Clandestine - Playthrough Diary

The car sits just across the empty street.  It's night, the office is closed, and there's just security guards inside.  It's time to make our move.

My hacker talks me through it.  There's three pieces of key intel inside the office, and my options are open.  I can leave the guards alone if I want, but nobody's gonna lose any sleep if I have to kill them.

I'm a direct sort of woman, and I'd rather not take any chances.  My hacker gets that - we understand each other well.  All that really matters is the intel, and me getting out of there in one piece.

Some pudgy rent-a-cop walks up to the middle of the lot and just stands there, looking around like a king.  I'd have to drop him somehow anyway, but he offends me.  I lean up against a tall box, peek out around the side, take a minute to steady my aim, then pull the trigger.  A single shot takes him in the head, and a little spray of gore goes flying as he drops like a sack of potatoes. 

"Good shot," Alex says admiringly.

As soon as the guard is on the pavement, I come out from behind the palettes and boxes, crouching instinctively as I jog across the empty street.  Ducking behind a car, I wait for my partner to sift through the cameras and tell me where all the guards are.  One behind the glass door, another in the loading dock, a third one moving around somewhere inside.  We'll have to figure out the rest later.  It's go time.

I sneak by the glass door and run directly to the loading dock, left half open by some careless worker waiting for his truck.  Alex - that's my partner, the hacker - is in my earpiece.  He's the one that gets to sit in the cozy office with the his snacks and Mountain Dew while I get my hands dirty.  Anyway, he tells me when the loading dock guard is in the far hall, on his way back in.  I pull myself up into the dock, under the door, and put my back against a stack of boxes.  I pull out my sidearm, take a deep breath to steady myself, and aim at the hallway where he'll be coming out.  I see the poor bastard soon enough, dark hair, probably late thirties.  I squeeze off another single shot to the head, and he drops slowly to the ground.  I wait that painful few seconds, then move past him up the stairs.

Room after room, office after hallway, I've got my partner in my ear, telling me where everyone is, if there's someone coming, when to wait, when to go.  My first piece of intel was in a long office.

"Shit, here he comes!" he says frantically over my headset. "You better find some cover.  I don't think you're gonna get out of here in time."

So I duck behind a desk, and wait the agonizing few seconds for the guard to open the door.  When he does, I nervously fire three shots, two into his torso, one into his face.  Another one down, and I'm still breathing.  Maybe I can make it out of this after all.

The whole time, Alex is on the other end, remotely disabling cameras before I move into a certain area.

The last piece of intel is in another long office full of desks and computers.  Two security guards are in there, making their rounds.  There's no way I can burst through that door and get both, unless...unless there's a distraction.  Hmm.  I remembered to bring a pager along, thankfully.  I tell Alex about it, and I toss it through the doorway onto the floor.  He calls it, and both guards walk over to it to find out what's making the noise.  That's when I come out from behind the doorway.  It's too easy.  They don't even see me coming as I pop their skulls, one bullet a piece.  I walk past their still-warm bodies and grab the intel.  It's time to go.

I run back the way I came, exit the loading dock, and sprint across the street into the forest of crates and pallets, waiting for my extraction.  The mission is over, and I'm alive.

Clandestine is an upcoming espionage thriller from Danish studio Logic Artists.  It takes place in 1996, when hackers captured the public imagination, pagers were still a tool for professionals, and flannels were still in (the first time).

It can be played single-player or in co-op.  In single-player, you can switch back and forth between Katya, the professional spy, and Martin, her hacker buddy, to make your way through tense missions.  The co-op system, though, is where this game really shines.  I almost want to use the word "unique" to describe the co-op, because I've never seen anything like it.

In my playthrough, I played as Katya, complete with fire engine red hair and flannel, as I killed my way through some warehouse in search of mysterious pieces of intel, stored on 3.5" floppy disks.  Alex played as Martin, the wizard-behind-the-curtain, disabling cameras, watching my progress, alerting me to danger, and generally being a sort of deus ex machina figure.  And this is the way co-op works in Clandestine - the spy does the dirty work, but all she knows about her environment is what she can see.  It's nerve-wracking and even frightening at times.  The hacker can see most things, either through his magic Windows 95 terminal or through the closed-circuit cameras he can manipulate, though he's limited to some extent - for instance, he can only see guards and other foes once he sees them through the cameras.  The hacker can't really intervene for the spy, either, so if he sees danger, all he can do is tell the spy about it and hope she reacts in time.  It really does force both players to rely on each other completely, as two halves of one operation.  It's not about who can hose hordes of enemies with the most bullets.  It's real teamwork - patience and cold nerves.

But here's the caution.  Clandestine is not for everyone.  It's not Splinter Cell, and it's not Rainbow Six.  It borrows inspiration from these titles, but it is certainly its own game with its own personality.  Check it out if you're an espionage enthusiast (or if you're still in love with the 90's).  It will certainly please you.

But it's got a few flaws that I personally hope the game developers have the time and resources to address.  It's a little awkward, for one.  If you come out from behind a wall and want to use the game's 'takedown' feature to silently subdue or murder a guard, you have to be facing just the right way, and everything has to go just right.  It's so easy to come out, thinking you have him, only to pound your buttons faster and faster in desperation as he raises his gun and snuffs you out with one bullet.  And if you like using your gun to solve your problems, don't expect a ton of realism.  If you played Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, you might be used to realistic recoil and even the sound of the bullet cases tinkling on the floor after you squeeze off three shots from your HK-MP5.  Not here.  Clandestine's guns need serious overhaul for realism.  Short-range shots feel like they're more about luck than skill, and long range shots are virtually impossible, since there's no zoom feature (in the build I played, anyway).  And so far, there's only three handguns available.

Bond?  Bourne?  They should make a new difficulty level for me - "That Clumsy Assassin From Mulholland Drive".

But it's got its set of advantages, too.  It's not Golden Eye, so you're not forced into murdering your way through a map.  You can outfit your spy with any number of noise-making distractions to incapacitate your foes in any number of clever ways.  If it suits your style and you're slick enough, you can make your way through most missions without killing anyone at all, if that's how you want to play.  Unless you're running a Cleaner mission (which is where you let out your inner mass murderer by killing everyone on the map), there's tons of options open to you for how to accomplish your mission.

Clandestine is a sweat-inducing game of patience and teamwork, and it could provide loads of entertainment for the spy enthusiast.  If Logic Artists can smooth out the tangles and provide a lot of polish, it could stand on its own next to any espionage thriller.