| Deleted User | Ok. Considering it take me eternity to write a sentence correctly, some part of this review will be short and some may be totally ununderstandable :-/
Spycraft is one of those games from the era of FMV. It puts you in the role of a CIA agent who rapidly become the center point of a planetary conspiration against the president of the united state. Very ambitious hein? hummmm. At least I like the X-files ???
With older games, technical specifications are importants so:
playable on Windows (I use 98SE) in 640x480 and 16bits colors; the taskbar must not be set on "always visible". Installation procedure flawless.
I got this game a while ago in a used-games bin, remembering it got the "adventure game of the year" title in a french gaming mag -before GK2...that's big .
However, I admit that the "You are the cop, now let's go shoot bad guys" mentality is not my thing and it was endlessly waiting in my closet, or the game cemetary. But reading some posts here about it (good but short they said), I decided to give it a try (I have NO problems with short games you see).
The beginning is conventionnal for that kind of intrigue : the meeting with the boss, the training...The game is first person point of view and is build excusively of FMV (average quality, for NOW), non-moving pictures of situations (especially offices) and the choose-your-destination screen. For the other 50% of playtime, you are using you PDA (personal database eehhh -laptop): receiving e-mails, video conference or accessing "intelligence report", etc.
Wow, spending time on a computer, on my computer, that's niiiiiice :-/. Not very enthousiast about it. Ok, where was I ? yes, meeting with boss, training, shooting exercice in the woods......Patlaaaok! Your training teacher, who was the CIA leader of your group, get a bullet in the head. Result, you're put in charge of the team...From now on, the game start the engine and accelerate the pace right into an unbelievably twisted storyline leading you to various countries and asking for an incredible array of task for clues. Those include photo searching, tape analysis, chinese spy torture... (oh, I'm gonna put this in the "naughty things" tread right after this )
Very original indeed!
The difficulty is medium and the game offers a lot of non-linearity and alternate solutions (by this I mean the "shoot" or "talk" ways). It always include a descriptive and historical documentation about the tools used, like the Kennedy Association Tool -KAT.
That brings me to the down sides: the game don't include subtitles and the dialogues contains evidently a
lot of names, technical terms and abreviations. For a person not having english as his first language, the thing may gets difficult to follow...
"Today, president Coliknypov ask for the SVU to stop the END with the PEG blablabla... ??? :-/ :'("
Also, the game require some disk swapping, at least when you don't know where to go (USA-cd1, Russia-cd2 and other-cd3) and need CD-1 to start the game, but I've seen worst . Oh and for those who cares about that, it's a little short.
The only bother about the story is the American Power, USA rules the world state-of-mind this product overflow with. The conclusions (the two of them) are totally ridiculous in that way, but I'm getting political here... sorry.
In brief,
on the plus side:
-interesting and complex storyline
-excitings and original puzzles
-FMV and good acting
-non-linearity and alternate solutions
on the negative side:
-disk swapping
-no subtitles
-a bit short
-the "american rules" irritate me
-saving the president just a joke hihihiiiii
A really nice unexpected and original adventure game you should try.
Tired now. Stop writing.
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