It Cuts Like A Knife Because It Is

I picked Velvet Assassin because it looked like hardcore third-person stealth game, along the lines of Thief: Deadly Shadows. Except I'd be busy killing Nazis rather than stealing from people too stupid to guard their possessions better. The game certainly delivers on the Nazi killin', and it mostly delivers on the stealth.

Violette Summers is a British agent, and we guide her through several missions, some about disabling chemical weapons plants, others about highlighting submarine locations, but mostly about killing particularly nasty officials in the SS. It gradually becomes apparent Violette is remembering these missions in dreams, and the story eventually reaches her present circumstance, which is dire.

Most of each level involves sneaking from one shadow to another, figuring out the guards' patterns, and picking them off one at a time. If you can sneak up behind them, you're prompted to hit A, and automatic kill. Usually it involves her knife, but it can vary depending on circumstances. If they're in a room full of toxic fumes, she'll remove his gas mask and let him asphyxiate. If you're not having much success with that, there are other, less subtle ways to kill people. Explosive barrels, pools of fuel on the floor, pools of water (and convenient switches for turning on the electricity). If you can sneak up on someone, but want to take out multiple people at once, you can always try triggering their grenade. You can also just start shooting, but Violette, like Garrett, isn't well suited for being shot multiple times, so I'd avoid it if possible (which it isn't always).

The Nazis are like most guards in these sorts of games, even after they know you're there, they get bored eventually and go back to their patrols. Their peripheral vision is limited, but they can surprise you with their awareness occasionally. Depending on how patient you are, this could lead to a lot of hesitation, as you try to figure out whether that guard over there will see you if you sneak out to stab the guy in front of you. There's probably a way to handle most situations silently, depending on how willing you are to watch, and how lucky you are sneaking around to get in the proper position.  What's key is, the game plays fair with that. There's an outline of Violette in the lower left corner that acts as her health gauge. If it has a blue outline, you're safely concealed unless a Nazi gets really close to you. As long as you keep that in mind, you're fine. So that's nice. I love the stealth parts of the game (mostly).

It's not all stealth, though. Near the end of several levels, you find a locker with some larger gun. A shotgun, maybe even a machine gun. At which point stealth goes out the window. The guards finally realize you're there, and you have to blast your way out. Shooting is smooth (though reloading is a time consuming pain in the ass), and you can fire from your "sneak" crouch, so you can use cover, but it's a sharp shift in gameplay. I don't understand it myself, and it wasn't what I'd signed on for.

You see games sometimes where there's an element (driving, hand-to-hand combat, puzzles) shoehorned in. As though the designers didn't really want it, but felt they had to include it, so the controls don't feel natural and it doesn't mesh with the rest of the game. The combat in Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, for one example. That isn't the case here, possibly since shooting people is an option available even during the stealth parts, thanks to the magic of silencers.

I said I love most of the stealth parts, but there's the disguise option. In some levels, Violette finds a woman's SS uniform. There are closets and outhouses you can hide in, and you can use them to change into or out of the uniform. It's useful in theory if there happens to be a sniper or a lack of cover. The disguise can be seen through, though. This is is represented by a white bar across the bottom of the screen, which shrinks as Nazis get closer. Problem: The designers based it strictly off proximity, with no regard for the surroundings. I've nearly had my cover blown by a guard whose view of me was completely obscured by a truck, and also by a guard on the level below me in a cell block. Apparently he used x-ray vision to look through the metal walkway and determine Violette's undergarments were made with Egyptian cotton, which means she's obviously a British spy. Or something. In a most ridiculous circumstance, my cover was blown by a guard in a different room entirely. He had to walk down a hall, through a door, turn right, and walk through another door to reach the room I was in. Yet somehow he had known to investigate there.

The Saboteur has the disguise option, but they exercise a little common sense. If you're running through the grounds of a museum and a troop of Nazis drives by, they don't get suspicious if there's a 15-foot high wall between you. Why? Because they can't see you! The whole disguise thing is the worst part of the game. The parts where it turns into a shooter aren't my favorite, but the game gives you fair warning when it's going to happen. The disguises are still part of the stealth gameplay, but they're not done properly. The good news is, it only comes up as an option in 3 of the 12 missions.

Violette has something of a character arc over the course of the game. The farther into the game you get, the more personally disturbed and disgusted she gets with the Nazis' actions. She doesn't like them prior to that, but she's largely impersonal about her missions. She might take some pleasure in killing a particular officer, but it's largely about completing the mission. As things progress, the horror sinks in, and she gets a little more vengeful about it. Several of the missions have secret objectives and in one level, it is to kill every single Nazi in the level.

But there are repercussions for these actions and by the end, I'm not sure she isn't questioning whether she's accomplished anything whatsoever. Yeah, she's killed a lot of Nazis, but what good is it? It's always after those guys have killed lots of people. Now innocent people are dying horribly as reprisals for her actions. Killing the Nazis doesn't bring those people back. It's hard to tell how much of that really sank in with her, she seemed to have a nervous breakdown at the end*. That might not even be the point, as the end tells us she didn't properly finish the job on one of her targets (I knew that petrol tank in his hotel room was fishy).

* A side effect of all the morphine? Morphine is sort of Violette's version of Mario's Invincibility Star. Use a vial of it and the rest of the world becomes a off-white, slow-motion scene with flower petals blowing about, until it wears off, or you kill somebody.