Death to spies: the Soviet Hitman game no-one knows about.

SMERSH

This is possibly the second game that has actually ran nicely when I loaded it up; straight into the proper resolution and up to max settings. Although, with that came bad news: Steam’s screenshot system broke, which is a huge shame, and this will be the first blog without screens to accompany it.

When I say this game is Soviet Hitman, it is a pretty spot on description of this game, all though certainly not a bad thing. You are a Spy for the Soviet organisation SMERSH, - coming from the Russian for Death to Spies - which was the USSR’s counter-intelligence agency during WWII created to combat Nazi spies attempting to infiltrate the Red Army; essentially an anti-spy agency, hence the name.

The game has a nice tutorial, set on a bootcamp style setting; you go through an assault course to learn about movement, shooting range for guns and grenades, - which are super tricky to throw precisely - and a little guard house part to teach to you the sneaking and taking out of enemies. It’s a pretty helpful tutorial that shows you everything you’d need to know to be able to get stuck in to the game.

Mission 1

So the first mission: I was tasked with gaining access to a Nazi army base, stealing some documents, and 'kidnapping' an SS officer.

Firstly I had to gain a Nazi uniform, lose my PPSh, and drive to the base in a truck; the game starts you off in a kind of large forest area, with a path up to a small Nazi camp. The road to the camp had a couple of patrols I had to avoid. The first couple were easy, but one kept catching me out - thanks to quicksaves it wasn't too much of an inconvenience - but I persevered and hid behind a tree at the right angle as to not be seen. Once I got to the small camp, I had to negotiate my way past a few guards, down into a bunker, and get myself a uniform; which I did by knocking out a guard and sticking super close to a wall. I pinched his uniform, and swapped my PPSh-41 for his Kar98k, got in the truck up top and drove away, with none of his Nazi friends any the wiser.

After driving my way past the earlier patrols, and up the road I arrived at the base and I ditched my truck next to some hangars and scouted the area out, checking my map where I needed to go. On the minimap I noticed a flashing blip on one of the Officers in the area, and realised he must be my target; so I stalk him around the base 'til he gets to an alleyway with a little side alley off of it, knock him out, and stow him back here. Unable to steal his uniform, I set off in search of more uniform, stealing one from an SS trooper, and a supposed officer, neither of which high enough in command to get me into the building with the documents. I finally find myself a high enough ranking officer to take out, steal the uniform, and steal me some documents. Unfortunately at this point, I alerted an unsuspecting female in the next room, she comes bursting in, and I had to shoot her with my silenced Tokarev; poor girl.

Next I realised I had just dumped my truck and the target and mostly forgot about them, so I rushed back to my truck and came up with a plan to move my unconscious, slightly overweight SS officer to the back of the truck. I returned to my alleyway, parked my truck in a manner so other Nazi soldiers would not be able to come along the alleyway, then crawled under, collected the Officer, stowed him in the back, and drove out the base, and all the way down to the exit, finishing the level; with minimal fuss I must admit, pretty good considering rarely could I finish anything in Hitman without some bloodshed. I am sorry for that helpless girl's family, but she drew her Luger, so there wasn't much for me to do.

Mission not 1

Next I load up the second mission, and boy, was this one different. I was present with a large area full of guards and buildings, some ruined, some fine. My first objective was to find and set free a target; this target was holed up in a building surrounded by Nazis and I had to get past them all. The only way to get past some of the guards was to find myself an officer’s uniform, something that I found to be impossible without a huge shootout. There were two officers on the map, both inside well guarded buildings I needed officer clearance to enter aswell. So really, I was at a loss from the beginning. After numerous attempts at luring guards away from said buildings, I had died for the last time, and said to myself “enough is a enough sir” and decided to write myself a blogpost.

So that was Death to Spies; a pretty good game, but let down by its insane difficulty - the internet tells me they all found it difficult too, by the way.

Unfortunately the game before this, Dawn of Magic, decided it wouldn’t run, so here we are.

Возрождение

Death Track is a pretty explanatory name for this game, you drive around tracks and there is death. It’s a racing game at its core, but you have guns on your car and you can, and should, destroy the other cars as you gain a place on them, and you gain currency for doing so. The game also has other things typical to vehicle destruction/racing games: nitrous, power-ups, extra weapons etc. There are also parts of the scenery you can destroy to gain currency as well; they may cause destruction to enemies too, but I am not entirely sure on this. With this currency you are able to purchase better cars and better upgrades in between races.

