Velvet Assassin

Velvet Assassin uses the unlikely combination of a steely female lead character in a World War II setting, with a smattering of stealth combat thrown in.

Apparently inspired by the historical British secret agent Violette Szabo, you play as the fictional character Violette Summer, a captured agent who lies dying in hospital at the beginning of the game.

You guide her through her World War II career via a series of flashbacks, which mainly involve sneaking through the shadows and knifing Nazi soldiers in the back.

Guns occasionally enter the equation, but you can also whistle to draw an enemy’s attention, or use morphine (administered in your hospital bed), which lets you move at a lightning-fast pace during the flashback. You can also improve your combat skills by finding items scattered across every level.

The hospital cut-scenes and flashbacks have quality textures and realistic animations throughout, while the voice acting mostly sounds authentic.

Large sections of the game are frustrating, since it seems trial and error is sometimes essential to progress and because Violette dies after a single shot. Even worse, there is a lot of unnecessary repetition, since every time you die, you’ll have to restart from an earlier auto-save point which could be at the start of a level.

The levels are very linear; you can’t pick up dead enemies’ weapons – they disappear, probably to stop the game from being too easy – and you have to push waist-high objects aside rather than jump over them.

We expected an epic masterpiece of storytelling, given the history the game is based on, but the plot is rather thin. We think it would have been more touching if Violette Szabo’s actual war experiences had been retold, but these are ignored, leaving behind an unremarkable stealth-action game.

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