Counterspy: A lukewarm take on the Cold War

I was late to the Cold War party, but my introduction to it was unforgettable. I was already fascinated by video games and computers when my dad dragged me along to see Wargames, and the film left part of me changed, frightened. With its use of the term DEFCON and its depiction of an American military system so powerful and so paranoid that it almost destroys the world over a computer game, Wargames left me feeling like the world could end at any minute.
Then I heard news stories about something called “Star Wars” and I knew they weren’t talking about the movie but about satellites and nuclear missiles, and I knew that in fact the world could end at any minute.

Counterspy takes its cues from an earlier Cold War era, with a space race storyline and music and art design reminiscent of 1960s spy movies.

But in its alternate-universe take on the struggle of competing superpowers to assert global superiority, victory is not achieved by getting a man into space or landing a man on the moon.

Although both the Imperialist States and the Socialist Republic are too arrogant and foolhardy to acknowledge it, as an agent for COUNTER, a spy organization with allegiances to neither nation, you know that such a nuclear strike would knock the moon out of orbit and send it plummeting catastrophically toward the Earth.
Underscoring the fact that the actual Cold War was both terrifying and absurd, loading screen facts sometimes inform us of how close we came to destruction:

and at other times refer to actual Cold War plans so irrational that it’s almost hard to believe they were ever real.

The game tries to generate tension from the concept of trigger-happy nations racing to the brink of global, mutually assured destruction by making you consider the DEFCON level of each superpower.

Each level involves infiltrating a base on either side of the ideological divide to obtain documents needed to foil the moon scheme. The DEFCON level is raised if you are spotted by guards who report your presence, if you remain visible to security cameras, or if you run out of health. You can lower the DEFCON level by pointing your weapon at a high-ranking officer when there are no other enemies present. If the DEFCON is already at 1 and gets raised again, a countdown timer starts, and you must reach the computer console at the end of the level before time is up, or the missiles are launched.

It’s a concept with potential, but Counterspy fails to capitalize on it, primarily because the action just isn’t very good. The game tells you that, since levels are randomly generated, your experience will be different every time, but your experience sure doesn’t feel different. You enter a room, hide behind cover, maybe pop out and eliminate some enemies with easy headshots, scavenge for documents and other supplies, and move on. There’s a short-lived sense of superspy panache that comes with so gracefully and capably neutralizing threats, but it quickly becomes a matter of going through the motions. And when the game notches up the difficulty or the random nature of the levels does become noticeable, it’s always at the expense of the elegance that is the most appealing aspect of the gameplay. On higher difficulties, the action shifts from spy-like subtlety into chaos, with enemies firing so many rockets and chucking so many grenades your way that you feel less like James Bond and more like the Terminator. And level layouts sometimes make it difficult to just figure out where the enemy who is radioing your presence in is located, and how to get to him.
The other problem is that, in the world of Counterspy, the threat of nuclear launch ends up being toothless.

That’s it, I thought. The end of the world.
I thought that maybe when this happened, it was all over. Maybe I would have to start my struggle to prevent Armageddon over from the beginning.

But no. You can just pick up right where you left off. Shrug off the end of the world and give it another try. This is a video game, after all.

In the Global Thermonuclear War of Wargames, the only winning move is not to play. In your attempts to defuse the world-jeopardizing global tensions of Counterspy, however, no real caution is required. Nothing is really at risk.
Some games are better off not having real consequences for failure. Some games only work because they make failure and defeat meaningful. Counterspy fails to make your failures significant, which just undermines the game’s attempt to generate tension around the possibility of the world ending in the first place.
Still, I appreciate Counterspy’s stance that, if either side “wins” the war for global domination, we all lose.

5/10
Notes
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feitclub reblogged this from agameofme and added:
this sounds cool but not cool enough to drop everything and buy it right now. But two thumbs up for infusing your review...
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