Velvet Assassin – a box of beauty with death

I have long lost my memory when exactly I happened to purchase Velvet Assasin in “Steam”. It seems to be 2014, if not earlier. All these years, the game fundamentally refused to open, without any mistake or launching processes related to the game. During this time, I managed to completely change both the equipment and the operating system – no changes. The game, in fact, many who refused to work, and there are guides at Steam, how all this can be fixed, but those decisions did not help me. I don’t know what prompted me to try again and where, in principle, I got such an persistent interest in the game that I don’t know anything about at all, but this time “Velvet Assasin”, as if in gratitude for many years of hopes, suddenly started and works almost without complaints. I don’t know who is responsible for bringing the Velvet Assasin store to a viable state – the publisher or “Steam” itself – but thanks to them I finally recognized this game, and fell in love, even though she, like an eccentric beauty, tried to brutally break with me.

“Velvet Assasin” has many root problems that can easily find a laconic explanation-the game was released on April 30, 2009, and on August 25, 2009 “Replay Studios, the game developer announced bankruptcy. It is obvious that the game was already finished on an inch, which resulted in, for example, completely unbalanced and non-conceived the latest levels, as well as the absence of any intelligible ending of the game. The plot “Velvet Assasin” also hardly falls under the definition of it, which could also become the result of a hasty assembly of the game together.

And even with the problems that incorrigibly mutilated it, “Velvet Assasin” is a wonderful video game, as outstanding as the time of its release and difficulties in development allowed.

The plot, as it is said, is really not in the game. There is a general exposition that allows you to find out that the game takes place in 1943, and entrust the British spy of Violetta under the management of the player, which conducts subversive activities against Nazi Germany, performing unrelated tasks in the enemy rear.

The plot feature of the “velvet killer” is the fact that in the manner of one of the parts of the “Heatman” all the missions of the game, except the last two, are the memories of the heroine lying in the coma, the circumstance of which connects together disparate episodes. Before each new mission there is a small Katszen, where still unconscious Violetta – whose name, if I am not mistaken, does not even sound in the game – hears how unfamiliar people decide her fate, arguing about the need to give out a spy of SS soldiers. This intrigue will not have the climax, it will end with the fact that Violetta will wake up very timely to the next episode and will face Nazi attack aircraft, without any reasonable cause and subsequent plot support. Even those two who persistently discussed the whole game on how to do with a spy, they will not take any participation in history in the end, except that the body of one of them can be found nearby. The game ends with an absolutely random scene, in which the girl falls from powerlessness and despair in front of the burning rural church, in which the Nazis drove the local residents shortly before that.

Assessing those scraps of the story that www.casino-seven.co.uk/ remained in the game, it can be assumed that the Nazis staged reprisals against the villagers precisely because of the cover of the main character on their territory, and one of the debaters, whom Violetta could have heard them on their trail,. It could be a grandiose dramatic moment, because the fault for what happened would lie on both a spy and the informer hoping to appease the Nazis. Moreover, before that, the heroine impassively deprived the life of another agent who fell into the hands of the Gestapo, so that the knowledge that had it had, could not harm anyone. Of course, the story told by the game should not have been broken down in a half -word, it should have had a more intelligible and logical epilogue, and the climax with the Church was supposed to be directed as emotionally strong, turning point for the heroine, and not as it looks like – some kind of stupid spontaneity. It is regrettable, but the plot in Velvet Assasin, with all the inclinations and the present cinematography, remained at the level of a concept that did not receive either a full presentation or adequate completion. Instead, he remained a set of short scripts about sabotage in the territories occupied by Germany.

The game has no plot, but there is an entourage. A lot of video games were involved in the representation of the attributes of Nazi Germany – the appearance of the Wehrmacht troops, the totalitarian Hitler ideology, the Nazi traction to inhuman atrocities and their same obsession with occultism and treasures. And I must say, “Velvet Assasin” does it better than many others. The game is completely devoid of any mystical background and the theater grotesque, instead of that enemies in the person of German soldiers are depicted here as reliable as required for the artistic tasks of the game. German officers, who mainly hunts Violetta, are unprincipled sadists who have earned their high posts with selfless devotion to the interests of the total war and countless crimes against humanity, at the same time, from dialogues of ordinary soldiers, one can hear that some of them unconditionally believe in their leader and his goals, while others relate to war with Irondespair, jokes, for which the vacation in the Gestapo relies, and someone is just worried about the family left in Cologne, which will bomb the allied aviation. Well, about whores, of course, they say, what else.

At the same time, the crimes of the Nazis in the game were filed without any pathetics and demonstrativeness, without hysteria and shudder before the savagery they created. Only after half of the game of Violetta is chosen in a destroyed city, in which, among other things, you can meet several people shot at the wall, a dead child lying on a broken stone clad, in the future it will be possible to find a family of an innkeeper, hung on a tree for communications with partisans – of course, there are all in the game, but these things are depicted without any accent on the emphasis onfor yourself, being something as terrible as it is also everyday for the world, bogged down in a fighter war for freedom. Violetta does not comment on this in any way – it is generally laconic, but periodically still shares replicas about the Nazi Zhizhvyers.

