Four Fat Chicks -- IGI 2: Covert Strike Review

IGI 2: Covert Strike

Review by Steerpike
April 2003

The Shame

Some years ago I reviewed a game called Project IGI: I'm Going In. Of all the things I've ever written, from high school essays to making my living as a writer, that review is a favorite of mine because I was just so damned witty when I mocked the game's title. I noted that Citizen Kane would not have been nearly as popular had it been called Dude, Where's My Sled? and pointed out that no matter how good or bad a game is, you're doomed without a quality title. Project IGI: I'm Going In is an example of a bad title.

It also had plenty of other problems, including a dumb-as-deadwood AI, no in-mission saves, and a graphic engine that looked like it had grown a coat of fur. I ridiculed and I lambasted. Just about everyone else in the gaming press felt the same way—Project IGI definitely won the "Nice Try" award but was too deeply flawed to be worthy of serious attention.

Yet, years later, I still play the game. I still play the game. On and off, yes; usually when I've been drinking, yes; but Project IGI: I'm Going In has galled me for years because despite the fact that it is desperately flawed, worthy of a 4 out of 10 at best, it has a certain indefinable charm that has kept me coming back to it over and over again. It is without question the only example of a "bad" game that I play and replay.

So you can imagine my shame/excitement when Innerloop Studios announced IGI 2: Covert Strike. They apparently sensed my derision and retooled the I.G.I. acronym to mean not I'm Going In but Institute for Geotactical Intelligence, a quasi-clandestine international good-doers group. Once again you play the role of David Llewelyn Jones, a former member of the British Special Air Service turned mercenary. In a series of games best described as a humorless No One Lives Forever, Jones and the rest of the IGI team trot the globe, righting wrongs and making the world safe for normal taxpayers.

The original Project IGI told the story of a nuclear warhead stolen by Russian terrorists. Jones was tasked with first finding and then securing the stolen nuke before the bad guys could flatten a city with it. Helping along the way was Major Rebecca Anya, your voluptuous blonde controller who offered mission briefings, occasional witticisms, and moral support, all while sitting behind a computer ten thousand miles away dressed in a completely unmilitary spray-on T-shirt and jeans.

For those few who finished that insanely difficult and often ridiculously frustrating game, one final disappointment awaited: after you secured the nuke, Anya, having joined you physically a few missions earlier, comes bouncing in to defuse it. Once she finishes, you're taken without warning back to the Main Menu. There was no closure in a game that had made a pretty serious effort to be a story-driven FPS.

Meanwhile, IGI 2: Covert Strike deals largely with betrayal within the IGI ranks and the theft of some valuable computer technology that's apparently immune to damage from the electromagnetic pulse released by a nuclear detonation.

Yawn.

Compared to Project IGI's race-against-time broken arrow franticity, the mystery terrorists led by Ekk, a seriously insane former KGB wetgirl, and the elusive, irritatingly indispensable information possessed by chunky arms dealer Jach Priboi, IGI 2: Covert Strike tells a frankly more obvious and less gripping story. Even the traitorous leanings of some characters don't raise many hackles, as they're new characters in which we have no preexisting emotional stake.

Which is not to say the game is bad. It's a vast improvement over the original in nearly every single measurable way; however, it remains to be seen if this sequel holds me in the same mysterious thrall that the original does.

The Game

My computer hates Covert Strike. Nine times out of ten it returns an illegal operation when I try to start the game; that tenth time, however, the title runs just fine. I blame the Radeon 9700 Pro (so does Codemasters tech support); ATI makes the worst drivers in the world, has no interest in making better drivers, and will go down in history as King Suck the Sucky, Ruler of Suckland, when it comes to driver support. For those with similar stability problems, there is a patch available, though you won't find it on either Innerloop's or Codemasters' US websites; the UK patch is out (the UK version of the game is apparently identical to the US version) and can be found here. This patch addresses some known issues with the Radeon's crapalicious drivers, as well as some other basics. Other than my start problem, however, I've found Covert Strike to be very stable.

Covert Strike uses an engine similar to that of its predecessor. IGI's real claim to fame was the use of the Joint Strike Fighter graphics engine, a flight-sim codebase that allowed the game to model vast areas of outdoor terrain realistically. It was the key to IGI's great exterior level design. Sadly, the terrain, when viewed from person-height rather than airplane-height, was little more than a gross, overfiltered soup. This sequel fixes that while retaining good exterior modeling.

Covert Strike doesn't use pixel shaders, but it does employ some slick water and particle effects, plus realistic landscape features and human modeling. They're still using sprites for trees, but the only serious complaint about Covert Strike's graphic engine is the lack of dynamic light—even so, it looks fairly good. Engine-supported anti-aliasing and excellent positional audio are icing on the cake. Innerloop didn't fail us technologically with the first IGI and they don't fail us this time. The tightness and stability of their engines (not counting the crappy performance of King Suck the Sucky's video drivers) is likely the result of the company's focus on the console space, where sloppy code is less forgivable.

