Secret Agent (1992)

Name:Secret Agent
Number:241
Year:1992
Publisher:Apogee
Developer:Apogee
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:4/5
Time:5 hours 30 minutes
Won:Yes (106W/77L)

Apogee's gone through some rather unusual places so far. We've been on Mars, dealt with a bootleg Indiana Jones, stopped a mad dictator, mined crystals and helped a child who got lost for a considerable length of time. If nothing else, Apogee has been content to go through a wide spectrum of thematic genres. Which brings us to Secret Agent, a game where you play as a spy.

Using the Crystal Caves engine, you play as Agent 006 1/2 (Which is inconsistently used, sometimes it's just 006), who has to stop the Diabolical Villain Society after they stole the blueprints to a defense satellite. Take them out and retrieve the blueprints before they can destroy the world. Some defense satellite. Oh, and the villain of the opening episode? Dr. No Body. It's so lame I'm not surprised they didn't get sued.

Being Crystal Caves 2 in essence, it plays out much the same way. Arrows to move, a jump and shoot button. Up and down do not look up and down, sadly. Once again there's ammo. There are improvements. You have to push a lot of blocks around, but if you push it into the wall, it gets pushed away just enough so you can push it from the other side. On platforms, if you approach at certain angles which shouldn't allow you to reach the top, it places you on top. 006 can take three hits before dying and you have unlimited lives. You get bonus points for going through a level without getting hit.

Doors require you to find the usual colored keys, with the door out requiring you to find dynamite. But before you can leave a level, you need to destroy a security radar. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that it looks like a satellite dish. You need to clear out every radar in order to reach the final level, where the blueprints are.

Various power-ups include the usual point items, mostly themed around spy fiction, the usual letters, which if gotten in the right order give a bonus, this time spelling SPY, glasses which reveal hidden platforms, gun power and a speed boost. Gun power is a misnomer, it really gives you more bullets on-screen. Otherwise you and everyone else has just one.

Everyone has one shot on-screen. At least, until you get a gun powerup. Enemies and traps are limited as well. At first, it's fair. As a result, it's fairly easy to exploit things if you're careful. Most enemy shots are not faster than you, so assuming you can outrun it, you can exploit this.

The help function doesn't mention it, but there are also power-downs. Confusion, which reverses your movement keys for a time. Slowdown, which slows 006 down for a while. Basically, just wait them out.

One of the final components that makes itself known are floppy disks, computers and lasers. Find the floppy disk, bring it to the computer, then deactivate the force field. It takes a few levels for this to show up, but when it does, levels tend to center around it.

The primary enemies are No Body's security force. Five different humans who, as you shoot them, turn into a human of a weaker rank. At the top you get a thug, which is a reskinned version of your blond hero with the ability to shoot, to a ninja master, who can also shoot, then three varieties of enemies which can't shoot. Finally, you get a tombstone which you can collect for extra points or shoot for less points. Ammo isn't at too much of a premium after the first few levels, but I seem to recall shooting the tombstones having a chance of creating a ghost.

The robots are more varied. You get sliding ceiling and floor guns, which you can take out with three shots, in contrast to side guns, which are just traps. Then there's a robot dog, which just requires a few shots. Every other robot has something odd about it. A giant cyborg where you need to wait for it to stop so you can shoot it in the face. A big robot you have to shoot in the stomach. A seemingly ordinary robot which goes back and forth which shoots out ghosts horizontally when it dies. A big robot which extends its head out when it stops and has to be shot in that head then.

Basically, a lot of enemies are about jumping up or being one block above the floor they're on. Despite how this sounds like it could be annoying, I felt like the constant focus on positioning 006 and shooting the enemies with various special conditions gave the game a lot of variety. Whenever you had to deal with an enemy was never the problem.

Traps are mostly typical, spikes, wall guns, water. Then there are odder ones, moving robots which float one tile above and shoot electricity into the ground. Slowly moving fire, which you can jump over, but are generally placed where this is inconvenient. Ceiling fans, basically permanent ceiling spikes, but I must admit I thought it was clever for a jumping man to hit his head on a ceiling fan.

Each episode has a small overworld, more tilebased than the freeform of Keen's worlds. There's a final level you need to solve the other levels before you can reach it, and several blocking off other levels. A lot of the time, it's not entirely clear where you can walk, because sometimes tiles imply gaps you just can't go through.

For the first episode, most levels are of the fun, short, but unmemorable category. A level where you're going back and forth across a series of jump-thru floors with blocks on either edge is fun in the moment, but not exactly mind-blowing design.

There are a few levels where you have to go back and forth through large swaths of the level. At this point, it's becoming the big Apogee issue. Need to pad out a game some? Just add a level where you have to climb to the top, go over to the other side, then fall down and repeat three times.

But the truly awful levels are those that require you to guess or go through them multiple times just to win. In a sense, there's no level that technically can't be won on the first try, but a lot rely on the luck of knowing that a sudden drop isn't going to place you on a landmine or down a pit you can't escape from.

