We all like surprises, well at least nothing bad happens at the end of it of course. Well here’s a surprise that I’m sure you will like and it’s called ‘Stolen’ from Blue 52 and published by Hip Games. You play as a female cat burglar named Anya Romanov and your mission is to infiltrate a high security museum. Of course there are sinister players in the background and all doesn’t go exactly as planned. Nevertheless, it’s a decent stealth games that encourages not to kill anyone. Plays in the vein of the Medal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell series, whilst not on par with them, it’s still a very enjoyable game to play besides its obvious console port issues.
As briefly explained above, the gameplay is all about stealth whilst not killing anyone. This places an extra challenge yet exciting one. Of course this is not unique however I really like that touch that your only option for any human opponents is to knock them out. Take note they eventually wake up and set off an alarm so it’s best to avoid this if you can. Also, once the alarm is set off, all the guards will whip out their torchlight so hiding in shadows is almost worthless. Yet, like most stealth games, they’ll eventually give up the search…sometimes (as this can bug out). Yet the game is all about stealing items from high tech places and the setting is in a dark futuristic metropolis called Forge City.
Obviously stealth plays an important part of the game and the darkness is your friend. So it’s a case of analysing the area and where the shadows lies and, if there are guards, monitoring their movements. Being set in a futuristic world, Anya will have a set of tools to assist her nabbing objects to increase her purse. Most gadgets are located in her dart gun and has a variety of uses like motion tracker to temporary disable security systems to noise distraction and so on.
Also, to break that ‘stealth’ ice, there are a variety of mini games that places a very nice diversion. Anya gets to pick locks (by matching up patterns), computer hacking (retracing a pattern on a 3x3 grid), pickpocketing (get close to a guard then a success / failure zone appears – it’ a matter of pressing the ‘e’ key on the success zone), steel cutting (tracing a pre-determined path in a circular motion), safe cracking (pressing left / right however don’t do this too fast otherwise you will fail) and the two coolest being rappelling and zip line (obviously inspired my Mission Impossible). Whilst these mini games are not exactly innovative, they do provide a great diversion nevertheless.
Anya herself has a lot of manoeuvres like roll, jump, shimmy, backflip and so on, to control her is quite difficult and does require a lot of practice. Other word, the game does suffer from consolitis. To give an example, when using the dart gun, you need to press ‘Q’ to ready it then press ‘E’ to shoot. You cannot use the left mouse button to shoot as that’s reserved for taking a photograph and the right mouse is reserved for…nothing. Though controls can be customised in the options menu, the morale of the story is it takes a couple of actions to do the most simplistic feat.
The game is viewed in third person and does change to first person when using the dart gun / taking photos. However, in both modes, the view can be limited as I feel the game is trying to emulate the view of the main character through her eyes. Also there are times where the camera angle is locked at an isometric viewpoint thus cause unnecessary aggravation as it makes is close to impossible to determine height. For example – can I roll underneath that electric fence? However, like all things in life, a little practice can ease the pain somewhat however will won’t be as smooth as, say Splinter Cell.
Another consolitis ‘feature’ is the checkpoint save system. Granted that it makes the gameplay more intense yet, because you can also save ‘anywhere’, it can cause confusion when loading up the game again. Basically, the checkpoint save can be used when you die in the game however, when booting up, it picks up from the last manual save point. Confused? Well, the easiest way to understand this is, when the game triggers a checkpoint save, manually save the game too.
Visually it’s not too bad. The game does well with playing around with shadows however the textures are not as detailed as I hoped for. Being in the future, I was hoping for flashing neon lights and plenty of cables lying about. However what we got instead was plenty of grey hues. The sound quality are also decent enough with nice sounding footsteps and background noises like the high pitch sound of wind rushing when shimmering outdoors at high elevation, the voice acting has issues to say the least. I guess you can, at least, understand what they are saying however the musical scores are quite decent, as expected from composer Ian Livingstone.
As far as the game’s length, well it depends upon whether you are going to rush it or play it the way it was designed – that is stealth. Why I have mentioned about rushing, Anya can take a fair bit of damage before dying and health packs are pretty common. Other word, Anya can run from a hail of bullets and pretty much shrug it off. This is not to say she’s immortal however, because the gameplay plays on stealth, I was expecting Anya to fall down very easily. This was not the case.
However, if you play the game as it was intended too, it’s still not a long game – maybe six to eight hours or so. However, the game does have an overall rating system for each mission and bases this on certain criteria like loot gathered, objectives completed, how many times you were spotted on so on. However the game and its manual doesn’t explain well enough as, for example, during the first mission, I achieved three As, three Bs and one C yet my overall rating is A. By the look of it, I believe it works on a weighting system like objectives weights a lot more than, say being spotted. Also you can unlock concept arts however I don’t know the criteria for this. To give you an example, I finished the game, all with an A rating and still didn’t unlock all of the artworks (I missed out about four of them).
Stolen, even though it certainly screams out ‘console port’, is not a bad game – it’s a pleasant surprise. Granted it has all of those ‘evil’ console features however, with a little practice, can lessen the frustration. Thankfully, the tool tip does appear as a gentle reminder of what key to press, I still enjoyed the game due to its myriad of features like lock picking, hacking, safe cracking and so on. Also, because it also have a decent amount of side missions, I really enjoyed the game as I did feel like a thief in a futuristic world. Well, that’s what the game was designed to do so, in my eyes, it did exactly that.