Velvet Assassin

If you do manage to arm yourself, don't bother trying to shoot at close range. No matter how hard you hold down the targetting button Violette will fire blindly into thin air, even as one of Adolf's minions batters her over the head with the butt of his magical rifle.

Guns are only good for shooting from a distance. And only then if you're sure you can get a one-kill headshot. And only then if you can hide from any nearby soldiers in the shadows. And only then if the shadow system works properly. And only then if you haven't given the whole thing up as a bad job and thought to yourself if Sylvia Plath had been a videogames journalist instead of a poet she wouldn't have lasted as long as she did and that reminds me must put the oven on.

It doesn't help that the game is painfully linear. There's only ever one path to go down, and every time you're forced to restart from the last checkpoint the same old Nazis can be found trudging the same old preset routes. They also have the same old subtitled conversations in which they whine about running out of chocolate and not being able to smoke near oil barrels.

(Oh yes, there are plenty of oil barrels in Velvet Assassin, along with plenty of wooden crates and locked doors. Often, the locked doors can be opened by Rusty Keys found on the dead bodies of your enemies. Sometimes, just to spice things up a bit, you'll come across Shiny Keys. There are a lot of easily disabled fuse boxes lying around, along with levers that turn red lights green. There are desks laden with oil lamps and old maps and abandoned medical kits. It's a miracle there's not also a lava level and a mine cart race.)

You don't even get to choose how you dispatch enemies. Let's say you decide to take out that soldier standing on his own with your penultimate bullet. Effective, but then you turn the corner to find two enemies standing together. They'd spot you if you tried a stealth kill, and you've only got one bullet. No problem - use your only morphine syringe to slow down time and perform melee kills.

But what's this? Around the next corner there are two more enemies standing together. Stealth kills are out, you're still a bullet short and you're out of morphine. You could try to shoot one then stab the other in real-time, but what with Violette having all the close-quarters combat skill of an orang-utan in a barrel, it's unlikely you'll succeed. So you'll end up dying and starting again from the last checkpoint.

In this regard, levels become like puzzles - it's a matter of trial and error as you work out which techniques you're supposed to use in which situation. There's also a lot of waiting around and hiding behind crates/in outhouses/within the shadows as you learn the patterns your enemies follow.

That's what good stealth games are all about, of course; they reward you for thinking ahead and being patient. But this isn't a good stealth game. You don't feel rewarded for clever thinking, because there's only ever one way through. You can only survive by working out what the game wants you to do - there's no scope for working out your own solutions to problems. The fact enemies are so thick and endlessly repetitive in their behaviours makes things even more tedious.

If you're a serious stealth fan, and if you've got huge amounts of patience, you might get something out of Velvet Assassin. It's certainly challenging. There is satisfaction to be had when you pull off a sequence of kills in the right order using the right techniques. The problem is this is only possible when you've spent ages working out what you're meant to do and what the enemies are going to do, and when all the elements of the game work as they're supposed to. Success is more down to luck and perseverance than skill and patience.

Besides, nothing else about the game makes doggedly plugging away worth the effort. The visuals are well short of spectacular. The storyline tries to be mysterious and intriguing, but it's daft and dull. The mission objectives, locations and level layouts are clichéd. The mission structure is far too repetitive and rigid. The nightie thing is silly, and about as sexy as Solid Snake running round in a leopard-skin posing pouch.