For reasons I intend not to belabor, I'm not really qualified to say whether Velvet Assassin is a good game or not. However, I'm beginning to suspect that it is not a very good game. The story is unconventional, and it can be, at times, visually striking, but the writing is inconsistent and there are bugs everywhere.
Mostly, it's just minor graphical issues. If I get too close to a moveable box or certain map edges, the camera will start to shake and bounce, as if it can't quite turn enough. Once, I got sucked into a box I was meant to climb and had to reload a previous save. Another time, I failed to sneak past some guards, but when the game reloaded the checkpoint, the guards were gone - they just completely failed to load up.
Honestly, though, that sort of thing doesn't really bother me. None of the bugs I've encountered have been even half as annoying as the save file corruption I experienced in Fallout: New Vegas. The thing that annoys me most about this game is the shotgun. Sometimes, when you're near the end of a level and you have to fight a boss or make a quick escape, the game gives you a shotgun and expects you to just blast your way through the level . . . and it's freaking awesome.
Why can't I have the shotgun all the time? It's so much more effective than sneaking around and stabbing people in the back, as evinced by the fact that when I have it, it is almost never preferable to use stealth. Now, you'd think this might be a case of selection bias - of course the shotgun is more useful whenever you get it, because they only give it to you when you need to use it, but actually, I think that if you're only taking on one or two enemies at a time, it's even more useful.
But you know what, that's just me disagreeing with the fundamental premise of the game, so I'm going to shut up about it.
Instead, I'll talk about the writing. I said it was inconsistent before. The best part is probably the conversations you overhear between the Nazis who are unaware of your presence. These are never very deep, but they do imbue the random enemies with a certain degree of humanity and flesh out the world, so they're always welcome. On the other hand, Violette Summers is still a dull, generic character. I suppose it's a blow for gender equality, to have a female character who's as grizzled, aggressive, and affectless as any space marine.
I think it's a theme of the game - that the brutality of war makes me people brutal. The way that future-Violetta's hallucinations contrast with the action, showing her vulnerable and under threat by some sinister mystery men and juxtaposing that with gameplay where she is a virtual murder-machine creates a picture of a cycle of violence. Violetta's chickens are coming home to roost.
Of course, it kind of seems like the mystery men who are threatening future-Violetta might be Nazis, which means that if the game is playing out the way I think it is, it's casting Nazis in the role of arbiters of vengeance against a tainted hero, so it's more likely that these hallucinations are not making a greater thematic point, and only serve to stir up some classic spy-movie suspense. I'll have to wait and see which theory proves to be correct (assuming, that is, I don't flame out under the increasingly difficult stealth missions).
Yep. That game is WEIRD.
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