Spycraft: The Great Game

Overview

You are Case Officer Thorn. Your mission: find an assassin who has killed a Russian presidential candidate and is thought to be after the President of the United States next. Put together with the help of William Colby (former director of the CIA) and Oleg Kalugin (former KGB Major General), this game is billed as a very realistic interpretation of what real-life case officers have to do. During the chase of this assassin, you will be taken off the track a few times to solve something else that is more important. The challenges aren’t all easy, some require a few days thinking if you don’t get it at first glance, and if you make too many wrong guesses you will get the boot from the case so it best to look at something for a long time.

Gameplay, Controls, Interface

Moving around in this game is a little like moving around a complex file system in a computer, going from directory to sub-directory to sub-directory… Cities are your main directories while buildings would be the next step down, then the rooms in them. There are short videos when you move from some places to the next. Most of the work you do solving the puzzles is done through your personal data assistant (PDA), and the work that you don’t use it for is reading. Reading is key to this game! Read everything. It may take you a half-hour, but you won’t be able to complete things that come up suddenly nearer the end unless you’ve read everything through. I liked the fact that I always saw videos from my point of view and never heard myself talk; that way I didn’t end up looking and sounding like someone else.

There is a combat portion of this game where you will shoot people from a first person point-of-view. Don’t get too excited; it’s nothing like Quake or even Doom, it’s a collection of stills where videos of bad guys are played within. Your mouse cursor is changed to a targeting reticle. When you shoot them, it switches to the corresponding video of that particular position falling down. If the video of the death doesn’t start fast enough, you may end up shooting the guy more than once.

Audio

The majority of the audio in the game is just that of the videos of people talking to you. For the little bit that isn’t videos (and for the video audio itself) it’s very good! When you begin playing this game, there is a gunshot sound effect that (if your speakers are turned up loud) will make you jump a little. The quality and realism of the audio is done to perfection.

System Requirements

486/DX2-66MHz, 8 MB RAM, 2X CD-ROM drive, 30MB hard disk space

Documentation

A card is included in the box that points out all the stuff within the normal views and is all the documentation you really need. If you need more, there is a help button in your PDA that will explain the current view.

Bottom Line

Spycraft is, as the name says, a great game. It gives what may be the real jobs of a real CIA case officer working on a case like the one in the game. Those jobs are made somewhat easier in the game, I’m sure. The game presented enough difficulty to last about a week playing at least an hour each day. Spycraft’s development was very detailed and was put together very well.