Velvet Assassin [360]



£9.99

£9.99

Such high hopes for this one. Velvet Assassin was to be a World War 2 game that’s neither an FPS nor an RTS, but a stealth game. It was relived in flashback, with a morphine mechanic to give you more freedom in play style and get you out of tight spots. More than that, it was based on the life of Violette Szabo, a rather under-appreciated British agent who helped sort out the French resistance and assisted with D-Day before being captured, tortured, raped, and executed. 

Such high hopes, and yet it succeeds at exactly none of these things. 

Velvet Assassin is a broken game. The idea is that, as Violette Summer, players go on a series of missions ranging from sabotage to assassination, in which they sneak around in shadows, dispatch Nazis, and Save the Free World. What this usually entails is hiding in shadows, being spotted from far away, being shot, and then reloading a checkpoint five or six rooms back. 

Initial impressions are actually fairly good. Graphically, the game is quite stunning, and whoever worked on the art style deserves praise. The lighting effects are excellent, and the faint purple glow to indicate when Violette is hidden fits well with the slightly stylised look of the game. Voice acting is adequate and authentic, with the Nazis speaking German that from what I can tell is subtitled quite accurately, and the musical score adds a lot to the atmosphere. Early kills let you sneak up on opponents without much difficulty, and stab them to death in a short in-game cinematic which, in terms of violence, is often vaguely reminiscent of Manhunt. One in particular features your hapless opponent being viciously and frantically stabbed in the chest over a dozen times while they lie prone on the ground. I understand that Violette’s husband and family were killed by the Germans, but damn, the girl has problems. 

Then you go towards the first building and teleport through the door when you try to use it. 

This is weird. There are no loading times here. Some doors can be opened normally (but not closed, which you’d think is a bit of an oversight in a game revolving around staying out of sight.) Others, despite the lack of loading times, basically teleport you into a new chunk of the level. Enemies can’t actually follow you through these either, which amusingly lets you pop out, take a few pot shots at guards, and then run back in again and wait for the search parties to wander back to their patrols. Or at least, you could if you had any ammo, because Violette is sent into the most heavily fortified Nazi strongholds with a knife and, occasionally, a silenced pistol containing seven shots. 

This would be less infuriating if ammo wasn’t implausibly scarce, or the gun aiming wasn’t incredibly twitchy with a dreadful dead zone on the analogue sticks. You can’t scavenge ammunition or weapons from felled enemies, which would be understandable in the stealth context (no noisy weapons) were it not that you can use these weapons. Hell, you can use flare guns. You just have to find them in lockers, which is also the only place you can get ammo for them. When you’re using the exact same weapons as your enemies, this again feels like an oversight - presumably for balance purposes – but in terms of creating a stealth game that’s based on reality and was intended to be somewhat realistic, I wasn’t aware that Nazis glued their f**king weapons to their hands. The most egregious example comes towards the end of the game when one mission objective is along the lines of “Get a weapon at all costs”. Because you can’t rob the dead (except for keys, letters, and other trinkets, which we’ll get onto) Violette gives stabby death to about 30 heavily-armed soldiers before you find the locker containing the gun which Violette can magically use, despite being the exact same machine gun the enemy soldiers are using.