Stolen Review

Now, if you take really good care, you can sneak up behind a guard and steal their pants off them. Sometimes you'll find chewing gums, sometimes you'll find security cards giving you access to specific zones. What made this game really irritating was the fact that many things did not make sense. I was able to sneak up to a guard while he was fast asleep and search him thoroughly. Hey, who the fuck hired *you* as a guard? My grandma would do a better job. And she thinks the Germans won the war.

Couldn't we just blast the damn door open and kill everyone in sight?

Maybe I should just drop on them and knock them down. It's not something I do for everyone, anyway.

To make sure you'll avoid the guards' attention, you can always check your meter, which informs you how loud or visible you are at the moment. Most of the time, the game takes place in rather dark surroundings, so even the lightened rooms have several dark spots ideal for hiding. In order to avoid the guards and security systems, you'll have to take care of every detail, most of which aren't visible in the dark. Luckily, thanks to your hi-tech goggles, you are granted night vision, and the first-look perspective allows you to zoom in and out and thus notice things, which would otherwise stay unnoticed. This view is also used when shooting, so it gives the game quite a realistic feel. On the other hand, the realistic aspect of the game is somewhat ruined by the stupidity of guards and the sometimes unpredictable behavior of security devices. What also brings the game down is the sometimes-awkward way in which Anya moves, which makes certain acrobatics and crawling flat against the walls difficult. Anya seems to be a bit wooden, which is not a good premise for an acrobat, and while this doesn't stop her from swinging on poles and jumping from platform to platform, it sometimes makes performing these moves unnecessarily annoying. This could be blamed on the camera, which sometimes wanders off, leaving you to wonder what the fuck is going on. The camera is prone to disappearing behind walls or giving you a see-through perspective of your character, which is nasty given you're fighting a guard standing next to the wall. On several different occasions, the camera stuck in the worst place possible when I was supposed to make a leap onto a platform, so it cost me a lot of nerves to replay the last segment of the game because I didn't bother to save my progress.

Apart from the irksome camera and the stiff animation, Stolen suffers from a certain number of bugs, which are neither that frequent nor irritating, but still mar the gaming experience to a degree. Anya's shadow sometimes dissolves into the background, and the mini-games are at times impossible to solve, as the lock you are trying to unlock isn't visible. The cure for this is restarting the game, and god knows I'm a very impatient person.

Visually, Stolen doesn't look that bad, but it doesn't look that good, either. The game has been in production for a few years and, according to the lead designer Jonathan Biddle, it has lived through several various incarnations. The initial project was rather ambitious as it required a lot of hardware resources, which weren't available at the time, so the developer gave up the idea, and went on to do a major overhaul. "When we first started Stolen, Splinter Cell didn't exist, and Metal Gear Solid 2 hadn't even been shown yet," says Biddle. "The early designs of Stolen had a full, free-roaming living city in which you could break into any building you wanted, steal whatever you could find, and sell it to the highest bidder. Like a classic heist movie, you'd stake out buildings from afar, investigate the security systems' weaknesses with your contacts, influence or manipulate the security staff within, or survey the inside of the target building the day before the job."

Stolen does not have anything of the cartoonish look it was originally intended, except for the guards who all look the same, with beer (or doughnut?) guts and often the silly moustache. The character models are rendered decently, although they are not particularly good-looking, except for the main character. She has gotten a bit more attention. The environments are mostly dark, but they are done with a reasonable amount of detail (though some textures are low-res and ugly), and they include some rather nicely designed halls and rooms. Unfortunately, most of the time you'll be forced to use night vision goggles for obvious reasons, so there's not going to be much opportunity to admire your surroundings.

The game consists of four massive levels. The level design is not always of the same quality, so it features some cleverly designed areas and some that seem rather confusing.

Finally, the music in the game does a pretty good job by complementing what should be the stealthy, secretive atmosphere, with the habit of intensifying when the action heats up. The voiceovers are rather good, varying in quality but mostly passable.

I must admit this one gave me a hard time, as it did not appear to have any obvious flaws that I could point out, and yet I didn't enjoy it all that much. The hi-tech gadgets are there - yet you don't need them. The massive levels are there - yet most of them are plain boring. The place is full of security cameras and guards - yet you can easily deal with them once you've familiarized yourself with the gameplay mechanics. Well, you get the picture. My verdict is that Stolen is doomed to dwell in the realm of mediocrity forever.