This is probably the first game I've reviewed on here without completing it, so if you think less of this review for that fact, I don't blame you. Why don't I plan on completing this game, well there's a few reasons.

The quickest way I could describe this game is as an early PS3 era budget title, a poor man's Hitman. The graphics of this world are all very ugly and muted. I thought maybe they were going for a Saboteur sorta black'n'white style, yet they do have color, but it's all been ran through the desaturation filter. Everything also looks like it's lathered in a film of grease. It wasn't real bad until the level I quit on. This game is just an ugly, ugly duckling.

But I can overlook ugly graphics for fun gameplay. Again, the game is very much a Hitman wanna-be. You pick your loadout before each mission, and you better pick right, because there's no way to restart a mission and change your gear. The game is based around social stealth, my surefire method is find a guard and take his uniform because that can get you into most places. Most of the gameplay is pretty clunky. There's not as great a range of possibilities as in Hitman, because there's not a lot of animations in this game. Most of the hits boil down to strangling the target with a piano wire. You have a spider sense to help you find guards, but it doesn't highlight most of the intractable objects, so it's hard to pick them out from the murk.

The henchmen AI isn't too bad really. They don't immediately aggro when you do something fishy, and it's easy to avoid their cone of vision. I guess the enemy AI is one of the high points of this game. Too bad it's hard to see them sometime among all the muted colors and shapes. When you do end up in a firefight, it's basically game over for you, if more than one guards involved. You've limited health, a standard of stealth games, but the gun mechanics aren't built for prolonged firefights, a lot of the controls are very laggy. There's also no hiding spots for you to wait out the alert.

And you better hope you saved recently too, because apparently no one told these developers what autosave or checkpoints are. Most of my game time was spent just going to the save menu.

The whole reason I tried this game was the story potential. I saw this game tucked away on a Gamestop shelf a year or so ago and thought it looked interesting. I saw it on PSN for $5 this week and decided to try it. I'm glad I only spent a fiver on it. I figured we'd get a neat little story of Cold War espionage, but not really. Sure it's set during the 60's and you play as a Russian spy working for the Americans, but most of the locations don't feel very 60s-ish. There's some diagetic music when you're near radios, but the game's soundtrack is bland techno beats that take me out of the time period even more. I was hoping for Cold War fun, but again, it's just a bland Hitman copy. And the whole reason your KGB agent is working with the CIA during the height of the Cold War is really odd. You aren't a rogue agent or a secret double agent, no the CIA needed some help tracking down a bunch of in-house conspirators and the KGB loaned them you. What?! I don't think the Reds would do that. Now, maybe the end of the story is that you actually are collecting intel for the Reds or you defect to the US, but that'll remain unknown to me.

The first half of the game is actually spent in WWII and the latter half is the promised Cold War setting. You spend the Cold War section hunting down crooked CIA officers and mobsters, now maybe this all culminates in the Kennedy Assassination? One of the conspiracies say the mafia may've been involved. The whole story is told through still screenshots with voice-overs, which reminds me of the old PS2 budget games. And I'm guessing this is made by a Russian developer, or European at least, because some of the written intros have some sentences that are oddly constructed. The voice actors all have good grammar though, but they sound exactly like the kinda VAs I've heard on a really good New Vegas mod. They aren't awful, but not professional either. The overall audio mixing in this game stinks. The actual levels are pretty well sounded, but they do have random phone rings that cut abruptly and the music restarts every time you pause the game. The cutscenes however are very quiet. Thank God the subtitles are permanently on because I couldn't hear anyone.

So, the level I ended up quitting on? I was infiltrating a Florida mansion in the blazing sun. The colors were at their ugliest, you were in the middle of an open yard, and it was near impossible to tell where the enemies were until they started shooting and then I was in a firefight with my pistol against Tommy guns.

All in all, I hate to crap on this game, because it's very much not a triple A studio, so it's unfair to expect a UbiSoft or Rockstar level of polish. Those sympathies can only go so far. I was willing to work with it on some of it's hiccups, but after the graphics seem to get worse and the Cold War setting was underutilized I had my fill.