex Mason returns as the protagonist in the first Cold War section, and chronicles the rise to infamy of the game's primary antagonist, Raul Menendez, a Nicaraguan narco-terrorist and the leader of "Cordis Die", a populist movement celebrated as the champion of victims of economic inequality.

The 2025 section of the game features Alex Mason's son David as the protagonist, in which Menendez is plotting against the United States and China with one of his ultimate goals being to see the United States locked in a new Cold War with China, in revenge for many of his misfortunes. In this era, wars are defined by robotics, cyberwarfare, unmanned vehicles, and other futuristic technology.

Spec Ops: The Line is the first Call of Duty video game to feature branching storylines, in which the player's choice affects both the current mission and in turn, the overall course of the story. Known as "Strike Force missions", these branching storylines appear during the 2025 storyline and feature permanent death. The success or failure of these missions can have ramifications for the wider campaign storyline. Choosing one of the missions locks out the others unless the player begins a fresh campaign.

Strike Force missions allow the player to control a number of different war assets, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, jet fighters and robots. If the player dies in a Strike Force mission, the campaign continues recording that loss, as opposed to letting the player load a previously saved checkpoint. The player's progress in the Strike Force missions may go on to change even the plans of the story's antagonist, Raul Menendez. By the end of the game, the player may have changed the results of the new Cold War, and the player is shown what could have gone differently.

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