Bad Habits - Geeked - June 15 2005

When the folks at Blue 52, the developers of this stealth-action title, named their first project Stolen, I don’t think they quite understood how apropos the name would be. The sad truth is that the few poor, unfortunate geeks who bought this game when it first hit stores are probably still scratching their heads and wondering if there’s any way they can submit a police report on the $40 that was stolen from them. Yup, Stolen is that bad.

Even now, after a $20 price drop, I’m not sure I can bring myself to recommend anyone to shell out their hard-earned dollars for a game that will take the average geek all of eight to 10 hours to complete - especially when there’s absolutely no reason to play through this stinker a second time.

I should have known something was wrong when I saw how the game opened: a cut-scene of a newscast describing the upcoming mayoral elections in crime-ridden Forge City that segued into a tutorial-like segment where I was instructed how to guide Anya Romanov, Stolen’s heroine, across the city’s rooftops.

The fact that I had absolutely no clue what the city’s elections had to do with Anya’s being a thief or, worse, what Anya’s motivations were for breaking into the city’s art museum (the target of her first mission) was a sure sign that perhaps Blue 52 should have taken a bit more time on the plot elements of the game.

Even if the plot were stellar, Stolen’s embarrassing AI would have even your kid brother asking for a bit more of a challenge. Anya’s opponents are the stupidest bunch of security guards you’ve ever seen. If they’re on to you, just duck through a doorway or shoot out the room’s lights, and these guys will pretty much forget you were ever there. The fact that the missions aren’t noticeably harder to accomplish when you’ve screwed up and triggered an alarm says a lot about the quality of the AI.

One thing that is kind of troubling about the opposition, however, is the speed with which the guards recover from being knocked out. Take out a guard with a chokehold or a simple barrage of rights and lefts, and the guard will be back on his feet in about 30 seconds. Now, Anya has a set of goggles that allows her to see through solid doors and a series of darts she can use to track guards, temporarily take out security cameras and create diversionary sounds, but she doesn’t have anything like a rag with a little chloroform or some rope to help keep a guard down for longer than 30 seconds? Somehow that doesn’t strike me as too likely.

Another troubling aspect of this game is the poor quality of the graphics. Considering the fact that we’re dealing with a stealth title here, which means that most areas of the game should be fairly dimly lit (Anya’s working at night, after all), you would think the shadows would be painstakingly rendered. That’s not the case, though. Here, shadows are often much larger and much darker than they should be, and they all have hard edges rather than the gradually fading edges of many a true shadow. After all, if you’re building a stealth title and you can’t even render the shadows right, that may be a sign you should rethink the whole project.

geeked@creativeloafing.comWHAT’S COOL: Anya’s outfit is pretty low-cut - I guess that’s kind of cool - and the price has already dropped.

WHAT’S UNCOOL: Terrible AI; a pathetically weak plot; absolutely no replayability.??