Spycraft: The Great Game

The Good
You play a CIA agent in similar style to James Bond. Your objective is to investigate the assassination of the current Russian president. With all sorts of cool spy tools at your disposal, you will delve into the world of espionage to uncover the deadly plot. Your actions directly effect which of several endings you’ll get.

Spycraft was indeed a challenge. Getting to know all of the various spy gizmos (the Comlink, PDA, etc.) wasn’t easy. There are a couple of areas I remember most vividly. For instance, in one section you had to doctor a photograph before showing it to a suspect you were going to interrogate. You are given various choices of objects to place within the photo, but they have to be placed in specific spots and at exact angles making it ridiculously difficult. In another part you had to analyze a group of background sounds to see if you could locate the whereabouts of someone. Isolating the various sounds using the Sound Analysis was tricky. Decoding cryptic messages using the Cypher Tool could have been handled better also.

The story unfolds gradually, giving you new twists and turns along the way. Keeping your wits about you is the key to finding the culprits behind the assassination. You must use every tool at your disposal and really dig into the evidence to find the hidden ingredient that will break open the case.

The Bad
I had serious problems playing Spycraft. I played this game on a brand new Pentium 166 with 32 Megs of RAM (which exceeded the box requirements), but still couldn’t get the game to function properly. I continually had to uninstall the game and reinstall it because it would not initialize my Soundblaster 16 Plug ‘N Play drivers. In order to finish the game, I had to reinstall it with each new boot-up, which became tiresome to say the least!

So why did I continue with the game? The story got me! I was intrigued to the point that I had to find out “whodunnit”.

The Bottom Line
It may play better on today’s faster machines, but be forewarned that you may experience some serious problems with Spycraft. If you can get it to play, you will find it to be very challenging, suspenseful and full of great spy stuff. Believe it or not, I liked it despite the problems I had.