Alright, so I bought Velvet Assassin the other day. Watched the commercial, read the reviews, saw some gameplay – looked good…

So I sit down and start playing.. It starts out with you in some ditch next to a sewer or some shit. I move around a bit to get a feel for the controls (Silent Hill 2 meets Assassins Creed? Not a fun combo.).. Climb up the ladder, and head off to my first objective – kill some drunk guard – easy. Crouch down, sneak up and slice his throat – good to go. On to the next objective.. Over and over and over (And that’s about correct for the enemy part. Three? Whatever…) until I get to the bunker.

So by this time, I pretty much have the whole “crouch’n'kill” shit down, not too hard. So now I’ve come to a fence, I crawl under (they really should have just made it a cut scene..) and have to manually crawl through a 3 foot hole (maybe? It was short as fuck) to the bunker area. I go through the grass into the shed and grab a syringe of morphine and a ‘collectable’ (You have to collect these to level your skills up o.O?!), turn around and see the guard in front of the bunker door and the one on the roof. Shoot up some morphine and run at the guard by the door – slice, dead.

So I open the door and I’m pretty sure this is where the mission ended. I ended up with 800 points (You need 1,000 to level up one ‘star’ which is a skill point) and soldier because I missed some collectables I was supposed to pick up (I’m not even going to go into depth on how much the ranking/point system sucks in this game…). So the new mission starts, and I’m inside the bunker. Same ol’ shit – crouch’n'kill time! Except this time guards are harder to get to? Not really. The beginning guards are always alone, and eventually you get a gun (Silenced, how convenient) which makes taking guards out a fucking joke.

When you finally hit point where you get the “Whistle to draw a guard to you” message, it starts getting semi-interesting. You’ll find yourself in a couple rooms where you get non-roaming guards or short distance roamers. Head shoot the furthest one, shoot up some morphine and drop the second (There’s one room in the bunker where this is almost impossible, since killing someone removes the morphine while you get jumped by 3 guards after killing the first – hide behind the boxes next to the radio and head shot them as they peer around).

I got to the end of the bunker mission and turned the game off, as it was repetitive and boring. Anyone who rates or has rated this game on a number/start scale anything more than a one should not be allowed to review and rate video games. They either got paid to fucking rate it decently, or they’re just complete retards who never played a decent fucking FPS/Strategy. I understand where they were going with the game, and I digged the idea of being more hand to hand than weapon based fighting, but seriously… If you can’t keep your players intrigued through the first couple of missions, your game is a fucking fail.

The good..

  • The Concept. Maybe a different development team could have pulled it off.
  • Dead Bodies. Dragging is always nice when you’re an assassin, I mean, look at Hitman…

The bad..

  • The Graphics. Yeah, I realize the game’s based on WWII, but should the graphics be too? If it weren’t for the semi-decent character model clothing graphics, this would have been lower.
  • Whistling? Are you serious? What assassin besides the original fucking James Bond (He’s classified as a spy, but wtf ever. Same difference.) would whistle?
  • Menu Screen was cluttered as shit. Hard to navigate through any of it. And maybe I didn’t look hard enough, but where the fuck were the mission objective or even overview (Not the fucking movie…) while in-game?

The fucking hideous inbred child..

  • Movement… I can’t remember the last time I had to use both sticks to move a fucking character around.
  • Repetitive gameplay.. If you can’t fucking keep your audience captured in the first mission, why would we continue to play?

Alright, I’m done with this review.. I traded this game in for Dead Space and Fallout 3, so I’ll be reviewing those too next. So until then…

-Nito