What do you get if you make a sneaky-assassin World War II era Metal Gear/Splinter Cell/Hitman-type game with an upper class girly English heroine instead of smelly old Solid Snake, Sam Fisher or Agent 47? Only Velvet Assassin, that’s all. You take on the role of Violette Summer as she goes behind enemy lines to thwart the German war machine. The game shares many similarities with the aforementioned Splinter Gear Solid Cell, with hint of Hitman mixed in.

The haunting story is told in a series of surreal flashbacks as terribly posh, MI6 operative and femme fatale Violette Summer lies comatose in a hospital bed after she gets careless whilst completing a mission and is hit by a sniper’s bullet. Between Violette’s memories of past missions (that’s the parts you play) she hears two French resistance men discussing what they should do with her; save her and protect her, or kill her in her sleep or hand her over to the Nazis and a horrible fate. Vials of painkilling morphine are strewn on Violette’s bed, and when you find a vial of morphine in game it can be used as a sort of ‘bullet time panic button’, to either give you the time to escape after being discovered, or just to get behind and finish off an enemy who may have been alerted to your presence.

There’s no Metal Gear-style mini map with the patrolling enemies’ line of sight cones clearly indicated, so you have to be able to see where the enemies are, and which way they’re facing, and due to some clever level design, there’s always some accessible spot from which you can observe what all the enemies in the vicinity are doing. For gameplay purposes to make all this sneaking around possible, the enemy guards are blind as bats, and at times the things you can get away with seem daft, especially with regard to hiding dead bodies, but when alerted the enemy are aggressive and lethal, so the game always manages to conjure up a good, tense atmosphere, aided more than a little by some excellent sound. Sneaking up on so many German soldiers means you'll eavesdrop on a lot of conversations, and plenty of them aren't happy with the way the war is going. You'll feel like killing a lot of them simply because of the song that so many of them sing; I have no idea what it is (it's not Lili Marlene) but it's the same voice sample singing it over and over again in area after area, and in a game with so much varied dialogue it rather lets the side down.

The difficulty can be set to “Normal” for less experienced stealth action players and “Agent” for Metal Gear and Splinter Cell veterans. Unfortunately all turning the difficulty to Agent seems to do is make the German soldiers bullet resistant, so they’ll take 3 or more rounds from Violette’s silenced pistols before they drop. It’s a silly and lazy way of making the game more difficult. The game allows Violette to blend in when she acquires a female-SS uniform. She can change her attire at pre-defined points (usually wardrobes) in the game. When wearing the SS garb guards will not identify her as a threat unless she gets too close to them, or she performs a suspicious action - such as aiming a gun at them or running around like a loony.

Ah yes , when it comes to killing Germans soldiers quietly Violette is in a class of her own, and just by sneaking up behind them and pressing ‘A’ she’ll stab ‘n’ hack them to death in a number of preset ways. Sadly you don’t get to decide how she stabs them and animations are performed randomly, but needless to say there are a few variations and a lot of Nazis get a combat knife right where the sun doesn’t shine. It was interesting to see that later on in the game having seen some of the horrors perpetrated by the German invaders Violette seems to “lose it” a bit, and stabs a few victims in a frenzied, psycho kind of way – and who could blame her? You can also use some set piece traps in certain places, like shooting puddles of oil to burn an unsuspecting guard to death, releasing gas to poison them, electrifying puddles of water to frazzle them or sneakily pull the pin on a guard’s grenade and retreat to a safe distance, hopefully timing it right and catching his buddies in the blast – it’s a nice touch, but the resulting wimpy explosion should have been more violent and gory. You can even whistle to lure a guard to a secluded area and jump him.

Velvet Assassin is a quality story told in a unique way, I can see it being made into a movie starring maybe Kate Winslet or Cate Blanchett (hopefully not directed by Uwe bloody Boll though). The game engine looks less than state of the art and basic at times but gives the game a dreamy (or nightmarish) look that suits the subject matter perfectly. Kudos to the German developers Replay Studios for broaching a subject that can’t have been easy for them - for all sorts of reasons, and making a pretty decent addition to the stealth genre.