NomanFun: IGI 2 Covert Strike

Friday 12 September 2014

IGI 2 Covert Strike

IGI 2 Some years ago I reviewed a game called Project IGI: I'm Going In. Of all the things I've ever written, from high school essays to making my living as a writer, that review is a favorite of mine because I was just so damned witty when I mocked the game's title. I noted that Citizen Kane would not have been nearly as popular had it been called Dude, Where's My Sled? and pointed out that no matter how good or bad a game is, you're doomed without a quality title. Project IGI: I'm Going In is an example of a bad title.

It also had plenty of other problems, including a dumb-as-deadwood AI, no in-mission saves, and a graphic engine that looked like it had grown a coat of fur. I ridiculed and I lambasted. Just about everyone else in the gaming press felt the same way—Project IGI definitely won the "Nice Try" award but was too deeply flawed to be worthy of serious attention.

Yet, years later, I still play the game. I still play the game. On and off, yes; usually when I've been drinking, yes; but Project IGI: I'm Going In has galled me for years because despite the fact that it is desperately flawed, worthy of a 4 out of 10 at best, it has a certain indefinable charm that has kept me coming back to it over and over again. It is without question the only example of a "bad" game that I play and replay.

So you can imagine my shame/excitement when Innerloop Studios announced IGI 2: Covert Strike. They apparently sensed my derision and retooled the I.G.I. acronym to mean not I'm Going In but Institute for Geotactical Intelligence, a quasi-clandestine international good-doers group. Once again you play the role of David Llewelyn Jones, a former member of the British Special Air Service turned mercenary. In a series of games best described as a humorless No One Lives Forever, Jones and the rest of the IGI team trot the globe, righting wrongs and making the world safe for normal taxpayers.

The original Project IGI told the story of a nuclear warhead stolen by Russian terrorists. Jones was tasked with first finding and then securing the stolen nuke before the bad guys could flatten a city with it. Helping along the way was Major Rebecca Anya, your voluptuous blonde controller who offered mission briefings, occasional witticisms, and moral support, all while sitting behind a computer ten thousand miles away dressed in a completely unmilitary spray-on T-shirt and jeans. muhammadasadmughal.blogspot.com For those few who finished that insanely difficult and often ridiculously frustrating game, one final disappointment awaited: after you secured the nuke, Anya, having joined you physically a few missions earlier, comes bouncing in to defuse it. Once she finishes, you're taken without warning back to the Main Menu. There was no closure in a game that had made a pretty serious effort to be a story-driven FPS.

Meanwhile, IGI 2: Covert Strike deals largely with betrayal within the IGI ranks and the theft of some valuable computer technology that's apparently immune to damage from the electromagnetic pulse released by a nuclear detonation.

Yawn.

Compared to Project IGI's race-against-time broken arrow franticity, the mystery terrorists led by Ekk, a seriously insane former KGB wetgirl, and the elusive, irritatingly indispensable information possessed by chunky arms dealer Jach Priboi, IGI 2: Covert Strike tells a frankly more obvious and less gripping story. Even the traitorous leanings of some characters don't raise many hackles, as they're new characters in which we have no preexisting emotional stake.

Which is not to say the game is bad. It's a vast improvement over the original in nearly every single measurable way; however, it remains to be seen if this sequel holds me in the same mysterious thrall that the original does.