Clandestine [PC Review]

Clandestine is a game I should have reviewed a long time ago, but it got shoved to the pile of unused codes due to me having too much to play and then Fallout 4 happened and everything went to heck.

Clandestine could have been better, but it feels too amateurish. It starts you off with the usual tutorial and that’s where you get to experience the poor voice acting, not so much from the men, but the women don’t seem bothered and make it obvious they’re reading from a script. It’s clear that the developers aren’t English when the dialogue reminds you of Crash Time.

The idea of Clandestine is to infiltrate places with a Spy (the girl) and a Hacker (the guy), only, in single player you control both or if you play co-op, one plays as the spy and the other as the Hacker. If you’re going to play co-op, you’ll need to be able to talk to each other with your voice, not text chat since the Hacker needs to tell the Spy where to go as he opens up doors and controls security cameras.
Clandestine
The Spy needs to relay back to the Hacker about what’s actually going on since the Hacker can only see through the terminal interface and that’s what makes the game unique. It’s like they’ve taken Metal Gear Solid and added <insert a hacking game here> to make something that, with the right kind of budget and exposure, could have turned out something like a MGS title.

Playing solo is tricky, the Spy part isn’t so bad, but there are things the Hacker has to keep an eye on in order to not get detected in the system. The controls are nice and easy, so movement isn’t much of an issue, the thing that did become a problem was when I played the tutorial and I did something to cause a message to constantly show over the top of other messages, so I had to restart.

The gameplay is there. What makes the game more interesting is that two players can play on different computers in separate parts of the world, you just need to work out which of your friends is better at being sneaky or have the hacking skills to get you through. Most of all, communication is a necessity between players if you want missions to go smoothly and successful, wrong information could get the Spy killed.
Clandestine
I’m not sure if it was meant to be easy, but sneaking past guards and taking them down went too smoothly. Sometimes you will make silly mistakes and get caught, the good thing is it saves checkpoints, so you won’t have to go back to the beginning of the mission.

It’s a nice little sojourn into the espionage genre and while it’s not exactly my thing, I enjoyed my time with it and will go back to it at some point to delve deeper. A mid-range PC is good enough to play Clandestine (i5 4xxx, GTX 660), so don’t worry if your computer is a few years old, it’s not very demanding.

Despite its apparent low-budget feel with not-so-synced lip sync and seemingly uninterested female voice acting, Clandestine is enjoyable to play and the graphics more than make up for the slightly clunky movement controls. It’s certainly worth your time and at £19.99, you may think it’s a little over-priced, but you’re really getting good value for money.