Aurora Watching

The makers say "red-hot action and ice cool stealth gameplay". We say "pants".

	Version PC	Developer Metropolis	Publisher Schanz	Genre Action

By Andy Robinson

With its grey hues, terrorist disaster plots and snowy local you'd be forgiven for at first confusing Aurora Watching with Metal Gear Solid. But this isn't Metal Gear Solid, in fact, it's not even up there with Hitman in the stealth game league table. Developed in Poland, Aurora Watching is at best a very mediocre knock-off of the stealth-titans that fill an increasingly crowded genre.

The plot predictably puts the game's hero (a drunken mercenary) in the middle of an artic terrorist situation involving a submarine and lots of idiotic guards in snow suits. Questionable voice acting and badly scripted dialogue will inspire you to ignore the majority of what is going on in the cut scenes.

However this is far from the worst game ever made, there's some nice presentation displayed in the colourful menus and the included overhead camera mode is at least useful at times. The games problems lie in uninteresting game mechanics and tedious level design. Aurora Watching's awfully slow pacing successfully kills any enjoyment that would have been found in the offered stealth features, the game's hero drudges around In the most comical running animation I've ever seen in a game, even at full speed it takes you forever to travel the games abundant grey corridors.

Unfortunately, the design of Aurora Watching seems to have lost a lot of focus if we're led to believe that this is a stealth game. The ability to drag bodies and sneak around seem like token gestures against level design which encourages you to leave no man standing. The game is so random that it leaves you unable to adopt and play it in a straight forward manor. Progressing through the game avoiding detection sounds like a sound enough strategy until you discover that the extremely primitive AI guarantees that your enemies will either ignore gun fights right next to them or spot you from the other side of the map.

In addition the game does its best to throw every cliché in the book at you. Aurora Watching will have you threatening violence against your PC hardware the next time you have to tediously hack one of the games many computer terminals, waiting patiently for the progress bar to crawl its way to completion.

This type of repetitive, lazy game design prevents Aurora Watching from rising out of mediocrity, a mid level snow-mobile section embodies the games lack of ambition and absent polish - shoddy controls and a strict time limit hinder any enjoyment that could possibly have been available in the first place.