Industrial Spy: Operation Espionage

"It's no grand prize contender, but it's innovative."

WHO?
You are the boss of a small group of elite industrial spies.

WHAT?
With corporations ruling the world in a nearby future, the need for industrial spies is high, and there is a lot of work to do. You'll have to steal expensive paintings, blueprints, lab documents, infiltrate complexes, unlock mechanisms, hack into computers, anything that'll get you to your mission objective.

WHY?
You're in it for the money.

HOW?
By monitoring the actions and giving orders to up to four agents. Each agent has his or her own set of skills, and you'll have to carefully order them around in order to deactivate traps, hack into computers, and anything else required to accomplish your mission. After each mission, you will be graded on time and efficiency, and will also be given ability points to spend on upgrading your agents.

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GRAPHICS
The game features horrible graphics for the Dreamcast's standards, but since this isn't the main attraction of the game, it can be pretty much ignored. The appearance of everything is at a functional level, which is good enough to allow you to recognize things at a glance. Framerate is smooth, everything's in place, all is OK.

SOUNDS & MUSIC
The music could have been excellent - I can see it featuring atmospheric sounds and setting an absolutely great ambience, but the experience is destroyed by the MIDI-like quality of the instruments. Indeed, it pretty much seems that the music was composed using Windows' internal instruments bank, which we all know isn't the most realistic orchestra to ever grace the Earth... The sound effects are even worse, especially the voices. Over-enthusiastic and loud war cries, completed by a character with a faux French accent simply destroy the experience as well, regardless of the quality of the other miscellaneous sound effects. Basically, the worst sounds are the ones you hear over and over again, which means, the war cries and the characters' voices. This is enough to make one want to disable sound effects entirely.

NAVIGATION
The menus are fast. Load times are few and fast, transitions are instantaneous, menus are quick to figure out and get used to. This is great, since you will be using the menus a lot during your missions and thus things get taken care of very quickly.

THE IDEA
I personally find the concept of the game refreshing. It's something that's not really been seen before, and the developers did a fine job at making the game get up and work. It surprises me that there aren't any more games of its genre, since the concept has a lot of potential and could be a really fun experience to get into.

DIFFICULTY
This is where the game takes its worst blow. Most of your missions are based on lucky finds. To activate such or such computer, you will have to go find the power switch that's at the other end of the building in the last room you were going to look in. Most of your time is spent simply looking for those key items to proceed through the mission, and thus it's almost assured that you will go over your planned mission time by several minutes. The only good way I've found to make good cash is by doing the mission once, and then, knowing the entire script of the mission, load my file and do it again with surgical perfection. Get ready to frantically look in tons of random places for five minutes before finding what you're looking for.

REPLAY VALUE
Since the missions are heavily scripted and thus very linear, replaying the game will do nothing more than get you more money and ability points to upgrade your agents. There is little flexibility available to you, if at all. You can investigate all you want, all you will find is a couple of bonus files and that's all.

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THE GOOD
-The concept is innovative and refreshing.
-The scripts have no loopholes - things in the missions evolve so that you can't "go back in time" on the script.
-The menus are quick to navigate, something necessary in this game.

THE BAD
-The replay value is next to nil.
-The missions involve a little thinking and a lot of luck when trying the first time around.
-The sound effects and music were unbelievably butchered.

SO, WHY A SIX?
I have to give it to the development team again for actually getting the idea of this game. I am certain that should they make a sequel, it will be much, much better.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/23/04