The game is set in a post apocalyptic world, and as an FMV newscast told me, these races are a televised, commercial thing set in ‘some of the biggest capital cities in the world’. All in all, it seems fairly reminiscent of Death Race 2000, but less dystopia and more WWIII inspired apocalyptica. These races are organised by a corporation seemingly fronted by a human version of a Hutt, and his consort of scantily clad ladies.

The FMV Newscast was pretty wonderful to behold too, because the FMV was clearly recorded in Russian, but they have dubbed it with English, of course, so it just looks hilarious to see this lady opening and closing her mouth with no regard for what am hearing. Also, everything is super blue, even her lips. Those crazy Russians.

That’s pretty much all there is to this game; I played through the first couple of races, won them by destroying a couple of the other racers, getting up front, then nitrousing my way to the end. blowing things up as I went.

The game did decide it didn’t like my secondary monitor, and got stuck in a similar cycle as I think AIM did; and then when I finally managed to load it up, I was greeted with some obnoxiously bad menu music that made me wish I hadn’t been able to get it to run.

That’s Death Track really, a bad rip off of Death Race but more Russian.

Desert Law, a game about deserts, and law.

Yo, Bred.

Upon loading the game and hitting new game, I was greeted with a cartoon strip that gave a little bit of story in a nice manner. The panels would show up on a timer so you had to read them one by one; or, you know, you could just skip them and get straight into the game.

Now, the game: it’s a post-apocalyptic RTS set in a desert, a similar aesthetic to Rage - I think, I didn’t actually play Rage. The map screen and the on screen UI seems to be exactly the same as in Cuban Missile Crisis which I guess is nice? At least I am familiar with it. And I guess 1C own the rights to these games so it’s not a problem. I’d try and work out what engine they run on, but no website on the planet has much documented on these games, which kind of sucks.

The game is a mixture of vehicular and infantry combat, but the vehicular side definitely seems to take precedent. You get proper characters as well as just units, and these characters can be levelled up in an RPG style manner, which is helpful as you’ll always be controlling at least one of them.

The missions I was given were all just roll over to this point with your units, kill anything on the way, and either kill units at the point, or meet with another person. The game would throw units at you occasionally, but you were always going to survive, as the AI seemed ok at attacking without me telling them to, just issuing an ‘attack whoever you see whilst travelling to here’ order. I never lost a unit, and only one became slightly injured, but I gained a mechanic character, and was able to heal up and continue without needing to worry about anything.

That was about it with this game really; it wasn’t particularly special, with the post-apocalyptic setting being its ISP I guess. The UI and controls were pretty basic, and there wasn’t much to drag you in and engross you, nothing bad though.

This one’s just a short one.

SAVE THE SCIENTISTS.

Here we have another old RTS, at least, I think it’s old. None of these games have Wikipedia pages for me to check. The game at least ran at native res, which was nice.

The game is pretty similar to Cuban Missile Crisis, which oddly came before, even though clearly should have come after. I guess those pesky Swede’s don’t know the alphabet? Anyway, the game is another War time RTS where you can play as the USSR or the Allies, which makes me assume it’s Cold War era? I’m not too sure.

The game isn’t as ‘in-depth’ as other RTS games, and has some more arcadey elements to it, but it’s still not particularly easy; I managed to get my arse handed to me on the first mission. You can control units of infantry and armour, and you need to take over settlements and wipe out the enemy. The game doesn’t have any options other than move or attack, which is kind of weird, but I think you can obtain some sort of power-up style upgrades further into the game.

Then the game dumped me into a weird direct control mode where I controlled a single tank and had to clear a map full of enemy tanks, infantry, and AT, and to no surprise I died fairly quickly.

The game looked alright, for a game that I would guess at being at least 7 years old; a cool style that allows it to stray away from any sort of fancy effects.

The game has terrible voice acting; the supposed Russian accent my captain has sounds like someone impersonating a Scotsman, poorly. The game also has some kinda nice music playing as you go through, slightly rocky with some violins and such; nothing amazing, but suited the game at least.

The game isn’t all too good. Admittedly, it’s one of the better games in the pack thus far, but that’s hardly saying something.

Finally, a game worth my time.

Echo?

