Smersh. No, it's not the phonetic rendering of a sound effect - rather, it's Russian for the phrase Death to Spies. As well as being a game in development by Haggard Games, this was the name given to a group of counterintelligence departments within the World War II Soviet army. That said, our interest is firmly with the game - I'm very happy to leave the spying and counter-spying to the professionals.
In Death to Spies, the player takes on the role of a World War II era agent with the Soviet counterintelligence services. Your missions involve assassinations, kidnappings, sabotage and information-gathering, and your operations take place behind enemy lines. As the German military aren't known for welcoming Russian agents into their bases of operation, your training includes infiltration and stealth techniques, and your arsenal includes such playthings as strangling cords and silenced revolvers.
The controls and view are both in the third-person shooter milieu: mouse movement to look around, left click to shoot, WASD to move and number keys to switch weapons. There are also some departures from this norm, which set Death to Spies clearly outside of the shooter genre. For example, instead of scrolling through a weapons list, the mouse wheel moves the player character between the standing, crouching and prone states. Warnings are given when the player is visible to the enemy, or is wearing a combination of clothing and equipment which would make the enemy suspicious. The context menu which appears when standing by a corpse invites the player to set a trap, to move the body or to change into the clothes of the dearly departed. Wartime etiquette at its finest.
The game missions are based on historical events, and the settings, locations, weaponry and vehicles are all authentic to the period and location. The missions I played revolved around assassination: infiltrate a location, dispatch a potentate or two, and make a quiet exit. The actual assassination is the easy bit: getting in and out is a little more involved. Fortunately, the locals are able (if unwilling) to help you with this task. If you're able to incapacitate or kill an enemy without damaging or staining their clothes, you can then disguise yourself with their uniform. That won't fool everyone (officers tend to be a little brighter than your average squaddie), but it's certainly a start. Once you're able to move more freely, careful manoeuvring and the occasional tug of the strangling cord will get you where you need to go.
Obviously, enemy awareness is key: once you’ve been spotted, your life is likely to become very interesting indeed in a short space of time. Ensuring that this doesn’t happen will do wonders for the length of your career as counterintelligence agent. Two key mechanisms aid you in this: firstly, alerts across the top-middle of the screen warn when you’re about to be spotted, prompting a quick scrabble for cover. Secondly, and more usefully for tactical planning, a minimap view is available, displaying your location relative to the targets and to the guards. Your enemies line of sight is also visible on the minimap – a little unrealistic, perhaps, but a much-appreciated boon when trying to plot a path to your next victim.
The art style is realistic, not cartoony, and the art stays true to the setting. The graphics engine does a good job of presenting the art: crisp textures and detailed models are the order of the day. Not being a sci-fi title, there's not much call for flashy effects, but the visuals communicate the state of the game clearly and they look good - and I'm very happy with that.
Ill confess that I found the preview build rather challenging. Is this a bad thing? That all depends on your point of view. This is one of those games where taking a few moments to work on a strategy will serve you much, much better than running in all guns blazing (figuratively or literally) and trying to play by the seat of your pants. Stealth and sneakiness really are key in this game: I found that as soon as I pulled a gun in anger, I'd already lost the mission. When I slowed down and figured that out, I found myself having a lot more fun.
As I'm currently living off a student budget, my recent purchases tend to be from the various budget ranges of older titles: I'm more likely to be found playing Quake II or the original Unreal Tournament than Thief III or FarCry. I'll probably make an exception for Doom 3, though. (For the record, I did try Doom 3, and wasn't very impressed. Thief III has made it to the budget range here in the UK, and one day I'll play it. Perhaps after I've updated this profile properly...)
I enjoy online games, but I prefer the persistent world offered by the MMORPGs to the competitive environment of the CounterStrike servers. I've a feeling too many years of leisurely RPG playing have ruined my shooter reflexes; needless to say, I tend to end up on the tail end of the scoreboards in online FPS games. That said, I enjoy the competitiveness of multiplayer gaming, but prefer the face-to-face encounters of LAN gaming to the anonymity of the public servers.
