Velvet Assassin Review

Velvet Assassin
PC DVD
Developer: Replay Studios
Publisher: SouthPeak Games
Game website: http://www.velvetassassin.com/

Overview

Velvet Assassin is stealth based, third person perspective action/adventure set during WW2. You play as beautiful British agent Violette Summer, sent behind German lines on a range of missions to kill key targets, sabotage enemy installations and generally be a real nuisance for the Third Reich. The whole narrative of the game is told as flashbacks, with Violette retelling her exploits from a hospital bed, surrounded by German guards. The set up for each mission is portrayed in a photo album, with each picture animated to show a scene from the upcoming mission. The flashback theme is continued in the actual missions, with Violette recounting key events in the past tense.

In the actual missions, you view Violette from a third person perspective with standard keyboard controls for moving back & forward and strafing left and right. The mouse movement controls turning left and right and moving the camera view up and down. All pretty standard stuff. Violette can jump, but only at set points and she can climb up ladders and onto objects such as crates or boxes. Unfortunately, Violette doesn’t have quite the range of moves of Sam Fisher or even Lara Croft and cannot do things like shimmy along ledges etc. You can put Violette into a crouch by holding down the left ctrl key and then hide in the shadows to avoid the guards. Crouching also makes Violettes movements slower, but quiet, so that she can sneak up behind German guards that have their backs to her. In the bottom right of the screen, there is an icon that depicts the silhouette of our agent and when there is a blue outline, you know that Violette is concealed in darkness and cannot be seen. When Violette is close behind an enemy, the screen darkens, the music changes, and pressing the left mouse button, when prompted, initiates a stealth kill with the knife. This initiates a rather stylised and often grisly set animation of our lovely agent robbing the poor German guard of their life.

Throughout the game, various secondary items, not really related to the missions, can be picked up. These have an experience point value. For every 1000 experience points, Violette gets one upgrade point and you can use this to upgrade a number of her key attributes (i.e. stealth ability, shooting, speed), offering an almost RPG “lite” aspect to the gameplay. Violette can also pickup medkits and morphine shots that are sparsely left around the game maps. With both the medkits and morphine, Violette can only pick these up if her health is low or the morphine meter is not full. If the morphine meter is full, pressing the F key slows the whole game and Violette is suddenly wearing a negligee, the same one that she is wearing in the hospital bed at the start, while recounting her exploits. While in this odd “negligee time” mode, Violette moves quicker than normal, while everything else is slowed down, so for a limited amount of time, she can kill German guards with ease. When the morphine meter runs out, everything is back to normal, but you cannot initiate the mode again until the morphine is replenished by finding another pickup of the stuff. This offers a certain tactical element to the game, as you have to be careful about when exactly you use this mode. Likewise, you have a pistol with a silencer that is quicker and generally more efficient at dispatching the guards than with your knife, but you always have a very limited amount of ammunition, so you have to pick and choose when to use it.


The Good Stuff

Graphically, Velvet Assassin is a bit of a stunner, with good character models and animation, and impressive environments. The lighting and real time shadows are particularly impressive with this title, creating a very intense and dramatic feeling as you are sneaking Violette around in the shadows, avoiding the guards and waiting for the right time for the kill. This puts the game (at least visually) on par with the more recent Thief and Splinter Cell titles.

The Bad Stuff

Unfortunately Velvet Assassin is one of those games releases where the bad points far outweigh the good ones. While it’s true that the game is nice to look at, I always say that that great graphics alone do not make a great game and it’s in the gameplay department that this title really falls short of the mark. For starters, the game is very linear, to the point of mind numbing tedium.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with certain game genres being linear by nature (for example arcade based shooters), but stealth action games need to offer variety and choices in the gameplay. With Velvet Assassin the guards always move along the same paths, are always in the same location when you enter an area and always stop for the same intervals on their patrol.

To further demonstrate this, during the first mission you are tasked with placing explosive charges at a gas facility to destroy it. When you finally get to the area, two guards come round a corner with you just out of view, but in earshot and then proceed to have a subtitled argument, where one guard accuses the other of stealing his chocolate. This is amusing the first time you hear it, but when you die and reload from the autosave, you have the same sequence repeated, with the same dialogue. You need to wait for the sequence to finish, so one of the guards can walk past to a point where you can kill him from the shadows.

The game is littered with tedious moments like this and the gameplay is more about trial and error than anything else. The other annoying thing, which adds to the frustration of replaying linear sections over and over again, is the autosave feature, which you have no control over. There is absolutely no manual save. Games that have wretched autosave systems and nothing else annoy me because this is often used as an artificial and lame way of making the game more of a challenge and is used as a poor way of disguising sub standard game and level design, which is the case with Velvet Assassin.

The other part of the game design that baffles and annoys me in equal amounts is the half-hearted inventory system. As mentioned earlier, Violette can pickup medkits and morphine shots, but only if she is injured or the morphine meter is empty. Again this introduces a lame artificial difficulty mechanic. I guess the developers felt the game needed to be a challenge, but completely failed to come up with a logical way of making the gameplay be more tactical. I would rather have had the ability to carry limited supplies of these items in the inventory and had the challenge upped with better German guard A.I or more cunning level design.

Conclusion

I personally found Velvet Assassin a huge disappointment. I love WW2 and stealth action games, but quite frankly this title just does not deliver much enjoyment. It is very much a missed opportunity, as the concept of a stealth based WW2 game with a female British agent has not really been explored before. I’ve only made it to the second mission, but to emphasise the tedium, I don’t think I can really stand to play anymore of this game. In my opinion, it doesn’t even have an engaging story that makes you want to play right through to the end. The other sad thing is that this game completely fails on a gameplay level to even approach the playability of the Thief or Splinter Cell series, which both perfected and pretty much set the standard for the stealth action genre. There’s no nice way to say this, but if you love WW2 action games and stealth games, there are much better, older titles already out there, at a budget price. Save your money and avoid this title.

Score 3 out 10