Velvet Assassin (Xbox 360)

Reviewed by Darren on July 18th, 2009

Velvet Assassin is primarily a stealth game in which you play the part of Violette Summer taking part in various missions during World War 2. Your trusty knife gets a real workout, being the best way to silently dispose of Nazis but curiously, the game also encourages some gunplay that really doesn't work in a game like this, but more on that later.

By now most of you will have read the reviews and know that Velvet Assassin was not exactly a darling of the critics. Review scores hovered mostly around the average mark with reviewers offering some praise but mostly criticism and lamenting the many poor design choices. Having just completed the game from beginning to end, I thought the reviews were mostly right but I enjoyed large parts of this game.

The real thrill of this game is lying in wait, watching the movements and patterns of the german guards and deciding how you'll take them down. Who will be first? Do I have time to take him out before being spotted by another guard returning from his rounds? Should I try to drag that body into hiding or leave it where it is to be found? It really is exciting to creep around and clear an entire area of Nazis while detection and death remain so close at hand.

But with the good, you also have to take the bad. Sometimes you have to wait a while for the guards to finish talking to each other before they continue their rounds giving you an opportunity to kill them. And if you die, you have to keep sitting through these same conversations over and over.
The missions are unrelated. When you finish one, the next is a completely new mission with no relevance to the one before (except for the last 2 missions of the game). I would have much preferred some sort of link to give the illusion that each mssion was a small part of a larger overall picture.
By finding enough artifacts, you can assign bonus points to improve certain abilites but It didn't appear to me as if upgrading my abilites was actually doing anything at all.
There are a few bugs in the game like guards getting caught up on the scenery, when you continue a game it should load the last saved checkpoint but instead loads a checkpoint from a few further saves back, dull A.I., guards who can sometimes see through walls etc.
My last comment about the flaws in this game has to do with the last couple of levels. This is a stealth game so why did the developers make gunplay such an important part of the final levels. You are given a machine gun and then strongly encouraged to use it but throughout this game, the stealth aspect was the fun part and the shooting part was not. So I ended up finishing the game having a distinctly bitter taste in my mouth because the final 2 levels of the game are EASILY the worst levels of the entire game.

In conclusion, Velvet Assassin is not a bad game but nor is it a classic addition to the stealth genre. I thought parts of the game were a helluva lot of fun but other parts like the final 2 levels just sucked! I couldn't recommend it as a full price title but to stealth fans I would certainly say check it out once it hits the bargain bins.