Genre: Action
Reviewed on: PC
Publisher: SouthPeak
Rating: 15+ (PEGI)
I wanted to love this. It’s a sneak-fest involving lots of Nazi throat slitting loosely based on the real-life story of heroic British agent Violet Szabo. So, it’s a about a Brit for a change and a not especially pneumatic woman for a change and it’s not all guns blazing for a change.
Great! Only it’s not great.
For a game about summary execution, it’s own execution is at times staggeringly poor.
There are moments when you pull off some awesome assassin stuff. Sneak round a corner, whistle to attract the guard, pull the pin on his grenade and watch him wander back to his mates oblivious to the fact he’s now a deadly bomb – bang! Three dead for no bullets. And brutally face-stabbing the Hun never gets old. But for every drop of joy there’s a bucket of tedious, repetitious, misery.
For every time you sneak round a corner and get all lethal, there are at least ten where you attract attention for no apparent reason and end up a bullet-riddled corpse. This leads to endless replays of long segments between saves, forcing you to memorise every second of the guards’ routines. Boring, not very assassin-y and not at all fun.
It’s also clunky, with none of the mastery of third person action shown in the Resident Evil series. At one minute you can climb boxes when the next you can’t. Low fences are impenetrable barriers, making the glued-to-the-rails nature of the action ever more apparent and seriously undermining Violet’s all action credentials.
The real Violet was captured, tortured and eventually murdered and cremated in a concentration camp by the Nazis at the ripe old age of 23 – a grim fate to be sure. But at least it spared her having to witness this ham-fisted, albeit occasionally inspired, botching of her larger than life adventures.
SCORE 5 / 10
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