Velvet Assassin



Velvet Assassin is a stealth game developed by Replay Studios and released in April 2009 for PC and XBOX 360.

It follows female British spy Violette Summer (based on real life secret agent Violette Szabo) during WWII. The game begins with Violette comatose in the hospital bed of a small village in France, where the player relives her past missions through France, Germany and Poland via flashbacks leading up to the point where she was hospitalized. Every so often you are shown glimpses of the present, where two doctors beside her bed are shown arguing whether to keep her on life support, kill her to save her from being tortured if she is discovered, or give her over to the Schutzstaffel to save the village from torture.

The game is known for it's dark, unnerving atmosphere and portrayal of one of history's darkest periods.

The game contains examples of:


 * Action Girl: Violette Summer, of course.
 * Back Stab: In dozens of flavors.
 * Body Armor As Hit Points: Vests help you take more punishment and they never wear down, but Violette always manages to lose her armor between missions, forcing you to find another set.
 * Bullet Time: Using morphine stops time momentarily allowing you to kill one alerted guard. This is an effect caused by the drugs in Violette's system back in the present day, as.
 * Crate Expectations: C'mon, would it be a third-person action game without some crate-pushing?
 * Cyanide Pill: One set of missions revolves around delivering one to a captured agent.
 * Dressing As the Enemy: You can change into an SS outfit on some missions and try to sneak by the guards instead of fighting them, but Conspicuously Selective Perception rears its ugly head as your enemies will attack you for doing anything other than walking slowly from 30 yards away. Possibly justified, though, as a sexy new female soldier is going to raise some curiousity, especially in Nazi Germany.
 * Enemy Chatter: A considerable number of scripted sequences occur that you can listen in on. Some (like an argument over a candy bar) are to lighten the mood, while others intensify it, like the occasional repentant guard or genocide enthusiast.
 * Excessive Evil Eyeshadow: Actually worn by our heroine, undoubtedly due to her artistic roots in the style of the Femme Fatale and old pulp stories.
 * Framing Device: The missions play out as the memories of a comatose Violette.
 * Gas Mask Mooks: Justified in that the guards with masks are working in areas filled with deadly fumes. Violette can kill them by simply slipping their mask off from behind.
 * Groin Attack: One of the many possible assassination animations.
 * The Guards Must Be Crazy: Artificial Stupidity abounds, from guards failing to hear their buddy getting butchered from five feet away to not checking inside an obvious hiding spot like the game's many wardrobes. If you do get caught, you can simply go through a door to a previous area and wait for them to give up and reset back to their old patrol routes.
 * Heal Thyself: Medikits are all over the place.
 * Hide Your Children: Averted; as the game involves the atrocities of the Holocaust, it shows dead children lying in the streets or hanging from the gallows. High Octane Nightmare Fuel to say the least.
 * How We Got Here: Most of the story takes place in the past, eventually leading up to the moment when the heroine is hospitalized where we first see her at the start of the game.
 * Kill'Em All: Unlike the genre giant Metal Gear, your performance score is improved by using stealth kills, and not by avoiding enemies altogether. Of course, the game is called Velvet Assassin and not Velvet Shadow.
 * Kill It With Fire: Many options along these lines, including a Flare Gun, Exploding Barrels, and even guards standing in gas puddles that are ripe targets for those magical Bullet Sparks.
 * Knife Nut: Violette's default weapon. Some of the kill animations show that she REALLY gets into her work.
 * Knight in Sour Armor: Violette, of course, which is probably the only sane reaction to what she witnesses on the job.
 * La Résistance
 * Mata Hari: Surprisingly averted; Violette never uses her considerable feminine wiles on her missions, preferring the more direct method of stabbing Nazis through the skull. I guess even the dimwitted guards in this game can't be fooled into thinking that a well-armed British woman snuck onto their turf just to look for a good time.
 * No Swastikas: There are no Swastikas present despite the enemies being Nazis, this is because Replay Studios is a German company where it is currently prohibited to include the symbol in video games.
 * Pay Evil Unto Evil
 * Pineapple Surprise: Not very stealthy, but quite fun. And the guards in the next area won't hear it anyhow.
 * Pistol Whipping: Or good old-fashioned strangulation if the sniper rifle is used.
 * RPG Elements: A rather unique take on it here, as you can enhance Violette's abilities via Experience Points. These are earned by finding collectible trinkets or completing secret secondary missions, though, and not via combat.
 * Scare Chord: One of these slowly builds each time you stalk an enemy from behind, growing in noise right until you get within killing range and unload on a guard. The game throws in the Red Filter of Doom for good measure.
 * Sniping Mission: The sniper rifle is a fairly common weapon later in the game, but some areas are designed so that you have no choice but to take it out.
 * Third Person Seductress: Considering the grim setting, though, it's not dialed up very high.
 * Unusable Enemy Equipment: And considering the historical context, there's no way for the game to use any of the traditional Stealth Based Game hand waves that more modern or futuristic titles can employ. Of course, mowing through an atmospheric stealth game with an ample supply of machine gun rounds kind of defeats both the purpose and the challenge of the game, so chalk it up as an Acceptable Break From Reality. Still, this trope hits the fan on the second-to-last mission, when Violette desperately needs to secure some firearms but never thinks to just take some off of the dozens of guards she just spent the last hour painstakingly hunting down with her knife. (Never mind the Fridge Logic of her somehow knowing there's a full weapon locker on the other end of the stage.)
 * Very Loosely Based on a True Story
 * Very Loosely Based on a True Story