The exposition of cruelty is growing many times by the end of the game, when the heroine finds himself in the village of the village, which is also a kind of emotional escalation of history – because, as if mechanistic and everyday sometimes, the work of the spy far beyond the front line, this did not cancel the truth that monstrous things were happening somewhere nearby. “Velvet Assasin” remarkably conveys this mood of war, when the fighting becomes familiar duties, but it is not always possible to restrain horror.

“Velvet Assasin” with all graphic flaws, a game capable of being damn beautiful due to a juicy palette of colors and the general liveliness of the drawn environment. Unfortunately, most of the game takes place in bunkers and other basements, where there is nothing left of the riot of colors. The game in any case is good visually, more often due to the chosen style than thanks to the schedule as such. The feeling of light, warm and enveloping, accelerating the cold twilight of the musty German bastions, as if the game was painted with oil paints is remarkably conveyed here.

Violetta herself the heroine of charming appearance and type, practical and at the same time stylishly dressed, although her outfit is still purely cinematic and endlessly far from genuine spy vestments. The girl Violetta is a laconic, like Max Payne preferred to express herself with a metaphors language, a dry and restrained tone, behind which genuine emotions are hidden, primarily anger. Another feature is related with Max – if a retired coppered along the ditch of her fate always having a pacing of painkillers at hand, then Violetta prefers to accept morphine. And the fact of the very visual effect, which accompanies the use of morphine, pushes me to the idea that this feature also had to become a significant element of the plot and quality characterizing the heroine. Regrettable and expected, but in the game itself morphine does not bear any narrative value, being a purely gameplay element. But even so the main character of the game, her character and statements, to a considerable extent help to perceive the setting of “Velvet Assasin” reliable and detached -brown – even if not the plot, but the character creates proper mood to the artistic work.

No matter how hard he tried, I could not remember who the heroine of the game could be inspired and where I could see such a female image in other art works.

And finally, gameplay, by no means the last dignity of the game. However, it naturally has problems that are aggravated closer to the final part of the game. “Velvet Assasin” is a stealth explosion in the most literal sense of this definition – Violetta is as agile as a skill with weapons, and both of these skills will apply equally.

Stealth itself is simultaneously standard, and at the same time has a number of unique moments. The game, I must say, is very narrow and corridor, open spaces are almost not found here, but even under such conditions there are four types of stlax – stealth behind shelters, stealth in the grass, stealth in the shade and dressing. Everything is clear with Stals in the grass – we are sitting in the grass and the enemy does not see us, except that we need to move very slowly, otherwise the heroine will be found. Stealth behind shelters is also entirely what you expect from him. Stealth in the shade is much more interesting, especially since this is the main way to hide in the game. Here Violetta imitates Garrett from the “Thief” series, and rather from the 3rd part – as there, the enemy may not notice the protagonist located at the extended hand of the outstanding hand. Only if there were several levels of invisibility in “Thief”, then in the “velvet killer” there are only two of them – Violettes either see per kilometer or not seen in principle.

And one could say that this is damn stupid, but this is the conventionality of the video game, and in this case, its conditions additionally dictates a tiny left -handed leverage. But it looks sometimes absurd, because even being on the street, under a bright sunset sky, Violetta manages to be absolutely invisible, hiding in the shade under the trumped roof. The problem lies not in this mechanics itself, but in the fact that it works incorrectly, and visually far from always obvious where Violetta can really hide, but where only it seems that it can. Therefore, you have to focus more on the corresponding indicator, since in the case of the shadows of the unified rule for the player does not exist. It really brings problems a lot of problems, because you can quietly crawl out in sight in the shade of the fence, but you should get under an inch ray of light as you are immediately found and start to shoot. They kill the heroine very quickly, and usually nowhere to run, because it is always a restart from a control point.

There is another big problem with Stels – enemies here have very primitive movements routes, and at the same time extremely twisted. This is doubly problematic because the heroine crawls on bent legs unbearably slowly – only with complete pumping of invisibility, she will be able to overtake a German soldier walking a light gait. Therefore, often a situation arises when a soldier, reaching a very interesting wall, immediately decides to turn around and go back, and the spy and half of the right path to him has not yet crawled. At first, this state of affairs is discouraged, but you can learn to cope with this, again with the help of Violetta’s skills to merge with shadows even at noon in a clean field. The heroine also knows how to whistle and attract the attention of enemies, which I constantly forgot about the passage. The ability is useful, but it needs to be used carefully, because the excited enemy quickly goes to rapprochement, and the girl creeps down very slowly.