Sid Meier's Covert Action

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.

unique game still have fun 30 years later

I played this game so much as a kid. There are already plenty of reviews covering it already, so I'll just join the choir chanting for a remake.

This classic game is as fun as ever. It's a refreshing change from the action-oriented/FPS-style games that now dominate the spy game genre. The weaknesses of the game are the repetitive nature of the crimes (there are only so many plots) and the sluggishness of the game's response in DOSBOX. Overall, it's an enjoyable diversion.

I can't belive this game's reputation is as poor as it is!! Loads of people talking about a game they've never played. There is no "Covert Action problem," it's problems are no big mystery, it's a minigame game where the minigames all kinda suck. But the metagame AROUND the minigames is **INCREDIBLE**! The best mystery game I've ever played, possibly ever made. Brilliant design, just begging for somebody to revisit it. Can't recommend it to DOS game fans enough.