Velvet Assassin (Xbox 360)

• Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 1 review
• My rating: 0 stars

• Sort by: Most helpful Highest rating Lowest rating Most recent

• 5 stars

  More polish could have made this game a must have

  by Ascalz on May 2, 2009

  Pros: Very atmospheric. Steps away from the generic grizzled hero soldier seen in most WWII games.

  Cons: Lackluster AI, lack of control and depth

  Summary: Velvet Assassin is one of those rare games based in World War II that shy away from you being able to absorb a copious amount of bullets before dying. Velvet ...

  Read more

  Summary: Velvet Assassin is one of those rare games based in World War II that shy away from you being able to absorb a copious amount of bullets before dying. Velvet Assassin relies on stealth elements for you to accomplish your mission. You are Violette Summer, an agent sent into Nazi occupied Europe in order to throw a wrench into Hitler's war machine.
  
  I found the game fun but to a point.
  
  First of all, a golden opportunity was lost to make Violette easy to control. You'd think that in a game that relied this heavily on stealth, that Violette would be able to slide along walls and use her surrounding enviroment to her advantage.
  
  Sadly, its not meant to be. Violette has two forms of motion, walking and sneaking. The sneaking is rather simplistic in that you hit RB and she sneaks. No trying to hide your moving sounds. If you are standing in shadow you cannot be seen by the Germans unless they practically bump into you. Which brings me to another point, the AI.
  
  AI can make or break a game and in this case, it breaks it. The Germans are legendarily stupid. You whistle to draw their attention and they, like the family dog, come running to the spot you were standing. They stare at the spot you were occupying for a few seconds then turn and go about their business like nothing ever happened. The Germans also never seem to have a type of cohesion in how they operate. For example, in a room with two of them, I whistled. One followed it out of the room while the other stood there like nothing was going on. You'd think that if a guard heard something, he'd ask another guard to check it out with him.
  
  The simplicity of lure and/or sneak up on guard, knife him in the back gets rather old quickly.
  
  The graphics of Velvet Assassin are decent and the music helps draw you into the game, but unfortunately as mentioned earlier, the AI helps push you back out.
  
  One thing that I found infuriating about the game was Violette's inability to stab Germans from the front. You can lure a German to about anywhere with a trail of whistles and bread crumbs. But you'd better be able to get behind him to actually kill him with your kinfe. The only way you can knife someone from the front is if your in what I like to call the "Morphine Zone," which essentially means Violette injects herself with morphine, changes into her underwear and everything around her stops moving for a few seconds. However, your Morphine supply is limited and in all honesty I found this little gimmick to be mostly useless.
  
  Despite what I've said, I actually sort of like Velvet Assassin, it's trying something new in the World War II market which I'm certainly grateful for. But if your expecting a revolution in stealth gameplay, you'd better move on.

  Show less

See pricing