So the other day I got IGI: Covert Strike II from gog.com.

According to the promotional blurb the idea was a tactical shooter where you get to plan various approaches to missions and have to execute things in a stealthy, reasonable manner.

The comments section was filled with gripes that wereas the last game in the series (not available on GOG) was open ended and satisfying that the sequel was relatively linear and defined by crazy accurate enemies.

Since it was cheap I decided to go for the game and buy it. I had been a big fan of FarCry 1 and Soldier of Fortune II so I thought maybe this game, even if flawed, could provide some diversion. After all, the old Ghost Recon games and Rainbow Six games that were pretty good were all characterized by crap AI combined with superhuman enemy accuracy. And IGI had a celebrity endorsement by some SAS man who acted as the technical consultant on the game.

But IGI somehow manages to get things exactly wrong. It's almost the worst possible combination of all the bad elements named above. I feel like there are some aspects of the game that are cool but they needed just a little more work to make them really memorable instead of unsatisfying and silly.


The game is mostly linear. There are some points where you can pick one route or another but they're very pre-defined, and not at all open world type like in ARMA: Cold War Crisis. It kind of reminds me of a mentally damaged variant on Deus Ex where maybe you have two routes and one of them is blatantly a stupid route you're not supposed to use.

The AI is hilariously bad. Sometimes when alarms are set off, large amounts of reinforcements actually spawn and pour into the map. This had potential to be really cool and challenging because as far as I can tell they're not unlimited reinforcements. So had the game been done really well you could have the challenge and reward of ambushing the reaction force as well if a little more work had been done on how they arrive (by vehicle? how many? do they bring heavy weapons?) and how they sweep (one squad? two squads that are programmed to check different areas of the level?). I don't think any of this stuff would have been so hard to program; I think most of it could have simply been scripted.) As it is, they literally run around in a big gaggle on an individual basis and begin running repetitive circuits around the level. It looks hilarious because they look like a bunch of idiots who are all trying to be a Rambo except they're almost running into each other when they do it.

The gameplay has strange points to it. You move faster and less visibly prone than crouched. It feels like you're sliding down a slip-n-slide. Why not just go prone everywhere?

Apparently you can't move while you're reloading. This seems like a huge goof. All you have to do is watch a USPSA competition on YouTube to see that it's possible to shoot and reload on the move. I mean your accuracy should be crap for longer distances but it should be OK for CQB.

Your character model is a little goofy too. Your guy has blue BDUs, a black tac vest, and black stripes painted across his face with no base paint, so basically it's a flesh tone face with black diagonal stripes on it. He also doesn't wear a boonie hat or anything on his head so he still has a pretty distinctive human silhouette. Would it have killed them to give him camo and brown base paint and a hat?

To top it all off you can absorb a superhuman amount of incoming fire before dying. You kind of wish that instead of doing this they could have tweaked things to feel a bit more realistic in terms of making enemy aim worse but then not having you take as many hits, and things like that.