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while.
You can't quickly and (or) effortlessly whip around a corner, take
a shot and pivot back to safety. You can't even shoot while crouching.
The gameplay is a step back from Splinter Cell and MGS2, which approaches
unforgivable. Why not include these things?
They did come up with some of their own ideas, though. Spy Fiction's
main thing (not quite a gimmick) is your ability to use one of your
items, the 3DA camera, to take other characters' identities. There
are two levels of dress-up, depending on how much of the target
is visible in the picture - clothing data only, with which your
spy's incredible bodysuit replicates the duds of the photographed
subject, and clothing and face data, with which you can reproduce
the subject's face and outfit. You can also acquire a subject's
voice through eavesdropping, although this is only useful when it's
actually listed in your mission objectives. Once you've done this,
you're all set to walk around in front of guards and checkpoints
and so on without fear, for the most part. If you collide with another
character or use one of your spy gadgets, though, you'll arouse
suspicion. If you get inspected too many times, you get discovered
and it's game over. The number of body search "lives" you have is
up next to the health bar, when you're in disguise.
Your super stealth action spy suit has another super stealth action
spy function, as well - if you crouch against a wall (most vertical
surfaces will do), you'll become invisible. As long as no one saw
you and you're not in the way of some guard's rounds, you're perfectly
safe.
Finally, you've got a bunch of gadgets at your disposal. There are
pen grenades, stick-on cameras, a climb-around-on-ceilings device
- even a bomb that looks like a bandage! A couple, like the Spider
Grip (ceiling climbing thing) and rappelling kit, are required at
times, while most of the rest you are free to use whenever you want.
I never used some of them (I only used one bandage bomb the whole
game, just so I could say I did), but it's certainly nicer to have
way too many items at your disposal than way too few. There are
also several guns scattered throughout the game, although really
they're only useful on the final bosses, as your stock starting
gun works very well.
Now, all of this comes together, mostly. Every level has the mission
objectives clearly outlined and they update as you progress. There
are very few points, if any, where you'll be wondering what you're
supposed to do next. Most of the missions boil down to going somewhere
to find an object or get a disguise, going somewhere to use the
object or disguise, and then going somewhere else. Often, you'll
have to find little objects or little disguises on your way to the
bigger goals. What counts is what you have to go through to carry
out the general formula.
In MGS, at least the way I play, it takes some studying of
guards' patterns to advance. Spy Fiction has almost none
of this. As you're in a disguise a lot of the time, a good part
of the game is less of a sneaking mission and more of a walk-through-hallways
mission, and it's usually pretty easy to avoid getting noticed.
There aren't really any ring-around-the-rosie-with-guards bits.
In these segments, the only tricky bit is changing clothes - you
can only do it, strangely enough, in specially marked stalls, dumpsters,
trash cans, barrels and lockers. While it makes sense gameplay-wise,
it doesn't make much sense game-wise. Why can't I change clothes
in this very dark, very out of the way corner? I mean, I'm technically
not even changing clothes - my spy suit is crazily reforming itself.
It's puzzling. You can change back into your spy gear at any time
by holding L1 and spazzing out on the thumbstick, which you'll need
to do to be able to jump and crawl through vents (for some reason
you can't perform such complex maneuvers while in disguise). Shouldn't
that be pretty much the same as changing into something else? This
again evokes the feeling of being limited by the game, which isn't
pleasant.
Also unpleasant is waiting for the activity that accompanies your
discovery to die down. This takes less time than in MGS2,
but it's somehow less tolerable and more boring. You'll usually
just be crouching against a wall, invisible, watching the enemy
soldiers walk right by you, so you'll be holding down L1 to make
sure you stay that way. Ninety percent of the time, there is zero
chance of being discovered - the only way to screw this up is to
plant yourself in one of the guard's beats or get seen going into
hiding. Sometimes, these two foibles won't even get you caught -
if a guard bumps into you but doesn't quite wisen up to what's going
on, he'll just fire off a couple random bursts in your direction.
If they don't hit you, you're home free, because the guard won't
investigate further. This can lead to an interesting loop, if you
let it. If you position yourself correctly, so that a guard will
stand in such a way as to be touching you just a tiny bit, you can
have him bump into you, fire shots that don't hit, bump, fire, bump,
fire, ad infinitum. I even got this to happen while I was perfectly
visible, though ostensibly hidden in a fern. So the A.I. isn't the
brightest, but that's easy to tell from the fact that there are
so few different discovery-triggered voice snippets. So every time,
or maybe one out of every two, your alert percentage gets down to
a certain level, you will hear the "maggot on the run!" sound byte.
Every time guards are searching for you, you will hear "no intruders
here!" several times. That's just how it goes, and it does get annoying.
The levels themselves are neat enough, although a couple are definitely
better than their mediocre brothers. The game is best when it breaks
free of its indoor environments and tosses you outside. It actually
introduces some platforming elements, and while this is an end to
which the controls are obviously not suited, they work well enough
that these segments are, surprisingly, some of the more enjoyable
ones. The outside area I'm speaking of starts off in a swamp'ish
jungle region, so you've also got the bonus of a MGS3 demo-like
setting for a while. And although you can't tranquilize little critters
or climb trees, you can hop around on logs in quicksand and snipe
annoying cameras from a platform perch. Other than this, the stages
range from a cathedral to an airship to a science lab, with not
much in between. The coolest level in the game, though, is a beast
- you work your way up from the tail end of a speeding train, ducking
and jumping to avoid incoming obstacles while fighting off bad guy
thugs. It doesn't last very long, but it's well thought-out and
enjoyable.