This is one of the games I actually bought the pack for, so finally getting to play it has been great. I have played about 60% of the game so far, and whilst I am going to finish it, I felt I should write a blog as it has been a while since my last, and I feel I should keep ploughing through these games.

Now, if you know nothing of Cryostasis, firstly, you’re missing out big time, and secondly it’s a Ukrainian developed First-Person-Adventure-Horror game with numerous puzzles and occasional shooting; I think that’s a good way of describing it anyway.

You are Alexander Nesterov, a Russian Meteorologist who is supposed to board the North Wind, a Nuclear Icebreaker, somewhere near the North Pole, but finds it shipwrecked. You board the ship and set out to discover just what caused this.

The game has some really interesting gameplay concepts; the two big ones being body heat and Mental Echoes. In this game you don’t have a typical health meter like in most FPS games - you certainly don’t have regenerating health - but you do have a heat meter. As the game is set on a frozen ship, things are quite cold, and you need to stay as warm as you can; you do this by warming yourself on various heat sources: exposed lights, machinery, fire etc. Obviously when you’re an environment that’s colder than you are, your body temperature will decrease until you equal, and vice versa for when the room you’re in is warmer than you are.

Now, the more confusing of the two; Mental Echoes. You find dead crewmates all around the ship, with flashing red orbs on them, to let you know of course, and you can go back to the last minutes of their lives and can do what they did differently and consequently save their lives. This generally has a big difference to your surroundings in the present; generally opening up the path for you to continue. The game is pretty linear and you need to complete each of the mental echoes to continue with the game.

Now, to that occasional shooting I mentioned; some of the former crew have undergone some sort of ‘changes’ so to speak, essentially, they all want to kill you. You start the game with no weapons, save your firsts, but you accumulate some as you go along: a chain, an axe, a Mosin Nagant and more. Obviously the guns are of the same time period as the ship, and ‘cause of this the reload time are quite long, combined with sparse ammo, you really have to make every shot count. Thankfully, the enemies only take 3 bullets or so, or a couple of swings of your fist or the axe. The enemies also have similar weapons, so any disadvantage you face, the enemy does too.

The biggest draw to this game for me, whilst including a lot of the stuff with the enemies and weapons, if the atmosphere the game creates. It’s a horror game, and I mean the good kind of horror, not dumb jump-scares and silly things you get in most horror games and films, but actual horror. You are pretty fragile throughout the game, only taking a few bullets before you die, so you’re always worried about what will be next, along with the eerie-ness of the boat and the flashbacks, the game provides an actual scary atmosphere, comparable to Amnesia: the Dark Descent.

Gallery

I think I lasted maybe 7 minutes of this game, dear me.

Sheriff Bob :(

It’s like a real time action, turn based action strategy? I don’t know. You have turns, but you can move around in real time on your turn, and you run around and attack other things with really clunky controls. Oh, you also play as goddamn gorillas... CALLED SHERIFF BOB. I can’t tell if it’s aimed at children, or just immature adults, but it’s not very good.

You have to click the mouse to raise your weapon, and then again to attack. It’s not a very good way of attacking when the game is in real time. You can jump around, but it seems to serve no purpose.

You can run around a planet of sorts, mildly reminiscent of Super Mario Galaxy, and enemies appear, and you attack them, then they take turns, and attack you. Although when I played the enemy ran around doing nothing then missed with a projectile, it was pretty dumb.

You build up teams of dudes as well, but I didn’t get that far. I am probably a bad person for not actually playing much of this game, but I don’t care. Screw this game.

Gallery

Despite the name, the game is set post Cuban Missile Crisis, in a post nuclear world. I played through the tutorial, and the game is an RTS with a turn based map screen strategy part too, a bit like in Total War games, but the RTS bit is much more like a cross between Men of War and Company of Heroes.

Obyekt 279

You control your armies on the map screen, sending units to different sections to capture and to face off against enemy force. Then on the actual battlefield you control your individual armies in a similar way to most RTS, but with some Men of War esque functions; being able to control individual men in the units for example.

The game features four campaigns, USSR, the UK and US, France and Germany, and the PRC. I assume you face off against everyone else in these campaigns, but I am not sure, as I don’t have the time to play them all, unfortunately.

The tutorial leads you into battle in the North of Spain, as the USSR, southwest to Portugal, taking over land as you go. The first thing the game has you do is learn to blow things up with tanks, which is a pretty great intro if you ask me. The tanks controls mostly as you’d expect, you can set attack orders, and whether to attack on site when travelling etc, pretty basic RTS stuff.

