Operation Wintersun is a boring game.
I knew I was in trouble when it took me a half hour to get past the tutorial-style intro. I finally had to turn to the manual to find out that I needed to — no lie — dig in the trash, find a potato, scatter the potato onto a special part of the ground so that a crow would fly off a branch to eat it. I then needed to tear down that branch and “combine” it with a loose bar sticking out from a nearby window.
I was then supposed to use the stick/bar to open another window that was too high. This was all done so that I can overhear two British spies talking, but as soon as I got the window open, one of the spies came outside to talk to me and the level was over.
…
Then the gameplay started to get slow.
The rest of “Undercover” is summed up best by Brett Todd, a Gamespot reporter “Anyone who can solve this spectacularly hard game without resorting to a walk-through deserves a ticker-tape parade like the kind they used to give generals and astronauts.”
The game is hard. The puzzles are completely non-intuitive. But worst of all, the gameplay and movement is so ridiculously slow that you don’t want to go spend days going through it all.
I really tried to like this game. It has a pretty interesting plot, good graphics and landscapes and a full voice cast. I even tried to forget the fact that Lighthouse Interactive, the game’s publisher, is largely European-based, so slowly developing, verbose, detailed plots are natural (just watch any British or Canadian crime drama).
The film-noir plot casts you as British physicist John Russell, drafted by intelligence to check out a Nazi plot to build a nuclear weapon.
The script is solid enough, but in the end I just couldn’t get past the fact that I was falling asleep at the mouse. And I don’t mind a slow, noir-style video game (Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, Tex Murphy: Overseer) — the fact is that Undercover: Operation Wintersun just isn’t a good game, period.
Quick hits:
Publisher: Lighthouse Interactive
Developer: Sproing
Platform: Windows PC-CD
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1
Launch Date: August 28, 2007
Playability: [rating:1/5]
Learning Curve: [rating:2/5]
Sound: [rating:3/5]
Graphics: [rating:3.5]
Overall: [rating:1.5]