Preview: Death to Spies 3

At the 1C Company’s recent annual press event, Another Night in Moscow, they showed off the latest in espionage action with the latest build of Death to Spies 3 on the Xbox 360. Set in the the incredibly tense Cold War period, you will be taking the reigns of Captain Strogov from the Soviet Russian counter-intelligence team SMERSH, which literally stands for “Death to Spies” in Russian. As an undercover spy, you will be infiltrating various areas in North America, Cuba and Europe. For being in such an early stage of development still, this stealth action title looked incredibly impressive. In this demo we played, we visited a 1962 New York police department.

If you haven’t played the previous Death to Spies games (both exclusively for PC currently), we will let you know that they were difficult games. A challenge is one thing, and usually welcome at that, but this was a whole ‘nother ball game. Luckily with Death to Spies 3, we were told that the difficulty has been lowered a bit to ease frustration and make it more welcoming to new players with it’s console debut. Now I must stress though that that does not mean it’s being “dumbed down” for all of you scoffing that console players are being treated with an insult here. We and a number of other critics had the chance to play Death to Spies 3, and it was by no means easy. It took a lot of strategy and tactic to maneuver and take down our enemies without being caught.The enemies were seemingly always on alert so I found myself constantly bringing up the map to make sure there were no other pigs on my tail to catch me in the act.

One false move and Strogov gets it. In other words, if you feel the need to take out the trash, do it when no one’s looking or around you at all; and you’ll definitely need to quickly hide the body in an unsuspecting location like a dusty armoire. Be careful too when you think no one’s looking, because I was strolling along the police parking garage in my well-deserved stolen police threads and took out an unsuspecting officer seemingly alone, when another cop came running after my silent takedown of his buddy. He had seen me through (what I thought was) the dirty glass window of his office somewhat nearby. Once you are detected or caught doing a dirty deed, you can try to run but it’s currently designed for you to be massacred on sight just about. When I asked about the damned-to-death when caught feature, one of the reps showing off the game told us that they may be working on adding a possible hiding technique/feature so that you can escape detection and continue your infiltration once the alert meter empties out again.

So let me actually share how my adventure went. I started off on the first floor of the New York police precinct as a normal civilian type of guy and everything was fine and dandy, but my goal was to get to a Russian traitor being held on the thing floor. Our first course of action was to find a lone officer and take him out, strip him and jack his uniform. At every turn I found myself bringing up the map, which takes over the whole screen, to see if the cop was truly alone or alert or if anyone could possibly find me suspicious. I hope that in the final version of the game they decide to include a mini map on-screen, even if they want to make it optional, because bringing it up constantly for players who need to be extremely cautious in a game like this can get tiring. So once I located my target, I took him out in a small room quietly and disposed of the body, then went upstairs to where the more alert detectives were wandering about. The next goal was to take out a detective to bypass the detectives guarding the third floor which houses the FBI agents. My prowess was not enough for them and my takedown of one of their brethren detectives got me caught and gunned down in a flash.

The controls are mostly context sensitive. You can hold the A button to run (which could cause the alert meter to rise if used at an inappropriate time), and you’ll use one button to peek through a deer before opening it where you can also turn on an alert sensor to see how alert the cop is before you bust in — he might just be asleep atop a box of fat free (ha) doughnuts. You don’t have to peek in first, but it’s definitely advised… Someone just “wandering” into the Police Captain’s office without purpose will surely raise the alert levels of any nearby enemies. Use the Y button to perform a silent takedown, just one final caution to keep all eyes off Strogov before you decide to get dirty. In the final version of Death to Spies 3, you’ll also have two other playable characters to manually switch between with different techniques and spy gear. I’m also looking forward to the little mini games that will be present like the ability to poison drinks to pawn off on some unsuspecting victim. So far it looks like a promising title for stealth action fans out there especially for 360 players. The 1C Company and development team Haggard Games are hoping to have the game ready for PC and Xbox 360 by the end of this year.