Stealth

Genre: Top-Down Stealth

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Stealth is a Top-Down Stealth game released on Nintendo Switch in 2021. Interestingly, while this game and War of Stealth – Assassin both come from the same developer/publisher pairing of Plitka Games and Kurenter, the two games approach the genre very differently. Stealth offers an extremely simplified version of the genre that reduces players and enemies to simple dots and the goal is simply to collect three stars in each level and reach an exit as quickly as possible.

To match this game’s simplicity, the visuals here are about as simple as they could possibly be. Simple geometric shapes, no textures, flat colors for everything. This game is only 163MB large and even that seems a tad big given the simplicity of the game’s visuals. Probably that file size is due to the game’s soundtrack, which has appropriately percussion-led “stealthy”-style music that’s forgettable but works well enough for the gameplay.

As for the gameplay, what’s here… works. It’s nothing that does anything especially extraordinary for the genre, and players only really have a few options at any given time, but this game gets the core fundamentals of the genre down – sneak around enemies’ cone of vision or take them out by sidling up behind them for a short period of time, watch for patterns in movement, you can even get caught intentionally to lead enemies away from a place if you like, although this only works in some areas.

Having said that, this is pretty bare-bones, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy or memorable about it, and it does get a few things wrong – movement is frustratingly slow, and often if you get caught you’re pretty much doomed to fail. Well, okay, there is one thing this game does that’s fairly uncommon in the genre – two-player co-op play, which works pretty well.

One final note: this game has no touchscreen support, even though its simple aesthetic is reminiscent of a mobile game. This is just as well though – I don’t see this game being improved by such an addition.

In the end, Stealth is a basic, decent but unspectacular Stealth game, which doesn’t do anything egregiously wrong, but the only thing out of the ordinary it does right is its decent two-player co-op play. If you’re a fan of the genre, this may make for a decent $5 time-waster or an easy way to play a game in the genre with a friend, but don’t expect much more than that.

tl;dr – Stealth is a Top-Down Stealth game that boils down the genre to its absolute basics, with extremely simple visuals and gameplay. It’s a competent but unspectacular entry in the genre whose sole noteworthy trait is its co-op 2-player mode. For $5, it’s a decent time-waster, but not much more than that.

Grade: C+

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