Gamertell

I had the opportunity to try Gamecock’s Velvet Assassin in an appropriately dark, curtained back room at this year’s PAX 08. After all, the game’s tagline is, “Battles are won on the fronts but wars are won in the shadows.”

In Velvet Assassin the protagonist is Violette Summer, a British secret agent in World War II Europe, who begins the game in a hospital in a comatose state as “death dances upon the ruin of her life”. 

The gameplay consists of flashbacks of former sabotage missions behind Nazi lines. Some of these missions are actually based on real-life events from World War II.

From the portion I played, you’ll spend a lot of time going through dark corridors armed with three weapons: a knife, a gun, and a rifle.  The player sometimes has the option of sneaking past enemies or coming up from behind and stabbing them, usually in the back of the head.  There was a lot of blood in the stab when Violet gets violent and, unless I am mistaken, she can stab right through a helmet.  There was naturally a lot of cheering from the small crowd at PAX when that happened.

For a little extra boost, Violet can use morphine, which creates a very odd looking world of slow time.  For some reason (hopefully other than to turn young boy players on) she goes from her skulking uniform to a shortie nightgown when she’s on a morphine trip. This is all she is wearing as she lies in a coma and I’m guessing that most of the game concentrates on how she got into that coma.

This game definitely has a Bioshock influence, despite the lack of super-science.  Corridors are always gritty, dark, with as little light as possible, and the morphine injection reminds me of Bioshock’s plasmids. 

Velvet Assassin is expected to be released in 2009 for the Xbox 360 and PC.

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