So Velvet Assassin finally managed to show itself, despite a long string of delays and various excuses as to why nobody could manage to lay hands on it.  And now that it’s finally out, is it any good?  Is it worth your rental or purchase dollar?

My answer?  Not a chance.  If it were possible to put a game on trial for war crimes, I would happily sit on the prosecution on this one.

You’ll play as Violette Summer, a British secret agent in the field in the declining days of World War II.  Violette is a lovely, charming lass with plenty of genteel English charm, and she’s also a trained instrument of death and mayhem.  She got that way after her husband, an RAF pilot, died in combat.  Feeling she needed to do something to atone for her loss–and get a note of vengeance in the bargain–she went in for MI6 training and thus came out a spy.  She’ll be neck deep in Germany with no support from the English government whatever, and she’ll be doing as much damage as possible to help bring about the end of the Nazi regime.

But she’s not REALLY in Germany right now–she’s actually in hospital right now, dying from massive injuries sustained in her spying efforts.  And you’re reliving her missions through a series of flashbacks.

This all sounds fairly innovative, of course, reliving your missions backward through an unusual perspective, but the problem is–the BIG problem, why I’d cheerfully put this game up in front of a firing squad, is that the gameplay is incredibly tiresome.

On the one hand, they’ve put some innovative concepts in here, such as a “morphine mode” which slows down your memories and allows you to engage in killing on a rampant scale, temporarily.  And of course, as numerous other gamers have already suggested, playing an attractive female character in third person vantage has some advantages of its own.  Admittedly, as advantages go, these are pretty minor at best, and frankly, of limited appeal.

The disadvantages are much, MUCH more tragic—mainly, this is a game that requires a lot of sneaking around, especially in the early stages, and I have never been one to enjoy the sneaking around.  I’m going toe to toe with NAZIS.  I expect to be able to bust some serious caps up in some fascists.  One particularly annoying segment in the beginning required me to jam a knife in a Nazi while his partner wandered off.  If after doing the killing on the first one, you don’t get the body sufficiently hidden in sufficiently rapid fashion, you’ll be attacked by the second.  You’ve only got the assassin’s knife you’ve been using all along, and that’s not going to do a whole lot of good against the German with the grease gun.

And that in a nutshell is the biggest problem with Velvet Assassin—entirely too much sneaking around.  If you recognize games like Assassin’s Creed (that one even HAS the word assassin in it), or Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell or No One Lives Forever, well, that’s not a surprise.  I kind of caught that one myself.    Oh, sure, some people can’t get enough of stealth action games like this, and for some, the adventure and romance of being a spy in World War II is just entirely too much to resist.  Depending on your very specific tastes, you’ll either love this game or wish it’d never been made.

A lot of people had fun with Assassin’s Creed on the Xbox 360. I am not one of them.

In a mindbender of a plotline, you play as the distant descendant of a legendary assassin, Altair.  You’re stuck in the middle of a lab in 2012, having memories extracted from you on the genetic level about all the stuff your legendary assassin great-great-great-many times over grandfather did.  Your character will be remembering these events, but you’ll be the one playing them.

Altair did a whole lot of damage to the so-called Assassin’s Guild, breaking all three of its cardinal rules on one mission, and thus getting demoted all the way down to novice.  This means, sadly, that all the sweet things you can do in the first level will be off limits to you until you can re-learn them.  I can’t even express how ludicrous this is–demotion equalling loss of ability is too preposterous to even try and refute.

So you’ll be going about your business, trying to regain your former status (and ability, somehow) by carrying out a series of missions related to finding something that will end a war permanently.  Worse yet, further complications will come around by introducing the now-popular Mayan end of the world date of December 21, 2012.

On a visual level, Assassin’s Creed is patently top-notch.  And all the bells and whistles are present with great sound and level design and the like.  Indeed, whoever compared Assassin’s Creed to a giant parkour run wasn’t just whistling in the dark.  And the plot is massive, if confusing in more than a few points.

But the biggest problem in this game is its lack of substance.  The missions are mostly information gathering runs, without a whole lot of fighting or action.  This makes sense on some level–it’s not Warrior’s Creed or Soldier’s Creed, it’s ASSASSIN’S Creed.  If you get in a big rolling fight then you’ve probably done your job wrong from the word go.  This makes the problem a structural one—if you don’t want to play the stealthy assassin, then you don’t want to play Assassin’s Creed.

Specialization, folks, is for INSECTS.  Robert Heinlein said it first and best.  The best games may well require you to be the most versatile.  Look at some of the greats—where you have to gather information, act on that information, and see it through to the end.  You’ll have to plan your approaches, fight your way through a legion of foes and solve some puzzles to get where you’re going.  You get to play on every conceivable level at once—strategic, tactical, and operational.  Games where you do the same thing, over and over, seldom offer as much fun as those games that offer variety, no matter how pretty they look.

So if you love the parts of the various games out there where you have to sneak around, then you’ll no doubt love Assassin’s Creed.  It’s a beautiful game with a storyline so dense that light cannot escape from its surface.  But if you want something fast-paced with a more comprehensible storyline, you’ll likely turn this one down.