Spy Drops is a stealth action game with various missions and objectives. Each of these missions requires the player to use items and mechanics to complete in any way they would choose. Although this sounds interesting to try out and play, the game has a lot of rough edges that need to be smoothed out. Spy Drops has a number of interesting ideas and gameplay scenarios, but those are heavily undermined by the lackluster game feel.
Stealth Action Gameplay
If you’re familiar with games such as Metal Gear Solid for the original Playstation, this game just by its looks should incite some thought of comparison between the two. However, Spy Drops is vastly different from Metal Gear Solid and most action stealth games. After completing the tutorial, you are given the option to take on random sets of missions with different objectives. These missions have a star rating to signify the difficulty of them. Upon taking on a mission, you may be required to purchase items necessary for completing them, such as C4 explosives to destroy certain objectives.
One of the selling points of this game is that the mission levels are randomly generated. In that way, if you take on multiple missions with the same objectives, the map layouts will be different each time. Another unique aspect of the game is the equipment you can buy or find. The variety in these equipment items is plentiful as you can use them for whatever situation you’re in. If there’s a guard in your way, you can hack a turret camera and shoot him down. These items can drastically affect how you go through a mission.
When completing missions, the intel gauge fills. The intel gauge fills based on how well you completed a mission and signifies the main story progression. Once filled, you will have to take on a story mission with their own unique objectives. This seems to be the main gameplay loop of taking on a number of missions before progressing the story.
The Rougher Edges
With how much you can do in this game and the various ways you can play it, the game unfortunately has quite a handful of rough spots. Actions such as attacking and sidling on walls felt janky at times. Performing a basic attack would halt your character’s movement and you would be stuck punching and kicking in a single direction. You have no way of turning yourself unless you let the whole animation finish and attack in another direction. It’s slow, awkward, and clunky. Not to mention that the camera will randomly zoom upon attacking.
The collision in terms of the game’s wall and other environmental objects is also pretty messy at times. Whenever I’m hugging the side of a wall to sneak and press the run button to get off said wall (which is the same button to sidle against walls), I immediately snap a wall I didn’t want to go to or snap back to the same wall I was at. Prior I mentioned that the levels were randomly generated. Unfortunately, there were multiple cases of one level layout that made the mission unfinishable. One of the doorways required your character to crawl through. The problem though was going back through that same crawl space. Even after trying every item I had and using the mechanics, I had to cancel the mission and retry.
Lastly, I noticed right away with the game’s intro cutscene that the voice acting sounded very stilted. It wasn’t till after that I learned the voices were AI. Because of that, the voices sounded extremely bland and uninteresting.
A Positive Future
For everything that I’ve said about Spy Drops, some and hopefully all the negatives I’ve had with the game will be fixed. At the time of me making this review, the developers, Rainy Night Creations, announced that they will be replacing the AI voices with actual voice acting. Rainy Night Creations is a small dev team, but hopefully they can deliver on that promise and work on the other issues with the game as well.
