Shaken, not stirred…

I recently completed a little game called Counterspy on PSN.

This is an espionage-action 2D side-scrolling game with a heavy 1960’s influenced art style. The art style feels quiet cell shaded and reminds me heavily of Evil Genius (which was partly what drew me to playing it). I’ve got to say it’s a lot of fun.

The game play is mostly fast paced pick-up-and-play action and the levels are all fairly short and proceduraly generated, so you shouldn’t face the same military base twice (although you will notice similar sections).

Using cover allows you to get a 3D perspective on various areas, shooting down corridors to knock out security cameras or drop the guard at the back of the room minding his own business.

The game play is less run and gun and more stealth and plotting, well, before everything goes wrong and you need to shoot a lot of nameless goons in the face. I appreciate a game that doesn’t necessarily throw you down a single lane, but let’s you choose your gameplay style.

If you want to kick the door down and go in guns blazing, by all means – take a rocket launcher and blow up the base – but, if you want to try your hand at sneaking about and stealth killing it’s a lot of fun and way more challenging to get away with, you can always fall back to blasting your way through too.

The difficulty seems to scale quite well as you gather more information about the Soviets and/or Allies, with the game adding more enemies to the bases and creating more complex situations to solve. Ammo isn’t unlimited, but rather than preserving it (which isn’t really an option most of the time) you just need to make sure you come equipped with the right weaponry; there are ammo refill points on some levels (again – randomly generated) but that will only get you so far and although there’s no knife, you can snap necks or just punch the guards in the face.

The game is quite light-hearted and doesn’t take itself too seriously – there’s a silenced pistol you get early on called The Diplomatic Pistol – an appropriate name if I ever heard one.

Silenced pistols are always a good choice – use them.