IGI was teased because it tried to concentrate on realism and stealth when it was really balls-to-the-wall action; it was easier to go in guns blazing and ignore the alarms, despite the fact that opponents respawned and seemed almost preternaturally aware of Jones's presence. In Covert Strike, Innerloop made a concerted and generally successful effort to produce a truly realistic stealth/infiltration game—if the alarm goes off now, you're doomed unless for some reason you've planned it that way.

Once you get used to the keyboard controls, which at first seem daunting, you'll appreciate the ability to stand, crouch, or lie prone; run, walk, or creep; look through thermal goggles as well as binoculars, zoom and manipulate the map computer, and so much more. Take the time to map your keys the way you want and you'll soon be quite comfortable in the game's well-designed interface.

Finally, and rather inexplicably, Covert Strike includes a Counterstrike-ish multiplayer mode. It's okay, but certainly nothing to write home about; the missions deal mostly with planting or disarming bombs. You can even buy weapons and equipment at team spawn points, just like in Counterstrike. The two titles even sound similar. Weird.

Note to developers: it is not necessary to include multiplayer in every FPS you make. In fact, it wouldn't kill you to spend your development dollars creating a really solid single-player game (which, luckily, Covert Strike is). Just because multiplay is the "in" thing right now doesn't mean that your audience will not buy a game that doesn't include it as a feature. You should especially avoid spending time and money to include multiplayer if it's an exact copy of the most popular multiplayer FPS available now. That is all.

The Tame

Covert Strike's AI is certainly better than its predecessor's. In that game, opponents ignored corpses, explosions, firefights, and other subtle clues that something was amiss around them; you could shoot an enemy in the head and the guy standing next to him wouldn't notice. Try that in Covert Strike and you're going to get your ass handed to you. In the same vein as Rogue Spear and Counterstrike, a shot to the noodle will kill you every time. This is not one of those games where you can absorb gunfire—you'd be wise to not get shot at all, and wiser still to not get seen.

But the AI is not perfect. Enemies still see you too easily, shoot you too accurately, and have an unfairly strong sixth sense. For example, a "realistic" AI would not assume that a person standing in a tower with a sniper rifle is a bad guy—especially if there's supposed to be a dude in the tower with a rifle. A "realistic" AI would look twice, or radio in with the old TK-421, why aren't you at your post? rather than screaming for its mother and spraying the tower down with bullets. Nor would a "realistic" AI assume that every click or pop or footstep is an opponent. So Covert Strike's AI is not "realistic." In fact, it's not very good compared to most stealth/shooter AIs—but it's better than it was before.

Covert Strike also adds a limited in-mission save feature, and it's a lifesaver. Project IGI was neither brief nor easy, so the lack of in-mission saves (both IGI and IGI 2 save automatically between missions) made it a nightmare. Now you can save a handful of times during the mission, which helps a lot but still encourages you to be judicious about saving.

Jones's inventory also has been tweaked. You can only carry a handful of weapons: a primary, which is a rifle of some sort—usually an unsilenced automatic like the MP5 or ever-popular AK-47; a secondary, typically a silenced pistol like the SoCom or Glock, though the .50 Desert Eagle and others are available; and your usual combat knife plus some grenades. On special missions you might have the opportunity to carry or find anything from an RPG launcher to a laser designator, allowing you to call in airstrikes on enemy positions. Ammunition sizes match in this game as well—the AK-47 and Dragunov both accept 7.62mm rounds, for example, so their ammo can be used interchangeably, as it should.

Covert Strike's armory is even vaster than that of its predecessor. Normally in the original you started out with an MP5 but always wound up with an AK, since that's what the bad guys carried. Here you start with any one of several cool weapons and have the opportunity to pick up more. Sadly, to do this you often have to swap weapon A for weapon B, a choice that can break a man's heart when he's holding the glorious Pinelli Jackhammer and finds the magnificent FN MiniMI on a shelf. Ah, dilemmas that warm the soul.

Yes, there are weapons galore in Covert Strike, and they are not vague copies of one another—there are clear and obvious benefits and drawbacks to each in rate of fire, clip capacity, range, accuracy, penetration, and audibility. All told, some thirty weapons with which to smite thine enemies are available. So many bullets, so little time. One thing I want to see in IGI 3 (if there is one) is the ability to customize your own weapons and equipment loadout, NOLF style. That, plus some additional stealth options like a garrote and rappelling line would make the game even more exciting.

The Lame

The first two missions are stupid, boring, ill-conceived, and too difficult. For gamers who are patient enough to suffer through them, however, all of the following missions show a spark of the clever design and attention to detail seen in the original IGI. Better yet, you get some nice variety in the locales you visit. I preferred the level design in the original to that in this sequel, and that's the principal reason it gets the thumbs up rather than the gold star; though Covert Strike is an improvement in many ways, it also lacks qualities that its predecessor had.

