TGS 2003 Spy Fiction Impressions

Sammy is showing off a playable version of Spy Fiction, a stealth-filled action game from a developer named Access Games, at the 2003 Tokyo Game Show. The game starts out with you picking an agent and taking that agent into a complex, where you must dodge the watchful eye of the guards while working with a series of military weapons and high-tech gadgets.

The game's opening sequences serve as a tutorial of sorts, designed to quickly acclimate you to your freshly infiltrated surroundings. Right off the bat you'll be trained on the fine art of not being seen and things you can do to fix situations where you've been spotted. You start out armed with a silenced pistol, which is helpful in tight situations. You also start the game out wearing an active camouflage suit. The science behind active camo is still catching up to the fiction, but the general idea is that you're practically invisible when you aren't moving. So if you duck behind something and stay still, you'll slowly disappear into the background. It isn't perfect, though, so nearby troopers can still see through your façade. But they can't see through the active camouflage's other trick quite so easily.

The other handy item in your inventory is a camera. The secret to the camera is that you use it in conjunction with your suit's active camo abilities. This is used to take photos of guards and essentially steal their uniform so that you can walk around undetected.

On the hand-to-hand combat side of things, the game's agents can punch and kick fairly well. The standard stealth tactics apply, so if you can roll up behind some unsuspecting guard, you can choke him out and lay him on the ground without making a sound.

Spy Fiction appears to have enough different stealth elements to be of interest to fans of the stealth genre, but how well all these elements come together and fit around a story will be the difference between an average game with some neat ideas and a great game that uses its ideas to the fullest. Spy Fiction is currently scheduled to come to Japan in December. A US release will follow shortly after.

See more of GameSpot's coverage of the 2003 Tokyo Game Show.