Covert Action

1990 video games Amiga gamesPC games

adventure gamesarcade gamespuzzle gamesrole-playing games

Sid Meier was one of the most talented game designers of 1980s and 1990s with such titles as Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Silent Service or Pirates! to name few, to his name. But as impressive and innovative as they all were there is one gem that is often overlooked - Covert Action.

On surface it sounds simple - you are CIA agent and your boss informs you that there is something going on in some part of the world. There are few basic clues, like intercepted messages or suspicious activities of potential bad guys, but it is up to you to find out what is going. Sounds like simple shooter, where you will blast into some fortress of some villain and will shoot your way to stop him from doing whatever he is doing. But it isn’t that kind of game. Although... it actually is.

First of all you have to review the clues that you are given, decode intercepted messages (if there are any), and use every bit of intelligence available to work out what the bad guys are up to. What to do next is completely up to you - you can visit one of the safehouses belonging to suspicious organizations or foreign intelligence agencies, place wiretaps, sneak into buildings in search of data, break into them and arrest people or find evidence. You can also watch the building, follow people who leave it or just place bugs and hope they will catch some more data.

And that is how it all starts - you can sneak into a building of some organization and photograph some documents found in wall safe that will provide you address of hideout belonging to another shady organization. You can place a wiretap on that new address to intercept communication, after decoding which you will learn a name of an agent or clues what they are up to. Then you can break into location where you assume that agent is hiding, but make sure you have evidence to support his or hers connection to a crime, otherwise you will just waste your time or send the other suspects into hiding.

To make things more interesting not only the game has 4 different difficulty levels (which change the scale of the operation and increases difficulty of gathering data), but also each time you will be given a new randomly generated situation and characters, which means every time you play Covert Action you are solving slightly different puzzle. And it is hard to get bored with it, because you have to chase against time to actually catch masterminds that are behind those operations before they will go into hiding (after which you cannot find them). You can approach each game differently, you have to take under consideration double agents, it is one of the most packed games of the era and still stands out in today’s standards.

On first glance it is just set of minigames put together, but once you try it Covert Action leaves a mark in your mind. Just like other Sid Meier’s games it seems very simple and obvious, but when you realize he packed in that simple game more elements than you will find in modern titles it shows how good game designer he really was.

User rating: 5 based on 1 votes

★★★★★

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