CounterSpy review: arms race

CounterSpy places you in the role of an agent of COUNTER, an apolitical spy organization whose simple goal is to prevent the planet from going poof. The biggest present threat: two major nations ("subtly" referred to as The Imperialist States and The Socialist Republic) are racing one another to be the first to launch a nuclear strike...on the moon! As a briefing message gravely states in prologue, "Our boffins calculate the combined detonation will knock the Moon into the gravitational pull of Earth. The ensuing Earth impact will extinguish all life on the planet."

The game's silly premise is tonally backed by 1960s aesthetics and jazz music. Films like Doctor No were definite inspirations and the game even opens with an animated, James Bond-style credit sequence. It's clear a lot of love was put into making sure that the art and audio matched the time period and the end result is spot-on and extremely impressive. The in-game graphics are equally slick, with a cel-shaded look that has a propaganda-poster vibe, albeit in 3D. The heroic spy and his foes (guards stationed in secret military bases within both nations) are animated incredibly well, calling to mind the precise movements of games like the original Prince of Persia or Out of this World.

Once you're done drooling over the incredible presentation values, though, CounterSpy starts to show its cracks.

This is particularly frustrating because the game is designed around scores and performance. The idea of a procedurally-generated spy game (the levels are crafted from randomly-selected rooms) that you could play "forever" is, at its core, awesome. But every time a guard bugged out or the game didn't act as it should, I felt cheated. The best, most polished games make you feel like you're always the one at fault. Instead, I got a buggy, frustrating two-hour quest that, as a reward, unlocks a new, harder series of buggy, frustrating levels.