Gorky Zero

Have you ever heard of Gorky Zero: Beyond Honour? There wasn't a thundering hype build up for Jowood's latest title, so don't panic.
You could panic however, that games like this are making it to actual production.
Let us glance briefly over this "STEALTH ACTION CLASSIC" in the hope of identifying exactly what it was the developer was thinking. If anything.

You are the poorly animated Special Forces drone, agent Cole Sullivan. To start with, your archetypal superior officer explains the generic secret crisis through an in-game cinematic. "These are zombies,” he says, glancing mechanically at the projection on the wall. Between lengthy drags on his cigar, the obligatory reason for the game is spat out, and it begins.

Mission structure is more or less identical to that of Metal Gear Solid, or Splinter Cell. There's the "infiltrate the base" mission, and the "escape having lost your gear" mission, it all feels reasurelingly familiar.
The first irritation though, soon becomes apparent. The camera; rigidly third person, but from a detached high angle perspective severely limits your view distance. The only way to look directly forwards is to go into crouch mode, which settles the camera over your shoulder. Hilariously, this means you can only shoot with the mouse by creeping. To run and fire, you have to return to the almost birds eye view for a loose, auto targeting affair. Neither work.
That's ok though, because under no circumstances would it be a good idea to use guns anyway. At normal difficulty, enemies take the best part of a whole pistol clip before an awkward death animation takes over, and your own health won't last you for more than a couple of encounters. AI run blindly towards you while shooting, and while you're painfully inaccurate outside of "mouse aim" mode, you can never be sure your bullets are having an effect anyway due to the unreliable clipping.

On the more subtle approaches, a "Stealth Kill" can be initiated by shooting someone in the head when unalerted. Whether this works is completely hit or miss, often a guard's only reaction to a bullet will be some Russian expletive before their lightening reflexes kick in. The minimap displays your sound radius, inside of which the subtly different material of your boots must make all the difference to the guards. Outdoors, at ten feet, in the pouring rain, enemies will robotically pin point your location if you so much as take a single step in walk mode. Running is usually out of the question, projecting your sound area of certain death to every corner of the miscellaneous facility/bunker. That leaves most sections reducing you to the noiseless, but maddeningly slow crouch mode. In another instance of over-whelming realism, an ear splitting gun battle in the central hallway of the research centre wouldn’t disturb the scientists in the next room, such was their concentration.

Learn the necessary patrol patterns, then cross open areas towards the next block of cover. It’s a quicksave/quickload routine not only that we've seen before, but that shows a severe lack of play testing. Obvious paths through guarded areas aren’t spaced properly, for example. Its like Jowood watched someone playing MGS for five minutes and decided, "lets make a stealth computer game!"

No part of the design can redeem the core elements. Explosive barrels are placed next to stationary guards, climbing through vents will greet you with "SECRET AREA FOUND" and anything remotely computer related will "UNLOCK THE LOCKED DOOR". A CCTV vision cone, when disturbed, sets off an alarm that made me wonder if my sound card drivers needed reinstalling. None of the four guns are even remotely satisfying, sleeping troops are hardly any less alert than the waking ones and the amateur level design forces you to retrace your steps frequently. I mean, really, you have to question a game’s integrity when headshots count for more from behind than head on.

Perhaps in a witty sarcastic joke, the music is actually very good. From the fade-in logos to the combat score, it all gives the deception that Beyond Honour is a playable game. The disguise doesn't hold though. The simple fact is that there's nothing new here, anything that is here, is done badly.

This month, Gorky will be head to head with Thief 3. Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow was out a few weeks ago. There's just no comparison. All said, the only amusement Gorky Zero provides is in the script/voice acting, which is laugh out loud ridiculous all the way through. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Sam Goldwater