Master Spy Stealth action that makes you feel like a total badass

9 years ago

Master Spy

Stealth action that makes you feel like a total badass

Master Spy, protagonist of TURBOGUN’s Master Spy, is a real badass. He jumps over tigers, he smokes, he wears a trenchcoat and a balaclava indoors, he has people address him as Master Spy. After defying death to infiltrate a heavily guarded skyscraper in the game’s first mission, it turns out that he was just showing up for a job interview. The animated cutscenes in this game are a hoot.

Master Spy is also a pacifist. As Master Spy, not once do you draw a gun or creep up behind someone and silence them with a chokehold. Instead, you’ll be sneaking, jumping, and—your ace up the sleeve—cloaking. When you’re cloaked, you’re invisible to humans and cameras, but your movement is severely hindered. And be careful; the fact that you’re cloaked won’t make a difference to things like dogs and lasers.

Every level is a puzzle. Each puzzle’s solution is the carefully timed and precisely executed sequence of running, jumping, cloaking, and de-cloaking that will get you to the keycard, and then the exit, without being caught —which means anything from being spotted by guards or janitors to being killed by buzzsaws, sharks, teleporting ninjas, etc.

Getting caught also means that you have to restart the level, but it’s painlessly quick, and levels are small. They’re generally only a screen or two in size, and once you’ve worked out the timing, you could get through most of them in seconds. That’s assuming you also had flawless execution. Master Spy would be a fantastic game to speedrun, were you inclined to such things.

There are no weapons or upgrades. Master Spy has the heart of an arcade game, not only in its looks and its level of difficulty, but also in how it’s built around mastering a small skillset and applying it to increasingly tricky situations. Your abilities remain the same throughout the course of your missions, but new types of hazards are thrown at you as you progress. You’re constantly having to adapt the moves you thought you’d mastered to new circumstances.

Master Spy’s smooth blend of precision platforming and stealth has that “easy to learn but hard to master” quality and that “just one more” factor. It’s fair enough to avoid inducing rage, but it’s difficult enough that you truly feel like a badass every time you pull off yet another death-defying escape.