Velvet Assassin

Review - Martin chalks up another one

We're supposed to believe that, in our despair-addled current climate, no game can be truly abysmal. Development costs are too high, goes the argument, and everything is so expensive that wholly inadequate design is a relic of the past: the E.T.'s, Shaq Fu's and Rise of the Robots's of the medium are a terrifying facet of yesteryear that modern sophistication has managed to defeat, just like smallpox and mullet haircuts. It's all nonsense, and Velvet Assassin proves it.

It's a game so ghastly it's actually at its worst when you're playing it; the human psyche's latent ability to repress genuine tragedy kicks in as soon as the disc goes back up on the shelf. From my current perspective, and with as much nostalgia as can possibly be afforded to such a game, Velvet Assassin is an amalgamation of gloomy, grey-shaped buildings and wretched corridors constructed from Nazis and misery.

In fact, when I was assigned Velvet Assassin I was tempted to reel off an e-mail to our benevolent editor and ask if I'd done anything wrong, or if I was being punished somehow. Its reputation certainly preceded it, so sliding it out of the jiffy bag felt very much like when I was nine and was given a whole batch of duff birthday presents even though I took the time, and effort, to remind everybody exactly what I wanted, only now all my grief was nicely consolidated into one manageable, disappointing DVD. Having played it I, like anyone who's been within fifty feet of a copy, can confirm that Velvet Assassin is awful.

It might not be the worst game ever made, but it will certainly sometimes feel like it when you're being forced to drag yourself from one bit of poorly designed level to another for the tenth time because the game is so bloody broken. There's a natural rush from chaining together several successive kills, but I'm almost entirely certain such short-lived joy made its way into the game by accident. It feels like absolutely no effort went into refining Velvet Assassin, and even the lousily written blurb is proof that you can, sometimes, judge something by its cover: skulking around its long, claustrophobic confines is an excruciatingly horrific experience. I sat down one evening, for what felt like years, and when I was at the point ready to staple my eyes together the in-game clock reminded me that I'd only spent one hour and forty seven minutes in this state of prolonged agony. It took another six hours to finish the game, which is like anguish cubed.

Velvet Assassin is based on real-life WWII spy Violet Szabo, apparently, although I doubt very much that she used to inject herself with morphine and run around in bullet-time sequences wearing a skimpy little nightie whilst occasionally hiding in wardrobes. The missions are an unconnected series of assassinations, the game presenting the greatest hits of the dour spy's artistically interpreted career: Violet on her deathbed and the game is told out from her dope-addled memories, her structured and orderly mind neatly relaying mission briefings via storyboards and maps. In an effort to refute claims of bad taste, although it is bad taste, they've renamed her Violet Summer, an especially apt choice when considering that you spend every single part of the game lurking around gloomy, boring-looking shady corridors. Apart from some bits which are outside and a bit orange. Still boring, though.

The idea is that it's a stealth game, which the developers seem to think gives them license to make everything completely asinine. You sneak from point to point, sticking your knife in the soft fleshy bits of whatever nasty Nazis get in your way, although most of the time they're just standing around talking about how much they want the war to be over and that they miss their wives. When you creep up behind something the screen goes red and a quick tap of the A button gives you a particularly unsatisfying death animation. Manoeuvring to make these kills viable is the key, naturally, and for at least the first fifteen minutes of the game it feels like Velvet Assassin might be a competent, if unremarkable, title.

When it all goes to plan, that is. Dying in Velvet Assassin is usually only your fault half of the time, with the game's inability to respect its own gameplay mechanics responsible for the other half. Because it's completely broken, of course.

It's a common sight, for instance, to see baddies flip around and empty a clip into your face even though the in-game lighting doohickey says you're completely hidden in shadow. Or that, for some reason, guards can see you because you fired a round of a silenced pistol despite the fact you're fifty feet away and completely hidden. The game will always make a slightly patronising "dong" noise when this happens, which means you're pretty much done for. All guards have the uncanny ability of being able to open fire from sixteen miles away with pinpoint accuracy; I can only assume that Hitler made all his troops graduate from the Martin Riggs firearm academy. So you die. Restart Checkpoint. Repeat. Die again. Restart Checkpoint. Repeat. Die. Quit to Dashboard.

It's all just one big, horrible combination of bad design choices, and it certainly doesn't help that it plays like a bad stealth game from the PSone-era. Outdated design is clearly a prominent focus. There are only two types of lock in the entire game, for instance: Rusty and Shiny. They'll become intimate acquaintances, too, as you're forced around every level in search of the promiscuous little sods. You crawl around and pick up some letters, collect valuable items that have been left about to level up your character - Violet can up her hardiness from wafer thin to papier-mch thin, for instance - and follow entirely linear levels around a prescribed path. This wouldn't actually be so bad if the path wasn't so frighteningly poor. A touch of stereotype blends in nicely if the core game is respectable, just look at X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but in Velvet Assassin it only serves to make a bad game feel worse.

The trouble with it is there's no single standout problem with Velvet Assassin, just a horrible juxtaposition of all kinds of terrible features that render the game nigh-unplayable. All the levels are boring, the script is flat, and the story is about as gripping as the second episode of a two-part ITV1 drama when you haven't watched the first. The dialog is a complete mess, brimming with supposedly-enigmatic lines like "everything before me was sharp and clear. I was sleepwalking and wide awake at the same time", which doesn't even make any sense to begin with. It's nonsense. It's all nonsense. And perhaps the king of presentational gaffes is that there's a cinematic where Violet escapes from the Nazis wearing a costume she hadn't been wearing for the entire level building up to the FMV climax.

Because it's customary for reviewers to say something nice, I'll mention that there's a level that starts well. You're sent to help assassinate three of your fellow soldiers that have been captured by the Gestapo, but even an intriguing start doesn't help when you're constantly reloading on the same bits with the same guards and the same game over screen every twelve seconds. The level also has an interesting bit where, near a guillotine, the red-tint slow-mo kill screen shows images of hanging corpses, but it's also got a sniping section where aiming doesn't seem to have any effect on the bullet's trajectory, and a room where you have to kill two guards only to have another two guards appear, magically out of the air, in a section that's seemingly impossible to do whilst remaining hidden. For every positive in Velvet Assassin, there are at least fifteen negatives.

This also brings us, nicely, to the shooting. If there was one special little god-awful part of Velvet Assassin, one feature that helped contribute a special kind of badness to the game, it would be the shooting. For a stealth game it forces you into a surprising amount of armed conflict, including the entirety of the last two levels, and you either get headshots with the fiddly, cumbersome aiming system or you get killed. It's all about the head; shoot someone in the heart and they'll simply reel backwards for a second before riddling you with holes. You'll also often find yourself having to kill two or more baddies, and the flimsy aiming means it's more a case of luck rather than skill. Just like the rest of the game, I suppose, but even more stomach-ejectingly terrible.

There are things that playing Velvet Assassin made me want to do, but none were more significant than my now-constant, unending desire to invent a time machine so I can travel back and warn my former self to never, ever play Velvet Assassin. Forget Violet's dilemma, after trudging through her tedious memories I almost found myself on my deathbed. Velvet Assassin is an excruciatingly painful, unappealing mess of a game, and its number of redeeming qualities can be counted on the stump of a leper's former arm: it ends.

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