Death to Spies

A worth-playing game if you enjoy stealth games in general. Pros: 1. Has decent social uniform sneaking, but also with a half decent stealth and distraction system (whistling and smoke pots, leaning jumping and vaulting), and a less jenky combat system then the older Hitman games. 2. Very open missions. You're given objectives and plopped into enemy territory. How you complete the objectives is entirely up to you, as long as you complete them to the letter. 3. As you progress through the missions you'll find that there are A LOT of npcs, and they converse with each-other and hang out in view, choose smart locations, and only infrequently present themselves as an easy stealth takedown target. You have to either lure npcs into blind spots with whistling and smoke pots and thrown knives, catch them at opportune moments while watching patterns, get a better uniform, or just plain avoid them. 4. The missions are all unique and interesting, with an ok attention to detail for a not-AAA game. 5. Pretty ok graphics for the time, and seems well optimized. It's no Crysis but they stick up pretty well even today. Cons: 1. Cheese. Sometimes to stealth and get that professional score at the end of a mission, you have to cheese the ai and level. Sometimes though, the ai will cheese you back just as hard. 2. The game provides a lot of neat weapons&explosives, but they're all hardly worth using if you're stealthing. Npcs do notice if you're wearing a big gun or backpack that are clearly not normal for the disguise, and using anything but muffled weapons is generally a bad idea. 3. Besides the mission intro movie and the occasional npc bark, there's barely any chatter at all. 4. It's not always clear what the developers intended you to do in a mission, leading to confusion and heavy save/load till you get it. 5. The npcs have some pretty distant view cones, and sometimes will spot a body through the most unlikely crack in a window out of the corner of their eye.

Death to Spies: Moment of Truth is the sequel to this one and is a decent if flawed espionage game. Unfortunately, the developers seemed to have used the first outing as their practice-run. The concept is there. Changing clothes to blend in, lock-picking, crawling, taking guys out silently...but there's just too many bugs which makes me wonder how it got as many positive reviews as it did. I frequently run into a bug which creates seemingly invisible barriers in front of doors, making the player character advance extremely slowly. This bug also often results in causing the camera and the player to become unsynced, so the player ends up moving sideways instead of where the camera is actually pointing. You might also attempt to jump onto to float in the area for many seconds which, as it turns out, is very suspicious to the enemies. I give it two stars because I was willing to go as far as the second level and who knows I might try again later but it's just simply too broken of a game to really succeed where it tries. The good news is that Death to Spies: Moment of Truth is a lot more polished so if you want this kind of experience, get that one, instead.

This game is very much like Hitman, you need to sneak around to achieve an objective, often by incapacitating enemies and wearing their cloths as a disguise. The controls are very similar and has that kind of feel. The game has some nice features, enemies will recognize items you carry to identify you. Example if you steal a german soldiers cloths but still have that russian rifle slung over your shoulder they will be alerted. It also treats disguises and actions a bit more liberally than Hitman. You can run, walk by and even bump into enemies that are "green" on the map (those that are "fooled by your outfit". While sometimes some enemies are always "red" (higher ranking officers etc) that will see through your current disguise. The bad part is the game is very linear. Very rarely do you feel rally free to accomplish a goal and there aren't very many choices or unique opportunities or scripted type events (like say turning off a generator or planting a bomb for a distraction). The story seems pretty weak and the voice acting and lip sync in the cunt scenes is pretty bad.

There are good ideas in the game and it can be very immersive, but the jankiness is too strong... On the positives I'd list the mechanics (changing clothes, alarms spreading throughout enemy camps in a 'natural' form, decent difficulty) and moderately interesting missions (I've played only 3 at the time of the review). As negatices my main problem is with some mechanics and the controls. Things like being forced to approach an enemy from behind if you want to punch them, added with only being able to do said attack (or any other stealth takedown) while moving extraordinarilly slow... this combo makes approaching enemies for stealthy takedowns extremelly delicate. Which sounds like a good idea, but there's no depth to this difficulty... it just turns into a boring mechanic which demans constant reloads... The action menu was another pain point, with it's awkward controls (involving pressing "e" and scrolling thru options which are shown in a tiny menu on the bottom corner of the screen). This gave the game a feeling of slugishness which goes against the need to act fast during stealthy missions. In the end you die alot... not because you had a bad strategy, but because you had trouble executing your plans given the game's controls.