The combat, though, isn't. The shooting is point-and-click, minus
the point. Hold down the target button and a reticle will appear
on an enemy. Shoot until he's down. New target. Shoot some more.
Feel free to run around while doing this. Not too much skill involved
in the firefights, here. The first-person shooting is nothing new
- standard aiming there. The close quarters combat is bare, with
one button to hit for punch>punch>kick. It's frustrating because
once you start on your combo, you really can't change direction.
This becomes a problem when you go after bosses bare-handed and
when soldiers flocking around you scoot a little in their random
movements. Without the Toe Blade item, punching and kicking knock
your opponents out. After you've handled all the defenders who've
rushed to the scene, you can eliminate them for good with a grenade.
After taking care of prying eyes, you can deal with the other obstacles
- the villains in Spy Fiction are very fond of ineffective
infrared beam detector-deals. If you can't see the green box with
a blinking light to destroy, you'll theoretically have to jump or
roll around them. It is very possible, however, in some points,
to just barrel through, braving the sentry guns, and wait out the
alert status on the other side (most doors lock when your presence
is discovered). Another one of their favorite intruder-deterrents
is electricity-spouting squares. These are strategically placed
on ledges you have to hang from and scoot along and in vents you
have to crawl through. Each square has a pattern, a rhythm of zapping.
You simply watch, learn and time your movement accordingly. The
game introduces these as pigeon-zappers (to prevent the birds from
landing on the roof and ledges, for some reason), but the only pigeon
dumb enough to fly into one of these would have to be a dead pigeon
to begin with - especially the ones in the vents in the basements
of the buildings. So they're really spy-zappers, exclusively.
Spy Fiction does look pretty good, though. Most of the time.
Some of the textures could have been a bit larger resolution-wise,
and since you control the camera freely, it's not hard to notice
where the programmers skimped. There are also some problems with
shadows, occasionally, such as them being in nowhere near the right
place or suddenly becoming unexplainably pixellated. But the characters,
designed by the renowned Range Murata, are excellent, with a nice
number of polygons and a very smooth look. They've been animated
with lots of attention to detail - it's enjoyable to watch the box
attached to Sheila's belt bounce and shift as she walks or climbs
a ladder.
The game sounds alright as well, with music in appropriate places
in appropriate volume and in appropriate style. The voice acting
is passable, though sometimes overdramatic and exaggerated. One
bothersome factor, though - some sound effects are simply much to
loud. In the first level, for example, the howling of the wind packs
a bit more punch than it should, and to tone it down you have to
tone down the music as well. Aside from that, guns sound like guns
and grenades like grenades, and the only other thing amiss is that
your footsteps can also be disproportionately noisy.
It's a decent package, but it's brought down by a few more general
shortcomings. Some of the scenarios seem almost impossible, at first.
At one point, you have to perform a Mission Impossible-style drop.
Remember those infrared traps you'd encounter while moving on the
X/Y-planes? Surprise! In this activity you get to deal with them
on the Z-axis, timing your descents and position on the rope (vertical
or horizontal) to not even be grazed by a single one of the beams.
Oh, and you're timed! The boss battles are equally goofy, with one
seeming so cheap I almost didn't feel bad about taking one bad guy
down exploiting the melee combat and its convenient knockdown. I'm
also curious as to how this boss created dozens of simulcrae in
his image to take potshots at me from the sidelines - this wasn't
covered anywhere in the gameplan, and no one ever attempts to make
it fit in with the story or world.
I'll also venture to say that including the first level twice was
a dumb move. Yes - you play the first level first, and then you
play the first level last. Again. As in almost everything is exactly
the same. I kind of understand that the rest of the game was a flashback
(don't worry, that's not a spoiler, they tell you as much in the
mission briefing), but that doesn't mean I'm cool with repeating
the entire first level and having my character, in a cutscene, fall
for the same trick. This is a not-at-all veiled bid to simply add
more hours to the game. I clocked in at thirteen in my first runthrough,
but that's not counting all the time I lost in a death or discovery,
so be prepared to spend more than that. (Here would be a good time
to mention that, upon death, when you're given the options 'Keep
Playing' and 'Quit', if you choose 'Quit' you really will quit,
with no chance to save. Doh.) The game also seems to think it has
you more engrossed than you really are, and pulls a "Luke-I-am-your-father"
stunt from out of absolutely nowhere. Beating the game with each
character unlocks a second costume, and there is also an alternate
ending that can be achieved through beating the game multiple times.
Unfortunately, you probably won't want to bother.
Overall: 5.5/10
So, in the end, it's a fairly
mediocre game. Despite it's grabbing for attention by touting its
own single-name director (Swery [Hidetaka Suehiro], who worked on
the Last Blade games at SNK), it's no match for Kojima's
opus. After his last game before Spy Fiction, Swery "increased
his fighting spirit for the next project." This increase wasn't
enough to generate a pure winner in Spy Fiction, but if the
spirit keeps increasing, maybe the quality of the games will, too.
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