Eating out at a restaurant in China can be difficult for an expat.
Menus are almost exclusively in Chinese, and the staff rarely speak any English at anywhere but the most upscale of places. And if there is English written on the menu, it will be a phrase already wrenched through Google Translate* to become a disjointed description that never sounds appetizing.
Expats being what they are, it’s fortunate there is a fool-proof way to allow anyone to order anything they want.
Even though food is the universal language, pointing at a picture of a dish in a menu is the simplest non-verbal method of ordering your dinner. But despite even the best of intentions, not even this can provide a guaranteed result of satisfaction (indeed, what can in China?).
Even if an expat recognizes a dish from the picture and knows all the ingredients that go into that dish, and the dish arrives and it looks exactly like the picture, an expat can still wind up on the losing end when the dish turns out to be nothing like he expected and taste like crap.
Likewise, Largo Winch is everything I could ever ask for in a spy video game. You can look around corners and get the drop on guards by incapacitating them from behind as you sneak around the secret hideouts of super villains. You can hack computers, defuse bombs, and even shimmy into first-floor open windows.
You can do all this and more in Largo Winch, but it’s not the spy game I want. Despite clearly showing what kind of game it’s going to be from an extensive tutorial, Largo Winch turns out not to be the game it’s supposed to be.
Largo Winch has all the right ingredients culled from a recipe that should ensure a winning formula for a spy game, but as a video game it’s just half-baked.
A game ahead of its time, the ambitious gameplay features of Largo Winch aren’t implemented well at all. Sure, you can sneak up on a guard whose back is turned, but you’ll have trouble trying to take him out, surely the point of all this sneaking around unless this is a game about pretending to work as a hired thug but without getting any of the perks.
As you stab repeatedly at the “subdue” button in frustration, the guard will patiently stand there like the highly-paid employee he is until you elapse the window of opportunity for backstabbing shenanigans. The guard will then turn around and immediately start his attack animation upon realizing that a super spy had been standing behind him all this time, his life that was hanging precariously in the balance saved due to improper gameplay implementation.
It’s a frustrating shame. No one wants the game to succeed more than the player, but it seems this broken game doesn’t want the player to succeed at all.
Largo Winch has everything it needs to be a good game… except it was conceived ten years too soon. It would have been a great game on the Playstation 2, where its sneaking features were better implemented in Metal Gear Solid 2 and Manhunt.
Instead, since it wandered beyond the allowable scope of the technology of its time, Largo Winch has became a lost delicacy for those that can be satisfied wholly by the ambitions of its consumers.
* Chinese version is Baidu Translate.
How far I got in 30 minutes: I made all the way to the end of the first level where you have to defuse a bomb… but was never able to defuse anything because I couldn’t find it. I wish I had paid more attention during spy school.
The good: That is one awesome sneaking animation
The bad: this game is apparently based upon a cartoon, but now I have no desire to see it
Will I play this game once this year is up: I’m interested to play it, but it would be to see how far the wreck goes rather than to enjoy the non-existent tight gameplay
Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 26
Play-a-Daystation 