Sid Meier's Covert Action

Like a great John le Carré novel, Sid Meier's Covert Action generates excitement not from the action-packed escapades of spies but through the intense methodical procedures they follow. It's about gathering information, following money trails, staking out rival organizations and piecing together vast conspiracies and revealing the shadowy figures behind them.

Microprose makes great simulators that frequently break the mold. Covert Action is an espionage simulator, and it is one of the most unique games I've ever played. There just aren't any other games like it. The premise seems simple enough: One of the many terrorist organizations is hatching a plot to do something bad. Your job is to prevent their ultimate goal by gathering evidence and arresting the suspects. There are up to 8 suspects in a single case, with their own faction, job, and face, (yes, there's a random face maker). Each fills a specific role, such as courier or kidnapper. They all work together, passing information and mission items back and forth. The blueprint inspector tells the burglar how to break in, while the electronics whiz sends him/her a door bypassing gizmo. And so on. Arrest the known suspects, or allow them continue on to reveal even more suspects. Be careful of red herrings. There are limitless enemy agents, and only some are relevant to the current case. Besides the main game, there are 4 mini-games that are all connected: Breaking and entering, driving, electronics, and cryptography, (though honestly you will mostly be breaking and entering). You don't strictly have to play any one mini-game, as I often don't even bother with electronics. The complexity of the game comes from the various ways you can gather information, and how you formulate your plans based on it. But the clock is ticking. It takes hours to fly to the different locations, and to perform the mini-games. The plot is always moving forward, so let's hope you figure out what's going on before it's too late. It would be impossible to describe the number of unique features in a short review. There is so much going on that is atypical for any video game, but it's familiar and intuitive enough that it only takes some practice to really get it down. Highly recommended!

If you are a fan of Tom Clancy-style spy thrillers from the Cold War era, this game is definitely for you. Each mission basically follows a heist or plot of some sort, and your job as a CIA agent is to stop it. However, what Covert Action does that I haven't seen any other game do is that the plots are driven forward organically, with each conspirator performing their job in turn. The planner of a plot might send a coded message to an inside contact in another organisation, that in turn hires an assassin and commissions a sniper rifle from an arms dealer. The assassin then travels to the location to perform the hit. Most games today would probably have the entire heist scripted with key events for maximum cinematic tension, but in Covert Action, depending on how quickly you act, you can prevent the plot at any stage. Even though the plots are kind of similar every turn, the realistic, time-based development of the plots means that it's always feeling fresh, and that you're really racing against the clock to stop the plot. If you waste your time chasing the wrong leads, your mission will probably fail. Another unique thing about Covert Action is that it allows you to choose your approach to some extent. The game consists of various minigames, like hacking, driving and combat. Although the combat part is mandatory, you can choose not to do the others if you don't like them. It almost dips into immersive sim territory in that regard, long before that genre became a thing. Much of the graphics are still beautiful, with hand-drawn animated panels, and although the controls in the combat sections are very unintuitive, they are by no means the worst of the times. I keep coming back to play this game again and again, and although I've probably seen every plot the game has to offer it always feel exciting and new. I can't recommend it enough.

I love Covert Action, but I'll be the first to admit it's because I learned how to avoid certain minigames for most playthroughs. Covert Action is an old gem that covers the kind of randomized gameplay that is now hollowly echoed by the likes of Skyrim's "Radiant" quests as if it's some amazing new discovery. You have a goal and a set of skills that allows you to reach them; track down terrorists, collect clues for the more long term game of apprehending a set of elusive masterminds, and catch them all like a set of mad bombing Pokemon. The difference from randomly generated games these days is that success or failure isn't a binary state. Sometimes you lose, but you still have more information on the people you're tracking. The next time that villain pops up, you're better prepared to apprehend them. Failure becomes a building experience, not a dead end. If you're fine with state of the art graphics and gameplay from a time before people realized they could eat eggs, it's a rock solid way to spend your gaming time. Sid Meier, the designer, was disappointed with the game. He felt it had too many minigames, and that none of them were very fun. This is kind of valid; I definitely hate the driving sequences, but equally love the stealth action segments, wire tapping, and cryptography. If you start on easy to train yourself and slowly amp up the difficulty, the challenge is masterful and gives you the tools you need to stick to your own strengths, to avoid the parts you like less. The game feels smart, too. You can hang back and collect intel over the wire, or go in and steal files, follow cars. The world feels comprehensive and wide open, in an 80s DOS kind of way. There's a lot to do and figure out. Covert Action lacks the scope of Sid Meier's timeless Civilization series, but is also playable in micro-doses. It's another game I can come back to, time and again, for a few sessions when I don't feel like blowing three weeks on an epic.

I love this game, I wish there was a remake, but Covert Action is fascinating to me. The controls are horrible, you spend a ton of time trying to break into buildings with rooms like "Chair room" where almost every single tile is filled with a chair, often times facing each other in such a way that they are both unusable as anything but a crappy bed. There's also the popular "office" which has desks that have absolutely no logic to their placement, and it's common to enter the room and have to hop over a computer desk because your path is blocked. It's even better when you can enter a building into a room that isn't connected to any of the others, this isn't game breaking, but it wastes your time, and time is a HUGE deal in this game. The basic premise is that you need to prevent a horrible terrorist activity from happening by solving clues using cryptography, breaking and entering, and finding evidence. If you can, then you can track each member of the plot and throw them in jail. This is a very challenging game even on easy. Like I said before, the controls are bad, so each one of the many minigames might control completely differently from the last. Combat is.. rough, and on higher difficulties it's unfair. Cryptography is one of my favorite activities, as is the wire tapping, they are both fun minigames that need to be completed in a timely manner. Time is your biggest adversary in this game as, depending on your difficulty, you need to rush to figured out what's happening and who's doing it. On easy, you have plenty of time and can make quite a few mistakes with, at worst, a couple of guys escaping. On hard though? It's insane, and things start going down immediately, almost demanding a innate knowledge of the game mechanics to even be remotely possible. This probably isn't a good game, but I still happily play it from time to time.