How can a goddamn review of Velvet Assassin take me two weeks? I can not grasp the reason, but anyway, I don't think I really want to find out the reasons why writing a few measly lines can take an eternity. This review was rewritten at least four times, so what you'll see here is a short essay on why the game sucks dirty socks. I guess it's because the game is worse than any oneiric product released in recent years, that has stealth in it. People will probably disagree with me, and still find Velvet Assassin a half-decent game, but as a stealth game, it dissapoints every fan that worships this genre.

Read on to find out more... 
 

Oh great! World War 2 again! At least we should be glad that Velvet Assassin isn't a first person shooter. That would have really been a buzz kill. But still, just because a stealth game is set in that period in history, doesn't mean that greatness awaits us. On the contrary, Velvet Assassin manages what most mediocre stealth games manage to do, and that is: creating headaches and frustrations to the player. Being a fan of stealth games, the release of Velvet Assassin came into my life as a powerful kick in the balls. Okay, I'm not a pretentious prick. I don't expect every stealth game to reach Thief 2's greatness. I must admit I had a lot of fun with the Splinter Cell series, in fact, I consider Sam Fisher as a role model for post-modern stealth heroes, and all the Splinter Cell series (maybe except Pandora Tomorrow) as a beacon of greatness in the modern stealth genre. But enough about the greats, and let's talk about the rejects. Hello Violette Summers!

I've got a few bones to pick with this game, but the biggest 'bone' here is the crappy take on one of WW2s most tragic participants. The historical accuracy here is non-existent, in fact, if you manage to find any after a while, you'll soon realise that the developers defiled and desecrated the memory of Violette Szabo, the allied spy on whom Miss Summers is based. Violette Szabo only actively participated as a spy in the war for a year, afterwards she was captured by the Nazi forces, where she was repeatedly tortured, raped and ultimately, brutally murdered. If you want to honour a great soldier in the Second World War, you don't make a game about her, where, after backstabbing a few German troops, she gets to run around in a semi-transparent pink nightgown slashing throats in slow motion. But I'll get back on this subject later on. Miss Summers, puts the 'ass' in 'assasssin' (predictable pun, I know); she's depicted here as a smoking hot super-bad action G.I. Jane, that slices, dices, and eviscerates legions of Nazis while looking sexy in the meantime. The more-than-vulgar boxshot depicting Violette Summers' ass in tight black leather pants, is a bit of an insult as well, but I guess it was a marketing decision to get the young ones to spend their allowance on this game.

If we look past the blasphemous way a heroine is defiled here, we can see bits and pieces of gameplay that also have been raped by the developers. Okay, it's not incredibly bad, but it's so flawed, you'll want to take a few bites out of your keyboard. Everyone knows that stealth games rely on gameplay. Of course, if you add an awesome story to it, you can enter the history books, but, the back bone of a stealth game must rely in a fluid and well thought out gameplay. Velvet Assassin fails miserably here. The stealth mechanics, although functional, are so poorly implemented, that you'll think your advancement through the levels, is solely based on luck, and never on skill. 

But the most pressing issue of Velvet Assassin resides in the gameplay. How can something so bland be so annoying at the same damn time. First of all, as we all know, the majority of multiplatform games suffer from some control differences between the PC and consoles, obviously. Most PC versions of multiplatform games feel like some cheap ports due to their nauseating issues with the controls. Few developers actually get this issue right. Replay Studios didn't have the privilege to enter that category. The PC version feels extremely awkward, the controls don't feel responsive and most of all, the sensitivity and precision annoyances are way through the roof. Moving around, from shadow to shadow, keeping a low profile isn't THAT hard, but when shooting comes into play, you'll curse in your native and all foreign languages you know. And just to piss you off, Replay Studios highlights the issue of "this is a stealth game, if you don't get it right, you don't have any other option besides trial and error" by giving you a pesky little gun, while your enemies have automatic weapons. The only "get out of shit free" card is the morphine. It's such a retarded addition to gameplay, it just has to be bashed. This gimmick should be introduced in every stealth game from now on, just to fuck up the entire genre, in a short period of time. So, you have morphine, you inject it, and the world transforms into a peaceful but eerie place, where rose petals fall from the sky, while the sexy Violette, dressed just in her porno-PJs, slashes jugular veins. It's a clear 'WTF' moment, in which normal people that play Velvet Assassin will ask themselves "Was this inserted here as a joke, or as a bit of R-rated visuals to get the horny teenagers to get this?" And also, the ability to dress up as a German soldier seems a bit far off. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but people who played the first two Commandos games will see a rip-off here.

I almost forgot to view this game from a technical standpoint. Because there isn't any. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad-looking and especially not a bad sounding game, but graphics enter the "nothing special" category. I could nitpick about the ridiculous blue-ish purple tint that Violette has when she's in the confort of her shadows, but that's not even a pressing issue. The game looks good, like most current generation games. The sound however is pretty well done. The voice acting stands out especially. The wide range of voices used in the game give it a nice dose of credibility.

As I try to aproach a conclusion to this grumpy ramble, I realise that Velvet Assassin is a game, that, if you want to hate it, it can give you more than enough reasons, but as one game, in a market full of others, it's just a bland reiteration of things that were already done, and done better. At the beginning of this review I wanted to rate this game 1/5, because of the insult that it personifies regarding the stealth genre, but I'll add one point because it's functional. And considering the awful lot of games that have been released in the past 2-3 years, this 'feature' has transformed itself into a quality. It's pretty sad actually.

2/5