Some of the "improvements" are, well, not. Everyone who played IGI remembers the SVD Dragunov, perhaps the best-loved sniper rifle of any FPS. It's back in Covert Strike, but ... they took the silencer off. The earsplitting KERBLAM that followed my first pull of the Dragunov's trigger in this sequel broke my heart (figuratively) and Jones's head (literally) as another sniper across the map bisected me with his own round. Stealth nuts, the secrecy of long-range sniping is no longer an option. The MP5, also, lost its sound suppressor. If you want to be quiet, you can sneak up behind people and snap their necks like twigs in this game, which is awesome though difficult because you have to be very sneaky indeed.

Jones is played by a different actor, one who in fact sounds even less British to me than the original, and the voice acting in general is mediocre. The actor playing Jach Priboi, the brutal, hammer-wielding arms dealer you can't help but want to hug, is especially poor; I don't recall him speaking much in the original, but if he turns up in IGI 3 they'd better get someone with talent.

The two lead characters are okay. The actress playing the (American) Rebecca Anya is so appallingly Canadian that it's amusing to listen to her (Americans don't say "aboot"), though her acting is pretty good. The new guy they got to play Jones is also all right, except for the accent—I'm going to be mortified if he turns out to be British—but I don't approve of changing actors in midstream unless they're bad actors. The last guy who played Jones was better. Other than that, the voice actors really chewed up the scenery, and Innerloop should look to Shiny's insistence on quality voice acting as part of the package. Getting Rob (or, rather, Bjorn, since Innerloop is Norwegian) from Human Resources to play the role of Mekvlar the oddball alien pilot never works out.

As stated above, Innerloop is from Norway, so I can forgive a certain ignorance of American politics. Still, about nine seconds on the internet would have revealed their most obvious and embarrassing error: specifically, Senator Patrick Lenahan, founder of IGI and unfortunately a Republican, is "the leading Senator in the House of Representatives." Take a minute with that. Leading Senator. House of Representatives. If you still haven't guessed, go back to high school.

The Dame

Then there's the portrayal of Anya. In the original IGI she was overtarted, but she also kicked ass and was obviously the brains of the Anya/Jones partnership. It was Anya who directed Jones to his objectives; Anya who told him what his next steps were; Anya who helped him when he was injured, alone, and terribly frightened as in the awesome "Border Crossing" mission of the first IGI; and finally, Anya who defused the bomb at the end. In fact, the only reason she wasn't doing Jones's job throughout Project IGI (according to the instructions) was because she'd been hurt in Desert Storm and was confined to a desk. Truth be told, it's Anya's unexplored potential for character development that keeps me coming back to the crappy Project IGI. So I'm deeply disappointed with Innerloop for how Anya is treated in Covert Strike, and I expect better behavior in the future—though a glance at the splash page for Innerloop.com says a lot about how they treat women in their games.

Anya doesn't turn up until the middle of Covert Strike, and when she does, she's wearing a new midriff-baring T-shirt. She constantly examines her nails. She talks like a Malibu Barbie ("nuclear physics is hard"). She has manga-sized baby blues. She would win a Lara Croft-Rebecca Anya-Cate Archer Boob Off. Worse, she's not cool any more. She's just a curvy chick, not a brilliant strategist and soldier who happens to be female.

The writers failed to further develop her as an interesting female character. And I say this as a male who approves of hot chicks as much as the next but believes that story and character development deserve more importance. Just once I'd like to see a developer create a cool female character first and worry about her bust size second.

The Same

Ultimately IGI 2: Covert Strike is more of the same with most of the critical improvements that the original required. Unlike its predecessor, playing this game is not an exercise in rage management—it is challenging but logical, difficult but fun. Speaking as a person who can't help but like the desperately flawed original and who is usually disappointed by sequels, I was pleasantly impressed by Covert Strike. It is, without question, worth your money if you're an FPS fan who happens to enjoy FPS games in the vein of Thief, Deus Ex, and Rainbow Six.

It addresses the gross inadequacies of the original by adding an in-mission save and improving enemy AI—though the AI is still nowhere near as good as it should be. These two items were really all that kept Project IGI from potential worthiness. At the same time, however, it lacks as compelling a story and similar attention to design detail; in the IGI series, some of the missions from the original are so great ("Eagle's Nest II," "Protect Priboi," "Nuclear Infiltration") that their quality may never be achieved again. Still, the work they did in Covert Strike is nothing to sniff at—and though the game doesn't deserve a Gold Star, it's well worth the award it has received. Stealth/shooter fans sick of playing mediocre console ports, rejoice—IGI has returned. To say it's "better than ever" is going too far; instead let's just say "it's a heck of a lot better."