by: Robert Zacny

A stealth-assassination game has to sell its setting. If you do your job right, you will not have a lot of frenetic action to distract your from noticing your surroundings. Observation is everything in this genre, and you spend most of your time ducking into hiding places, stalking victims, and keeping an eye peeled for witnesses. They are games about using the camouflage of the unremarkable, and that requires a sense of place.

Death to Spies 3 may prove to be an excellent new addition to the genre, and Hitman fans will probably feel right at home. You play a Soviet counter-espionage officer at the height of the Cold War, and your job takes you on a tour of the hotspots and back-alleys of the 1960s. In order to have a hope of completing your objectives, you have to strike the right balance of sneaking, murder, and disguise.

Where Death to Spies really seems to stand out is level design and decoration. The mission I saw was set in an NYPD precinct house where a Soviet defector was being interrogated on the third floor, and your character had to make his way up there and kill him before he talked. As I went through police headquarters, I felt like I had stepped into an Ed McBain novel.

Grime and age-yellowed walls permeated the station, and every other desk sported an overflowing ashtray, a pack of smokes, or an overworked personal fan. A couple maintenance guys struggled with an air-conditioner in the lobby. Rumpled, middle-aged detectives congregated in the cramped confines of the detective bureau, shooting the breeze in cheap sport coats and wrinkled shirts. They cast a bored glance at my character when he walked into the room.