Once you get all the rest of the levels, the final level is one of those where you have a bunch of hills you just keep jumping up on. Despite the odd enemy in an inconvenient position, it's not that hard or special. Just get the usual three keys and dynamite, then the blueprints are right next to the door out. Really? The blueprints couldn't be somewhere else? Lame.

Episode 2's closest level, thus the one you're likely to start with, starts the episode off on the wrong foot. In that the most obvious route the player will take will likely result in them being in an unwinnable situation. There are two pathways at the start, one behind a blue door you get the key for right off, and a jump to a floor below. You don't know these lead into each other or that that key you got could be used to allow you to open all the doors you need to in a moment, with the third blue key being at the end of a long walk.

Continuing to not endear me to the episode, the map is setup in such a way that continuing is not obvious, kind of an issue for what should be a straightforward map with no secrets. Some levels are getting to Arctic Adventure levels of annoyance. Gotta jump over one-tile pieces, some of which have spikes, and everything is over an acid pit!

Now, I don't want to imply that this is nothing but heartache. It's easier than most previous Apogee titles, especially the smaller tile-based ones. I picked up a lot of full health bonuses on these levels. The game gets a lot of mileage out of its enemies and forcing you to jump around them or jump in time to shoot them. It's just easier to complain about constantly having to reach the limits of your jump yet again.

The final level of Episode 2 is disappointing. It's very mundane. There is nothing special about it, no challenge, you could replace it with about half the levels from before and there would be no change. It just exists.

Episode 3's intended first level takes advantage of the lower starting bullets to put you in situations where you really have to decide if shooting some enemies are worth it. It's nice having to make every shot count for once. Unfortunately, the starting section is very difficult to get out of without getting hurt, and the dynamite is located on spikes, not the kind that come out of the floor, the kind that kill you when you land on them.

This continues for a while. It's actually cool. For the first two episodes having practically unlimited ammo encouraged you to not worry too much about successfully jumping and hitting something, because you could always get it on the second attempt. It's a bit disappointing when you get enough ammo to render it all once again a non-issue.

It feels fitting for a third episode, like every piece that's gone into the game until now has been building up to it. A level here or there with a trick that now that you've been doing everything for a while, feels like a natural end result. One particular level requires you to hold off on pushing a barrel until you find the invisible platform seeing glasses.

One fun level near the end was one where you're jumping across clouds. You have to find two sets of keys to open the door at the bottom, at which point you may discover that getting a key of one color when you already have one causes one to disappear. It might just be a series of long jumps, but it's the way the long jumps are set up that make them more interesting. Having to figure out where you need to go to get up is more interesting than the dozens of flat jumps over water in previous levels.

The final level, once again, is quite mundane. Long, but nothing about it feels special other than it being the last level of the game. It does sort of go over everything previous levels did, but that isn't special by this point.

The ending text is quite mundane, just an expanded you won screen, but the pictures. Oh, boy, the pictures. At first we get a surprisingly mean-spirited image of our hero blowing up Dr. No Body, who is a brain on top of a robot. I mean, blowing him up is fine, but chaining him up and then setting off explosives in front of him? Are we sure we're playing the good guys here? I guess it's supposed to be a reversal of the typical Bond villain trope, but man, that's a mean-spirited way to do it.

Then we see an island explode. Which seems to have a suspicious resemblance to Australia. Congratulations, you won, basically. Onto the rating.

Weapons:
Despite the rare extra shot power-up feeling very nice, it's still ultimately just your basic gun. 1/10

Enemies:
An interesting variety of enemies, each of which require different tactics to deal with. That said, I do wish there was a final boss. 5/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
For once, the game doesn't feel frontloaded. Instead, we get cool and interesting levels as we go through the episodes. 8/10

Player Agency:
Simple, straightforward, smooth. 6/10

Interactivity:
Basically just limited to pushable blocks. 1/10

Atmosphere:
The humor in this felt kind of flat, like it was just there because if they did a serious spy game they'd get sued for some reason. That said, the spy theme itself did feel unique, if underutilized in a standard platformer. 5/10

Graphics:
Despite being small and goofy, there is some decent detail in it. In retrospect, this is also one of those games I'm impressed is EGA and not VGA. Not quite as much as ID's games, but it doesn't bring to mind the usual EGA problems. 5/10

Story:
Go to three islands to pick up three sets of blueprints and oh, I can't be bothered. 1/10

Sound/Music:
Basic blips and bloops. 1/10

That's 33, Apogee's current best in-house game.

To a certain extent it could be nostalgia, but this does play a lot more competently than previous Apogee titles. The tedious focus on throwing as much crap at the player as they can handle is gradually going away and making challenges that have to be worked around. There were only one or two levels that made me question the game's design, for the most part even the hard levels just felt hard rather than annoying.

There is an expansion/remake that turns the game into VGA and adds a boss fight against Dr. No Body in addition to another episode. Looking at it, the visuals seem to place it into that category of VGA game where the graphics don't quite feel like an upgrade and instead feel like the colors you're using because you can use VGA. It's...odd.

Next time, the other Strontium Dog game from 1984.