But instead of a medieval thief, we'll go with a more usual stealth setting: sometime that appears to be between about five minutes or twenty years from now. Enter Anya Romanov, sexy mistress of the night and high-tech cat burglar. With a sarcastic tongue -- which she uses to pull apart Louis, the guy in the earpiece who gets her the info she needs -- she's a feisty stealth lady. She also happens to have caught our attention for the past several months, ever since Will stumbled onto it in England. Fortunately, our first hands-on with the game reveals that it's shaping up. However, there are a few concerns on the cusp of its arrival.
We've commented before on Anya's propensity for acrobatics. Unlike the sluggish, skulking creepers of the rest of the stealth genre, Anya doesn't feel comfortable only hiding in the shadows. She can leap gracefully from ledge to ledge, grab poles and swing, and use walls to run up and gather height for jumps. Of course, this adds a little spice to the levels, giving a break from the sneaking and crawling required of any good stealth heroine. The developers mix indoor and outdoor environments and large and small rooms, giving you ways to test Anya's skills out in different contexts in the same level.
In the initial stages, it seems as though the levels offer a "correct" path. Given the scads of optional objectives (things to steal, data to gather) it seems likely that your options will be more open once the developers feel you have a handle on Anya's capabilities. I certainly didn't have any problems coming to grips with the controls. They're mostly context sensitive -- i.e. Anya will jump or roll, depending on the situation -- which can be a bit awkward at times. Once I acclimated to paying attention to the on-screen prompts, though, it wasn't that big of a deal.
Of course, a fat pack of gadgets is the cornerstone of any respectable stealth arsenal, and Anya comes packed with several handy devices. One, which works on the principle of sonar, lets Anya see through closed doors -- as long as something generates sound waves to bounce back and forth to create the image. This can be a guard's footsteps or Anya's own whistling. Devices that impair the function of cameras and fool guards are, of course, part of the main course, as are night-vision goggles. What serious sneaker would be caught without them? As with the core gameplay, the developers of Stolen seem content to add new flourishes rather than re-invent the genre.
