Velvet Assassin Xbox 360 Review

Velvet Assassin has top-shelf graphical production elements, with lighting and shadow effects that are as good as the best in the business. It has excellent visual detail and noticeable textures that immerse your mind for just a second in the fate and feelings of Violette, before you realize the story line makes no sense.

Stealth/action video game veterans from days gone by will remember most of the game play concepts included with Velvet Assassin from titles they played a decade ago.

Violette sneaks through one boring and unconnected mission after another, with each one containing an increased number of frustratingly long checkpoints to go through.

The AI is poorly balanced and shows no consistency, at times it will show an uncanny sense to detect you through a solid wall, and at other times AI soldiers will walk to their doom over and over.

The outstanding graphical presentation of the immersive environments of Velvet Assassin puts you in touch with the feelings and eventual fate of Violette wonderfully. The stealthy look and feel of the environments can really catch the eye at first as a sexy Violette goes through her moves, but good looks aren't everything, my mom told me.

The animations included are average most of the time but occasionally the scene would go from one animation to another without any transitioning animations and if you watch closely it becomes very noticeable.

The voice work for Violette is excellent, but the voices of the other characters sounded uninspiring and lackluster, like maybe the actors weren't really into their parts. The sound track was pretty good, with nice mood swings that were very easy to notice, but they did help to give you an audible clue. The included soft rock and light pop tunes were hard to hear at times but when you do hear them it improves the entertainment level of the production nicely.

Once you slog through the beginning missions of Velvet Assassin and the story line begins to unfold, you'll start to realize the events scripted so far have nothing to tie them together. That this story line has no overarching plot to tie all your game play experiences together into a cohesive picture. Violette is wandering through a universe devoid of context or meaning, terrified by the events and actions during her adventure, yet continues to march on for reasons even she doesn't understand.

Velvet Assassin is a relatively slow experience but the controls all work well and were useful for the actions they were intended. The actions and game play included are a little behind the times though, you can't pick up any of machine guns you find on the bodies of the men you kill, and forcing Violette to walk around the last two levels wearing nothing but a nightgown was just naughty. The missions vary from forgettable to absurd, in one mission Violette needs a firearm to help her escape, so instead of taking one off of a dead guard, she sneaks past the entrance to retrieve a similar weapon from its hiding spot, and then shoots her way back to the exit.

Velvet Assassin is only an average stealth/action video game on its best day, but it will still provide enough entertainment and fun to keep the odd casual gamer happy. Veteran gamers to the genre will be disappointed and it's not recommended they give this game a try. They can safely skip it and keep playing the game they were playing before they decided to take a look at Velvet Assassin.