Velvet Assassin

I played through Velvet Assassin this week because I was vaguely interested in it after seeing bits and pieces of it released over the last year. The real reason though is GameFly decided they’d rather not ship me the ‘highly available’ Mad World, but instead wait three days and then ship the newly released Velvet Assassin, which was lower on my queue. I was a little hesitant to play it because pretty much nothing had been said about it since release. By the time it arrived at my house there were three reviews up on MetaCritic, a 50 and two 75’s. Woohoo, this should be fun.

After playing for a few hours I decided the game felt incredibly last gen. It reminded me of the older Metal Gear Solids. It is a stealth game, but all the guards only had a forward cone of vision and walked in scripted paths. I simply had to wait in the dark or behind some bushes until the right moment to stab a guy in the back and drag him away. For whatever reason, the guards didn’t seem to care at all if the other guard they met at the end of their path every 17 seconds for the last 3 years didn’t return as long as they couldn’t see his corpse in their 4 foot range of vision. Most encounters had a few different ways they could be dealt with, but I could almost always figure out the way the developers planned for me to deal with the guards. If not, after doing it my way I’d usually find a switch that triggered electricity under a guards feet or a fuse box I was supposed to break that would have made the encounter easier. German electricians back in the 1940’s must have been really really bad. Makes sense I guess considering how stupid their guards apparently were.

The reviews I read primarily described the game as frustrating and inconsistent. As I was playing through I found it to be a tad tedious at times, but it still had a bit of charm that kept me interested. The checkpoints are very far apart, so sometimes I would end up playing through a part several times before I worked out my entire path through it. This would get old, but every time I finally succeeded it was quite satisfying. I was left wondering why the reviews were so harsh. It was far from perfect, but it was obviously a low budget game and still offered a bit of fun with an interesting story wrapped in.

That of course was until I got to the final two levels. The second to last mission by far took me the longest in the entire game. I started with nothing but my knife, which is fairly standard, but did not acquire a gun until the very end. In fact, the mission objective was to acquire a weapon. That means I spent around 2 hours trudging through a hospital and its courtyard, stabbing countless guards, and dying and reloading dozens of times just to get a machine gun that almost every single guard had on them when I swiftly ended their life.

I found the objective alone to be incredibly annoying, but could get over it if it wasn’t for it being the end goal of the most frustrating level in the game. Suddenly all those inconsistencies I read about came flooding into the game. Sometimes I’d be standing in the dark waiting to pull off a stealth kill, and suddenly after doing it successfully the previous four times (only to be killed in the next room before the checkpoint) the guard would see me as he passed by and blow me away. Other times I’d sneak up behind a guy whose script dictates he won’t turn around ever, much less before I get to him, but sure enough right as I was about to stab him he’d turn and blow me away. It was like everything bad I read about suddenly decided to manifest itself in the climax for me rather than causing me to quit in frustration four hours earlier like everyone else. I was so close to the end though, so I soldiered on.

Once I finally got my hands on a gun the game decided it wanted to be a shooter for the final 20 minutes. Sadly, Velvet Assassin is a stealth action game and does not play like a shooter. The guns cross hair are wide and designed to be fairly inaccurate. Kills are hard to pull off from far away and headshots are damn near impossible without several seconds of aiming prior to pulling the trigger. Sounds perfect for a stealth game, not the shooter this bipolar monstrosity of an ending wanted to be. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for how impossibly accurate all the previously inept guards had randomly become from miles away. I basically had to lure everyone into a doorway or small alley and then sit at the end firing small bursts as they showed up. Otherwise I would get headshotted by machine guns from across the level while behind cover. That’s right, they could headshot me when my head was not in their line of sight.

I fully understand now why the reviews were so harsh. Why Joystiq even started a series about quitting video games midway through because of this game. I must have got lucky for my first ten missions because everything wrong with the game let itself be known in full force for its finale. There was definitely potential for this game to be decent, if only it behaved the way it was supposed to the entire time and if the ending was retooled a lot. It has the charm and while the stealth mechanics are old, we accepted them ten years ago and can still enjoy them today. A few bad design choices and poor polishing though suddenly a decent game became a very not so decent game.

I never knew an ending of a game could be so terrible that it would change my entire opinion of the first 80% of it. I suppose I could applaud them for that at least.