- Publisher: SouthPeak Games
- Developer: Replay Studios
- ESRB Rating: “M” for Mature
- Genre: Stealth
- Pros: Great setting; nice lighting
- Cons: Brutal difficulty isn’t helped by glitches and inconsistencies in the gameplay; very slowly paced; linear levels
Velvet Assassin is based on the real story of a British spy duing World War II named Violette Szabo, renamed in the game as Violette Summer. It was Violette’s (and other spies like her) job to sneak around behind enemy lines and disrupt the Nazi war machine by destroying fuel depots or assassinating specific targets and then sneak back out to safety.
The game begins with Violette in a hospital bed. Her last mission didn’t go so well, and she is on the brink of death. The missions you play are actually Violette’s memories of what she did, and in between missions you get brief looks at the real world that reveal her rapidly failing health. The “real world” bits are kind of hard to follow because you never really get enough of the story to put anything together until near the end of the game, but it is interesting nonetheless.
The whole setting in Velvet Assassin is really quite interesting. It is a look at World War II from a completely different perspective than we usually get in video games. It is as the same time brutal and frightening (you see some awful things and hear some crazy conversations) but also realistic and human as you read letters from German soldiers and realize they aren’t all evil and are just like you – fighting a war they’d rather not be in at all.
Gameplay
The levels are very linear in design with only one path to your objective. It is just bottleneck after bottleneck and there isn’t really any way to get through without killing people. You only have a handful of bullets, however, (and the shooting in this game is awful) so you have to either sneak up and use your knife on enemies from behind, or do things like electrify puddles of water or release poison gas to take out enemies. In this way, the game becomes more like a puzzle game because you go from one set of enemies to the next and have to figure out the best way to take them out with your limited resources.
One additional gameplay element is that there are morphine needles scattered around the levels, and a shot of morphine puts the game in slow motion and lets you get through sections easier. It does make it unrealistic, but we are playing through memories, after all, and we already know Violette gets through the mission, so the morphine is like hitting the fast forward button on her memory to let us do cool stuff and get through instead of having a QTE or something. I don’t mind it.
It Just Doesn't Work Right
There are some good ideas here, just poor execution. Stealth games are traditionally difficult, but Velvet Assassin is particularly brutal and most levels are a frustrating series of trial and error as you figure out how to take out one set of enemies only to die at the next ones. Then you die and restart and die and restart and inch along a level until you eventually kill everyone in the right order and reach the end. It also kind of irks me, really, that you have to kill everyone. It is war, I get it, but stealth games are usually about sneaking instead of fighting almost every enemy you see. Another problem is that the game is glitchy, and besides having to be in exactly the right position to stealth kill an enemy (lots of inching around behind people until the button command appears on screen), but sometimes the “stealth” stuff doesn’t even work. Occasionally you’ll be standing in the shadows and the onscreen indicator shows you are hidden, yet an enemy will walk down a hallway and kill you anyway, or a dead soldier will be laying in full view and the other enemies don't even notice. The whole game is filled with inconsistencies and areas where stuff just doesn’t work the way it should. There are moments that are impressive and figuring things out and getting through a section is pretty satisfying, but there is so much frustration in between these moments that it just isn’t going to be worth it for most people.
Graphically, Velvet Assassin isn’t particularly impressive. The environments or character models aren’t anything special, but the lighting effects do stand out as being fairly good. It isn’t great looking, but it isn’t ugly, either.
Sound
The sound is pretty good with decent music, decent sound effects, and above average voice acting.
Bottom Line
All in all, Velvet Assassin just isn’t all that fun. If you are both a huge stealth fan and a big WWII buff, you’ll definitely get more out of it and enjoy it more than other people, but for everyone else it will be a struggle to find many redeeming qualities. My recommendation: Skip it.
