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Going into Velvet Assassin, I had my hopes up high for a quality stealth action game that would pull me back into the genre.  It had an interesting main character, a distinctive special mechanic to replace the oh-too-common “bullet time” and of course, killing Nazis.  After playing Velvet Assassin for several hours, I instead realized I got a Velvet Assassin that is full of repetition, overly strict stealth guidelines and a game that became more of a chore than a joy to play.

In Velvet Assassin, you play as Violette Summer, a British operative that has been injured and presumed dead behind enemy lines.  You play through the game in a series of flashbacks that have you remembering the missions that put you in your current predicament.

The character of Violette Summer is an interesting choice for a main character, as she is based on the real life exploits of British Special Operative Violet Szabo.  Szabo performed missions behind enemy lines for the British government until she was captured by the Nazis.  She was tortured, raped and interned at a German Concentration Camp, where she died in 1945 near the end of World War II.  Beyond the historical significance, Replay Studios also did not play up, or sexed up, the female part when designing the character.  She is not busty or playing up her female charm in Velvet Assassin.  It is a refreshing change of pace for a female lead, and one that more game companies should look at when casting a female lead.

As with most games in the stealth action genre, your goal in Velvet Assassin is to skulk around in the shadows, killing enemies when necessary, without alerting anyone that danger is near.  At first, I found the mechanics sound, through the first level and a half, and then problems started to occur.  The problem comes from the stealth being forced upon you to an annoying point.  You are constantly holding limited ammunition, and your weapon could not kill a fly at point range sometimes.  So if your cover is blown, death is normally eminent and swift, prompting you to reload from a checkpoint, many times over.   So as you play, you find yourself spending upwards of 20-30 minutes, just watching patrol patterns, planning your route through certain sections of a level, because as stated, a wrong move will just result in a reload as you cannot survive a sustained firefight.

The story of Velvet Assassin gives you enough to want to keep playing through the game, as you are presented with a grittier version of World War II.  In the intro along, you see bodies hanging from lightposts, bodies burning and the ugliness of war that is normally sanitized by other games covering WWII.  I found the missions varied, with levels taking place in unique locations.  At one point, you are in a town, trying to sneak into a cathedral, trying to kill a general that has killed scores of French Resistance fighters.  From there you move to a dock setting, where you are looking to move around to blow up a submarine.  If there was an item that Replay Studios nailed it was the story and the locations of Velvet Assassin.

Following in the rage of most shooters, there is a “bullet time” mode in Velvet Assassin, but it is rather cool and fits into the mold of the gameplay quite nicely.  Since you are reliving these missions from a hospital bed, heavily sedated, you find packs of morphine in the game.  With these pickups, you can use them to freeze time, allowing you to attack a guard that might be causing you problems to sneak around.  It is a different way to handle the “bullet time” mechanic without feeling awkward.  Kudos to Replay for deciding to use morphine, as a lot of developers would shy away from having real world drugs in their game.

While Velvet Assassin has decided to be strictly focused on making you use stealth over action, it does not help its case by having oddly spaced checkpoints.  There are some sections of the game where you seem to go for quite some time, working through several sets of enemies, only to die and have to go back 20 minutes in your game.  They are not physically far apart, but the fact that you have to slowly, and methodically through a level, a death can lose you a chunk of gameplay, adding to the already high frustration level.  You will be looking for a “save anywhere” function very early into the game after the 20^th time you end up dying and getting sent back to a checkpoint in an area far away from your current point.

There is no multiplayer or co-op to speak of in this game, with the only replay value coming from collecting special items on each level.  While the story is interesting enough to warrant the lack of multiplayer or co-op, it is a mode that would have been nice to break up long stretches of repetitive gameplay in the single player game.

Replay Studios set out to create a hardcore stealth action thriller with some basis in reality.  They succeeded with that, but at the expense of any sort of joy with Velvet Assassin.  It might be an enjoyable rental at best, but only if you don’t mind repeating yourself again, and again, and again and again.  Velvet Assassin gets 2 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.
Check out Velvet Assassin and other PC reviews at Test Freaks.