Then you get some infantry, with which you use to take over a small village, although really, you use the tanks they give you part way through the tutorial. You can disband the units and control the units one by one, which is pretty cool.

This is probably the first game that seems like it’s worth playing through, but I don’t have time to play a seemingly huge RTS like this, not yet anyway. If I remember I shall come back to it later on.

A bit of a jump here today, Ascension to the Throne and BorderZone both failed to launch, and Brigade E5 is the predecessor to 7.62 - High Calibre, the game this started with, so I decided to skip that. So here we are at Classic Car Racing; a game about racing classic cars.

Steve

The game is pretty self explanatory to be honest, you race classic cars. Boot up the game and you’re greeted with a character selection -- I chose the nakedest lady obviously -- and a choice between simulation and arcade modes; I naturally chose simulation mode.

The game has a career mode, in which it gives you some money and you’re able to buy yourself a car and spend money on upgrades. You win races and gain more money, buy better cars, and win more races; pretty typical for a racing career mode. Obviously this game’s USP is the classic cars, but this is purely cosmetic, but a nice change, I think.

I started the first race, got about halfway through and realised that by simulation they meant try to turn and you spin out, especially when attempting to control it with the arrow keys; so I decided I’d give up and change it out to arcade mode.

Something that weirdly requires you to create a new profile; so I did just that , I chose the same nakedest lady and named her Steve and chose arcade mode. I then chose the same car, started the first race, and did not spin out at every turn. The game has a drift function in arcade mode, which basically comes into effect whenever you turn, but you can initiate it by turning then accelerating, which I believe is the way it usually happens in arcade racers? I don’t play them often.

That’s basically it for this game really, there’s not much more to it than that. I did a couple of races, won some credits, and got bored. The game is fine, but ultimately nothing special, thus the super short blog. But it’s ok, here’s a large picture of the nakedest lady.

Alien Shooter is a game about shooting aliens, lots and lots and lots of aliens, mostly ‘til they turn to goo.

Flashlight

There isn’t really much I feel I need to say about this game, the name sums it up perfectly, as does this screenshot.

The aim of the game is to shoot thousands of aliens and get through levels; it feels very like an isometric Serious Sam with spider looking enemies and less macho dudes. The first game is kinda basic in its approach, giving you merely a level to progress through and not die; whereas the second game -- Alien Shooter: Vengeance -- becomes more of an RPG, with voice acting and everything.

Unfortunately both games are only able to run at the high resolution of 1024*768 -- which is still pretty high compared to consoles; derp -- but then, this is a 2003 game, so I guess it’s to be expected, maybe. The low resolution doesn’t mean much though really, the game still looks ok, for a 2003 low-ass-budget isometric shooter anyway. The second game has some pretty nice dynamic shadows, which when half the game is set in dark rooms this is a pretty nice addition, especially when I am as big a fan of lighting effects as I am.

Speaking of 2003, this game had dubstep on the menu music, so for those of you who think dubstep in games is so super cool and new, you're an idiot. It also actual dubstep too, none of this new fangled HEAVY DROP BASS BRO stuff.

In the first game you gain cash throughout the level and are able to spend it during the interim on new guns, armour, and a couple of skill upgrades; whilst in the second game you gain money, which you use to buy guns, ammo, and armour, and you also accumulate exp which you’re able to spend on an actual set of skills: health, speed, strength, weapons classes etc.

Both games seem to stick to a similar way of chucking thousands of aliens at you: corridors. You can generally tell when there will be a new wave because you’ll enter a corridor of sorts, or the door in front of you will close abruptly. This was never as worrying as you’d think they would have you think, as you just hold down the trigger on your automatic rifle of choice, and occasionally back up, and you will defeat them all and come away mostly unscathed. It’s only when the arena of combat is widened that this game gets tricky, as the enemy can then get all around you which makes fighting them off harder; although, when there are health and ammo drops every 20 or so alien, it’s not that tough to stay alive.

The games aren’t too bad to be honest, but they do get a bit boring, as the combat isn’t too much more than spamming a trigger. Saying that, they are probably the better of the games I have played so far, if that actually is saying anything?

First check this.

Then, remember this?

So uh, yeah, these are are the same game, with different names :( Oh and A-Race runs at 1600*1200, Adrenalin wouldn't; so there's something.